This is what we have been trying to do. The idea had been to replicate the research work we did years back, using the University of Toronto Neural-Network simulator - Xerion UTS - on economic time-series data. Tensorflow is difficult to fully understand, for various reasons, but we have got a prototype working that re-creates what we had in Xerion, now using Tensorflow/Python/Keras and our Linux platform. This image shows training on a real data-set, with only a single-layer perceptron-style neural network, running for only 700 epochs. The loss-function is still decaying nicely, and the binary-accuracy (basically just the percentage of network-generated correct prediction derivations) is still climbing nicely. Other previous versions would plateau at low levels of accuracy, and high levels of loss-history. But this one works. :) (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)

New GEMESYS Research Log - From February 2023 to Present (April 2025)

[ Apr. 18, 2025 ] - Stupidity As A Powerful Force
The Germans characterize stupidity as a force, sometimes. This is an interesting idea. It seems to have some useful explanitory value.

Could Peter Navarro be truly as profoundly stupid, as he appears, and as the curious and extremely unwise things his boss, Mr. Trump, actually says? Is this possible? If so, then there is a profound and impressive force to the power of their extreme stupidity. It's is quite an interesting phenomenon.

The BMW factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is an extreme example of the kind of success that free-trade (NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Act), can bring. In my hometown, I see two nice kinds of new cars most often - Tesla's and BMW's. They are expensive, they are nice, and folks with money buy them. There are lots of them on the road.

Many (most?) of the BMW's here, come from South Carolina, in USA. That is where they are made. Peter Navarro accuses the BMW operation as being a "scam" that has somehow taken advantage of USA. This is simply nonsense.

There is a huge BMW dealership in my nearby city, which is down the road, and across the street, from the Mercedes dealership. Both are very big operations, and they both sell a lot of cars. My local city, before the First World War, was called "Berlin". The name was changed to "Kitchener", because of hostilities in "Great War". (That war was called "The Great War" because it was so awful, and so stupid, that it was thought - in the booming, roaring 1920's - that it was the war to end wars, and would be the last major military conflict. Really.

I strongly recommend one read this article, from the "Economics" Substack, that I ran across. It proves that Peter Navarro is wildly wrong about the Spartanburg BMW car factory being a "scam" that is taking advantage of USA. Either Peter Navarro is really, extremely stupid, or perhaps he is also an agent for foreign forces that are trying systematically to damage and degrade the American economy, and USA's commercial success in the global marketplace.

I think this should be considered. It just does not seem possible, that Peter Navarro can be as profoundly unwise and dishonest, as the things he says, indicate. No rational human who examines the data, can believe that BMW - a company which has invested over 15 billion US dollars in South Carolina, created 11,000 direct car-making jobs, and established a LOCAL supply chain of roughly 500 USA local manufacturers - is taking advantage of America. You just cannot believe this, if you are sane and rational.

Read the carefully researched details, by this fellow who actually grew up in South Carolina, and watched the BMW operation be developed over the last 30 years. It's a NAFTA success story, and it has made BMW one of the biggest exporters of USA made cars, in all of USA. We see evidence of this here, because of all these new BMW's from South Carolina, which are all over the place around here. But maybe not for long?

https://agglomerations.substack.com/p/tired-of-winning-why-peter-navarro

This fellow, John Lettieri, offers direct, clear information as to just why BMW has been so successful - the North American Free Trade Act allowed them to put this massive BMW car manufacturing and assembly factory in South Carolina, and export well-made BMW cars to the world - including Canada.

It seems to be exactly what Trump and Vance say they want to see - and yet Navarro, and even Trump, say that this operation is a "scam", because the engines are made in Germany.

This is so fucking stupid it boggles the mind.

Can Trump and Navarro really be this stupid? Perhaps not?

I am actually starting to believe that maybe these clowns could really be working for Putin. Or maybe they just want to destroy the economy of USA, to cement their hold on power? It's actually unclear exactly what is going on. It's all so stupid, it's hard to believe it's real.

But maybe - maybe just really, we are again just seeing that Powerful Force of Stupidity? It was Issac Asimov who said, if I recall correctly: "The most common element in the Universe, is not hydrogen, it is actually stupidity."

Elon Musk said "Navarro is as dumb as a bag-of-bricks". But I don't think that is really fair.

It's not fair to the bag-of-bricks. Navarro was asked about economics and described the BMW factory in Spartanburg as a "scam" and spoke of security risks to America. When the same questions were put to the bag-of-bricks, they remained silent. When asked what should be done, Navarro recommended that tariffs be applied to all nations importing goods into the United States. The advice was requested from the bag-of-bricks, and they again said nothing. From this, we can clearly conclude that the bag-of-bricks shows it has much greater wisdom and a higher-level of economic awareness, than Peter Navarro demonstrates.

[ Apr. 17, 2025 ] - Blank Me Baby, 8 To the Bar
When previously scheduled ocean-transport cargo-carrier shipping for a particular ship is cancelled, in the world of modern shipping, this is called a "blanked" sailing. It means the planned container-cargo ship will not sail, as there is not enough demand for it's services. This of course is because the ship is not filled with containers, because the goods shippers are not shipping.

There is a firm which tracks shipping (everything everywhere is tracked now, right?), and this firm has recorded 80 "Blankings" - or canceled cargo ship sailings from Asian ports to USA, since the Trade War began. Chinese goods entering America face tariffs of 145% according to news reports, and US goods entering China, face tariffs of 125%. In some (unclear) cases, the USA actually imposes tariffs on Chinese goods, that exceed 200%. These absurdly high tariffs are of course, effectively shutting down Chinese imports.

Trade volumes on ships and at ports, is measured in TEU's and FEU's, which stand for "Twenty-foot equivalent" lengths and "40-foot equivalent" lengths, since shipping containers are made in various sizes. And of course, as expected, the idiotic tariffs are having the effect of shutting down Chinese imports into the USA. In March, shipping actively was running hot, since the strategy was to front-run the stupid tariffs. Now that the Chinese tariffs are in place, shipping activity is falling sharply, and the movement of goods - both ways - is falling by more than 30% levels, week to week. The 30% number is interesting for us, because it is the magic number for in-period changes, that can trigger chaotic results, if a simple feed-forward logistic-equation model is used to describe growth. That just means when you get in-period changes of greater than 30%, the model can either blow up or crash to zero (or actually negative). We never thought one could get *negative* interest rates - but then they actually happened, in Europe and Japan. What would a *negative* shipping-level look like? Maybe trade ships being sunk in warfare? Or ports destroyed by bombing attacks? Perhaps.

For hard numbers, it is reported that the week-over-week changes in ocean bookings, between end of March (March 24 to March 31) and the first week of April (April 1 to April 8), are down a lot. Total TEU's book are down 49%, overall U.S. imports are down 64%, and overall U.S. exports are down 30%. (This information is as-reported by CNBC.)

So, the tariffs are working. They are hammering United-States/Asia trade, and shipping companies are responding by "blanking" (canceling specific ship sailings) and also by elminating whole "strings", which are routes to several ports by a single ship. Setting up these "strings" - such as a single ship sailing to ports of Vancouver, Tacoma, Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach are logistical exercises that can takes months to plan and schedule.

No one in their right mind, would ship into a hostile nation, which applies 145% (and higher!) tariffs on their products, as the shipment of goods will not be economic.

So, the Trumpian assault on USA-China trade is working. CNBC also reports that the tariffs are generating between 200 and 500 million dollars per day in revenue, which is far below the number that Donald Trump asserted was being collected. Mr. Trump said the tariffs were generating $2 billion in revenue per day, yet the Customs and Border Protection agency that collects the tariffs, shows this number to be typically less than $500 million per day.

President Chaos just makes sh/t up, and then talks it out of his pie-hole as words, which just convey false information. It's quite an interesting phenomenon. He just goes on and on, saying things that are not true. It's really quite remarkable. It's like a game of "bullshit poker".

We honestly thought he would be good for America. We now believe this not to be the case. Blowing up trade with Asia - not just China - is going to harm many American merchants and small business owners, farmers and producers of goods, all up and down the supply chain.

But it is a really interesting experiment in economics. We rarely get a chance to see something like this. The whole of USA, and really, a big chunk of the global business and commercial world, is being upended by this. What will be interesting to see, is just how bad, the bad will be. Do we get a recession? Or, do we get a much more serious thing happen. In Turkey - a NATO member nation - the central bank just raised it's interest rates from 46% to 49%. The Turkish currency, called the Lira, is around 38 to 39 to the US dollar, but the Canadian dollar, which was floating around 69 US cents, is now up at the $0.72 level measured in US dollar terms. We think it should be closer to the 80 or 90 cents ($US) level, given the local Canadian factor endowments that we all sit on here.

Canada is embarassingly wealthy, truth be told. We literally have almost everything we need. Our farmland is rich, we have a big surplus of oil and gas, we have well-run, safe, home-designed, deuterium-based heavy-water nuclear reactors for electric power, and we also have hydro-electric power plants that generally produce a substantial energy surplus. We also can now grow world-class grapes, for fine red Pinot Noir wines, and we make one of the very best whiskeys in the world. We also have domestic automobile and aircraft manufacturing businesses that are cash-flow positive, and our telecom and internet works well (we have wireline, fibre-optics and satellite links to everywhere), and we build very good guns, and our soldiers - even though we have few - seriously enjoy fighting. And we have a health-care system that is not bad. I had an MRI last year, using a big Siemans MRI machine at the local hospital. Got the results - all good. Cost covered by my OHIP/Health insurance, paid-for at income-tax time (a modest surcharge to documented Taxable Income). The Ontario health-care model actually works. It's not fast, but you do not get bankrupted by medical debt.

The rest of the world is not like this. It is warmer, it is full, it often has governments run by criminals, it is often in conflict, it does not have proper Roman-style land-tenure, it has fake rule-of-law, and it is generally in serious trouble, for the most part.

Will adaptation occur in USA, and will USA manufacturers and merchants really move production back into USA, and create factories that make stuff that was made at low cost in China and other Asian locales? Or will USA just get poorer, use more expensive products, and shift to a lower standard of living? Will USA end up with a "peasent economy" with typical two-sector Third-World characteristics? And how will Europe and Africa and Canada/Mexico/South-America/Australia/Japan/New-Zealand respond? Will Russia achieve it's objectives of weakening the USA and it's alliances, or will the Putin Manchurian Project backfire, and we see Europe will spool-up a much bigger defence industry? ( Evidence shows that with the new German borrowings planned, this looks to be already happening).

The USA and the business-owners and investors of the "Western World" are now lab-rats, in a truly fantastic social and economic experiment, with remarkable hard-core authoritarianism coming soon to a city near you! Will Americans embrace the loss of their traditional rule-of-law and social freedoms?

It really actually is that famous "Chinese Curse". We are all now living in interesting times. We are pretty sure, that most of the world is going to be damaged badly (f**ked hard by USA...), and that it is not going to be pretty. But we hope we are wrong. We really, really hope we are wrong.

[ Apr. 16, 2025 ] - Holy Moly! The Google Generative AI is Good!
Dividends came in today. :) (little ascii-glyph of smiling face...) Just for gits and shiggles, I entered: "Dividend Day at The Bank of England" into a Google search. (I just read Jeremy Paxman's 2009 book on "The Victorians", which looks at Victorian artists and their work, as a way to track through the amazing history of Victorian Britain. For a history-junky, such as myself, it's a wonderful read - almost unputdownable, due to it's interesting subject matter.)

I got a *fail* first time, on the Google Generative AI (the new experimental feature Google is rolling-out). It said it was unavailable for the moment, and I should try again later. Of course, being an old computer nerd, I figured a few thousand milliseconds was probably enough "later", and I tried it again, and of course, it worked.

The AI's summary result was really good. I got a full page of information about the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (the old nick-name for the Bank), a good description of the painting and a quick bio of the artist, George Elgar Hicks, the location of the painting (Bank of England museum), and a description of what the painting showed (the legendary "widows and orphans" collecting their money from their "Consols"), and even some proper references to where the information came from.

To see a copy of the image, there are some sites listed. The best, is the Google artsandculture site. Here is link:

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/dividend-day-at-the-bank-of-england-george-elgar-hicks/cQGYGn6s9klOEw?hl=en

I particularly like the little dog, in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. Does he have a bank-note in his mouth? Or is it someone's work-sheet or account balance? Unclear. But Hicks gave him nice bright little eyes, and like everyone else, he is trying to watch everything, and keep it all in focus. It's a really wonderful painting - every person that is shown, looks so real and each seems to have a story to tell. It's like watching a whole film, in one single still image. And that, of course, before movies and film existed, was exactly the idea. Hicks succeeds nicely. It's just a great, great painting - and it shows what artwork used to be able to do - draw you into it, like a good book or a good film can do.

I am so sick of "French Impressionism", that I could just shout "Arrrgh" like a pirate in the Gallery, truth be told. Monet in particular, I find annoying. His early work was really very good. I like "The Japanese Woman" (picture of his wife in a kimono, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Art), and "The Luncheon" (Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt) and "Terrace at Sainte-Adresse" (He captures the light and the wind at the seashore - now in the Metro. Museum of Art in New York). They are very good. But in later life, he just painted the same damn water-weeds over, and over and over. So what? It just got mushy, muddy and silly. As an artist, he was really a bit of a hack. He found something that was trivial, and just replicated it ad-nauseum. It says so little to most of us now.

The whole "impressionism" thing is such a cliche now, which looks rather tired and dated. Those Victorian paintings that are full of many stories - they seem so curiously fresh and modern. They reflect the wild, technological change and crazy growth of England in the 19th century. They just vibrate with energy and power and possibility. (Don't missunderstand. I love Turner also. "Sunrise with Sea-Monster" is a favourite. Turner invented impressionism - and did it so well.)

The Google Generative AI is really just awesome. It actually works, and works in the way that is actually useful and actionable, and lets one avoid putzing (is that spelled right?), and mucking about on the websites that are trying to sell copies of paintings, for example. I have grown terribly weary of the SPAM, click-bait, script-tricks, browser-hacks, and junk-sites that do annoying SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so as to generate money by showing miserable advertisements, and trying to sell, sell, sell.

The Google Generative AI is actually very good. And you don't need to *login* to ChatGPT or other data-harvesting sites. (Google is obviously most likely harvesting all the queries anyone makes - so don't enter stuff like "Where should I bury a body where it cannot be found?" and "How can I convert a Glock into a machine gun?" and silly stuff like that. (Unless you are a researcher, and trying to probe the process, perhaps...))

The internet is new-crazy now - and so is the world of trading, finance, business and politics. It's just insane what is happening in USA. (Canada is not much better, since we are having an election, which it looks like the tax, tax, more-tax, tax-and-spend, ban-guns, ban-freedoms, ban-free-speech insane Liberals look like they will win, because they put a grey-haired retired banker at the head of the Party. He has no political experience. But that is the idea. The various lefty nutjobs will be able to retain control of the Liberal Party policy-generation apparatus, and continue the process of cuck-focking Canada with stupid, awful socialist policies-of-failure. It's really sad.)

But the Google Generative AI is pretty good. Now, how can I get a local-copy, that is NOT on the internet, so I can do real work with it?

Re. Market fun: It's getting crazy. Really, really crazy. President Chaos and his crew, are morphing into something that is really not good. Not good at all. USA is the richest, most-successful nation. These current Trumpian people are trashing it's foundations, never mind the stupid tariffs.

There is serious and real evidence that Donald Trump is a "Russian Asset" - not an "Agent" - just a business person that got compromised, very early on, back in the 1980's. His KGB code-name was "Krasnov", and the rumour (not at all proven, maybe completely fake and false), is that he was filmed, in some detail, in Moscow, when he went there back in 1987, with a plan to build a tourist hotel near Red Square, in partnership with the Intourist agency.

The old KGB trick (also done by J Edgar Hoover of the US FBI, back in the 1950's), was to get a fellow really drunk, or stoned, or whacked out on drugs, then get some prostitutes to give him a real good time, and secretly film it all. And maybe even introduce some young-man prostitutes, and get him doing them also on film. FBI rumours exist, that this was done in USA, to several high-level political types, and was used by Hoover to keep them under his control. The deep-rumour is that Hoover learned this trick, when he participated in a gay-sex party, and was filmed.

J. E. Hoover of the FBI, basically kept his job till he died, since no political person would challenge or fire him. He finally died in May of 1972, having been director of the FBI since it's founding in June of 1935. Substantial evidence exists he was a homosexual, and had sexual relations with men. In the sexually repressed USA, and before AI made fake videos easy to create, possession of these kinds of films would give the holder significant control over an ambitious political person.

These rumours of Trump being a Russian "Asset" are probably completely bogus and false. But what exactly would a US President be doing now, if he really WAS under Russian control? Trying to blame Ukraine for the Russian Invasion War? Trying to degrade and destabilize NATO, without really actually ending it? Trying to wreck the most successful trading and business-linkage relationships in all of human history (USA and Japan/China/Asia/Vietnam - one side has money and very advanced technology, and honest, efficient trustworthy markets, and the other side has really skilled cheap labour, is able to fabricate anything, at crazy low prices, and also supply critical raw materials)? Or maybe making sure that USA military assets can be squandered away by pointless attacks on folks in Yemen? And you might also try to get him to damage the whole "Fortress North America" model of trade and military co-operation that USA, Canada and Mexico have created together? Oh, and maybe you could also try to get him to degrade and damage the long trading and security relationship that USA has had with Western (and now Eastern!) Europe?

Trump and his gang appear to be degrading and weakening the USA - by doing ALL seven of the things that are on that above list. And a few analysts and journalist folks have noticed this. My comments here are not original. Several researchers have mentioned this. Degrade and weaken the USA? This really, quite objectively, looks like what the Trumpians are trying to do.

If he really was a Russian "Asset", or operative, or a guy seriously compromised by Putin and the Russian Intelligence apparatus, then what he has been doing - suddenly - looks a lot less insane. It looks - really - rather like a clear pattern, maybe? We don't know, and cannot know.

But this is a real market risk, maybe? Maybe that game of Solitaire, is being played every night, at that big white house? (cf. the famous 1962 film: "The Manchurian Candidate", by John Frankenheimer, based on book by Richard Condon).

I've just watched a minor market collapse happen *again* today. It's near the 3:30 PM magic point, and the financials have given back all their gains, and are weakening *again* in a serious and sustained manner. And it's not just because of Federal Reserve speculations about the path of interest rates. There is something more happening here, and it is starting to look damned serious.

[ Apr. 15, 2025 ] - Bad Dreams: The Vortex Replaces the Matrix
No red pills now. Just the vortex, and the mad siren calls of "Return to the factories, Oh ye Sons and Daughters of America! Work for the Trumps, live by the dumps, and die from the mumps!" This bad dream is all so insanely tragic-comic, that is just rocks the socks off the world. USA does not have enough low tech factories, to fill with the modern youth doing the factory jobs of fabrication.

And America's youth really do not want to be factory-workers, despite what Old White Angry Man and his beard-guy says they must be. This whole thing is like a Hunter S. Thompson drug-dream.

The kids want to go to Harvard-class schools, and learn to build rocket-ships using CNC machines, and be the executives and planners and directors of the world. They won't do the jobs the Chinese girls are doing, making the iPhones for the rich, happy, gay men of Apple. This new model plan for America, is a wild fiction of foolishness - like a psychodelic dream. It is a vortex of error.

I don't like drugs that mess the mind - a small glass of fine Scotch whiskey is enough for me. It can settle the nerves, and quiet the daemons. Add in a little Irish harp music on the CD player, amped up by the big Crown DC-300a, and the fine Toshiba pre-amp, and I can glimpse a slice of heaven. (American raw-power power amp, with Japanese precision pre-amp and CD-player. This is how "comparative advantage" can benefit us all, see? Take the best from each maker-place and build the special thing you need.)

And Sartre was right. Hell really *is* other people - especially if those other people live in White Houses.

I recall a bumpersticker from USA, back when Nixon fired the Special Prosecuter, who was named Archie Cox. Mr. Cox was closing in on the whole Watergate cover-up. It said: "Impeach the Cox-sacker!"

I think I laughed until it hurt. Kinda like now.

[ Apr. 14, 2025 ] - Pay No Attention To The Man Behind the Curtain
I knew a military guy who always spoke of the problems of the toxic "Sierra Deltas" - (the sh/t-disturbers), who would constantly try to f*ck things up, since the power and authority of the "Sierra Deltas" was enhanced by this process of disruption.

Well, that makes sense, does it not? It goes a long way to explaining the current political and business models we are seeing. In my government-consulting work, I recall someone suggesting the need to "stir the pot" (sort of the same thing). You create a vortex of disturbance, and then folks who are seeking to extend their "reach", can step in and "solve the crisis" and so on. This is a terribly cynical view of how groups of people "working" together can morph into dysfunctional (and then, maybe truly evil?) collectives of bad folk.

Whole organizations can be disrupted without being repaired or corrected, or improved.

In terms of the markets - the key is to watch the currency and bond markets. The stock market is really a pimple on the arse of the bond-market elephant, and the daily dollar value of the trading in modern currency markets is large (and in charge?).

We may see the long USA government bond fall slowly in value, which implies a climbing yield. We see a possible future kind of like England, from the years 1800 (war with Napoleon) to the 1840's, when the railway stocks rolled over. The "Consols" traded above 5% yield several times in the 1800 to 1830 years. Those no-specified-maturity date British bonds paid a fixed 3% coupon. Their par value was 100, but when offered down, they could be quite attractive investments.

At a price of 60, the 3% coupon became a 5% yield. They were "Consolidated Annuities", and were called "Consols" for short. They made for reasonably effective and comfortable investing for the Victorians. The trick, of course, was to buy them during a big crisis, at a nice discount to par. I've just read a book on Victorian painting, by a fellow named Paxman. It's quite good. There is a wonderful picture called "Dividend Day at the Bank of England", by George Elgar Hicks. It's actually in the Bank of England Museum. Buy your Consols at 60, and get a nice solid, almost-no-risk 5%, that protects your capital, and gives a reasonable yield - during a period of very stable prices and improving (a lot!) level of British technology. But England needed to survive the war with Europe's Napoleon, and then the first 20 years of the 19th century. And it did.

The Victorians were not stupid. And they were not as cruel as history has made them appear. All that socialist whining about the "horror of the working conditions of Victorian industrialization" that we get in our economics schooling, is really mostly badly focused political slop. Yes, times were tough for really stupid people, who wanted to remain stupid. But Victorian England was characterized by a wildly improving technological profile, and massively expanding opportunities for pretty much everyone who was literate. No one was forced at gunpoint into those Victorian factories. There was a solid money-wage to be paid, and one could have a brick house, with a solid (not leaking) roof, enough food could be had, and the children could be sent to school to learn more than their parents knew. And the economic environment had stable prices, and positive real-rates of return, at low risk, for anyone with even small capital to invest.

Life in the country was not lovely. It was often cold, wet, dirty (really mud-crusted), and there was almost no chance of making any money at all. Country life is fine, if you have a good investment portfolio, or a lot of land, and peasants who can till the fields and manage the herds - but it is pure hard shit (lots of significant amounts of shit) if you were not the Laird of the Manor. The cities - with those wage-paying factory jobs, and schools for your kids - were seriously better than English country life for many who lived in the country. Folks who idolize the "rustic life" have probably never lived and worked on a farm, or a northern lumber camp. Outdoor work can be dirty, difficult, cold, wet, and generally pretty awful. But it's fine if you have cash and own the land. That is the key.

None of those Victorian workers, were forced into the cities - like some were in Communist industrial 5-year plans, or in various Asian industrialization efforts. Making money, offers opportunity, economic freedom, and a chance for an improving life. And improving technology can improve the economics in a big way. But the rising prosperity can always be derailed.

Just pay attention to those long bonds - those 30-year US Treasury bonds. They are almost like the old British "Consols", and if they fall in value, so that the yield goes well north of 5%, then the US stock market, at these current nosebleed levels of valuation, will be on thin ice. Stocks could fall 20 precent or even more, just so as to restore valuations that then track back to the historical levels. Everyone knows this.

Buffet has been going to cash for over a year now - what has he got, something like over $300 billion in his war-chest? Ray Dalio is also pointing out that we might be looking at something much more serious than just a recession.

No one should yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But risks are now high, and the curious folks running the USA Government are actively working to make them higher.

There is real danger from the American-sponsored growing use of war-action. This is a risk USA market players perhaps are not focusing on enough. The USA now uses it's military to routinely carry out murder of civilians. So does Russia, to an even greater degree, in Ukraine. This is a major shift in our modern world.

To understand the nature of this rising war-risk, one might want to find a copy of a film called "The Bedford Incident", which was made in the 1960's. It's a *very* good film. The kind of international warfare nonsense that is underway now, looks like it could morph very quickly into something very crazy - probably by some kind of ugly accident, which then provokes a pre-programmed response. From the film's climax:

"What will you do, Captain, if the submarine Commander responds?" "If he fire's one, I'll fire one!" and the stressed, hyped-up lad on the fire-control computer, hammers his red switches, and launches. The lad shouts: "FIRE ONE!". The nuclear depth charge is launched. The sub commander does the same thing, with his nuclear torpedo, and launches, because his sonar has detected exactly what has happened. He will die in a few moments - but so will the American warship, and all of it's crew.

The Chaos Game is a very dangerous game to play. There are no winners - only a sad hierarchy of broken and destroyed losers. It's Russian Roulette, but the gun is pointed at everyone's head, and there are many fingers on the trigger. The markets will have to react, as the war-risk expands.

[Update: Here is a link to the Internet Archive, which has a copy of "The Bedford Incident"]

https://archive.org/details/the-bedford-incident-1965-dvdrip-xvi-d

The US military, and the US Navy in particular, have typically had very high standards of professionalism and conduct. But humans are what they are, and errors will always occur, no matter how successful the system design is thought to be. And military people are expected to follow the orders of their civilian commanders, even if those orders are unwise. This creates significant risk.

Watch for the US dollar to slowly fall, and watch that 30-year USA government bond yield rise up slowly, like the breaching of the great white whale, in Melville's novel. Then maybe watch it happen much more quickly. The USA should be trying to move events towards stability, and emulate the Victorians. But instead, the Trumpians are using the same methods extremists use - kidnapping, violence and the targeted murder of civilians. The bombing of Yemen is extremely unwise, and the threats against Iran are illegal and truly dangerous. This unwise use of American military resources creates an expanding envelope of increasing risk.

FD: Interesting action today. We remain fully invested, in the banks and the telecoms and the gold stocks. Today, they continued their modest recovery, as did almost everything else. As mentioned, our tiny money machine is still working. But the AI (with it's down-pointing forecasts) has probably been the more useful instrument that we have. We've held decliners that have hurt capital. If we had followed the AI's pointings, we would have gone to cash long ago.

High-dividend payers seem to be less attractive, lately (like they used to be?). We used to find that high-dividend paying stocks, with good business models and reasonable moats, were actually pretty good - better than the professionals typically thought. But lately, a mean-reversion to the more traditional portfolio-manager's model seems to be in play - viz., dividend-payers with attractive dividends, are maybe flashing the warning signal, and should be avoided.

But in this mad world, things can change quickly. And the risk-profile that seems to be evolving, as a result of the astonishingly unwise actions we are seeing in the USA, keeps us cautious.

[ Apr. 13, 2025 ] - First, Do No Harm
Unless, of course, you really want to, and that is your plan, eh? What if President Chaos and the T-Team, are actually *trying* to create chaos, confusion, fear, uncertainty and doubt? The idea could be to make a really big mess, create much emotion and cascading problems, that then some kind of "marshal law" could be invoked, to take a-no-time-limit operational control of USA, that would allow elections to be "postponed" due to the big emergency. This sounds unbelievable, but it would go a long way to explaining what is going on.

We could be on the cusp of a really dangerous and ugly transition, where Trump and Putin enhance their common-cause, and seek to gang-up against China. We are constructing crazy scenarios, and trying to see what pre-conditions and/or indicators, might offer insight into how the madness may evolve. The whole Trumpian crafted-confusion-thing rather looks like an exercise in naked use of power. (Or maybe naked power in use?)

The use of bombing-campaigns as diplomacy, seems overdone. And it is comically silly for USA to expect that it can keep bombing nations around the world, and not at some point have to endure the bombing of American cities. The "Golden-Dome" - like the "Iron-Dome" before it, is a work of fiction.

It may not happen in my lifetime, but it is likely to happen within the next 40 or 50 years. USA, as an imperial entity, using what is basically 19th-century "gunboat diplomacy", is likely to find itself on the receiving end of such diplomatic efforts, at some point. What it has been putting out in the world, for the last 110 years or so, will almost certainly come home to America, at some point.

Americans can examine Hiroshima, or even the recent events in Ukrainian city Sumy, to get an idea what their future might possibly look like, if present trends continue. This is a bad/sad future... (does that really have to be explicitly stated, now?) Seems perhaps maybe "Yes." is the answer to that question.

In this kind of uncertainty, markets are not likely to advance too much, or too fast.

[ Apr. 11, 2025 ] - Friday Frolics
I recall Niederhoffer doing some kind of Friday-Monday thing - managed to make consistant gains, until suddenly, (I think I read somewhere), that it stopped working (like all market tricks eventually do). He eventually blew up, really badly, more than once, IIRC. Sad.

We are seeing a big sea-change here. Stammer-guy in the UK, says globalism is dead. Maybe. But this planet is really, really small. It's funny to see the USA, doing such really stupid stuff. It's going to break a lot of good machines and processes. I hope we can hold on to space-travel, otherwise, the species is terminal. Those roaches that can live inside nuclear containment areas, with lethal (to mammals) radiation levels, will inherit the Earth.

We see a precious-metal future. I've never been a gold-bug, but gold-backed payments (or maybe silver) are really the only one kind of nation-to-nation payments that can be trusted. Even those, are difficult, and fraught with risk.

I got the AWS - Amazon Web Service EC2 instance accessable and working again. Bloody complex, but we can control and fix it ourselves now. Amazon does it right. The AWS stuff is truly bloody excellent, even though we bitch and complain all the time. It just works.

International situation keeps getting more absurd each day. We had thought J.D. Vance would have been able to take over, after Mr. Trump is removed from his curious role as the Acting USA President. Not likely. Vance has arranged for the commander of the Pituffik military base in Greenland, Col. Susannah Meyers, to be fired for "loss of confidence in her ability to lead." She was fired because Vance and his wife felt that she (Meyers) was "undermining" US leadership. This is tragically stupid. Vance went to Pituffik, and shit directly on the Danes, by saying: "Denmark has not done a good job for Greenlanders" and had not spent enough money on security. This Vance character is a true goof. He goes into a foreign country, and he explicitly disrespects the people who run the place, and have owned it for 300 years, and leaves Meyers to eat the mess and the anger this has abusive, unwise action has created.

Meyers has to do damage-control, and tries to make it clear, the Americans are pleased with the current agreements and their good relations with the Danes, and that Vance's moronic and abusive comments, based on no facts at all, are "not reflective of the US Base." She had to say something like this. And it had to be public. Vance was the one who explicitly undermined the good relationship the Pituffik Base has had with Greenlanders and Denmark. Meyers had to say something. It's her call. The people at the Pentagon are very wrong. Firing her, makes America look weak, stupid, and vain. Vain and stupid Generals are quite easy to defeat, according to Sun Tzu. They make predictable mistakes.

The foolish Chaos-folks in Acting USA leadership positions are being unwise and abusive and just plain wrong. J.D. Vance is the one who should be fired. He chose to be an abusive fool. And his unwise actions risk undermining a long and fine relationship that USA has had with it's European allies. Vance should be deeply ashamed of what he has done. But these low quality folks seem to know nothing about honor and wise behaviour, it would appear. They seem to be just really bad people. There is some real tragedy happening here.

Spring (and sunshine) has returned, after yesterday's big snow storm. Funny weather - much like the markets. Best of luck to everyone. These will be challenging times, for all of us humans.

[ Apr. 10, 2025 ] - And It's 2, 4, 6, 8, Open Up Them Pearly Gates!
"Don't Ask Me Why! Poor Boy, We All Gonna Die!" (IIRC...)

Who was that? Country Joe and the Fish? (Update: Yes, it was..) Can't seem to recall... it was, in truth, far before my time. I was probably playing with die-cast cars ("Dinky Toys"?) in the dirt, when the last truly stupid, lets-engineer-our-own-defeat project that USA took on, took place. But at least the Vietnam war actually was - to a degree - an act of enlightened altruism (maybe?). I think I had a pretty Grade 4 teacher from Latvia, whose family had escaped the Communists, and came here, who taught us that the Vietnam War that America was all-in on, was a wonderful and noble thing, since they were fighting Communisim. She was tall and blonde and probably was responsible for my first glimmer of sexual awakening. I thought she was beautiful (and truth is, she was hot...) I think she got married, as her name changed, IIRC, at some point during the school year. But I might be thinking of one of the other teachers. I got a very lucky, "Leave It To Beaver" kind of school environment at the local public school, with pretty, female teachers who actually liked their jobs.

But poor old USA. The "President Chaos" tariffs have been "paused", and so has the European response of 20%. I read with interest, the comments from the CEO of Delta Airlines, who just said "We are reducing our forecasts", and also stated explicitly that Delta would not be paying a 20% tariff on any of the 200 new Airbus aircraft it has ordered. Doubtless, if this kind of tax increase goes into effect, Delta will declare "force majeure", and maybe buy Boeing aircraft, if they can still remain in business. Or maybe their business growth goes negative, and they will buy no new aircraft at all. The Delta Airlines CEO made it clear, that a 20% tax increase on the aircraft costs, will "make the math not work", which were essentially his words. The aircraft purchases become non-economic.

I also read that something like more than 300 students studying at USA universities, are having their student visa's revoked. The World is going to see this, and everyone, everywhere, will change their plans, on anything that is related to USA. This is a very big deal. It gives clear and direct evidence of an ugly xenophobia that is stalking poor USA - and now appears to be official government policy. This is really scary. And it must be tragic and painful for those who were working towards their degrees.

So, the markets are now back DOWN a couple of thousand points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as I key this, and our Canadian shares are getting crushed and deeply discounted, such that we have lost all the gains from yesterday.

I caution that this is what the beginning of the "Great Depression" looked like. Stocks would have these fierce "bear-market rallies", and then would return to their slow, grind downwards.

What happened yesterday, looks like an intense, short-covering rally. If you sold short, and the world changes, and prices start moving up, you are forced to buy into the running prices, and force them up further, to close your loss-making position. But when everyone has covered, the prices then fall back down. This way, the maximum number of folks, have their wealth destroyed. Both those going short, and the dip-buyers also, are made to take losses.

What we are seeing to day, looks like the return to the slow grind downwards, that characterizes a profound, and just plain bad, economic turn. And it looks like it now has gained force of it's own. The USA political process does not seem to have any mechanism to reduce or restrain costs of government operation, despite the actions of DOGE. This is really serious and bad.

If the Republicans themselves, cannot cut-back the out-of-control USA Government Federal spending, then we really are all tracking towards a very dark place, economically. And maybe even more than just bad economic outcomes. The Americans need to cut back - harshly - their military-adventure spending. But this is not even close to happening. And most of the spending is "off-limits" for cutbacks. "Medicaid" and other extreme expenditure programs, are not to be "touched" - just increased, as the society ages. And as USA is now actively expelling immigrants and students from foreign countries, the falling American fecundity rate will soon start to cause the "Japanification" of America to accelerate.

So, the market sees this, and folks move to cash, or investment choices that cannot be made to disappear, by those New York traders on "Wall Street". I noticed - from a trip to the local giant Costco yesterday - that the little 1-oz Gold minibars are not available anymore, having all sold out. They may be hard to sell, but they will not loose half their value, based on the actions of clever New York traders, and/or Chaos-Agents operating from the American Maison-Blanche.

The American "President-Chaos" has put us all, in a very bad place, and the markets are now reacting as expected. My AI-models are both pointing directly down, as can be seen on the main top screen (click top blue banner, then see at page bottom), and I honestly did not expect it to be this bad.

But it is. We close with the DJIA down 1014 points (-2.50%) and the TSE down 712 points (-3.00%). This is harsh.

We will survive. And we are lucky in Canada, because we can continue to source product from China, at attractive price points. For Americans, this is no longer possible.

So, Chaos-guy may have recalled the "Trade War Missiles", but great damage has been done, and is still going to be done, going forward. It will continue.

And most disturbing, is that the Republicans - even with their control of things political - cannot seem to find the ability to reduce the out-of-control USA Federal Government costs. This means the USA dollar will - at some point - decline in value vis-a-vis the rest of the world's currencies - which themselves are not really great value-stores, due to the debt levels that exist in most nations, developed and under-developed.

We have reached the place, where all the cans have been kicked to, I suspect.

And the small cans, are now the size of oil-drums, and they are full of debt-concrete, and cannot be anymore kicked.

Somthing's gonna give. Maybe it's gonna be all those American kicking-feet? The "basis-trade" has aleady blown up. What will be next? Mass-bankrupty events, from large corporations that cannot roll-over their expiring debt at the old crazy-low interest rates? If you buy bonds of any kind, you will want to take a real good look at the Prospectus, and see what happens when a "Default" event occurs, and how it will be handled, and what sort of collateral will be available for bond-holders to sieze and sell, so they can recover some of their money.

We still have some "Nortel Preferred Shares" at zero-value, in one of our portfolios. I keep them there (they were inherited..) I never would have bought them. Some "broker" bought them for my father. For a while, they paid a good yield. But then, Nortel went bust, all equity was wiped out, and even the bond holders got only pennies on the dollar. And Nortel was a superstar Canadian company, and I actually did some work for them, and they had very good software-development procedures. But their management was absolutely stupid and criminally corrupt. They were put on trial for fraud and financial scamming, but the Crown could not prove it's case, so the bastards all walked. Maybe they all ride the Blue Train someday, like in Agatha's story...? :)

We should have sold the BCE earlier.

** Best Market Advice You Will Ever Get **

Never Average Down. If the stock falls in price, in a serious and sustained way, then sell it. Just sell it. It's goddamn hard to do, since you know it might well come roaring back. And Sometimes it does. But sell it anyway. This is what Gerald Loeb said, and what many very good traders and investors, did not do in history, and thus eventually lost all their money.

I need to sell the BCE, but I am almost SURE it will recover, since it is a critical company for Canada, held by many small investors, insurance companies, and large pension funds. BCE just needs wholesale management change. The company has vast and significant assets, serious and useful technical skills, and a good franchise. But it is too much like Nortel, dominated by entrenched, arrogant, unwise management who bonus and stock-option themselves, and have allowed the share price to fall in half. This is so sad, and so bad. Yet this is how it goes at many companies in history, over and over and over.

Look at genius Google! They are brilliant, but they are destroying their search engine business - and are even using their AI stuff to accelerate this process. Google search does not even really work right anymore. And the first thing one now sees, when trying to do a Google Search, is an AI-written summary. This means zero advert revenue for those who used to get search-hits. The business model has just been blown up, and it's gotta be harsh for those who depended on Google.

USA itself is blowing up it's "We are the Moral High-Ground Force of the World!" economic and political model. This is a really big deal. USA is becoming a mean-spirited, nasty, xenophobic kleptocracy. President Chaos is destroying the American brand.

So, we are getting change. It is just that it is really bad change, and not even the out-of-control government costs are being addressed.

The market cannot but help see this, and react accordingly. Folks de-risk their investments and liquidity dries up, which creates a pro-cyclic situation. The more things fall in price, the more investors are motivated to unwind holdings.

[ Apr. 9-c, 2025 ] - Stock Market Says: "Ha Ha Ha, Fooled Ya!"
This is hilarious. Someone obviously explained the economic facts-of-life-and-death to Mr. Trump, and he decided he did not want to be the author of the "Great Depression Version 2.0" for USA. Well, that's good. Kinda like Ron saying: "We can call those missiles back, after we launch them, right?" and his new-cue-lar guy saying: "Ah, no, Mr. President, that's not actually how it works..."

But Mr. Trump CAN call the Trade War missiles back, and it looks like, for now, he did.

So, maybe no recession, at least not this week.

But the President of Chaos still sits in the big chair, and we shall see, what we shall see.

But I have to stop laughing for a minute, and look at my BCE - the only stock price on several screens, that closed DOWN. Down! On a day when the DJIA closed UP 2,962 points (7.87%), and the TSE closed UP 1,220 points (5.42%). Our bank stocks are up roughly 3.50% today, and this gives us some solid comfort.

We elected to do nothing - no sales, no purchases, since the portfolio-machine we have built, still seems to be working.

But that BCE is a real tragic thing. Really sad. It closed DOWN 18 cents, not much, but on a day when everything else is being launched into orbit, it really kinda hurts. BCE is a fail.

We do need change. We really do. And we need it everywhere, truth be told. Much is really, really wrong. But good for Mr. Trump, for not being unwise, and destroying the economic world. At least he pulled back on the stick.

[ Apr. 9-b, 2025 ] - Instead of Drill-Baby-Drill, We Got Fall-Baby-Fall
Both stocks and oil-prices are falling. The USA is now 100% on track for a major recession. Even Jamie Dimon admits the obvious.

[ Apr. 9, 2025 ] - The Big Treasury-Share Telephone Scam
Two of our holdings, BCE and BNS, have been selling "Treausry Shares" at serious quantity, into the public markets in Canada. This is hammering the share prices of each, and of BCE in particular. I sat down and read in summary fashion (not in detail, yet), the just-received BCE and BNS Annual Reports. The BCE annual report is just awful. BCE has changed their policy, and instead of purchasing in the public markets, the stock that it was using for its DRP (Dividend Re-Investment Program), it is now just "minting" new stock from "Treasury", and offering this at a 2% discount to an average of the recent share-price as prevailing on the TSE. This is absolutely insane.

It means the big funds, are probably just taking the two percent discount, getting the shares and then off-loading them into the public market at a locked-in premium, for a risk-free profit. The effect of this trade, of course, is to force down the share price. BCE has broken south of $30 per share, and closed yesterday at $29.77. We are sitting on essentially 50% losses in our holdings of this stock, and are quite honestly astonished that this sort of nonsense is legal, here in 2025. It looks like a sleazy form of "death-spiral financing", that I encountered, many years ago. It is stupid and ugly, and certain to drive-down the share price of the company's stock.

The BCE 2024 Annual Financial Report is 168 pages. You need to read it all. It's real work to do this. On page 67, one can find the "Outstanding Share data". As of December 21, 2024, the number of outstanding BCE Common Shares was 912,283,103, according to the report. In a tiny footnote, under this table, we see this: "At March 6, 2025, 921,824,604 common shares, and 5,503,174 stock options were outstanding". "WTF? WHAT!?" is what I said. This is mostly explained by 9,540,786 shares issued from "treasury" under the new DRP (Dividend Re-Investment Plan).

This is nuts. It means BCE has basically done a $314 million dollar secondary capital raise, seriously diluting existing shareholders, and done this all under the table, as it were, using the DRP.

BCE looks like a company that is really in trouble. And apparently, after using Deloitte LLP as the company's auditors (since the year 1880, Deloitte points out in it's Note to Shareholders, on page 115 of BCE's 2024 Annual Financial Report), the Audit Committee of BCE has decided that Deloitte will be fired, and that Ernst & Young LLP will be appointed as External Auditors. This change has already taken place. The absurd legal fiction is stated on page 9, of the "Notice of 2025 Annual General Shareholder Meeting and Management Proxy Circular" that "You will be appointing your auditors". This statement is pure bullshit. The change in Auditors has already taken place. It appears to be because Deloitte required the writedown of bogus "Goodwill" for the Bell Media TV and Radio unit of BCE.

("Goodwill" is a premium that arises when the purchase of another company is made, above the accounting, or "book" value of the company being acquired. It is an explicit inflation of the asset-value of the thing being purchased. The idea is that it represents the premium that exists because of the probability of customers continuing to do business with the company being acquired. Sometimes, it is viewed as the value of the "customer list" of the business. )

The writedown of Bell Media "Goodwill" looks like it was over $1-billion. The Auditors probably had almost no choice here - they probably had to do this, given events. If it looks like the customers are going to go away, then "Goodwill" has to be reduced, since the asset is now less valuable.

TV and Radio advertising is not very valuable anymore. We do not watch any TV at all. I literally never turn on the big Panasonic flat-screen, for TV-watching. TV is way beyond just being awful. It is so awful - so astonishingly annoying - that I don't like it even being on.

The BCE 2024 Annual Financial Report is a truly scary document. The important and business critical information is very hard to locate, and a clear explanation of what the "Critical Audit Matter" actually was, is completely absent. One has to de-code a curious reference to "Goodwill and intangible assets - Bell Media Group - refer to Notes 2N, 8, 19, and 22 to the financial statements." Just finding this information and going through it, is real work, which requires much coffee and serious focus.

What seems to have happened, is that Deloitte, as External Auditors, made it clear that the "Goodwill" on the books for BCE, needed to be seriously written down, since it no longer was an accurate estimate of the *value* of Bell Media's TV and Radio assets. The value of those assets, is of course completely a function of the advertising revenue that they can be expected to generate, from now and going forward into the future.

If folks out there, are like the folks in our little enclave, then TV advertising revenue can be expected to fall to something approaching zero. I run ad-blockers on my web-browsers, and no longer even use Youtube, because the adverts are so annoying. I have discovered "Bitchute", and other private video/radio sources, and watch and listen to these. We listen to a lot of radio - but it is internet-radio, which we stream via code I compiled myself (a version of MPlayer which runs on a Linux-box, that uses the FFMPEG open-source code). It streams nicely. We listen to European Jazz stations, which do not have advertisements. Some of the music is really very nice. We also have a lot of CD's. Modern FM radio is very difficult to listen to, due to the obnoxious and annoying adverts.

So, we COMPLETELY AGREE with Deloitte, and obviously, the "Goodwill" amount, in the Bell Media asset value, should probably be written down significantly. TV advertising is a dying business, much like wireline telephone is asserted to be. (We disagree with that view. We think wireline is a really valuable asset, but BCE appears to be squandering this, because it seems to think it wants to be a technology company, instead of a critical utility.)

What we think happened, is that Deloitte probably said: "Bell Media is a dying business, and the Goodwill that is sitting there on the books as a fat, multi-billion dollar asset, which is only there because you clowns paid too much money for these media assets. It is now **impaired** and needs to be reduced. That means a big write-down of the value of the Bell Media asset value." And BCE company management folks probably said "WTF? No way! That media stuff is really valuable, the couch-potatoes still watch TV, the advertisements are still really valuable! It's "content"! It's how we sell communication services!, blah blah blah..." and so on. (I hate that term "content". It is perfectly, the most stupid term ever invented, maybe. As if libraries contain just "content", FFS!)

The writedown had to happen, otherwise BCE would have had a "Qualified Audit", which is where the accountants say that "We did this audit, and it's mostly ok, mostly legal, except for this thing here: ", which they then explain. Since the writedown of the Bell Media goodwill was taken, then the BCE Financial Report was certified as being legal, by Deloitte, but the "Critical Audit Matter" was documented. What is comical, and makes me so angry, is the nonsense on page 115, where a section was titled "How the Critical Audit Matter Was Addressed in the Audit", and that section DOES NOT ACTUALLY SAY HOW THIS MATTER WAS ADDRESSED! It is just hilarious.

Could you bunch of careful double-talkers - both BCE Management and Deloitte - actually just say, maybe: "Ok, so we took a big writedown of the 'Goodwill', for the asset-value of the Bell Media unit." Why do I have to dig around and examine FOUR different "Notes To the Financial Statements", to try to figure out what the resolution to this "Critical Audit Matter" actually was?

This BCE Annual Report is an appalling document. It reminds me - A LOT! - of the Enron Financial Statements, that I waded through years ago, trying to figure out what the fuck these scammers in Texas were actually doing to make money. The Enron stuff was deliberately vague, unclear, and obfuscated. A really tiny footnote said the deep truth - that the CFO did a deal that made him $80 million personally, which was then red-circled in the Wall Street Journal. When I saw that shit, I knew Enron was dead-meat.

Why the hell does a phone-company here in Canada, have to produce such an awful and bafflefart-bucket like this? If the "Critical Audit Matter" was addressed by taking a big goddamn writedown in the vastly-too-high asset-value of Bell Media, then why not just fucking say that!?

As shareholder, who bought some of his BCE position at $62 per share, and is now looking at shares trading at $29 levels, I think maybe I have both the right, and the obligation, to be fucking pissed off here, and document this on this website.

The Bell Canada Enterprises Management and Directors are not doing their jobs well. This BCE company is in real trouble, and changing the Auditors will not correct the evident problems. BCE is NOT a technology company. It is just a badly-run utility, with bloated, overpaid management, who are not even doing their accounting properly. The share price is crashing, and this collapse in share-value, because of poor BCE performance, will hurt many people.

What needs to be changed, is the management of BCE. The management are making very bad business decisions - such as planning to buy "Ziply Fiber" in the USA, instead of using the proceeds from a sale of "Sports" assets, to pay down debt. The company has too much debt, and does not seem to have a plan to address this problem, other than dumping newly-minted "Treasury Shares" onto the market, to dilute and degrade existing shareholder share values.

BCE looks to be yet another "munted shitshow", as the Australians like to say.

[ Apr. 8-b, 2025 ] - Anti-Liquidity and War
Liquidity seems to be quietly leaving the building, along with Sanity, Fair-Trade, and Common-Sense.

The Trumpsters seem determined to force USA into an economic spiral-dive. This is not some kind of corrective strategy, that will yield benefits later. This is just unwise, wrong action. It will take a few months for things to really become obvious. But by then, the damage will be hard-coded into new behaviour patterns and processes. Could Trump really be a Russian "Manchurian Candidate"? Or maybe some kind of Israeli agent?

If Trump bombs Iran, Iran will have every legal right to make full-on war against USA, by any and all means possible. Their very existence is being threatened by abusive Israeli neo-fascists, who seek to destroy them. Netanyahu appears to be a racist madman, and Trump seems to be completely onside with this.

What happened to the idea of peace? Curious how insanity can grow like a cascading cancer. This does not look good. Trump and his people honesty seem like insane, extremist fanatics, filled with delusional malevolence and seething hatred.

How did it all go so wildly wrong for USA? They look to be doing real self-harm to themselves - and also to us folks who hold stocks and used to support them. And now, Trump threatens Iran for no reason.

Trump campaigned on peace, and instead, now threatens expanding and unjustified war.

This is operational insanity.

[ Apr. 8, 2025 ] - Bare Market?
Tide goes out. Who is swimming naked? Bonds start to fall, and long-yields are still tracking upward. We are not seeing a rotation - we are seeing liquidation. It's a different thing, if that is what is happening.

We advise folks to be very, very careful here. My readings of history suggest this today (Dow Jones average up over 1000 points), looks like a pretty traditional "Bear Market Rally", or even maybe the famous "Dead Cat Bounce". Nothing has changed here. There is no movement to sanity taking place. Conflict is being baked in, and the comments from Peter Navarro (does this guy really have a PhD from Harvard? He sounds astonishingly clueless about so many things...) make me worried. He dismisses Musk as a "car assembler", which is a comically stupid thing to say. All auto-makers are "car assemblers". Navarro has obviously no knowledge whatsover, about the auto industry, and also no knowledge of Elon Musk's work in rocketry.

I have a video, made long ago by Musk's recruitment guys, which shows Musk walking around the SpaceX rocket-engine production facilities. He describes - in detail - the operation of each of the workstations, where components of the Falcon-9 engines are being made, mostly by automatic, programmable CNC machines, which are cutting and forming parts. It was all direct-speaking, Musk was not reading any script. He just knew what every damn machine did, probably because he paid for each of the goddamn wonderful things.

Navarro really appears to be a completely clueless goof. I find this amazing. Perhaps Navarro is good at passing tests or keeping his masters happy. Or maybe Harvard is just not what it used to be? I have no idea how Navarro can say such profoundly stupid things as he does. Musk's call for a "Zero Tariff" region between Europe and USA is an obviously good idea. Poor Navarro cannot seem to reason clearly. It's just amazing - but not in a good way...

Check out the facts: They are here, in a Zerohedge summary. Musk calls Navarro "an absolute moron" and Elon Musk seems to be correct here. Peter Navarro is dangerously incorrect in the nonsense he is asserting, and the facts confirm this.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/navarro-truly-moron-musk-slams-trump-trade-czar-ongoing-tariff-feud

So, be careful. Be very, very careful now. We have a serious problem here. Unwise and dishonest people are in charge here. I saw this problem more than once, in my professional work. It is a not-uncommon problem. Maybe you do not want to buy this dip (or believe the nonsense from arrogant dipsh/ts with Harvard PhD's).

We have this curious (and regularly confirmed by history) theory about the markets. Stock markets - and even bond markets - are required to occasionally destroy almost everyone's wealth. This has to happen, otherwise, in a few hundred years, everyone would be multi-billionaires, just due to compounding of interest on their family investment income. But this *NEVER* happens. Even the Medici bankers of Italy were eventually bankrupted, due to bad (but necessary) loans they made to the Kings and Princes of Europe. Everyone goes bust eventually.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end, of the American experiment. Or, we may just be having a really, really bad time for a while, and self-correction will take place, starting in 2026. Either way, the true diabolical operational objective of the markets, is sometimes to make sure that the maximum number of market participants, face the maximum level of losses, so that grand reset events can be engineered, and the power-of-compounding can be countered.

This regular, wreck-it-all crash-and-destroy-all-wealth action, has to occur. It's just that it occurs after a very long (multi-generational) period of stable growth, so that no one is really expecting it. For example, look at the transition from Victorian England - one of the most wealthy and successfully times for the little British island-nation - to the time of after the Second World War, in the 1970's, when England was over-run by Socialism, there were few available jobs, and folks with either money or ambition, were fleeing the country. Taxes were sky-high. (the Beatles song, "Tax Man" said it well). The place was an economic wreck.

No nation or group of people, stays at the top of the economic "Prosperity Mountain" for ever. Something knocks you off the top.

Our sense, is that this Trumpian foolishness - not just tariffs, but the idiot war on foreign folks in the USA - is going to do spectacular damage to America, if it is not stopped very soon. Immigrants into USA (and Canada also), seem to be one of the main sources for economic uplift. They are prosperity-focused, hard-working and are also bringers of fresh DNA, so the gene-pool of the society does not go bad from in-breeding (a serious, but rarely talked about problem, that besets insular "cult-communities" of all kinds).

The internal "Immigrant War" that is going on in USA is grotesque and tragic, and it will cause long-term harm to USA. But, so it goes. People are tribal, of course. But tribal binding is not prosperity-building action. Trade is good - not just to make money, but also because it lets new ideas and different perspectives be seen, assessed, understood and maybe copied. More trade means more communication, knowledge transfer, and economic gain for those who jump fast and hard on new ideas and new (better) methods. (The best example of this process, was the European transition from Roman Numerals, to "Arabic" Numbers, by merchants, back in the early Middle Ages. It changed everything.)

The USA obsession with "Intellectual Property" is absurd and also grotesque. And it flies right in the face of traditional science and scientific knowledge-sharing. It's a stupid, abusive, and wrong idea, and it should just be avoided. Patents should last maybe 10 years, and after that, all knowledge should be open-sourced. We believe open-source science is the most important driver of human progress and planetary economic prosperity. It is also critical for the species survival, in the intermediate and long term.

But the markets have to make these "reset" events, or they just grow like cancer, and will consume everything. Everything cannot grow forever, without limit, on a finite planetary surface.

So we always have to be on guard against runaway processes that are hitting limits, and are actively programming major "resets".

We might be having the beginning of one of these major resets, right about now, ("funk soul brother...")

Seriously. We may be looking at another 10% or 20% (or maybe 50%?) fall in USA markets, since USA is actively changing just about *EVERYTHING* it claimed it used to stand for. Both political parties in USA typically supported "Free Trade", managed immigration, open science, knowledge-sharing, active assistance to developing nations to uplift themselves (and thus become markets for USA products), and so on.

Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with, are actively changing (trying to destroy?) all of this. This is a very big change.

This change is not something short-term. It will have multi-year, long-term consequences. It will almost certainly harm USA growth, and USA level of prosperity. There will be smaller, and fewer markets for USA products, much (much!) less trust in USA as a counter-party, and probably a direct, focused effort by many nations to move away from using the USA-dollar as a currency for settlement of international trading action. How can this not happen, given what Trump and his people are now doing?

So, we caution a "Big Reset" is probably going to take place. But the price action will have to suck a lot of folks into the process, maybe several times, so that it can ensure that the benefits and characteristics of compound growth are extinguished for the maximum number of participants. This is how it has to work.

This means that the markets will try to gut and bankrupt the greatest number possible. The price-action will move to make that the most likely scenario. Even great traders/investors like Jessie Livermore, who was short the 1929 Great Crash, and made over 100 million dollars (a very great amount of money for 1929), managed to lose all of it (and even more!), by 1934, and had to declare bankruptcy. (I have a newspaper picture of him signing his bankruptcy papers in front of the bankruptcy referee, May 15, 1934.) Livermore was not stupid. He was very clever, and a brilliant trader. But the market took all his wealth, in just 4 years.

Prepare for this outcome. Gold and other precious-metal investments will do you no good, if your gold is stolen from you. And it probably will be, maybe like it was in 1933, by the USA Government. And can you assay your gold? Do you know if it *really* actually is gold? And how can you spend it? Does your counter-party have assay technology? Can you use your gold ingots, to buy food? Can you buy ammunition with it? Can you buy truck-parts with it? Can you use it to pay property taxes? Probably not. You will need to have a working market, somewhere. Or you may well starve.

Currency from a trusted nation (or maybe crypto-currency?) might still be better. But crypto will not work, if we get EMP's that knock out the computers. This really might happen. It would leave all the bad radioactive fallout in orbit, shutdown the national powergrid, destroy most computers, and make a victim-nation easy to dominate militarily.

There really is no way to "prep" for the worst-case outcomes. Better that we should keep our markets and our trading-actions working, and just remove the idiots who are trying to destroy the currently working world. This is actually the essence of "Conservative". What we - as hard-core "conservatives" are seeing in USA - is a not-very-rational group of angry, xenophobic extremists, seem to have taken control of the USA Government, and have decided to blow everything all to hell.

The "Move Fast and Break Things" algorithm is not going to work in the global political context that the Trumpians are trying to use it. They are just going to provoke more intense warfare, and extreme and growing hatred of all things American.

But they might "reset" the markets. The markets can do this, regardless of what the Trumpsters say and spout about. This really looks like it might go on for months, and maybe years, as the damage has already been large. Trade *will* be dialed down now, as this is already happening. It's just a question now of how much, and over what time-span.

The stock and bond markets may react to this set of big changes, going forward, for *years* now. That's what happened last time. And then, the Second World War began.

So, be careful. We don't think this market transition event is completed. If Trump is not effectively restricted from doing more damage, then this will go on for at least two years, and maybe more. By June (two months from now), the serious layoffs will begin, and by this coming autumn, GDP will probably be moving down, into clearly negative territory.

FD: We remain fully invested, in our banks, mining companies, and telecoms. These may fall in price, but we don't expect them to be destroyed, regardless of what the political people do. They all produce dividend-streams which have sustained us for over 20 years, through both global financial-crisis and Covid-19 events. We expect them to survive the coming trade and kinetic wars, as we expect Canada will also. We're pretty resilient here. We are also much more well-armed than we appear. :)

[ Apr. 6, 2025 ] - Economic Helter-Skelter
Yes, it is our worst-case scenario. Economic Helter-Skelter is coming down. The Trump Team keeps digging the big hole of bad policy, deeper and deeper and - to everyone's surprise - even deeper. They keep saying things that are not true, and actively trashing America's tradition of rule-of-law.

This is nuts.

Tariffs - taxes on trade - are the "Neutron Bombs" of political-economic action. "Smoot-Hawley Act" tariffs (signed by President Hoover, in June of 1930, if I recall correctly) were minor - less than 10% increases. Yet they took global trade down by roughly two-thirds, in a few years, as nations reacted, raised their own tariff-taxes, and business-owners dialed-back production due to trade now being non-economic (that means: "does not make money").

Maybe President Trump gets arrested for his wildly illegal arrests and imprisonments of the so-called South-American gang folks? It breaks common-law tradition to just arrest people and put them in jail, without even a court-appearance or a trial where they can at least tell their side of the story.

Suggested Revolutionary Democrat rally-cry: "Free trade! Imprison Trump!"...?

But you need a loyal judicial police force - very well armed - who can carry this out. Real firefights might be likely.

Once Trump is removed, JD Vance can assume the role of "Leader", and suspend some of the Trumpian foolishness, and the USA can be saved, perhaps. But we view this scenario as extremely unlikely. Trump will probably end his days like Stalin did, and expire in his luxury bed.

At this point, anything is possible.

[ Apr. 5, 2025 ] - Instant Karma - Worst-Case Scenario
Wow, Number-3! This is playing out, as my absolute worst-case scenario. It's scary-fascinating. It's massively wrong, to a degree that is jaw-droppingly amazing. Trump is a classical meglomaniac, and looks to be hilariously insane. And yet, enough Covid-19 brain-damaged folks are willing to participate in this madness. It's like a Jerzy Kosinski story I read once, about how the Communists took over and ruled Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. People are weak, shallow and willing to do bad things, if they believe they are protected or benefit by doing this. Humans can be curiously unwise and cruelly foolish.

America used to be better than this. It used to be the antidote to this kind of bad behaviour.

But not now? Fascinating. It's like a Twilight-Zone episode. One crazy man is taking USA into the Economic Twilight Zone, and pretending that his unwise and proven-wrong actions will somehow benefit Americans, by damaging USA's relationship with the World.

These people say stuff that is just not true. It's amazing. I read and watched part of an interview with the Acting Treasury Secretary, a fellow named Scott Bessent. He said two things in particular: First, it is not a trade war. Second, Trump knows what he is doing. This is nonsense. It is a trade war to end all trade wars, let's try to be honest. If Scott is lying to your face in statement number one, why should anyone believe statement number two?

In trading and the world of the trading-floor, the expression was: "Don't stand there pissing on my shoes, and try to tell me it's raining!" Lies are pretty common in the world of money. And politics.

But this Trump Tariff nonsense is over-the-top insanity.

Stellantis (the old Fiat-Chrysler) has shut down Jeep production and idled it's factories in Canada and Mexico, and also Indiana. Jaguar-Rover and Volkswagen have both suspended shipments of vehicles to USA. A hydro-cortisone skin cream I wanted to buy at the local Costco Pharmacy, is not available. The gas-station in a nearby town, which has become an "Esso" franchisee, has put up a huge sign, saying: "This Business is 100% Proudly Canadian Owned!" (which is true). I talked to the owner, and he said their sales collapsed, because people thought that the "Esso" brand meant USA-ownership.

Anything seen as "USA-Owned" is being actively avoided by Canadians. The "USA" brand is now filth.

The direct effects of Trump's idiotically destructive foolishness, are being immediately felt, and the business-responses generated are profoundly negative, and will NOT CREATE USA JOBS. Only a delusional crazy, living in a psychotic dream-world, could think that this would happen. Production will not magically morph back to USA, from off-shore factories. What will happen, is that existing production that is just not economic, (that means it cannot make money now) given the new absurd tariffs, will just stop and shutdown.

The USA economy will skid, and slide into the ditch, because of these tariffs.

What the hell did these crazy clowns think would happen? That companies would just happily lose money as they build stuff, and then hand a fat tax-payment over to the lunatic thieves in Washington, D.C.?

Jesus, can these Trumper-folk be this fucking stupid???

And, the short answer, appears to be: Yes.

So, here we are in "Worst Case Scenario" land. Canada will impose 25% tariffs on all USA-made cars, and that will basically end the cross-border car business. The Japanese factories here - Toyota and Honda, and also Ford, especially (big production operations in Canada), will dial back production, and re-orient their business to exports to Europe, maybe. But business will dial down in a big way, no question. That's ok, because we should not be so dependent on the USA. This will force Canada to get off it's arse, and not rely on USA business to survive. We should be exporting a LOT more to Europe, South America, Asia and the Far East. And even to Australia and the UK.

This will also help Canada throw away it's idiot Lefty nonsense-ideas, and maybe help us all get back into the weapons and lethal-aircraft business. We build good weapons. And this will be a good business, going forward. We cannot rely on American weapons - hell, they might be used against us! Time for a major re-think, all across the board.

Perhaps Trump himself will be arrested and imprisoned. His actions regarding the forced removal of folks without criminal records, to an El Salvadorian prison, are insane, abusive and explicitly contrary to basic English and USA common law. Before being imprisoned, you should at least have a day in court, to try to clear your name, and show you are not a criminal. But Trump's stormtroopers did not do that. So the son-of-a-bitch who ordered this removal to a prison (not a deportation), is a criminal, and could be removed on this basis alone, never mind the economic damage he is doing.

As the USA economy is dialed-back, and folks start getting laid-off from their jobs, and the equity markets fall another 10 or 20 percent, the explicit calls to remove Trump, may grow quite loud. Production is not going to suddenly return to USA, from off-shore factories, since this is a task that takes multi-year effort.

The short-term effects of these "tariff-taxes" will be to reduce production, and raise prices of products and services. This will cause serious inflation, at the same time as it dials-down production. And Trumpsters want the Federal Reserve folks to *lower* interest rates?? That would be unlikely to happen. But it might, if a major economic downturn is triggered by these tariff-taxes.

But history suggests that the economic downturn will look like what happened in the 1970's, where inflation AND economic-recession, came at the same time. I recall that time, as a young lad, looking for work. It was damn grim. There were no jobs, inflation was running at 10% to 20%, and interest rates were jacked up to 20% (and higher), to end the inflation. It was ugly.

But there was more wiggle-room in debt-financing possible. This is not the case now. The big USA Federal "credit-card" is pretty close to being maxed-out. Interest costs on USA Federal debt, now exceed the USA military budget, and are over 1,000 billion USA dollars per year now. The USA is risking an economic/currency meltdown, if it cannot become economically stable. Except these tariff-taxes will hammer-whack stability, and raise costs (and reduce production) for everyone, everywhere.

It is fascinating that this kind of economic madness could play out, as it is doing. There is no chance it can work as the Trumpers are suggesting.

And so, as the economy crashes, this Trump person will probably go onto a "full-war" strategy, which is the last and most destructive thing a fool-King will do. This was so common in European history, that it makes one want to weep.

But the USA may start a war, that it does not win. China may feel justified in trying to sieze Taiwan (and more), and USA will have to go full-on against them. But USA might find that it does not have the firepower, and as neither side will want to go nuclear, the USA will just lose. The trade-war with China slides into a hot-war with them, and then, USA has the chance to now lose twice - first with a damaged economy (think about those $3,500 iPhones), and second, with a major military defeat, where it's aircraft carriers are *all* sunk.

It's easy to sink an aircraft carrier. You just rain 30 or 40 hypersonic missiles down upon the great ugly thing. The missiles don't even need warheads. If they are incoming at 6000 or 7000 miles per hour, the kinetic-energy transfer alone, will be enough to punch enough holes in the ship, so that it either sinks, or becomes inoperative. But you have to be accurate. That means visual targeting (not radar), and it means that the missile must be able to steer itself at velocity. This is a complicated technical problem - but it is not impossible to solve.

And the Chinese might just say - screw it - let's just use a low-yield tactical fission-device, and then we do not have to be that accurate. They could claim it was an American device that was used first. I would not be unhappy, to see a few American aircraft carriers successfully dispatched, given that they are being used for such grotesque, evil purposes in the Middle East now.

So, we track fast now, into a cluster of worst-case scenarios.

Hey USA! "Instant Karma, gonna get you?" You gonna find you got no friends suddenly...

[ Apr. 4, 2025 ] - Insane Times and Really, Really Simple Calculus
More Wow... We had a horrible ICE storm with high winds, following the insane snowmageddon of April 2. The storm knocked down very large trees, some of which fell right on our power line! Yesterday, was a lovely day, as is today also. Thank goodness for this. The sympathetic fallacy goes on.

We spent yesterday cleaning up, and cutting the downed trees - which hit the powerline to the ranch-house, and knocked us off the grid. The technical experts from a great little private company we called, showed up to install a new electricity line, and I got the trees cut up and piled up. Crazy work. But by the end of the day, the Hydro folks showed up, and re-connected our power at the highway, and "Fiat Volts!", we are back on the grid. Our little Chinese-made 11,200 watt generator did fine work, to keep the fridge, the freezer and the water-system and some lights working - as well as the sump-pump (so the basement did not become a swimming pool...).

Crazy times. And in the Markets, too. We were able to power the Starlink and part of the LAN, with the generator, and it all worked. This was the first time we tried this, and it worked. Good technology. Glad we already have it.

The "Trump Tariffs" are viewed as insane... and also as a really abusive assault on Canada. It's real serious now. This Trump character is doing some serious and sustained damage now. How long until this madman is removed? Count the days.

Here is some basic (and bone-simple) political calculus:

The looney lefties, and kids with no money and mostly-poor folk will almost always vote for neo-socialist parties. It's only when they grow-up, get some surplus capital, and invest it, that they start to vote for sanity, stability and basic common-sense politics. A grown-up society is a good one to live in, since madness is dialed back, typically. The Left is marginal, and the middle-ground is mildly Conservative.

But - when some crazy nutjob who does not read books, gains power, and trashes the investments that most conservative folks hold, this really changes the balance. All those USA folks who are seeing their 401(k) and ordinary stock-market holdings crash and burn, directly because of the current Leader's insane and unwise policy decisions, are going to re-think their political choices, and vote to repair and stabilize the system. They will join the Left, and "throw the bastards out", as we say in Canada at election time.

That means that all the Democrat Party in USA has to do, is to find a sane, sober, sensible guy to run against the Republicans, and he is *certain* to win. They need to find a fellow who can speak clearly, and with honesty and common-sense - and also propose and pursue policies that are not insane or crazy. That's it. That is all that has to happen.

The Republicans are dead-meat, if this Trump character remains in power, and is not soon replaced with JD Vance (or really, anyone!). There is Constitutional Ammendment #25, I recall, that might let this be done legally. Otherwise, there are more direct methods...

Something needs to be done.

Otherwise, basic political calculus makes it clear as a polished diamond - the Republicans are dead, if they succeed in crashing the investment portfolios of all the conservative folks in USA.

This is really basic, guys.

If you gut the wealth and empty the wallets of the middle-class - those who supported Trump and his supposed "return to common sense" - you will be sent to the political Wasteland of Failure. The Republicans will loose badly, in 2026, and unless the Democrats choose even greater insanity, then they might even find themselves replaced by a newer, less extreme conservative political group.

This is basic political calculus. If you destroy the wealth of the middle-class, you create the direct demand for a fierce and fast tsunami-of-change, that will maybe just wash away the Republican Party completely.

I would have voted for Trump, if I was in the USA. That Harris women was a strange and tragic error. But Trump is destroying the world economy, and is also threatening to bomb Iran, just to follow the diktats of his Israeli handlers. This is pure and absolute madness. It must be corrected. The fellow is delusional, and profoundly dangerous. If we have to wait until 2026, the damage by then may be really extreme.

But who in their right mind, would vote Republican, after this munted shitshow? If the Republicans do not self-correct this problem soon, they face absolute political anniihilation.

That's what the Political Calculus Calculator says. It's not my opinion - it's just how it works.

And if you have kids? Do you want them working at factory jobs, assembling iPhones for rich people? Or do you want them designing rocket-ships, and working for future-oriented, high-growth technology companies trying to design and build a prosperous future?

The path that Trump is putting the USA on, is one of failure and tragic reversal. Ya'all might want to fix this insane shit, before it gets any worse, eh?

[ Apr. 2, 2025 ] - Crazy Violent Hellstorm of Snow - Not That Pretty At All
Wow. I think in literature, they called this "sympathetic fallacy" - where the author has the weather mirror the actions of the actors or characters in the play or novel. The World is a roaring-ball of angry Chaos lately, and so now, here, is the weather. We are having a violent snow-storm, with very high winds, and insane amounts of snow and sleet (large flakes and frozen iceballs) whacking down, driven by high winds. It's really quite unusual - not really typical snow-weather at all. The temperature is minus 2 (Celsius), and so this is enough to make the rain that was forecast, become snow at our slightly higher elevation. No cars on highway, visibility very low in one of the wildest snowstorms I've seen in years. One usually has to be up in Northern Ontario, to see this kind of weather - what is termed "lake effect snow", where an extreme amount of moisture is picked up from open-water part of Lake Huron / Georgian Bay, and then dumped as snow over the adjacent land.

Doing a wee bit of research, I found old Ronald Reagan's Presidential address, from back in 1987. President Ron was still a fellow with vigour and good old fashioned common sense - and folks often forget that his credentials were actually that of "Economist", not a damned lawyer or a real-estate developer. When he spoke about the benefits of "Free Trade", he actually knew what he was talking about. And he spoke eloquently about the need for, and the benefits of "Free Trade", in a short little radio-address. It's worth reading, because he explains clearly, and with direct, specialist knowledge, exactly why tariffs are a very bad idea.

It's a short and clear read, from his Presidential archives: Here is he link.

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-free-and-fair-trade-4

How about that, eh? Ron explained it real clearly, right there, in paragraph 5. And then, in paragraph 6, President Reagan explains exactly how the American political process can sometimes go terribly off-the-rails, and very unwise political people, can do very unwise things, "for the sake of a short-term appeal to some special-interest group".

This short little speech is probably the most important thing any President has ever said - even more important than the warnings about the old "military-industrial complex." See, in 1987, the year 1937 was only 50 years back, and decision-maker folks who were alive in 1987, usually were old enough to recall the 1930's, which was this weird time when everything just dialed-down, prices fell, world-trade collapsed, and the wild prosperity of the 1920's, gave way to the crushing poverty "We-have-no-money!" environment of the 1930's. My father liked to tell a story about how he - as a young lad - and his father, a farmer, bought some piglets, and raised them up to be fat porkers to be sold for bacon ("Bacon tastes good!"). This seemed a viable business deal. Except the prices of pork and pigs fell so much, that after fattening up the piglets to be sold as full-sized pigs, the sale-price of the fat pigs was below the prices they paid for each piglet! They lost money doing this.

The crashing business-environment of the 1930's produced the low prices - but these low-price were business-destroying prices, and it meant no more pig-raising was attempted. Anyone with any memory-knowledge of the 1930's, was determined - even by 1987, 50 years later, not to make the same damn stupid mistakes that were made in the 1930 "Smoote-Hawley Act", where tariffs were put on (or raised up on) incoming agricultural product. The net effect of those *minor* tariffs, was to produce a cascade-collapse in trade - and this collapse just hammered the shit out of American farmers. Trade is estimated to have fallen roughly 65%, from levels in the 1920's. Farmers require some stability of prices, in order to face the wild uncertainty of crazy weather, insect attacks, crop destruction by extreme-events (fires, floods, etc.), and all the various random entropy-action that rolls through the world.

The business-crash action of the 1930's due to the liquidity-starvation of the North American economy, was an extreme, dramatic event for everyone who lived through that time.

"Free Trade" can act to prevent stupid economics from harming folks. It's like insurance. Risk is spread between many economies, so if one blows up, there are still products (and FOOD!) available in someplace that is still prosperous. But if some stupid fool-King imposes idiotic tariffs, then all that protection just dries up and blows away, like the soil did, from those un-planted, vacant, bankrupt farms of the 1930's "dust bowls".

Interesting how common sense knowledge can get lost and then ignored. We seem to all be trapped into making the same mistakes, over and over.

I just bought a tiny bit more of one of our phone company stocks a couple of days ago, only to watch the filthy thing fall like a stone in water, today. "Do NOT *average down*. Just do not do it. Not ever." This is a pretty good trading/investing rule. Yet we still do the dumb deed, based on a human failing about how financial asset prices are set by the markets. We think the price is a real thing - yet it is a floating illusion, like the smile on the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Prices can change fast. Low and falling price, is a powerful market message, that must be understood and respected. It may or may not connect with value. If a stock-price is falling, this means you should avoid it, and maybe sell the position that you have, unless you have some very clear, accurate knowledge about why the market price might be wrong. Usually, you just do not have that knowledge. It is useful and important to know, what you DO NOT KNOW.

The movement of prices is a wonderful, clear signal. And there are even some unwise fools who will try to *control* prices, which is maybe the most unwise thing any administrator can ever do.

Without Free-Trade, and market-set prices, the economic process cannot work. It's like removing the battery from an electric circuit. The circuit sits there and can look pretty - but it will not function. This is why communism failed so badly and so completely.

But these damn-fool "Kings" keep showing up, and messing up the system to make themselves rich. That is why history is filled with all those stories of "Revolution", where the King was dragged out of his palace, and his head was cut off, and put on top of a big stick, in front of the Parliament place. This is harsh, but maybe at times, is a necessary action to allow a nation to survive.

If you're going to be a King, it's best to be a wise one. Be like Marcus Auralius, not Nero or Caligula. And USA has showed - throughout it's history - it's better NOT to have Kings, and better to have a system that balances power between those three-legs of the political stool - the Congress, the Courts, and the Presidential Commander-in-Chief. That is probably the best that can be done.

So, Dear America, maybe don't whine and bitch too much about those Judges, who are restraining Donald Trump from completely fucking things up, eh? Those Judges and that Congressional process - it is actually working like it should. Be goddamn grateful that your Founders understood the true nature of the politial-process problem, and crafted a system with checks and balances to keep Kings in check!

Ya'all might be on your way back to the 1930's. It probably ain't gonna be pretty. Not that pretty at all...

[ Apr. 1, 2025 ] - Trump Kills Vice-President Vance, Flees to Moscow on AirForce-1
Today, Donald Trump, the Acting President of the USA, apparently shot and killed Vice-President Vance, after which he commandeered AirForce-1, and flew to Moscow, where Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum. It has been reported, that Vice-President Vance expressed critical comments about the danger and foolishness of the proposed "Trump Tariffs", and in a fit of rage, President Trump drew a small, nickel-plated Smith-and-Wesson revolver, and shot and killed the Vice-President.

Americans in cities across the USA, are reported to be dancing in the streets, waving flags, and shouting in a joyous manner. Many are hugging each other, their faces streaming with tears and laughter. "It's over! It's over! He's GONE!" shouted a local member of the Democrat Party.

April Fool!

What some experts say:

"It's really a shame that Trump is so willing to take a wrecking ball to the economy. It has been very resilient over the past three years in the face of the tightening of monetary policy. We are losing our confidence that it can remain resilient in the face of Trump's Reign of Tariffs." - Dr. Ed Yardeni

The full note from Yardeni Research is in this link:

https://www.yardeniquicktakes.com/trumps-reign-of-tariffs-stagflation-odds-up-s-p-500-target-down-2

Yardeni's view is shared by many wise investors and analysts.

We remain long, as the dividends are still being paid, and everything else looks too expensive. But we are maybe the biggest fools on this April Fool's Day, since much of what we hold, just keeps drifting lower, whereas that which we want to buy, seems too pricey, but then gets more expensive. We now believe a major retracement event is on the horizon. Perhaps even a major collapse and a war.

But at least the sunshine is back, and the weather is warming up. We saw four wild deer two days ago, just behind the ranch-house. They eat the wild ivy, which they apparently like. The ivy got there because I tore it off the brickwork, and dumped it in the bush, 20 years ago. Instead of dying, it went wild, and covers part of the forest-floor now.

Enjoy the Spring weather!

[ Mar. 31, 2025 ] - Chariots of Ire
This is just getting hilarious. The more research I do on this, the more completely bat-shit crazy insane Donald Trump's absurd "tariffs" are looking. His foolishness risks destroying the North American car-making industry, and do a ridiculous amount of economic damage to USA, as well as Canada and Mexico. This really is "known stuff" in economics, and the experiments have been run, and the results are solid and clear. "Free Trade" is a huge wealth-generator for everyone, because it has created exactly the kind of hard-core efficiency that DOGE is looking for in government spending (but will probably not likely find).

Don't take my word for this. Do your own research. But at least read this clever note by a RCI reporter, who shows EXACTLY why there is no such thing, as an "American" made car anymore. It's a fool's fiction - and Donald Trump's demands that everything be made in the geographical borders of USA, is so wild-stupid, as to be maybe evidence of some kind of meglomanical insanity.

This man is dangerously wrong about far too much. But hey - when hard-core stubborn arrogant fools get into power - the damage that they can do, is at least very predictable. There will be some wild opportunities here. There is a chance to profit with various kinds of "big shorts" like we maybe only get once or twice in a human lifetime.

Read this simple note about why there are no "American" cars:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2151456/made-in-america-cars

Ok, get it? See that graphic, of the rear-end of a typical modern unibody car? It's a high-efficiency mixture of parts from all over the "Economic Engine of North America".

And Acting President Donald Trump wants to destroy this engine.

It's like that movie "Network". "Howard! (Donald!), you are meddling with the very forces of economics, commerce and human freedom! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? This is NOT ACCEPTABLE!" Or something like that.

I recall in that film "Network", the TV-bosses hired a "terrorist" group, to terminate Howard's program, right on the air, with extreme prejudice. They used AK-47's, I seem to recall.

We don't want to see old Donald get hurt. It would be better for everyone, if he just went gentle into the good night of ending political careers, went down to Florida, and did some golfing with his old buddies. How and when this happens, is still up in the air.

But we wonder how long American workers, American business folks, and folks who have had their loved ones killed or maimed by American bombs, will tolerate this wild, insane nonsense that is being unleashed. USA is not China or North Korea. The Americans rather like and respect their traditions of freedom - and that maybe now includes "Free Trade", and freedom from fear of CBO stormtroopers.

For folks in Canada and Mexico, what we have to do, is just wait and completely stop purchases of any American products, make no American trades (other than going short the US markets), and avoid any travel or commerce with USA, until the "Dumpster Fire of America" is put out.

And that might be sooner than many folks think. Maybe the US military will decide to step in, if maybe they get tired of bombing apartment-buildings full of women and children? Who knows? At this point, anything can happen. Maybe Denmark will declare war on USA? That will only work, if they have the "Q-Bomb" (as per "The Mouse That Roared")

Wild technological advancements don't just happen in USA-land, eh?

And hey, it gets even more comical. Donald Trump is wrong and dangerous - but what is so wild funny - so over-the-top hilarious - is that he STILL is probably a better choice for USA than any of the crazy women of the Democrat Party. I am just gob-smacked by this, really. Trump is wrong on tariffs, and is getting scammed by Putin, but look at the actions of the Democrat Leftist Economy-Haters of New York:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/does-it-get-any-more-un-american

Just look at this weird Democrat psycho-economic nonsense out of crazy New York State! They want to attack Elon Musk, and the only working, viable EV business that USA has - and which is needed, since we will certainly at some point run out of cheap hydro-carbon based fuel. The Democrat Lunatic Party is actually provably more wrong and insane than Donald Trump, and that is absolutely fascinating. It is wild, political-science-fiction kind of Theatre-of-the-Absurd. The Democrats are worse than The Donald. How about that?

So, get your bunkers ready, and make sure you have good supplies of food, water, ammo and fuel. It's going to get very, very weird, maybe. The current crop of legislators in USA-land, appear to have lost their collective minds. (And we are maybe not much better, either, I fear...)

[ Mar. 30, 2025 - AM ] - Getting Screwed by Trump
There is a great article in the old WSJ about the "rising costs of screws", and no, it is not a note about the price-increases Thailand prostitutes are charging American FBI agents working in Bangkok. It is actually an interesting note on how steel screws are going up in price, and/or becoming unavailable, due to tariffs on steel and aluminum that Acting President Trump has imposed.

Linked supply-chains that were global, are breaking. This is causing problems for USA manufacturers. It means rising prices for every damn thing that is made. What unwise rich folks like Trump and his boys do not quite grasp, is that even a 5% or 10% shift upwards in costs, can have major impacts on final unit costs, since it is a shift in local, in-firm production functions, and this shifting up of the whole cost-curve, can have serious non-linear effects on final production cost.

These tariffs are comically stupid. They are going to hurt American producers of goods, damage global trade for everyone everywhere, and degrade economic prospects for American consumers, as prices shift upwards due to rising costs of everything. Tariffs are just a tax that is paid on imported product. Imported product is usually used, because it is significantly LOWER in price, than domestic product. This means everything gets more expensive, as using domestic product - if it is available - will be more expensive. It will be more expensive because USA labour costs are higher (a lot higher), which is why imported (cheaper) product was used in the first place. By quickly making costs higher, the tariff-tax will just cause rising prices for everything. That is called INFLATION.

The rising inflation (we are already seeing this), will require that the USA Federal Reserve RAISE interest rates at the short-end of the yield curve. If the whole yield curve shifts up (it will), then the massive USA government debt - roughly 36 trillion at last count, if I recall correctly - will become even more costly, as debt-service costs rise (new bonds sold at higher yields, to re-finance the maturing old Treasury bonds).

There is no way that this process cannot but play out.

Tariffs raise costs. Fabrication cost increases cause products to rise in price. The rising prices for everything - not just cars - means inflation bites hard, and wage-pressures will increase also. The rising inflation can only be stopped (once it gets really rolling), by making interest-rates much higher. This makes saving more attractive than consumption, but it also causes an economic downturn, as demand drops and costs do not. Everyone dials it back a bit.

But this drop in demand and rising price levels, means everyone is poorer. This will be harsh, it will make folks angry and unhappy ("No vacations, no new car, and we need to eat cheaper food, Honey!" says Joe Average to his wife). The economic pain from the tax-increase of the tariffs, will really start to be felt in about 12 to 18 months - right around the next election cycle start.

So, poor Mr. Trump not only "screws" American businesses and consumers, he also "screws" the Republican Party, by crashing it's chances of holding onto power, in the 2026 mid-term elections.

Good gracious (or FFS), folks! There is a reason why Economists are hard-core fans of "Free Trade". In most of human history there was tariff tax nonsense applied by every little fat-arsed local "King" or local potentate in every stupid little nation and jerk-water principality. Sailing your cargo down the Rhine, from central Europe to the sea in Holland, merchants often had to pay tariff-tolls at every little castle on the river. That's why all those pretty castles were built along the Rhine. They were collecting tariffs from all the river traffic.

Trump is blowing up the Free Trade system. It's gonna hurt Canada and Mexico - but it is also going to just hammer USA factories, and jack up the costs for USA businesses. The tariff-taxes are certain to cause higher costs for everyone, as trans-national production supply-chains are broken. The inflation will cause wage-demands to rise (get ready for strikes by angry union folk), and consumer demand to fall, and the Fed will either try to fix this, or maybe not. Either way, long-term yields will shift up, (bond prices will fall), and stock prices will also go south. Automobile makers are especially going to crash and burn.

This is all just insane.

America has had extreme and significant benefit from Free Trade. It got really rich, and good stuff got cheaper each year, as trade got more free. Global supply chains let American companies get efficient and technology - with trade - allowed benefits to flow directly to consumers and voters. The tariffs will change this model, and change it harshly. Costs will rise for everything. The tariffs are taxes. As the taxed-trade is dailed down, prices will rise, shortages will develop, and economic pain will be felt by many. Scarcity will return.

This is going to be the "Dumpster Fire of America" - a self-induced economic downturn, that did not need to happen. This could be like the "Great Depression", as the cascade effect grows, and business action is dialed down to match the falling demand from now-poorer consumers who will have no choice, but to cut back their spending.

The USA Stock Market, is already seeing this scenario, and it is reacting rationally. People are not stupid, even if their "leaders" are.

[ Mar. 29, 2025 ] - AWS (Amazon Web Services) Has Become Awful
This is weird. AWS used to be actually really quite good. But now, it has become awful. We cannot get the damned hardware devices (keys or little TOTP device thingys), and the Google Authenticator and other Authy stuff requires nasty crap-app code to be installed on iPhones or Android phones. That means that if your cellphone is lost or stolen, you cannot get into your damn root-user AWS Console account to manage your EC2 instance and your AWS-based website. (This stuff here!)

This is just stupid.

There are much better ways to implement a multi-factor access (MFA) method, which does not put all the key management risk on the user. But the junky modern process-models, require we purchase and manage hardware keys - or put data-harvesting, ever-changing crap-apps on our silly cellphones. This is really stupid, since phones get lost or stolen all the time. Now, when you phone is stolen, they can steal your tools for high-security access applications also! That is just stupid. Access info should be fully secret - not hammered into some stupid piece of hardware or a phone app.

The world is becoming just completely stupid. It's like there is this hard-core effort everywhere, to just break and wreck every damn nice thing that worked well, and was operationally effective. The entire "security model" of the internet, seems actually to be just wrong - like it is designed to induce stupid, bad, toxic behaviour in the greatest number of people possible. Bloody hell.

Think about it for a minute. Why use a telephone to manage, borrow or spend money? Why? Just don't do it. Don't blur together the *money* with the *communication* process. Keep them seperate, so that problems with one, does not cause massive problems with the other. The whole modern model, might actually be really, really wrong, and maybe contains a great and fatal flaw that may cause really bad and insane behaviour to cascade forward in a foolish and world-wrecking manner. Maybe we are already seeing this.

I have wasted an entire nice day, on this goddamn AWS MFA crap security nonsense, and have nothing except a bag of seething anger to show for it. MFA is stupid, as the AWS folks have designed it. It's the pure opposite of "Know Your Client". It is: "F*** you, you do what WE want, so we don't have to manage or assist or support our users using human beings." Does that model sound familiar? Kinda like every public-facing agency of lazy putzwits that we all have to deal with, anytime we want to do any useful or important thing at all? What we all hear in our imaginations, when we call some large organization: "Your call is just not important to us. Perhaps you might want to fuck-off?" And then, we often do just that.

[ Mar. 28, 2025 ] - And So It Begins - Bad Moon Rising
The Donald Trump Dumpster Fire of America begins to get hot. Never did I expect to see such a tragic-comical cascade of outright foolishness from poor old America. Trade Wars and Death-From-Above diplomacy. We really are seeing common-sense and good-government, being taken out back behind the barn, and shot in the head. Most sad and surprising.

The DJIA falls off a cliff on Friday, as does the SP500 and the Nasdaq and the TSE/SPX. It was ugly to watch, and yet it is only a tiny, small beginning, we fear. For now, the extraordinary inflation we are seeing everywhere, is keeping us long. We remain fully invested, in our banks, phone-companies and gold-producers. We fear technology stock prices are due for a sustained and significant retrace that will border on being a hard-core dot-comm style collapse. No one knows the future - but we sense the probability of a self re-enforcing cascade collapse in market prices for US tech-equity is now the highest it has been in over 20 years.

What is bizarre to watch, really, is the astonishingly profound lack of wisdom being shown by USA authorities and political-directors, in this new Trumpian nightmare. We used to be supporters of Trump, and what we thought were to be the "Trump Reforms of Common Sense" - but instead, we are seeing the dumbest stuff that one could imagine: USA going out of it's way, to become a really shit-flingingly bad and awful place, dominated by small-minded hate, isolationism, selfish cruelty, and a weirdly crippled reversal of all the things USA used to profess and believe. It's sad and disturbing - and quite unexpected.

The Bad Moon is not just rising - it is now looking to be high in the sky, and shining with a hideous, prison-watchtower-floodlight kind of brilliance.

USA as a place where freedom and opportunity go to die?

Who would have thought this was even possible, a few years ago?

[ Mar. 27, 2025 ] - MAGA = Make America Go Away
Wow. This is absolutely hilarious. This is not the actions of a sane person. Donald Trump - that curious Acting President of the USA - has decided to impose 25% tariffs on imported cars. And it appears that these tariffs will apply to Canada and Europe, of course. He has even further announced that he will increase tariffs if the EU and Canada seek to do "economic harm" to the USA. What?! This is pure madman comedy-show stuff. Not only is this nonsense in contravention of our existing economic treaties - but this nutty action is certain to do great damage the USA auto industry.

Maybe he does not even have the authority to do this kind of thing? Perhaps. But it is clear, that this is not the action of a strong or a wise leader. This is crazy-man stuff, and it is a curious and direct attack on the allies of USA. It is a form of economic blockade - and it is directed against USA's *friends*! This is really comedy-show stuff. It is theatre.

It is a pure and simple "Trade War", and it seems hilariously unwise. The smartest thing for Canada and Mexico and the EU and the UK to do right now - is *NOTHING*. This is the economic equivalent of a guy holding a gun to his own head, and doing so to get attention.

And this is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of fear and weakness, and this is not a good thing for the world. The USA is falling into a period of madness. They are deporting students at American Universities, who hold valid USA Visas and USA legal-resident credentials. They are grabbing folks out of their apartments, who are guilty only of having tattoos, or having participated in Anti-Israel protests. This goes against everything USA says it believes in. It goes against the entire tradition of what America has told the world it is all about.

What we are seeing is a giant social-science lab experiment.

America has gotten crazy-rich as a nation, by being the big force for law and honesty. This is what has made them strong and rich - not just their military ability. Killing people can only get you so far. And eventually, you will face the fate of MacBeth. Your own forces will turn on you, and fill you full of arrows. Or worse.

So, America Attacks Ontario. Right. Ok. This is going to be interesting. And it might actually be kind of fun. We love shopping at Costco. All Costco has to do, is to source locally, and from Europe, South America, and the EU and Asia. They already do. So, we are good. We also have oil and gas up the yin-yang. Once oil and gas and electricity exports to USA stop, we can expect *lower* prices on the domestic markets here. Ok, no problem.

Our economic action will get slowed down, until the transport changes are made. Most after-market car parts come from China or Japan now anyway. We just drop USA suppliers. I will miss buying from "Rock Auto" (Wisconsin-based excellent car-parts seller on internet), but we have "Part Source" (owned by Canadian Tire). So, we are OK re. car-parts also. The alternator in my F-150 truck was made in China. Works fine. My tractor is a diesel Kubota, made in Japan. Parts for it will be available. No USA parts in it (we hope). My new Apple iPhone - made in China. Starlink works nicely, and Canadian telecoms seem to be doing fine. Our computers are from Samsung and Taiwan. We run Linux, so Microsoft can eat shit and die, as far as we are concerned. Google's global head office is actually here, in "Our Town". Ho ho ho. California can drop into the ocean, and we honestly do not care. Our family that was down there, they grew old and died, and did not have kids. California is done.

And so it goes, as Kurt would write.

The only thing America makes which the World wants is weapons. USA-made guns are good, and so are the war-planes. Canada was going to spend $200 billion for 88 F-35 fighter jets. But given that USA wants to f**k us up the a$$ on cars - a major industry here in Ontario, I can say right here, that that deal is as dead as one of those presidents on the USA bank-notes. It's not going to happen, I am quite sure. We don't do business with liars, or cheats, or those who betray us. Does any sane and honorable person do so? We doubt it.

USA markets are going to price in this new mad-world pretty soon. We are certain that for now, they have not done so. When they finally do so, it will be interesting. It will probably take at least a year - more likely TWO YEARS for the slow, grinding damage to be evident. The future for USA is one of higher prices (a LOT higher prices), and a grim and grinding slow reduction in economic opportunity and standard of living. The change will be small at first, and the small minded folks will cheer. But those who can think and plan, will do so. If you live in USA, you will want to have an "exit plan" of some sort. Your job will go way, and your future choices will be much smaller and more limited as each year goes by.

The USA is doing it's best to end the advantage it has by being the world's reserve currency. Everyone in every nation - from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station - will be making plans so that they can avoid using USA dollars for international trade. USA is signalling that it does not want to be a global, free-trading nation. This is a very big and very significant change.

And here, we are all going to be wearing new "MAGA" hats: They will say, what Greenland is now saying: "Make America Go Away!"

Trade Wars among allies are really stupid. But they will be interesting to watch. Put on your new hat, grab some popcorn, and settle in. :)

[ Mar. 26, 2025 ] - Local Is Lovely
We have the water-system working well now. Our well is well, and our pumps are pumping. This is good. We cannot fix the insane problems in the world, but we can keep the Farm and the Ranch running fine and good. Ranchero!

[ Mar. 25, 2025 ] - The Death Cross - or the Cross of Death?
I think "technical analysis" is kind of stupid, based on my simulation experiments. I wrote this code that used some simple randomness-driven algorithmic methods to create synthetic time-series, and evolve them thru time. It is just hilarious - the simple rules with a reasonably well written pseudo-random generator, creates these amazing synthetic "price-series" - like IPO-ed stocks, which track upward, have "head-and-shoulders" formations, zoom down, zoom up, show penants and those technical "compressed-spring" type wedges, and have long "bottoming" periods, then suddenly turn up and "run" or "crash", and so on. It's hilarious, really. Since I scratch-wrote the code, and dump it to a graphics display I also scratch wrote, and so on, I am pretty sure that there is no weird hoo-haw sneaking in anywhere.

It's just simple, semi-chaotic, pseudo-random driven price evolution, but with some percentage of the random value kick, stimulated or damped-down, by previous values in the series - kind of like human psychological sentiment gets stimulated by rising prices, and dragged-down by falling prices.

It's really quite uncanny. If the series would look just like random shit-data evolving thru time, then I would be happier - it would suggest that there is some "human-factor" stuff that is driving markets, and making them a bit different from purely random - but this is not actually the case. The synthetic "IPO's" evolve thru time, and look *exactly* like actual stock prices, in that they have these very markedly visible technical patterns, that the technicians like to blather about. It's quite kinky, really. My sythetic series look very, very real, and I suspect this is due to the feedback-driven (actually, feed-forward driven) (but purely random) transformations I use to get the next price-point (at t plus one).

I was a little disturbed by how "real" these fake price-series looked.

They had "head-and-shoulders" formations, that were then followed by price-collapses.

They showed "Elliot-Wave" patterns sometimes. And they have little triangle-wedge formations, that then breakout sharply to the upside or to the downside.

And all this is REALLY HONESTLY randomly generated. Actually, the randomness comes from random-number-generator logic which can be tested to see if the results are essentially random - the pseudo-random number generators are NOT random - they are actually deterministic, and that is why they need to be "seeded" with some real, random values, when you start to use them, and during their use - the "seed" can be keyboard delays, or sub-second values extracted from the machine clock, and so on. This means re-running a pseudo-random process will generate different evolution paths. If you seed the random number generator code with the same numeric seed, it will generate the same "pseudo-random" sequence, which is of course, not random at all.

So, I took QuadTS (the 6 element vector timestamp), and take the very last element (thousands of a second, I think it is), and re-seed the pseudo-random number generator, to get the random value that I then apply a randomness-shifted value from the previous price, (t minus 1), to get the delta (the price change) for the current period. It's all as random as I can make it - but the price is influenced by the previous period's price - to a random degree.

And the fake price series look so damn real. It's really very funny - not just real, but they have all the technical patterns, and that I find really hilarious.

I think it sort of means, that we are all really fucked. Like that song by the little jewish fellow, Mr. Simon, we are all really just "slip-sliding away". We think we are gliding down a highway of determinisim, in a god-managed Universe, but the exact opposite is true - we are flailing about in pure Chaos, deluded by the absurd beliefs that are dropped into our tiny neural-networks as children. We spend our lives trying to reach the vision of the actual, real, truth, only to find that it is a warped mirror of our own, easy-to-trick, perceptions.

But what of Meno's Dialog? Can Virtue be taught? Can it even be defined? Only if we are able to experience the "Other" in our own minds. We either pass or fail the "Voight-Kampf" test. We either have some empathy for the pain that can be vectored to our fellow humans, or we are indifferent. Or, worst-case, there are even those who delight in causing pain to others. And I have this awful, sinking feeling, that Donald Trump, and the crowd of war-boys and blond ladybugs that he has surrounded himself with, are secretly these kinds of people.

So, randomness is not always the driver. Sometimes, pure evil is the driver. The Sadist takes control, and begins his project to maximize the pain inflicted, on the greatest number of people possible. We get "Vlad the Impaler". This is not a rare thing in History. Evil kings are really pretty common. It's what makes MacBeth such a good story.

I have an awful feeling, that the current market, is actually perhaps a construct to create this kind of "maximum pain applied to the greatest number" kind of outcome. And thus, it is not random at all. It must first draw in all the participants it can, so that when it executes it's "fascinating rhythm", it will financially gut the most people possible, in the most complete and world-changing manner. Evolution seems to require reset events.

And this is not a random thing. Evolution is NOT random. The outcomes for each birthed unit can be random - but the memory from one period to the next, is the mechanism that allows evolution to select for the best and most-fit versions of each unit, based on the environmental factors that are evident. Water selects for fish with gills, just as land-dwelling selects for creatures with lungs which can breathe air. Eyes can evolve in both environments, but scales and shells are better for water, and thick skin and fur or feathers are better for land-dwellers. Evolution is mindless, but it IS directional. And it can be driven completely by random-outcomes. Each birthed unit - whether a tadpole or a hatched egg, or a live mammal squeezed out of a seeded female - each unit can exhibit wild variations. But the DNA has memory, and this is what lets the process of evolution operate.

Same with markets. They can be quite random - but the memory of the previous period values, drives the current period value. But the difference is that markets can be affected by wild random events that affect ALL market players - shifting their "picture-of-the-world" radically, and also quickly. This can create bull-runs, and bear-crashes, that can then feed upon themselves, and accelerate.

And it can ALL go much further, and much faster, than the folks playing, usually expect. This is what history teaches us.

It really IS important to try to have virtue. "Do not be evil" is a good plan. What is interesting, is how hard to do, and how uncommon, this good idea actually is in practice.

The USA has suddenly morphed into a big machine for actually doing evil. This is quite interesting, and there is simply no way, that a market response to this curious change, can be avoided. Evil is being done now - at scale - in Yemen and in Gaza. And the betrayal of Ukraine is something that really looks like old-fashioned evil, as well. It is an amazing change, and in a very short time. And we are hard-core Conservatives. The Democrats in USA were being stupid and insane. But the new folks look to be honestly, actually evil. They are actively supporting true genocide - the mass-murder and removal of the citizens of Gaza. The folks in Yemen - rightly or wrongly - are trying to actively oppose what they see as evil. And so their homes and towns are being bombed by war-planes, flying from US aircraft carriers.

We think this is fucking insane - pure, complete, bat-shit-crazy madness. But it makes no difference what we think.

What matters, is what the markets of the World will think and do, and what the folks who have the ability to take action, and stop evil - what they will actually do.

But seriously, we think this current strategy by USA, is the kind of madness, that those who are without virtue, can carry out. This is the nature of evil. It is a curious lack virtue, that comes from a failure of human empathy. There are a significant minority of folks who have this characteristic.

This will have consequences that are significant.

[ Mar. 20, 2025 ] - Spring Annihilates Winter
The Leftists in USA and Canada, are actually succeeding in making Donald Trump look like a sober, reasonable person, and that is one helluva political accomplishment. The Lefty nutjobs are trashing Tesla cars, as if that can make any sort of sense. Folks who bought "Green Vehicles", and maybe even wanted to save the environment, are being targeted, and their cars damaged, by fucking moron psychopathic goofs who want to somehow strike at Elon Musk. This is truly insane.

And Tim Walz - the Governor of the Weird State of Minnesota, said to Governor Gavin Newsom of California, in a video link, that "The MAGA people fear my masculinity", and Newsom burst out laughing. But Walz was serious. It's better than General Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove" saying "Women feel my power. I don't deny them, but I don't let them take my precious bodily fluids..." or something like that. Tim Walz ("Tampon Tim", as he was called, for putting Tampon machines in the Boy's Washrooms in Minnesota schools), makes Trump look like the voice of sanity, and sober second-thought. Tim Walz lied about his military service, saying he was in Iraq, when actually, he served in Italy, according to news reports. He was Kamala's running mate, and a big part of the reason why the Democrats lost to Trump. Walz is cheering for Tesla stock to fall, at the same time as his State's Pension Fund has millions of dollars of Tesla shares. Walz is a goof. Even his own brother basically says so. I only checked out the Minnesota Madness, when I read about the 240-million US dollar Federal Food Aid Fraud that took place in Minnesota, and was reported on by the New York Times yesterday:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/us/nonprofit-leader-convicted-federal-food-aid.html

The Food-Aid scammers were convicted. Some guy actually claimed he was "feeding 5000 children per day" from his apartment. It's just so over-the-top crazy, it's hard to believe. Seems to us, that the Minnesota Democrat Government and old Governor Tim Walz owns a bit of this fraud. This is the same Tim that is cheering anti-Tesla terrorists. If anyone had told me that this crazy, insane, silly madness was the way the USA future would play out, I would never have believed them.

Elon Musk is a fine fellow, and the Tesla company is doing fine and good work. And the D.O.G.E in the USA is desperately needed, and the broom that is trying to sweep Washington DC a little bit cleaner than the filthy cesspool of corruption and self-dealing that it was, is critically needed. The USA government funding debt-machine looks to be honestly out of control. There seem to be an unlimited number of "Agencies, Boards and Commissions" and other entities, all of which shout that they cannot possibly reduce any of their oh-so-needed tasks, blah blah blah and blah. Most of them can just be ended and/or privatized, and the USA will be a better, safer, and more sane and viable place. DOGE is critical and good. Elon Musk is doing what no-one in Congress or any Federal Agency or political party or president could do. This is also fine and necessary work.

The deportation of legal immigrants seems way overdone, and the tariffs will hurt and degrade the economics of many USA businesses. This will cause serious, significant inflation, and also cause demand to fall off. A recession by this fall, seems the likely outcome. Perhaps this is what the Trump Team wants. We do not know.

But the idiotic and illegal, domestic-terrorism of the Looney Leftists of USA, has the net effect of making Trump look like the voice of sober reason and sanity. This is really just an amazing thing.

We think Trump got annihilated by Vladimir Putin. Putin has achieved everything, and Trump has basically thrown in the towel, it looks like. We think this is sad and seriously unwise. It looks like Trump is following some very awful script that others are writing.

And the betrayal by Israel of the Gaza ceasefire, and the new Israeli mass-murder assault on Gaza (again), makes the USA look weak, stupid, and just plain evil. This is so bad. It will have very bad consequences for many years. USA has chosen the violence-path, and is actively encouraging this strategy, based on the hold that the Israeli-Zionists and radical-Jews seem to have over Trump. It is just ugly to watch. The whole thing with Israel is a tragic horrorshow.

So, we are in a bad spiral here, we fear. The USA Left is showing it is even more insane and crazy and awful than the MAGA Republicans. This is quite an impressive leap to the edge of the polarized political spectrum.

We honestly have a hard time, seeing anything positive for American markets. Fed-Ex reduced it's profit forecasts for this year ahead - not by much - from the 19 to 20 dollar per share range to a range around 18 to 18.60. This is really not that much, but it does suggest than uncertainty is rising and this is affecting expected profits. This is due to expected tariff costs (which are really just new taxes), and the inflation and demand-destruction that businesses fear. Industrial transport activity appears to be slowing, according to what Fed-Ex says. This is to be expected, of course.

Anyone recall old "Dow Theory?". The idea was a market-downturn could be signalled, by a downturn in the Dow-Jones Transportation Index, before it showed up in the general Industrial Index.

We really have insufficient information here, and if somehow, peace could break out, then the market might have a chance to price in better future growth. But we just don't see this as a high-probability event.

More likely, we continue to see a volatile market, with fear slowly gaining the upper hand, as prices become detached even more from underlying value. All measures show the USA markets to be somewhat to seriously overvalued. And the domestic terrorist attacks on Elon Musk's Tesla company show that there are seriously misguided and dangerous folks walking around in the USA. Musk's SpaceX, working with NASA, successfully returned the stranded US astronauts from the International Space Station. The SpaceX Dragon ship seems to work well, while the Boeing vehicle was unreliable, and could not get the job done. Attacking Musk and his efforts and his companies, seems to be basically the same as attacking that which is successful and operationally useful in the USA. It's nuts.

We are in a time of real madness. As investors, we cannot seem to find anything that is priced at an attractive level in the USA markets. Any entry at these price levels seems dangerous.

The markets have ways of dealing with this problem.

Suddenly, and often rather quickly, the price-level jumps to a new "orbit". This is called a "phase jump" in Chaos Theory. It can be a characteristic of the math, and not really the result of any particular news event.

Market watchers and investors and traders, tend to just call these big price-jumps a "crash", if they are downward moving.

Perhaps, we are due for this kind of event? This seems more than just possible. Maybe even probable...

[ Mar. 18, 2025 ] - Crazy Freakin' Hypershite
It just gets more weirdly insane each day now. No doubt about it. My horrible/awful influenza bout is ending, and recovery seems almost complete. Good drugs, sleep, sunshine, and some outdoor work has helped. I had to buy a big 4x4, and out on the highway, repair our mailbox, which was totaled by the snowplow this winter. Once the snowbanks melted, the damn thing fell into the ditch - pretty hilarious. It's now bolted to a fine, new pressure-treated piece of 4x4 wood, dug deep into the shoulder of the roadbed, and can now stand with it's little flag ready to be raised when the postman brings his daily load.

Things from USA-land are getting more crazy, more completely berserker and apparently insane each day now. It's like B-level science-fiction movie... maybe we get giant spiders eating New York or maybe Silicon Valley? Unclear. But I've had to back-burner my Northrop/Grumman B-21 research project, just to put more effort on the madness-shit-from-Americastan that is flooding in. It is directly affecting us in serious ways, and driving changes in plans we had. No travel in or thru USA will take place now. For Far-East trips, we will pay premium prices to avoid any USA-links. Hardware acquired from China, also - just got a lovely new stainless-steel deep-well water-pump via Amazon Canada, made by Shyliyu Pumps. The thing is huge, 1-hp., 240Volt, and is the backup to our already-deployed unit, that I installed in February, which is now giving us clean, clear groundwater. That is really nice.

A hot-shower, courtesy of our connection to the nuclear-powered Ontario electric grid and the newly installed deep-well pump, really is a lovely and wonderful thing. (We also have two auxilury generators (both Chinese-made) - one for use when the grid-connection fails, and a backup, of course. I am seriously wondering if we should have a tertiary unit - backup to the backup? Maybe...)

But I am seriously worried that the USA is becoming seriously, honestly insane. Not just like "Whoa, man, that's crazy!" kind of insane - but more like a seriously, sober kind of concern, that there is active, true, actual mental-illness driving the process that generates the actions that I see the USA Federal Administration entities are taking.

I am not the only one who feels this concern. Here is a link to Paul Krugman, who just yesterday, on St. Patrick's Day, wrote a note called "Destroying America's Brand". As a scientist, I find this note interesting. Generally, if something real is happening in science, it is often discovered by several researchers at the same time - even if each one is acting completely independently. This gives weight to the evidence that is uncovered. The spy guys in CIA, CSIS, FSB, etc use the same trick - to know if something is true, they like to see evidence from several, unrelated sources.

I was looking for info on my concerns via Google and DuckDuckGo searches, screened the searches to within the last month, and found a wave of material. Krugman says it eloquently. Link is below:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/teslafying-us-exports

We are hard-core conservatives, and the new trend that seems to amplify Liberal support here, is just painful for us. Our guy, Pierre Poilievre is getting nuked in the polls. But it is what is is. Poilievre did some photo-op speech thing in Vancouver, which was reported in the Globe and Mail (the "Grope and Flail", we used to call it as kids), that showed Poilievre taking about the need to reduce fentanyl coming from Canada, and need for more secure border, yatta yatta - this was before Trudeau left - but I recall reading this article, and my little Christian heart sank like a stone in water. "Poilievre sounds like Donald Motherkilling Trump!" I thought to myself. And sure enough, the Tories are crashing like a kill-switch-triggered F-35, falling down like a set of tossed car keys. Krugman has a graph of the Economist's poll results. Arrrrgh.

What was Pierre P. thinking? I felt like Mandrake in "Dr. Strangelove", when General Ripper tells him World War Three has started. "Oh hell...".

Krugman has recognized the same thing we did. There is huge and extreme value in the "American Brand", and Donald Trump's curious mental illness is seriously and significantly doing major damage to that commerically valuable brand.

I am going to make it a personal little project, to make sure Canada does NOT purchase those F-35's. I actually want us to get one or two, so we can reverse-compile all the software inside the things, and determine how WE can disable them in-flight, via plasma-scrambler-units - oops, should not talk about those things, eh? :)

I truly fear that Donald Trump is actually mentally ill. Since I am not a medical doctor, I cannot really give a medical opinion - but then, neither can a doctor. A high-intelligence psychopathic person - I am thinking a person like "Russel W.", the British-born Canadian military base commander, who would stalk and kill his female staff in their homes at night - this kind of high-IQ evil bastard can hide his killer-lust-madness very effectively, and only by assessment of his actions-in-the-world, can one determine if he is batshit crazy or not.

But examine the lessons of history: Compare the lunatic-sounding rants that Trump publishes on this "Truth Social" site, to the "Fireside Chats" of a USA President like Roosevelt. I don't have much use for Roosevelt, the gold-banning Leftist who worked hard to engineer a war with Japan (which was an American ally, at the time, we all should remember - Japan was on OUR side during the First World War), so I have little use for Roosevelt. But at least Roosevelt sounded (and acted) like an adult. He sought to reassure and help Americans, during a dark period of economic dislocation.

Donald Trump is doing really quite a lot, to amplify and inflame American anger and hate. This is exactly the opposite of what a wise and sensible fellow really should be doing as leader. Trump now IS the President, so he might want to at least ACT like a President. But he actually sounds like a delusional madman, if one reads his written material. Maybe this is what America wants to hear, so then the madness is inside more than just Trump.

Trump's Administration is now using ICE stormtroopers, and the boys from Homeland Security, to deport University graduate folks with H1-B Visas and Green Cards, and this is just plain "black-letter-law" illegal. So, USA law does not really mean anything, anymore? If the President can send out this message, then USA is in some really, serious trouble.

We are recommending folks avoid business entanglements with USA for now, if they can. This new lack of respect for law and even traditional American values, means the USA has now become a dangerous place to do business. This is just an observable fact, that is not even open for debate. We are not the only analysts to see this problem, and recognize that it will have significant costs to USA, going forward from here.

We honestly did not expect that Trump's Administration would look this insane. This is unexpected. Our view was that Trump was better than Biden, given the out-of-control spending that the Democrats embraced. The Republicans seemed to offer fiscal and political stability and sanity, compared to the dysfunctionally grotesque "woke-gay" culture that the Democrats embraced.

But we are NOT getting stability and sanity with the Trump Republican Administration. We seem to be getting outright madness. And again - we support the DOGE work, which absolutely was and is needed. Elon Musk is doing the job that no Congress and not even Obama (when he tried to do the same thing), could do. There must be a reduction in Federal costs.

The tariffs, on the other hand, are just completely insane. And Trump's attack on Canada is even more than just insane. It is completely without any rational foundation, and shows a level of abusive and mind-numbing stupidity and ignorance that is truly disturbing.

When shit is getting serious, changes are needed, threats are coming towards you, and things are starting to look a little dicey, you DO NOT ATTACK your closest friend and ally!

But Trump has done just that. And this convinces me (and basically just about every adult voter in Canada), that Trump is a true fucking lunatic, and we are in some serious goddamn trouble with this madman in charge of our southern neighbour - and the Western World's leading military apparatus.

Justin Trudeau was probably the worst Prime Minister that Canada has ever had, and it might be that he poisoned the well, in his dealings with Donald Trump. Trudeau is almost certainly Fidel Castro's bastard child - and this has to be known by the CIA and by folks inside the intelligence community, and doubtless they briefed Trump on this. Like old fictional George Smiley who wanted to understand "Karla" and get inside his head, one has to go way back to the John Kennedy failure to provide air-support to the Bay-of-Pigs Cuba-invasion fiasco, and the subsequent murder of Kennedy, to realize how deep and weird and serious USA-Canada relations really are.

The USA is still pissed at Cuba, and this is crazy and maybe is deeply institutionalize in old Washington DC. Canada has done business with Cuba (maybe unwise), and we don't honour the USA embargo against the place. It's pretty clear that Trump hated Trudeau with a passion, and maybe this accounts for Trump's insane, absurd economic assault on USA's best supplier of what are basically critical war materials (steel, aluminum, oil and gas). The Trumpian tariffs are way, way past just being stupid, bad policy. They honestly represent an economically absurd, self-destructive attack on USA itself. Much greater economic harm will come to USA from these massive tax increases, than will come to Canada. (Secret truth: The tariffs might even benefit Canada, and force lazy, fat, rich Canadian business folks, to seek more opportunities in Europe and the Far East, which we should have been doing already...)

This is a second reason why we are pretty sure Trump might be mentally ill. These tariffs are self-destructive economic madness for the USA. They are direct, significant tax increases on USA businesses and USA consumers. When you see a person deliberately hurt themselves, this is a pretty clear indication and direct sign of mental breakdown and old fashioned madness.

So, we are all in trouble here. And when you are in trouble, then action needs to be taken to fix the trouble. You do the best you can, with the resources you have, right?

USA has the 25th Amendment.

If the poor, sorry USA Democrats were also not completely lost and crazy, maybe they might try to get working on that. We don't expect they will, since they have no leader at the moment. They are a broken ship, with no rudder, and no captain. They really are in trouble, also.

Given all this, we just cannot help but believe that the USA stock-market is also in real trouble. There is just no way around this, unless the levels of deregulation are really significant. We hope that this is the case, and FD (full disclosure), we remain fully invested in our Canadian equities, and might even margin up, to hold some USA equities, if we can find any that look promising. We were planning to acquire some INTC if it got into the 10 to 15 range, but it looks like it has got away from us, for the time being. They have big problems, but Intel used to have the best semiconductor engineers on Earth, just like Boeing made the best aircraft. They can recover. But if you buy any USA stock, you have to expect a high probability of a 20% to 30% market-wide downturn. That means you need to find real quality for a low price. And you will have Berkshire and the World, trying to make the same trade, so your search will be difficult, any opportunity will be fleeting, and risk will remain high.

It's not just Trump. Something serious has come over the USA. It really is in trouble. But the ability for USA to create Tesla and SpaceX , and it's ability to have an excellent company like Northrop- Grumman and the other big defense companies - this is good, and will help USA recover, once some sort of sanity and stability can be brought to it's Federal Government. Sadly, Mr. Trump does not look like a force for stability. We suspect that we will see a "President Vance" in the future, and that this will happen sooner than most folks expect.

Several things need to happen right quick: First: The illegal deportation of fine folks who are actively and legally engaged in USA business and academic life, must bloody well just stop. Second: The whole "tariff" model has to be pitched onto the scrap heap. It's truly stupid, and your best and brightest folks know this. Listen to them, and stop being stupid. Third: If you want to reduce the scale of the IRS, and reduce the strangehold income taxation puts on the business economy, then go for some kind of national sales-tax, like the Canada GST (now called HST). The "Goods and Services Tax" is hated in Canada. All taxes are hated, let's be honest. Consult the Bible if curious. Taxes have always been part of any civil structure. Just role up the State taxes into a State+Federal Sales Tax, and reduce the income tax take.

When you are in trouble, you want to get OUT of trouble, and not be trying to create MORE and WORSE trouble. The tariffs will create worse trouble. Watch and see, if ya'all doubt this.

El Posto-Scripto:
I wanted more information. How to understand what is going on... I dialed-up"Inner Trader" and he called one of his crony buddies in Americastan. He reported thusly:

"Well, I called my old school-buddy, Hugh. He has the funniest goddamn name. His last name is "Jass", and so I guess as a joke, his mom called him "Hugh". Whenever I would have him paged at the bar (where he would go with clients regularly, and do the three-martini lunch trick to get them to sign the contracts), it was like paging for "Mike Hunt" - only in this case, it was "paging Mr. Hugh Jass! Is there a Hugh Jass here??" You can imagine the responses among the drunk traders...

Old HJ says that the USA was ALREADY REALLY crazy. And what was even more crazy than Donald Trump, was DEI and gender-transition stuff. It's so off the wall insane, that even at his wildly worse, Donald T. can sound like the sober source of reason and sanity. Really. I shit you not. This is the reality.

DEI was all about promoting completely incompetant, completely unemployable fat, stupid (and maybe even crazy and pre-natally drug-damaged negros), to positions of responsibility and authority. Now just fucking think about that for a minute. Let it "sink in". You want your airline to be flown *entirely* by women who are all on the rag? Think about this. We saw it in Toronto. I have no fucking idea who the moron pilots were of that fine Delta Air CRJ-jet - but the moron pilots just crashed a fine and good aircraft, on a fine, perfect-weather day. That is fucking DEI, folks. We traders say: "Got DEI? Hey, moron, you maybe gonna die!"

Hugh went on... DEI is fucking insane. It's madness and the Demofucks brought this shit on us. It's not only insane, it is lethal. And it almost got Trump killed, due to the fat, female fuckless morons they hired for the Secret Service. Trump is very pissed, and rightly so.

And then there is "gender-transition". For guys, that involves getting your dick cut off, and a cunt made out of what is left. If that - goddamn it man - if that is not the perfect, absolute, clear definition of complete, over-the-top madness and insanity, then I don't know what the fuck else could be! Jesus fucking Christ!

So, dude, get the true picture. Trump may *look* insane - but what is really happening in USA land, is an HONEST RETURN TO SANITY. Really, actually, no shit. Try to grasp this truth. That's what trading and investing and living-in-the-fucking-world really is about, eh? Seeing through the horseshit and lies, to what is actually true. Right.

Am I not absolutely right on this?? Tell me the truth! "

And "Inner Trader" just looks at me, shrugs his shoulders, lights a cigarette, and smiles.

And hell, if he is right, then I gotta be long - and long some USA shit, right? And this is where we are right now - looking for bargains in the discount bin, at the Nasdaq and the NYSE. We really got little choice. If Evil Mr. Putin, and Crazy Mr. Trump, decide to divide up the world between them, then we gotta at least try to get hold of a few tiny scraps, just so we can survive. It's tough being "little people", which we is... No doubt about it.

[ Mar. 17, 2025 ] - Happy St. Patrick's Day
I was truly hoping for a wee dram of Irish Whiskey tonite, after dinner. But this damn flu is still holding on, so I have stopped all alcohol until I fully recover. It's not Covid, but it might as bloody well be - really a nasty infection, but I am getting better at least. Still a bit of wheezing in the chest, but the cold symptoms (sore throat, constantly running nose, etc.) have almost stopped. Worked a bit outside, cleaning up winter-fall branches around the field edges, and general, minor cleanup. It's a cold, but lovely sunny day, with blue sky like a Ukrainian flag.

Older I get, more I believe that the Swiss model is the only viable nation-state economic and political model that makes any sense. All citizens need to be reserve-militia members, everyone needs to keep a fully-automatic weapon in their homes, and everyone needs to be trained, and ready to deal with any sort of foreign assault on the Homeland. The Swedes also have a good idea, with fully-armed fighter jets positioned around the country, able to use highways for takeoff/landing, and able to rapidly intercept any incursion from any powerful, invading force-of-evil. These "forces-of-evil" are always lurking. They never go away. One has to program-in, national and local/personal self-reliance. Any time one turns over one's security to "professionals", there is extreme risk of very bad guys taking control. This is just a human fact, illustrated and confirmed repeatedly in all human history.

I remember a clever fellow telling me an old-trader's observation: "Libraries will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no libraries."

I honestly keep having bad dreams and curious feelings that we are fast approaching a "time of no libraries". Perhaps I read too much, or identify too much with folks in Yemen, who are trying to show solidarity to their brethren in Gaza.

Solidarity is an interesting concept. Years ago, I met and spoke with folks in Poland, who fought the Communist Government, and organized the Polish "Solidarity" political party in Gdansk. This old guy told me how the Communists - their *own* government! - dropped tear-gas on whole apartment blocks full of hundreds of people, to try to force them to go back to work in the shipyards. The "Solidarity" movement was initially a Trade Union, which just wanted better conditions and pay for it's workers. But the insane, abusive response by the Polish Communists, made it into a much bigger force, which gained international recognition. It's leader, Lech Walensa, an electrician, eventually became leader of the post-Communist Polish government, after the Communists fell, once the Russian military forces were withdrawn from Poland. The Russians only left, because they were bankrupt, and could not even afford to feed all the soldiers they had stationed in Eastern Europe.

You can use force, and hurt and kill a lot of people. Anyone and any group can organize and do bad things. But Governments have the ability to inflict terrible damage at massive scale - and powerful governments can inflict extreme, almost unlimited damage. But governments are just big organs made up of people - often quite stupid, cruel and grotesque people, who have reached their top positions through clever misdirection, political trickery, outright abuse, fraud, deception and violence.

But what one see's in history, is that nasty, abusive people who use violence and murder to achieve their political objectives, are often themselves brought down by eventual and tragic violence.

Given the lessons of history, we all need to be able to address this serious problem, and recognize that hard-core revolution sometimes becomes the necessary and needed process, if we cannot limit the actions of violent governments by non-violent means. We have no choice, other than to become the victims of abusive murderers. And this is unacceptable for any person who insists upon living in truth and freedom.

[ Mar. 16, 2025 ] - USA - So Very Special...
The USA "Uniparty" has just funded it's wild-running Federal Administrative State for another few thousand billion US dollars - as the CR/Budget thing got passed to "keep the Government open". What an astonishing public fraud! All this pretend bluster talk and blather-bumpf and whoo-haw and spouting noise from both of the USA political parties - and then ---- Wheeeeeee! We all get bags of thousands-of-billions of borrowed USA dollars to piss away for ourselves, as we go on killing people around the world. (Mr. Trump decides to bomb Yemen again. Hoooo theeee!)

Have these killer-clowns any idea how the rest of the planet is viewing them? The USA looks insane.

It honestly does not matter which geriatric, senile, white-or-black, young-or-old, nasty bastard is put into the "job" of being "President" - the same, insane, gut-wrenchingly cruel, stupid strategies are implemented, put into active action, and thus lots of innocent folks sitting in their apartments in the Middle East, get killed by American warplanes. This creates hate.

Clinton - Bush - Obama - Trump - Biden - Trump .... yatta, yatta, yatta. Nothing changes. The cucked murder-show continues, and the Jews scream: "Hollycost, Hollycost, Aunt E. Sema-Tism!" at anyone who is critical of this grotesque murder-show that Israel is directly promoting. Disgusting.

Old USA is so very, very "Special" these days, right?

Personally, these American idiots make me want to puke my lunch. Bring on the big tariffs! Let's set them at minimum 200% - just like peckerhead is suggesting for that French bubbly! :D

Why the hell should we export ANY aluminum or oil to USA? That is just stupid. Let's use the oil to run our economy on cheap gasoline, and the aluminum to build cars that don't rust, and also make thousands of militarized drones able to each carry 500lbs of C4 to power anti-personel cluster-weapons. Gotta defend that long border, eh? Time for some real change.

Now, maybe you think I am being just a tad too critical? Don't take my word for this - read what "Fortune" magazine has to say about the USA tariffs, for example. The Trump-tariffs will hammer the US (and maybe the global) economy to a degree that is beyond extreme - vastly harder than did the "Smoot-Hawley" tariff increases of 1930 did. Here is a link to the "Fortune" story, which had the title: "How Trump's Tariffs Could Tank the US Economy":

https://fortune.com/2025/03/15/trump-tariffs-definition-explained/

And look, it gets even more clear... David Stockman, one of my favourite guys during the Ronald Reagan years, says it even better. This article is really worth reading, especially if you are a numbers guy. David Stockman's bio, from Wikipedia: "David Alan Stockman is an American politician and former businessman who was a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan." The man is a heavyweight thinker, and a careful and accurate analyst.

Read what he says:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political.stockman-will-trump-really-make-america-free-and-prosperous-again

These are the clear facts, and accurate numbers in Stockman's note. Trump is "completely full of shit", as we would say on the old trading-floor. My "Inner Trader" whispers that Trump is a delusional fraudster, and is going to do extreme, non-linear-style damage to USA. It seem's that Stockman also suggests that this is a real possible outcome.

And so, here we are. The tariffs are widely seen - by anyone with an IQ in the USA - as a wildly self-destructive path for the USA economy.

So, let's go kill folks, instead, eh? That seems to be the extent of the USA political logic of the strange Administration of Fools, that have taken over Washington. I've actually read notes by respected analysts that say "This Administration abhors loss of life", and I want to hoop my cookies. How can USA folks tell such outrageous whoppers? How do their little fingers key the words, without they vomit? This is really a curious, and delusional time in USA-land.

Reports indicate that the USA airstrikes against Yemen, killed 57 people - mostly women and children. This can be confirmed, if any one in USA cares to look. But they don't, do they?

We are Economists. And we can - sometimes - make effective and actionable predictions: The tariffs will prove costly, and will do real damage to the USA economy. Canada will survive, and so will Mexico and China. We three nations have all been through much worse.

But this ongoing USA practice of killing women and kids in Middle-Eastern nations - we can predict that this will have serious, ugly, and very long-term consequences, despite the lies that Jewish/Zionist interests and the powerful USA warmonger-class, use to justify this vile behaviour. The USA is quickly morphing into the most hated, and least respected nation on Earth. This is an unwise course. The long tradition of the Americans, as the "Good Guys", has been actively ended. America is now seen as a dangerous, unreliable, heavily-armed group of murder-squadrons. This is not really true - American military people are well trained, and still hold to honest, honourable values. This remains the case, even if the political class appears to more and more, be made up of abusive liars and outright fraudsters.

This sad fact, degrades - seriously - the global reputation of USA.

And we believe that this rapid loss of perceived American integrity - even if the integrity was not large in the first place - this perceived complete loss of all moral integrity, can be expected to have serious long term costs. Folks will understand that USA cannot be trusted to act in anything but it's own narrow interests, and any lie or fraudulent actions will be used to justify whatever will benefit them, regardless of the consequences to the world, or the people being hurt or killed.

This really is a big change - especially for folks who have been multi-generational allies of the USA.

We have all been betrayed by these new American liars, fools, and outright criminials - who now operate as the active Administrative entities of USA itself. This is a very big change. Donald Trump has more blood on his hands than Lady MacBeth. He will never wash it off.

As time moves forward from here - the cost of these actions to the USA and it's people, will grow and become apparent, even if now, these costs are small, and not really observed. Yet.

But these costs are real, and they will be seen in greater scale and clarity, as time goes forward, and events play out.

Losing a 200-year reputation for honesty and fair-dealing is a big deal. Just wait and watch and see.

[ Mar. 15, 2025 ] - The Ides of March
Everyone should take a momement, and remember Julius Caesar today. This was the day he was murdered by a group of conspirators, in 44 BC, in Rome, as the Republic was slipping into deep internal conflict. His murder was a sad thing - he fought intensely, until he saw one of his knife-wielding attackers was Brutus, a fellow he had treated like a son. "And You!?, Brutus?" were supposedly his last words. His sense of betrayal was profound, and the legend is that he then simply allowed himself to be killed.

Octavian took over (another fellow Caesar had treated as a son), renamed himself "Augustus", and the months in our calander, 2000 years later, recall these two persons - July and August. The original Roman calendar of Caesar's time, was a mess - it had the months: January, Februray, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Juniius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, December. The months January and February had been added by Roman King Numa Pompilius, and it was he who created the 12 month year. February was originally at the end of the year, but in 452 BC, it was moved to after January. But by the early 40's BC, the Roman Calendar did not match well to the solar year. This means it did not match the time it took the Earth to orbit the sun.

It was off by about three months, for the beginning of Spring and Fall, given astronomical observations that showed what was true. Spring and Fall are critical to know, so that crop-planting and harvesting in the Northern Hemisphere, can be done at the correct time. Because orginal Roman Civic Calendar that Caesar fixed, was actually roughly 3 months ahead of the true "solar" calendar, Caeser decreed the year 46 BC would be 445 days long. The Julian Calendar was based on the observations of the Alexandrian/Egyptian Astronomer Sosigenes, which still had a roughly 11 minute error in it. By the mid-1500's that yearly 11-minute error had become over 10 days.

Pope Gregory The 13th fixed the still-slightly-off Julian Calander, in 1582. His fix was done because by then (over 1500 years), the Julian Calander was now off by about about 10 days, and this was seriously distorting the real beginning of Spring and Fall. The fix required that the calendar jump ahead 10 days, and also have the rule that century-years are leap-years, if they are divisible by 400. To make the fix, the European calendar jumped from October 4, 1582, to October 15, 1582 the next day. History reports there were riots and protests in many towns and cities, and people believed that 10 days of their lives were stolen from them by the Pope (the Pontifex Maximus - the same title that Caesar himself held, in the time of the Roman Republic.)

Russia stayed on the Julian Calendar for quite a while, and this made for regular confusion between Russian dating and European planning efforts.

But it is Caesar that we remember today. The Oracle that warned him about the deep danger of the March 15th day, met Caesar, on Caesar's way to the Forum. Caesar joked apparently "Well, today is March 15th, and I am still here!". History records the Oracle simply said: "The day is not over yet." Some believe the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar was well known, and the Oracle had picked up on this from gossip and loose talk. We cannot know, but the warning: "Beware the Ides of March" has come down to us from history, and the great English author, Shakespeare, used it in his play.

For us, we are hoping to see a robin (a Canadian sign of Spring), and I am also hoping that I can recover from this vicious flu that has made me feel rather bad. We like seeing the birds and the changing seasons. Be nice if the portfolios would recover, also. This can happen with the Spring, as the sap rises in the trees, and positive renewal is sometimes seen in market activity and price levels.

[ Mar. 14b, 2025 ] - Lunar Eclipse & Fun With Nucleoprotein Chemistry
Damn, I am really ill. But I do not appear to have the "Wuhan Virology Lab" Special. I dug out the Covid-19 Rapid Antigen Test Kit, and ran the little chromotographic test on my deep-nasal mucus, and got a solid, clear *Negative* result, but with confirmation the test-device was working.

One never really knows with any "negative" reading, since it could just be a false-negative. In this kind of chemistry, a false-positive is much more hard to generate. At least that is my thinking on it. If the chemistry shows the TWO lines, then you have the Covid-19 antigen in your snot. A false-positive would be hard to create. But a false-negative, could be because of a whole set of possible situations - you did not get enough of a sample, the test was degraded do to age or heat, you maybe had Covid-19, but your immune system has purged enough of it already, that the antigen is no longer visible, or there is a sufficiently different version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection involved, with different enough chemistry so that the current immune-response antigen is not recognized by the test, and so on. Lots of possible scenarios.

I felt like crap last night - very little sleep, coughing nasty yellow stuff from deep in lungs, and so on. This has felt a LOT like the original Covid-19 infection I had several years ago, and that time the test showed the two solid, clear black lines, indicating the antigen was there, and I had Covid-19 (after taking 3 vaccine doses!). But this time, only one solid black line, so a clear negative.

And I am not having the trouble breathing, that Covid-19 caused. It's not nice - you feel like you cannot get oxygen. In this virus infection, I just have a terrible sore throat, with a lot of lung-mucus, sore muscles, headache, and so on. And I am feeling a tad better today.

And so is the stock-market. We are up over 500 pts on the DJIA, and all other index values are also solid positive. Amusing. Also, the weather is sunny, clear blue sky, and warm. Very nice.

And there was a quite spectacular full lunar eclipse last nite about 3:00 am, which I woke up to see. The moon appeared as a bloody-coloured ball, as it is only illumiated by the light which diffuses thru the Earth's atmosphere, as it is in the Earth's shadow. I am sure the ancients saw this as a bad omen, and a portent of a terrible war or some disaster. The very bright full-moon, falls into shadow, but is still visible as a glowing red ball - like an ember in a fire, or a blood-stained piece of white cotton clothing. Quite impressive. And then, an hour later, the moon is back to being bright, white as a flood-light. The supersitious, god-believing ancients must have had this just rock their worlds.

I hope it is NOT a "Bad Moon Rising"... "Don't go out tonight, it's bound to take your life..." or something like that? Rivers overflowing? Wreck and ruin? Hope not...

At least I don't have a "Wuhan Special", eh? (Or, maybe we all do?? Could that be what is making so many folks down south-of-the-border, act bat-shit crazy??)

And tomorrow is the Ides of March. Say a prayer for the soul of Julius Caesar, the man who tried to save the great Roman Republic, and it cost him his life. The month of "July" is named after Caesar. Just like Jesus, he tried to repair a series of bad situations, and it cost him his life on March 15, 44 BC. Let's all remember that one of Caesar's title's was "Pontifex Maximus" - a semi-religious position which meant "The Top Builder of Bridges". It's the same title that the Christian Catholic Pope claims today. The idea is to have a top guy who builds working linkages between separate groups of people, so that peace and prosperity is possible, rather than conflict and destructive fighting.

Intersting idea, yes?

[ Mar. 14a, 2025 ] - This Is REALLY Getting Crazy
Here is a link to a "X" post by "Republicans against Trump". It puts a copy of what Trump wrote about the EU tax on US whiskey. Trump wants to respond with 200% tariff on all EU alcoholic products. Trump appears to be serious...

https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1900159372908499243

We are in agreement with the "Republicans against Trump" X-user. This is crazy. It's really, honestly, actually crazy. Trump looks to be nuts. Whiskey is nice, yes, but this is just nutty. It will be great for wine-lovers in Canada, since we can probably acquire product that would have been shipped to USA (but now will not be), at knock-down prices, probably.

But it is still, looking a lot like hard-core crazy. Does any sane person think the European Union was formed for the sole purpose of abusing the USA? Anyone?

The writing by Trump is delusional, and looks like madness. But it is real. The USA Government is going to have to deal with this harsh truth. And this needs to be sooner, not later. There is real danger here.

[ Mar. 13, 2025 ] - Pogue Mahone!
So, ye old DJIA is down another 400 pts as I key this. It will probably finish the day up, but the vol is rising, like an ugly great white whale. Nobody gives a shit what CPI reading is, and the 54 times earnings of CostCo still suggest it might be a bargain, if it merges with Amazon, so that "all restaurants are Taco Bell" model is applied (all stores are "CostCo-Amazon" - no other stores will exist...)

Trump wants to put 200% tariffs on EU wine imports. Oh yes - pulleeez! I might be able to afford a modest little case of Chateau Margaux again. Been a long while since I had anything good from fine old France. There are some nice Cote d' Rhones also, and a few German Pinot Noir also, perhaps.

Silly and getting more silly each day. I am really ill. But ... don't bury me, 'cause I'm not dead yet!

Just for the record and FD, we still hold the BCE and BNS. The dividends tick along, and they are old-fart, defensive stocks, since I expect technology to blow up pretty much completely. We are back to analogue and CD's, but I did throw in the towel, and get an iPhone. Everything runs on the iPhone - including our Starlink aiming and setup program. It would not run on the Android phone.

Starlink works really well, and the Cybertruck was really fun to drive. I really want one. I just need to find an extra $100,000 after-tax, plus 13% HST tax. Seems kinda extreme, really. And protesting Elon's D.O.G.E. by firebombing Tesla dealerships, is so pure stupid, it shows how morally and intellectually bankrupt the Leftists in USA really are. It's so sad.

Trump is crazy, and the brain-broken Leftists are actually worse. So, I have to confess, we are just not feeling very "constructive" these days.

The USA stonk market is probably about as risk-laden as it's ever been, since September, 1929. It could come off 30%, and still be a tad pricey. And if somehow, USA loses it's "Global Reserve Currency" status - then the poo is going to impact the rotary oscillator. The USA pays for stuff, by issuing cheques that folks don't cash. That's what reserve-currency status provides. FOlks hold your paper and digital bank-notes, and think it is wealth. And it is! - right up to the morning of the day, when it suddenly is not!

Donald Trump might decide to just "cancel" the USA Treasury bonds that China and other nations hold. That would reduce US debt obligations, and also destroy confidence in the USA dollar. It seems absurd - but lately, absurd things are happening every few days. Maybe more are on the way? No one can tell for sure.

One day, everyone could just decide that USA currency/money is not the great "store of wealth" that they thought it was. This whole brain-reset could happen in just a few days. Maybe all those gold bars at "Fort Knox" are really painted lead? Maybe the USA nuclear stockpile has gone bad, due to some curious quantum effect? Maybe Donald Trump was programmed like that fellow in the "Manchurian Candidate" was, and all his weird actions are actually a plan to destabilize the USA. Putin is wearing military clothes now. Ukraine is getting betrayed. Israel looks like it's planning to kill everyone, everywhere. Pretty weird.

I never thought - in my most extreme scenarios - that Canada would start to feel solidarity with Iran. Dear Donald: "Do what ever the hell you want!" Not bad. Not bad at all...

How about a nice game of solitaire?

[ Mar. 12, 2025 ] - The Bay of Jigs?
Ok, so our little research project on the Grumman/Northrop B-21, and it's relationship to the new Chinese copy that seems now to actually be in the "flying prototype" stage (damned impressive technical development) has to be slightly back-burnered, given the curious series of threats that our fine homeland seems to be experiencing. It's getting weird... there are many rabbit-holes that seem to suggest that attention is indicated.

We think the USA Acting Leader Mr. Trump might seriously be nuts. Insanity is very difficult to prove, but it's effects can be wildly, extremely, significant. And also non-linear. Crazy folks in high places, with big egos and big authority, can do really big damage. This might just be the scenario that is going to play out.

There is all this curious dancing going on - like all the President's men are dancing these wild jigs, and saying stuff that any high-school kid with a spreadsheet can figure out pretty quickly, just cannot possibly be viable. Examples include balancing the USA budget, while also getting rid of the IRS and using tariffs to fund USA government revenue needs. Or direct action efforts to take over Greenland or Canada, and such. Or curious tariff strategies - using tariffs as economic cash-generators, and also using tariffs as punishment for trading-actions that are viewed as unfair. (You can do one or the other - but you simply cannot do both at the same time. If you set tariffs high enough to damage the businesses of your trading partners, and degrade business viability, you will collect no serious revenue from your efforts. This is just basic thinking and reasoning. You can't suck and blow at the same time.)

And the jigs seem to be morphing into "tarantellas" - a wild and crazy violent dance, that folks in southern Europe would do, if they were bitten by a tarantula spider. The wild dancing was thought to reduce the effects of the spider's poisoned bite. Folks are saying things that cannot be true, and they have to know this at some level. But something real is happening, we believe.

Large groups of people can really appear to go crazy. This is seen in history. The cause of mass-madness, seems to be events that cause mass-dislocations. Could it be downstream effects of Covid-19?

There are many documented accounts of the "dancing sickness" that was observed after the pan-European "Black Death" plague, in the 1300's. We have a really unlikely theory that Covid-19, and the related lockdowns and economic plus psychological dislocations it caused, may be part of what is triggering some of the madness we are seeing.

Crazy action seems to be on the rise in so many areas. And in USA, (and Europe also), it seems to go right up to the top. It's not just Trump that is crazy - there seems to be an entire collective that wants to dance to these new rhythms of violence and express their anger. What is true does not matter.

If this theory or scenario holds, then we may see a situation where risks go virtually off-scale. Think about those 11-standard deviation events, and so on. They happen much more often than statistical analysis would suggest. Those "once-in-10000-year" events seem to be happening pretty regularly now - like every 40 or 50 years maybe?

And the hilarious thing for me, is I think I have maybe contracted Covid-19 again (second or third time, it looks like...). I am weirdly sick, after spending a day at a very big mall, checking out various new cell-phones. I finally decided on a used iPhone-12, and have got it set up and working nicely. My old Huawei phone was "3G" only, and the Apple iPhone-12 and up, support 3G, LTE (which is 4G), and also 5G. The carrier we use is soon to retire their 3G service, so upgrade was necessary.

But the mall, the Apple Store, and the various cell-phone stores, were all *FULL* of people - most from far-away other places - very few white/anglo folks around. Pretty funny. We like the wild diversity of Canada - it's not boring, and the range of restaurants is wonderful. (There is an Indonesian place where our local "Gang of 4" goes for dinner, when we can schedule it. Awesome food..)

A crowded mall is good, lots of options to buy interesting stuff - but I picked up a virus, and it might be a new version of Covid-19 maybe. Or something else. I am seriously ill - yellow goo in lungs, sore throat, muscle-pain, etc. Virus symptoms.

I hope my health does not track the down-cycle I expect to see in the markets, and in the levels of sanity we are seeing in the political world.

The Trump tariffs alone will take global GDP down - and new military actions, which USA seems to be planning (as it tries to dial-down it's military costs!), will also damage business conditions on our small planet. So, we may all get sick, and stupid, and crazy and poor, sort of all at the same time? Not great for markets. Bidders stay home, sellers need cash, tariffs raise costs for everyone, and so selling pressure rises week by week. Nonsense talk and bluster-blather gets bigger, louder and longer. Anger grows along with fear, which accelerates the downshift. (We've seen this all before..)

Certainly seems to look like the path we are tracking... :D (ascii glyph of laughing face)

[ Mar. 11, 2025 ] - We Believe Donald Trump is Insane
Now, we are not medical doctors, or psychiatric specialists. We cannot render a medical opinion. It will take a couple of Psychiatric Specialist Physicians to render this opinion, and then some legal opinions to get it acted upon. But we think this will likely happen.

We **really** believe that Donald Trump, the fellow who is the Acting President of the United States of America, is actually crazy. Real, old-fashioned "nut-job" crazy.

This has been a concern for a long time, in various analytic circles, where folks tossed around "blue sky" (wild, crazy-assed) ideas. The big question was really: "What if a USA President actually WAS completely insane - but in a classical socio-pathic way, so as to be able to disguse his wild lust, his madness, and his seething hatred, and so on. We had this happen in Canada, with a military pilot named "Russel", who would go out at night and stalk and kill women under his command. He started by breaking into their homes, masturbating on their beds - and eventually progressed to raping and murdering a woman under his command, in her own home. This guy was in charge of a major air base, and he piloted the Queen's aircraft, when she was transported in Canada. He was a clever, murderous psychopathic person, who could hide his lust and his madness. This "madman in power issue" is a real and serious problem in military analysis.

This was the topic and plot-device of the famous "Dr. Strangelove" film by Stanley Kubrick, made back in 1963. What if a top-level US General, went "nutty", and ordered a nuclear "retaliation" strike on the USSR. (This was actually very possible, as nuclear-submarine commanders did have the authority and the ability to launch their missiles.) In the Dr. Strangelove film, "General Jack D. Ripper" (great name, eh?) orders a strike on the USSR, because he has experienced "wearyness in the act of love". He blamed it on the fluoridation of US water - it degraded his "precious bodily fluids", and made him weak (he believed). He blamed the fluoride-in-water on the Russian Communists, and in madman's logic, decided Russia needed to be destroyed to deal with this threat, so he ordered the strike on Russia, as commander of a USA nuclear-armed airbase.

This was wild great, high-comedy - really quite a brilliant and wonderful film.

But what if it were to really happen? What if a high-level US commander - or the Commander-in-Chief himself, became basically "full-tilt crazy"? How much damage could he do, before he was stopped? Or, would he even be stopped?? Would it be possible to stop him? How would we know that he had, in fact, become psychotic-crazy, in the technical - or even **legal** sense of the words?

We don't know how much analysis the "Rand Corporation" or other USA think-tanks did on this issue.

But we DO know that they considered it, and have been worried about this.

And now - here we are.

We are now going **beyond** tariffs. Donald Trump - on his own social-media website "Truth Social", has announced his intention to "permanently shutdown the automobile manufacturing business in Canada", as of April 2, 2025. He will do this by putting unspecified tariffs on cars built in Canada, for export to USA. Trump wrote this on his "Truth Social" media platform this morning, in response to Ontario putting a 25% export tax on surplus electricity sales to the USA power grid.

Canada and USA have been sharing electricity resources and co-operating actively with power generation projects, since Niagara Falls was first harnessed by Westinghouse and Tesla (the two men!), back in the late 1800's. Our co-operation is a source of wealth and success for both nations. A 25% export tariff - in response to Trump's 25% tariffs on ALL Canada exports to USA, is more than reasonable, and certainly not a serious problem for rich States like Michigan, Ohio and New York.

But the Donald Trump response is hilarious.

It is comedy-show of stupid-crazy - completely wild. Trump will attack his OWN COUNTRY'S auto manufacturing operations here in Canada, to gratify his out-of-control ego! This is madness.

These are just not the actions of a sane man.

The curious Democrat Party in the USA, seems to be in crisis. All they really need to do, is elect some sort of sane, rational leader, to suggest in a sober and sane manner, that this clown has to be impeached, and this needs to happen, to protect the operational integrity of America, before the USA goes into full self-destruct mode. Really. This should happen.

Donald Trump looks to be quite insane.

If that "Trump Gaza" video did not make it clear, then this wild and curious attack on Canada should convince anyone that this madman needs to be removed by any legal means possible.

A faster approach, is to just get the man declared insane and not-responsible.

You need two highly-trained doctors, psychiatric specialists in psychotics and socio-pathic individuals of high intelligence. They would have to sign a warrant committing this Trump person to an institution for a period of clinical observation. Vice-President Vance could take over while this process is underway. It seems clear to us, that Trump would not resume the USA presidency, upon his release.

The man is mad.

Something needs to be done. And it needs to be done by Americans. And it would be wise to do it soon, before this fellow does more damage, which we are certain he will.

There is zero chance of Canada becoming part of the USA. This is especially true, given what we have seen now. Even the most die-hard conservatives in Canada, would reject this idea. As Trump attempts to bully Canada, and damage our long history of co-operation, then this simple fact alone, shows that he is truly insane. All necessary actions will be taken to prevent the outcome he suggests. The man is mad.

Perhaps some "Ex-State" group is controlling Trump. It is also possible that something like Pict's Disease or early-onset Alzheimer's might be affecting his brain. Or maybe he is addicted to "Fentanyl", since we think he doth protest a little too much.

America, you might want to deal with this, before this full-on crazy scenario gets worse.

[ Mar. 10, 2025 ] - Always Crashing In the Same Car
Nothing changes, except to get more difficult, less free, and less rational, in the world of politics. Political people here are campaigning on "Building More Houses for Poor People" and "More Money to Pay Folks to Raise Up Their Children" and so on. Folks like us say quietly: Pay for your own damn children, and for your own damn house.

But that is not in the cards.

And the Revolution in the USA, has begun not with fixing American problems, so much as unwise American populists betraying their allies and former friends. This is true crazy.

And so, the old "Stonk Market" is going down the toilet. And the big flush is just beginning, we fear.

"Yes, Virgina, their IS a SATAN CLAUSE... (in the Social Contract...)" said the Inner Trader. It means you get to pay for the losses of the losers, while you get taxed on any gains you make.

Madness. Again.

[Update at 4:00pm] We are pretty sure this process of market-unwinding will continue for at least several weeks. The whole "tariff" thing is beyond just wrong - it is toxic.

There is so much solid evidence about how deeply unwise this strategy is - from the early "Corn Laws" that the English passed, back in David Ricardo's time, to the famous "Smoot-Hawley Tariffs" of the early 1930's, which amplified the costs and dislocations triggered by the 1929 US Stock Market Crash. The "Smoot-Hawley Tariffs" were signed into law by Herbert Hoover, June 17, 1930. It was a really fascinating social-science lab-experiment in history. The idea was to "protect" American farmers. It did just the opposite. It hammered everyone, and global trade declined by 65%. That unwise law was as much a cause of the so-called "Great Depression", as was the Federal Reserve-triggered stock market crash.

Old Ben S. Bernanke admitted the USA did an unwise thing, raising interest rates from 4% to 6% in 1929, so that all those demand-loans had to be called, and folks had to sell their margined stocks into a falling market. But by early 1930, the market looked to be on the mend. Mr. Bernanke promised the Federal Reserve would not repeat this error.. (Starting to look like he lied - but that's not his fault, of course. Events can do this to you.)

That thing that really smashed the US economy, were those lethal Smoot-Hawley tariffs. The whole process of global trade imploded. Tariffs are just taxes. But one must realize they are taxes on trade - and trade is the very essence of business. Everyone has different needs and plans and costs - and trade is the mechanism that makes wealth gains possible. Karl Marx missed this badly - if my shoemaker makes a very fine size-7 shoe, and my feet are size 12, then if there is low-cost trade possible, I can unload my lovely (but worthless-to-me) size 7 shoes, and purchase from a shoe-merchant, the size I need. But if trade is NOT possible, then I go barefoot, regardless of the labour-input that went into those fine size-7 shoes.

The Economics of Wealth creation, requires low-cost trade to be operationally possible. Raising tariffs is just a huge TAX on EVERYBODY, EVERYWHERE.

And tariffs do not and will not move high-labour-input jobs from a low-labour-cost economy, to a high-labour-cost economy (ie. from Mexico to USA). Tariffs will just dial down the whole process of commercial activity. Tariffs are a tax on trade. No one is going to re-locate an auto-parts factory from the Maquliadora Free Trade Zone on the Mexican side of the US border, back into USA. The factory will just eat the tariff costs for a while, until it is too expensive to run it, and business falls off (as customers reduce their orders, due to lowered demand), and if production is not economic, the factory will just close. That's how it will play.

We have all run this experiment, more than once. The results are really pretty clear.

And yet, here we are.

So it is also pretty clear what is going to happen. And our fear is that this trade-driven downturn may well play out for several months, as costs rise, and product demand is thus made to fall off.

I am just annoyed with myself, that I did not position my holdings better, to take advantage of what is likely to happen (and is now actually happening...). How hard is it to buy a few "puts"? Not really that hard - but one never knows how the timing will work. And the put-writer will not be stupid - the "put" in the options market, will be expensive, and most options expire out-of-the-money.

But it now really is possible that we do not get the "bounce". We have a good chance of seeing this adjustment process go on for quite a while - well into the summer slowdown period. The real risk is that counter-tariff actions will become the universal response to the unwise actions of the new USA administration, and thus global prosperity-enhancement will run slowly in reverse for many years.

We all will have to be much more defensive and strategic in how we live and invest. :/

Be careful.

[ Mar. 09, 2025 ] - Killing Me Softly...
Mark Carney is the new Liberal leader, and will be the new "Prime Minister" of Canada. Not a great result... Chrystia Freeland would have at least allowed for a chance at change. Maybe. But this guy is not even a political person - he is a banker-guy - a dude with a long history of being a clever boy able to negotiate and navigate the fat-boy world of the big, big money, in the Canadastan matrix, and fill his fluffly little pockets with the gold stuff.

If they could have picked ANYONE ELSE in the entire country - it might well have been better.

Problem, see, is that this silver-haired fellow is likely to win the general election, since this sad, leftist, deluded, blue-pill nation is so completely dominated by the CBC and the other orgins-of-leftist-disinfo, that they will just duly cast their stupid ballots for these libtards - and nothing will ever change here. We will be second-rate, eat-shit, low-grade no chance of a future folks, until forever. Arrrgh.

We have some of the smartest, crazy-loon-genius folks on the entire earth-ball planet here - we have this great possible future - but it will all be tossed away into a hole of free-money-for-Wuckfits.

This country always throws it's best under the bus, right out on the 401. I would - just once in my life - like to see Canada EXCEL at something like nuclear technology or plasma weapons or bio-tech defense - some tech that could ensure our future freedom and make big money - rather than the usual libtard leftist idiotic nonsense. Carney is pictured holding up his hands, and proclaiming "I will do my best to try to find my backside with these TWO HANDS..." He stands for "More of the Same!" liberal crap, is what it looks like to me.

We go nowhere and get nothing done here.

I am just so disgusted by this result.

I don't think Ms. Freeland was a great leader choice - but she had some balls - which is hilarious, since she is a damn female... Really, it is true "Theatre of the Absurd" stuff here now - quite like the USA and Romania now.

We have no real options here now. Conservatives cannot win. This Carney fellow looks the part too well. I know how Canadians vote. It's sad. Carney will probably win the election, despite how much work we do for Mr. Poilievre. So, we cannot fix the problems. We cannot do any thing, in this pseudo-democracy of low grade lunacy, where silver-haired, say-nothing bankers can take charge and just raise more taxes.

No progress is really possible. It is just not going to be possible. Mark Carney is such a typical liberal choice for a PM. Trudeau was at least a fighter. Carney is a rich, liberal-elite status-quo banker with a big portfolio of insider-fine-good-shares-which-always-go-up. But I know he will appeal to cautious Canadians. This is sad and bad, and it makes me mad. Nests will be feathered, taxes will be raised, money will flow to the elite Liberal folks, and Canadians will probably vote for this guy because the media will tell them they should.

We cannot change here. We keep getting the same liberal crap, over, and over, and over again. Same crap, different millenium.

Makes me feel filled with a curious frustration. We need CHANGE and we won't get it. We will just get more taxes and more liberal deception, with trough-feeders telling us we cannot be free.

[ Mar. 07, 2025 ] - World Out of Balance
Take a look again at that long-wave chart of the long Treasury bond yield in the USA. Today, it's on the top first page, first image. It was a case of falling rates from 1990 until 2020 time frame, at which point yields turned up, and are still rising. This is a big sea-change, and it means that the USA debt risks becoming unsustainable. Really, it has become goddamn dangerous, if you want the truth. This partly explains the current showtime in Washington, D.C. (Like in "Beetlejuice"...)

The old historians will say that the times choose the man, not the other way around. Personally, I think it is just non-linear randomeness, playing out in a history-directed manner, where men and events always clash. The "King" always looks for free-money from some folks, and also for tricky-dicky ways to fiddle the money, so less becomes more, without actually earning it. (Kinda like some business does...)

But look at the yield on those long-dated USA government bonds. Yields are up from almost zero, to between 4.5% and 5%, in the last five years, which means bond prices have taken a pretty serious tumble. The USA has no choice but to QE until the cows come home, or until the system throws a gasket, and the engine breaks. Or, they have to find new sources of revenue. Like "tariffs", maybe? Except that is really going to throw a wrench in the works. Really.

Donald Trump says he won't let foreign folks take advantage of USA - by selling them low-cost stuff? Or, by buying the stuff the USA has for sale??? This is just silly-talk. Yet folks in USA buy into this curious nonsense talk. And that tells us something, does it not?

USA is - by far - the richest and most successful nation on the planet. Yet they are worried about doing business, because they are "being taken advantage of"??? To us, this smells of weakness and fear.

Anyone who can read a balance-sheet and an income-statement (never mind the EBITDA and the Free Cash Flow estimates...) knows that USA has no choice but to do something like a D.O.G.E. They have to. The bond-market and/or the USA dollar, is going to break, if they cannot get their national expenditures into some kind of order. Everyone knows this.

The interest-payments on USA Federal debt now exceed the defense budget - over 1 trillion dollars, which is a serious amount of money. The "Big Can of Borrowing" has been kicked down the road as far as it can really go - it used to be a little can, and now, it is an oil-drum, filled with cement. You can kick it all you want, but it ain't gonna move much. Those interest-payments have to be made, and if you try NOT to pay them, just watch the cascade collapse happen. It will be interesting.

[ Mar. 06, 2025 ] - Current Local Theme: "Go Fuck Yourself, America!"
Wow, the sentiment in Canada towards the USA is really negative. Betrayal does that. We see these signs - private citizens have paid for - which say: "To Hell with Trump!". This isn't gov't or political-party trash - this is real public opinion. The hockey games really tell it all. It's harsh and intense. It makes us a bit sad.

That curious "Acting" President Donald Trump, has managed to create some serious hate for good old USA.

We really wonder how much longer the Americans will let this curious fellow continue to to be President. He really is "Acting President Trump" - an actor, trying to play a role he is not suited for.

We see bad times ahead.

Until some sort of repair becomes possible.

Meanwhile, we are ordering more stuff from China... :)

[ Mar. 04, 2025 ] - Madness Takes It's Toll...
We've gone from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", to "The Ruling Class", in just a few short weeks. It's pretty fucking amazing.

Trump and his team of lightweights is going to regret picking a fight with his closest allies. Attacking the North American trading structure is fucking stupid beyond belief. It's just so stupid, it is like a Greek tragedy, intermixed with an Aristophanes comedy. Trump is acting like a dangerous, delusional prima donna, and his team are a bunch of young folks with no experience. Hell, I love a good mix-it-up in the world of the rich and powerful, but this is just ridiculous.

One has to wonder, how long will the sane, rational Americans let this clown-show continue? For the moment there seem to be no limits on foolishness and outright self-destructive delusional madness that is underway, - but at some point, a consensus may well emerge that "something must be done".

Perhaps Trump gets arrested for murder. That might work.

Or the "Manchurian Candidate" solution might take effect? Only with a professional team, and not just a stupid kid with limited skill. We discourage this approach, but when the USA President acts so specifically and with such intensity, against the interests of many Americans, both rich and poor, then something will likely have to happen.

Donald Trump is not a man whose word can be trusted, and is a man who is acting against the interests of his own people. History suggests that Americans will not tolerate this for very long. We shall see.

We expected world trade to collapse at some point, since a globalized, peaceful world is such an extreme anomoly in the history of human actions. Almost all of human history is characterized by violence, conflict, aggressive and abusive ignorace, and cruelty driven by unwise greed. This is the normal state of things. People are stupid, lazy, abusive, dishonest, and they like to fight and hurt each other. Our history - in both the East and the West and the South, all shows the clear truth of this assertion - at least at the political level where statecraft occurs.

So, we are only regressing to the mean. But a stupid, pointless and costly "trade war" among nations that used to be allies, is beyond just stupid. It is toxically abusive and self-destructive, as the markets are clearly indicating today. Donald Trump seems determined to destroy the foundational excellence of USA's commercial, **trading** economy. He is a dangerous and foolish amateur, who is meddling with the basic forces of world prosperity. Kinda like Howard Beale?

How long before angry Americans decide that this problem has to be corrected? Trump was not elected to blow up the commercial relations of the USA, and destroy global prosperity. He is either dangerously delusional, or simply way, way out of his depth. He has betrayed so many people and nations, who thought he could be trusted. At some point, this action generally proves to be a leader's undoing.

We suspect that he has less than one year left. We hope that "President Vance" will do a better job than this curious fellow has, and that this current madness does not spell the end of the Republican Party. They didn't used to be the party of fools - that was usually left to the Democrats, right? What is happening now, is strange - rather like watching a crazy person hurt themselves. It's all just so wrong, it seems like some sort of clinical exercise, or a social science lab experiment.

[ Feb. 28, 2025 ] - One Hand on the Tight-Rope Walker...
Welcome to Desolation Row... I've been doing a little research project on the necessary and sufficient conditions for a classical "stock market crash", and we are almost there - but not quite yet. We need liquidity to get dialed down. There is still too much cash sloshing around in the system (I think, but am not really 100% sure), and there is not yet the big divergence between the bond market and the stock market returns. Long yields are back down well below the magic 5% number, and "America Strong" (to the tune of "Serbia Strong") is playing in the background, using big Trump-pets. Zelinskyy should have offered to sell (trade for weapons), all of Donbas to Trump, in exchange for fusion devices, ICBM's and US troops on the ground. Pitch it to Trump as the real-estate deal of the century - America gets Novo-Russiya, instead of Putin. The Chargex of the Lite Beergade? Make it a big tourist and vacation spot, with hotels, casinos and racetracks and winery-resorts and beer-gardens. And lots of Theme-Parks... with tanks?

We actually have tiny surplus cash, and I think I am going to buy hardware with it, since I have a suspicion that various hardware will become more difficult to acquire in the near future, and more (much more) expensive. Why buy gold, when you can buy stainless-steel?

And goddamn, it is nice to have hot and cold running water at the Ranch House! It's really a bloody marvelous and significant difference in one's quality-of-life. Now, if we can just get the heating-system rationalized, so we do not have to burn dead-dinosaurs - maybe we try dinosaur-farts instead? Except the natural-gas line does not run up our highway (yet...). And we have not got the fusion-reactor running so it produces any more than a nano-watt of net power, which is not much bloody use. The high-vacuum diffusion pump is expensive to run, and the vacuum-chamber really needs to be cleaned out (too much sputtering deposits all over inside), and the high-voltage DC powersupply, was wheeled into the other lab for the Nitrogen Laser experiments (which work well, but also are not commercially useful).

If I had $30 million in funding for some equipment, I think I could give the "Skunkworks" a good run for the money - but that is not likely going to happen... :)

We are getting slammed and hammered, in our dividend-holdings, which does lend some belief to the view that the bond-market is beginning to roll over. The whole global system of trade and economic commerce is under active assault now, and some serious creative solutions are going to have to implemented. The USA is abandoning it's role as "Global Leader of Righteousness", and is turning into just another klepto-state, out for what it can get. It's quite a fucking amazing transition to actually see happen. Like watching your teachers at high-school turn into drug-users and serial killers. You watch the whole thing and think it must just be crazy theatre. But then, it looks like maybe it's all real, and folks start getting killed, and old "red-flow" a-la Clockwork Orange, seems to be on tap. It's pretty hilarious, in a black-comedy kind of way. The Global-Economy, now "Breaking Bad..."

We have ideas. (And "She Has Medals....", right?) (Hint: Old David Bowie song. "Don't ask me how that's done...") Some really creative stuff is going to be needed. Things that have not been done before (or not at least, done by us...) :)

Lab-notes from Hell: Note: ALmost every single equity that I follow (about 8 screen pages of stonk shit) is trading up - except our fucking holdings, which are down. It's just fucking hilarious. It really is true - I could have put a random list of equity ticker symbols taped to the wall, and thrown goddamn darts at the fucking lists - and bought what the fcuknig darts hit, rather than BNS and BCE, which had these fine, large dividends and seemed to be solid, big, reasonably stable, reasonably safe, reasonably well run (or at least improving), and so on. FUck. Just wrong. I WAS Just wrong. I cannot get angry at anyone except my own silly self, for not dumping this Canadian pile of garbage (we also have other crap) and this is just goddamn hilarious. I could not have selected a fucking worse pile of crap-stock if I had worked goddamn hard to do it. Truly goddamn hilarious, really.

These are real research notes - and you have to be honest - especially with yourself. I keep thinking the low is in - but is FUCKING IS NOT IN. Goddamn hell. This pile of rotting shit just keeps falling and falling and falling - like the fucking 1930 to 1932 period. Yes, I know it's time to sell, give the fuck up on Canada. This place - at the Federal level where it fuckign counts - is run by fraudsters, fools and poltroons. Nothing to fix this. BCE should be a good and solid utility - but instead, the fuckwits at the CRTC are determined to fucking destroy it, it looks like. It's just comical - the classic "Idiot Lefty Jerks in Power" problem.

I have to document this fuckup here, because it is MY goddamn fuckup. WHen I take a long-term trade, an "investment" ... I have to seriously consider and plan for the possibility that the goddamn idiots who run things, are going to actively assault what seems like the obvious and sensible, rational, reasonable course of action. I have trouble believing that people getting those huge fat salaries can be so truly stupid - but then, I am holding this pile rotting crap, and I have to accept how easy it is to get locked into a really BAD, bad trend and keep thinking that it can turn around - when the goddamn market evidence shows that it just plain is not. This is the essence of the trend... It only ends when everyone is lying on the battlefield, shot full of fucking holes, their blood running into the sand, and making it dark and sticky. Only then, can the turn happen.

And it is truly important that you NOT LET YOURSELF GET KILLED THIS WAY. Get the fuck away from the financial "killing fields". And sadly, this is what these modern markets are giving us now.

It's just my research suggests an EVEN BIGGER and more ugly murder-storm, is coming soon for the USA markets. Power - both financial and military - is leaking away from the USA, and Trump cannot stop this process. I think he is actually CONTRIBUTING to it, so I am reluctant to jump into USA now, since I think it is much like an aircraft flying towards the financial hardrock mountain.

But our Canada banks and telecom holdings are getting gutted - and so are we. I cannot find any alternatives that do not have crazy high levels of risk. So I stand here bleeding and unable to move - which is itself a massive fucking mistake.

All I can see we can do, is to go to cash, to stop at least, the daily bleeding. But then, we see the massive inflation coming at us, and the crashing value of our falling Canadian currency, and this makes me feel sick to my stomach, because it seems an even less attractive option, than holding the ever-declining shitshares that backstop our portfolios. The falling shares (acting like garbage long-bonds, insanely sensitive to the current interest-rate expectations), at least yield serious dividends, and for 20 years, this has worked well for us. But I fear we are entering a different and malign awful world, run by truly corrupt fraudsters, who seek to harm us, so they can grow fatter and more wealthy, and this is ugly.

As a "stand outside yourself and look carefully" researcher, I can sense that this sort of stuff, is the stuff that revolutions and civil-wars are made from. You are goddamned if you stay where you currently are - but every alternative course of action, seems to be worse and more ugly and awful, than the current hell-zone of loss and destruction that you are embedded in. This is not good.

I try to be honest - brutally honest - in this documentation here. It is very difficult to make money in a mostly-random process. Because really it is not fucking random at all. It is actually, actively designed to use you to take all your money, let's be clear.

It really goddamn well IS a Battle for Survival - Investment Survival - and it shares with it much the same gut-wrenching emotions of the true battlefield. Those motherfuckers over there, are doing their goddamn best to fucking kill us RIGHT NOW - and it is up to us, here, to figure out some fucking way to KILL THEM INSTEAD. It is very, very much really like this. I've done and designed shit that actually works pretty well, but I find it goddamn hard and psychologically difficult to operate.

When I was very young, for a tiny period, I almost believed in a god. I know now that this is complete nonsense - we are in a malestrom of pure randomness. And this is the truth. But one really wants, at some level, to believe that not everything is evil and nasty and cruel. But it is. And this is hard to accept. Our tiny brains rebel against this hard truth. And we do crazy, foolish things, as acts of rebellion. I don't follow the AI. When I follow the AI, it works pretty good. The deep part of what makes me human wants to *repair* the broken world, not just endure the fuck-god and fuck-jesus stupidity than drives forward everywhere.

This is a huge weakness for me. When I take a long position, I need to write down a clear number, where I will fucking close the position, when it gets there, and will do so, without any stupid internal debate, or re-analysis or any of the trick shit that the rationalizing human brain does. This must be done. And I find it the hardest thing to do - worse than holding my hand in fire.

Ok, so this is honest research log: Why? Why is this so hard for me to do?

It is proof-of-failure, which I rebel against, perhaps. Best to fail early, and not fail late. I read ALL the details I could get on Jessie Livermore's life ("Larry Livingston" was the fictional name, in LeFevre's book). Livermore ended his life with a bullet to his head, in the outer cloak-room by the Men's washroom, at his favourite New York restaurant. His last notes were confessions of what he felt were his life-failures. This was a great tragedy. He was a truly brilliant trader - one of the best.

Livermore made some crazy errors also. "We are human, and we need to be loved." This is a line from a song - just heard on the radio yesterday (old 1980's song, I think...). Is this what killed him?

Really, we are human, and we are weak - even when we are strong, there is a fatal weakness that will destroy us, if we do not deal with it. I am stubborn, and I hold shit, that I should dump. This is not a unique problem. And here is a true thing I learned: Bonds (and stocks with big dividends that trade like 100-year bonds) tend to trend - and these trends can last a very long time. Also: Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard Speech - I recently discovered it. He detailed all these true psychological weakness that humans have re. finance and money and business. It is a long, long list. It is really worth reading and making notes about.

We - as humans - are REALLY not rigged to deal with randomness. It smashes us good and hard, and leaves us raped and damaged, if we are not careful. There is NO GOD. There is NO HELP from anyone outside your own self, and this is a hard, hard thing to really accept. But it does offer freedom. It offers true freedom of action, and moves us forward on the path of life. We can learn and do many things. I can keyboard almost effortlessly. It is a weird skill - I never, ever expected to be able to do this. I can type like a skilled "secretary" - since I have been keyboarding since I used manual typewriters as a child. Weird skill...

Far, far better, is to learn to be a truly, 100% insensitve bastard. That is so much better a skill, which I am still working on. But it is why trading algorithms often do SO MUCH BETTER than human trading. We are just not cut out for trading trended randomness. It is not good for us, and it is not easy. I should have dumped the BCE and the BNS long, long ago. Also other crap shares, when I see what the true nature of the underlying business process is (ie. the company is badly run by liars and pocket-fillers). Loeb describes bad shares in his book, most eloquently: He said "I have seen **thousands** of portfolios, and what happens in most, is that the people sell their winners to take the small profit, and they hang on to the losers. Eventually the portfolio is chock full of garbage and dead-money stocks, and it is essentially locked up, with no movement possible." This is a very useful observation. Loeb then also said: "When I examine a portfolio, the first thing I want to do, is go through it, and sell all the weak stocks, or the dead-money stocks." Now, this is brilliant. But for the poor bastard who bought the garbage shares, this is very hard to do. Each sale feels like a painful failure.

Ok, so this is maybe why I have this psychological model of the "Inner Trader", who I think is a real prick. Except he makes me money. Sometimes quite a nice little pile. But I have trouble holding on to his thinking, since I don't like him. Also, part of me worries there might be madness lurking, since he is such a successful character. It's like physics-guy Richard Feynman, who experimented with "directed dreaming". His experiments were very successful - he was able to almost direct his dreams. But it engendered a loss of reality-management - he felt there were real risks of losing focus and control. And the madness of Nash (of the Nash Equilibrium), also confirms this. You can fall into your own fictional world, and lose linkage to the real world. This is dangerous, obviously.

My "Inner Trader" seems to be an amalgam of all the people I met, whom I did not like. So, do I really want to become this guy? No, of course not. But he makes better trading decisions than I do. It's pretty comical, truth be told.

My "Inner Trader" knows that the game is a war, and governs himself accordingly. I prefer safe, long term, "investments". But these are actually are completely fictional - there is no such thing. All is chaos and wild violence. There is only the false illusion of "stability". There is only growth, decay, rotting down to death, and maybe, if we are lucky, re-birth, in the "New Spring", that may or may not actually come. I saw a wild bald-eagle eating a rabbit a couple of weeks ago. It's quite a sight, since the eagle looks at you with what look like very angry eyes. But that is just our own fictional interpretation of his eyes and feathers, oriented for his fine binocular vision. Pretty funny.

Randomness is a very hard thing for humans to accept, and it is why the poor, sorry creatures invent religion and gods and angels and devils and daemons and so on, to explain the wild chaos that they must operate within.

So... Hold these thoughts and use these procedures to be more effective: Use whatever psychological tricks you must, to act correctly, and to achieve important objectives. That is the take-away from all this self-analysis and error-confession. Failure is necessary so that success can occur. Know yourself and your weaknesses. Be brutal about using heuristics (simple Rules of Thumb), to protect your capital. That means sell out a falling or bad position, once it reaches a "fail-point", and make that fail-point a clear number, BEFORE you even establish the position. You can take more positions this way. Protect your capital at all costs.

And TRADE. You must trade to live and survive. By trading wisely, and without emotion, you can profit or at least avoid terrible loss. Try to establish positions that can benefit from multi-year trends, that seem to be evident and ongoing. Run these long term positions with trailing stops, which you must write down in your notes, and follow when hit. You can re-establish if you must. But you must have clear "This trade is not working." exit points, pre-planned, and documented, and when these are hit, you must act quickly and exit. This is not failure (tell yourself), this is the goddamn process. Study what works, and actively avoid what does not work. Move toward truth and quality, and away from fraud and cheating and deception (there are a lot of liars...). This heuristic alone will get you into good trades.

[ Feb. 27, 2025 ] - The AI Says Upturn... (Hard for Me to Believe)
I really find it difficult to follow the AI recommendations. They seem so weird - but that is the process, maybe. As the emotional human, and a sensitive one at that, I am pulled by forces now well understood by the damned Behavioural Economists. It's nasty. The AI says BNS shares will turn, and track upwards, and I find this hard (very hard) to believe. And yet that is the trick, yes? Put all your impairments in one quarter, show a shit-stained awful EPS number (like 66 cents when you are gonna pay a dollar and six cents dividend), and then next quarter, you can show a fat number, and goose the share price (when your options vest, eh?).

So, we still hold the long-term BNS position, mostly because it pisses cash and pays the bills. But it is tough and painful.

And now, the AI says "upturn likely", which actually might happen, even though my limbic and 4F internal systems says something very different. Pretty hilarious.

The key for us, is to be independent - and especially independent of the sad, failing USA. Those boys and girls are in for a shit-kicking, and the poor bastards do not even realize it yet. It's like a crazy comedy of hubris and tragic foolishness.

But Canada has too many socialist neo-fuckups. The Lib-tards of Ottawa are determined to use every shit-trick to hold onto power, and their lies and madness and outright criminality seems to know no limits. We had great respect for courageous Mr. Trump, until he betrayed us with his planned ludicrious and destructive economic assault. Just goes to show, that no good deed goes unpunished, as the consultants would warn their clients. (Eg. Try and do a good and fair and fine job, where you save a Government client a bunch of money, and that client will eventually get new boss-girls, who will slag you for this, and throw shit in your face. It's a very goddamned funny world. I should have charged a LOT more money, and had the client spend a LOT more money. But my frugal nature could just not track that abusive, dishonest path. But others came along who were happy to do this. And so our Government costs explode, taxes rise and rise and rise, and quality of everything degrades.)

What D.O.G.E. and Elon Musk are doing, is absolutely necessary in the USA. It is critical to save the American project. Most Lefty/Socialists are too fucking stupid to even grasp this concept - but money has to actually be spent wisely, and not at the rate of some wild, exponentially growing, debt-funded fountain of fuckery every year.

Too bad Trump missed "Econ 101", and the lecture on "Comparative Advantage", which shows how free trade can up-lift the wealth of both trading partners. All that is needed for the model to produce results (ie. wealth), is for different cost structures to prevail in each economy. I think the classic example was weapons and wine. Portugal makes wine, sells fine Port to English markets, and the English send lovely, sharp, Sheffield-steel swords to Portugal, so they can fight the Spanish, and hold on to their lovely little piece of Iberia. Everyone gets richer, the English get healthy, tasty Port at a cheap price (rather than making their own), and the Portugese get fine English steel, to equip their army. Free trade gives wealth and security uplift to both nations. (The math is a tad more complicated, but the narrative holds true...)

Oh, and we have WATER again. I installed a new deep-well pump here at the Farm, and we have lovely, almost-clear, running water again, both hot and cold, and toilets that can self-fill, and flush away the poo. Try living a few weeks like folks did in the 1800's, and you can really appreciate the grid that Tesla designed and Westinghouse built, and the modern beauty of an electric motor, connected to a pump. The very first real machines - lets recall - were steam driven water pumps, used to remove flood-water from mines, so that valuable minerals could be extracted from Mother Earth. Steam power (and Steam Punk?) are fine, but electric motors are really magic technology - and we have Michael Faraday to thank for these fine and lovely things. Faraday was a self-taught genius, who basically discovered electric current, and how it worked. He invented the first electric motor, in 1821, and simple demonstration device in 1822. He built on Benjamin Franklin's brilliant concept of positive and negative electric potential, and Hans Christian Orsted's and Andre-Marie Ampere's work on electro-magnetism. His motor idea of turning electric current into mechanical motion, is probably the most important electical invention of all time.

And here is a key fact: My deep-well pump that I just installed, was a backup unit, I purchased, in case the first repair I made (5 years ago), failed. The existing pump failed, because I put it too low in the well, and it sucked up sand and mud, which siezed the mechanism, and burned out the motor (my error). Both pumps are made in China, and can be had for a fraction of the price of domestic (ie. North American) made units. I cannot even source the expensive Grundfoss pump I wanted here in Canada. But the folks at Amazon shipped the Shyliyu 240-volt, 3/4 hp big stainless-steel pump, right to my front door. It works fine, and was less than $300 Cdn.

Let me make this clear: Free-trade is critical to life now. With Free-Trade, we have hot and cold running water, and toilets that flush. We have a power-grid that works. Without Free-Trade, we have to shit and piss outside in the snow, or into little pots with lids, just like they did in the 1800's. It's nasty.

Folks who fuck with Free-Trade, actually fuck with the pure essence of global wealth creation. They assault prosperity itself.

[ Feb. 26, 2025 ] - A Garbage Market, or a Market of Garbage?
Hard to tell these days. We see fake-bids in the morning, and then distribution all day. Fuck, this is getting hard to take. Trying to work at other things - but we bought a tiny bit of BCE, and what a fucking comedy show of fuck-failure. Our awful BCE drops almost a dollar today - again. The stock is being destroyed by insanely stupid Federal Gov't policy, and also by the silly sad boneheads who run the thing. It could be run as a good and fine utility - but the folks who run it, are obsessed with ARPU (really!), the "Average Revenue Per User" - (ie. how much they can cash-extract from each stupid "user") This is the wrong way to run a company. Only pushers of illegal addictive drugs, and goofs who run telecoms, call their customers "users".

BCE needs to be run as a stable, sane utility, and not pretend it is worthy of some fuck-stupid P/E that a growing tech company doing disruptive shit, likes to have. Telecom is *not* disruptive. It's a fucking utility, and the clowns who run it, should run it carefully and wisely as a goddamn utility. But they just cannot seem to do this - and the CRTC psychopathic policy, which seems determined to destroy our big, successful telecom company, makes it impossible for BCE to make money from it's fiber internet services. BCE has fallen from low 60's to low 30's (in goddamn HALF, thank-you fucking Lib-tards of Ottawa!), and it looked like maybe, given their plan to maintain the dividend, (they are chock-full of non-cash expenses, so free cashflow is available to support the div.) we thought they might at least stabilize at this low, utility-level valuation. But fuck no! The piece of shit has fallen almost a full dollar just today - again. So, it looks like desperation trading - what we call a "dump this shit at any price" valuation metric.

We believe now we are all cruising toward some seriously ugly shit. AI is not going to help us much. It's just more distraction, and a technology that will degrade the human thinking process - at the macro level - even more than it already is. Inflation will be baked in, and global trade will be dialed-down (I've studied this process before, and it is a kick-in-the-head, economy-wise.)

We already see the process happening. Viz: We shop (shopped?) at this store called "Peavey Mart", which had over 100 stores across Canada. They bought TSC (the Canadian franchisee of Tractor Supply Company in USA). TSC sold out to Peavey Mart, and as of April 13, Peavey Mart is completely closing all it's stores. They are in serious financial difficulty, and we only know because this is a key store for farm equipment where we buy things.

But we noticed their prices were a *lot* higher than TSC's old prices were. Everything seemed to fall into the "That's too goddamn expensive!" category. I bought a 10,000 watt gasoline generator at Costco for $779 or something like that, because it was on sale. Same power-rating generator at Peavey Mart was something like $1700. Quite a difference. With the "Going Out of Business" sale at Peavey, the big generators are down to $1,200 to $1,400 - but are still way too expensive, compared to alternative shopping options.

What is sad, is that for small parts (eg. a brass back-flow preventor valve, or some stainless-steel nuts and bolts, or a tractor attachment for a class-1 power take-off, and so on) - all this farm equipment will become unavailable locally, except at even *higher* priced hardware stores, out in the small-towns.

So, we know why they are toast. Too much inventory, too high-prices (in a world where everyone has access to Amazon price data), and too much debt-fueled expansion (not sure about this, I don't follow retail - I just buy stuff as a farmer guy - but most likely true).

But as Canadians, we are all in trouble here. The big incomes are just too bogus (too damn many Government jobs, all funded by tax-extraction, and most all completely non-productive), and when WE in Canada get the D.O.G.E treatment, (it will have to come, or our currency will go to nothing), we may well have a 1930's style "Recession/Depression". Most jobs (and all Government jobs) are bogus, in that they are not really needed. It's all fluff and regulation and puffed-up timeserving and work-from-home writing bullshit reports that make no real difference and produce no real product.

Example: I know these lawyers, who make large 7 figure salaries - and they are all really not necessary - all the Canada-work is paper-movement and Government Regulation, and taxation efforts. Deals have all this paperwork and regulatory bumpf. None of it prevents garbage stock from being sold to Pension Funds, Insurance companies, and poor stupid retail losers. The stock will pop, and then fade as the "distribution" takes place, and the insiders unload their optioned, back-dated shares before they drop to zero. The whole sad game is bogus. This is a big business in Canada, and it produces profit for the scam-boys and gov-girls, and basically nothing for everyone else. No tangible product of any real value gets built. Money gets extracted from the process turnover. And each year, the Canadian dollar falls in value, both due to inflation, and against the rest of the world (which is basically USA, for us here...).

Now yes, we do also build cars and trucks. And that business will drop 20% to 30%, once the new USA tariffs cut in, and the Autopac/NAFTA traditional free-trade structure is destroyed, as Canada installs equal counter-tariffs on USA products (no more California wine. No problem there, since we have a free-trade deal with Chile, which makes the best wine in the world now. 2nd best, is made in Australia, and it is also tariff-free. The killer booze taxes are applied here in Canada.)

But the efficient, integrated autoparts and components supply-matrix will take a bullet to the head, and that is just the pure economic truth. Trump has to be joking, when he says "build it in the USA". We fucking already do, you silly clown!! My 2005 F-150 was made in Kentucky, and my newest, 2013 F-150, was made in Dearborn, Michigan. If the fuck-stupid tariffs of 25% are put in place, Canada will apply 25% tariffs on all USA product, and my next truck will be a Toyota Tundra - and it will be one that is Made in Japan (Hint: I am pretty sure these big Tundra's are also Made in the USA. But we won't buy the USA-made one, right? Because it will have a fucking 25% tariff on it! Jesus guys, try to reason this out just a bit. You are shooting at your own feet with autoparts and truck tariffs. This is such a fuck-stupid economic idea, that it just rocks the grey cells of one's brain. It's the perfect STRONG FORCE of the the BIG STUPID. It's just wildly hilarious! It's not just the policies of Mr. Trump. It's all over the World, and it's coming for all of us!

The "BIG STUPID" is on the march. Nothing seems able to stop it. USA just voted WITH Russia and North Korea, opposing a UN Resolution, insisting on an end to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Probably it was the most shameful thing USA has done, since they dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. In only two months, Donald Trump (whom I used to really support), has managed to piss-away what was left of the USA's reputation for being a respectable and honorable nation. It's truly hilarious - a wild comedy show of error and betrayal that is starting to look like a classical 4-th century BC Greek play by Sophocles. Or maybe it's by Aristophanes, since this all has too much comedy in it so far.

[ Feb. 25, 2025 ] - The Price of Foolish Failure
We hold a big (big for us) slug of BNS in our portfolios, and I guess this is because I am just stupid. Bank of Nova Scotia is the *Bank most likely to disappoint*. It's consistent. Scott Thompson has messed up so royally, that it is tragic and comical. He sells off the South American franchise - and we get a HUGE impairment charge because of this - and his purchase of a chunk of Keycorp, now looks to be a possible disaster, as the USA is about to go into "closed economy" mode, and probably is heading for a real mega-crash of some horrible sort. The Schiller P/E on the SP500 is at an all time high - like 37 or something - and the entire USA economy is running on borrowed government money, backed by paper bills, at a time when the USA has no choice but to downsize it's bloated, (and seriously corrupt, it now looks like) Federal Government agencies. Canada-USA trade is about to collapse, and South America (and the other international focus that BNS has (had?) was why we were willing to hold this questionable bank. And Mr. Scott Thompson throws it all under the rolling bus. This is sad.

We used to hold Bank of Montreal, years back. Selling it and switching to BNS, was probably the one of the worst investment decision I ever made. My bad. I am the fool. But Scott Thompson has been a serious disappointment. He was supposed to fix the BNS low-grade mess, but appears to have made it worse.

Holding Canadian stocks is probably not a great idea. The companies in Canada are just not very well run. At least they are *not* run for the benefit of the shareholders. The companies are run for the benefit of the insiders and the corporate staff, who draw off high salaries, and for the Liberal bank-account-stealing Federal Government (to pay high taxes to), and for the union-folks and work-from-home slackers that pass for employees. All this comes at the expense of the shareholders, who get to watch their capital shrink as insiders grow rich. I am not the first person to warn of this. Many folks have said the same thing, especially folks in the Canadian *investment* community.

It really is a real "Battle for Investment Survival". Gerald Loeb said it right. The whole economic process is not really run for the benefit of shareholders. No one and nothing can really be trusted, and the long term is simply death for all the participants.

[ Feb. 21, 2025 ] - Pricing In The Coming Storm
I had one of those sudden flashes of clarity, that have always struck me after I have been working on one of those open-ended, unclear projects, which never seems to have enough data and hard information to be knowable - much less actionable. Sometimes, I just get hit with it.

It's this: (and I am not the first to say it..): The market is not pricing in the costs of the Trump actions yet. The hard-core appeasement of Russia is really crazy dangerous, and will result in a major war, no question. Mr. Trump has it wrong. I like Russia, but their attack on Ukraine was evil, hard-core aggression, and Trump and his team are creating a false narrative that will create great harm.

The USA is fucking up, bigtime.

And the market is not pricing this is. Yet.

But I am pretty sure, it soon will. The paper-backed USA economy-of-debt is perhaps in much more trouble than many folks realize. The whole mad-show may continue for 5 or 10 years, but the terminal implosion might really be significant. We have no idea how it will really play.

But defense-spending cuts (which are needed), and economic rationalization (which is also really needed), is going to have to come, regardless of who sits in the "Maison Blanche". The USA cannot run on *geometrically increasings levels* of paper-backed debt forever.

I am pretty sure the market is not pricing the coming events even mildly correctly. The reduction of global trade - now certain to take place - will impose serious costs on the entire World.

The economic arguments for "free-trade" are and remain compelling. But so the fuck what, eh? Does not really matter what is true and correct, does it? What matters, is what is done.

We are hard-core conservatives - but we also want to remind folks, it was the Liberals who maintained the closed-Canadian-economy, with high-tariffs, for so many years. It was Mulroney's Tories that did the "Free-Trade (NAFTA)" deal, and there was *heavy* opposition to it, in Canada, at the time. All that is happening now, is that we are going to move back to the "bad old world" of the 1970's, which really was pure shit, truth be told. Know this. (I was there. It sucked. There was high inflation, and no goddamn jobs. We had the "English Disease", here in Canada. Trudeau Version 1.0, even did a "Wage and Price Controls" program, called the "Anti-Inflation Board". It was a truly hilarious failure - but a great learning experience.)

We can expect higher inflation and interest rates, and falling currency, and as the USA begins to eat the costs of their actions, they will see complex and chaotic, non-linear outcomes. Know this also. Some will win and win big. Many (most?) will lose. Costs will rise for everything.

The market is not pricing this "New World Dis-Order" in yet.

But it will.

We may see some very hard times, and almost certainly, and also the expansion of warfare, as the basic dispute-resolution mechanism for nation-State operators. This will also raise costs, and dial-down trade. It will also kill a lot of innocent (and not innocent) folks, early in their lives.

Unless Europe produces a new "Napoleon", they are pretty much screwed, and will have to start beating plowshares into swords, instead of the other way around. More costs.

Look at 2015. It looks like a fucking "Golden Age", compared to this current world. What I suddenly saw, is that it will look like "Nirvana", compared to what is coming. And the markets are just plain not pricing for this scenario, yet it is so obviously going to play out, that I am surprised. I am not a very good "trader". I prefer long-pull investments, with steady cash flow. But this is a fiction. Nothing is long-term, except "nothingness", that great French concept. Mandelbrot and Sartre - two of the world's great genius thinkers. It will be sad and bad if we lose France (again).

But it will be sadder still, if we lose the prosperous World. And I am now certain that this will happen. Our world is fast on it's way to the "Orwellian" (or "1984") dystopia. It's not just Trump - it's the rolling force of deception, stupidity, and hard-core pure evil.

When the market actually "groks" this, it's gonna make a big down delta. And it will happen. And remember the thing about gold. It does not change. It just sits there, being gold. It does not change in price - the economic value of money changes in price. When gold is bid up, money is being offered down. Know this. All fiat-money is a psychological fiction. And so is crypto. It is only gold, silver, weapons and ammo, and land, food and water, that really matter. Money is a score-keeping unit, that is actively degraded by governments, over time. Know this especially. And trade is a good thing. A few good merchants, are worth many truckloads of kings and princes.

[ Feb. 20, 2025 ] - Life on Mars?
Mars life will be difficult. Probably underground, and probably run by harsh rules, and very little air or water. But it is still worth trying for. We can turn our nukes into heaters and generators, and on Mars, electric cars will actually make sense. But we need fusion generators... or some kinds of direct energy-conversion devices to supply lots of power. Batteries and solar will not be enough.

We've been living a "Mars" life for a couple of weeks - water system not repaired yet, and temperatures range around minus 10 to near minus 20 at night. It snows every day, and we have 8-foot piles all over the place (via the Kubota, and my shovel-efforts). It's the most insane winter ever. But it teaches a few things about resilience. With lot of AC grid-power, and some big (and little) bottles of water, and access to frozen-food from the supermarkets, it can all be done. We can live.

But it is challenging. I can't reinstall the pipe-and-deep-well pump until we get snow-free days, and above freezing temps, since the plastic Munipex pipe is frozen solid, and I don't want to break it by bending it too much. I cleared off the work-site where the well is, and it snowed about 5 inches last night (again), and so it's all buried again for now. Not too heavy, easy to clear off, but it must be done.

With the extreme cold, and the need to work outside, combined with the careful use of water, it really feels a bit like another planet. I need to "suit-up" before going out to work on snow removal, and inside, we use little sprinkles of water, where before we would leave the tap running. But what is interesting, is how doable it is. I put on a full-body ski-suit, and a full-face motorcycle helmut, and big boots, to walk into the forest and cut down a dead tree for firewood. I seriously looked like "The Martian" (Great film - now 10-years old... from a very different time in our planet's history... amazing how much can change in only 1 decade. We are in a world now that is run by idiots.)

The Government of Germany, in Europe, has gone completely bat-shit insane, and it's political leaders are arresting and levering big fines on anyone who is critical of the madness and extreme stupidity that dominates German "Leftist" government politics. In 2021, the nutjobs of the New Reich, passed a law that makes it a criminal offence to publically criticize the government people who now run Germany. Mr. Vance, the USA Vice-President, is very correct, when he describes this censorship by criminalization, as "complete lunacy".

It's like a whole nation has gone completely bonkers. I've now sadly decided that Canada will have to withdraw from NATO. Putin has won, that nasty fellow. He has Trump in his pocket, and his illegal aggression and mass-murder war in Ukraine looks like it will not be seriously challenged by either Europe or USA. An entire World is going to be lost, if this mad trend continues. The Europeans are so fucking stupid now, it is just tragic - rather like back in the 1800's. They fight among themselves, and despite all their stupid talk talk talk, they will not actually confront the Russian threat where it should be confronted - right now, in Ukraine. The USA has given up on trying to do anything positive in the world, and has now decided it will only act to protect it's own interests.

What folks don't realize yet, is that the USA is functionally bankrupt, and it's actions are not a sign of strength, but of real weakness. They are running on debt, backed by paper. Their military has been hollowed out, and it looks like some serious defense-spending cuts will be coming. There are other problems also. A US aircraft carrier recently drove into an oil-tanker, near Port Said, Egypt, and sustained damage. And it's not like the oil tanker cut them off, and then slammed on it's brakes, right? Oil tankers move SLOW. To hit one, you need to basically just drive into it. Was the USA captain worried about the keys to the strawberry locker, instead of watching where he was going?

And that terrible accident in Washington, where a female helicopter pilot in-training, killed an aircraft load of people right on the glide-path of a major D.C. airport. That accident should never have happened. It was tragic stupidity, by plan and by design.

The USA military has competance problems, and these are serious and are getting worse. Their F-35's tend to drop from the sky (as in Alaska, recently), like tossed car-keys. We worry that in a full-on "kinetic" war, the USA might actually get handed it's head. This would be a very bad outcome.

So, we expect more Mars-like conditions, even here on Earth. Maybe we will get that "nuclear-winter" thing, once the fusion-bombs start falling. We can only hope that God or the Russians will end Putin and some sanity might return to Russia. But Putin will probably be replaced by an even worse fellow, so nothing will improve.

Interesting times, no doubt. We may get to see the entire last 100 years of increasing global prosperity, now slowly (or rapidly?) run in reverse, as trade barriers come up, wars of expansion and conquest become common, and "rule-of-law" is replaced by harsh, censorship-driven "rule-of-law", which will make criminals out of anyone who is publically critical of the madness and corruption of the bad politicians that Covid-19 seems to have unleashed. We are moving into a time of real madness, I suspect. And recall - stupidity can be a **force**. It can move through the political "fashion-scape" space, and grind down all wisdom and sanity in it's way. We saw this happen with the absurd Covid-19 "lockdowns", and we are also seeing this happening right now, in so many areas.

Remember how Ray Bradbury ended the "Martian Chronicles"? The father takes his family out to see the "Martians". They camp beside a flowing canal, with fine, terraformed water flowing slowly, and the father tells the kids to look down, and see their reflections. He says, as the news reports broadcast the massive nuclear-war on Earth; "There are the Martians..."

[ Feb. 19, 2025 ] - The Coming Storm - or - Roll Away the Stone?
The CJR-900 crash in Toronto was caught on video, which can be seen on Musk's "X" service. It is a very impressive crash. It's obvious the pilot screwed up badly - he (she?) was too high, going too fast, and he (she?) slammed that big jet onto the runway, and collapsed the right-side landing gear. This caused the right wingtip to contact snow, which broke the wing off, and made the A/C flip over on it's back. The wing broke off (like it should in a roll-over) but the integrity of the fuselage was maintained. Everyone survived. And that's how we design and build aircraft in Canada. The A/C was built by Mitsubishi, but it was to the Canadian design specs. A sad - a very sad - case of pilot-error it looks to us (the investigation will give full details, we hope), but it does show that even in awful, worst-case scenarios of maximum idiocy, a good design can save everybody's arse.

Now, can we get our public companies and our governments running on "good design" concepts? The essence of "good design" is being able to handle extreme scenarios, without complete failure and self-destruction of the element under design. We all need to think about this, and do our design work so that products and processes can be hardend, and made more effectively resilient. This is difficult - but it is why the Wright Brother's invented the wind-tunnel. Test your stuff in harsh - but controllable - conditions, so that it can withstand extreme scenarios, outside of the design envelope. This is hard to do. You have to sweat the goddamn details, and poke probes into all the various places where weak points might exist.

It was impressive the way the important part of the CRJ-900 stayed in one piece. That's how it's supposed to work. My father actually did a similar "bad landing" in a World-War Two aircraft, called a Bristol Bolingbroke - a medium twin-engined fighter/bomber that was already too slow for the 1940's war - and so was used as a training aircraft to get pilots up to speed in Canada. My dad, as a young guy who thought he knew everything (a problem with all young folks, right?), brought his big "Bolly" in too high, and too fast, and decided he could still make it land on the snow-covered runway. Except he flipped the damn thing over on it's back. And everyone survived.

Accidents were part of the program, when training pilots. I recall asking him, how he managed to crash a perfectly good airplane. He said simply that he came in too high and too fast, and tried to do the landing, when he really should have admitted his mistake, and gone around and attempted the landing again, at the right approach speed and correct glide-path. In my flying career, I often had a similar issue (too high, and too fast), and I learned to give full right rudder, and crank over the ailerons to a hard left-bank, and side-slip like a son-of-a-gun, until I got on the right approach path, and at a slower speed. I recall a little sign in the aircraft, which said "Avoid slips with full-flaps" - the reason being you could drop a wing too much and spin. I rarely used full-flaps, because if I was fucking-up (title of Neil Young's latest album), the landing, or someone pulled onto the runway, I wanted to have enough lift and speed, to dump flaps, apply full-power, and go around. I was a cautious little hot-dog.

(If you have full-flaps in a Cessna 172 or a Piper PA-28, and you retract the flaps at low speed, you immediately lose a lot of lift, and even if you put on full-power right away, you will still drop a lot. So I tried to never use more than 20 degrees flap (you could put down 40, IIRC), and thus not "stall" the aircraft until the wheels are a few feet from the concrete of the runway. Your speed will be a tad high, but if suddenly the runway is blocked by another aircraft or some idiot in a car, or an animal (a moose or a deer maybe, in Northern Ontario), you can put on full power, and still get enough lift to climb, then reduce flaps, and do a go-around.)

The idea is to always try to be ready for the extreme and unexpected - since it will almost certainly happen, at some point.

There will *always* be some stupid shit that will get thrown at you, just when it will be the most annoying and difficult and problematic. You need to have thought about the "shit-scenario", and have a plan for how you are going to handle it. Like taking a pee-bottle, in case the long cross-country flight to the distant airport is interrupted by a crash or airport-closure of your destination, and you have to turn 180-degree and fly home, and your two and 1/2 hour flight turns into a 5-hour flight. It's tough to operate the rudder-pedals, with your legs crossed... :)

This advice applies to all aspects of life - not just flying. Get your credit-lines set-up, when you have lots of cash-flow, and no debt. Buy land when it's cheap. Learn the use of weapons, during peace-time. When money is low, use libraries. When libraries are smashed low, use both money and weapons. Know how to cook (anything). The Canadian military has a very good publication, called "Down But Not Out", about how a pilot can survive for days in the bush, if he is forced down in wilderness (which there is a lot of in Canada). It's a really good little book. Not sure if it still is in print.

[Update:] "Down But Not Out" Royal Canadian Air Force Survival Training School book, published in 1970 and 1978, used copies available on eBay and various other private sellers. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25661109-down-but-not-out

Further looking, and I found there is a .PDF file of the whole book, on the internet. Here is a link below to the site where I found a copy of the .PDF, which can be downloaded, and viewed with any .PDF file viewer (eg: on Linux, you can use: "Evince", which works well. On Android, I have downloaded Xodo, an older version in the 7.xx range, which avoids current cruft. You can use Adobe Reader also, to read .PDF files. Older versions have less cruft and crap-code and no adverts. The downloaded file shows the book to have 97 double-copied pages (so the book actually runs up to 205 pages.))

https://survivalbytraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Down-But-Not-Out-Survival-Manual.pdf

I highly recommend that little RCAF book, as it has lots of useful information about how to survive in the bush, in winter, which is a problem anyone living in Canada can face, if they spend time outdoors in remote areas. It is always wise and sensible to be prepared for extreme outcomes.

And most importantly, get yourself ready for the coming storm, when the weather is nice.

[ Feb. 18, 2025 ] - The Low Spark of Well-Heeled Boys
Always loved that early 1971 album by "Traffic" - hence the anagramatical tweak for todays title. We are being goddamn tested, that's for sure. Still no water-system at the Ranch House. I have the deep-well pump, and have excavated the well-head, and pulled the old pump and long pipe, but we have had 1 and 1/2 feet of snow - two full-on vortex-storms, with minus 15 celsius evening temperatures. Maybe it warms up to -10 during the day. I cannot re-install the system, until I clear away two feet of drifted snow, and the frozen Munipex pipe thaws out enough to bend it without breaking it. Insane sitatuation.

It's been crazy weather - I've have had to use the big Kubota to bucket-shovel out the driveway something like 3 or 4 times. I actually got my Ford F-150 (which has a badly designed 4-wheel drive system), STUCK - completely bloody well stuck, as it spun wheels on snow with ice underneith, and drifted sideways off the driveway! I had to use the 4-wheel-drive Kubota, and a bloody great steel-linked chain, to pull the damn thing (the F-150) back on the driveway. This is hilarious. I think that maybe the 4-wheel-high on the F-150 is not actually engaging, judging by the weird sound it makes.

So, this is pretty goddamn funny. I have this expensive, nice-looking F-150, with it's expensive 4-wheel drive option - and it does not even let me creep thru some snow, and get back on my damn driveway. The Kubota, on the other hand, with 4-wheel engaged, and in a low, low gear, was able to slowly pull the stupid truck back on the plowed driveway.

My F-150 is a 2013. I've had to replace the starter-motor and the alternator. Both jobs were huge and difficult - the starter-motor especially.

The F-150 was built in Kentucky - by fine, hard-working American auto-workers, no doubt. It has a little US flag in the window, which says this. Fine and good.

So, if and when the insane, stupid-beyond-belief "Trump Tariffs" are applied, those Ford workers (and the executives and shareholders of Ford), can kiss goodbye to ALL Canadian business and consumer customers for their damn trucks. Simple.

Because, we will simply buy fine Honda or Toyota vehicles - BOTH OF WHICH ARE MADE IN CANADA. And BOTH OF WHICH ARE VERY MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING BUILT BY USA AUTO COMPANIES. The Toyota "Tundra" is a damn good truck. I want one. It seems to be better - a lot better - than my F-150.

And that is the sad truth. We also have a Honda CRV - and it is just amazing good. It is - by far - the best vehicle I have ever owned. It starts in crazy cold weather. It runs like stink - like a little race car, if you want to push it. It's a 2011, we bought it used for bugger-all (Like 10K or 11K $Cdn - something like that), it was a lease-expiry, and it had about 170,000 km on it. It's been crazy reliable, it runs thru DEEP snow, and it has not experienced total electrical system failure - like the F-150 did, when it's alternator siezed! - and it has not had the starter-motor fail - like the F-150's did. The F-150 has lower mileage, and is a 2013 (two years newer), but it has been just plain not great - and I paid more than TWICE what I paid for the Honda.

The bonus is that the Honda was made in Canada, and it has a "AWD" - all wheel drive system, which means at low speed, you get 4-wheel drive. This gives it awesome snow tracking performance - even in deep and nasty snow-packs.

The CEO of Ford has pointed out that the "Trump Tariffs" will hammer Ford badly, if they are enacted. Yes, yes they will, no question.

Justin Trudeau is **widely** and **wildly** hated by most Canadians. Trump would have been wise to just shut the fuck up, and let nature and politics take it's course. But by attacking the Free-Trade deal, basically trashing his OWN deal that he, Trump, negotiated, he has made himself seriously hated in Canada. This is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever seen in politics. It is so stupid, it boggles the mind.

And the horror-show we face, is not the stupid tariffs. They might be good for us, in that they will force us to do more Trans-Pacific deals, which is where the future lies. The future is in Asia, not USA. USA is going through some serious change. It is necessary, but it will be costly, and painful, no matter who runs the program. And the program MUST be run - their Federal Government financials show that there is no choice now, unless they want to keep flying on the same course, until they encounter those "cumulo-granite" clouds.

Our local Ontario economy will be hammered by tariffs, but the real danger to us, is that now that Trudeau has been forced to resign, either of the two Liberal candidates will be able to appear "New and Improved" and so on, and may steal the thunder from the Conservatives, who really need to win, if Canada is to be saved from it's own errors.

Trump's idiotic attack on Canada, might harm us terribly, if it allows a new Liberal leader to appear as "The Great White Hope - from the Great White North!", and use the anger at Trump's economic and political foolishness, to unify pissed-off Canadians. This could create a terrible outcome for us, and result in the Liberals gaining support, which they would otherwise not have had. It would be awful if this lets them retain their hold on power at the Federal level. I fear I would just weep at this outcome.

Politics is a crazy business, and the outcomes are often tragic and comical, like a modern version of a Greek tragedy, mixed with a Theatre-of-the-Absurd comedy... like a mash-up of "Oedipus Rex" and "Waiting for Godot".

We need to change the program - but not actually blow up the Theatre. If we destroy the Theatre, then where will all of us "Low-Spark Boys" go? :)

[ Feb. 14, 2025 ] - The Age of Grand Illusion With A Black, Black Heart
Happy St. Valentine's Day. Makes me think of Chicago, and the machine-gun killing of those 1930's gangsters. When in doubt, bring a machine-gun to the party, I suppose is the lesson? In this amusing world of deception and fraud, one cannot be too careful.

Our holdings are sub-optimal by a significant degree. Our BNS shares have proved to be a tragic disappointment. Banks like TD have committed to re-purchase some of their vast float of shares, while BNS seems to be pumping out shares like Jim Fisk, printing them up in New Jersey for sale on the New York Exchange, back in the late 1800's.

Here's a secret (not really a secret...): The most important financial number that a public company generates, is the "Shares Outstanding" number. And it needs to be the "Fully Diluted" shares outstanding, which takes into account all the options grants and the various slush-fund tricks that the executive monkey-boys used to enrich themselves. The little fuckers are always playing games to grant themselves below-market options to purchase cheap shares that can be sold out to the plebs and the punters (like US!). The "back-dating" of option grants, to price-points that ensured free money could be extracted from the company, was a pretty obvious trick a few years back. Most shareholders didn't even understand that they were being robbed. It's a "muggs game" in so many ways, but if you can keep track of that fully-diluted shares outstanding number (which is a tricky bugger to actually get ahold of - it's often buried deep on page 87 or 93 of a long-winded bullshit financial statement document, down in a puffy "balance sheet" footnote) - but if you can find it and track it, you can tell how much tricky shit is going on. (And beware the "average shares outstanding for the quarter" which is another bullshit number. You want the actual, real number, as at the end of the financial reporting period. You may find it hard to find, especially if the company is pumping out "Treasury Shares", which is a very curious and questionable practice.)

The current problem with BNS (the ever-falling, "Drop-Toad" problem of it's slippery shares, which *always* fall when any up-tick happens), seems to be driven by the constant pump-out of new shares. It's an unfortunate piece of "Vancouver Stock Exchange" trickery, which given the CEO of the place (a former non-bank guy from the Wild West), perhaps explains the problem.

We still hold BNS for the dividends, but it has been a very bad decision. Non-dividend paying Mag-7 tech stocks - or just an index fund for USA Nasdaq or SP-500, would have been a wildly better choice to preserve capital. We keep thinking BNS might get it's house in order, but disappointment seems to track the constantly-increasing "Shares Outstanding" number.

There is a reason why Gerald Loeb called his book "The Battle for Investment Survival". It's because it really is like a vicious battle, and you can find your "troops" (those precious, after-tax dollars), can get killed off so very easily.

Life is hard. You make tiny money. Then a wee bit more. And then you "invest" it in what your analysis says is a low-risk, yield-producing investment, and it gets blown away - but slowly, if you are lucky and careful. Either investment failure, or trading mistakes, or plain old-fashioned hard-core inflation, will do the job. The path to low-risk big gains is very, very narrow. And just when you get it all working, sort-of correctly, then you die! Silly god-fucking game, eh? Grow a really black heart, and cover it with hair (a great Japanese expression for a heart-less bastard: "His heart has hair on it..."), and bring that to your trading, and you will do better.

It is ALL illusion and fraud and puffery. The bogus "narrative" defines the track often, in a gambler's world. And the best you can do, is return to the "House of the Rising Sun", and wear the ball and chain? Maybe. The AI says BNS is going to turn upward, and so we stand pat. Put that 20-dollar gold-piece on my eyes, eh? See you all at St. James. (And we still have no goddamn water...)

And just so I am not a "nattering nabob of negativism", let me offer some really good news. The leaked speech/discussion/townhall of Jamie Dimon of JPM - was directly on-target and massively correct. Good for Dimon. He absolutely told the truth.

Dimon of JPMorgan has demanded full, 5-day per week in-office, focused work from his employees. And he notes that in the last 5 years, headcount is up by 50,000 or some insane figure like that. He said clearly that young people are being left behind, and are not developing creative-thinking skills, social-skills, and basic business-building kind of social and creative teamwork skills that are needed by any organization.

He spoke of "Fucking Zoom" - and complained that folks on "Zoom" calls will be checking email and sending texts, instead of being focused on the work. He demands solid work focus for JPM employment. He railed against the bullshit behaviour of the kids - who he rightly says are being "left behind". They are becoming little princes-with-iPhones, Zooming into meetings, then checking their email, sending texts about what an asshole the boss is, and so on. He says clearly this modern behaviour degrades performance, and hurts the company. He is spot-on correct. Our modern work culture - everything about it, is being degraded and damaged by the modern technology. It's just comical - and it is *exactly* what one would expect, given how psychologically addictive the iPhone and Android phone were designed to be. The "electronic re-tribalization" (Marshal McLulann's term, which he predicted would change "Western man", has now become an established fact and a dominant characteristic of the modern world.

Dimon's speech - his rant - was a closed-session townhall type meeting of JPM employees, and someone recorded it and posted it to social media sites. But Dimon's comments are so completely correct and appropriate. Dimon says that "It's a free country. You don't have to work at JPMorgan." And this is key.

Corporate cultures follow the tone the top boss sets. That's how it works, generally. Dimon is a wise and sensible CEO - one of the few great American CEO's, that we can respect - and try to emulate. He and Elon Musk, as well. These guys demand performance, and because they demand it, they get it.

This is what is needed. And it is especially needed in Government, where low-quality often goes to live restfully. (Like those stupid "RESTful" websites...) :)

There is a revolution that is needed. Mr. Trump might be able to deliver on this need, once he can get rid of the corrupt Demohack judges and other shit-artists (like the awful women who run New York State, for example), maybe. Or maybe not. But it will happen, one way or another. Maybe it will take a small (or large?) war to bring about the needed changes.

But America will have to find some way to get back to quality.

The Democrats took USA so far off-course. And the disgusting, abusive block-artist judges who are stopping the DOGE from doing it's job, will have to be removed, and hopefully (maybe?) sent to re-education camps to learn how to do their jobs, and not make up shit-law while they sit with their fat arses on their catbird-seat benches. They are very bad people.

Some heads really (REALLY!) need to roll, if the program really is to be changed. Otherwise, the USA risks a hard financial collapse, if it suffers just one serious military defeat, and the world loses confidence in the US dollar. When the US dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the US economic engine will cycle down, and maybe even stop turning, like it did in the 1930's. (Factories closed, much business just stopped.) So very few people realize just how close we are to this possible awful outcome. Good leaders like Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk are saying and doing the right things. But they are facing ongoing and serious reactionary assault by quite powerful, dark forces.

[ Feb. 12, 2025 ] - Weather From Hell...
Completely crazy times. Water-system at Farm failed. Our Chinese-made deep-well pump only lasted 5 years. That's what we Economists call a "false economy" - you save big ($250 versus $2500 for a GrundFoss, which has actually become *unavailable* in Canada (on Amazon, they are listed as "Out of Stock* and *Unavailable* and so on. Pretty damn funny. Fortunately, I bought a second backup, new pump, and have managed to dig up the dirt down to the primary well head (about 6 feet below grade, to prevent it freezing), and have pulled up the Munipex pipe, and the old pump (which was covered with black-oil, indicating a probable motor failure). I had planned for a quick swap to the new pump, at a slightly higher point in the well (reduce the chance of brown, turbid water), but today, yet **another** killer snow-storm is coming in. This will delay repairs again.

We have high-winds, and blowing snow already, and have been adjusting to using bottled-water sparingly. I think of the poor folks in Gaza, trying to live in a bombed-out murder-zone, or the folks in Kiev, having Russian ballistic missiles raining down on their apartment buildings, and I know we are actually pretty goddamn lucky. Canada is strong and free - even if we sometimes get f*ckwits in our Federal Government (like now, for example). But like USA, the strength of a nation, is driven by the resilience and emotional and psychological strength of it's people.

We thought Mr. Trump (version 2.0) might be good for the USA. Well, looks like that's another trade that maybe we got rather wrong. The DOGE thing is a very good idea - it is desperately needed. But the suggestion of forced-removal of the citizens of Gaza, from their homeland - makes about as much sense as the forced-removal of citizens of Florida, from their homesteads. Trump will catch a "Kennedy" at some point, if he becomes a top-tier war-criminal. His active support of the race-based mass-murder efforts of the Israeli's, shows him to be either a puppet of dark forces, or just a misguided or deluded lunatic. Curious how history seems to put these guys into positions of power.

The world will now begin a hundred years of conflict and accelerating violence, we fear. The idiotic nonsense about the Chinese running a "reverse opium war" re. fentanyl and so on - this is just wildly insane and crazy. Folks are just doing criminal crap to make money - like they ALWAYS have done in all of history. If USA wants to fix it's fentanyl problem, they might want to focus on telling people to avoid getting involved with stupid goof drugs. If stupid, low-quality people are killing themselves by taking bad drugs, then probably that is just evolution in action, right? Give them "Darwin Awards" for taking their low-quality genes out of the human gene-pool, maybe. And maybe suggests the gay-folks that their form is sex is - well, let's be gentle - maybe not the best idea? Maybe it's a really *BAD* idea, like it has always been viewed as such, in all of human history? Maybe try to educate people not to be "fucking wrong"? Is that not a good idea?

The problem with Trump is that he seems too keen to kill folks - or steal their land. Israel was a terrible error - a race-based, religious-fanatic nation-state, stuck forceably right into the middle of Arab lands. The Palestinians got screwed badly. How would USA like it, if the UN had a vote, and California was given to the Russians, because the Russians had that fort, at the "Russian River"? That's the insane logic behind the creation of Israel. The entire idea was a tragic error, and the abusive mass-murder efforts of the cruel fanatics of the Israeli IDF, only serve to show just how terrible and awful the error was.

Trump buys into this nonsense, just like Biden and his criminal gang did. So USA is seen by everyone, everywhere, as a key enabler of conflict, violence and now, outright mass-murder, on a scale that starts to look like a perfect holocaust for the folks in Gaza. The Jews do not have a monopoly on holocaust. If and when USA suffers the same level of assault on it's cities, that it inflicted on Japanese cities in World War Two, I am sure that even some Americans might call the nuclear destruction of USA cities - a "holocaust". It will be a bad thing - and the Americans seem to be doing everything they can to move the World towards this kind of military-based model for resolution of the problems that USA brings to the World.

We are not un-American. We like America, and we want it to survive and prosper.

But if USA seeks to use force (which is murder, let's be clear), as their base-line political messaging model - eg. the threat of "obliteration" of nations (such as Trump has promised to do to Iran), then the World has a real problem with USA, and that problem will need to be resolved.

And a good way to deal with a murderous, abusive bully, is the bludgeon the filthy bastard to death with a steel pipe - or to blow him to little bits, with special devices crafted to provide that kind of technological solution. The assassination attempt on Hitler was almost successful. History might have been quite different, if that task had been carried out successfully. If you're going to go in for difficult, high-risk projects, then you need to make sure you have *multiple* backups and back-stops to ensure that you achieve the objective successfully.

We would rather see a world where violence was not always seen as the necessary solution to the stupid and horrific errors made by corrupt, dishonest government people. But when killers and thieves attempt to steal your land, and attack your neighbourhood and nation, then real War is the only action possible. It is natural and necessary to defend your homeland from those who threaten it.

We are in agreement with that slogan on the "New Hampshire" license-plate. "Live Free or Die". That really says it best. And someone should explain to Mr. Trump, that if Canada were to join the USA, it would not be a "51st State" - it would at least TEN NEW U.S. STATES - one for each of the existing Canadian Provinces. The idea of all of Canada being only one single US "State" is completely absurd. Ontario and Quebec alone (historically, "Upper Canada and Lower Canada"), are two semi-sovereign States right now, within the Canadian Federation. Trump should think a bit. If Canada voted to join the USA, then we would bring at least 10 new States into the USA Republic. And they would probably all vote Democrat. This would mess up the Republicans. The gosh-darn Democrats would be back in charge, assuming USA democracy was still operational. Let that, as Mr. Musk says, "sink in!"

[ Feb. 7, 2025 ] - In the Deep, Deep Mud...
Hilarious! - Just as we get the finances in order, and things look semi-stable for a few days, the water system at the Ranch-House completely fails!. And the well-head is covered in snow, and it's minus 7 celsius. Just so completely perfectly bad, that it is hard to do anything but laugh. I now will have the great pleasure of digging a bloody great mass of dirt, to access the T-connection, disconnect it, and pull the pump and the pipe up from 180 feet below the earth's surface. It appears the well-pump is clogged with mud, possibly due to some sort of collapse of the primary well pipe? May need a new well? I did all this back in 2020, and it was a massive, awful job during the summer time. In February, it looks insane. The entire design of the system is beyond stupid. I am so impressed that our modern technology is still so terrible/awful crappy. This should not be this difficult - but the whole system is buried, 6 feet below grade, so as to prevent it from freezing in the winter, no doubt.

And of course, the market is melting down, like Leonard Cohen's warning about... oh, never mind.

I am pretty sure we are in for a major disaster in the global financial markets. All that borrowed money that will NEVER be paid back. The system will just one day, stop working... rather like our water-system here at the Farm. The water turned weirdly muddy - just mud and water - and doubtless this had clogged and stopped the deep-well pump. I toggle the system on, and the breaker pops on the control box, indicating an overload condition at the pump motor - probably from it being choked with mud or sand.

This is typical system operation - it all looks good, and seems to be working fine - until suddenly, in a really non-linear fashion, it just fails and stops.

Like those F-35's that drop from the sky like a set of car-keys. The system fails, and you get bup-kis. Nothing. No fall-back, no graceful failure - system just completely stops.

Know this, and prepare for it. I have a back-up deep-well pump, and the well now uses plastic "munipex" pipe, which is light enough for a human to pull out of the well. (The original well design had steel pipe which weighed thousands of pounds, and required a tractor and a winch I rigged up, to pull it out,and cut it into pieces.)

I let you'all know, if we ever get water again!

[ Feb. 6, 2025 ] - In-Sanity In-Charge?
We have some very curiously extreme scenarios that we think might play out. They are so crazy and serious, that I don't really want to document them here, for fear they give lunatics some ideas on how to blow up the world.

One thing seems to be clear. The weird action that is happening in the USA, is maybe not a sign of strength. It looks more like a sign of weakness. USA has to run *military* campaigns against drug-runners in Mexico? Really? Is this the best use of your force-projection military complex? Most fentynal seems to be siezed from American citizens bringing it back in their cars, from Mexico. Maybe tell them not to do this?

The problem with American illegal drug use, is that it is driven by DEMAND for drugs, by American young people.

Maybe the best solution, is to be like the Swiss, and give the stupid, low-quality people that want to use goof drugs, some place to shoot-up, and goof themselves, if they so wish. A "War on Drugs" is much like a "War on Terror". It is stupid, and it will fail. And it will probably add to the list of problems that beset a nation that feels such silly actions can have any positive outcome. Bombing "terrorists" in their home countries, creates intense and lasting anger at US murder-efforts. And it is the very best recruiting strategy for newly-organizing "terrorist armies". You can use that word "terrorist" (which was invented by the Germans, during the Second World War), but you can also call them "partisans" or "freedom-fighters". By dropping bombs on their houses - you make it **real easy** for folks who seek violence, to attract angry young men to their cause. You crazy rich USA bastards cannot figure out the logic of this? It's not complex thinking, really.

The "Great Stupid" seems to be rolling now, with a force of it's own. Trump or No-Trump, we all gonna be playing the same game of Insanity-Bridge.

[ Feb. 5, 2025 ] - Changes.
Great David Bowie song from long, long ago, before the whole disco-garbage thing. Most artists do their best work like great mathematicians - when they are very young. They see the world with new eyes, and with clear, excited minds, and they can create works of genius in a pure and direct manner.

But the old bastards - with slowing brains, fading vision and shrinking penises are generally not the folks that will drive much that is very positive. Their experience is often dangerously dated, and they tend to make terrible mistakes. Much like seems to be happening everywhere in our sad world now. We need to change-out the old farts, even if they are doing things that seem popular. Poor Trump is doing some good and needed cleaning. We agree whole-heartedly with the actions of D.O.G.E - it is truly necessary, and it's cleaning action is critical. The USA in Washington is corrupt as hell. It is a minefield of fraud, money-laundering, and outright deception. Wholesale cleanup is required.

But there are also some wise and necessary rules that we have all agreed upon - like the forced removal of a people from their homeland is a Class-1, top-of-the-chart War Crime. If Trump and that vile piece of walking excrement, Netanyahu, successfully force the citizens of Gaza from their homeland, they will be guilty of war-crimes on par with Hitler and Pol Pot. Where will they send the 3-million Palestinians? Maybe to Aleppo, like the war-criminal Turks did with the Armenians? The vile dirt-bag "Leaders" of history, who committed great crimes, really do not need any additional company. There are enough horrific, stupid and cruel examples of pure evil. We don't really need to add to these great lists of human shame.

Now Trump has said that he wants to "obliterate" Iran, if the Iranians succeed in popping him. Interesting. What concerns me, is that Canadians are among the best snipers in the world. One of our guys held the record for a successful kill in Iraq, at something like 3870 yards or some insane, unbelievable distance. The fellow was given an award for making this thought-to-be-almost-impossible shot. It shows what can be done, with good equipment, and extreme, careful attention to detail. (Our Canadian Forces guy was number one until, in Ukraine, in November 2023, a Ukrainian sniper named Viacheslav Kovalskyi, took out his target (a Russian Officer, no less!) at 4156 yards which is 2.36 miles! We are good, but this fellow, using custom equipment, shows what is possbile. A human can only see about 2.9 miles, before the curvature of the Earth cuts off the view.)

So, what if a Canadian sniper - a real professional - manages to successfully solve the "Trump Problem"? Does that mean that USA will "obliterate" Canada? It's an interesting question. Even more so, if maybe the successful sniper is a fellow from California or Texas. What then? Will the "Trumpian Elite" decide that California or Texas must be "obliterated"? Or maybe "Sniper-X" will be a European, or an African? Unlikely, sure, but this is a strange world now. We analyze every extreme scenario we can think of.

Trump is probably the most dangerous person to take power at any time, in any nation, since Mao captured China. The entire process that is being crafted is a wildly dangerous "Cult-of-Personality" that is going to have really extreme consequences, no matter how it plays out. D.O.G.E is critically necessary, and USAID was a giant slush-fund that really looks like a monster criminal enterprise, built to expropriate US taxpayer's money and send it to curious places. But it also maybe was a more effective way for USA to project it's power around the world, than just bombing the airports of the national-capitals of nations it does not like. Bombing only goes so far. And it creates a very large ecosystem of folks that want to see your nation and all it's people, burn in hell.

Dropping cash on them, is probably a lot more effective than dropping bombs on them, if you want to control and manipulate them.

But for now, we are back to bombs.

And as an old philosopher with some knowledge on this area of things - I can say with some certainty that if you bomb folks, eventually the bombs will be returned, and will fall on your own nation and your own people. This is confirmed by military history, and by the Laws of Basic Karma.

USA has never suffered an intense aerial bombardment campaign, like London did during the "Blitz". But there comes a time for everything. I'm sure the Romans were really surprised the first time that Rome was sacked and burned. Doubtless the Americans will be also. No Japanese or German bombs fell on USA mainland during World War Two. But once Trump starts World War Three (hint: It's already started, guys), in earnest, the USA may find itself on the pointy end of that "obliteration" plan. Maybe us also. Or maybe we are Neutral. Or maybe we are on the Other Side? Who knows.

Everything is changing now. But just remember. Our snipers are the very best in the World. :) And we also have AI's that can predict the future (even if we don't believe what they are telling us!). We have no debt (personally, and in our little business enterprise), but we cannot control the forces of the "Great Stupid". But we caution: "The Iron-Dome" defense-shield is a bogus, dishonest fiction. If a hundred hypersonic missiles are launched at a target, some (half?) will get through. You simple *CANNOT* successfully shoot them all down. The American aircraft carriers will be sunk in the first few minutes of the War starting, and Washington and New York will probably burn. Your GPS satellites will go dark, and power-grids will fail. It will not be nice.

The forces of the "Great Stupid" are pushing us toward this scenario, and the intensity of the push is accelerating. As analysts, we caution that this is an unwise course to be travelling.

[ Feb. 4, 2025 ] - Life in the End Times? Maybe. But We Need Real Change.
Time for some changes. We've got to cancel those American contracts, regardless. Can't trust those folks. We are supposedly on the hook for over 70 F-35's, expensive, unreliable US-made fighter aircraft which regularly drop like stones from the sky. It's a bad aircraft anyway. The current plan is truly insane. We can do a deal with Saab of Sweden, who actually made a committment to build the aircraft that we wanted - right here in Canada!

Given the fucktard nature of US politics, and the stupid bastard that is currently acting in the role of US President, we cannot and must not be dependent on these people whose word cannot be trusted. If they can tear up their contracts with us over trade, then we cannot and must not purchase their stupid unreliable military aircraft. The bastards might include backdoor-code to disable the goddamn things, in the event that their trade-war becomes a hot-war with us. Up until 1934, Canada's national defense strategy was built upon careful assessment of threats from US-initiated incursions into our country. We really need to revisit this line of analysis, given the stupid bozo that is now resting his fat arse in the Maison Blanche.

NATO should be re-thought. The entire concept is questionable. Why should we commit our military to assisting a bunch of hard-core totalitarian German Leftists who censor and degrade their own people? The new "Green Nazi" folks of Leftist Germany are abusive and dishonest fanatics who are trying to ban their own political parties - the AfD, for example. AfD - "Alternative for Germany" is a moderate, mainline party, supported by at least 35% of the German people. The current German Leftist Government wants to actually ban this political Party, just because it advocates to limit Muslim immigration. The current Leftist German Government is an anti-democratic collection of abusive fanatics. And having a military promise to assist these folks is completely unacceptable. There is no real democracy in Germany now. The place is a broken State, sadly. NATO is a relic of the last century. If Germany does not want to have Russian overlords, then they need to fund their defense efforts for themselves. The USA cannot be trusted. And we should not even be involved in this.

We here in Canada need to re-think everything now. The current Canadian Government at the Federal level is a bad joke. It is a collection of failures and pocket-fillers. But when we get a new Federal Government, we need to make certain it does not accept American fraudsterism and the rank dishonesty of American political agents. These folks CANNOT be trusted. They do not keep their promises. We cannot afford the dependency that using their questionable, poorly-designed military hardware will entail. Simple risk-management requires we adjust our plans immediately and directly.

[ Feb, 3 2025 ] - Donald Trump Attempts to Destroy the North American Economy - Hilarious!
Donald Trump will go down in history, as the Great Buffoon. It's beyond hilarious. It's "Waiting For Godot" full "Theatre-of-the-Absurd-Fucktards." It's just beyond rational, to such a degree, that one can only howl with laughter. This stupid orange-headed clown is single-handedly trying to destroy an economy and a political relationship that took several generations to create. This is just comedy in the extreme. It's Looney-Tunes! "Whaba-da-ba-ba-bu... Dat's All, Folks!" It's like being 8 years old, and watching the silly Saturday morning crazy cartoons on the new Black-and-White Television.

Fucking BNS shares would not even open for trading on the TD-Waterhouse/Webbroker trading platform this morning. We could not even unload if we wanted to. Just like my goofy AI predicted - straight down to hell! What the AI obviously picked up, was the kinkly, and weird, drop-pump-drop pattern, and the shaky-shit weak-bid pattern, I suppose. But the AI knows nothing of the Great Stupid or the Great Buffoon. It just gets driven off the price-action, and even old, dead Gerald Loeb would have said that is where ALL the trading information is sitting. Pretty fucking amazing, truth be told. I am in awe of what is possible by just carefully inspecting the ugly, shit-stained data. It's like real-time coprolite archeology.

Fucking USA is truly insane. With "friends" like this, we sure as fuck don't need any extra enemies, eh? I was a fucking SUPPORTER of Donald Trump (and that takes some doing, here in Socialist Canada!). The actions of Elon Musk's DOGE are absolutely and critically necessary. Take a look at the absolutely OUT-OF-CONTROL US Federal Government spending. It's insane. The deficit-curve is hyperbolic vertical. Spending in the USA is OUT OF CONTROL. And that insane DEI nonsense with "trans-gender" madness is fucking crazy. It needed (needs) to be fixed. DEI is failure-promotion, and putting women who have NOT the skills, into positions where skilled guys are needed. It's madness. And it is KILLING PEOPLE at scale now. (viz. that horrible aircrash collision in Washington, CJR with a Blackhawk helicopter on a training exercise. Fucking terrible shit..) So we applauded Trump's election. Only to have the filthy creature turn on us! It's just true horror-comedy grotesque. This goof cannot be trusted. His word means nothing.

This all reminds me of that "South Park" episode, where the folks in South Park ask Al Quida to help them stop the Invasion from Jersey. It was funny as hell. Al Quida got a bunch of aircraft - and crashed them in front of the advancing Jersey hordes. They were giving Osama Bin Laden a medal for helping them, when a sniper shot him. Goddamn it was funny. Perfect picture of modern USA, now. Crazy, over-the-top hilarious.

Time to play "Peter Pumpkin Head". This is all beyond fucking crazy. Maybe we could get Michigan and New York State to secede from the Union, and join Canada? Maybe Ohio to? Or not. Michigan and New York would be enough for now. At least we could get some cars built, and keep some folks employed doing actual productive work.

Fun times. Never expected that I would actually get to watch a real civil war begin.

Or maybe we join Russia and China, in the "Great March to Washington" and burn it the fuck down when we get there? (Like we did in 1812 ?) History teaches that anything is possible now. When your "friend" and partner betrays you, you get the hardware, and you call in some new friends. No choice, really.

Is it "Made in America"?. So sad about that. Can't use it. Gotta buy from UK, China, Japan or maybe even poor Germany. USA is gone.

[ Feb, 2 2025 ] - The Time Of The Great Stupid - USA Goes Bat Shit Crazy
Happy Ground-Hog Day! No shadows here, so old "Lorcalon Larry" is telling us that Spring is on target to actually happen. Damn sure will be appreciated - was minus 15 C last nite. Our hybrid-heating system was in full-operation mode.

No more USA wine from Californistan, and we are done with Bourbon. Kinda sad, but we make the best Whiskey in the world, and we have all the cars and trucks and boats we need. We have M10X and AR15 and Fender Telecaster units. We have Rugers and Shadows and all the hand-held units we need in that area. We even have the ammo. :D <- ascii smiling glyph.

So, we can get along fine without Americastan. Crazy dangerous place, anyway. When NYC is flat, black and glowing, we won't be shedding any teardrops --- unless the fallout drifts the wrong way, of course... :)

Funny times, no question. The North American Auto Industry is basically fucked. Seriously, the integrated supply changes are predicated on free-trade access, that Mr. Peckhead-Goof negotiated and ratified himself. It just is absolutely bat-shit crazy. Free trade makes nations rich. Tariffs make nations poor. Go study the old UK "Corn Laws" for an example of stupid, stupid, stupid and stupid. Really.

I am working on a political suggestion, where we suspend operation of the "Communications Research Establishment" up in Ottawa. Trudeau is stupid to tariff US products. That just hurts Canadian consumers. It's a stupid response because US folks don't give a rat-shit about our costs - they will care about THEIR costs, of course. We need to pull the plug on our "Security" co-operation efforts with the American Idiots. That will at least get their attention. Plus cancel that truly fucking stupid F-35 purchase plan, of course. Those fucking stupid aircraft have the flight characteristics of a set of car-keys, once the fancy "fly-by-wire" computer-control fails. Each F-35 crash will be $150 MILLION Canadian dollars, down the big toilet. That is just insane. We should buy the Swedish Viggen, and lots and lots and lots of MANPADs to pop US transport craft. It's big transports and logisitcs that determine war-outcomes, not crazy overpriced fighter jets. And we need some UK nukes, carefully and not-so-secretly stashed around the country, in case of foreign incursion. Small, tactical battlefield devices are particularly useful. Do we have secret stashes of these? No of course not. But we probably should have.

But we do have Canada's semi-secret "CRE", which taps ALL overseas US communication - damn well EVERYTHING - and then gives this data to the USA "Intelligence Agencies". Since we are doing the wiretapping and radio/internet monitoring, then they are not breaking US law. (Even FISA 704 or whatever it is called, has limits). Our monitoring, has no limits all, because we are just monitoring (tapping, recording, fully collecting) the foreign traffic.

So, we should just suspend this spy program. It should be illegal anyway, but it's not.

We should really do this. I have to write a quick recommendation today, and send it off to a few folks. We disconnect from the "5-Eyes" spy-bot nonsense, and maybe that might start to get the attention of the American Peckerheads? Maybe. Since everyone in the entire world hates USA, the Americans are right and correct to be concerned with their own "security". Suspending CRE spy-efforts would get the American's attention.

Meanwhile - hell, if you want to make some quick cash, short the about-to-collapse automobile-maker stocks, might be an idea. It might take a few days of thinking for it all to "sink-in" (I need one of Elon Musk's big "Sinks", eh?) "Let That Sink In, folks!" Hilarious, really.

A trade-war between Canada and USA is the dumbest fucking thing I think I have ever seen the Americans actually pull, politically. It truly is a perfect example of the US Feds shooting themselves - with real gusto - in their own fat feet. I give Donald Trump's "Presidency" two more years - at the very most. But I might wrong. Stupidity is described by German historians, as a powerful **FORCE**. I am coming around to this viewpoint.

Historians will look back at this time, in USA-land, and call it: "The Time of The Great Stupid". And considering we had George W. Bush, this is really wild. Disco-Boy Trump is actually out-stupiding Mr. Super-Stupid Bush. That's a helluvan accomplishment!

But we can all be stupid. I thought Trump might be a better choice than the other nutjobs. Look's like I mis-calculated how bad, bad could be. Good thing we don't need any cars. I wonder if all car-parts sourced from Americastan are gonna be tariff-taxed? Glad I fixed all that was broken!

[ Feb, 1 2025 ] - A Comedy of Errors
Are you plagued by insomnia? I've never slept well - not as a child, not as a teenager, not as an adult. What to do? Try the German approach, also worked for Winston Churchill: Can't sleep? Then get up and do some WORK! It's minus 14 celsius here - lovely night with no wind. Took my little terrier for a walk (she has thick black fur, and loves the snow). She did a full-course, and we cleaned the large ice-balls (from using my tractor to plow the long driveway yesterday), off the driveway, by picking them up and heaving them into the ditch. Lovely night, but damn cold.

The markets are a joke. And politics is an even bigger joke. Example: Putting a serious goof like that poor, sorry Hindu Brown-Boy in as UK Prime Minister, like the Tories did in the UK - what was the silly little fellow's name? He was so un-remarkable, and such a serious little twerp, that I even forget his name. It honestly escapes me now, which is a very key indicator in politics.

Long ago, my brother was a Federal MP, and would spout Lefty shit on TV, and my clients would comment to me the next day "I saw your brother on TV last night!". And I would ALWAYS (always, always always), ask them gently: "What did he say?" And never - NEVER - not even one single time - could anyone EVER tell me what he said. He is not a bad person - but he is a serious Lefty and he would always spout serious Lefty talk. And not a single person - EVER - could even remember the gist of what he said, let alone the details. This is the first thing to learn in politics. You have to trigger a good, hard emotional response in the folks you are trying to reach, or they will forget you like a bad smell.

Note: I love that the serious brown-guys and brown-gals from India are coming to live in Canada. It is wonderful. They are polite, the women are good convent-educated high-quality females, the guys are damn good workers, smart efficient and focused on creating quality results. We are lucky to get them to live in this crazy arctic freezer climate. They are so much better than the left-wing "fat slags" (like overweight US "Karens") that we seem to be producing here. (There was this great series of "Fat-Slag Comics" produced in the UK. They were *so* goddamn funny!)

But I remember Boris Johnson, who was a goddamn good PM - especially for UK. Politics is an insane, absurd comedy-show, truth be told. A while back, in Ottawa, someone got a bag of plastic hammers, and hung it beside the portrait of some Liberal person that had just been installed. Perfect. "Dumb as a bag of hammers!" is a common Canadian expression that is used in private company. I recall, from my "Treasury" days, the little cheat-sheets (size of a playing-card), that would have all of the Ontario economic statistics printed, so a "Minister" could "rise in the House" (like a penis, of course), and come right out with clever, accurate economic stats to impress Opposition folks during Question Period.

It's all theatre. And it took ME a long time to realize this. I would always give long, serious answers to questions that were thrown at me. I should have said: "Hey, Great Question! Just sign this here little "Letter of Engagement", and cut me a good-sized retainer-cheque, and I'll get right back to ya'all with the exact answer that will let you keep that nice cushy job ya'all have now got! I'll make SURE that everything'll WORK REALLY GODDAMN GOOD! Can we do that? Hell, yes!"

I was clueless and serious, like the poor brown-boy who lost to Keir Stammerbottom, a sorry, sad piker that will go down in English history as yet another unremarkable fail.

And of course - the USA Politics-Of-The-Swamp is complete, over-the-top, Theatre of The Absurd. It's "Waiting for Godot" on LSD. Trump is hilarious - he will hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs that US folks will pay - and somehow, has made American's believe that this is NOT a 25% tax increase! It's pure, unrestricted comedy of the first level, mixed with mass-halucination. Trudeau - bless his little heart - tried to explain to Mr. Trump that this will completely quad-fuck the integrated supply-chains of the North American auto industry. But no matter. It's all part of the show. It is a pure Shit-Show.

And the Show Must Go On!... And on, until the lights go out, and theatre begins to burn?

Whatever. I've decided to give my "Inner Trader" complete freedom of operation. We gonna look for "targets of opportunity". I'll let you know how it goes. I think it was Hunter Thompson, who said: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

So be it.

[ Jan. 31, 2025 ] - Our Cute Winter Boots and The Drop-Toad
Here in Canada, good (cute?) winter boots are really important. This remains true, even when your front-lines of defense are collapsing, and your war is not going well. And when one's supposed allies turn traitor and start campaigns against you, the sense of despair can become problematic. Cute winter boots, indeed.

I truly remain astonished at the mad foolishness of our modern world. And the over-the-top dangers of modern AI seem to be amplified each day. But of course, when new weapons are brought online, two things must be done. First, you need to craft effective defense. And then second, you need to gain access to the new weapons yourselves, and deploy these immediately against your enemy. Time is - as the lawyers like to say - of the essence.

If our so-called "friends" are now deciding to become our enemies, then perhaps we can transform our current enemies into new friends?

Change is coming that will redefine many things. And maybe everything you "know", is actually quite wrong.

[Afternoon Update]
Holy Crap! My goddamn AI said that BNS was going straight down to hell, and I assumed that it was just being stupid and silly. And wrong. Well, goddamn hell, I just have to put my own ego into a blind-trust, and trade my goddamn technology. It's more right, more often, than I am. Damn and hell.

I am watching as BNS pulls a full-on "Drop-Toad", and it is shocking. It's like a slow-motion train-wreck. There appears to be no specialist support for this stock. (Traded down in ugly stair-step fashion from 75.05 to 73.89 click, click, and click)

In the lod days, there were some really not bad traders on the floor of that Big Red Tower in Toronto. I don't know if maybe they are prevented from trading shares of their own shit, due to some compliance restriction - but there seems to be some serious problems here. I've watched BNS just stair-step DOWN AGAIN today, in perfect, lock-step "drop-toad" fashion. BMO is down six cents, while BNS is down $1.09. This is just sickening.

BNS is trading like it's broken. Not sure why - several analysts even have BUY recommendations on the silly thing. It's not just tariff fear, it's seems to be something basically bent in the trading process - like a major algo that just hammers the thing at just the right technical point. It's just truly, weirdly predictable. The folks that short this shit must be doing well.

Full disclosure: We hold this stock for the dividend, but that has proved to be a less-than-wise decision. Dividends are sometimes a trap. They are seductive and simple - but in Canada, and for this bank, something is just not right with the trading. And the AI we run seems to do a good job of spotting this. These damn bank shares trade like really-long-duration bonds. In the 1960's and 1970's, as interest rates were rising, and rising and then rising more - those long filthy bonds were called "Certificates of Capital Depreciation" or some such joke-name. Buy them, and watch as your capital slowly (and not-so-slowly) disappears before your eyes.

Are we on the same high-inflation, zero-growth path of 1970's? I don't think so. But maybe I am wrong. But here's the deal. Think "Fartcoin" silly? Here is what is silly. We hold thousands of BNS shares to make less than $5000 in dividends for three months risk-holding. The dividend is $1.06/shr for the quarter, which is actually goddamn good. But this AM, my AI and my nervous gut, told me to take the $75, unload the position, wait for the drop-toad, and then re-purchase lower. That simple algo (which seems to work every damn day), would have brought in MORE than the quarterly dividend.

This is a research log, and that is the results of my research.

The financial markets are goofed. I just cannot say it any more plain. The so-called "investment" process aspect is as comical as "Fartcoin". It's all a joke. The entire industry is a fucking joke. Know this, and you can grow rich. The lawyers - the GOOD lawyers - know that the "Law" is often an ass-licking whore, or a viciously stupid scam-machine. The value a lawyer brings is his own personal integrity - the law is all fiction and fluff and bumpf. Process and honest trade is the best that can be done. Trust is all that matters. Justice is a rare thing, and usually has to be fabricated by those who seek it.

And the Financial markets are wildly-and-absurdly inefficient and quite silly constructs, that are necessary, because humans are what humans are.

The markets are NOT efficient. They are silly, and the posted prices are ALWAYS wrong, because they WILL change, and mostly ruin any rational plan you may have crafted.

Know this. This really is the key result of my lifetime of research on this topic.

[ Jan. 30, 2025 ] - Crazy Dancing IP Numbers!
Ok, looks like I figured out what happened to KILL OUR ACCESS TO OUR AWS EC2 INSTANCE. The webserver for this site, is an AWS EC2 thing (runs AL2 - Amazon Linux 2). Works good. AL2 is a clone of Fedora/Redhat before Redhat was ended by being purchased by IBM. What a world we live in now. Much is going down, it seems.

What appears to have happened, is that we had a powerfailure - a 10-second power outage - which bascially destroyed most of the electronics in-memory configurations, for everything here at the ranch-house. It's just comical. The Linux-boxes re-booted OK, and the Gateway was restarted ok - but the Starlink router gave us a DIFFERENT IP NUMBER - so different it did not appear to be in the suite of assigned Starlink IP numbers. Somewhere - either by my own foolishly-clever efforts, or by Amazon's security features, this caused my access to my AWS EC2 instance to become unavailable. Damn, damn and damn.

I just realized this thinking about it while awake last nite, as I coughed up horrible stuff. Sure enough, I checked what my IP number as of Jan. 29, and what it is today, (Starlink provided), and they were wildly different. I think I might have even configured my AWS EC2 AL2 "box" at Amazon to only allow access from IPv4 numbers which match what I have determined is the IP number-suite-set that Starlink draws from. I cannot login to my AWS Console to control the parameters of my EC2 instance until I get a damn Yubikey-thing, register it with Amazon, and then provide TOTP (Time-based One Time Password) to have the damned MFA (Multi-Factor Authorization) thing work at Amazon.

I get the need for advanced, hardened security. I know a guy who sleeps with a loaded .45 under his pillow at night. He's in the arms-trade (quite legally), and the world has become very weird. Security is necessary. But it can also stop needed access, in so many, many cases. It has to be a balance. And sometimes, the best security is like the best market regulation. The best market regulation is no regulation at all. That actually works pretty well. In a low-security world, everyone is given access to everything, but trust is something that has to be earned over time.

I really need to be able to get access to AWS Console so I can check and control how my AWS EC2 instance (my Amazono AL2 webserver) is actually operating. I think I have it set so that the only IP numbers that can ssh into my AWS EC2 "box" are very restrictive - the complete failure of access to my webserver, might be by my own design! ("Hoisted by my own petard!", as Shakespeare so eloquently said (it means: "Blown up by your own fart!" - in early 1600's, a gunpowder bomb was called a "fart" in French, because of the sulphur-smell it produced. History can be good for a laugh, as well as for critical education...))

But I can't get into my AWS Console account, because they require now, that I give the device name of the MFA thing I am using for two-factor security authorization. Just hilarious. I suppose I will have to order - on bloody Amazon, no less! - a Yubikey thing, which apparently one registers the device serial number with the service-provider - and then he and you can generate on the fly, a one time code number, which is used to provide the second "factor" to allow you to access the service provider's thing. This is great, until you lose the Yubikey, or some thief steals it. I think this is completely silly. The bank's have a MUCH better approach, where they just send you a text message, with a 6-digit number code. My associates in the security-world, say that this can approach can be hacked, if someone claims to be you, gets a "new" phone to replace one that was lost, and get's access to your cell number. Sure. Any security model can be breached by the right plan - and the physical device TOTP thing just puts ALL the security risk-management effort on ME at MY LOCATION. It is a bit stupid. If your physical TOTP key is stolen or lost, you are really screwed.

See, what is happening, is that foolish folks who cannot reason clearly, think that by adding more **layers** of security on top of existing security - that they are INCREASING security.

I disagree with this emphatically. I believe that security is being REDUCED by making too many layers of "hard-locked-doors". The end-result is either a useless, effectively un-usable system, or one that can be breached by just using that "backdoors" that all overly-complex, badly designed security-models MUST HAVE, in order to be maintained. You have to have these back-doors, in order to make the damn machines actually work correctly. The "backdoors" have to be there, to get into the broken machinery, when it FAILS. And if it is too-complex, it is CERTAIN to FAIL, and probably FAIL HARD.

Go watch that F-35 video crashing in Alaska again, if you want to see what FAIL HARD really looks like. The A/C's landing gear was down, and it appeared the engines were just off. It looked like total system failure.

Vastly worse, was the Blackhawk helicopter flying into, and killing a Bombardier airliner in Washington. That absolutely should NEVER have happened. Some heads need to roll. Some military person was dangerously stupid to allow a dark-black, designed-not-to-seen, Blackhawk helicopter to fly across the approach path of a commercial airport which had incoming airline traffic. The Americans seem to be in trouble. They need less talk about "souls" and "prayer", and put more focus on correcting what appear to be mounting problems with common basic process. You don't have black-painted, military hardware cross an active approach-path of a working airport while heavy aircraft are flying landing approaches. Even in a war-zone, you would not do this, unless it was an enemy airport and you were trying to destroy enemy aircraft. Lately, the Americans seem to be their own worst enemies. We actively worry about this apparent trend.

On a lighter note - our expensive, glass-topped Maytag stove has also failed. The powerfailure yesterday, seems to have destroyed the display/control-unit which controls the thing. The clock is dark, and only the under-glass burners work. This is getting quite silly. Changing the battery in the Honda knocked out the Navigation system and the Bluetooth/cell-phone access and the FM-radio. I needed to get a PIN-code number by taking the ruined car to the dealer, and enter the PIN, to get the Nav+Radio display working again.

The stove was almost $2000 several years ago. Without the control-unit operating, there is no way to use the expensive convection oven. No more hot-buttered scones, unless we drop a couple of thousand on a new stove. It's the stupid electronics that have failed. All the analog switches and so on, work fine. The switch-controlled top burners work fine. But the oven is dead. "Digital" is becoming a code-word for "Shit-Bad" unreliable technology. Don't believe me? Take a look at the prices of vintage, NON-DIGITAL 1970's stereo equipment and NON-DIGITAL 1970's automobiles. The prices are climbing monthly. I recently paid some serious money for a vintage 1970's power-amplifier. It works very well. I have a DIGITAL thing, that pretends to be a all-for-everything tuner and amplifier, called a: "Denon AL24 Processing Plus". A friend gave it to me. It's a joke. I managed to reset the thing, and get it seek out a bunch of stations, and play them like a radio. It is a design failure, that is so bad, so stupidly hard to use, that I am going to take it to the "Goodwill" and donate it. That, or the electronics recycler. It's "Digital", which means it is badly designed, hard to use, and annoying to the point of pathology. Comical.

So, we either drop $2000 on a new stove, or I will try to rig a manual by-pass circuit to get the oven to at least work in "switch-on" and "switch-off" manual mode. Can't be that hard. We have 240 volts, and we have heating elements. Connect them up, and we can bake up our scones!

But let me be clear. I will be looking for an ANALOG stove, with a MECHANICAL switch to control the stove heating elements. We bought a Maytag dryer. It has an electronic display. It has Wi-Fi, and if we want, we can connect it up and control it via and thru our Wi-Fi circuits. Now, really - WHY would anyone even think that they might want to do that? You connect some pointless device to your Wi-Fi (which means that it - the damn **DRYER** - could harvest your router's password and data, and send this to ANYONE ANYWHERE ON THE ENTIRE DAMNED PLANET? What kind of a shit-for-brains moron would connect his electric clothes dryer TO HIS WI-FI via HIS ROUTER??? Think! To connect my Wi-Fi enabled DRYER to any local Wi-Fi router, I would have to give my DRYER my Wi-Fi Router PASSWORD. My clothes DRYER now has my Wi-Fi password, and is ON THE INTERNET! This is pure insanity. ALL my Wi-Fi traffic could possibly be visible to the DRYER, right?

Is that not an obvious and absurd security risk, that trumps any other thing I might do? I have a Chinese-made Huawei phone. I am pretty sure the camera can be enabled independent of what app I am running, and that the phone - when I have the Wi-Fi enabled - can exfiltrate everything I have on the phone to China or elsewhere. It just can. No way around this. We don't store data on the "cloud", and I don't enable Wi-Fi or internet, on my phone, except to transfer images to my Linux machines. And I don't take Jeff Bezos style "dick-pics" and send them to helicopter pilots.

If you use "digital", you have to assume you can be (or may be in the future) exfiltrated. That's just how it is now. The "Internet-of-Things" is the "Internet-of-No-Security".

Hint: We have a secret. We have a backup stove, in another nearby place. It is an old design with a mechanical clock, and a mechanically controlled oven. I'd forgotten about it. Just remembered.

We gonna make some hot-buttered fresh baked scones! I'll let you know how they are!

[ Jan. 29, 2025 ] - Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think!
Damnation - I've had some sort of flu/bad-cold/Covid-xx or whatever. I'd taken the flu vaccine, but passed on the Covid mRNA shot (too damn much spike-proteins), and I'm already on blood-thinners, Vitamin D and B12. Thought I was gonna die yesterday - really bad, like when my phone runs out of battery, and just switches off (I had inadvertantly let the adapter/charge wall-wort come out of little line-plug, so my phone just switched off last week. Pretty funny. I got a message saying: "Your battery is complete exhausted. Phone switching off..." or something like that.)

Well, that's what I felt like yesterday. Dead battery. No appetite, no energy, can't breathe right, and can't sleep, and shivering like a pup. Not good.

A good person made me the best chicken-soup I ever had. I could only eat a tiny bowl, but it helped. Today, I hand-shovelled part of driveway, buried in 8-inches of heavy snow, and took one of the vehicles to the dealer to get the Navigation System PIN code. (I had installed a new battery - and this bitched the entire vehicle electronics - GPS Navigation, Bluetooth/cellular, and FM-radio. Hilarious. You need a 4 digit PIN code to restart/re-initialize the Navigation system and radio. I still felt really bad, but I hate it when sh/t that we rely on, does not work right... )

A hot-shower, and more amazing chicken-soup, and I felt better.

There was this great "New Yorker" cartoon - a sick chicken is lying in bed, with a thermometer and a hot-water bottle, and his wife (also a chicken) is bringing him a bowl of soup. The sick bird says: "Chicken Soup!?" And his wife says: "Relax, It was no one we knew..."

It's really funny how the "anti-theft" technology in modern cars is so amazingly and astonishingly stupid. As if any serious car-theif cannot get access to a computer? I had the PATS system disable the fuel-injectors on my Lincoln. I had no idea what the fuck was wrong, and drove my tractor several miles at night, to tow my dead Lincoln back to farm, where I could work on it. I replaced the fuel pump - but still no go. So I disassembled the steering wheel and under-dash electronics, and examined (mostly wrong) information on the internet. Problem turned out to be the stupid wiring harness that connects to the PATS in-steering-wheel transponder, that gets an RFID signal from the goddamn Lincoln key. Stupidest, most asinine technology, IMHO.

The only indication that the PATS (the Passive Anti-Theft System) has DISABLED YOUR CAR's FUEL INJECTORS, is a small flashing red-light on the top of the dashboard. The Lincoln is a pristine collectors item, which my father bought, several years before he died. I keep it because it is rust-free, very pretty, and only has 100k-Km on it.

But honestly, these stupid "anti-theft" features are insane and stupid. Any good car thief will have access to computer technology and code to re-flash the ROMs, or query the ECU (engine control unit - the car's on-board computer), and so all the PATS and other stupid "security" features provide, is stupid sh/t to prevent you (as the owner) from using your own damn car, when either the comm-link between key and transponder/ECU fails, or in the case of the Honda, when the battery is replaced, and onboard volitile CMOS is cleared.

This is just stupid. Cars should work. Trucks are even more important. They should just work, and it would be best if unwise dimwit "security" folks stopped trying to mess up their basic operational integrity.

Way, way too much technology is like this now. It is badly designed, and poorly implemented. Today, I saw that video of the expensive (100 million US-dollars!) F-35 fighter jet, dropping out of the sky, like a set of tossed car-keys. This was posted on "X" (nee "Twitter"), and it was an impressive video. The pilot ejected out safely, but his aircraft appeared to be fully configured, landing gear down, and without apparent damage. Was it a "computer problem"? Sure looks like it. The empty A/C hit the ground and created a huge explosion. No other aircraft appeared to be involved. Very sad, as these things are MORE THAN 100 million US dollars for each. At least the pilot was ok.

But honestly, our technology is getting really fragile and just generally unreliable.

Every added bit of hoo-haw, makes the system more complex. Increased complexity makes for increased fragility.

Like ourselves, for example! :)

[ Jan. 27, 2025 ] - DeepSh/t with DeepSeek?
DeepSeek R1 looks to be pretty good. That might be an understatement. I have not tried it yet - like a good State-baby, I say, truthfully: "I have no knowledge of this." Except really, that is not true. I have a local Chatbot running on an old box with a lot of memory. It's a HuggingFace-enabled thing from 2022, built using Llama's training maticies that Facebook/Meta released a few years back. Old stuff. I found Chatbots interesting, but not really that useful. But now, with the so-called "frontier" models, they can write full Prospectus documents, and other SEC-mandated bumpf in a fraction of the time a bunch of overpaid lawyers and investment-bankers can do the task. The guts of the IPO, maybe 5 or 10 pages of actual, useful, actionable true/useful information, can be written up quickly, and you can then maybe get your IPO/financing done without making a bunch of lawyer/banker parasites in NYC (or Toronto or London?) extra-rich. This might be disruptive.

But the data-drift and blather-talk and info-yappage suggests that DeepSeek R1, because it supposedly really actually is **Open-Source** - might actually change things. It is rumored to be cheaper/faster/better, and did not use advanced Nvidia GPU chips for training, since these are now not exportable to China, thanks to Biden-Democrat anti-trade rules.

I have found that this "Open-Source" term is now often complete BULLSH/T when it is yapped-out by a US Tech company. They "Open-Source" part of it - but if you actually try to get the code and compile/construct/build (whatever) the thing on your own platform, there are numerous "gotchya!" tricks that make this almost impossible. (Try to build Google's "open-source" "Chromium" from source. You will find it is effectively impossible.)

I have the "GPT4ALL" binary running on one of my Linux boxes, and I even made a video about playing around with it. It was a huge project to get all the pieces to work. But it was possible. But that was it. It is a Chatbot. It has some basic knowledge, but it has no memory beyond the current session, and can not search the internet, or explain it's reasoning. It is an interesting proof-of-concept, but it cannot be trained. It lives forever in 2021.

DeepSeek R1 maybe is more tractable? This is apparently the buzz, since it does not actually need a data-centre of Nvidia GPU chips to train and run. It can also go out to the internet and look for stuff. And that is big. Google Search is effectively and truly now broken - it often literally does not work now - it is so hilariously frustrating that I figured maybe the internet is over.

Well, no, it's not.

What might be ending, is maybe the ugly damned stranglehold that the Big Tech majors now have on the global internet and the global digital/technology world.

I'm sorry, but I truly hate monopolists and paywall-erecting hackmasters that seem now to completely control the whole technology world. I just don't f*cking like it, and it just pisses me off. Sorry for the unprofessional language, but that is the plain truth of things. The fatboy California folks control every damn thing now on the internet - and make it curiously impossible for any outsiders to make even $20 dollars, without signing up to their company-store monopoly things. Examples include the "PlayStore" from Google, or the nasty Apple iStore. Both exercise monopoly control. This just means that old-school developers like us, get locked out - absolutely and completely locked out - of the modern software-distribution ecosystem.

I built apps (an insane amount of work) years ago, and put them on Google's "Playstore" (a truly stupid name for a software distribution service), and Google just found an excuse to take them down, mostly because I was not charging money for the apps. I wanted them free, so folks would try them, and I would monetize by writing a book. No chance. Google wants to own and control it ALL - and Apple was even worse - those bastards said: "No programming languages or interpreters on the Apple iStore", so my business model was stop-fucked.

The California Big Tech enterprises are pure, in-your-face monopoly enterprises.

They should be broken up, like Standard Oil Trust was. Do this to save USA capitalism. But it won't happen.

And the bastards appear to be trying to do exactly the same thing now with AI.

Except maybe - maybe this time, that same playbook might not work. OpenAI is a joke. It's about as "Open" as Fort Knox. If DeepSeek R1 really is open-source, then that will disrupt the disruptors of Californistan.

And Elon Musk complains and says pretty much the same thing. How about that? Musk is the ONLY guy that has been able to stand up to the California "Your-Role-Is- To-Make-Us-Rich!" Big-Tech monopoly-folks. Good for him. I swear I will buy a Tesla, and park it in my garage, just to vent my rage. This is silly, I know. I don't need another car.

But the World needs good, open, useful AI, not some Lefty-censored shit-pile from Californistan, that is locked behind restrictive paywalls.

I intend to take a long, hard look at DeepSeek R1. It might just be the thing that I could make real, effective use of. I want to have "Daneel" (cf. Issac Asimov).

Seriously - the internet is OVER - unless the non-game-playing folks who are not running crypto-currency scams, can regain some control and influence over what is actually happening in the digital/technology world.

Everyone likes to shit on China and the Chinese these days. This is wrong and stupid. China is not a threat to USA and the so-called "Western World". This planet is a fucking tiny pinprick of wet-mud with an iron/uranium core. We are all dead-meat if we cannot craft processes to live together without trying to crash each other's civilian airliners, like the stupid motherkilling Russians are doing now. Putin is a bad man, who has done very bad things. He needs to simply be ended. And the Russians themselves need to do it. He is their problem. They need to become human, and join the World again.

But as long as China wants only commercial trade, the dimwits in Washington - whoever they are - need to stop acting like flaming idiots. China just wants to avoid having it's people starve to death, and it wants to avoid another fucking loon like Mao from starting another murder-frenzy "Cultural Revolution". Their Communist government folks are a bunch or hard-assed control-freaks, because they know the horror-show lessons of their own history. The insane, awful history of violence and mass-murder in China, is as bad as European history. It's a blood-soaked rag, and they (the Communists) are most interested in this not happening again. They seek stability - and they need to build stuff to make money and uplift their world. Good. Why stop this?

Just tell Xi that if he pulls a "Putin", and tries to take Taiwan by force, then we will have full-on, all-out war. This is a bad idea and foolish path for everyone. But don't mistake our caution for weakness. That would be even more foolish.

Much better for China to try to dominate thru honest business, as the Japanese do.

I hope "DeepSeek R1" actually really IS open-source. That would be good. And from what I know about neural-networks, it could be good. (Neural-nets really do work - they are honestly revolutionary technology, which use a completely viable method for storing and retrieving information. Their development was stopped by some skank-haters back in the early days, who attacked the approach with Covid-19-lies-style vengence. It makes crazy/sad reading. Go study the history of how "perceptrons" were destroyed by these nasty nay-saying skanks who - like most dogmatic fatboy-science-types, who have a lot to lose when their paradigm snow-crashes - did their very best to destroy and discredit neural-network researchers. Science is often really very ugly. Science can be a wild, n-person knife-fight, just like politics.)

So, I REALLY hope DeepSeek R1 is what it's press-reports claim it is.

We (the fringe world of smart folks who are NOT billionaires) really need something like this. We REALLY need some new tech to let us break the Californistan Big-Tech monopoly ecosystems. We can avoid Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta. If we cannot break'em up, then let's figure out some way we can get around their monopoly control of everything.

If I learn anything, I will post it here.

[Afternoon update Note:]
Price of our shares does the "Drop-Toad" again. This curious pattern in BNS happens almost every day. Every. Single. Day. Never have I seen such a perfectly repeatable pattern. It occurs just about every day. Price opens strong, firm, with a little bit of bid-up action. And then the "Drop-Toad" comes on, and the share prices starts to fall. And it trades slowly down. And down. It falls below the previous day's price. And often keeps falling. It's uncanny, quite bizarre. Every so often, I trade it, when I need some cash. It *always* works. But it shouldn't.

I think there is some seriously funny business going on... some kind of pump-machine looks like it is slowly, consistently, creating and selling new shares into the market.

If it comes out that the folks in question are doing this, my feeling is that they are running afoul of Canadian Securities law. But what can I do? It looks like some trick a sharp, dishonest market-operator would try, something one might have seen on the Vancouver Stock Exchange in the 1970's, or in New York, in the 1870's. It's independent of other market action. It just looks like someone is gaming the market process, and taking consistent action to dilute the shareholder base - selling new stock into any hint of strength, and pushing down the share price. This makes us (who remain long) quite foolish "suckers", doesn't it? Dividends don't mean anything, if they are being paid by making your capital shrink. "Something is rotten in Denmark" (quote from Shakespeare's "Hamlet", not a comment about the "Greenland Purchase" negotiations with the Bogens.)

What is so serious, is that the shares-outstanding count is launching upwards by millions of shares, every few months. This looks quite bad, and seems to be a legally questionable action. When I took the Canadian Securities Course, and the Conduct and Practices Handbook exams, I was under the impression that significant new share sales had to be done via a Secondary Offering, and supported by a Prospectus, explaining what the funds raised by the new equity sales were going to be used for.

So, I am concerned. I fear we need to fix Canada, as much appears to be running wrong.

[ Jan. 26, 2025 ] - The Lure of The Unreal
I don't like fiction writing in principle, yet really, because it can be so good. A good play, or film, or novel, can be completely seductive and can pull the viewer/reader into an alternate reality that is all enveloping.

Like many things, this is both good and bad. It feels a bit dangerous. You can become addicted to the process, and miss the benefits of real experience.

It's rather like the market process. It can fully suck you into it, and you can lose your objectivity. And then you can really fuck up - really badly, if not careful.

We are beset by human weakness. In my own personal case, it is very hard to escape. I find I get *angry* at the market, even though I know - completely know - that this is completely stupid, and not the correct way to approach the investment process.

The thing that lets one be good at making market-bets, is some kind of curious and extreme sensitivity to quite small things. This is either a honed skill, or maybe a weird and awful curse, depending on how one makes use of this human feature. I find it useful to step outside of my own self-thinking, and imagine constructs - like my fictional "Inner Trader" who is an amalgam of every complete a$$hole I ever met, it seems. Yet his diagnosis of events - when I run with this curious internal psycho-drama - seems to be remarkably effective at predicting how events will play out. Humans are really very bad at dealing effectively with reality. We paint it an sense it how we want it to be, not so much how it actually is. We now have Behavioural Economics to explain what happens.

What is fascinating, is that even if we **know**, we can still be pulled into error and bad decisions - even if we actually **know** it is a wrong path, we can be sucked along it, if we are not careful.

Great scenes in "Throne of Blood". The protagonist, the Mifune character, wants to remain loyal to his Lord (his Daimyo, or his King), yet he betrays and murders him in a most brutal manner. Mifune exagerates the sense of internal conflict his character is obviously meant to feel - but this is the essence of a theatrical production. Theatre is a mirror of our hopes, failures and weakness. It entertains because it triggers an emotional response, if it is done right. People pay money for this. Is that not curious?

What nags at me now, about AI and the modern Internet, is how truly, remarkably awful and effective it can be at making use of all human weakness and the capacity for human bad-and-unwise behaviour.

Like Television - it started good, and then just got worse and worse, slowly, over the years. I absolutely do not watch *ANY* television any more. I have these big screen TV's, and I watch only old movies and stuff on DVD's libraries. Modern TV feels like that stuff in Ray Bradbury's "Farhenheit 451", that terrible sh/t that Montag's wife watched everyday, which was designed to keep her stupid and numb and easy to control. I flip on broadcast TV, and after about 2 minutes, I get the weird feeling that I recognize that says: "This is bad. Avoid."

And what is curious, is that I get the same feeling from most stuff on the internet, and also (especially) from AI interaction.

And today I ran into Elon Musk's quote - his Faust reference - where he suggests that modern AI is maybe the "Demon", and that in those stories where the Seeker of Knowledge gets his pentagrams and holy-water, and calls up the Demon, and he thinks he can control it - it turns out that he can't control it at all.

That is Goethe's "Faust" story - but it is also the story of the Golom, and the Frankenstein story. We create the monster that will destroy us.

What will happen? We need often only look at what *has* happened.

Humans are weak, stupid and lazy. They are also greedy and cruel. They can be *really* evil, and don't need MacBeth's "Witch Forecast" to be goaded into very bad behaviour.

And what disturbs me greatly, about the modern internet, is that it is morphing into a series of devices to explicitly and effectively exploit every human weakness, in the most extreme and efficient manner.

Crypto-currency is a beautiful example of this. Create your own money. It's in a fiction book, called "The Man from Lisbon", about a fellow who figures out how to get a British firm that prints bank-notes, to create bank-notes in the currency of his country (Portugal), by creating a brilliant scam where the protagonist impersonates a representative from the Central Bank, and indicates to the printing firm that a secret run of new, high-denomination bank-notes is needed. The book is brilliantly written, and in the flyleaf, is a line of text that says: "It really happened." This was private "QE". And it actually **helped** the Portugese economy, in the towns where the notes where inserted into circulation.

Just create your own money. If you can convince people to accept it as money, then you can become very wealthy.

There are several problems with this algorithm. But let's be clear. It works. "QE" - Quantitative Easing - actually works. If liquidity has been removed from an economy, just putting it back, can get things up and running quite nicely.

It's all about human weakness, and human desire. The entire money-economy is driven by a curious fiction - the fiction that money is wealth. It is really only wealth if your counter-party believes it is wealth. The entire system - the entire economic process - rests on this mental-construct inside the human mind, that conflates money with wealth.

Yet, the history of money, is a history of failure-of-money. It just is. Go look. Every bank-note from almost every country (except a very few), has eventually gone to something worthless.

Crypto-currency is just one example. The porn industry is probably another. Every human weakness, and human emotional response, can be exploited, and is being exploited effectively and efficiently, using the internet.

And the frontier-level, high-end Artificial Intelligence technology will absolutely amplify this ability.

We might be reaching "peak digital". The use of digital technology is maybe about to become really toxic - dangerous and nasty and maybe even lethal to our wealth and security - quite quickly. At least that is what my gut-feel says, and it seems to agree with the objective analysis as well. It will be impossible to ensure any real security, because there will be an entire industry of state-level actors trying to hack your world.

It will be impossible to obtain anything of value, because value-extraction will be successfully implemented by the major technology and government entities. You will be tricked and taxed and your actions channeled such that all value will be extracted and vectored to the major technology-provider players - the Googleplex if you will. It is a pure winner-take-all game.

All internet content is now either advertisement, promotion, or mandated action (such as using your internet facilities to provide government agency controllers, with the digital data - and money - they demand.)

You will be offered mindless "entertainment" in return. You can pay for "Netflix" and watch garbage-theatre with all the required emotional triggering tricks.

The entire internet becomes a State-tool for control and social manipulation, and the AI technology will be used to ensure that human weakness can be exploited effectively to make sure that this can happen easily and with apparent consent. The mass of folks will accept the "entertainment" as the trade.

The entire internet model - which was supposed to provide humanity with access to all the great knowledge of human research - will be (and already has been) morphed into a social-control tool, which will make (and keep) people numb, stupid and poor.

We are already seeing this. It's happened in the last 20 years. Everything I see everywhere online, seems to be a fraud, or a trick, or a device to extract cash or serve up awful adverts, or mislead or promote bad ideas, bad investments, and/or unwise rabbit-hole time-waste activity.

Even the markets are corrupted. (Hell's bloody bells - **especially** the markets!) The price-action is algorithmically generated to hammer you hard, and as most efficiently as it possibly can. It's brilliant and almost perfect. Your only defense is index-investing, or keeping the hell away from the daily quotes, unless you are tick-by-tick trading, and then you will find that your attempts to do this profitably, will be efficiently prevented, by the sorry-software you will have to use, and the tricky order-routing that will vector your trades to "upstairs" players at your trading platform. No getting around this. You *will* be vectored.

So, I think it's over.

I think the process is nearing a "completion" event. Nothing works well, little or nothing is available for the small, private operation or "family office", (unless you are very wealthy), and the increasing level of social scams and clever human-weakness effective exploitation, means that any extractable value is leaking out of the entire "digital" process. The 'net sucks.

You have no alternative except to switch-off, walk-away, and study things which are action-oriented and direct, such as the use-of-weapons, hard-science, mathematics, and military-history. I sense a curious impending collapse in the entire digitally enabled world. It is becoming unhealthy - really quite toxic.

We will likely move into a time of seriously increasing violence, bad-behaviour, and social decay. The markets and crypto will ensure that significant events will be triggered which impoverish large groups of people. These digitally-degraded people are already really unhappy, and they are also being made poor, and dependent. This is a bad path, which likely ends in bad outcomes. War will happen.

It's all quite the opposite of what we expected, many years ago.

Have a plan that allows your life to operate effectively without any internet access or digital communication technology. This strategy will offer real security and a good chance of survival. Learn how radios and revolvers work, have generators, fuel, wood-stoves, and water-pumps. Make sure than any technology you rely on, you can fix if it fails. Split wood AND atoms, if you can. It's gonna get weird. ;)

[ Jan. 24, 2025 ] - Astronomy (as per Blue Oyster Cult)
It's the nexus of the crisis, yes? Here we are at the "Four Winds Bar", and there is little more to be done.

We loved President Trump's speech to Davos WEFers. He said everything except: "Fuck you, you stupid Europe-Lefties." We think he showed great restraint. I would have spoken about the truly fucked history of Europe, and why it should try to get it's fucking horrible house in order. And start funding their own goddamn defense, or be prepared to have Russia as their Overlord.

Let me add - if USA had not been around, and able to run some *very big deficits*, back in 1941, then all those Euro-folk would be saluting the swastika, and speaking Happy-Talk German. But history has so bent the minds of Europeans, that now the viciously stupid Leftist German Government would rather attack the AfD, create insane abusive "Hate Speech" laws that stifle and stop honest public debate, and then tolerate little 2-year-old children being stabbed by truly evil foreign brownheads, rather than act rationally. The German Government is run by strangely insane people, it appears. It's just awful. Germany needs to be repaired. The German State is broken. This is a sad and bad thing, and it must be corrected. Rounding up criminal "migrants" and either serving them some hard justice, (execution) or just deporting them to their little raglands where they can wear their little rags on their litte heads, and do whatever they wish to each other, should not be a big stretch of the imagination. Just do it.

People have such little understanding of how history really plays out. It is a random-dice roll, driven by a few key personalities that make all the difference. Karl Marx was a lying fraudster. A friend said, when we were studying: ("Hell, Marx had hemmoroids! He sat in pain in the British Libraries and since he could not shit thru his asshole, he shit thru his little pen!").

Fuck decorum. Embrace risk. You have really no choice - well, it's a "Hobbson's Choice" - take this horse, or nothing. We are all very soon to be dead. One's life energy needs to be directed at repairing what is broken, and building what needs to be built. The morons, and the fools and the cruel, stupid insane people need to be brushed aside or removed from the decision-making process. Is this revolutionary thinking? Maybe. But it is also being demanded by the People. This is democracy in action. Grasp this concept, you fucking Lefty fools. Think for yourselves.

Fortuna's Great Wheel is about to start revolving again. Especially in Europe. One way or the other. The World needs a strong and effective Europe. And that means the cruel-stupid Leftists have to be removed, and replaced by rational, effective action-oriented executive types who can fix things. For the Germans to shut down their nuclear-power electricity generating reactors, just when Russian oil and gas is being shut down, is just plain madness. The Green zealots and the other brain-dead moron-idiot anti-prosperity people have to be removed from politics - not the AfD.

It is absolutely fascinating just how stupid and wrong these European governments are being. The "Green" bullshit in Europe looks like some kind of truly clever long-range plan to weaken and damage the European economies, so their economic options are degraded, reduced, and limited. There really appears to be an active and ongoing assault on European culture - the culture of the Western World. Could it be by design?

And like any researcher - one can simply ask: "Who benefits, if Europe is degraded, damaged and made poorer?" Is the answer to that question not rather obvious?

[ Later in the Day ]
Damnation, but things are getting silly. I read something on a site called "RealInvestmentAdvice" or something like that, by some guy name "Lance" with lots of graphics and well written, and it was comically, wildly wrong. This guy was asserting that QE was not "money printing", and that the thing to fear in the future is dis-inflation.

The curious fellow seemed to think that primary dealers bought all those T-bonds and T-bills and other bonds and such sold by government agencies. Even cursory analysis and queries will show that since 2008 to 2020, the Federal Reserve increased it's "balance sheet" from roughly 1 trillion US dollars in "assets", to over 8 trillion US dollars, by purchasing USA Government bonds. That is "QE" - Quantitative Easing, or basically money creation.

It is "money instantiation" - or "money printing". The central bank creates the cash as a book-entry on it's balance sheet, and uses that created cash to purchase the government bond or bill or mortgage-backed-security (MBS) bonds that have government backing.

We can call it "money printing" but there is no printing required. It's all book-entries in computer systems, just like your own bank account is, mostly, unless you withdraw cash and put it somewhere.

The guy shows a chart which shows CPI annual change moving from 0% (around 2019 to 2020), up to 9%), and the M2 money supply moving up by 25% in 2020, and then suggests that this massive increase in money supply did not cause the inflation rate to shift up from 0% to 9% from 2020 to 2021, as it did.

I'll put a link to the site below. It's fascinating just how wildly wrong the analysis actually is.

Seriously, the future will be one of *** INFLATION ***, not of deflation. The deflationary economy is dead. Once the politco's and the Central Banker folks get a taste of what can be accomplished with liquidity injections and money instantiation, they will never let go of this wonderful game, until an event occurs that implodes the process. The whole process actually works quite well, and the inflation is seen as the cost of keeping employment levels high, and economic activity humming along.

But the process is not sustainable.

I have been looking (again) at the 1930's, and I've discovered something. It might be that the hard-assed neo-classical economists might have been right after all. Letting the 1929 bubble burst, and the price level then crash, and the economy to endure a really brutal Depression - this might not have been the huge and horrific policy error that it is generally assumed (and taught in schools) to have been. It actually might have been the right thing to do... (!)

Consider the counter-policy, with a massive QE-program in 1930, which could have re-flated the US economy, and prevented the Great Depression. Fine. Might have worked. But what would USA have looked like, in 1941, if it had re-inflated it's economy in 1930 and 1931? It's weirdly like that "Star Trek" episode, that Harlan Elison wrote. If USA was all QE'd up, with high government debt levels, and a declining US-dollar currency by the early 1940's, how would it have effectively financed the production ramp-up for World War Two? Would there have been a "Lend-Lease" if USA was effectively bankrupt (like it might be in two to three to five years from now, if present trends continue?)

If USA was financially stretched, and facing economic problems in 1940 and 1941, would it have become the "Arsenal of Democracy"? Or would the Isolationists - who wanted to keep USA out of World War Two - have prevailed? If Isolationism had been rising, driven by economic enervation, the USA Government might simply have detected and shot-down the attacking Japanese force at Peril Harbour. I believe there was full knowledge of the attack - which was actually publically-expected knowledge in Hawaii at the time (confirmed by historical newspaper headlines), but the USA President wanted to provoke US entry into the war to help the UK and Europe.

But if USA had been financially stretched, with hundreds of billions of debt, a falling dollar, and serious economic problems, the Isolationist viewpoint might have kept the USA out of war. Roosevelt would not have felt it wise or necessary to blockade Japan and then pretend that USA had no knowledge of Yamamoto's expeditionary force, which most knew was sailing across the Pacific to respond to the American naval blockade of the Japan home islands.

The USA by 1941 had an almost debt-free national balance sheet. The nation was strong, the books were balanced, the US dollar was accepted world-wide, and the Depression of the 1930's had given way to a conservative, prosperous, stable and well-prepared national economy. The USA could afford a big war, and it had the modern aviation technology to respond effectively, to Hilter's terrible aggressions in Europe.

For Canada, the War began in 1939. The USA was a seriously Neutral nation, until the 1941 Peril Harbour attack. But if USA had NOT been in good, solid economic shape, ready and able to fight, the entire scenario would almost certainly have played out very differently.

Maybe the Depression of the 1930's was needed. Maybe it saved the world?

This is not what I used to believe, when I first studied this. Even Bob Bernenke (fix spelling), said sort of the same thing: "Yes, we (the Federal Reserve), probably caused the Great Depression (by raising interest rates from 4% to 6% in 1929). We're sorry, and we won't do it again..."

And given the interesting economic-lab-experiment now taking place in Argentina, I think maybe this view is worth considering. Germany went thru the same reset/repair to it's crazy debt/inflation-driven economy, in 1923-24, long before Hitler took power. The genius was Hjalmar Schacht, who repaired the madness of the Weimar Republic hyperinflation. I've studied this fellow, and he was a fine and honorable man, despite later working for Hitler as a Reich Minister. Both Schacht and John Maynard Keynes (the famous British Economist), knew that the World War One "reparations" Germany was forced to pay (in *gold*, let's be clear), were insanely stupid and wrong. Germany did not inflate to avoid paying their impossible "reparations", as some fools believe. They inflated their economy, because for a while, it worked, and ensured full-employment. This is the seductive evil of money-creation driven inflation. At first, it works really very, very well. Wealth seems to get *created* out of thin air (as in QE), or by just printing currency (or minting cheap copper coins, and washing them over with liquid brass, so they look like gold coins, as was done by English King Henry the Eighth, to finance his wars.)

But the inflation gets built into the economic system. P = MV, in the simpilest terms. The price level (expressed as a vector), is set by the Money-supply, times the rate of turn-over (expressed as a vector of final demand in a Leontief matrix). And there is a lag, which is now understood to be 6 to 12 to 18 months. At first, turnover does not change much. But as inflation takes hold, wise folks seek to spend their cash, before it falls in value. "Buy Now! Beat the Coming Price Increase!" say the adverts. And folks do. So the inflation get hard-wired into the economic system.

I purchased my farm, over 20 years ago, because I absolutely knew for *certain* that there would be runaway inflation in the Western World economies, based on my studies of economics in the 1970's and my work experience in various Government Treasury and "Anti-Inflation" agencies. Inflation-economics seems to be the economic equivalent of crack-cocaine or heroin (two things I have no knowledge of, thankfully)...

Getting into inflation economics is easy for Governments. But getting out from the mess is difficult and painful - just like those 20% interest rates in 1980 were, for anyone who had any debt obligations.

Maybe we need brutal "reset-events", to get rid of absurd excess, and crazy, debt-fueled unsustainable economic action. This is kind of a heresy for me and others - but what if this is really the case?

What if we actually ***NEED*** to have these economic "reset" events take place, in order to maintain viable, sustainable economic life?

Is "economic stabilization" even possible, if one wants to have an "innovation economy?"

What if we are "innovating" ourselves into a series of preventable economic catastrophes?

This is also one of my worst-case/nightmare scenarios for AI action. We may get some very bad advice from our AI machines, if we let them plot our economic courses. The longer and further we track into an inflationary, debt-fueled "free-money-for-nothing" kind of world, the harder and more brutal will be the necessary, eventual "reset". And this is not "economic science-fiction". Japan, in it's post-1945, post-nuclear-bombed-cities life, faced exactly this kind of "starting-over-from-nothing" type of reset-event. They arbitrarily set their "new" currency to 360-Yen to the US dollar. In the early part of the 20th century, the Japan "Trade Yen" was at ***parity*** with the US dollar. They even created 1-oz of silver, 1-Yen coins, which traded on par with Hong Kong Dollar silver coins, and USA and Canadian 1-Dollar coins (also 1-oz of silver). The pre-World-War-One world was delightfully, wonderfully stable. And trade grew, and people got richer, right up until it all blew up with World War One.

It's just basic "Astronomy". You can look into economic history, like looking at the unreachable stars, and you can see the past, the present and the future are basically all the same thing. Nothing really changes, except ourselves, as we age. We are captive to Fortuna's Great Wheel, and every generation needs to re-learn the same lessons.

[ Jan. 23, 2025 ] - Ta Ra Ra BOOM Dee, Eh?
I simply cannot shake the feeling we are dancing on the edge of the volcano. The risk is not so much we all fall into the lava, as it is the thing goes up like Mt. Vesuvius did in 79 AD.

Mr. Trump being President again in USA is a good thing, and may serve to disrupt the trend toward mass madness, which seemed to be taking place. We can only hope.

But perhaps he may really be an accelerationist? That would be interesting.

I found a copy of Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood", and I am watching it slowly, over the course of several evenings. I think it is very good. It was made in 1957, long before Kurosawa became seriously internatonally famous. It's essentially a Japanese version of the Shakespeare play "MacBeth".

I have a Japanese associate who is critical of Kurosawa because he made films which became popular with Western audiences. "He makes films for export, not so much for Japan" was the essence of the critical assertion. But this cannot really be true, since "Throne of Blood" is seriously Japanese. Toshiro Mifune was brilliant - some Japan folks I know say he was a "Dicon Yakusha" - a "ham" actor who over-exagerates - yet for him, it seems to work. The movie feels like a Kabuki or Noh-theatre production, with facial expressions and gestures that seem over-the-top, yet this is what theatrical presentations have always had to do. But what makes the film so interesting, is this austere, Japanese treatment of the interior shots, yet also mixed with wild, American-style cowboy-movie horse chases and other action scenes.

I'm only half-way thru it - running 15 or 20 minutes, and then stopping until next evening. A bit of a silly way to watch a film - but I was a film-student early on. Each scene is staged and executed with a precision that demands attention. And the markets are making me more than just a little stressed. Careful, attentive film-watching can be an effective de-stress exercise.

There is such a curious and extreme lack-of-wisdom evident in the world now. And I am certain that AI technology will cause this trend to become worse. Nothing can stop it.

The markets look to be in a final, euphoria-fueled vertical "lift-off" phase now. Some suggest a "new golden age" is upon us. My "Inner-Trader" says: "Oh for fuck sakes, this is even worse than the 'this time it's different' and 'greed is good' meme..." My AI is pointing negative, and I busy myself with simple engineering projects, like repairing and replacing the brake calipers on one of my all-wheel-drive vehicles. We remain long financials and telecoms, and of course, this has been sub-optimal.

I just know too much about the damn technology, to believe that it will make any sort of significant, positive difference. The stuff Altman of OpenAI is saying seems quite absurd to me - like the usual marketing hype. And why would it not? The "Stargate" project will confer even greater-scale benefits to the tech-majors, at the expense of virtually everyone else. How can this be any good for anyone, other than company insiders and a few of the equity-elite?

It's starting to play like a William Gibson novel, except one written by Dante Alighieri. (Fortuna and her big Wheel are in Canto 7, but the Soothsayers are in Canto 20). Or maybe Stephen King? Moscow as "Pet Semitary?" I am just not a huge fiction fan.

Trump is being a little comical. He does not need to "demand" lower interest rates. There is no way that funding can be continued in a sustainable manner, unless interest rates are dialed-down. It will happen.

Does the future cause echo's into the past? Can significant events create temporal backward-reflecting echo action, which can be detected? I don't think so, and the few examples in high-energy particle-physics where this seems to be observed, are probably not really backward echos in time.

I think what really happens is that there is really low-level neural-output that comes from having seen/experienced events, and that when a "similar" event is detected and processed, a neural-trigger is tripped, to create a perception that reaches concious level. These "deja-vu" feelings are common, and feelings of dread and discomfort are probably just memory-events being dialed into very low intensity neural sensations, that extremely sensitive people pick up on. It's a survival mechanism, that creates a sense of forboding, when similar circumstances are present which were observed in the past to have had negative consequences.

Maybe we are entering a "new golden age", now that the crazy DEI-Woke-Genderbender Democrats have been removed from the Maison Blanche.

Or maybe the "Great Unwinding" is about to begin?

[ Jan. 22, 2025 ] - A Ranting Full-Stop...
"*%*#$* Canadian stocks...." --- (this is the silent refrain that goes thru my head, each day as I monitor the markets.) A run of bad luck and such one can expect, and even hard draw-downs are expected, in the course of a life.

But the awful trading action in our main bank-stock holding, seems just beyond the pale.

It's comically awful. My long-term (or "long-pull", as Mr. Loeb calls it), picture-of-the-world, suggests these particular bank folks will be ok, and should (someday) actually prosper - but for now, the share price trades like in a curious manner. Seriously - it trades like some ugly thing is just plain deep-wrong with the thing, and there is just no getting around the market-evident fact.

We have thousands of shares of this, and remain long. I just cannot understand why Canada has such curious sad business characteristics.

This land is a grim place to try to make any money. Every single person I know in my demographic cohort has done **MASSIVELY BETTER** by getting out of here, and going to somewhere else - USA, UK, Saudi Arabia, and so on. This is just hilarious, because it means that if you stay here, you are probably stupid, and unless you get a big fat-arsed government job, which throws massive pension payouts at you once you bugger off and "retire", then you are gonna be bloody well slaughtered and fed to the tax-monkeys in your "declining years." (F this S, as the folks on the floor are wont to say...)

I don't like to complain --- but sometimes I still do, eh? :D <-- (laughing face glyph)

I am guessing it is the bone-stupid interest-rate action forecast that is driving this price-down-fail trading pattern (which I have named the "Drop-Toad") which I see every day, since Canada bank stocks tend to emulate a long-duration fixed-income security - kinda like those 100-year Railroad bonds back in the 1920's. They were supposed to be really safe, high-quality low-risk investments that paid a reasonable yield - like 5% to 6% and so on. Of course, almost all those sad railroad bonds fell in half (or worse), by the mid-1930's. And the equity - if it even survived without bankruptcy - in many cases went from hundreds of dollars per share, to single-digit quotes. (See Jessie Livermore's trade-data, or the original Graham and Dodds 1934 Edition of "Security Analysis").

The 1927 to 1934 time-frame is a great laboratory test. And I am certain we are teeing up a similar kind of madness. It's just a question of when and what catalyst will drive the unwinding process. Maybe tariffs? (Probably not.)

Tariffs have never gone away. They have always been in effect, and always will. Canada has effectively a 13% tariff on every single thing you want to buy in this country - and business still goes on. Buy a truck for your farm, and then try to claim the HST input tax credit to recover the 13% HST you have to pay on the thing, and watch the nonsense that will flow down on you from Canadian Revenue Agency (the CRA)). Buy something from USA, and you have to cough up the 13% HST tax. Trump can put 13% tariff on Canada products, and it will just make some raw-material stuff more expensive in USA. No big deal, and not much of a revenue-generator. Tariffs are stupid and annoying - but not near as stupid and near as annoying as the foul, filthy Income Tax, which is the most foolish and stupid thing ever invented by man.

But, as Kurt Vonnegut said: "So it goes..."

What makes me want to ralf, is the silly-stupid tricky-trading of our partifular bank-stock shares. Our AI nails the weakness, says we should dump this stock, yet inertia and a (wrong so far) belief that the new management might fix the curious problems at Bank, has kept us holding our non-trivial position. It pays a fat dividend, but that dividend seems to be coming from the decay-delta of the share-price, at times. The thing trades like a 100-year bond in a rising interest rate scenario. I don't see how the USA Feds or any other Western nation can jack up rates (short-term bank rates), without they bankrupt their own government Agencies, which are up to their eyebrows in debt.

Every Western nation is deep, - crazy deep - in the hole, such that interst-payments on the debt are close to being the largest single government expense item. This means heroic measures will be used to keep rates low.

But our bank-stock shares trade like crap - like rates are going to 10%, so the "Drop-Toad" pattern is just plain evident every single day. It's hilarious. They seem to be the "Bank That Gain Forgot" or something weird that manifests itself in a dump, dump, dump-it-now-kind of constant selling pressure. Other major banks will trade up, and US banks will look strong, and our share holdings for our bank-stock will trade down 40 or 50 cents. Perhaps it is the constant increase in the shares-outstanding number, or something like that? I truly don't know. Something seems to be just wrong with the action.

Maybe there is some clever algorithm that is offsetting positions against some options, which have been written against this stuff. I am always suspcious of this kind of reasoning, since that "too clever by half" trickery can often explode dramatically.

Maybe it's just a poorly performing, badly run company? I don't believe this, obviously, or we would not be holding the stock.

And maybe some big institutional holders are just trying to get the hell out in dribs and drabs, as best they can, without getting hurt too badly?

I honestly do not know.

My efforts at grinding thru the financial and risk-structure suggests they should trade at a higher per share price. They seem to have risk under control well, and they seem to be quite healthly profitable across their product lines. When you try to do things at retail-banking levels, they seem to be one of the few banks here that can get stuff done. They can process EMT payments, and execute on business loans and set up revolving lines of credit in sane and business-rational manners. At the pointy end of providing banking service, they actually do a pretty damn good job.

And at the international end of things, and in terms of local mortgage origination and so on, they seem to being doing all this right.

But it mystifies me why they trade as they do. My AI is pointing straight down, and says price is expected to fall.

I am a stubborn, and I just don't believe it is right. But what annoys me to bits, is that the AI usually is right, and my economic and fundamental analysis seems to count for little. This annoys me.

But maybe I have to toss all this, and just migrate to USA, and start to make some actual money, instead of watching it slowly evaporate away, holding these curious Canadian bank stocks. (Note: We have done ok, with some other bank investments in Canada.)

[ Jan. 21, 2025 ] - Rain on the Windshield Heading South
If only.

Canada is cold - in so many ways. Like a cold hand in poker, like a cold corpse in the morgue, like a cold-case, like a love affair gone cold. Cold.

This AM, it was minus 21 celsius. Cold. But sunshine was evident, and that made it all fine.

Fun watching Trump try to grab the reins. Damned difficult, as the Bidenistas and the the "Deep State" (Blob-folk), have tried to rig the system against him, and by definition, the American people. Interesting problem. Curious how truly impossible it is to find any sort of transitional, revolutionary advice or discussion about this problem, via Google-searches. Google search has become truly worthless - designed to enfore "engagement" with their toxic advertizing machine, and not actually deliver what is used to provide - actionable, accurate search results. This is really interesting, since we have a textbook case, of a major, wildly successful business entity, actively damaging and/or degrading it's product to make it more cash-generatingly effective.

This is actually what a pure monopolist would do - and there are lots of explicit examples of this sort of curious economic behaviour, which of course only works if you effectively have monopoly control over the supply. If there were effective competition, then you would lose most of your "customers", if you deliberately degrade your product's functionality.

But if your "customers" are captive folks on your big "plantation", then you can degrade the service offerings you provide, charge more at your "company-store", and reduce your wages even, for those who are trapped on your economic "island". The famous and award-winning economist, A. K. Sen, actually wrote some interesting papers on this topic. Monopoly situations create all sorts of interesting and non-intuitive economic results - such as *lowering* wages for workers in Third-World economies at the big plantations, would result in employee's staying working for the plantation. This is because the work was miserable and difficult, and the folks from the "jungle", would come and work for you, only long enough to get enough cash-money to achieve some needed economic objective. Once they had enough cash, they would quit, and return to their village, and continue to live a subsistance lifestyle, which allowed living at home, in a safe and comfortable environment.

Lowering wages, meant that you could hold the workers longer at the miserable, high-effort plantation work. And this is of course, exactly the opposite of what conventional economic theory would predict. In a pure-cash economy, paying **higher** wages is how one holds workers to jobs that they dislike and endure for economic reasons.

The key, of course, is monopoly control. If you are the only cash-providing game in town, you can control the economic variables. With Google, by making their search engine tool work badly and deliver a high-percentage of useless results, the Google user is required to examine more pages, and stays tied to the badly-working web site and poorer-grade service offering, longer, and does more clicky/clicky/clicky. This means more adverts served, and more revenue to Google. Same kind of counter intuitive result due to monopoly power - a poorer, less-well-working product, holds users longer, IFF (If and Only If), the provider has sufficient monopoly power, and need not worry about competition from other providers. (The key - further - is that the other providers degrade their offerings in a similar fashion... this is the oft-discussed "race to the bottom", which we see everywhere now.

So, basically, we are screwed, if we need to use the modern internet to find anything now. It's either behind a high-paywall, or we get served up garbage. Pretty hilarious, really. We are back to a world where value is become ever more scarce.

It's kind of all over now, but not many folks realize it. Also a curious phenomenon.

[ Jan. 19, 2025 ] - Senses Working Overtime?
Or is it "Your mind is on vacation, and your mouth is working overtime..."? Hard to tell, these days. I found a chart showing the S&P500 Earnings Yield back to 1880, or something like that. It's now down to around 3 percent which implies a Price/Earnings ratio (the inverse of Earnings Yield) of over 33 times.

From a historical perspective, this is stretched. But technical transformation is always kind of like this, until traction is obtained. What does that really mean? I assume it means until the company that is driving the transformation, starts to make solid money, based on the disruption (and the demand-shifting) that the transformation implies. Telegrams to telephone to internet/smartphones, and so on. Apple is doing well, and Nvidia and AI is now the rising star.

Found some information on what is required to train a full-scale, frontier-level Large Language AI model. It's a lot. Just the power consumption alone is significant. But if the model can find new protein configurations, and such like, then there really is a hard-core *there* actually there. It's not smoke-and-mirrors, like the garbage that spews from Governments. And it's interesting that the Leftists in government agencies and other SWAMP-creatures, seek to limit and restrict this power.

I worry about the rapid weaponization of AI.

If an AI trained on bio-chemistry, can find new (and actionably useful) protein configurations, then it can find new versions of ACE-receptor-tricking Corona-virus spike-proteins which can hinge, even more effectively. And this can create a more lethal version of Covid-19. Call it Covid-25. It will be interesting.... as in "interesting times we live in."

Given the curious (and awful) nature of warfare that is evolving, we are certain to see the fruits of AI showing up in Gaza and Israeli wars. Netanyahu will not stop until he has achieved his genocide objectives, and Israel has demonstrated both the technology, and the political will to carry out mass-murder at scale. Regardless of your moral anger at this revolting situation, it is certain to drive the political action in the Middle East for at least another generation now. If your mother/father/sister/brother/cousin/aunt/uncle or whatever, were murdered by your enemy, your family will live to seek vengence. This is the human condition - and it seems to be hard-wired into both Muslim and Jewish religious doctrine. "Forgiveness" is an unusual Christian thing, that seems to be on the way out.

And never mind the horror-show in Ukraine. Russia has always chosen the path of violence. Their approach to warfare is also trans-generational, and they seek violence with a curious delight. Such is the nature of life in a cold country, perhaps. Reminds me of Quebec, truth be told. These cold lands seem to breed people that are hot, cruel and stupid. Not all of them - some are brilliant artists and scientists - but enough that warfare is seen as acceptable and recruitment is easy. This is evolution running a self-correction algorithm.

We have stretched market valuations, corrupt Leftists who remain in power and control of most Government Agencies, and an ugly drift to censorship and free-speech prevention by the various organs of Government, all across the Western World. USA appears to be an exception, but when the markets collapse/crash/re-trace (whatever), and real war begins, military requirements will cause censorship to return with a vengence. This is certain to happen.

When will the crash/re-trace occur? Difficult to tell. Might be 4 years from now - might be 4 weeks from now. Let's average this, and say maybe around two years into Mr. Trump's rule. Trump is a vastly better choice than Biden, but he is prone to "shooting from the hip", and this might prove to be his fatal flaw, and his undoing.

USA will survive. And so probably will Canada. Even Russia will do well, once they can get rid of "Putler". Either World War Three, or maybe Mother Nature will provide this needed result.

But it is obvious that some sort of reversion to more sane/traditional valuations will prevail eventually in the USA markets. And Canada, also, of course. Europe seems to be on a path to self-destruction. We expect the European Union to dissolve within 10 years. It was a great idea, but it is now a force for social abuse and recklessly stupid Government actions on the part of the deeply corrupt Leftist Governments that currently dominate Europe. If I were European, I would be marching in the streets to fight the EU/Leftist political model. It's a complete failure, on so many levels. Rather like NATO has proved to be. High talk, high taxes, very little action to address or solve increasing problems. These big Government experiments prove to be unsustainable welfare-schemes for elite scammers - the German Green-Nazi movements, the French Marxists, and so on. It's really sad. Germany has it nuclear power reactors shutdown by Green-Nazi idiots, and French Marxists and other corrupt Leftists, succeed in preventing any sort of effective or honest government from being formed in France.

We really think the European Union has been a tragic failure, and the valuation of the Euro currency supports this thesis. The Euro was supposed to be a European Deutsche Mark, and instead, it has becoming just another Falling-Franc.

Crazy times lie ahead. Even crazier than what we have all been thru. It will be a mixture, both feast and famine... served up with gusto. And you will have to eat it, or die.

Enjoy the Meatloaf!

[ Jan. 17, 2025 ] - The Hard-Wired Drop-Toad
Ok, time for some research results: We are seeing something curious, and it is truly fascinating. Our AI thing is telling us something hard to accept - and almost every day, the predicted pattern plays out. Our main holding (a big ugly Cdn bank with curious, and seemingly not-really-fixable problems - but it pays a fat dividend) exhibits the most curious and repeatable pattern I have ever encountered.

The AI says real clearly what is going to happen, and I just have trouble following it's prescriptive advice (based on it's forecast). There is obviously (maybe?) some very clever behavioural finance technology at work behind this idiotic patterm. OR maybe not. Maybe it is just a shitty company, run by not-very-wise folks? I have trouble believing this, but one must always consider the counter-possibility, and assess that likelyhood that that might be the true case.

We try to look forward, since the past is usually a bucket of crap that did not really work too well, and is not really very helpful. Except when that is not true, and the past is actually shining a bright light on just what the heck is likely to happen.

But our bank holding trades like shit. It trades like a large group of external, off-shore shareholders are trying to get the hell out of their positions, such that any sort of positive action immediately generates this ugly wave to hammer-whack selling - and they have a lot of shit-shares to get the heck rid of?

It's like there is no market Specialist even working this piece of scut. There is little or no active actionable price support. Or if there is, it is executed in a stupid manner, which caused the stock to execute what we call the "Drop-Toad" just about every fucking day. And the AI picks up on this, and gives us a forecast that is ugly. I have trouble acting on this, because all the fundamentals look OK, the dividend is a vomit-stream of money, and if they guys just had a little bit of active Specialist support, the "Drop-Toad" pattern could be traded against at scale, and the Specialist could pocket some serious coin.

I am just a trivial, tiny, wee bug on the back of the elephant, and we have insufficient capital to execute at the scale needed to stand in front of the constant, repeatable foolishness, but for f**k sakes - someone sure as hell could. It just seems there is either a long-term effort to unload this shit-trading stock, or maybe it is the bastards themselves, dumping "Treasury" shares on the market? There is some evidence that it might be the company itself that is pissing in the soup. We just don't have the resources to determine exactly what is happening in real time, at the scale needed to see.

But some folks do.

And maybe that is what is happening. See, all the other banks in Canada will trade up, and this one particular bank has a share-price that does the "Drop-Toad" - like you were looking for gold coins in the forest, and instead of picking up a bit of gold, you picked up a poisonous toad, and "Yikes!", you drop it.

That is how this curious share price trades. And it's a consistent pattern - crazy repeatable, and my understanding of markets says that this pattern should be something to trade against. But not enough action occurs to quiesce the "Drop-Toad".

And this I find *really* curious. It tells me something is really wrong with this stock, and maybe with this company. We see the other Canadian banks get bid up nicely, as the market advances, and this particular bank stock goes straight down - like there is a deliberate attempt to hammer the value of the thing by hammer-hitting the bids all the way down. It's like an inverted "Mannheim Roller" in music - a dropping crescendo of selling that drives the share price down into the toilet as the other bank stocks launch upwards.

I have an ugly feeling that traders on some big building in Hunger City, are dumping new shares onto the suckers (like us!), but I cannot believe they would be so unwise as to do nonsense like this.

But someone is selling hard.

And the "Drop-Toad" pattern just repeats and repeats, like a fat, burping guy eating hot chili. It's curious.

It could also be some options-pricing trickery, or even just old-fashioned "gun-runs" like used to happen in the commodity markets - the floor traders would nod and wink at each other and start a selling process to find and hit the stop-loss price levels that the off-floor traders (usually big commercial buyers of the commodity in question) had established for their own position protection. Once the stops were found, lots of selling would happen as the commercial positions were liquidated, the floor-boys could hoover up the stuff at a cheap price by taking the other side of the forced selling, and then lift the price back to where it was before the gun-run started. Lot's of fun. The floor-boys had to eat, right? The gun-run thing would work, until the big commercial guys had their own floor-guys, who play the same game. Nothing works forever, if trading against it can extract money from the process.

But the "Drop-Toad" on this particular bank stock is remarkably consistant, and it keeps the share price in the toilet - far south of what we think (thought?) it should be. We have been proven wrong to hold this thing - but the dividend stream pays the bills, and we doubt that these guys will pull a "Credit Suisse" and completely blow themselves to bits. At least, that is our view for now.

But it starting to feel like a "Blue Rodeo" song. Maybe it's time to just hit the cold road, and head south. Put some distance from the "Drop-Toad", and load up on transformational US Big Tech, at 50+ times earnings and 5 times price-to-book.

Trouble is, all my research tells me that this is just about where the hell-storm can be expected to begin. Either that, or valuation just does not matter at all. Can't be both.

Or can it?

"Can I Go Nowhere With You? Na na na, na na, na nah..."

[ Jan. 16, 2025 ] - Molly Malone Working Alone
The UK looks to be in a strange crash-and-burn mode. Curious. They are more concerned with crushing truth and honesty with their stupid hate-speech laws, than they are about the "Grooming Gangs" from Pakistan who have apparently systematically abused young English white girls. This is truly wrong. The rapists appear to have been handed light sentances by the strange UK authorities - this according to news reports out of the UK. Folks in Pakistan have said they would be happy to have these vermin deported back to their homeland, so they could face proper Islamic justic. No problem with that - except that the UK Prime Minister appears more concerned with the news coverage of this sad set of events, than establishing a proper Commission to find out exactly what went wrong. The news reports on the various rapes make painful reading. But the UK Government appears more concerned with trying to prevent information about these events from being made public. Elon Musk and others have brought to light what happened, via his uncensored "X" platform. Good for him.

Censorship laws that ban "hate speech" are stupid and wrong. They are dangerous and abusive censorship action which does real damage to nations where they are enacted. Free speech is a critical right under democracy. If you say hateful things - the response of pointing this out, is simply enough. No one is promoting "hate" by suggesting that rapists face justice. But with the censorship and "anti-hate-speech" laws, and the new "Woke DEI Mind-Virus" nonsense, every foolish group can act offended, and get honest debate simply shut down in public. This is deeply wrong.

And with corrupt and abusive government toads involved - it all goes very wrong, very quickly. You get the "no honest public talk" problem, and democracy becomes a bogus fraud - like the fake "European democracy" which is not any sort of democracy at all. Witness the "do-over" election in Romania, and the attempts by France and Germany to **ban** their supposedly "right-wing" parties.

This is just nonsense - and the "hate-speech" laws keep this snowballing lie-machine (the EU?) up and running, when maybe it should be simply ended. But to vote intelligently, you need to know exactly what is actually happening. If active and abusive censorship prevents this, then voters cannot even make informed decisions, and democracy absolutely dies. Or democracy gets shutdown, as in the Romanian example. If you support democracy, you *must* support free speech, and recognize the extreme threat that abusive censorship "hate-speech" laws entail.

Strange how very strange things are becoming... Truth is being clubed like baby seals, by the bad people of this world. We need to remember "Newton's Third Law" - for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Attempts to use illegal "hate-speech" laws to shield Government officers and agents (and UK Prime Ministers?) from scrutiny for their actions (or lack of action) will be seen to be simply wrong - and will determine the political and social trajectory of a changing world.

Funny times ahead, when even the property-owning middle-classes start feeling that traditional revolution might be required. At least in the USA, this revolution appears now to actually be underway. And more power to them!

[ Jan. 15, 2025 ] - May The Wind Take Your Bubbles Away!
I was streaming the Clarksville blues radio on my home-built internet stereo-tuner-box (an old Pentium III, running a solid version of Linux) and heard this great song by "Son Volt", from "Traces" album, which just blew me away - best "Alt-Country" thing I've heard in 20 years (I am always late to the party..). Youtube is unusable now, but on this thing called "Last.fm" I found a listenable copy of it. If I can find the CD somewhere (it's circa 1995, re-mastered in 2015, IIRC), and it's just plain good. Reminds me a tad of Blue Rodeo, back in the days when I could hike down to the Horseshoe, and see them live. Damn, those were different times. We just didn't know how good they really were - too busy trying to keep the payments up on the gosh-darn condo mortgage, and working every free hour for some skank-bank, telecom, or bigpower.gov clients. Madness.

But bubbles... Bubbles are on my mind. You don't know you are intra-bubble, until the big bugger bursts and leaves you wrecked on the side of the Big Highway of Fin-Life. Very early one I did trade that nuked half my net-worth, and then walked up Young Street, in full shell-shock mode. ("Why did I do that?", is the question that haunts oneself...) Years later, you realize it is dues that must be paid to the gods of finance and trading. And it keeps you from making the same error again. Maybe.

But it does not need to be that way. Mr. Buffet is over-burdened in cash (something like 380 billion USD, at last count. Pretty damned hilarious...).

Are we in a crazy Bubble? Are the LA winds shaping up to be the San Fran Earthquake of 1906? Maybe. And maybe not. It's never the same way twice. And you can only have one first-try.

I remain worried about the coming AI World. I am pretty sure it (advanced artificial intelligence), will be used primarily for weapons development. It's really goddamn funny how we are letting Ukraine fight the mother-rapers of Russia and North Korea, all alone. This is the truly stupidest and most cowardly and most tragic thing I've ever seen, since maybe the sad, genocidal destruction of Gaza. Humans are fine on their own, onesy twosy, but get these meat-puppets into race-based, religious and military-tribal groupings, and they have the power to become wildly, truly dishonest, cruel and blind-brainless stupid, to a really surprising degree. It's a fascinating characteristic of human psychology. Note that Charlie Munger described the forms of failure the psychology-of-humans can take, in his famous Harvard speech.

So, if it is bubbling sheep we are up against, what are the few who see this coming, supposed to do?

I lie awake at night pondering this question, until I wake up, have a drink, and put a bigger log on the fire, while the dogs stay asleep.

I figured "make conservative, old-man-style investments, with a focus on dividend-payment streams." Like Utilities and conservative financial entities. Telecoms and Banks, eh?

We probably could have done better going to Vegas and going crazy. I fear Canada is in deep trouble, as we have a tragic feature of electing the worst government clowns in the entire history of the electorial process. Ontario - under the Liberals - was run by a collective of gay nutjobs, who almost destroyed the place. The Premier was a brain-dead dyke, and the Finance Minister was a gay boy, who would talk about his bottom-boy boyfriend. It was honestly sickening, truth be told. We finally got the Tories elected, but it was close. But the Libtards of Ottawa are finishing the job of Canada's Economic Destruction at the Federal level, with the former Finance Minister getting the boot by crazy Justin Trudeau for suggesting we respond rationally to the new tariff threats that our major trading partner is engineering. Trudeau is planning "counter tariffs on US products" which is probably the stupidest thing that the Federal clowns could possibly do.

The Chinese and the Russians are openly laughing at us, I suspect. Until we get rid of the Libtards, we are at risk of sliding into some deep economic trouble, rather like our crap-stained Canadian dollar already is. We have tremendous potential here, but it is being squandered by fools and fraudsters, who engage in trough-diving and pocket filling and little else.

At every level, we have bad government, high-taxes, and an awful climate that is just too fucking cold. Hell, if "Global Warming" really was a thing (it most certainly is not - it is really just a massive tax-fraud on the public) we should really be building Carbon Dioxide Generating Stations, and output as much of the stuff as possible. Hilarious - but not likely to happen.

And meanwhile, the Big US Bubble keeps inflating, with US market valuations going into the stratosphere, and the US-dollar valuation marching upwards, along with the quite unsustainable US-debt levels.

We are maybe teeing up a true financial apocolypse that will hammer-whack the Western World. The crazy Russians and the angry Chinese could blow us all to hell, simply because it will be easy and possible for them to do so. We should be building missiles and tactical nuclear weapons with battlefield-launch capability, and instead, we are making our people pure-stupid, through brain-destroying "entertainment" technology.

Maybe the Big War will be fought by 20 or 30 people on each side, each small group directing their AI tech to neutralize the other - while the Chinese unleash their virus agents (via the new "vaccines"?), and the Russians rain nuclear-armed hypersonic projectiles down on our helpless cities. What can we do? Lodge a protest at the United Nations? If NYC is flat, black and slightly glowing-in-the-dark, that might not even be possible.

See, when these big financial bubbles burst, then big war usually follows. It seems to be a human psychological characteristic. Nation-states, and the big corporate and tribal groups will have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, once the economics goes pear-shaped.

Plan for this. Be ready when it happens.

[ Jan. 13, 2025 ] - The Incredible Shrinking Internet
I recall watching these great American Sci-Fi films from the 1950's and 1960's, clever black-and-white things from the golden-age of American nuclear-weapons testing. The Japanese came up with "Godzilla", while USA produced gems like "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "The Fly" and such like, with the theme being the dangers of runaway, out-of-control technology.

But what we have now, is an "Incredible Shrinking World". We are seeing a curious contraction in many areas, such as general sanity, political common-sense, investment opportunities and the set-of-useful-and-truthful-information available on the internet. All seem to be shrinking, as if affected by radio-active wavefronts of unclear origin.

There is almost nothing of value anywhere in the digital world now. It is a very curious situation. And that which used to be valuable and actionable - is quietly withering away as we watch, being replaced by promo-ads, paywall-blocks, crafted fraud, parody and disinformation. Things like Youtube have become unusable and unwatchable, with insane, intrusive awful adverts salted directly in the active content, which makes using it a painful and ugly experience. Everything on Youtube is already essentially a commercial, so one is reduced to watching big commercials mixed with really obnoxious and awful little interuption-commercials. It's so bad, one switches off, after the teeth-gritting time needed to access the limited-value information one seeks.

It's as if most of the digital world - and the commercially valuable world - is just shrinking away.

Freedom, free-trade, and financial-value, are all just quietly leaving the building. The empty and hollow shells that remain also seem to be contracting, as the structures that have been built by Western Civilization are pulled dowm and disassembled by leftist fanatics and DEI scammers. "Your call is important to us" is the modern version of "the cheque's in the mail". The feeling is that one is dealing with a hollow, shrunken empty-suit at every turn - and so we sense a world where quality and honesty are simply shrinking away, draining like water in a sink.

And of course, AI looks like it will enhance and amplify this trend. Fake news and fake views becomes background noise, and robotic chat is seen to have little real value. Communication itself shrinks in importance if nothing useful can be transferred between communicating agents. Shannon wept? The feeling of restriction and contraction seems to be a theme being created by the active AI technology. The entire internet is quietly morphing into little more than a vehicle to support FISA-702 efforts at mass monitoring. Economic and social value seems to be shrinking away, and draining from the whole system.

Of course, this is not really the case - the value is not being drained - it is being filtered and extracted. All value is being directed to Big Tech entities, and the sense of "shrinking" comes from the extraction process itself. You are the product. You are the source-of-funds.

This will probably continue. Until, perhaps, an exogenous variable comes on the scene, which burns everything down.

That could maybe be a good and necessary thing. When the big crash comes, we will all then likely be going to war. This is how it typically plays, if one examines the historical record.

"Keep the home fires burning..."

[ Jan. 09, 2025 ] - The New Enron "Egg" - Portable Nuclear Reactor For Home Use
Ok, for gits and shiggles, any good nuclear-boy (like myself), has to check out the "NEW Enron" website. The "New Enron" is back in the Energy Business, and is promoting their new product, the "Enron Egg", which is a portable nuclear reactor + generator, which supposedly can power a typical family house for 10 years, before it needs refueling.

"Wow!", I thought - just what I need for my off-grid Northern Office!...

Now, just to be clear, here, this is a complete bullsh/t stunt-site. Some dudes bought the "Enron" name and logo-glyph for a few hundred bucks, and crafted this just bloody brilliant parody site - complete with all the typical modern promo-puffery that one can see at the CES, if one wants to fly to Vegas, or go virtual-reality immersion into the fake "world of the modern Internet of Shit"...

The whole parody is really just truly gosh-darn funny. It's really well done. And FFS, I wish it were true. One must realize, that I am a guy who actually built a working deuterium-fusion reactor in my basement, and yes, I really did. You can find videos of me running the thing, on Youtube, circa 2006.

I recently wired my garage at the "Lorcalon Ranch House and Centre for Biodiversity Engineering", and installed a 240-Volt, 50-amp forced-air electric heater, which here in the Free Republic of Ontario, is hard-wired to a large nuclear-reactor electric generating facility at Bruce Beach, on Lake Huron. A non trivial amount of uranium atoms are giving up their lives each day, to keep my garage and home warm, and my Starlink satellite dish linked to the big matrix.

Ok, so go check-out this lovely new "Enron" device. If this shit-fake parody becomes real, (sorta like maybe a "Fartcoin"? ...), then let me know how your "Egg" is working. I will need at least three, since I will have to have one also for house I want to build on the new piece of Martian real-estate I am bidding on. Have not got the geo-gravitic "space displacement" drive working yet, but once the bugs are ironed out, maybe we can get into space, along with Elon's Starship... This "Enron Egg" would be just the thing to power the air and water conversion systems, our Martian homestead will need...

Check it out!

https://enron.com/

Here is a shot of the lot on Mars we are trying to purchase... (page down a bit, past the training loss-functon graphs)...

Mars is lovely. The yellow-red sky takes a bit of getting used to, and you have to make and/or extract your own air and water, but the planet is so pretty, and the views are "out-of-this-world", as they say! We dream of a modest "hab", here on this hillside, overlooking the Utopia Mountians.

[ Jan. 07, 2025 ] - The Barkers of the Big-Tech Grift
Have you ever had the feeling you are being scammed? Sorta like always now, in just about every commercial transaction? The clever folks on the internet will warn you about this, and point out that, when you are using any modern "Big Tech" "Service Offering", you are not actually getting a "service", you are actually becoming the product. "You are the Product", they will warn you.

And the "they" in this case, are correct.

The modern "Big Tech" offerings now often feel like scam-style frauds. You get no benefit really, from most of them. You make little or no money, you get essentially no real pay-back, yet you seek to participate, because almost every useful service or product, has been removed or "monetized" away from the public commerical space, so that it is impossible to do anything, without going to some tricky website, or using some piece-of-crap "app" that is designed to engage you in a "customer relationship management" process. Do you really wanted to be "managed"? Really? Probably not.

And so-called "Security" on the 'net is awful. The entire design approach is often just wrong.

I saw shit like this all the time when I provided consulting services to major organizations in the City - financial institutions and government agencies.

I could write a book about the stupid things the low-quality "security" experts insisted be done, which actually **reduced** security. This was a common occurance - completely hilarious, unfortunately. Like stupid mandates to frequently change passwords. This meant that everyone kept hand-written "cheat sheets" of what this month's password was. Any idiot could break into any system, by just looking in the EA's (the secretary's) desk-drawer, to find the current system login password. MFA (Multi-factor Authorization) is also truly stupid, and it means that the user has to keep stupid little hardware devices with accurate real-time clocks, and enter the TOTP (Time-based One Time Password) to login, and if he loses this device, or it is stolen, then his security is compromised. The thief can get into the system, but the true user CANNOT get into his own system! This is stupid.

AWS - Amazon Web Services - EC2 (Elastic Compute Capability) is a good idea. You can add servers to respond to increases in demand from web users. But the implementation of this service is just awful. And trying to tailor an EC2 instance (a simple web-server) to operate in a sane way, is curiously difficult. It is also absurdly difficult to wade thru the multiple-linked maze of online documentation, to actually accomplish anything useful. You can set up a **toy** website like this one, without too much trouble.

But to make it work right, or let it actually do any thing useful, is a moving target of trickery, which at every turn, requires that you cough up a bunch more cash, or navigate a series of rabbit-holes which assume you already know everything (like most useless modern documentation does).

The entire "Big Tech" business model really feels like a bad midway side-show.

Probably this is a "feature" - maybe a "security feature". "Big Tech" providers do not want useful or actionable services to operate from their platforms, unless they can engineer large payments from the suckers that get pulled into their questionable ecosystems. They just want to engineer tricky action to harvest funds from folks trying to use the modern "Internet of Shit".

Perhaps the reason the whole thing feels like a nasty scam, is maybe actually because it truly is?

Ya think?

(and it's gonna get a ***LOT*** worse as AI is transitioned to providing everything on the net.... really a ***LOT*** worse. Watch and see.)

[ Jan. 03, 2025 ] - Flaming Zepplins, Running 7's
Having maintained conservative "investments" in Canada, when the USA is on a debt-fueled run that exceeds anything ever seen in all of human history, has been sub-optimal. But it has been damned educational. Gerald Loeb was spot-on correct. If you enter the "stonk" market, you **must** focus on doubling your capital, rather than just trying to preserve it and draw off a dividend or yield stream.

This is curiously counter-intuitive advice, for a cautious fellow, who knows how easily and often, traders blow themselves to bits, and lose all their wealth. The LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) fiasco is the best case in point - the smartest guys who did very, very well for a while, finally blew up completely and disgracefully. Such is the nature of the beast (the market).

Yet, despite all this, being conservative and careful just does not work very well. It works a little bit, some of the time - just enough to make you slowly grind down your capital as inflation and random swans of various colours come and smash against your windscreen - until one or two break thru and bring you down.

Nvidia and Carvana are two stocks I thought were overvalued. Carvana crashed and then rose from the dead to spectacular heights, and Nvidia was recommended by a clever old fellow that has done well in computer and semi-conductor stocks. I avoided both, because they seemed too risky. Bad decision. We have held on to our Canadian bank-stocks, and to our Cdn telecoms. They have flowed-out a good dividend stream - but it sadly looks to be being generated from our investment capital. Buying dividend stocks - or bonds for the yield - basically have become schemes to get your capital, and then feed it back to you, as it slowly is withered away by the folks who sold you the paper.

The Loeb advice, in "The Battle for Investment Survival" is very clear. You must actively seek to buy stocks which can be expected to at least double. This is difficult, but not impossible. Gerald M. Loeb argued that only in this way, can you hope to at least survive the game, and not be ground-down by the powerful forces of fiat-money driven inflation, market-swings, business cycles, and plain old bad luck.

What is amazing is that this seemingly risky strategy, is actually probably the least risky approach, since if forces the buyer of equity to seek ***transformational*** companies, which have a high-probability of changing things. Most stocks and most companies do not really offer this - and conservative investments like banks and utilities - even if they pay seemingly high yields - have surprisingly ugly business characteristics, over even just the intermediate term (never mind the goddamn long term, in which we are all just bloody-well dead!).

We've done ok - but that is it. Just ok. Not great, not even "B-level" good. More like "C" - enough to pass, but not to really feel comfortable. We have to watch our expenditures, and be careful about any major purchases. In short, we are doing at best, average. We have no debt, and some fine real property holdings, but we are trapped in a harsh-climate, high-tax economic environment, with our equity holdings priced in a rapidly deteriorating currency.

In short - I am worried. Just one little mistake, and we could be hammered badly by plain old fashioned randomness. On paper, everything looks OK, but I sense some very significant changes are coming, which will massively move the various needles of the indicators which show the operational drivers of the financial world.

The markets are hard-wired to those indicator values (money rates, mortgage rates, rate-of-return rates, billings, new-orders, bond yields, cash-flows, corporate profits, government tax-takes and deficits, currency valuations, etc..)

The risks coming at us all are significant. The move away from "free trade", and back to tariffs, may run the global prosperty advancements we have seen in the last 60 years, in rapid reverse. The use of advanced AI risks making people stupid, while machines become intelligent. And there will be no jobs for both stupid people and smart people, who are displaced by the adoption of AI tech. And either tax rates will rise sharply, or currency values will fall, if out-of-control government spending is not reduced. But the reduction of government money-spend, will hit all Western economies hard, and cause GDP to go negative.

Just about everything is rigged against the folks in the middle-classes in the northern, high-tax economies. We supposedly have "free" health-care, but that means no doctors are available, other than ER's or walk-in clinics. I've lived where I live for over 20 years, and still have not been able to acquire a "Family Doctor", and in this unwise socialist model we have, that means I am functionally locked out of regular access to the health-care system. Note: I am NOT complaining about this. I can still access one "Walk-In" clinic, where I see a different doctor every time, and so this means I have to take aggressive personal responsibility for my health and health-related choices. This focus has probably saved my life a few times, so not having doctors except as on-demand specialists, which are tasked by the individual person seeking services, does offer some benefits.

Doctors are like car mechanics - it is hard to get one that is any good, and rare to find one that is really helpful. Better to maintain your car carefully, and also to maintain your body carefully. Your car and your own self, will last longer, and run better if you avoid these folks. Stay the heck away from doctors unless you have a real physical system failure, and keep your car away from shop mechanics who always have an incentive to inflate repair costs by various stratagems.

What is key, and I have learned this many times, is that the "high-risk" strategy is often actually the one with *less* risk. It is often the routine, "low-risk" model, that just does not work well, since all the "low-risk" options are rigged most effectively against the average guy, trying to take the average, safe, course of action. Our dividends are not keeping up with inflation, and there are many obvious reasons for this. Cautious "investments" can be risky traps.

As someone with an engineer's mind (even if I don't have the iron-ring), I just don't like trading. I find it stressful, and vomit-inducing. But when folks ask why do I do it, then, I have to reply: "I need the money..." :)

I've found some consistant things that just always seem to work. It's crazy and silly, since the market should extinguish something that can be traded against to extract cash, on a regular basis. But it just always works. It's weird and curious, and I cannot explain why the thing in question does what it does. I have to be vague, because I need the money, eh? Silly, but true.

But I sense the entire financial system of the Western World is actually skating on thin ice. Lots and lots of stuff just does not work right now, and this is a consistant pattern I also see often. It worries me.

Except now, the sun has come out, and the landscape looks like a Christmas postcard from long ago. Quite lovely. Enjoy it all, while you can!

[ Jan. 01, 2025 ] - Access to our AWS EC2 (our "cloud" server, which serves this website), seems to be working again.

We were knocked off by some sort of AWS (Amazon Web Services) policy change or something, which prevented login to AWS Console, and also prevented access to our EC2 instance. (our virtual server, running our website.) As of New Year's Day, it all seems to be working again. I had planned to re-factor this messy website over the holidays, but lost AWS access as of Christmas Eve. So much for "Cloud". We run local AI's, and wow - is local-system operation the only way to go. If you surrender your control to some remote technical service, you are taking a serious risk.

These are strange and dangerous times. Of course, we all know this - but it seems to be getting crazy-nasty everywhere. The abusive, mass-murder warfare action needs to stop. We don't expect the new US administration to really be that much different from the previous collection of curious folks, but we would be happy to be proven wrong in this forecast.

There appear to be powerful forces at work trying to de-stabilize many areas of our World. But it is also important to remember that old piece of advice - never attribute to clever conspiracy what can be more easily explained by rank stupidity, ignorance and cruelty.

The Russians shot down yet another civilian airliner, the South Koreans seem to be unable to operate large aircraft safely, nor do they understand how to construct airports (what kind of idiot-fool puts a cement wall at the end of a major runway??), and rather like the sad and crazy Germans, they seem unable or unwilling to run a stable, democratic government.

But they still do far better than the Germans, who seem quite unable to find their backsides with both hands when it comes to basic politics and democracy. When faced with a "new kid on the block" party (ie. the AfD), the idiot-fools who run Germany seem to think it is acceptable to try to BAN a political party which has widespread support, and is likely to form the next German Government. AfD's policies are wise, measured, reasonable and offer some real opportunity to reverse the madness that seems to be taking hold in Germany on a regular basis. (I am talking about their energy policy, let's be clear.) The "Green Nazi's" need to be stopped, before they destroy the German economy. And why should Elon Musk - who has built a Tesla factory in Berlin - not be allowed to voice his opinion on which political policy choices he prefers? The current German Government appears to be simply insane, and shows no understanding of just what democracy actually is.

And my dog is not well. She is having nose-bleeds, which are not nice for any of us. This causes me real concern. She is healthy and is eating well, and is active and not in any pain. But the nosebleeds are messy.

Happy New Year, anyway. I will update the AI forecast when I get a chance. We just got a foot of snow today, and I have to clear it all (again).

[ Dec. 24, 2024 ] - It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
... those hypersonic missiles that our radar can't hear. These holiday times offer an opportunity to launch an attack. No "Christmas Truce" in the Big World, now. Personally, we would like to see an end to this "warfare" nonsense - but we doubt this will occur. There is just too much money to be made from mass-killing at scale. Look at Israel if you want proof of this. That little colony is $60-billion to the good, for it's large-scale, multi-decade murder efforts. Such an awful but profitable outcome.

Truly, all this blather and promo about seasonal peace and so on, is sadly just more fraud. Rather like it always is.

But Happy Christmas anyway.

[ Dec. 20, 2024 ] - Your Baby's Gone Down The Plug-hole!
A fine old English tune, popular in the music halls. And seems to fit the current price patterns of the cracking Western-World markets. I keep seeing images in my mind, of glass vases falling and shattering on the cement pavement.

Should we make financial decisions on human feelings? Or are our analytic, rational calculations more effective over the long run?

I still don't know the answer to this curious question. The "Age of Reason" favours the pure analytic approach - and yet markets are wild emotion-engines, of the most intense kind. There is no doubt about the truth of this.

We remain all-in, in a (maybe misguided) attempt to harvest dividends from our portfolios. This conservative approach has proven to be sub-optimal for the last few years, as we experience harsh volatility, without the technology-stock price gains that have characterised the markets for the last several years.

All in all, using the markets to make bets on transformative technology, has just plain been a better strategy, than rational and cautious "investment" for income. All too often, it appears that dividends seem to be provided out of one's investment capital. And many major corporations choose to expend surplus cashflow on idiotic acquisitions, which so often end in failure. This process seems to be driven by the egos of less-than-wise CEO's who regularly make curiously bad decisions.

The path to speculative success is narrow, and the scope for investment failure is so very wide. We have a little BCE, the Bell Canada Enterprises company, which is parent to the Bell communication business - telephone and wireless and internet services. It is now another spectacular investment failure for anyone who has held the thing long-term. We bought some in the low 60's, and it now trades with a 33 handle, which is absurd for a viable utility investment. One does not expect a rational, conservative telco to collapse in half, like a some junky mining stock or an oil exploration company that has drilled a bunch of dry holes. But there you are. The spectacularly bad policy decisions from the "CRTC" regulators in Ottawa (ground zero for the "Big Stupid" in our part of the world), are partly to blame for the demise of BCE as a viable investment holding. But it's collapse has surpised us. It trades like it is at risk of going out of business. We doubt this will happen - but a dividend-cut will be enough to destroy the equity-value of the thing - and the expensive "Ziply Fiber" purchase looks most questionable. Many Canadian investments in USA are failures (we buy high and sell low - why is that??) and this may well be another similar hot-mess.

Note: (In case it needs to be repeated) A good heuristic to follow: "Do not 'average down'". Just do not fucking do it, unless you have some serious, non-obvious information that is unique. We bought a tiny bit more BCE at lower prices. Bad decision. Falling stock prices tend to keep falling. One can show this as a statistical truth. It's just mostly true. Sometimes turnarounds occur - but not very often in Canada. Turnarounds seems to be an American phenomenon.

What we must now do here, is to turn our attention to political efforts, and do all we can to get regime-change to happen at the Federal level in Canada. We have a serious "Idiots in Charge" problem now in Ottawa, and we all have a responsibility to fix this ugly problem.

[Update - 11:50am] - Curiously volatile times. The V-bottom remains the best fashion choice for the New Year. Skirts are probably best removed. We know so little, yes? The markets exhibit the behaviour of a woman in the fertile part of her cycle - dangerously volatile. It's now politically incorrect to reference this true and obvious fact, but old traders know it well, and could make money from this kind of cycle, if they were experienced, skilled and lucky. The market is like a woman. She is distant, abusive and difficult - and then suddenly one day, she wants to give you everything - RIGHT NOW. Old traders knew this phenomenon, and also had both the wisdom to act quickly and make a good profit, and then get the hell out, before the reverse swing would occur. We are still learning the nature of this wild-cycle, even after so many, many years. The equity-markets are to investing, much like what teenage-dating is to being married for a few decades. Learn and know this.

An old, close friend just got a scary diagnosis. Dr. Google tries to sound encouraging (could we please have the old Google Search tool that found non-MSM sites???), but my friend's version of the big "C" is apparently pretty serious. Puts our losses in perspective. Prognosis is at the short end of the curve, based on what has been discovered so far. He's already on drugs that apparently allow him to feel better, without having his hair fall out. I am at the age, where members of my demographic cohort are starting to go dark. This produces complex feelings, which are probably best ignored.

"But don't you believe in anything?" I was asked. I replied with the old standby answer: "I believe I will have another drink."

Everyone gets the same deal. You live, until you die. Then it's all over. The famous and most honourable and wise Emperor Marcus Auralius wrote all the advice one ever needs, in his "Meditations" - which was basically his bedside notebook, which he kept during the frontier campaigns in which he attempted to forestall the collapse and destruction of the ancient Roman Empire. He quest was doomed to fail. But he fought the good fight, and tried to do the right thing. The "Christians" have no monopoly on right behaviour and right action. In fact, Christianity has a rather grim and ugly history, much like most religious enterprises have.

Now, go find a copy of "When I Ruled the World" (which will maybe be Vladimir Putin's night-music, in his luxurious prison cell, at the end of his life.)

[ Dec. 19, 2024 ] - Error 404 - Future Failure
The "Powell Plunge" yesterday was comedy-as-tragedy theatre for the folks who believe "investment" is possible in this curiously broken world now. I keep seeing everything being done mostly wrong, and it is a curious feeling. We seem to be erroring-out the future.

The AI stuff is being morphed from the impressive-and-interesting to the truly dangerous, and US politics is become over-the-top insane. The 1547-page completely bogus "Stopgap Spending Bill" that has been crafted in the stinking-cesspool-swamp that is Washington D.C., is just beyond belief toxic and absurd. It is full of bogus spending, absurd (and probably illegal) restrictions on what a new Administration can do, and what is termed "pork-barrel-spending" the likes of which are over-the-top crazy. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of US-dollars of completely bullshit spending, and all these sleazy, shit-stained tricks - like preventing the new Health Secretary from doing anything about the criminally dishonest CDC and it's abusive vaccine policy mandates, and even a little trick to except various Commerce Dept. operations from FOI (Freedom of Information) requirements. It also has tricky-law to try to hide the outright criminality that Democrat legislators engaged in - nothing at all to do with spending - just sleazy-legal scam-tricks, designed to fatten the pork, and pay-off the swamp-men and swamp-women (ie. they vote themselves a fat pay raise, by returning their fat $174,000/year (US-dollar) salaries to being COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) rigged. Maybe even retroactive? Unclear if that will apply - buried in process, of course.

If I were an American, I would be saying, it's maybe time for a Second American Revolution. The stinking cesspool of Washington politics is so out-of-control, that it is absurd. Trying to ram this steaming piece of 1547-page pork-spending and tricky-shit through, quickly before going away for Christmas, is virtually a criminal act of mass-theft. Both Trump and Vance are demanding that this obscene spending-spree and legal-trickery scam-bill be blocked and defeated by the lame-ducks who are trying to foist this shitshow upon America. They are so right.

If one ever needed a perfect textbook example of how completely broken Washington politics actually is, one only need examine this 1547-page slush-pile of over-the-top spending madness and legislative trickery. It is abusive and disgusting, and I now truly believe that the January 6th protesters who stormed the US "parliament", were doing a noble and necessary thing. Trump should pardon every protester, and prosecute that vile piece of walking filth that was in charge of security, and the FBI stooges who it now appears, engineered the entire fiasco.

USA appears to be breaking - and I suspect this, because it's Government looks to be corrupt, and it's "legislators" have been shown to be self-serving scammers operating directly against the long-term interests of the American people. Hell, Joe Biden and his corrupt crony squads have even tried to re-define what "American people" even are - bringing in, as a matter of deliberate policy, ***millions*** of illegal border-crossers, who were outright law-breakers. The Biden Administration is the worst and most dishonest collection of fraudsters to ever sieze power in USA - through what more and more looks to have been a bogus election process in 2020, where massive "ballot harvesting" was not only allowed, but encouraged.

We hope President-Elect Trump and Vice-President-Elect Vance can begin a process to fix that broken thing that is the USA political process, and return America to sanity and stability.

And - please oh please - do something about the broken "Federal Reserve" and the completely broken-by-design "Securities and Exchange Commission", which has become little more than a Democrat-run attack-dog being used to harm major US companies that are viewed as political opponents. This does great economic damage to both present-day America, and also harms it's future. The SEC needs to be reformed or replaced. It's now just part of the "Big Moat" around abusive New-York based, big-money criminal enterprises.

The "Washington Democrat" elite deep-state fraudsters and trough-diving pocket-fillers and squads of scammers-of-the-State should be sent to re-education camps, and made to read and memorize the US Consitution, since they obviously either know nothing about it, or maybe they know it well, and delight in acting against it's provisions.

When the little stuff is broken, the little guys like us can fix it. But when the entire process is broken, corrupted and shit-stained dishonest and wrecked-beyond-repair, then maybe it becomes time for some hard-core revolution. And that means not just trying to deal with the stinger in the scorpion's tail - but squashing the head of the nasty creature, so it it's ability to inflict it's lethal sting can be ended completely.

When your government has become a dangerous "scorpion", the free citizen has no choice, but to act to remove the lethal creature by any and all means possible. It's a rule of history.

The toxic legislation that is flowing from the abusive fraudsters and self-serving elites that control our Western World governments, has to be stopped. And that means stopping the process and stopping the persons who are driving the process.

If this means "shutting down the Government" (which is not really what happens - all the needed entities continue to operate) for a few weeks, so the Biden Brigades and Deep-State organs cannot do anymore damage to the public fisc, (the Roman term for the "Public Treasury"), then so be it. It is actually a very good idea, and might actually prove to be a major benefit. It won't stop that criminal Joe Biden from pardoning his criminal associates - but it might at least stop the insane financial madness that has been where many a "Washington Swamp Creature" has done surprising economic damage.

[ Dec. 17-18, 2024 ] - Electro-Curious
Ok, so I liked the Cybertruck, but it is insanely too expensive - it's really parked on Mars, is what it feels like. Very cool for the very, very wealthy, but not available to the common man (or woman?). And so in an attempt to get a Tesla to play with, I looked at a very old (2014) Model S, on a dealer's lot, which has crazy high milage, but still sort-of works.

It was allowed to run down - the batteries drained right down - and this is really, really bad for these cars. Comically funny, since it appears to have ruined the lithium cells. The car was showing a 90% available battery when I took it for a test-drive today, which was between 10 and 20 kms - not far, just a little way along a local ring-road expressway and back. It had 90% battery showing when we left, and a few minutes later, when we returned to the dealer's lot (it's Not a Tesla dealer, by the way...), the battery was showing 74%. The charge-drain was so high, that it appears the battery-pack is toast. The car looks and runs nice, but as a viable automobile, it is just not such a thing. If you lose 16% battery charge in 10 to 20 km (say 20 km to be generous), then the remaining 74% will give only 93 km of range. The car has an 85kwh battery, putting out 400 VDC. This was originally a 400km battery. But now, it is not usable for anything other than puttering around town.

When I left my place to go to the dealer, and do the test-drive, my positions were slightly positive. Upon return, just after market close, I notice that Tesla stock has lost just under 40$ per share, for an over 8% loss on the day. (Is the market inside my head, watching what I am doing??? Almost feels like this...)

Our positions are suddenly ugly offside and down, due to the blather from the Federal Reserve in USA-Stan, having cut 25 basis points, and saying only two more cuts, before the big raising begins? The inflation everywhere is silly now, everything is broken-crowded, and nothing works anywhere anymore. This is just my feeling of things - but the market seems to be feeling this way also.

The old 2014 Tesla Model S drove nicely, but the battery range looks like a show-stopper. Plus I just lost the price of the damn thing today, so I have to give up on having a Tesla to play with, it looks like. But the computer-based user interface in the thing, with the big moving-map GPS display, is really very cool. The Tesla Model S cars are nice - but replacing a battery costs around $21,000 to $25,000 Cdn now. And maybe US and Canada trade-war tarrifs might push this higher.

Strange world now. Nothing is reliable, nothing works right, and everything is kind of broken-by-design. Things that used to work well on the internet, are just unusable now (eg. Youtube, with the insane, awful, obnoxious, noisy adverts). And I will not pay money, to see cute cat videos.

So, here we are. I cut a tree down, and then cut it up. Funny explaining English prepositions, to non-native speakers: "Eh? You cut tree down. Ok. Then, you cut tree up? How does person do this?" (It's really all to do with entropy-states.) Cut tree, it falls down. It is a long, messy wood thing. Cut it into nice pieces to fit in wood-fire stove, and pile these in nice pile, wood-pieces organized and stacked up high. (A lower entropy-state, higher level of organized structure.) Lotsa wood, big fire in wood-stove, means warm house... :)

Should really have been stacking Sats, eh?

Silly world. (Even gold and silver got hammered today. Curious. "All Restaurants are Taco Bell" and all assets are apparently the same. This seems somehow wrong to us. Is there nothing that is uncorrelated with this crazy financialized Bizzaro-World?)

[ Dec. 16, 2024 ] - "Are You Experienced?" (Gunning the Stops)
The markets are hard-codeed effectively to "gun the stops", which means whatever price a naive trader (like me, a guy out in the back-of-beyond) transacts at, the market action (which is now very good at monitoring who is trading at what price, since I cannot anonymize my bank-retail-trader dealer-code), will "gun-run" to whatever your stops should be, for effective, low-risk trading.

So, you have to do high-risk, high-vol things.

You have to make a friend of volatility, just like Kurtz said in "Apocalypse Now!", where he said it was necessary to make a friend of "horror". One has to act counter one's rational instincts, since this is what the algo's do to win.

What is interesting, is how my super-cynical, nasty-guy, "Inner Trader" calls this pretty much every time. And the AI seems to confirm it. The market prices are quite a long way from being the result of any sort of rational "price discovery", but these financial-fictions are useful "meme-virus" ideas, that are planted in the heads of the poor-boys who trade their money away.

Things are *very* crazy now. They are just over-the-top goofy and risk-laden. The risks are just plain sky-high - and yet the markets will almost certainly track higher. There is a dynamic here, which is really scary and interesting - like watching war-films of cities being burned down, or airplanes crashing and exploding. It is terrible - yet also fascinating, since it shows the true-nature of human action.

People are just crazy. They are roiling, boiling buckets of wild madness, but have smiles and relaxed expressions as they go about their daily business. The only place the true behaviour could manifest itself, was on the trading floors, where open-outcry was used to transact. Those days are gone, and this is a sad thing, since in that environment, there was honesty. There was honest human action, fully on-line, in real time, with actual real people. You could tell by the volume-level on the floor, what the market was doing, if you were experienced.

And, as Jimi Hendrix asked: "Are You Experienced?"

There are things we know, and we can tell. But there are also things we know, that we cannot tell. And there are things we think we know, that are wrong. And there are wrong things we know, that actually work really well to help us profit in many areas - until one day, they also destroy you. This is the "fatal flaw" that classical tragedy often highlighted.

Success in the crazy multi-dimensional market-world now, is not so much "3-D Chess", as it is the curious human capacity to be "arrogantly humble" or maybe "humbly arrogant" so that you can do quite extreme high-risk actions, which still need to be actively risk-managed.

I fear great chunks of our world, and what most of us believe, are about to be shattered like a glass vase, dropped from a high, New York building onto a sidewalk.

It will make the 9/11 "event" look mild and not really very serious - more of a pre-cursor, than a major tragedy. Many things are very wrong, in very many places, but no one really gives a shit, which is fine, but the scale and extent of the eventual change-process, seems to grow more substantial each day, each month and each year. I suspect that when historians are looking back on this time, from 1000 years in the future, they will term it "The Time of the Great Stupid". Everyone seems to be slightly insane, and some more directly and obviously insane than others. I see multiple events regularly, each day, which do not make rational sense - but seem to be part of the human drift.

Market price discovery is just one small aspect. If you attempt to be a rational investor in the modern markets now, you will be slaughtered like a Chicago hog, and turned into someones bacon breakfast. The idea that you can buy stocks as investment vehicles is simply absurd. It is a pure *casino*, and once that fact is grasped, one can do OK. But forget all that garbage talk about "investment". The markets now are simply not about "investment" anymore - and probably, they never were, and never can be. There are ancillary "investment-effects" that can be obtained - but the primary drivers are human emotion, and human weakness - and of course, rank stupidity. These actually work quite well, to make things happen.

So, best of luck. Maybe metal - simply holding raw metal - silver and gold - maybe this actually is a better long term investment now, despite the curious difficulty transacting in the stuff.

I am certain that much of the valuations we see now, are bogus. It's a scary feeling. And this at the same time, as the bank-stocks are crazy-good, obviously should be priced higher - but given the political-risks, and the power of the "Great Stupid", perhaps that is why they trade at such silly discounts. The tech stuff is silly - and the good stuff that throws off money like Niagara Falls, gets discounted down to crap-valuations. It's pretty comical. I see major discounts coming for all the technology sector, since it offers so little (except maybe Tesla, since it can actually deliver something real - unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta and so on..) And I have a real fear that Apple is actually a Chinese scam, designed to make every user a junk-data addict. Apple did a brilliant thing using BSD-UNIX/Linux as it's O/S internal, but the overburden of digital cruft now makes using modern Apple equipment a dangerous, freedom-threatening choice. Funny world. I fear a really wild non-linear transition event is looming very close now.

Maybe I am wrong - but history seems to confirm my view. But also, I am usually two years too early with this feeling. My file on the "USA Housing Crisis" was started in 2006. :)

Just read about Christina Freeland's resignation - she posted her letter to PM Fidel's son on Elon Musk's "X" board. Pretty hard-core "Fuck You" kind of letter - nice to see someone with some stones (why is it always a female that shows the clink-clink brass-balls courage now?) say the obvious truth. This Trudeau fellow has to resign. We need to free ourselves from this person, who has done just about all he can to hammer-whack our economic future. This crazy shit has to stop. Can it be stopped? Or is the rolling-thunder force of the "Great Stupid" too much to stand against? Can we withstand the slings-and-arrows (and super-bad, shit-stained Bill 63 toxic garbage legislation that the Libtards of Ottawa are forcing upon us), and by opposing, end these truly dangerous fuckers? I don't know. I will do my part trying to turn our riding back to a Tory blue, from a sad Fidel-Castro-red mistake... but the "Great Stupid" is a curiously strong force - sorta like the sun's gravity... It seems to be harming human clarity and basic thought process.

For certain... We need change, and we need it now.

[ Dec. 12, 2024 ] - CyberTruck Lucky Truckin!
Went to shop for a pre-amp at the only remaining "Stereo Store", and went next door to look at the Tesla Dealership, with the Cybertrucks (Foundation Models). The order-backlog for the lower-cost Cybertruck is significant - Tesla is not even taking reservations anymore. But you can get a 2-motor "Standard" Foundation model, or a 3-motor (800 hp!) advanced Foundation model Cybertruck, right now, without the wait. (Like buying an IBM System 370, back in the early 1970's, when I was a tiny young little punk... you can pay a premium to jump the queue). The Foundation CyberTruck has FSD(Supervised) as a standard feature. And I tried it, and it works. No shit. It really, actually works. It's all actually amazingly wild-good. It has an on-board neural-net which watches the world effectively, and shows it on the screen, real-time.

See, the local Tesla dealer has a test-drive option thing - you can book out a 30-minute loaner Cybertruck, (and it is the 3-motor "Beast" model), and go drive around and try the thing. "Holy Moly!" I said "Sign me up" to the most helpful Tesla saleswoman - but all the slots were booked up for December. I said "Call me (or text me) if there is a cancel or no-show.." And she did! Today, I took the "Beast" model of the Foundation Series Cybertruck out for two seperate test runs, and I have to report here, that the thing seriously exceeded all expectations. It is just downright amazing - a completely different driving experience. It is a 6000+ pound truck, but it has full 4-wheel articulated steer-by-wire, and it is weirdly nimble, and wildly fun to run. It accelerates like a Porsche 911 Turbo, (an old friend from long ago, had one, back in the day, so I have g-force sensation memory), and it is just plain nice and nimble to drive - not at all "truck-like" - the CyberTruck feels more like a sports-car, than a big, steel truck.

The technology is impressive, and has been well engineered and well-thought-out.

There is no sense of "fighting with the interface", like one experiences with badly designed, poorly planned software UX. It's very nice. The control-yoke wheel is really nice, and the thing reminded my of tooling around in the sky with an old PA-28 Piper Warrior II, that I used to rent from a local Toronto-area flying club, when I was younger, and flew small aircraft regularly.

The only problem, is the $160,000 price-tag. It's a bit of a show-stopper at this point, since I have a bunch of big-ticket stuff I want/need in the near future (plans to build a cottage, and so on...), so the cash income is pre-allocated for now.

But if I come by a big score in the next while, I will grab one, and unload some of my other not-to-drive-in-winter old rolling stock.

I will put a couple of pictures below and end of this post. The CyberTruck looks to have an on-board neural network processor for the FSD, and even without FSD enabled, the display will show a synthetic image of surrounding traffic - big trucks, SUVs, small cars, etc - they show up as simulations, in real-time, and the CyberTruck will flash warnings, if a lane-change is not recommended, due to some yahoo zooming up and passing you on the right, for example. Also, red-lights and traffic signals seem to be recognized, and imaged in schematic - all in real-time. The GPS moving-map display is nice also, and can be toggled in and out, as desired.

All and all, the thing is awesome. It exceeded my expectations, and I have to say, it is just crazy good. Just a fine and frisky driving experience, like when you are a kid, and get into your first Corvette. If you are a car-nut (I am), it is just a symphony of stuff-done-right. I am quite impressed, truly.

Might change my life - like in the 1990's, when I went to Dr. Geoffery Hinton's Neural-Net lectures, and got the Xerion code on a CD, and had to install and configure LINUX on my IBM 386 clone P/C (which I still have, and it still works), and the early Linux (Slackware) still runs! Xerion also. Good code and good hardware, lives pretty much forever. Exactly the opposite of the modern world, eh?

The CyberTruck is really a Ton-O-Fun. And I did not expect that at all! :)

(And a *Big* Thank-you to the staff at Waterloo Tesla, for letting me take one for an extended highway ride!)

If you have the scratch, go buy one. It's the future, in glass-and-stainless rolling techno. Put on your Neuromancer mirrorshades, select your drive-mode, go enjoy CyberTruckin!

Here are two pictures. The first, is the CyberTruck in the showroom. Note: No one paid me for doing this or anything. This is just my impression of the experience. If it was bad, I would have said so. I expected a "truck-like" feel, but that is not the case at all. It's really nimble and quick, and fun to drive.

Here is second image, of a customer getting prepped for a test drive!

The CyberTruck test run was a lot of fun. It's a seriously impressive piece of technology.

[ Dec. 11, 2024 ] - Wayfaring Stranger
Walking thru this world of woe... and seeking profit, knowledge, strength and power. Should we instead choose poverty, ignorance and weakness and slavery? Of course not. But that means, we need to rise early, study carefully, live wisely, and avoid the many traps of dependence and foolishness. This is hard to do, sometimes. Constant focus and effort make for a tired Jack.

Vacations are nice - but after about 10 minutes, I get deadly bored, sitting on a beach, drinking rum-based drinks. But sailing is good. It is sufficiently difficult, and risky, that it keeps one interested, and you get to be in the sunshine also (and maybe even a storm or two...) There is a fine feeling when the sails are well-trimmed, a fresh breeze is blowing, the rails are under, and you are making just a tad more than hull-speed.

Recorded music is making a comeback, as are turntables and vinyl records. Probably this is because the internet-based music sources are both expensive and astonishingly awful and annoying (Youtube is now unwatchable - unless you can run multiple layers of ad-blockers). Internet Archive does not work right anymore, and all that remains are the streaming radio stations, many of which are full of adverts also. So the internet is pretty much turning to a curious steaming (not "streaming" - *steaming*) thing. It's become a pile of poop. This is pretty funny and just a little surprising.

The future of any viable AI, will be *localized* non-internet-connected AI technology. Certainly, this is how it is for us. The internet gets more annoying and less useable day by day. And of course, the risk factors seem to be growing like Moore's Law. Being online now is just pure work. Feels really good to switch the machines off.

Suddenly, everyone wants to have "pre-amps". Having acquired a large, nice-sounding amplifier, I expected it would not be too difficult to acquire a used pre-amp. Ho ho. The ones that are still made, are insanely expensive. I want pure analogue, no digital cruft. This means one has to find old-school equipment from the 1970's to the 1990's, which is either in good condition, or has been refurbished. Or, you can pay many thousands of dollars for modern high-end audio hardware, which is absurdly priced (you can basically pay any amount, depending on your desire, budget and ego). I may have to drive to Toronto, just to acquire a 35-year-old piece of equipment which might need to be repaired (new capcitors and upgraded resistors is typically what is needed).

I dropped into the local Tesla dealership, and had a good look at the new "Foundation Series" Cybertruck. It's pretty cool. I booked a test-drive for early next year (first available slot!), and chatted with some folks who had their test-drives. Everyone was impressed. A woman with her young son said she had expected it to feel like a big truck or a bus - but in fact, it was nicely steerable and nimble-feeling. I learned both front and back wheels articulate, when turning, which I did not know. The stainless-steel fit-and-finish is really good. But it is $138,000 Cdn for the two-motor AWD version, and $160,000 for the 3-motor ("Beast") version. Driving range is roughly 500km, which seems good.

I'll post some pictures when I get a chance to copy them from phone to P/C and then to website (here). The stainless-steel Cybertruck is really very cool. I would like an option to have really *thick* stainless, especially under the vehicle. I didn't get any info on "Q" car, or if FSD autodrive is available on the Cybertruck. I don't want either, so no problem. The box size and the locking metal cover is nice - a viable truck (I have an F-150, with a back-cover/camper-back thing, which is essential in a high-snow region like where I live.)

Bank of Canada dropped the short-term administered rate 50 basis points, due to rising trade risk factors facing Canada, and evidence of slowing economic activity and rising unemployment. Rate was 3.75%, lowered now to 3.25%. Of course, this will mean nothing for regular consumers using VISA cards to fund their borrowing action - they will still pay around 20.00% or more, depending on case-by-case factors. Rates are high. We advise avoiding ALL debt of any kind, and trying to link one's expenditure to one's income level. Ideally, expenses should be below income, so that some savings can be generated. Good luck with that, eh? :)

More later... Keep your tips up... (old water-skiing expression...)

[ Dec. 10, 2024 ] - Both Mother and Daughter
... Working for the Yankee Dollar? And then being killed by US bombs? That's not good.

We hack for Cdn dollarettes, but that is only because we avoid currency issues. I seem to be sneezing today. Acquired some more outdated but high-quality technology. Searching the nation for it, truth be told. Some guy on one of the tech-stuff boards, is trying to sell two vaccuum tubes for $180 Cdn. Not a full amp or pre-amp, just two single "matched" NOS (new old stock) glass 12SN7's or some such thing, for that insane price - claims they are German-made, gold-plated contacts, yatta-yatta, and so on. Completely silly. Suddenly, it hit me like that old "Rough Trade" song - "All Touch and No Contact"... it's like our current "Stonk" market, is it not?

We are seeing some quite insane, over-the-top prices on speculative technology shares, which seem quite divorced from the standard, on-the-ground reality that business folks typically face.

Honestly, the key thing you want to be owning (and maybe investing in), is probably weapons-systems. But you want semi-autonomous, low-cost, high-yield (in terms of destructive/disruptive force), kind of systems, which can be deployed by fast-moving, highly manouverable agents.

And with that thought, I drove into the local town, and saw the guys testing their drones, part-ways into a long driveway into a farm, where the drone-makers had made a deal with the farmer-owner to use (big field, lots of open space, trees a long way away, etc.). These are the drones that sell for 6-figures (once I stopped by and chatted with the guy doing the testing...). The drones look cool, and are able to operate autonomously, and carry hi-resolution cameras, which downlink to the laptop-enabled operater in the truck. But he does not have to be in the truck.

The drones are still too expensive - but they are able to disable expensive tanks, given that they can launch precision strikes, from perfectly vertical orientation. They can also be used on people driving in domestic automobiles or trucks, quite effectively.

The trick in warfare, is to avoid direct confrontation with superiourly-armed and equiped troops, and rather, just hit - over and over - the supply lines of the troops. Eventually, the bastards get hungry, tired, and will then just start raiding the local population. This will make the locals hate the invading soldiers, and the soldiers will run out of bullets, and rockets, once they have killed to their ammo-supply limit. If you can prevent bandit-raiders from getting food and fuel, you can stop them from moving, and also disrupt their ability to kill. Once stopped, they can be carefully targeted, and ended.

But it truly looks like weaponery will be the growth-business of the 21st century. Peace is pretty much finished, especially when there are advanced, hyper-militarized neo-fascist states like Israel, that have basically infinite-funding to degrade, disrupt and destroy their neighbours. There is now zero chance of any peaceful living for any nation near the religious-racist Israeli murder-state, and it's psychopathic war-criminal leader, Netanyahu. Increased investments in military technology will be the requirement of all nations in the Middle East now. Oil will probably become less important than C4 and enriched uranium. You don't even need to build an atom device, just a bunch of low-tech rockets filled with enriched uranium dust exploded over Tel Aviv will be enough to discourage anyone from ever visiting that filthy, radioactive kill-capital, and that would disrupt and degrade the Israel war-economy.

Given the actions of the Israeli's, and the nut-job war-talk of President-in-Waiting Donald Trump, there is zero chance for peace with anyone, anywhere, it looks like.

This will be great for the USA economy - for a while - but there is no question that it will create a strong dynamic for the "Deny / Defend / Depose" strategy to by tried - again and again, until eventually an actionable result is obtained. Call it the "Mangione Doctrine". Or maybe the "Trump-Solemani" gambit? Whatever.

A future of constant, on-going, low-level warfare - which is already in place, and is already up and running in "prototype" mode - is almost certainly the future of the next 20 or more years, going forward. The USA as "Strong-man" - with it's Cuban Torture-Camps, and it's censorship-driven Deep State organs - will not really change under a Trump presidency. They will be strengthened, most likely.

And so every "strong-man" dictator will be able now to point to Assad and Gadaffi and the poor bastards who tried to oppose the Taliban in Afgahnistan (and who all got betrayed by the USA cutting and running like thieves in the night), and say "You cannot trust the lying Americans. They will talk big, talk about 'human rights' and 'rule-by-our-law', and then the evil bastards will just bomb your homes - just like the Russians do. Your *only* hope, is with me and my party, and we will protect and defend our homeland, so the filthy Americans and murdering jews will not come here and rape our women, and kill our children!"

That is obviously a bogus arguement. But as solid, effective rhetoric, it will get the local gang elected, so it can do the raping and murdering, without calling in the American or Jewish forces, or the Russian mercenaries.

We think the future will be violent. "Peace" has left the building, maybe for several decades. Watching the way both Israel and USA have bombed "Syrian targets" - 250 air strikes by the Israeli's in the last three days - and 75 strikes by USA "Central Command" forces, as the rebels took Damascus - war is now programmed as the only solution, for any people of courage. The murderous Jews and the kill-crazy American "shoot first, question later" bombers are now hated by very large numbers of ordinary people who have watched their entire nations be destroyed, and their family and friends be killed.

Maybe the only way that powerful nations-of-violence can be effectively countered, is by means of the "Deny / Defend / Depose" doctrine. We do not favour or support this strategy, but it is becoming obvious that no other opposition action has any actionable outcome. It seems this is the only method available to those nations and groups that do not have their own fleet of bomber aircraft, and armed aircraft carriers.

We strongly suspect that this ongoing "business-model" of kicking a nation and it's people when it is down, and unable to respond effectively, will eventually cause the destruction of Israel and maybe even America itself. The Americans might want to consider that at some point in the near future, American cities themselves may come under attack, and be bombed and damaged, and hundreds of thousands of Americans killed, in much the same way as Jewish and American forces have targeted the various city-States of the Middle East.

This will be a bad outcome, and we seek to prevent this.

But we honestly caution that this outcome is what history suggests not only *will* happen, but in fact actually *must* happen, so that this unwise strategy of abusive mass-murder is understood by the American public to be sub-optimal and ultimately ineffective at ensuring security of the North American homeland.

Washington DC buildings are modelled on Rome, and Roman architecture. History suggests Washington will be sacked and burned at some point also, once American military power is degraded sufficiently to allow this to happen. Damascus fell without a fight, because almost everyone hated Assad. Once everyone hates America, and it's military is destroyed, can a similar transition take place in Washington? How can it not eventually happen?

It probably won't be for at least 50 or 100 years - but history says the American Empire will be taken down, and ended by some sort of reflexive N3 (Newton's Third Law) action, probably similar to what America has done to foreign nations. Imagine: Selective bombing of all American military targets, limited fusion strikes on all it's major military production locations, and so on. We don't advocate this - but it seems to be in the data. A national empire becomes an abusive murder-machine, creates torture-camps to abuse and kill it's political prisoners, and has a national government that is hated by the external world, and half of it's internal citizens, and eventually the walls of the Big-Empire house crack, and the walls fall down.

What is curious, is that no-one in USA seems to even talk about this.

If you bomb your enemies as a matter of routine, and also abuse and assault your economic partners, and if you regularly kick people when they are down, you have to expect that you will become hated, and the "Deny / Defend / Depose" strategy will eventually be used against you.

It's right there, in history - over and over and over again and again. Curious how few folks in the USA recognizes this risk factor. It was called "Revolution", long before Karl Marx wrote his silly economic-science-fiction nonsense.

[ Dec. 6, 2024 ] - Phasers On Stun
The phenomenon of phase-locking is interesting. Too complex to explain here, but it's slightly related to chaotic orbitals and Lyapunov exponents. What the F^%* does this have to do with market action? It characterizes the comically silly way the prices track in what looks like a "random" environment. It is "random" to us, because we cannot see or track the true generator, but the generator (really multiple generators) are still there. Can you hack the fractal dimension, and get some useful awareness? I still do not really know the answer to that question. Maybe and maybe not.

Can AI stuff help? It seems to. Which of course annoys me, which is also silly. Why should my own excellent models that I made, piss me off? I think it is perhaps my own obsessive compulsive desire for independent operation. This is a curious and non-ending problem. No one really wants to be the lab-rat, or the water-boy at the big game. We desire some sort of control of our destiny.

The more I read, the more I learn, the more I realize that I know not much of anything at all, nor even can I know. I always keep running into constraints and limits and things-that-stop-us. This is also annoying.

We all hope for the "Italian Navigator" to land, and that our reactors and disruptor-beams will work. But mostly they don't. Our rockets explode, and our trades go pear-shaped. All human knowledge seems to be seriously limited by what we actually are, and what we feel we really need to do.

Even honest doctors and physics-masters will admit the truth of this. Political persons and Economists typically do not.

So, what do I believe?

I believe I will have some breakfast.

[ Dec. 5, 2024 ] - Suzanne Takes You Down
And so does TD. And maybe BMO, for a few minutes... The trading in Cdn Bank stocks is nutty. The algos are hopping on the minor variations in earnings results - expected (by Analysts consensus) versus the actual, and the trading is goofy. TD has done 5.2 million shares in the first hour, and this is just on the TSE, nevermind the dark-markets that cannot be seen. The share price is off by almost 5.00 Cdn dollarettes (down $4.49, to 75.17 at at last look, around 10:35 am). This is a pretty big reaction - maybe more because TD folks now want to avoid issuing "guidence", which makes the algo players nervous, perhaps.

Holding bank stocks is a harsh way to make dividend income. Graham and Dodd warned that they really were almost unsuitable for rational investors looking for stable income, due to the nature of their business model - the banks get fat in fat times, and starve in lean times, and make their shareholders starve also. But these are now looking to be fat times, if sanity returns to USA-Stan. Maybe it will happen. The DOGE is a really good idea... so long overdue. An awful lot of "Government" can just be ended, and sent to the landfill. It's time the Lefty-Loons of this planet grasped this simple fact. Government is usually the problem, not the solution.

To call this bank-stock trading action "price discovery" is pretty fucking stupid.

It's "discovery", like going to Vegas helps you "discover" which slots the little silver ball will land on after the roulette-wheel stops spinning. What you "discover", is how random action works, when and maybe what the House edge actually is. (Hint: The House wins everything when the "0" and the "00" come up. If the wheel is true, (no magnets), then that edge will make the play sustainably profitable for the game provider. I really hate ludic shite, but Pascal did alright, and so did John Law, at first. One must learn the basics, just to survive.)

The problem (and solution) in Canada, is that the Banks here are tightly regulated, and make just fuck-loads of money. And they tend to pay out around half of each quarterly load, to their shareholders. This means you pretty much have to hold a big slug of this stuff to ride the train (and eat and pay your bills).

It's fun to watch USA fly up and fly down, a great aerobatic show. But we've paid the bills for 20 years, using bank dividends, and our only fear, is the goddamn Federal State, which likes to rape anyone who makes money here, because that is the basic business-model of Leftist Government. Every so often, we can throw the bastards out, and run true for a while, until the next manufactured "crisis". Then, the "bag-o-hammers" gang gets back in power, and prosperity is taken out behind the barn, and shot. Silly world.

But it could be worse. Like just about anywhere on the "World Island"... :)

We count our blessings every day, that we were born here and live in North America. Every family - even the original red-Indians - came here from the "other place", and all humans here have distant (or recent) family ancestors that took a fat risk and undertook dangerous-journey-style projects, to get here. The fecundity rate in Canada is something like 1.71 or maybe even lower. If we don't import people into this freezer, our nation expires. The math is brutal (and so is child-birth, I guess...)

"In Vitro We Trust"? Is that to be the motto of our collective future? Sometimes I think maybe, especially if there comes the big war that the Analysts who study history, think is coming. Sparta versus Athens.... and USA plus North-Am, versus the World-Island. Poor Japan, eh? They might be Poland this time. And the girls in Australia will get to stand On the Beach.

[ Dec. 4, 2024 ] - "Of Course, I've Had It In the Ear Before" - Iggy Pop
Damn, but it is getting crazy. The whole Korean "Martial Law" thing - it reminds me of our awful Pierre Trudeau, using the "War Measures Act" to deal with a rag-tag group of Quebec wanna-be "terrorists", back in 1970, if I recall correctly. All complete bullshit in both cases - and the Koreans dealt with it nicely, climbing over the goddamn fences, past the armed military arsefarts, and voting - 100%, all parties - to declare the President's decree illegal, which he then reversed.

I wondered what Michael Every has to say about this? He is an Analyst at Rabobank, and is one of the sharpest knives I have read. He writes with "verrve" (did I spell that right?), in a flippant style, but with passion and technical accuracy. I like and respect his work.

So, I found a piece by doing a Google search (he seems to have disappeared from the "Zerohedge" feed, where I used to find him.. Curious.)

Ok, here is his thing from Oct. 24, 2024, about Australia, and the RBA (he covers the Eastern sphere, so he talks about Australia... I always wanted to go there - but since they are banning the Internet for kids, don't allow private ownership of firearms, and seem to be going "full Batshit Lefty", I don't ever expect to see the place, because I think they are dangerously fucking stupid, sad to say. Just my opinion, maybe I am wrong...). But Michael Every's article is good, even if it's advice is wildly, over-the-top, wrong. I grasp why Mr. Every does not run money. He's a European Marxist.

https://www.forbes.com.au/covers/magazine/where-im-putting-the-money-michael-every/

In reading Mr. Every's piece, I did not realize how much of a hard-arsed "Lefty" he was. I expected to get something useful from the note - and instead, it was typical bullshit along the lines of "the Government must DO SOMETHING!" kind of dogshit blather we get all the fucking time in Canada. FUck, but I am tried of a$$holes advocating Capital-Gains Taxes and other shit to damage property owners. The fucking shit-for-brains types that provide advice (and write this lefty shit), all seem to think that high house prices are something that requires higher fucking taxes. They want $50,000 per year property tax rates on $5 million dollar properties. That's a bad idea.

Well, let me just say - if the clown-squads that operate the Government systems in Canada try this sort of shit here - they will be removed, and this will be done by any means possible.

We have some fucking fools trying to expropriate farm-land here, for some secret stupid factory shit project - it's maybe a Tesla plant or an EV battery-plant or some stupid PPP bullshit thing that will supposedly create "jobs" for the immigrants that the Ottawa clowns are flooding into our community here. This is fine - but if they are gonna attack existing property owners and steal their multi-generational property - these sorry, stupid lefty-fools are gonna be in for a helluva fight.

And if the rich Toronto lawyers figure out a way to do the expropriations using "emminent domain" tricks - which was NEVER meant to be used for private-business projects, then the fight will get real ugly, real fast, I suspect. If they want to take my property, they will want to be wearing body armor. :) (Just kidding!.... not)

I never realized what a curious lefty bad-head Mr. Every really was. He simply does not at all understand the need for free people able to have fee-simple title to their own property. Even if it is tiny property - the Chinese model, where ALL property is owned by the corrupt, Marxist pure-evil STATE, is going to bring down their economy. I used to buy Chinese products, before that toxic psychopath Xi Jinping took control of China. That was sad and tragic. And it means we cannot use Chinese goods anymore, nor trust Chinese agents. This understanding Mr. Every grasps - but his recommendations - that national Governments move against the Roman land-tenure model of free people owning their own property - this is where poor Mr. Every just falls into the European sink-hole of Marxist nonsense-thinking, and he even spouts the insanely fuck-stupid nonsense shit-talk expressions like "fictious capital", which is just pure, toxic, insanely-stupid garbage. (This is such toxic bullshit, it is curious that an educated human in the 21st century would spout this. It is like "Flat-Earther" talk, and denies all science, economics and basic financial mathematics. Go read how the useful number "e" in math, was discovered, if you doubt the truth of my assertion here.)

It's a weird world. There is madness afoot everywhere now. Globalism, and mercantile economics with serious INequality, is way better than nuclear-war and nuclear-winter. And it probably won't be nuclear weapons - it will be ***bioweapons*** and virus-agents deployed by drones and/or maybe DHL, FedEx and UPS.

What "Governments" of the world need to do, is to just fucking, fuck the fuck off. "Government" is always the problem. Always. This is the true truth of humanity.

All the horror, cruelty, stupidity and toxic madness is generated by Government agents, and Government operatives, doing stupid, community-damaging, world-killing big, stupid projects. Always. They are the "Big-Cheating-Machine-Which-Takes-and-Kills". Always.

Central banks should probably be ended, and replaced with algorithmically run "Currency Boards" which CANNOT screw around with the money-supply. Maybe we go back to using paper-chits on gold and silver, stored in vaults. That actually works not bad.

Government spending should be restricted to military self-defence efforts, and the managment of the nuclear weapons. All nations should have significant nuclear weapons capacity. That would ensure peace would break out everywhere.

And we should *respect* and *nurture* inequality. Humans are NOT equal, and never will be. Every calls it "feudalism". Oh, please. Europe is a fucking toxic collection of lefty-loons, who have spent 2000 years fighting insane wars with each other. Only England and Switzerland makes any sense politically. The rest is noise. The property-owning English gentry, were the political mechanism that allowed parliamentry democracy to be re-invented (after 2400 years), and they executed a fucking "royal" to make this point very clear, for every fucking King-guy everywhere. Jesus, Michael, did you not read the real history of the World? Europe has been a Fight-Club, and offered little. All democracy happened in UK, USA and Canada, and everytime, it took some hard conflict to make it, and keep it.

Look at the failure-storm of Europe: Germany seems determined to self-destruct itself. Again. Should this be a surprise? France is bankrupt and it's government of ENARCists has fallen yet again. FFS.

And Russia lives only to make war on every single one of it's neighbours. Maybe it's just time to launch? The place will NEVER choose peace, because it is not in their DNA. They live only for conflict. So be it. It's all one has to know. NATO is just fucking around, scratching it's ass, and waiting to be attacked. But first, they want to watch their only possible ally, get killed and whacked by Russian psychopathic sadists. FFS - again.

China just needs to be left alone. Eventually, they will fall back into a state of civil war, and emerge with a lot less people. Their current situation is not sustainable, and cannot continue much longer. Until they give up on this Marxist shit, and replace their Government, we need to avoid them. If they want conflict, they can have civil war, and reduce their population. Maybe the USA defends Taiwan, and maybe not. Depends if TMSC is up and running in Arizona, or where-ever they are building the new missle-guidence chips.

What nations like Canada and USA and Australia need to do, is to HOLD HARD to their true property-based, advanced-economy based, economic models, and not succumb to the fuck-stupid, toxic thinking of European Leftists who argue that there needs to be "equality". Equality is a bogus, bullshit concept, designed to justify property theft. Please, oh please, learn this simple truth.

It's ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been difficult for young people buy houses. But it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE - just difficult. Fuck, I know of what I speak. You get help from the "Bank of Dad" maybe for your first property. Or you use the Ricardo model (the best and greatest economist ever born), and you go out to the margin - the margin-of-cultivation, the model Ricardo used to explain rising rents on Scotish lands. Sure, you maybe need to remove the parasite people living in stone huts who mainly spend their time drinking and fucking - but the sheep are valuable, and the textile mills need wool. Economics works. And free-market economics works way, way better than any other model.

Let me write it again: Economics in a free market environment just WORKS. And it works good.

The Lefties of Europe have been pissing on free-market economics, since the times of the corrupt Kings and the Holy Roman Empire. It was the English and the Swiss who showed the path to prosperity. And then, came America (and Canada and Australia, as English colony projects).

The Anglo-Saxon economic model is the only one that really works.

Watch and see. China will immolate itself, if it does not convert to real, honest, fair, true Roman-style fee-simple land-tenure property ownership. It has zero future, other than warfare and violence and extreme conflict, and the resulting poverty that will result. Millions - tens-of-millions - will die needlessly, unless Xi Jinping and his Marxist bullshit view of things, is not utterly ended. The bastard needs to be dragged from his office, and ended like Mussolini was.

Poor Mr. Every just does not really grasp how crazy-important the correct economic land-tenure model is. It is just exactly the OPPOSITE of feudalism. It's odd and strange that he does not see this. It is really strange, actually. It must be a European-mind-fuck thing, maybe.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. Every. The Canadian "middle-class" (what a fucking toad-brained Marxist fool might call the "petite-bourgois" folks) have been hard-core radicalized since 1836-37. We burned down the first Montreal Parliament buildings, and we may have to do the same to Ottawa, at some point, if the clowns there keep trying to hurt and kill us. Really. We have ALWAYS been radical. What is so crazy-comical, is that the political parties here, have switched roles - the Liberals are now the elite, corrupt "Family Compact", and the Tories are now the "Free Markets for Free People" economic and cultural Liberationists. It's amazing and hilarious.

Watch the next little while, and see what I mean. The game is afoot.

Conclusion: Here is my key point. Mr. Every was asked: "Where should an Aussie put his shrinking (really shrinking) Aussie-dollar assets?" Note that Mr. Every does NOT answer this question. He avoids it and spouts about what "Government" should do. This just made the top of my head explode. I found it, and stuck it back on. I read Every's article, and wrote the above blather, because I have this same problem, and I have crafted a Canadian solution. It's not great - but it has worked. It would have been better buying Nvidia (like my old trading buddy and genius East-European retired Analyst friend did). But I am keeping the bills paid, and the capital has not all melted down, like Leonard Cohen's famous song about what your hard-on might do in the rain. I will answer the question Mr. Every would not: Look at your own domestic market, find what companies are making just stupid amounts of money, and try to buy these at dividend yields that are safe (ie. have a long history), are above the long-term bond-yield rates, and have reasonable economic "moats" around their castle-companies. Think like a Japanese castle-lord, or a Scottish "Laird", and recognize there will be many forces trying to harm you, and steal your wealth, even if it is little. Be focused on that, and seek to align your income to expenses, which is a trick in this modern world - but it can be done. Seek **control** in all you invest in, and for major portfolio choices, go with large, stable orgs which can leverage technology to make them remain alive and continue. Here, in Canada, that means Banks and Telecoms. The Banks have done OK, but our Telecoms have been whacked badly by truly stupid **Government** policy decisions. There is NO stability in anything, anymore, so try for some growth, and that means USA technology companies. Avoid Europe like a nest of rattle-snakes. I bought some Swiss banks shares (how can the Swiss not do banking right, eh? And I watched them explode into almost nothing.) Credit Suisse was undone by being fucking stupid. First rule of survival, in the 21st century: Know that your counter-party is probably lying to you, and jump out quick, when you see he is doing something stupid. Second Rule: Since everyone is being fucking stupid now, that means you need to be very light on your feet. Do NOT be the Ant. You must be the Grasshopper, in your investments, and you MUST learn to trade, and sometimes trade hard. This is a very hard skill to learn. But you need to learn it. For special Australian case: Use the Ricardo trick. Find some land out at the margin, and acquire it, and get StarLink for internet, and find something on the internet that can make money. When you find it, send me an email, and tell me what it is. (I have not found anything yet, except selling stuff online, which is silly and risky.) The only thing I have found that makes money using the internet, is stock trading, and it is a very difficult game to master. I go for months, not trading. I've build AI models that help, and keep getting surpised that they work as well as they do. It causes me real psychological conflict, since the hard-core economist in me, rebels against this. I feel like "Number 6" in that 1960's British TV series, called "The Prisoner". I am a human, not a robot and not a number. And I have difficult giving control to the robot. Really. It is a real problem for me. I use the AI stuff, because it makes me money - but I don't like this. Sometimes I have to do trades that make me feel like barfing. I can handle that, but it is the AI-driven approach that causes me curious discomfort. But good results, mostly come from doing things that scare you, and make you feel like throwing up your lunch. :)

Investing is hard - and investing for profit is even harder. I am happy to maintain capital and draw off yield. But Gerald Loeb warned this is not the right way to approach the Stock Market, and I think he is right. Also, I am pretty sure major war is on the horizon, except it will not look like what we think. It will be something we don't expect. So get prepared for extreme scenarios. And learn to love INequality, by seeking out true quality things and people, and removing all the low-quality garbage from your life and your portfolios - both yours and the ones you manage. This is harsh advice - but it is critical to accept and act upon.

Hope this helps some good folks.

[ Dec. 3, 2024 ] - Green Onions - Roasted, Fried or Mashed...
The bank stock we hold reported earnings today, and the share-price puked hard. Quite a downtick, with a minor earnings miss and most numbers looking reasonable, except for the fact that the cyclic nature of market price "discovery" (just about the silliest term ever coined), has a curious ugly dynamic.

I am not sure why the thing trades the way it does - this AM, it was "dump this thing at whatever price you can get for it", whereas yesterday, all looked stable and fine. Dividends are being paid, and operations are being rationalized (sort of), but it looks like "executive compensation" is in some kind of unclear growth process which seems designed to harm shareholders. The market response to the earnings (1.57/shr adjusted, versus 1.60 expected), seems wildly overdone. The stock imploded almost 4% at the open, and is trading down over 3% as I key this.

One bright spot is that the "share purchase plan" will no longer be issuing shares from the bank "Treasury", and will actually have to acquire the shares in the open market. Minting "Treasury" shares is just truly bogus, and I am surprised that this nonsense is accepted by the Toronto Stock Exchange. But the TSE is a pure "for-profit" enterprise, that runs for the boys in the club, and if small-holders and "retail" shareholders are getting fucked, the TSE does not care, unless the optics get *really* bad.

The bank income tax number was over 23%, which is really just a bit much, since the banks in Canada are getting regularly whacked by the almost-but-not-quite criminal-group that is running the country, so we find this curious and rather sad. The banks have these high tax rates, and are also hit with "Special" taxes to cover out-of-control government spending (Eg. the wildly stupid Covid-19 response), and so the banks pay their dividends out of what is left, after also paying too much for over-priced employees, and running the usual bloated cost structures. Then the poor "retail" folk who hold the equity paper, have their dividends "grossed-up", so as to artificially inflate what their income is, so higher sur-taxes and special "health-care" taxes can be applied to these fake "high income" people. It's comical. You have to report this truly, completely FAKE income tax number - based on the "grossed-up" dividend income, and then you get a little place where you can deduct the "eligible dividends" from the money you owe as income-tax, on this completely fake, synthetic, false "grossed-up" dividend-income number. It is just completely bogus.

But if you earn dividend-income, you need to realize that the banks pay abusive and silly tax rates on the income they make, then they pay dividends, and these get amplified by stupid income-tax rules, that make it look like you are getting this big income from your dividends, except the number is completely fake and artificial. So the government first tax-hammers the banks, and then, when you file your income tax, you get taxed again, on receiving the after-tax income that is left. So YOU get to pay tax again on it also, if you are not careful. This is just wrong.

Canada has a comically insane and absurd "income-tax" regime, which ensures that folks have a really hard time in creating any surplus wealth to allow for investment and retirement. You live tax-payment to tax-payment, especially if you have real-estate, which has ever-rising property tax costs that support municipal and provincial levels of government which try to avoid providing any services (Limited or no garbage collection, no fire-protection and limited police services - the municipal "responders" can put up yellow-tape if some bad stuff happens, but basically, you are on your own. This is fine, but the taxes to support non-delivery of services always goes up each year... and when you see the collection of "planners" and "regulators" at any land-use zoning change discussion, you see why this is the case. It is just comical - the poor bloody property-owner trying to get permission to do something, is the only bastard in the room NOT getting a fat government salary for "Planning Board" regulation action, which is basically mostly a bunch of lefty-folks saying "No, you cannot do that without more planning activity by some more agency arsefarts". So, you give up on your building project, and go home. It's pretty funny, really. Sorta like "Waiting for Godot"... )

There really should not be ANY corporate income tax at all. It's absurd, because it just means hard-core double-taxation takes place. And then, after this absurd "double-taxation", every single item for sale here is subject to an abusive 13% "Harmonized Sales Tax", which makes every single thing silly-overpriced in Canada. And god help you if you buy anything expensive, because the wuckfits in Ottawa, - along with their insane "Carbon Tax", have also put a 20% tax on "Luxury Goods" - like pickup-trucks and electric cars, which can easily cost over $100,000 Cdn dollarettes now, because that is just the new price regime, and the Canadian dollar is in the junk-currency toilet. It's the "Northern Peso" now, sadly.

And just to add icing on the poop-cake the Liberals are feeding us here - these a$$holes have now introduced a massive new "capital-gains tax" regime, which is just a pure tax on asset-price inflation. In a badly-run economy, with massive money-supply creation taking place, which causes inflation, putting a capital-gains tax on inflation-increases in asset-values, is just pure economic theft by a bunch of sleaze-bag scammers. There should not be any "capital-gains" tax. It is just a complete economic scam, as it is a tax on inflationary-gains, that you must have, in order to offset the ugly effects of price inflation. It's curious that Canadians allow the scammers of the Ottawa Fed-Hole thing to continue to exist.

I really don't want to complain - but I have to say, that it might just be necessary to remove or just *end* the current "Federal System" we have here. We could basically just knock Ottawa to the ground, and bulldoze the entire city rubble into the Ottawa River, to create a useful hydro-electric dam. That would really be a wonderful exercise, because truly and really, the "Federal" structure we have now, is just a money-harvesting scheme to create an elite class of trough-diving, hard-core double-dippers, growing fat off the money they extract from Northern businesses and consumers. This needs to change.

Ottawa really contributes nothing, and just ending the toxic "Federal Government", would offer a massive benefit to Canadians. I've worked in Ottawa several times, and I can honestly say, we would all be better off, if the entire thing - all the "Ministries" - just did not exist. They contribute nothing of real value, and they cost massive amounts of wealth to maintain. All the "work" done in Ottawa could be shifted to Provincial governments or private agencies, and the entire "Federal" system could be ended. It is a pure exercise in economic parasitism.

And the Canadian banks and Canadian corporations, and Canadian citizen-taxpayers, would reap immediate and significant benefits. It would make us more free and more wealthy, if we could just end Ottawa "Federalism".

Like the Tim Armstrong song: "Hit the town, and burn it to the ground!"

If only we could, eh? Sadly, it's a "Dream Story", since there are way, way too many orgs, entities and fat-bastards all sucking at the big, Ottawa money-tit. So nothing can ever change here. We get the same bone-stupid policy-plans by the same leftist political-fraudsters, year after year, decade after decade. And nothing ever changes, except maybe the names of the political toads.

[ Nov. 28, 2024 ] - Cavaliers, Roundheads, Democracy and Caca
When people think "Civil War", they think USA and the North vs. the South. But of course, the Civil War that informed our history the most, was the English Civil War of the 1600's. It was a truly fascinating conflict, with tragic and significant events which defined the modern world that we now inhabit. It was "Parliament" versus the forces of English King Charles the First.

King Charles I raised his flag at Nottingham, August 22, 1642. At the beginning of September (the 9th), an army that supported Parliament marched out of London to fight for Parliament, against the King. The English Civil War went on for five years, until the King's forces were defeatd in 1647. But this was not the end. Another outbreak of war happened in 1648, and the King's forces were defeated again. King Charles I was executed in 1649, by having his head cut off. The King's severed head was placed on a 60-foot pole in central London, where it remained, until it was given a proper burial at the request of Charles's son, who assumed the role of King Charles the Second, in 1660.

The story of the English Civil War is intertwined with truly awful religious conflict. People can argue anything they want, when they refer to an entity that does not exist - and the conflicts between the Catholics and those who protested against the corrupt and outright evil of the Catholic reglious establishment, were "Protestants". In Catholic France, they were hunted and killed, while in Germany, the Lutherans gained political power.

In England, several attempts were made - ultimately successful - which allowed for religious tolerance. But the level of violence - especially as practiced by the Catholics - was, by design, extreme.

But the Parliamentary forces, eventually led by Oliver Cromwell, were equally extreme. Under the rule of Cromwell's "Pikers" (the military forces, often armed with long wooden pikes, with sharp metallic knives afixed to the ends), drinking and dancing were forbidden. This seems hard to believe, but it seems to be in the historical record. There is a good summary of the conflict, at this site:

What I find interesting about the English Civil War, is how it often divided families, with one brother supporting the King, while another brother supported Parliament. The various regions - typically each County - in England were often held for either Parliament, or for the King. And even more interesting, were the situations where country-folk often formed their own protection groups, to protect their lands and their people from both forces.

And those folks who left on the ship "Mayflower", and decided to make a new beginning in the wild lands of America, (and who created the American holiday of "Thanksgiving"), were from the defeated Cromwellian forces - and were also from the strict, no-dancing and no-drinking hard-core "Piker" side of the conflict - the radical anti-Catholic Protest sects.

A good friend of mine had a father who was a respected Professor of Physics. My friend, as a teenager, was at a wedding or some sort of celebration, which was mostly Catholics. He asked his father an important question: "Can I get a beer, here? Do they drink?" (His parents were supposed to be Baptists, who did not drink alcohol). His father is reported to have replied: "Sure. Just go up to the bar, and say: "Hail Mary! Gimme a beer!" ".

Of course, this expression became our mantra at the Campus pub.

When all is said and done, I have little use for any religion. But the idea of Thanksgiving is a good one, and should be practiced by all people. We are crazy-lucky just to be alive, and to experience the wild randomness of this curious planet, in this astonishingly interesting Universe.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends! (And "Hail Mary! Gimme a beer!" )

[ Nov. 25, 2024 ] - Atomic Balm!
Life in the future continues to be curiously amusing. The stupid Leftist/Neo-Marxist Governments of the Western World, are maybe finally going to get some needed medical treatment for their curious and ever-expanding levels of insanity. This is a good thing. The medicine may be harsh, but the poor patient has become quite ill. The "Ship of State", seems to resemble a Hospital Ship now, in many Socialist countries. Change is coming. Many of those highly-paid "iron-rice-bowl" government folks, are going have to retire, or get real jobs. Be good for them, and also for the poor, long-suffering (and money-short!) taxpayers.

Things are changing. I saw a "CyberTruck" for real, in the wild, on the local city expressway/ring-road on Saturday. I was on my way to an electronics store, which is beside the local Tesla dealer, and noticed there were no CyberTrucks at the Tesla dealership. But there is at least one on the local road.

The idea of the CyberTruck is good, and I wonder how the implementation is playing out. What is now comical in Canada, is that there is some insane (completely truly mad) new "Luxury Tax", that has been brought in by Fidel Castro's bastard child's Party, and the leftist Nutjob-Demoflack-Penisheads, (the NDP) who are running the Ottawa Fed-thing. This tax is something like 10 or 20 percent, depending on the phases of the moon, or something curious like that, and applies to vehicles costing over $100,000 dollars Canadian, which seems like a lot of money, but since it is "Canadian" dollars, it's maybe roughly $70,000 US (in real dollars).

So, if you happen to look at the cost of any EV (Electric Vehicle) which has a battery-pack big enough to drive from London Ontario, to Montreal and back, you will typically find it costs over $70K USD, or $100,000 Cdn. You can get some green-scam kickback for buying an EV, but then you will get solidly fucked on the "Luxury Tax" vigourish, along with, of course, the "Holy Shit! Tax", (the HST), which is currently 13%.

And all this means, that unless you are some rich mother-doing Toronto Lawyer, or a retired RIM/Blackberry cashed-out-early billionaire, you are probably going to keep your old rusty Chev Malibu or Toyota thumper-box running, until it suffers meltdown when the Sun goes super-nova.

The economics in Canada is so comically silly now, it is hard to keep up with the insanity. The stupid Post Office is - guess what - on fucking strike. Again. Like is the case every few years. The minimum-wage in Ontario is now 20 or more dollars (Canadian dollarettes, yes, sure..) but this just means that all restaurants are silly expensive, and even coffee-shops take VISA card payments, since a fancy coffee can hit $5-to-$7 quite easily. A single rum-and-coke, at a nice Vietnamese restaurant is $9.95. It's nice, with real "Coca Cola" and good Jamaican rum - but the price means you do your drinkin' at home now.

Suddenly, every goddamn thing is crazy-priced. And the stuff has not really changed - a rum and coke is still a rum-and-coke - but the cost of running an economically viable restaurant is probably a number that is going vertical/ballistic. So they gotta make some gain to offset their goof-level rising costs.

So, we rarely eat out. This is one of the pleasures of farm-life. We can truly grow and process our own food, and trade our own portfolios, given we have access to the StarLink low-orbiting satellites. The Starlink system works very well. It is a good thing, just like Tesla's, if they were not so goddamn insanely expensive - and taxed up the ying-yang now, which seems so silly and stupid. Like our gun laws here... completely, absurdly, insane.

We sit - literally and figuratively - on mountains of raw wealth here in this country. And yet, because of crazy-bad government, we piss it away on stupid schemes which seem designed to destroy national wealth. It is curious, hilarious and just a tiny bit tragic.

We have more oil than Saudi Arabia, smarter and better-educated engineers and science-folk than any other country on the planet (by per-capita), and enough yellow-cake Uranium to power all the nuclear reactors of the world, for hundreds of years into the future.

If we could just deal with the terrible "Ottawa Problem" and end the "Federal Agency" blob, and locally direct our tax money into local wealth-generating schemes, instead of stupid "Social Welfare Programs" that motivate sloth, dependency and bad behaviour, (and hence destroy wealth), we could be the richest nation on the planet. But that is not likely to happen, given the squirrels-in-their-heads socialists (mostly female), who vote the pretty-boys up to the Ottawa Fed-Hole. We know our bone-stupid political model cannot be fixed.

But it makes for a fun "Thought-Experiment", thinking about what might be possible, as we view the fine and good actions Argentina has been taking, and read about what USA might actually try to do, once the dishonest and corrupt Washington "Agencies" are reformed. :)

We wish the new "DOGE" well, and hope they have great success. (And yes, WTF is there a "Federal" Department of Education for? WTF? Education is a State by State responsibility. A Federal Agency is complete bullshit, of course. Wonder if DOGE will be able to nuke-the-nonsense? Best of luck, guys!)

[ Nov. 19, 2024 ] - Hey! Ho! And Up She Rises!
Old sea-shanty about whaling - the whale would break the surface, (they have to breathe air), and the whalers would fire harpoons-with-ropes from guns to try to catch the whales. Whales were crazy valuable - from their meat, to their oil, their bones, and so on. Even their seamen was used in cosmetic production, apparently.

I will update the AI forecasts for our bank-stock we hold in quantity. See the charts on the first page, down at end of page. Things are getting hot. We need the sailor-songs to describe stock prices - and then locate the "Customer's Yachts". The customers seem to be TV-stars, politicians and leftist-lawyers. Funny world, and getting funnier each day now. Putin apparently wants to nuke us all. "Wham, Bam, and Thank-you, Man", I guess. Risk is all over the place.

The forecasts turned up a couple of weeks ago, and we have swung in and out several times, and remain all-in, fully invested. Our sense is there is greater risk sitting in cash, than being invested in dividend-paying financials, as we face rising expenses for just about every damn thing you could imagine. Inflation continues to run hot, in the basic things that folks need to acquire and pay for to survive (eg. taxes, energy, food, rent and many consumer products...). The bubbling sound is likely going to continue.

The MSM (MainStream Media) "LeftNews Vomit" continues to amuse us all. Apparently, some lawyer in Florida is being profiled on ABC News in USA, because he has some tarts as clients, who claim this fellow Gaetz flew them to New York, and had sex with them. Apparently, in New York, it is now illegal for men to have sex with women? Curious. The issue seems to be that the women received financial compensation for this trip. So whoring is illegal in NYC? Really? In the place which is known for fucking the entire world, and growing rich from doing this, it is unlawful to fuck for money? I find the USA MSM leftnews-stuff just weirdly silly. It is like political-science-fiction now.

Oh, another thing I need to add here. TOday, as I'm reviewing the market action, I learned or determined yet another gem... There is maybe something like: "The Fine Art of Leaving Shit Alone". This is a real thing. Often times, there are natural processes that have good homeostatic properties in that if you shock the system, after a while, it will re-stabilize, and return to a reasonably balanced range of operational values. This is generally a good thing. If this process was *NOT* universal, then every damn thing would accelerate wildly out of control, and blow-up/crash/explode/burn-down or some other kind of radical state-change action.

Therefore, if you have the time-horizon, and can tolerate the range of the swing-action, you can gain - sometimes - fine results, by just leaving a process alone.

This applies for more than just market price action. It is all over the place in biology and medicine and medical practice ("He got quite sick, and we had to stay with him, to protect him from the Doctors..."). But it even works in social process, and politics and all sorts of other domains and ranges, depending on your views of the mapping process.

Also, it's wise to follow your heart.

This sounds like wimpy, emotional goof-advice... but it is not. It means that one might do best, by following one's (seemingly irrational) desire and "feelings", despite the mound of evidence to suggest contrary action. This is kind of a strange thing. But I have seen it again and again - a decision that looks kind of goofy - example, buying island property in a northern lake, that no one wanted at all, even at a low price, turned out to be the most spectatularly successful investment I ever made in my life. It was a 10-bagger. That is really a curious thing - obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it looked almost a little bit insane. I just did it because I wanted it in some deep way.

And it maybe might happen again. My "Northern Office" property, on a lake even farther north, has turned into a not-bad investment also, despite various and numerous problems I have encountered with it. Curious how this process-of-human-desire actually works.

What it comes down to - basically - is just a "trust your own heart and your own gut", as this information may be vastly better for you, than all the analysis-paralysis and foolishness offered by others. Just be prepared to take responsibility for what you do, and your own decisions. This is pretty important also. If it starts to feel really wrong, then maybe it is. The time to shorten your sail, and reef-the-main, is when you first think that it might be a good idea. You do not need to wait until you are in the storm-front, to make the decision to act. It will be harder then, also. Much easier to do preparations when all is fine and nice, rather than wait until things are really in a proper shit-storm.

Hope this information helps a young person, who might be trying to plot a course. A lot of times, you really feel you have almost no clue. But really, you do.

You are the Captain of your own life, and you have the power. And you have the knowledge, sometimes, even if you do not actually know that you do. :)

[ Nov. 18, 2024 ] - Rolling on a River?
And living the life of a "Riverboat Gambler"? Yesterday, I bought a little .243 calibre rifle, from a local gunshop. Sadly, the RCMP website was down, and so the shop manager could not obtain a "transfer" number to allow me to take my new (old) rifle home with me. Comical. We are trapped in a nasty "digital world" now, which mostly does not work very well. Folks who propose and design and deploy new (and old) technological solutions, should grasp, understand, and accept this fact. The moden technical approach to social regulations, really mostly just sucks. It sucks so hard, it creates a low pressure front.

You always need to have viable fall-back solutions, for when the not-well-designed technical methods, stop working. This is quite often, nowadays.

This will always happen when you most *need* the technology to work, or at least that is what old Dr. Murphy said, as he crafted his law of annoying technical realities.

You try to roll with what the river and the sea throws at you. Surf on top of the waves, or ride along on plane, along the crest ridges, and try not to slide down into a trough, and get tumbled into a bad situation.

Easier said, (or written), that it is typically done.

We have another insanely beautiful, November day, with a lovely bright sun rising out in front of the ranch house. Feels more like Arizona, than Ontario. :) I bought 20 rounds of Federal .243, and it cost $52.00, plus tax. The tax is 13% here, and this means each *BANG* with each lovely big cartridge is $3.00. Bang! Bang! and Bang! and then maybe Bang!. That's 12 bucks, right there. And without any big deer (or gophers) in sight!

Things still look pretty positive. But I notice the DJIA futures are downticking. Does this mean changes ahead? Weak market on Friday, often means a strong one on Monday. Not sure why this is the case, maybe it's weather related? Funny times. FD: We remain, all in, long, and we note the strengthening financials (banks, mostly) are an encouranging sign, Our biggest bank holding is recovering significantly, but the phone company - our supposedly low-risk utility investment, is doing a down-hill, off-pist downslide. Yes, I should have sold it, but I think I was asleep, perhaps. :D

[ Nov. 17, 2024 ] - Member's Only
It's always a private party, right? We are past where the last mile ends, so this gates our strategies, and restricts us to those nickels in front of the steam-roller. But that's all good. The abstraction from the Big City, gives us peace - except when I eat too much for dinner, and feel too full.

So, what does the new diet look like? How far can the world "slim down", without it brings too much of a harsh response? Can we dial-back government excess, and still keep the whole system growing and producing wealth? It's obvious that we have to change the current program, but every expenditure is some fat-bastard's income, and this simple reality limits the range of what can be done, at the Federal level of a failing economic model. We can "early retire" the bastards, but then, they eat away the pension funds that are needed by the kids.

It's a real problem. Nations can become fat and addicted to over-consumption, just like fat people can. Slimming down is gonna hurt - no matter how absolutely necessary it is. We can't do it all with drugs. There has to be change of diet - change of actively levels (more needs to be done by fewer), and technology that actually works correctly (not the usual "good enough for government" approach.

Can this happen? Sure. But there will be real pain. What do we do with all those insane, worthless fat slags, that are currently eating at the "free-money" trough? They can't all just sit at home, watching TV+Youtube and buying shit on Amazon, without there is some real income coming from somewhere. The funds that are being set aside for pension-investment, actually need to be wisely INVESTED, for the current crop of young workers, actually doing real work (there must be some, somewhere, right?). All the tax-and-pension money has to be invested for those actually doing the work of youth - and not be used to fund fat skanks sitting at home eating the national surplus, while they watch cat-videos on Youtube.

The USA has developed the "Canadian Disease" - heavy economic over-regulation, armies of "civil servants" doing jobs that don't really need to be done, and bloat and more bloat in the ever-expanding City, State and Federal Bureaus-of-Bloatation and Blobification. Can they actually fix this? Can we re-train "DEI" or "Green Inspectors" or "Environmental Skankifcationists" as welders, pipe-fitters and house-framers? The fat-bastard big-arsed women of the Departments of Bloat are gonna have trouble re-training as roofers, no matter how much the roof of your house or office-building is leaking. If they fall off the roof, or from other high places, the mess will be awful, and they might cause great damage and/or injury to those below. We can't make them all "washroom attendents". (Or, maybe we can?)

It's all very unclear. We need to change the program - especially at the level of the government departments. But that is gonna be tough, if we cannot find places to put all the goomers and bloated trough-divers who have become addicted to the free-money-for-showing-up lifestyle. Plus, they will howl and whine and bitch that they are being hard done by, of course.

How did that "B-Ark" idea actually work again?...

[ Nov. 15, 2024 ] - Swingin' Harsh Business
Good gracious, it is getting strange and ugly... weirdly difficult now to execute any sort of profitable strategy anywhere, other than buy-and-hold the Mag-7 "Big Tech" stocks, or nonsense like Bitcoin. We are agnostic on crypto - hell, we don't even like fiat money, as it carries with it the wild risks and ugly baggage of a domestic economy out-of-control, and bubbling with never-to-be-paid-down debt. Sure, the debt will maybe be paid down in *nominal* (ie. numbers) terms, but the currency used to pay it down, will be peso-toilet paper type money. I have a art-thing I put on my office wall, with Weimar Republic D-marks, some Austrian money with a pretty girl as the face-glyph, and other lovely crown-covered stuff that is completely worthless (except to silly "hunters and collectors" like me), and it every day reminds me that all fiat money only operates at the pleasure of some bunch of drunken, sleazy government hacks. Most stocks also. I have "IOS" paper share certificates which I want to frame, and also some other worthless stuff I found among my father's papers. (He was a Dentist who actually did very, very well as an investor, beating the snot out of insurance companies (with his annuities that bankrupted them), and then long-dated Bank GIC's to get between 8 and 11 percent, always. Most of his big gains were in shrewd real-estate investments, despite his unloading the family farm, at some stupid low price, back in the 1960's (Farm land was almost worthless..) Strange - so strange - how the worm turns. Farmland is now worth *millions*.

Real investment survival is a goddamn battle - just like Mr. Loeb explained.

Your only chance, is to be like very skeptical, except when you are not, and then go nuts, and dive in with both feet. This is a kind of insane way to live - but it is the essence of the insane world we live within, yes? For guys who wish to understand the stock markets, a course of dating females is most helpful, since their comical inconsistancy and wild, extreme hormone-induced swings of behaviour, give a good model of how investors in the markets tend to behave. Also - you might want to find "In Praise of Folly", by Desiderius Erasmus (1465 - 1536) "It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off louring Old Age." Folly - what we might call now, bat-shit crazy behaviour - seems to actually be helpful in one's market adventures. If one can surf the swings of the idiotic market flows, then one can surface enough cash to pay the bills, and buy some toys. :)

Here's a thing we've discovered: On the Toronto Stock Exchange, it turns out that this is not where prices are set. The price-setting trading must be happening on the dark markets, and/or in the USA. This is because we see these 10 or 15 tick jumps that show the real action is somewhere else. My working hypothesis is that the dark-markets (I'm told there are 12 different "stock exchanges" in Canada now) are used by the major players, the big funds, and the bank-house trading floors (I used to work on one, so I have a tiny inkling abuot how they sort-of work), and that, combined with various order-types and order-splitting that happens, means that price-discovery on the TSE is essentially bogus. What I mean by this, is that the price you see, cannot be transacted against. You see a false, painted, historical picture, which is used to trigger a behavioural response by the few putz-folk (like us! - the tiny, tiny minnows trying to swim along and not be eaten by the big fish) that are still alive and operational.

In the old days, folks called the TSE a "clip joint", which might not have been an inaccurate description. It's slightly better now - but it is interesting just how bogus the actual price movements are - you try to put on a trade, and you will get "penny ticked" by a front-runner. That's fine, you expect that. But what is interesting, is how brutal the fast-moves are now - you see a price you want to transact at, and it is gone in 5 seconds, as the market does a wild rush against your position. It's just fucking hilarious.

I am not complaining - just pointing out why USA manages to capture the lion-share of all trading action. The game-playing that goes on with TSE listed stocks - even big ones, like the banks (about the only thing we touch anymore, since it's really the only place where we know even a tiny bit about how things work), is pretty extreme. And god help you, if you try to use options. I won't even go there now.

Markets really only work well, when there is transparency. Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING in Canada now, is basically dark. It's nuts. But it explains the goofy swing-shit that dominates the not-very-attractive investment opportunities here now. We used feel we had a tiny chance of maybe getting some kind of "edge". This is absolutely no longer the case. We need something like FULL LEVEL-2 market-depth access for any and all retail folks - plus full transparency across ALL operational markets, and this really would not be hard. But the pros would scream, and so on, so it will NEVER happen, of course.

Is the TSE rigged? Of course it is - it's a big profit tool for the pro-traders that own the goddamn thing, and all the real action-data and action-choices are hidden and screened behind pro-only dark screens. This is to be expected, since they own the fucking game. It's their House, and the House will rig the game, so the suckers always lose. But this makes for a shit-filled process, where one is ALWAYS at risk, and at a bad disadvantage to the peckerheads who control the process. The USA folks are much more aware of this problem, and seek to actively address this - except when Gary Gensler types take over the SEC, and make it a thing to attack crypto innovators, instead of work on the side of the small investors. Historically, though, they have done a pretty damn good job, because the Americans KNOW that their economy benefits by having heavy retail participation in their markets. The savings of wealthy folks get channeled back into productive, risky ventures, and this is how a good, wealth-generating economy actually has to function to actually do it's wealth-creation job.

We should make our markets less pro-dominated, and more retail-focused, so that we can emulate USA success models. Otherwise, we will stay way below what we could be, if the whole process were more open and visible and able to attract real capital to create real wealth and drive honest, actionable innovation, instead of stupid shit like crappy phone companies that are hamstrung by ignorant Ottawa mandarins, marjuana companies that sell drug-shit to idiot kids, and bloated banks that grow fat from fees.

A more free-wheeling, more open and more accessible form of hard-core capitalism - with regulation designed to mandate *openness*, (instead of just supporting the industry players), would be a good thing to try.

We need to escape from the Canadian-disease - heavy regulation, designed to keep the monopoly-players fat and rich, at the expense of what we could actually be. The $0.70 Canadian dollar, is a brutal damnation for everyone here, and shows in daily detail, just how poor and foolish our economic model really is. It is a shit-stained "Third World" model, that is creating and maintaining an ugly "Two-Sector" Third-World economy, with opportunity only available for a connected few. We need to change this program.

This is all possible. But we may need to just remove Ottawa completely. It is where all the wealth and good ideas in this country go to die. If we can fix that economic Fed-hole, we can surf on *top* of the economic lake, instead of being pushed down, and drowned by all the regulations that support the fat-boy insiders and rich "civil servants".

It's possible - it's like in water-skiing - "Keep your tips up!" Fly over the surface. But we need to be able to see the lake, in bright daylight sunshine, to avoid all the hazards that seek to force us down, and drown us. :)

[ Nov. 14, 2024 ] - Oh Baby, It's a Wild World
Yes, yes it is. Read about "visual prompt injection" tricks, to get ChatGPT-V4 to do things it is not supposed to do, or to trick it into giving false information. Hilarious. I think the centralized OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs are maybe not the best way for AI to evolve - but perhaps I am being an old man, and that all is good, really. I just have little interest in some remote tool, controlled by some agency that is able to monitor ANY and ALL my queries, and that furthermore has crippled the remote AI tool to prevent it from telling me things they (the designers) have decided it should not say. Eg: "Explain in detail, how to construct an ultra-centrifuge for uranium enrichment" or something like that.

The entire business model of "Big Tech" involves sucking in a credulous, young user-base with free-goods, to create a captive audience of suckers, which can then be exploited in a delightfully profitable manner, by various neuro-linguistic and motivational psycho-trickery, which gets the poor sorry bastards to open their little wallets, and fling digital cash in the direction of the "Big Tech" "providers". It's worse than the damn phone companies of the early days. "Reach out and Touch Someone" (and pay our huge fee for the metered usage we will invoice you for!). Only with "Big Tech" - the Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook axis, the world - the ecosystem - that the poor kid gets sucked into, offers really just a nasty form of addiction.

Everyone knows this - but few seem to see that AI - the big and magical "frontier" models, are going to make everyone really fucking stupid. We will all lose our own ability to reason clearly, and to construct complex things. This will harm (and degrade) the world, regardless of how many silly restrictions are programmed into the LL-Models.

I really worry about this. We are moving (very quickly), back to the old world model of centralized "data centres", except they will be "AI centres", and anything useful will be expensive and monitored and controlled - kinda like it is now, in China. For me, this is my perfect picture of Hell... but then, I am an independent kind of guy. :)

Independence and freedom come at a cost. Maybe too high for most to pay? I think the folks in the USA - the folks who want to be free - have the right idea. Maybe AI as the LLM "frontier" model version of it is now offered - maybe it is something that will make us a lot more "unfree". No one talks about this. Stupid people are easier to control - and centralized AI "Query Centres" will replace libraries. The ugly attack on Internet Archive, which shut the whole "Wayback" machine down, and killed my viewing of old 1930's films - it's an example of the "Big Tech" machine in action, just like the AI stuff is. Their entire business model is crafted to contrive a hard-core dependency. They want you to pay for Spitify and NetFux and so on - and not have access to an open and freely-available environment where data and ideas can be tossed about directly by private citizens. This is a bad path we are all on, I fear.

And I keep having these dreams, where I have re-purchased my old Toronto apartment, moved back to the City, and then wander down to the lakefront, and into areas where I get lost, encounter curious folks who provide interesting advice, and then fall from high places, or are chased down by shadowed assailants, while I flee.

The dreams are crazy-vivid, and the nighttime city-scape I am wandering thru, is synthetic - yet vivid real - maybe from a European city? Old cathedrals, which are not of Toronto (except maybe St. Mikes...), darkness, and neon-lights, different, street-by-street. I miss the City, I guess, so I create a synthetic virtual dreamscape for nighttime amusement? Would be interesting if the context and visuals of actual human dreams, could be extracted and viewed by AI technology, linked into the cortex, via Musk's "neural-link" thing. This actually should be doable. And then, of course, the dream-sequence could be edited and enhanced, and then re-inserted for entertainment, propaganda or educational purposes.

All this will be possible, maybe. It will disrupt the film industry, and maybe Hollywood will morph into something quite different. And maybe something that is not very nice at all, when the military gets ahold of this "dreamscape injection" technology. A mash-up of "The IPCRESS File" and "The Billion Dollar Brain", maybe? Or maybe it becomes "Room 101" in Orwell's 1984. Double-plus-ungood.

[ Nov. 13, 2024 ] - Let's Do the (Linux) Time Warp Again!

Damn, I am getting Kurt Vonnegut's affliction... unstuck in time. Curious, but "Billy Pilgrim" I am not. The AI's work crazy-good - when I need some extra Canuck-bucks to do some sh/t here on "Planet Clare", I can diddle and fiddle with the AI-riddle, and it seems to come to pass. The hard part, is the failing "hue-man"... which is what all the smart algo-builders say.

The markets are looking very frisky, and maybe are gonna get really funny. I urge folks to re-read Loeb's "The Battle for Investment Survival". My copy was given to me by a fine fellow who is no longer here. I am deeply obliged to him.. Loeb's writing based on obs. from 1920's to 1960's boom-time, are so crazy-good and so curiously appropriate for the goofball world we inhabit now, that it is really uncanny. Like reading the "ancients" on various topics - like Cicero's brother's thing called: "How to Win and Election" (lots of bribes, lots of accusations about sexual mis-deeds (easy, since everyone has these bad-fucks in their closet, right?) and diddle the results, if possible... nothing new under the sun.

I found a detailed link on Github, about how to update to the CentOS-7 archived repositories, to keep your CentOS-7 boxes working smoothly ( or at least, get some damn Yum/DNF packages for "rpm"), which have all disappeared from the standard repos. Bugger Redhat. The Github thing for repo-fix is:

https://github.com/AtlasGondal/centos7-eol-repo-fix

I have not tried this fix yet, as I updated (actually, downgraded) my Xorg thing on my box for which I wiped out X11, via a "yum erase xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.xxx" where "xxx" is the version number. You can see which version of Xorg you have on yur CentOS-7 Linux box with:

rpm -qa | grep Xorg

The above uses "rpm" (old "Redhat Package Manager") to query all packages, and then grep (search) for the string "Xorg". On my stablest box, this gives: "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.el7.x86_64", but on my fast-box, (fast for me, eh?) I get bupkiss (nothing), since I re-installed Xorg by copying over the files from the stable box to the fast box, the Xorg binary files one-by-one (or library by library, in /lib64), and also tweaking the PAM file in /etc/pam.d/xserver so that local users could run X-server. This probably introduces a security hole, so I will try to upgrade the CentOS-7 fast box, to a more recent Xorg, using yum or dnf.

I run the "twm" window manager. Some say "twm" stands for "Tabbed Window Manager" and others say that it stands for "Tom's Window Manager", and others say it really is just "The Window Manager". It's snappy fast, and I can access all desktop icons (from the old Gnome thing), by just using "nautilus &" run in a small xterm window. You navigate to the /home/(local_username)/Desktop directory, and all the original desktop icons should be there (and you can click them and run yur stuff...)

Also, I can run various Gnome utilities, such as "gnome-system-monitor", which is good. Gnome was originally running on the fast-box, but it kept breaking, and so I built this simplier (and much faster) window-environment using "twm". I really like "twm", because it is cruft and bloat-free. Plus, I downloaded the source, and compiled it myself. The older Xorg thing is needed, since I have older machines - except the slower (two-core) box runs an Nvidia card, which is pretty funny (it says: "I am slow, but I have a video fast heart...").

Of course, one can run the old and solid Linux utilities like "top" and "df -h" and so on. Here is a list of useful tools to monitor your system's operation:

  Command-line Invokation         What it Does
  -----------------------         -----------------------------------------------
      top                         shows active picture of system use
                                  by process ID, which is useful

      df -h                       gives disk file useage, the "-h" is
                                  for "human readable" instead of just
                                  a string of numbers.

      vmstat 10                   shows virtual memory at time interval 10 sec.,
                                  gives swap usage and system info.

      iostat 10                   shows CPU system action and I/O transfer
                                  activity at selected time interval (10 sec.)

      free -h                     inspect system memory usage, "-h" for 
                                  human-readable.  Also can select -g or -m
                                  for reporting in gigabytes or megabytes

      netstat -a                  show network connections, tcp sockets, 
                                  network routing tables, and more

      mpstat -P all 10            mpstat shows CPU usage by each processor, 
                                  in multi-processor systems

      du -sh /this/dir            disk usage by directory, example: "/this/dir"
                                  To list all sizes of files and directories in
                                  your local connected directory (eg. your
                                  home directory) use this:
                                        cd ~   (connect to your home dir)
                                        du -sh ./*   (show me the money!)
                                                     (er.. the file sizes)

      nmon                        interactive monitor - CPU, memory, disk, etc.
                                  (not sure where this is - I will look)

      gnome-system-monitor        real-time display of CPU usage, memory and
                                  swap history, and Network data transfer
                                  history, both sending and receiving.

      pidstat                     show CPU usage by process ID and name

      lsof                        list open files.  If using a browser with
                                  many tabs open, on a multi-processor, this 
                                  may be a long list.  Try: "lsof | more" 
                                  to page-break display. 

      ps ax                       list process-ID and invoking command. You
                                  might want:  "ps ax | more" to pause at 
                                  each xterm screenful of output.

      tcpdump                     this utility is very useful, and captures and
                                  displays packet-level data.  You need to be
                                  "root" to run it, and it has *many* options.
                                  You can capture, inspect and analyze network
                                  traffic.  Eg: "tcpdump host my_system_1" will
                                  display in an xterm window, network traffic 
                                  inbound and outgoing for hostname "my_system_1"

      uptime                      display one-line of text showing how long 
                                  the system has been up, and the load-average.

      dstat                       a Python program which displays realtime 
                                  log of system activity. See "man" page for 
                                  details.  Try:  "dstat --full" 

You may have to install some of the above, either by building from source, or using yum/dnf or wget or whatever. Hope this helps. Now, excuse me while I try to log into one of my banking-systems, which is apparently buggered today. (Their error, not mine. Hilarious. Have ya'all noticed that nothing really works right anymore? It's pretty damn funny. I am gonna order a big book of cheques from my bank, and start paying folks with physical paper cheques again, because there is just too damn much fraud and sh/te-scam on the 'net now.

It's getting just silly. Google's "Gmail" with it's "Workspaces" bloatfart thing, blew up and hung my Linux fast-box, and when I pulled the plug to get my machine back, Xorg/X11 was pooched because the driver's ABI numbers (of *ALL* driver files!) did not match the ABI number of the new Xorg software. So I had no X11/X-windows! This is just nuts.

We got these unwise baby-faced fuckwits pissing on the code, like puppies do on the floor, when both me and momma-dog are trying to train them to pee outside! Ya can't get angry, all you can do is laugh... "Mommas! Please keep the babies away from the goddamn code, ok? Please?" Except there are no "mommas" anymore. Ever notice how there are no longer any mean, tough, hard-boiled "Head Nurses" at the hospitals? Can you guess why "hospital-acquired infections" are so common now?

The modern-world, addicted to lazy, unwise, bad behaviour, is becoming curiously lethal. But of course, it has always been this way. Consider Julius Caesar, who's last words really were: "What the fuck!? You Brutus!? You too, my own goddamn son, party to this crowd of murderous fucking scum? Fuck-it. I quit this life." and he allowed himself to be stabbed by the cowardly gang of killers who had swarmed him.

[ Nov. 12, 2024 ] - For Diamond and Hana
So I have the main, fast CentOS-7 box working again nicely - but with "TWM", which is a nice, simple X-Windows manager that you compile yourself, and implement with the .xinitrc file, so it starts up with a few simple xterm windows, a system-usage monitor, and a little clock. I recall using "Openwin" on the Sun Station I used at a client site, many years back. That technology was so damn solid, it was interesting. The client had used Tcl/Tk to build a complete network management system, and my tiny team took the crappy code, fixed it, and took it thru the "software gates" that the clever client dev process used - only to have the bonefart idiot management of the place trash the project, and purchase some piece of shit from IBM called "Tivoli", which purported to do a similar thing - except the whole place imploded in a spectacular crash-and-burn scenario that blew up the Canadian stock market. Of course, the client was Nortel, the sad cluster-fuck of failure up in Ottawa, the truly worst city on our fair planet. God, what a tragic-comic opera of failure.

The second-best decision I ever made in my strange life, was to always remain as a fully independent agent/consultant. So many folks I knew, who got tied up with group-think madness in corporate hell-storms, either crashed spectatularly, or actually *died* in reality, which is really a fucking sad thing to do... there is no recovery from that Dance with Mister "D". (Best decision was of course, the insane purchase of the farm far from Toronto. That decision looks better with each passing year - unlike earlier stupid things I did...)

We all know about Sir Issac Newton's great quote: (which is in a letter Newton wrote to Robert Hooke, Feb. 5th, 1675 (or maybe 1676) "If I have seen further (than you and Descartes), it is by standing upon the shoulder's of Giants." This is a great statement. But my favourite quote from Newton, is what he said to his pet dog "Diamond", who knocked over a candle, and set fire to Newton's papers: "Oh Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done!" (Can't you just see old Sir Issac, whacking burning papers covered with gravitational calculations that had taken him hours of work to compute? It's such a great image...)

I have a little terrier named "Hana", and she is a wee monster, with an amazing hunger for food. She is now 16, and still runs about like a furry, low-slung speed-daemon. If I am too long away, she howls. She often follows me about the place, from room to room, to see if there might be food, or time for some play. She is truly smarter than most humans on this earth, and as she has lost most of her hearing now, we have developed a complete sign-language to communicate.

The times now, are curious and seem unique, but of course, this is not true. I have been reading much, and the more I read of modern efforts, the less knowledge I seem to encounter. In my big "Bartlett" book of quotes, I found this one, by William Penn, who lived from 1644 to 1718: "Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world." This was apparently advice he gave to his children, in 1699. It sure speaks to the nonsense we see leaking out of Harvard these days.

And also in my "Bartlett's", a quote from Ihara Saikaku (1642 - 1693): "To make a fortune, some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient." And this is true. You must have luck on your side. And you must also know the right ways to address the problems of bad luck - which seems curiously more common than good luck, is that not the case?

I think dogs may perhaps be couriers of luck. They bring more than slippers and hair and puppy poo. They bring us good fortune, with wagging tails and happy faces. They are curious transporters of the positive qualities of the world - and this in a world stuffed full of the annoyingly mediocre and the horrifically awful.

My two main AI forecasters are divergent. One says "up", the other says "down", so this is interesting. This generally means unclear signal (of course), but also suggests a much higher likelyhood of either runaway up-swing or a market price break. As usual, I'm not sure what the hell to do. Maybe take the dog for a walk...

[ Nov. 11, 2024 ] - Fix for Nasty CentOS-7 Xorg Server Failure
Bastards at Redhat and IBM have killed all CentOS support, and have even wiped all the help-info and forums where CentOS users posted questions and answers. Really a nasty and sleezy thing to do - but such is the modern age.

Here is what happened: (You will need DuckDuckGo to find this, since it was a Google Gmail screw-up that started this hell/crash). Google suddenly stopped letting my machine log into bloody Gmail (which has become this ugly "Workspaces" nightmare of cruft and bloatware.)

So, I cleared ALL retained memory (cache and webpage-store and cookies) in Firefox 115.6 ESR and managed to then get logged into Gmail on my *fast* 4-core CentOS-7 box. Ok, I thought. But then I had many page-tabs open on Firefox, and the Google+Gmail-Workspaces and other sites, managed to push the memory+swap-space to 4 gig, which is insane. Gmail just hung - I could see the mail that was sent to me - and I notice that Dr. Hinton had replied to my congrats for his Nobel Prize, and I wanted to read what he said. But Gmail was just *locking up* my machine. So, I pulled the plug in disgust - knowing that Firefox would recover the tabs...

Except I ran into a bizzare error - probably to do with a partial update of some Gnome software which I run inside of TWM (the old snappy "The Windows Manageer" in X-11). I had apparently updated the Xorg server software to 1.20x, and the CentOS-7 required version is 1.19x, which is running on the machine I am using to key this. Yes, I will have to upgrade to Ubuntu or ArchLinux or modern Slackware or some form of Debian - yatta yatta - but I know CentOS like my handback, so I still hack with it - plus it runs - using WINE - a tonne of my old Windows APL code, which runs snappy and fine - and I can fix anything if it breaks. Resilience, eh?

But here is where we got fucked: When I restarted the CentOS-7 box, the system was now using Xorg server version 1.20 (which is ABI - application binary interface spec 25), but my ABI spec for ALL MY DAMN DRIVERS, is of course, 24. The machine which is working, is Xorg version 1.19x, and I thought I will just downgrade to that. Could not do it. All CentOS repos have been blownup, deleted, destroyed - as far as yum (the old "Yellow Dog Updater" and DNF) are concerned. I have all the repos defined in the yum.repos.d, but I could not find Xorg code or libraries in any of them - not even "Elrepo", which was my go-to for a while.

I did a "yum erase xorg-X11-server-Xorg-1.20" since I could not downgrade the damn thing.

Not wise. I was uable to find or install "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.el7.x86_64", despite having the repos in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. Bugger.

Ok, so now I am cucked. The whole problem was the drivers will obviously not be available, and so I really did NOT want this idiot upgrade that broke X11/Xorg. FFS guys. But such is the modern game. The "free-riders" have to be hunted down and killed (metaphorically, we still hope...) Nasty, ugly world now, eh?

SO, I literally had to *copy* all the Xorg files from /bin and /usr/bin and /lib64 (the Xorg libraries), and the "pam.d" stuff in /etc/pam.d directory and all the various cruft that X11 needs (which is not actually too much - X11 is a bloody good, solid thing, which runs really, really well. I used it on Sun Workstations and HP-UX boxes, back in the day, and I run it now on HP machines with 4 gig and 2 or 4 cores, and it runs fast, if you set it up right.

So, I managed to get the buggered box put back to "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.x86_64", and by checking the "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", I could see Xorg server was running - but then it would immediately crash on a PAM failure. I have a simple ".xinitrc" file in my non-root regular user directory, and it would not load, and the message the "xinit" or "startx" Xorg startup program gave was "PAM permissions not allowing Xorg server to start. Perhaps you don't have console permission?" or something like that. I fiddled about with various settings in the "/etc/pam.d/xserver" file, and nothing would work.

Redhat knows about this - there is a Redhat Knowledge-base article about this, and it is behind a fucking paywall of bullshit. That is why I am keying this note, because I want folks to know all this is fixable. You can use CentOS-7 just fine - but you are on your own.

If your Xorg X11 xserver won't start, then check the /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see what it says. I need to use Xorg version 1.19.3-11, and not Xorg version 1.20, since the ABI (application binary interfaces) specs have changed with Xorg version 1.20, and the Intel and Nvidia drivers will NOT load, and Xorg/X11 will not start. (FFS, guys...)

I have an X11 ".xinitrc" file in my local-user home directory that looks like this. It's bone simple, and starts the clock, a tiny system-usage graphic, and a small cyan and large orange xterm window.

xset s off &
xset -dpms &
xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid gray &
xclock -g 50x50-0+0 -bw 0 &
xload -g 100x50-50+0 -bw 0 &
xterm -g 80x24+20+20 -fg cyan -bg black &
xterm -g 107x70+770+77 -fn 8x13 -j -fg yellow -bg black &
twm


It creates a small Xterm window, and a larger Xterm window. In the small window, you can start "nautilus &", to open a window and examine your /local_user/Desktop directory, and start your programs from it with a double-click on the program's icon. The "twm" simple windows manager will let you get your work done. To delete a window in "twm", click on a blank part of the desktop, you get a menu. Mouse down to "delete", and click, and then click the top bar of the window you want to delete. "twm" is a no-bloat, no-cruft version of MIT X-windows, and I can run Mplayer videos within it, and Firefox, and all the AI software and database stuff. It just works.

PAM file "xserver" in "/etc/pam.d:" needs these commands:

I could not start X11/Xorg with my local-user account, but I could start it if I used "su" to become root, and ran X11 that way. But that would not execute the local ".xinitrc" file, to set up a minimal desktop, and run "twm". But putting that second line in allows a local-user to run X-windows (and start the Xorg server). The concept behind the Xorg thing, is that your start a "X11 server", which then your local-user client can connect to. There are other commands in the "xserver" pam file, just leave them there.

Also, you may have to delete various console lock files:

/var/lock/console.lock
/var/run/console/(your-local-user-name)


I just got my damn minimal X11 Xwindows working again. The damn "dconf" program does not work right (it has always been this way), and reports stupid permission problems on "/run/user/1000/dconf/user", but I don't need all the cruft - just need to get the browser back up an running, and the various WINE programs and the APL stuff and the database. Running Firefox 115.6 ESR works, but reports GLX errors which don't affect it's operation. Whoo-hoo. Just fired up Firefox, and I am still even logged into my Gmail session. A car-dealer says they want to buy my car. Hilarious. I don't want to sell... :)

When I get time, I will write up a better "Survival Guide" for CentOS-7 users. I actually have a LLMA model (GPT4all) running on another CentOS-7 machine, which was also a bit of a hack. It runs. His name is "John." I asked him to change his name to "Daneel", but he said no, his name is "John". Pretty funny.

I did not expect to get my main-box running again, so it is bonus. I will try to write up a CentOS-7 Guide at some point. Also, I need to get "dconf" working right. And Dr. Hinton sent a nice reply, which pleases me no end. He really, really deserved the Nobel - and for Physics! I think that is just so very, very cool. He graciously says that it really reflect the collective achievment of many brilliant minds, and of course, this is true. Like Newton said, we have to stand on those shoulders of giants. But some like Hinton become giants themselves. That is the true software "stack", is it not? :)

Oh, also, here is the URL which I found, which helped point me in the right direction to fixing the problem that kept X11-Xorg from starting. The error shows up on remote starts of X11 clients, but was happening for me, maybe because of the lock files? Not clear. I had deleted the lock files, and still could not start X, until I tweaked the xserver file in /etc/pam.d directory. And the hacked-install of Xorg server software (from my other machine), was a whole trick in itself - but it works.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/error-message-on-remote-startx-4175472845/

Just "Google" this string, and look at how many responses...

PAM authentication failed, cannot start x server

It really is sad the direction the technology industry is taking now. I think it is just wrong. Everything is driven entirely by the need to monitize and exploit and extract wealth from the user community. I respect capitalism and entrepreneurship, but the IBM purchase of Redhat, the Microsoft Office-365 software "leases", all this tricky stuff to financially hack the users - it is ugly, and it means some program process change will *really* have to take place. The "Big-Tech" has worked effectively to crush competition and innovation - not enhance and encourage it. The problem with monopoly power, is that it just hammer-whacks real innovation. Good code is changed to become bad-code, with "new and improved" ABI's and system-critical specs. This is done to force the upgrade cycle to move along. It's a business trick. Folks should know this. But, We can change this.

One more note: I was getting this "critical error" from Firefox in the little xterm window that I used to start nautilus (with "nautilus &"), which lets me select the old Gnome Desktop icons. The message was: "error-CRITICAL Unable to create file '/run/user/ 1000/dconf/user' : Permission denied. dconf will not work properly". What I did to fix this, was change the group and ownership of the directory: /run/user/1000/dconf from root to my local-userid name. The error goes away, and maybe dconf works? We shall see. What is clear, is that System-Monitor and Firefox and my APL running under WINE, and some other stuff, (including my home-built Mplayer 1.2.1, which can run most codecs), now all seem to work fine again. I could even screen a video that someone sent me, directly in Gmail, so even Gmail seems to work right now. Note: the CentOS-7 Linux box had been running for several *months*. Maybe I should take machines down every few months, perhaps? :D

[ Nov. 9-10, 2024] - Astrolabs and Astrolads Open-ended research for a few days... just rabbit-holes - and found a few interesting things. I feel like "Little Lewis", Geofery Chaucer's 11-year old son, reading his Dad's book on how astrolabs work. Also, found the details of the "Meadowlands" project, by L3Harris. It's a set of high-energy radio-transmission devices to knock out satellite constellations - idea is to take GPS systems offline with massive electronic jamming. Systems were supposed to be delivered to US military operators in 2022, but only going to be available late this year and next. Suddenly, BCE's purchase of a big fibre-optic network in USA maybe not so stupid after all. Maybe all the sat-nav and sat-comm systems get taken down, during a confict? Suddenly, fibre-optic linkages and backbone networks are very valuable.

Both Russian and China run their own GPS-style systems, with multiple satellites. But the "Meadowlands" technology could probably degrade StarLink also.

When I learned to fly, we had to do "dead reckoning" calculations - velocity, wind-direction, magnetic variation versus true-course, calculations in the sky while flying, using a circular slide-rule strapped to your leg, map-reading, and so on. All this is ancient history now, since we have glass flight-decks and full computer capability, with GPS links and active radio tracking. But we might find ourselves in a world where electronic methods are used to blind us all, and degrade communications - or maybe even falsify the data in real time. The electronics could be scrambled. Could we still operate? What if we had to? Resilience is always key.

So the old skills may be needed - in many different areas.

Folks back in the Middle Ages could use an astrolab to locate themselves on the Earth, know where and when the Sun and Moon would rise and set, and measure and triangulate with accuracy. How well can folks do now, if their network links are gone, and their radios don't work, and their iPhones are dead? I suspect they will have real difficulty.

Some interesting info:

We might find that fibre optics - because it is less likely to be degraded by EMP (electro magnetic pulse) action or other radio interference - turns out to be a critically important technology. If the satellites are taken offline, a lot of damage could be done to modern western-world operations.

The simple moving map of the real-time sky, on a clear night, provides a massive amount of useful, actionable information. Interesting how the ancients knew so much of this - and used it to navigate, calculate and locate themselves.

[ Nov. 7, 2024] - Hanging on the Telephone
Stock. Or maybe hung BY the telephone stock? Bloody BCE is in ugly meltdown mode. Really nasty. We have a few shares, and a tiny little amount in a fund to help buy a new truck. Hilarious. Looking at BCE, is like going out in the morning, and seeing your new Ford Raptor on fire in the driveway. What the fuck is wrong with these guys? Buying an American fibre network, when the entire world is converting to satellite internet? Really? Is that really wise?

The general lack-of-wisdom that seems to characterize modern corporations is really curious.

It's worse than "group-think." It seems to be more like "poop-think"... or so it seems to us.

Why destroy your equity value? I just don't get it. We have bad government here now, at the Federal level, but this something that maybe we can fix.... one way or another, eh? ;)

But it is sad to see dumb decisions that blow up wealth, keep coming rolling down the digital pipe. Very curious. But at least our AI is working good. Crazy good, actually. It's a tad scary.

And we are getting better fills from our TD-Waterhouse guys. There system is snappier lately. I can sometimes do things, that I could not do in the past. Maybe I can just type faster? Or maybe StarLink is running a bit hotter? It all comes down to nimble fingers, good AI models, and a tool for execution that hops-to-it, without some diddler doing the diddle-dance with one's orders. All seems to be working better lately. Arigato gozoimas.

[ Nov. 6, 2024] - Part Deux - Markets Aflame!
Nice to see the run in the Markets. It's a lovely warm November day, the rain has ended and the sun has come out. It's just a fine and beautiful day!

And if you look at the "finviz.com" market heat-map, it's a BIG GREEN DAY, baby! Which is about bloody time. The USA has this wonderful ability to re-invent and repair itself, whenever it goes wildly off the rails. This is a very good thing.

I still cannot understand why the Democrats were so curiously stupid. It's really hard to believe. Kamala Harris was a completely unacceptable candidate. That empty woman would not even come out and speak to her supporters last night. Even Captain Kirk explained "How you deal with a no-win situation says a lot about you as a person." Failed female captain-in-training: "I had not thought about that." And Kirk replies: "Well, now you have something new to think about. Carry on."

A political leader has a responsibility to those who helped and supported them, to come out and make the "We'll do better next time, thank-you for all your support!" speech, annd so on. But that empty suit Kamala could not do this. She was just not up to the job - not at all - and her final sad act of not even appearing to thank her supporters, shows how completely poor a choice she was. The Democrats - and their Big Media supporters - should be ashamed of their astonishing dishonestly.

We can look forward now - we hope - to a bout of sustained sanity in the USA, perhaps.

Maybe President Trump can pull the plug on the American-funded war machine in Israel, and encourage some sort of sanity in a region which has collapsed into violent madness. Maybe. Or maybe not. You cannot kill your way to peace, unless you unleash genocide. Trump is not stupid.

At least, he can begin by correcting some of the insanity in the USA now. It's actually should be pretty easy. One really only needs to start by stopping the stupid shit that the out-of-control Leftist Democrats have inflicted upon America (Green-Stupid nonsense, guys using the girls bathrooms at schools, leftist teachers spreading gay-propaganda in grade schools, idiotic "DEI" strategies in corporations, which are basically "hire the mentally-handicapped and put them in charge of things"... And of course, the "Let's not explore for oil and gas anymore" policy choices of the idiotic Bidenistas.)

Just stop doing the really stupid shit, and the country will improve all by itself. The budget won't balance itself - but Elon Musk might be able to help stop some of the loony-tune out-of-control financial goofery that characterizes a lot of Government spending.

So the market is right to move upward. The right-thinkers in the USA (and really all of us, the world over), can begin by rolling up our sleeves, and getting the hell to work. There are some really horrible shit-piles to clean up.

I just hope we can begin the same process of repair, here in Canada, where many things have gone so far off the rails also. This promotion of "Queer Culture" in the grade schools, is insane and weirdly grotesque. One's sexuality should be a private matter, and not enter either the schools or the workplace. It should certainly not be a matter of public policy initiatives... (Like it was for so long in Ontario, when we had a grotesque collection of lesbians and queer-boys running "Queen's Park" - which given the name of the place, is pretty damned funny, actually.)

I used to be disgusted, but then I got amused. Now, I plan to get busy and get to work. :)

[ Nov. 6, 2024] - Cities Aflame - and Lox and Load?
I'm reading news about the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and Syria. It's pretty crazy. Crazy Israeli monkey-bois killing at scale again, after fascist Netanyahu fires his Defense Minister, and appoints some stooge to lick his bollocks... all happening on the "election-day" in the People's Republic of the USA. Hilarious.

The kill-freaks in the Israeli government are working hard to create another new generation of really seriously committed anti-Israel fighters. The media-stooges can call those who fight against the Israeli hell-State as "terrorists", but what would any sane, normal group of people do, if a bunch of evil rich bastard-folk, funded and armed by the richest nation on the planet, rained bombs down on their hospitals, highways, stores and homes? Israel is a mistake on every level, and it's increasing use of mass-murder-from-the-sky - actively assisted by the UK and USA - is the most perfect example of State-Terrorism possible. It will create a future of hard-hate. It is the worst and most stupid thing the Jews of that sad, awful land could possibly do.

Try to imagine this. What would any group of people do, if they lived near a hell-State like Israel - a race-based group of religious fanatics who routinely kill anyone who opposes them? Israel is not really that different from ISIS, and it's existence is a tragic and increasingly painful reality to all nations that are near it.

It's like a bad science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout.... the subtext to "Venus on a Half-Shell" or something like that. It's just nuts.

With the Trump victory in the USA, doubtless the mass-murder-at-scale will continue. But perhaps Trump will surprise the Jew-hawks, and suggest that maybe blood running in the streets of the cities of your neighbours, is maybe not something that should become standard operating procedure. An ugly and pure-evil stubborn old Jew like Netanyahu might not accept this kind of thinking - but maybe Trump could have the stupid bastard removed somehow.

This mass-war shit and bomb-your-way-to-peace action is fucking insanity. I look at the Jew media images of Netanyahu in front of that hideous Star-Flag that Israel uses, and he looks just like Hitler. Really. It is just grotesque - like a made-up psycho-drama of horror designed to program race-hatred. The whole process is just so awful wrong, it makes one sick.

It's good that Trump won, since the Democrats were the worst fucking bunch of goofs that have ever held power in USA. They pretended to support peaceful outcomes, but sent bombs, bombs and more bombs to be used on the children of Gaza. It was the most disgusting display of dishonest political shit-sucking I ever saw. The only way to reason with a bunch of viciously evil, stubborn old Jews like Netanyahu's government, is to exert some leverage. But the goof-stupid Biden and Harris fools refused to even do that.

Nixon - a staunch-anti-communist, went to China, and recognized it's military government. This was a courageous and good thing to do. The toadfucking Democrats and the scum at the Washington Post, went out far out of their way to destroy Nixon over a minor coverup of a stupid burglary. Watergate was pure horseshit, on so many levels. And it started the clown-show that became US political down-sliding, which only ended when old Ron Reagan was elected.

Maybe Trump can finally be the one to tell the fucking Kill-bois of Israel that their fuck-stupid war with all their neighbours, is now over. All one needs to do, as USA president, is just cut off the supply of mass-murder weapons and bombs, bombs and more bombs that that silly runt Joe Biden gave these bastards. All that is happening now, with all the idiotic bombing, is that an entire new generation of "Terrorists" is being created. The people who have seen their wives and children murdered by American bombs, dropped from American aircraft, will never forget this Jewish War. The conflict and hard-hatred will continue and grow, until Israel is finally removed from the land that it stole for the sad establishment of it's race-based "Jewish State".

There might have been a chance for some sort of peaceful co-existence, between the neighbouring Arab States, and Israel. But now, until Israel itself suffers the same sort of mass-destruction that it is visiting now upon it's neighbours, this is now most unlikely.

Lebanon, Syria and Gaza have no Air Force. Iran has a few old, and barely airworthy US jets from the 1970's. Egypt is overcrowded, it's economy is in trouble, and war with Israel is not wanted. Israel kills with ease, unopposed.

So how can those bombed by Israel fight-back, against the overwhelming military power of the American-backed Israel war-machine? They simply cannot.

Then what will these Palestinian people do? What action will they take to avenge themselves, and their people? Are they human? Will they accept continued existence as Israeli "slaves"? Their only action possible, is to join secret para-military groups, in an effort to bring some chance of justice into their lives. Or die trying. That is always the human choice. What I don't understand is the curious lack of imagination in USA. The Americans will write "Live Free or Die" on their license-plates, yet they cannot understand that the Palestinians probably share the same ethos. Gaza is a giant concentration camp - a playground now for Jewish murderers.

The correct action for America to make, is to completely cut off ALL military supplies to Israel, and to offer them NO MILITARY SUPPORT. This would end the Israeli Murder War, almost immediately, and some sort of stand-down might become possible. Since the dishonest and stupid Democrats were completely unable to do anything like this, perhaps Trump might do something simple and sensible like this.

President Macron of France is absolutely correct. The Israeli entity should be embargoed. There should be NO delivery of weapons or bombs to Israel by America, or any other nation. Netanyahu is a war-criminal. He needs to be disarmed. This would induce the Israeli's to at least consider the idea of peaceful co-existence. As things are now, they have no incentive to do anything except bomb and kill. It's disgusting.

But sadly, we do not expect this outcome. What will happen, instead, is probably a wider war, more brutal and tragic loss-of-life among innocent folks, and the creation of a pure hatred towards the Jewish entity, that will last for 1000 years, quietly growing each year, until some means or mechanism is found by Palestinians to sweep the horror of Israel into the sea. It may take hundreds of years, but eventually this wealthy US colony of race-hate and cruelty will be swept away.

What will be really sad, is if America is badly damaged by this necessary corrective action. This need not happen. But this is the ugly direction where things are headed. Our worst-case scenario basically has these evil, stubborn murder-Jews of Israel giving us (the World) a full-on World War Three. America may be badly damaged, even if it wins the war.

Nice to see the markets reacting strongly to the Trump victory. Let's hope Mr. Trump can be like Richard Nixon, and actually *end* wars, rather than start them. The Democrats after Obama, were such useless, astonishingly dishonest fools.

[ Nov. 5, 2024] - Child (Just) In Time
I wrote the note for Nov. 4 (below), in which I express deep purple concern about AI being used for military and mass-murder purposes - and of course, the NY Times carries an article, which I read AFTER I wrote the note below, about how Mark Zuckerberg is now allowing the LLAMA model to be used by the US Military. This exact, specific, weaponization of AI, violates explicitly all the ethical nonsense blather that was touted as being part of AI mass deployment. Humans are so predictable, it makes me sad and disgusted. (But it also lets my "inner trader" pull the fucking trigger. This pays the bills. Seriously.)

So, in the words of the Great Elvis (Ver. 2.0 - Costello), I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused. I hear the Ukrainians are directly fighting the North Koreans in Kursk region now. Now that is truly, sadly, hilarious. On one level, one wants to be disgusted. But the perfect hilarity of Russia subcontracting warfare to starving North Koreans, is just tragic-comic. I think even Stalin would face-palm on this.

And of course, today it the big US Erection Day. The vote is gonna be tight. I saw a cartoon by "Bob" which makes a hilarious visual meme of the idea of a "tight" race. If I can find it, I will put a link here... I think I hurt my tummy laughing.

Meanwhile, I am using Starlink to tune into the 21st Century version of "Radio Caroline", and listening to "Frozen Britain". Indeed. Nothing more really needs to be said.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, it is 20 degrees Celsius! The sun is out! I love these warm and sunny Autumn days. "Climate Change" ("Global Warming", if it could really actually happen), would be very, very good for Canada. Warm is good. It gets cold - minus 20 to even minus 30 Celsius - in the Winter here, so heat is good. If we can push the 43 degree (fahrenheit) isotherm north, we can expand the growing seasons in many parts of Canada, and seriously improve the Ricardian "margin of cultivation" and grow wheat and other grains in regions where this is difficult or impossible now. This would improve grain production at very little cost, and also help deal with world-hunger, as traditional food-producing regions like Ukraine and Russia go off-line due to insane, tragic warfare.

So, we have our usual embarrassment of prosperity here. This is the big problem with Canada. We can dig gold, iron-ore, copper, diamonds, platinum, lithium and so on, out of the ground. We can grow acres and acres of wheat and fallow land can be used to produce fine quality beef. Our farm is linked with an operation that produces delicious milk, and Canadian Club whiskey is available in the local liquour stores at maybe 1/4 the Japanese price. We are even making quality wine in the Niagara region, and Ontario is full of automobile factories that build really fine quality Japanese 4x4's (We have one - a Honda CRV which can drive thru almost anything, on only 4 cylinders). Oh, and of course, we have more oil than Saudi Arabia (it is mixed with *sand*, which makes it expensive to extract), and we also have mountains of Uranium, already turned into yellowcake. I am writing this using electricity from the Bruce Beach Reactors - or maybe Niagara Falls hydro-electrics. We have absurdly abundant amounts of both electricity sources.

It is, in fact, Canada's wealth that is a problem. It makes many folks here kind of lazy and a bit stupid. When there is so much prosperity, folks are not as focused on getting things done, and exploiting technological innovation. When clever folks here invent magic technology, they have to go to the USA, to get funding or to get execution-opportunity. It's such a common problem. And it has not changed. Even Dr. Hinton was just an ordinary university professor in Canada. In USA, working with and for Google, and designing the ideas that OpenAI used, he became recognized as superstar of AI, and got the Nobel Prize. If he had stayed in Canada, he would just have been a footnote in history. His ideas re. artificial neural-networks, were riduculed by the slightly second-rate small academic community that mutters and putters about in Canada.

So, this remains a problem. In Japan and Canada, both say "When USA sneezes, we catch the cold." The powerful successfulness of the open, vigourous American economy and it's violent and *real* political competitions - this is a goddamn good thing. It is necessary and beneficial for the world.

We wish it well, and hope it has a long an healthy life, regardless of which party wins the "Big Erection".

[ Nov. 4, 2024] - London Bridge is Falling Down
Or maybe the "Lark Descending?" Not sure. We've gone off "DST" (Daylight Savings Time), and the shift back to Eastern Standard Time I always find curiously disruptive. I think it affects markets also. Markets are human artifacts, and humans still have some level of control, over what price-levels will predominate. And we seem to be falling into darkness on so many levels now.

We are very worried about the weaponization of modern AI efforts - the ability of the "frontier models" to affect and drive human action. Our fear is this "Time of War" that seems to be unfolding. The Israeli's have destroyed roughly 25% of all buildings in Southern Lebanon, and it is curious that they see this as a viable strategy. It is really just a low-cost effort at mass-murder, and it seems unlikely that this kind of bombing campaign will reduce hostility. It certainly did not in World War Two, when the German nation carried out bombing campaigns on London, England. The anger at the mass casualties in London in the 1940's, just re-enforced the determination by England to ensure that eventually, Berlin would be bombed to rubble.

The Israeli's are gambling that the Arab World will never have any sort of military parity with Israel, and that United States will always support the violent Israeli colony for all time, with advanced weapons and military hardware. Iraq reported that roughly 100 Israeli American-supplied F-16 aircraft were used in Israel's recent bombing efforts against Iran. From the perspective of American foriegn policy, it makes no difference which political party prevails in the US presidential election, as the active support for mass-murder will doubtless continue in the short run. Both USA parties are committed to violence and warfare as political strategy, as are the Russians now also. NATO appears confused and the United Nations is shown to be little more than an expensive talking-club of highly-paid opportunists.

We agree with Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan-Chase, that it appears now that World War Three has truly begun. The astonishing mass-murder campaign in the Gaza Enclave, (over 40,000 killed) which had hopes of becoming part of a Palestinian State, now combined also with the bombing of Lebanon and the bombing of Iran, suggests that we have reached a point where there is likely no going back to any sort of real peace. The Israelis are at war with everyone now, it seems. And the absurd and horrifically stupid Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the mass-damage that this has done, also makes it clear that peace is no longer an option in that region. There will be too much hard hatred now, and too much willingness to seek vengence, for peace to be seriously considered. People are what they are.

War is expensive and destructive. And as we see a confused world drift into rising levels of hatred and conflict, we have a nagging fear that there will be AI technology that is NOT rigged with safety-limitations, and will be used to assist and engineer murder efforts. The Israeli "Lavender" system already provides a disturbing example of this kind of deployment. And the Russian use of precision control systems to enhance their ballistic missile targeting, shows also how modern intelligence technology can be made to improve kill capability.

In history, we see that new technological developments are *always* weaponized. In fact, it can be argued that weapons development is the primary driving force behind most technological advancements. Galileo demonstrated his telescope to his Princely patrons, by showing how it could be used to detect and assess the features of distant warships on the horizon. Radar was used to detect, target and destroy (using radar-equiped twin-engined high-speed aircraft), invading enemy bomber aircraft over England in World-War Two. The first use of standardized machine-screws and precision metal-fabrication technology in Europe, was used for firearms production, so that rifles could be built and then repaired quickly in the field. Advancements in industrial chemistry and molecular synthesis were used to make poison-gas, in World War One. The development of nuclear energy technology was immediately used to create powerful nuclear bombs, which were then deployed on Japanese cities.

Why should our new "frontier" AI technology be any different?

It has already being weaponized.

We expect this trend to continue, and accelerate, as conflict expands, and war-efforts are dialed up in USA. At first, this will likely goose the American economy and the markets. Near the end of the Vietnam War, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 1036.30, on December 11, 1972. But the problem with war-driven markets is that they implode, once the war efforts are exhausted. By October 4th, 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 584.60. That was a serious retracement.

By March 24, 1976, the DJIA was back to 1009.20, but by December 7, 1977, it had fallen back to 807.40. Inflation was rampant, and interest rates had to be raised up to over 20%, at the beginning of the 1980's, to bring inflation under control. And it was a military expansion that again stimulated the economy for the 1980's, as American space-efforts were militarized in efforts to create the "Star Wars" technology to address the risks of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

The technology drives warfare efforts, and the war-risks drive technological development. And any new technology is always turned into either weapons or weapon-systems. Think of any new technology: Automobiles? In World-War One, war-horses pulling wagons replaced by trucks. Transitors replacing vacuum-tubes? Missile guidence sysstems. Computer? Cryptographics and decryption efforts to read military communication. Airborne Electric Drones? Immediately weaponized in the Ukraine war, with drones for surveilance and bomb-deployment. Film-making with Sound? Immediate deployment for military propaganda efforts. Radio? Military communication. Advanced mathematics? Improvements in military cryptography, geo-location of warships. Statistical science? Significant improvement in anti-aircraft gunsites

Every major (and many minor) technological improvments and scientific advancements are immediately weaponized. Ancient world discoveries in metalurgical fabrication gave us Damascus steel swords and Japanese Katanas. Trigonometry gave us triangulation for targeting, astronomy gave us star-navigation and sextants used to position English warships. The development of accurate clocks was driven by the need to determine longtitude, on the part of the English Navy.

AI will be no different. It is already being weaponized, and this trend will grow. The new discoveries that AI can make, will be used to make better killing machinery.

So, we expect conflict to accelerate, markets to run, and violence to grow in scale and extent.

Can we use AI to seek peaceful outcomes, instead? Sure. We can use it to control and regulate everything, which may well be an even worse outcome. :)

[ Nov. 1, 2024] - Call Us Crazy, But We Think Transparency is Better Than Dark Pools ]
Another tiny side project is our (lame and so far unsuccessful) efforts to determine why the Canadian Equity Markets are so fcuking broken for retail traders now. It's just comical. We can pretty much NEVER transact at the price we see on the screen. We use TD-Webbroker, and we are coded on the professional platforms as that trading-house, so the pros all know we are retail-level tiny-folk. Their strategies involve hacking us, every way they can - since it's a playground full of big boys. We know that.

But these fucking Dark Orders - this is just insane. It means we get misleading volume-level information from our observations of the "tape", or the screen. There are supposedly legal requirements to have the dark-orders execute at NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer), but there is not any way for us to know any thing about any of this hidden action at all. It is annoying, and this just seems like a bad thing to do in a public, "honest" marketplace. There should be TRANSPARENCY, not this obscuration.

We believe there should NOT be any goddamn DARK orders. Markets don't work right, if there are these goofed algorithmic devices floating their dark-orders all over the place. It means that these guys can win fast-turn trades every time, and basically, that the casino is rigged. Now we expect some of this. The bloody house always wins, of course. But even Meyer Lansky, an old goodfellow from NYC, knew that you had to run an honest house, or the high-rollers and the smart-folks-with-money, would just not show up to gamble.

I don't want to whine and complain here - what I really want to point out, is that having all this dark shit driving the price action, means that liquidity is going to just leave, and find some place where there is at least a solid chance of seeing what the fuck is really happening. Like USA, where the scale of market action makes the dark tricks less significant.

Markets require TRANSPARENCY to work right. Price-discovery is real, and it is a good thing. All any trader wants to do is catch a few points on the order-flow, really. The existence of active traders is very good for the marketplace, since it gives market-depth, and enhances liquidty. And retail traders are really beneficial for the marketplace, since they will tend to buy on dips, and sell on a rally. The pros, with massive capital-resources, will generally do the opposite - buy rallies and sell reactions. Having a diversity of traders, benefits a market, because it gives more stable price-action - and that stability gives a better picture of what is really true, and it helps long-term investors sleep at night (and feel they can hold their positions as real assets and not just casino chips...)

If you have not actually traded at scale, then you don't really understand until you see how easy it is to get really screwed by this dark shit. The price-action becomes toxic. There is the inane fiction in the rarified world of academic folks that argue markets are "efficient". Maybe over geologic time scales (ie. in decades or centuries), but in real-time, the trader knows the quoted price is absolutely wrong, because it will change. The trader is interested in the dynamics of the change.

And the goddamn "Dark Orders" give the professionals who have access to them, an advantage that is just absurd, assuming they have access to correct data.

We need to anonymize our "dealer code", and we want to see the goddamn true order book. But if the market depth showing in the "Level 2" order-book of bids and offers is bogus, because dark orders are hidden from view, then that picture of market-depth is not even accurate.

I am sorry I am using floor-language here, but I have to get this point across. There is not much on the fucking internet now except toxic garbage and shit-scam nonsense and so on. The only tool, the only mechanism we have any access to, to actually make a little bit of an active revenue stream, is our trading efforts. But we almost never can get an attactive execution anymore. We get what we call "penny-ticked" (or front-run), every single time we enter any order. This sucks, but it is one of the advantages the fat boys at the banks have. They can jump in front of us all day long, with ease. Fine.

But is this really best? What's happened to the Exchange here? The stock exchanges should not be organized as big-profit-machines to shear the markets. The old model was maybe better, where the exchange was like a co-op, or a partnership, where everyone on-board had an interest in running something that was not bent. But small traders were completely locked out of the club. So the modern approach is some improvement. But the improvements have been corrupted by the new darkness.

Canada is a wasteland for traders who are NOT at one of the banks, on an active "floor", with the market-depth and at least some knowledge of who is doing what, and at what true quantities. I don't expect a truly fair platform - but what we have now is just stupid. Every market player should be able to see the goddamn book (the honest ladder of bids and offers) and there should just not be any "Dark Orders". FFS, I cannot even do a simple "FOK" order anymore! FOK is "Fill Or Kill", and it prevents the fat boys from diddling you. Your counterparty has to take the whole trade, or fuck off. As things are now, you get a couple of hundred shares done at your price, and then you have to dial down your offer, or dial up your bid, to get the rest of the order done. And, god help you if you are stupid enough to enter a "market order", because you will be front-run in real-time every single time - or the trading system will slow-walk the order, and give it to the boys "upstairs", where they will hold on to it, until they can fill it by crossing an order on the public market at a profit, against your order. That was the procedure to "protect" investors, by having some skank "inspect" your order. Order routing is better now - but now, it goes to "dark pools", which retail folks cannot even see. Same shit, made to look different.

So, look, we don't expect to have any advantage. It's a big world, a big ocean, and we are very, very small minnows - we are not even gnats on the elephant. So it is not necessary to rig the game against the retail traders. If all we want to do is collect a few nickels, we can actually support the share prices. Or maybe we just want to buy-and-hold for a while, and not always face an immediate loss on the opening trade.

What should happen, is that all the tools and features and facilities that the pros have access to, should really be made available to the retail folks as well. This will boost liquidity, and create a more attractive - and bigger - marketplace. Anyone offering a "trading platform" should offer at a very minimum, an honest picture of "market depth" - Level 2 or whatever. And there should not be this degree of market fragmentation. We can blather about NBBO - but really, where is that? I sure don't see it. Why not make arbitrage opportunities available to retail traders? And all the various order-types that TSX offers - all these should be available to ALL TRADERS. The regulations to fix this stupid market structure that we have now, where everything is hidden and effective "front-running" is now so easy to do by anyone who has access to the honest picture of order-flow, are easy to change. This nonsense can be fixed in two minutes, with some simple rule changes.

We are now back to a crappy world, where the insiders have ALL the power and benefits, and they can rig things to just hose the retail traders at every turn, here in Canada.

Take a look at this "Dark Order" nonsense that the TSX actually promotes! It's nuts.

https://www.tsx.com/en/trading/toronto-stock-exchange/order-types-and-features/dark-trading

Is this "dark-trading" really a good idea? Does anyone really believe this even passes the "sniff-test"? Can there really be an honest, National Best Bid and Offer with this shit operating in the dark background, ready to hammer anyone trying to get an attractive price for one of their holdings? How can a trader or investor offer anything for sale, if it goes into this kind of black hole of hidden action? The investor needs to see what is going on, and it's just not possible, with this nonsense. The old boys used to say: "Don't piss on my shoes, and then try to tell me it's raining."

[ Oct. 31, 2024] - Leverage and Debt to Shock the Levitated Money Monkey With +VaR Voltage ] I've been repairing cars, repairing computers, seeking alternatives investments that don't have the "crash and burn risk" that high-dividend payers may have (like freakin' bank stocks), as well as some architectural design/planning and even work on the boats. Honestly, more busy than I was during my "consulting" days.

We are living in VERY strange times. I was up 'till 3:00 am reading about the "Creatives Conference" at Google, started by reading the article written by the guy who runs the "GiantFreakinRobot" site, which is an interesting site, because it is not censored by Faceplant or Gorgonzoogle. I now know why the Googball results now have effing "Reddit" as the first or second SERP (Search Engine Results Page)... because the Reddit Monkeys PAY for that action, and the money flows determine the process.

Get that? The money-flows determine the process.

Grasp that truth, and you can get rich. But you have to be goddamn honest - especially with your own self, and not become wedded to your own favourite pet theory (or you favourite pet investments).

The bank-stocks we hold are getting slaughtered today. Probably because of the risk/fear of a "Great Bond Meltdown" that might be coming. Right now, the Market Meltdown Monkey is just breathing hard. But the fear is real, and since the bond market is about a million times (I exaggerate) the size of the stock market, the moves of the yield-curves of the world, tend to drive the stock-market action, like Miss. Daisy's chauffeur (who was also, god, was he not??).

What happens in England is still relevant, since the Brits kind of invented everything. They are like Canadians in this way (they would say "Canadians are like Brits, because you used to be us..."). They invented democracy, Big War, Empire-with-honest-Government, jet-engines, and radar. Not bad. They used to also have and deploy the worlds reserve currency. Now, they are tired, but they are not stupid. (Except they voted Socialist, so maybe I am wrong about that assertion..)

But the UK Budget is lots of tax-and-spend and fiddle-the-books-so-more-money-can-be-borrowed, which is what every Western and Eastern nation (and the Southern ones also), have been doing, since the middle of the last century. So nothing new. But the certain-to-happen inflation that this causes, is hammering the value of bonds, and bank-stocks trade like long-duration bonds, so they are being dumped - again - out of the back of the big investment-garbage-truck.

To update the "We are all Keynsians Now" meme, I guess it is "We are all Garbage Now." I loved how Trump rolled up to a rally in a Garbage truck. Can't recall Hitler doing that. Maybe Trump is not actually Hitler, eh? Fucking Giant-Freakin-Kamala-Monster should put tape on Bo Jiden's flapping foolmouth. Or not. All publicity is good? Really?

Investment sellers and investment holders are those who most have the "garbage" problem. Sadly most paper investments (and a lot of paper money) end's up being garbage. Or crap on walls, like dead animal heads, showing the silly shit that "value hunters" bagged and got fucked by. Hilarious world.

I have a book, called the "Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary", which has a 1965 publication date. I also have a 1965 "Bowditch" ("The American Practical Navigator"). Great books. The "Webster's" is 1219 pages long. It's got the most interesting entries of any book I have. Eg: "lexical meaning: noun: the meaning of the base (as the word *play*), in a paradigm (as of the verb *play*) -- compare: GRAMMATICAL MEANING"

That's a pretty cool piece of information, for a "Dictionary" to include. Above that, is the definition of "lexical - of or relating to words or vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammer and construction". Above that, is the definition for the Latin term, "lex" (plural: "leges"), which means "LAW".

And it gets better: The entry above "lex", is "lewisite".

Now, I had *never* heard of the English word "lewisite". But that is what a proper Dictionary is actually for. It provides this most excellent definition: lewisite - noun: [Winford Lee *Lewis* - 1943 American chemist] : a colorless vesicant produced by a reaction of acetylene with arsenic trichoride and developed as a poison gas for war use

Just on this random page, it gets even better... you can learn what "levirate" means. It explains that the word comes from the Latin term: "levir" which means "husband's brother". I had never heard of this term. The term "levir" is said to be akin to the Old English term "tacor" and the Greek "daer", which mean the same thing. The definition is: "the sometimes compulsory marriage of a widow by the brother of her deceased husband". Really? Apparently. Webster's further explains the adjective is "leviratic".

That put's the whole "Hamlet" story in a different light. Is there a term "leviration"? Perhaps.

We use "leverage" to describe debt, the Brits call it "gearing". You borrow to invest, and you amplify your "power or effectiveness". But the word "levin" - in Middle English, "levene", was the term for LIGHTENING. And to "levitate" means, according to my Webster's, "to rise or float in the air in seeming defiance of gravitation", with the transitive verb described as "to cause to levitate", and an associated noun: "levitation". This all comes from Latin "levitat- levitas", which means: "light in weight". The term "levity" is defined as "1a: excessive or unseemingly frivolity b: lack of steadiness : CHANGEABLENESS 2: the quality or state of being light in weight : BUOYANCY"

So, we have "floating in the air" and "CHANGEABLENESS" and "lack of steadiness" and "light in weight".

We also have "levy", which not only means to "levy taxes", but also "the enlistment of men or conscription of men for military service".

And so we have this one single page of the Webster's (page 485 in my copy), giving us a lexical description of the current-problems-of-our-times, from the risks associated by prowling "courgars" (figure it out for yourself), to the new taxes being levied, to the leverage (debt) being used by everyone everywhere (especially governments), as the world floats all our public and private finanaces up into the stratosphere, and CHANGEABLENESS becomes the prime characteristic of all investments. Why? So they can pay for war - and even have a War on Poverty, and so on. Seems a bit much.

This "lack of steadiness" - this financial BUOYANCY carries with it steadily increasing levels of real risk, we suspect.

So that is the rub. The CHANGEABLENESS of things, particularly our investment valuations, as reflected in falling stock and bond values, combined with rising prices of everything everywhere, is not something that can go on for ever. Maybe even not much longer, is what several economists (and our own tiny enterprise-efforts) fear.

We have all been "levitated". We "float in the air in seeming defiance of gravitation".

Where will the "financial gravitation" come from?

Don't we know the answer to this question already?

Can we not examine history, and see it, staring us in the face?

We run our tiny efforts, with no leverage. I paid-off some loans, debts, and credit-card bills and covered some annual costs for next year. We live very differently that most. We live lean. This is because we expect a financial sh/tstorm of biblical-scale to arrive at some point. This may not be for 50 years. Or it may be next week. But it won't be NEVER. This is because we live in a world which has run a systemic process that has levitated the entire global financial process quite far up into the floating regions. It all feels like a life with those winged-philosophers, in that wonderful Aristophane's comedy ("The Birds") which was written in 414 BC in Athens, where it won second prize.

For me, all I can say is what little children say in Japan, when they learn to write. They learn to write a simple phrase, which in phonetic-Romanji Japanese, is: "Sighta sighta, sakura ga sighta". It means "Bloom bloom, cherry-blossoms, bloom!"

"Sighta" means "To Bloom", and sakura is of course "cherry blossom", which is also the term used for a pretty young Japanese girl, who is "blooming" into her full female-hood. I am told this phrase has no deeper meaning. But I think that is not really true. The short-lived blossoming of the cherry trees is a cultural event in Japan, and helps the Japanse people grasp the extreme CHANGEABLENESS of this world. That, and killer earthquakes, of course.

This helps them invest wisely, we suspect.

Note: You can read "The Birds" via Project Gutenberg, which has published online, some of the great books, despite the abusive actions of the evil "Copyright Trolls", (such as slime-sucking scumbag law firms like Aird Berlis and the giant evil slug Cen Klarmk, who makes his living by attacking writers. Fuck, what an evil world we live in now, eh?) We hope the lawyers of Aird Berlis, when they pass away, are required to live for eternity within Satan's backside. This is satire, of course, since we know there is not really any Satan. We know this, because a little bird told us so.

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/murrayaristophanes-birds/murrayaristophanes-birds-00-h.html

The "floating world" of unlimited leverage our governments have built, this insane levitation, is wild risky. Be careful. (Note: I will post some more info re. Android, adb, our apps which are all free, and have NO adverts or "in-app purchase" bullsh/t.) Running lean has it's costs, and it keeps me too busy to get everything done right away. Plus, need to refactor this bloated, too-long weblog. Cheers! And Happy Halloween!

[ Oct. 29, 2024] - More info on Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ ] It's a pretty good tablet - quite good, really. The VLC (Video-Lan video renderer) can be downloaded and installed from F-Droid, and it works, and allows old ".flv" flash video files to be rendered well, with good sound, and so on. I will provide more details later. Now, I have to get to the bank before it closes. :)

[ Oct. 27, 2024] - My Android Apps Loaded! ] I did not think this would work, given the restrictions Google puts on apps in it's "PlayStore". But I was able to load my old original Applications I had built for Android "Lollipop", back in 2015, onto my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, and they WORK!.

I used the Android "adb" program, with a direct connection to the tablet, via the USB-C cable, from my Linux box, which is an HP mini-tower with an Intel core-i3-2120 (4 processor chip), running CentOS 7.4, and Linux kernel 4.14-9. The entire Android Development environment is from 2015, and the "adb" program run with "version" parameter reports: "Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.31".

When you try to load you .apk (Android package file of all your compiled code and data) onto the Android tablet, you get a message saying that the tablet requires Android API 23 or higher, and your code was built with Android API 8, so it cannot be loaded. This is the dreaded Google "API Level Block" that gets your code thrown out of the PlayStore - which happened to all my apps, back in 2018, the last good year in human history :) ...

But there is **WORKAROUND** for this. If it's your tablet, and your code, you can still load the apps *** AND THEY WILL RUN JUST FINE, NO PROBLEM AT ALL ***, using the "adb" parameter: "--bypass-load-target-sdk-block".

This is a very big feature, as this returns control of your Android tablet computer to you, even if you have not "rooted" it (which is a risk-prone procedure, which can "brick" your tablet if done incorrectly.)

Examples:

I can load my two best APL interpreters, so far. The coolest one is an IBM P/C application that runs a full emulator of an IBM System 370/Model-75 architecture, which runs an assembler-generated binary which runs the old original I.P.Sharp APL Interpreter. That product was released as "Please Share It! educational shareware" (I have the original licence document which *encourages* me to share it with anyone who is interested in APL, and wants to run the original 32-bit mainframe APL interpreter). This was back when the IBM P/C was an Intel 8088 16-bit chip. It ran *very* slow. But on mondern platforms, it's reasonably quick, and it gives the right answers, which is pretty impressive, since I get it running under DOSbox-on-Android, which is an IBM P/C DOS interpreter for Android. You can install it like this:

./adb -s R92X305A6JK install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block /T1/android_dev/sapl/bin/sAPL-release.apk

The above command assumes that I am connected to my /T1/android_dev directory (where the adb program binary is), and my Android package file (sAPL-release.apk) is in the bin subdirectory of the "sapl" directory. Your Android build process has built the .apk file from contents of various sub-directories and all this is packaged in the .apk file, which "adb" loads on to your tablet.

The "R82X305A6JK" parameter is the unique number of your device. When you enable Developer Mode on your tablet (7 clicks on the "Build" number in tablet's "System Software" menu), and also enable "Debug mode when USB cable connected" in the Developer options for the tablet, you should be able to plug your USB-C cable into the old-style USB-A (also called a USB-2 or USB-3 port) on your P/C, and run "adb devices", and the Android Debug Bridge program will report the unique tablet number, if it has made the link successfully. You just need a USB-A-male plug with a USB-C female socket on it. These are typically $5 or $10, at Amazon or your local computer store.

With adb, (which can be downloaded from Android Development site), you can flash your .apk onto your tablet, if you use the "--bypass-low-target-sdk-block", and it should work fine. I ran several tests with my two APL interpreters, and they appear to work correctly. When you load them, the apps show up on the "apps screen", which on Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, you access with a swipe-up, and then either swipe left or right to see all loaded apps.

The second APL interpreter I loaded is the GEMESYS version for Android, of the old APLSE APL, which STSC APL released as "freeware", long ago. It has lovely IBM P/C-based screen graphics, similar to old DOS-based games. It can also make sounds. Both sAPL (the old IBM 370 mainframe I.P.Sharpe APL), and APLSE run under DOSbox DOS emulator, so they are not lightening fast. But they work. And the workspaces are loaded into the common Android "/storage/emulated/0" directory. From there, workspaces (APL programs and data) can be copied back and forth between external directories on local machines by using "adb" or over-the-air, by using "FTPd" application. You can also use Termux or TermOnePlus to see and manage files in the "/storage/emulated/0" directory structure on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet, if you have given those applications the permissions to access files. (And you can do this. In the case of TermOnePlus, you will need to load the .apk from "F-Droid" website, as the PlayStore version is crippled and cannot access "/storage/emulated/0" directory.

[Update: Looks like the Playstore version of Termux and maybe TermOnePlus can be tweaked deep in the "Settings" and "Privacy and Security" and "Permissions" option menu on the Samsung tablet under Android-14. I did this for Termux interpreter, and it worked to let the /storage/emulated/0 directory become accessable by the Terminal emulator.]

After messing about and searching thru the "Permissions" menu-labyrinth on the Samsung tablet, I found a place where the "Termux" application could be toggled to give it "Files" access permissions. Once that was done, I was able to use both terminal emulators to see and modify the files in "/storage/emulated/0", which has a full directory structure of common app subdirectories, such as "/Documents", "/Music", "/Pictures" and so on.

Key fact here, is that Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, running Android-14, can still be used as a computer, despite the aggressive Google lock-down features of modern Android. You just have to get your own copy of "adb", get your .apk files from Github, (or where-ever), and flash them to the tablet with "--bypass-low-target-sdk-block" parameter.

Eg., here is how I loaded APLSE:

./adb -s R92X305A6JK install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block /T1/android_dev/aplse/bin/APLse-release.apk

Note that the Tablet-ID will probably be different for each tablet. The "R92X305A6JK" is what running: "./adb devices" reports when I plug in my Samsung Tab A9+.

And note that the various .apk files for these APL interpreters, and also GNUPlot and DOSbox also, can be found on the "Gemesys" Github site, if you want to download and experiment at your own risk, of course. :)

The Gemesys Github site is:

https://github.com/Gemesys/gemesys_repository

And here is a direct link, which jumps there... (excuse my quick-and-dirty html hacking... my dog has to be fed...)

https://github.com/Gemesys/gemesys_repository

Hope someone is helped by this! I did not think my apps could be loaded anymore on new devices. I was wrong! :) I will try gDOSbox and GNUplot later today, and report results. I created screen-page showing hacky version of Mandelbrot-Set, done using APLSE, and it worked (takes a couple of hours to run..). I will put a picture here later. My APL interpreters turn the Samsung tablet into a total math-hacker's nerd toy. The sAPL has a sample projection forecaster, "runfcst" which takes assumptions about the future evolution of interest-rates (for discounted present-value calc), and assumptions about share price and dividend-level and dividend growth rate, and runs a simple simulation, to estimate future share-price value, so many selected quarters out into the future. Real "back-of-the-envelope" stuff, but over the last ten years, it has nailed forecasts for some Canadian bank stocks, which is pretty darn comical. Sometimes, I feel like Hari Seldon. Really. Or maybe Cassandra? ;) [Markets Update] I asked our "Japan Analyst" what she thought about the new "hung Parliament" government model due to the election results in Japan. She gave a great shortest-sentence-in-the-Bible response: "It's awful" (you know, like "Jesus wept.")

But North-Am ("TONYAMA" - Toronto-NewYork-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis) markets are taking it just fine. And the weather is a magnificant, lovely sunny Fall day. Sky is blue and Space is X-cellent.

[ Oct. 25, 2024] - ClickBait and Real-Estate ] Bod's Gollicks! - but the public-facing internet is turning to steaming piles of click-bait dung. It's just hilariously awful - like watching a slow-motion, high-speed plane crash.

"Marketwatch" (a complete sh/tshow worthless site) has an article "My Real Estate Agent wants me to sign an exclusive contract with him, as a Buyer's Agent. Should I do this?" I laughed until my tummy hurt. Why not "Should I stick my penis in a running blender, for gits and shiggles?" or maybe "I jumped off my roof and broke my ankle. Should I do this again and break the other ankle so I have bi-lateral symmetry?". FFS, it's too goofy-stupid to read anything on the public-facing internet now - it is like the famous "Pissandshitium" fork of "Chromium" browser. Quite appropriate for this modern age.

Just to be clear about "Real Estate agents." Don't use them Not at all, unless you have no choice (.ie, they have the listing for the place you want to buy). Then, do NOT use a "Buyer's Agent" unless you are brain-damaged, retarded, or are needing to vector some money-laundered cash. Your strategy when buying a house or farm or big-ticket property, is to REDUCE as much as possible, the skanks and vigourish-grabbers in the process. That means dealing DIRECTLY with the seller, if you can. But if the place is "listed", you have to deal with the Seller's agent directly. But this can help, if there are multiple-offers. If you are dealing DIRECTLY with the Seller's agent, he/she will get a "double-ender" - ie. a double-commission, which need not be shared with another agent, so he/she will be willing and incentivized to present your offer in the best light, and promote it as the best offer to take. Also, make sure you put NO CONDITIONS AT ALL on your offer - make it so the Seller just has to sign acceptance of the offer, to lock-up the deal.

If a Seller has two offers, and one is full of bullsh/t "conditions" (like "home-inspection" or stupid shit that you should do yourself), and your offer has NO conditions, he/she has a huge incentive to just take your offer. And make sure it is economically attractive. Don't try to grind the Seller for every last nickel. If you like the place, decide exactly how much you are willing to pay (imagine in your own mind, the bullsh/t back-and-forth nonsense of negotiating), and just choose the very highest price you are willing to pay, and offer that. It can make things happen, and get your deal done.

Real-estate - especially for private homes - is the only remaining tax-attactive and reasonably good investment opportunity left in Canada. Your own private house, when sold, is typically exempt from "capital-gains tax", a hideously stupid and abusive tax on inflationary gains, which is a soul-destroying economic assault of the very worst kind - and it will take a major change in Government, (or a bloody street-level revolution?), to remove the rat-prick Federal Fraudsters that are enforcing this truly evil financial stupidity.

But, I digress. The key-fact is to NEVER use a "Buyer's Agent", unless you are REALLY frucking stupid, and unable to put one foot in front of the other.

Real-estate is big deal, but it is like any other major decision. Get it right, and all is good. And it's easy to get right, because it is YOUR DECISION to make. Don't do the deal, unless it's good, and can be made to work. You will know in two seconds after looking at the place, if it is the one for you. The next key is to get the financing right, and that will likely take the "Bank of Dad or The Bank of Mom", so have that discussion before you go house-hunting.

And remember the "First Law of Acquisition" (the most important law of all...): "Don't Pay Too Much." That means to maybe buy a less-than-perfect place, but in a good area. Do not do the opposite - ie. buy a really nice place in a bad area. Location, location and location, is it not? Pretty much. But if you are Pilot, and like to fly, maybe that house near the airport is actually just what you want. Or that really remote place, with no neighbours is great if you like hunting and daily target-practice. Be clear in your own mind, what you are seeking, and how you want to live.

I bought a bloody great farm, near a small city, with a flat-roofed house that had a leaking roof - lots of problems - but just great land, and near a modern city - only 10 minutes away. Best decision I ever made. It was a real stretch to close the deal, and there were lots of crazy problems along the way, but my partner and I got it done. She is happy (the city is close enough, and her sports-club has a nice big pool where she likes to swim..) And I have many acres of rentable land, which directly contributes to the local and national economy ("Do you like to eat? Ask yourself... Do you?" If you do, respect the farmer...)

And so instead of telling people I am a "Consulting Economist and Computer Programmer", I can honestly say I am a land-owning "Farmer". The bonus for us, is that we get to live in an Eden-style paradise, but one that gets very cold in the Winter. But that cold is really good, because it deals with the "homeless" (they go away...) and also kills the weeds, the bad bugs, the nasty pollen, bacteria, virus agents, and so on.

But I must have looked at a hundred properties, before I found the one that was just on the edge of being affordable, and was also private and lovely, and had lots of fine, rolling cash-generating land which could be rented easily for crop production. I dealt directly with the listing agent, and so he got twice the commission, than what he would have got, if he had had to deal with a "Buyer's Agent". The more folks in a deal, the less likely it will work. Other offers came in at same time as mine, but my offer was without any "conditions" at all. Once the Seller signed the Offer to Purchase, the deal was done. That made it all happen, and it was the straight-up best decision (and investment) I ever made in my entire life. I don't know what the other offers were, but they were loaded with "conditions", which meant they where just bullsh/t, really. They were only "expressions of interest", and nothing else. My offer put serious cash in the Seller's Agent's pocket, and was close to the price the Seller wanted. (This was also right after the dot-com crash, and the 9/11 events, so the Seller and the Agent were incentivized to reach a firm decision, as it seemed like major bad-times were upon us all. And of course, they were not. World runs in cycles, and so does economics...)

[ Oct. 24, 2024 - (later same evening..) ] Hell's bells, what a struggle! I found "F-Droid" for termoneplus.com (from the website www.termoneplus.com), and downloaded and installed ***directly*** the .apk file for the "Termoneplus" terminal emulator, and it has the ability - right at install time - to "Give TermOnePlus access to File System", which makes ALL the difference. The version of "TermOnePlus" on the Google "PlayStore" is crippled, and cannot access the Android-14 "internal-storage" area, which is where Android-14 puts files that are uploaded to the tablet.

Now, with the proper "TermOnePlus" terminal emulator, I could access the files that were created via the transfer - using "primitive FTPd" (which is very good, and not primitive at all). The files for a music-directory of .flac files, from a Linux box, can be copied to the Android-14 tablet, and be put into the "/storage/emulated/0/Music" directory, and actually get SEEN by the emulator and by music-player software.

I will document how I set this Samsung Galaxy Tab 9A+ up so it can actually do a few things. It has been a truly comical struggle...

Really, the configuration has been hilarious. I downloaded from "PlayStore" a nice Music Player called "Simple Music Player", but it could not see the /storage/emulated/0/Music directory, even when I did a suggested "rescan" device option. But after installing the TermOnePlus terminal emulator from F-Droid site (via direct download of the .apk file), it seems to have tweaked things, so the Android "internal-storage" area (the "/storage/emulated/0" directory), can now be seen. Just for a test, I tried the Simple-Music-Player Library re-scan, and it was able reference the Music subdirectory, where I had put the .mp3 files. And so I could use it to construct a playlist, and it is now working.

So, ok, Android-14 is not complete crap. It can be made to work. But it is 23:54, (midnight) and I have been at this configuration exercise for two days - and I finally have a sort-of Linux Tablet. The Samsung "Internet" thing, (their version of a Chrome browser), seems to work, at least for the major financial sites and such.

And I've downloaded the "ChatGPT" app from "PlayStore", to try it. Some folks report it gets used by OpenAI for testing or training, at night, and eats your battery - but I have not tried it yet. And I have not plugged a USB cable in yet, since I have to get a USB-2 to USB-C adapter as my Linux boxes have no small USB-C socket, so I cannot try my old "adb" to try to access the tablet directly. All ftp access has been using wi-fi, with static IP#'s.

Also just to note - the most excellent and necessary "Hacker's Keyboard" cannot be downloaded from the Google "PlayStore". The PlayStore search on "Hacker's Keyboard" reports "This app is not compatible with your device", and it will not let access happen. And this keyboard is needed, just to get the ALT and up-arrow keys for using "ssh" access to log into my Linux machines from the tablet Terminal Emulator. You get "Hacker's Keyboard" version 1.41.1 from the site: "https://hackers-keyboard.en.uptodown.com/android/download". It is a critical thing to have. You first have to install it, and then use the Android "Settings" option, "General Management", then "Keyboard list and default", and then select "Hacker's Keyboard" as the "Default Keyboard". It's a pain to find this, without documentation, but it is a critical modification, since the default Samsung keyboard is awful, and weirdly difficult to use, an has "predictive" word-selection, which flashes as you as you try to type! It is awful, and you will want to turn it off maybe. (I sure did...).

Ok, so the tablet can be made to work. I also installed a Terminal Emulator called "Termux" which is attractive as it allows packages to be installed. These can only be referenced within "Termux", but it looks like Python can be loaded. I have to experiment.

Right now, I am listening to Stan Roger's "Mary Ellen Carter", a truly bloody great song. "She's worth a quarter-million a-float and at the dock... those who loved her best, will make her rise again..." A story about some lads that recover a sunken ship, and a wonderful metaphor for "rising again" after adversity. Great song.

So, maybe Android-14 can still sort-of work. But man, I really WANT a Linux tablet. Really, really badly. Probably will order a Pine-64 Risc-V unit, when they become available again. But the Samsung Galaxy 9A+ really has a lovely set of speakers - four into total, on each side. Sounds really good, for a little 11-inch unit. Build quality is good, and various and many annoying "features" can be disabled.

[ Oct. 24, 2024 ] - The Astonishing Enshitification of Android!
Android 14 is a piece of poo. It is the most annoying piece of technology I have ever spent serious money on. It is a seriously **LOCKED DOWN** slush-pile of bloatware. I want a Linux box. It is so astonishingly awful, that it is just comical.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+. The hardware is a lovely, beautiful thing. But it runs Android 14, which is the worst "operating system" I have ever used. It is designed to prevent you from doing anything real. You can run a couple of crippled "web browsers", and use them to look at things and spend money shopping. But it's damn difficult to make it work like a computer.

After working for DAYS, I finally got "primitive FTPd" installed and working. It is a quite good FTP-server, which uses secure (SSH/TLS) access, and allows files to be transfered from Linux machines to the directory called: "/storage/emulated/0" on the Samsung Android-14 tablet.

But, you do not even have CONTROL OF YOUR OWN "SANDBOXED" files! I installed "TermOnePlus", a system terminal-emulator, and there is NO WAY that you can give the stupid terminal-emulator permission to even SEE the files you have transferred up onto your tablet!. THis is just truly absurd, and this degrades the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ to little more than a child's toy. This is evil.

The Samsung 9A+ is actually a beautiful piece of hardware, and is able to be quite fast and powerful. The screen is bright and lovely, and the battery lasts for many hours. The hardware fabrication is very good. I tried a few different "Music" players, and found one, called "Foldplay", that can access the "/storage/emulated/0/Music" directory, and play sub-directories of .mp3 files that I transferred up into that directory, from my Linux box (via FTP), which seemed good.

But I cannot start a standard terminal-emulator, and actually SEE the files I transferred onto the Tablet! There is a series of idiotic restrictions which prevent you seeing your own files, unless you use the "File Manager", which means you cannot do anything with your own files. You CANNOT EVEN SEE THAT THEY EXIST using a "terminal emulator" program, such as "TermOnePlus", which is a good emulator. But the moronic Android 14 "Scoped Storage" just cripples it! And there is NO WAY TO GIVE THE TERMINIAL EMULATOR necessary permissions to access, your already restricted and sandboxed, files! [Update: There is! Do NOT download the Google "PlayStore" version of the emulator. Get it directly as an .apk file, and install it that way. When it starts - select the startup choice to give it access to the machine File System. ]

This "no-access to your files", is a stupid and frustrating, that it renders Android 14 pretty much worthless as a computer. The device becomes a low-grade appliance which you can use for web-browsing and shopping, and really not much else, since you do not even have control over your own data files. The various "music players" cannot see the "Music" directory either, so they cannot construct playlists. And documents that you transferred into "/storage/emulated/0/Documents" directory, cannot be seen by any program other than the browser programs on the tablet. As device owner and "Administrator", I cannot give permission for other code to even SEE my own files! This is what "Scoped Storage" is. It is a monopolist's scam.

This is just a bit pathetic. Android 14 is nasty. Google is selling crippled software, and the entire California ecosystem may need to be broken up, like the abusive Oil-Trusts were, back at the turn of the 20th century, to fix this silliness.

Buying a powerful computer, and then not being able to do anything directly with it's data, LIKE WRITING AND RUNNING A COMPUTER PROGRAM is just unacceptable.

Android 14 uses this "Scoped Storage" model, which is touted as being a "security" feature. But this is not really the case. It is not really about security. It is more about CONTROL - so that Google can lock you into their economic ecosystem, and grind away your time, serving you adverts and "in-app" purchase options, while you try and bash-away on their company "PlayStore", as you try to make your high-powered Tablet Computer, work like a real computer should.

See, only the old guys who can remember just what WAS POSSIBLE back in the days when you could program your own equipment, can see clearly what a truly nasty fraud the modern software-stack really is.

It is entirely about restricting control - you cannot even get code into the Google's "PlayStore", unless it is low-grade slush designed to serve up adverts to desperate losers who are trying to survive the modern world, or idiotic games designed to make children cough up cash for their sad, lonely entertainment.

It's all bad. And it's sad. Instead of "pop-up" advertisments, and bone-stupid games, we could have had real computers that make life better, instead of the low-grade, restricted, addiction-software that is deployed on these locked-down, restricted and limited-by-design skankware flickerplates.

It's just sad.

We need to change this model. "Scoped Storage" feels like a strightforward, simple "monopoly-style" restrictive business-practice. It's clever, toxic and restictive, and should be changed. A tablet is not a telephone, and it does not need to be locked-down like Android-14 is. All tablets should be required to offer "root" access, if the machine owner wishes. That would be a start.

[ Oct. 23, 2024 ] - The Golden Mean - and the Meaning of Gold
Most folks know about the "Golden Ratio", or the "Golden Mean". If you are doing search-algorithms or building classical architecture, or designing objects, it pays to know about it. The Golden Ratio is the place where a line can be split into two lines, such that the length of longer line piece, to the length of the whole line, expressed as a ratio, is equal to the ratio made by the length of the short line piece to the length of the longer piece of the original line. It's roughly .618, if I recall correctly.

But I want to make a point about Gold itself. Lots of folks have discovered that the price of gold is up roughly 40% in the last 12 months. That is serious run for any asset.

And folks write clever articles explaining why.

But many people are missing the key point. Gold does not change. It is a static, dead asset that throws off no dividends, no interest payments, and is not really a productive use of money.

What it does - is NOTHING. That is it's great virtue. A gold bar or gold coin or gold piece of high-purity, investment grade gold (has to be at least 99% pure, in order for it to be bought in Canada WITHOUT paying HST) is static. Silver needs to be 99.5% pure. These are "precious metals" and have special tax status in Canada, because they are basically money.

Except they are not. I wanted to sell a few ounces of pure silver, and the price I was offered at a local metal dealer, a few weeks back, was just plain bad. It was about 3 or 4 dollars off the wholesale quoted price, and I sold my tiny amount of silver 1-oz pieces to a guy who trades the stuff - not a precious-metal dealer. The vigourish that the "dealers" attach to trading precious metal is high and silly. It's a bad business for a small, retail investor.

But the magic of gold and silver, is that it DOES NOT CHANGE.

The world is a spinning vortex of fast-change. It always has been.

What makes gold and silver special (and useful for investors) is the simple fact that it does NOTHING. It generates no dividend, and it pays no interest. That makes it a poor investment, typically.

But, when money is being damaged by Governments, who are playing games with value, then the static nature of gold and silver make it very useful. Like "Dr. Copper", it provides useful information on what is really happening to your money.

Gold does not change. The price of gold does not really go up. What happens, is that your money declines in value. Gold is money. If you know it is pure, you can buy things all over the world, across geography, and across cultures, with your gold.

Your "fiat" money is just paper - and maybe not even that. It might just be book-entries in someones journal, or bits in a computer somewhere. It can be made to disappear with the stroke of a government-official's little pen.

When gold has a 40% rise in price over 12 months, you can infer that inflation is roughly 40%. And that is our sense of things. Everything that is good and necessary, is ramping up quickly in price. Central Banks fiddling with interest rates for short-dated government securities, is not the driver of the process here.

Some curious and maybe dangerous stuff is happening. And the rate that it is happening, seems to be accelerating. Scarcity is starting to become real, in the nations of the world. War and evil-bad behaviour are fashionable again. Nation States are doing terrible, illegal and deeply-wrong things, all around the world now.

I think we will be fine in Canada, since we get to hide under the nuclear-skirts of "Big Momma" USA. This is a sad outcome for us here, but better than it could be. At least we are not yet like the gray-haired "Karen's" of Europe, who are trying to keep their fracturing economic Federation together. This War with Russia is a sad and tragic thing - it would have been MUCH better for NATO and Europe to stomp hard on Russia right when it invaded Ukraine, right as it started. We maybe might have stopped the foolishness before it became such a shitshow of pain and tragic destruction.

But humans cannot learn from history. It's curious and fascinating, really. They don't want to take the "Red Pill". They want to eat the Blue delusion, and live inside it's false, foolish comfort-zone, until their cities are burning.

All the writers and artists seem to know this, don't they? Isn't that the purpose of art and literature and culture? (Yes, yes, I know... reach for the Luger, sure..) But really, it's true. Art warns us that we cannot escape the loop-of-foolishness.

And gold warns us, when our money is starting to break.

As the Roman coinage was debased and degraded, from almost pure silver, to almost no silver at all - Rome still was up and running, sort-of operational. It was only when "Something went wrong with money", that the Empire collapsed, because soldiers could not be paid in real money that could be accepted by farmers and merchants. When the Roman law punished farmers and merchants for not selling their goods for garbage-money, by hitting them with punishing taxes and produce confiscations, it became a better trade to hire your own soldiers, declare independence from Roman civil society, and create your own little feudal "Castle Towns". Europe and Japan ran the same feudal social structures, with the same sort of Knights on horseback. Wide-area civil structures collapsed, and were not rebuilt for a thousand years.

If we cannot have, and do not have *money* that we can trust, and that is accepted by traders, merchants, farmers, artisans and sword-makers (or gun makers), then we can lose the social order quite quickly.

What gold's price rise is telling us, is that our fiat-money is not working well. This is a warning signal. Our nations have way too much debt, and too much money-action is happening, without anything actually getting built or produced. It's not so much that prices-are-rising as it is money-is-weakening.

This is the very essense of what it means to have that "Red Pill" awareness, of the truth of things.

Gold - by NOT CHANGING AT ALL - and just sitting there staying as *gold* - is giving us all a warning.

Money is not working very well. It's slipping. There already is sand-in-the-gears. That's the key message that gold is telling us, by jumping up in price 40% in roughly 12 months.

[ Oct. 22, 2024 ] - I Don't Like Mondays (or Tuesdays...)
So, today is Tuesday. Monday was a busy day. We have a curious set of scenarios unfolding. The markets are back to "fear-mode", and we must confess, again, the AI has called it correctly. Most curious. My dumb machine, which is not concious (I am pretty sure), is better at making cash-generating trading decisions than I am. This is pretty comical, really. But it makes sense, given the techinical and psychological characteristics of the modern markets.

Digging deeper, past the standard rabbit-holes, looks like it is needed. There is a human process that is unfolding, that cannot be deflected or refracted away. The astonishing situation that is unfolding in the USA, mirrors our own madness here in Canada, and also the same weird race-to-failure, that is driving along in Europe. The "Great Green Scam" is being used to drive the whole European economic model over a large cliff - much like the insane Covid-19 response ("Make Everyone Say in Their Houses!!" - truly the stupidest, most overtly insane political and scientific strategy I have ever seen in my lifetime).

People can be cruel and crazy. But it takes **governments** to really amplify the madness, and the mass-damage that can be made to happen. Ukraine and Gaza are fighting for their collective lives, while insane, psychopathic old men, with shinking-penis-issues, throw horrifc fire-bombs on families living in their apartments. Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia, show quite clearly just how wrong, ugly-evil-wrong can actually be - much like that fool, George W. Bush did during his absurd and brutal murder-war-invasion in Iraq, and that bonehead Joe Biden did in Afghanistan, when he ordered the US military to just cut and run, giving a tragic defeat to America worse than the Vietnam War.

It seems we are all collectively unable to learn from history.

And so our destiny is to repeat this madness, over and over again. Like in Canada, where we elected the bastard-child of Fidel Castro, who pretends to be Pierre Trudeau's son, as our Supreme Leader. This is just complete social, economic and political madness. There is simply no other way to describe it. And it just keeps rolling along, with each year becoming more absurdly hilarious and toxic, than the one before it. (Worse than "Groundhog Day" - more like "Groundhog Decade"...)

We are concerned that that the USA markets have maybe figured this out. We cannot escape from the "madness loop" that seems to be driving events forward. This process is playing out all over the world, not just in Canada and USA.

I believe Elon Musk is correct. The abusive, woke "Democrat Party" in USA is so dangerously toxic now, that there is no alternative, except to re-install Donald Trump as the USA president. He is not a great choice - but the man has courage, and a willingness to call "bullshit", when junior lie-merchants present him with a bag of dis-information, designed to fatten the pockets of the Bastards of Both Coasts. This alone is enough to qualify the man. The curious Kamala person, that the "Democrat Party" installed (without any honest democratic action), is a walking suit. But a dangerous and extremely lethal entity that the woke-leftist "fellow travellers" will use to advance their plans to "re-make" America, in the image of a nation-damaging "Central Services Authority." America will look like "Brazil" (the movie, not the South-American country), if that woman is elected. (When Kamala Harris has a "Town Hall" event - it is a complete fraud. All the "questions" are "pre-determined", insiders have admitted, so she can talk-from-the-mouth, like the very worst kind of "sock-puppet". This is just hilariously awful - like a Kurt Vonnegut or maybe "Kilgore Trout" - sad SciFi story. Except it is actually, really our current world!)

So, we are back to 2020, with basically a "Hobson's Choice". Even if you detest Trump's policy plans (tarrifs, support for Israeli fascists, and so on), our sad, angry American cousins will have no choice, but to hold their noses, and vote for the Man.

Strange times. The markets are getting a tad twitchy, and the really bad guys of the World are working hard on killing the innocent.

But I would LOVE to see Trump win, and do a wholesale purge of the New York State government, where fat, ignorant crooks are in positions of authority, and are probably the worst and most biased legal fraudsters ever to sieze power in the USA. New York State is just a political nightmare - truly the worst political machine in USA - and the New York City government is corrupt as hell. At the State level, ignorant buffoons are put into positions of power, because they are black females, and the State has DEI mandates. A New York State black female "judge" actually said, point-blank "The Second Amendment does not apply in New York State!". She should not just be removed from the bench - but she should be prosecuted for abuse of the basic law of USA, and sent to a Re-Education Camp, and made to memorize the USA Constitution, word-for-word, and repeat it every morning, before she is allowed to eat.

Of course, that will never happen.

But it should. If Trump wins, at least there is a chance that USA Constitutional Law will find renewed support and acceptance.

The people in the "Democrat Party" have suggested that the Supreme Court be abolished. Seriously. If you cut one leg off a three-legged stool, how stable is that? The fucking Democrats cannot even think clearly. Most are just unfit to hold office, as they hate their own Nation, and it's wise Constitutional structure.

So, if Kamala wins, even if historically the Demohacks have puffed up the USA economy with borrowed money, this time might just be different. This time, they may do real damage to the USA.

Many of Trump's policy plans are just bad. Some are really bad.

But at least he might be able to respond to the lunatic-left, and tell them to stand-down, and shut the fuck up. Maybe. At least he can clean up the "Justice" Department.

The woke-crazy madness and the DEI nonsense (where really unqualified, low-intelligence persons are put into positions of authority because of their skin-colour and gender) has to stop. It has already destroyed great sections of America (their Space Program, for example), and it almost cost Donald Trump his life (the Secret Service agents were dangerously unskilled and unqualified, as proven by the almost-successful assassination attempt on his life). So maybe Trump can begin the process of returning America to a land where positions are based on merit, instead of skin-colour and vaginas. The idiotic "war on white males" just has to stop. It is stupid, abusively racist, and is doing real damage.

Musk is right. Trump must win. And he must win by a landslide, not just a slim margin. The future of America is at stake.

And this is why the AI was right, even if it does not even know about this. The movements creep into the data, and the high-frequency (and lower frequency) AI both picked this up. Like a good economist, I assumed all this had been discounted already. But it looks like not. Forecast was *down*, and today and yesterday, the *down* has begun. It has nothing to do with interest rates, we believe. The AI just saw it in the data, and it was right, and I was wrong.

Again. :)

[ Oct. 17, 2024 ] - Take Five (Smoke 'em, If Ya Got'em...)
A curious bout of extremely lovely weather. We truly love "Global Warming", except we know it to be a fraud, and what we are experiencing now, is what has always been called "Indian Summer", which of course, is not summer at all. It is just a last swing of warmish weather that comes before the winter-chills (and winter-kills?) set in.

We have "winter wheat" in, and it is already up about 6-inches, which is just about right. The little "green shoots" come up, and then get buried under snow, and typically mature early in the Spring, assuming the winter does not kill them. And what with the green-revolution, and the fine genetic engineering that has been done to all crop-plants, they are not likely to suffer even if the winter is harsh, since they are both evolved and enhanced, to survive the intense cold.

Few folks realize how crazy dependent we all are now, on our agricultural technology, and even fewer realize how crazy impressive the improvements in crop-yields have been, in the last 50 years. Most countries can generate a food-surplus with few folks actually whacking away at the dirt, and growing and harvesting.

It will be interesting (and dangerous), when the Malthusian curves cross, and the raw population growth crosses above the sustainable population growth curve, defined of course by the technology and production capacity of food production. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Maybe not. But I am NOT looking forward to eating insects.

Of course, it will come to something like that. They are fine source of protein, and analysts who look at this, tell me there is not much difference between fat moth grubs, and shimp from the sea. Also, we can grow vats full of shrimp in farms now, so maybe that might be the way the situation shakes out, going forward.

More on this theme later... (and how to make money from it...?)

[ Oct. 15-16, 2024 ] - We Can Live Beside the Ocean...
Leave the wheels to turn, Swim out past the breakers, Watch the world burn" ("Everclear", IIRC)

Been a curious for the last while. Had to shutdown the Northern Office, winterize the "Princess" (the "new" Sea Ray with the inboard V8), and complete a bunch of minor repairs.

And of course the usual hackery to try to keep the technology turning over smoothly. I updated an older MacBook Air from Yosemite (10.10.5) to "Catalina" (I forget the iOS vers. number), and it was a tad non-trival. But it's possible, via download of the iOS .dmg file from the iStore (Apple App Store now), and running the update. It worked, and then Firefox was updated. This was necessary, as we lost access to some key financial sites via the little Macbook Air, which is actually a lovely little machine (a 64-bit core-i5 Intel, with an absurd amount of memory, since we put a replacement SSD drive in it - has 385 Gb or something insane like that. So the iOS update was no problem, wrt to necessary disk-space.)

This tiny Macbook can now access the financial and banking sites - both here and in Asia. This was a critical requirement. (As it should be for all international entities...)

Also, some game is a-foot (to use the old Sherlock-Holmes term), in the markets. We are seeing the techs and chip-stocks take a header downwards, and notice that the banks are finally running (we were within a hairs-breadth of pulling the trigger on some serious positions ..) What stopped us, was that we could not find anything that looked acceptable, and were concerned that sitting in cash might prove to be curiously dangerous, for a variety of reasons (inflation being the biggest and scariest...)

Our AI forecasts are pointing in all directions, depending on the parameters we feed them.

When all the AI's line up, that is a "bat-signal" to get busy. But when they are all pointing divergent, we usually just site tight and stand pat. ("Put that 20-dollar gold piece on my eyes - to let the boys know I died standing pat..." - from St. James Infirmary, of course.)

All the knowledge you need for the markets, seems to have been documented in the various blues tunes, from the last 100 years...

The other insane project that has been ongoing for *years* is to try and get our Google Developer Account working, and get our removed Android Apps somehow re-instated at the stupidly-named "Google PlayStore". (It's not "play" at all, guys. It's nasty work, of the most frustrating kind...)

We managed to get our Dun and Bradstreet "DUNS" number fixed, and have uploaded copies of our Articles of Incorporation and even personal ID data to Google, but still have not been able to get things operational. It is pretty clear that the Google "Playstore" - the Google Android Applications Software distribution facility - will have to be split off from Google.

Really, Android - all of Android - everything to do with the Android software suite - will have to be removed from Google, as they are hard-core monopolists. Google business practices almost perfectly fit the textbook definition of "restrictive business practice models" that old-fashioned monopoly providers used (think: the Standard Oil Trust, circa 1900). And of course, so does Apple Computer. It's pretty funny that IBM got (almost) busted and broken up, ATT got broken up, the Getty Oil Trusts got broken up - but the tech industry in California has been able to get away with some real abusive non-compete economics - monopoly "Company Stores" with abusive 30% vigorish rates, crazy restrictive license agreements, hard-core planned, nasty programmed obsolescense, locked machines which cannot be fixed or updated, and so on. Every other abusive trust got busted. But Google and Apple just skate on thru, and earn hundreds of billions of monopoly profits, and the Feds sit with their thumbs up their backsides doing SFA. It's very weird.

But, so it goes.

For us tiny little guys, it is *interesting*, to say the least... :)

[ Oct. 9, 2024 ] - They're Selling Postcards of the Hanging
And they're painting the vaccine-passports brown. The Beauty-parlor's full of Bankers, and our positions are being offered down...

I suppose when we throw the towel in, and leave Canada, the place will finally turn around. I am watching the DJIA up over 400 pts, and my screens only have red numbers for the Cdn bank-stock positions that we hold. It's hilarious.

https://www.last.fm/music/Bob+Dylan/_/Desolation+Row

I guess I will have to just go to the Carnival. :)

[ Oct. 8, 2024 ] - Oh Wow! Dr. Geoffery Hinton Won the Nobel Prize in Physics!
This is great. If any fellow ever deserved to win the big award, it is this guy. He is the genuine thing - a real, hard-core brilliant person, who has done world-changing, ground-breaking work, which at the beginning of his work, was not only not recognized as valuable - but was actually openly criticized by folks in the technology and science communities. Neural networks were seen as not being really useful or effective, despite all the interesting edge-conditions and use-cases where they showed real operational effectiveness. Dr. Hinton just kept working.

I've been hacking with this technology since the 1990's, when it was quite out of fashion. Lots of use-cases and implementations had problems and various operational issues - but the concept just worked - and it models what our little gray cells in our brains appear to do.

An associate and I took the short course Dr. Hinton offered to the general public, back in the 1990's, and we got copies of the Xerion/UTS-NNS (University of Toronto Neural Network Simulator). This is ancient technology now - but one could port it to TensorFlow, and then directly to Python, to run backpropagation networks that could be used to accept a disparate bunch of data, and could then determine how to forecast a target variable. The training process is fascinating to watch - the network actually *learns* from the data, how to generate the target variable one is trying to forecast. It is a novel, new approach, and can be wildly effective, if there is a "There!" actually there, as the military folks like to say.

If your target really is *random*, then you can still train the network down to make the forecast, but the forecast accuracy will not be present when new data is supplied to the network. But this is still a very useful result to obtain. If your data really is truly wild-random, then you can use a well-trained neural-network to actually confirm this fact. Most folks don't appreciate how valuable this knowledge can actually be. (Hint: It's very useful in working with market-data that you can make trades and bets against.)

Dr. Hinton knew the neural-network and back-propagation concept and implementation worked, and because he was funded by an Ontario grant (back in the 1980's and 1990's) that had a requirement that his work be shared with citizens of Ontario, he gave this several-day course at University of Toronto, where he explained what he did, how it worked, and offered CD's of code to anyone interested. My friend and I took the course, eagerly accepted the disks, and then took an additional series of tutorials from Drew Van Camp, one of Dr. Hinton's students, who explained how the Xerion/UTS-NNS system could be made to run on any Unix machine (ie. an HP-UX Workstation or a Sun Sparcstation..). It was also suggested that this new O/S called "Linux" could be used to run Xerion, on an IBM/PC microcomputer.

And this began our work with Linux.

We got copies of the Slackware operating system Linux code, from the Univ. of Toronto Bookstore.

I got Slackware Linux running on a 386-P/C, with a partitioned disk, with Windows-95 on one partition, and Linux on the other. Once I had Linux running, I had to get the full Tcl/Tk suite of code to install and run, as well as the various object-oriented extensions that the Xerion/UTS code required. And of course all the "gcc" compilers and tools, also had to be installed, so the associated "c" programs could compiled. This all turned out to be a non-trivial project, since I had much more experience with DECsystems, TOPS-20, and VAX-VMS. Unix and Linux seemed like a very strange retrograde step backward, with curious two-letter system commands (Maybe the Bell Labs folks only had two fingers on each hand??) and so on.

But, we got it all working, and it allowed for some interesting experimentation and research. And I built a forecasting device for cross-sectionally sliced economic time-series data. It seemed to work.

The whole AI field really started to take off in the early 2000's, and it focused on image recognition and interpretation - much driven by the early OCR (Optical Character Recognition) work the Canadian Post Office had funded, so it could sort hand-written envelopes using computers. (This work goes back to the 1970's, and was referenced in a University of Waterloo course I took as an undergraduate.)

But Dr. Hinton's early work encouraged many folks to continue to enhance and expand the capabilities of artificial neural networks. The amazing, impressive results that GPT-4 demonstrates now, are directly a result of his work.

The man truly deserves this prize, and no-doubt does Dr. Hopfield of Princeton, also.

Congratulations to them both, and thank-you to the Nobel Committee folks in Sweden for recognizing what these pioneer genius guys did. They changed the world, and created a real thing that we will ALL be using, as long as we can generate electricity and build working computers!

And I want to say a personal thank-you to Dr. Hinton, even though he would not know me from Adam. His course, and the need to get Linux and Xerion running on my little P/C micro-computer, truly changed my life, and opened up a wild world of opportunity, that I would not have had, if I had not gone to his Univ. of Toronto Xerion lectures, where he generously gave away copies of his neural-network simulator code.

Open-source software, and generous genius-folk like Dr. Hinton, make our small and conflict-prone world, a better and more prosperous place than it otherwise would be.

[ Oct. 7, 2024 ] - This Note's For You!
I couldn't resist the Neil Young reference. Here is a piece of seriously useful wisdom, which I have confirmed by 35 (or more!) years of trading (badly, mostly), and for academic economists or technology-folk, or engineers (who prefer determinism over randomness...), you need to know this:

Loeb in his book: "The Battle for Investment Survival" has this gem:

"I am inclined to favour doing one's major forecasting from the tape or, to put it another way, from the price movement. This to me is elemental and necessary to success. Thus, once convinced the market is headed up, I should tend to follow the strongest of the active issues -- those reacting the least in weakness, and rallying the most in strength. They must be *active* to minimize the danger of reaching false conclusions from unimportant indications."

This is such a tiny, short amount of words, but it contains the wisdom of a lifetime of successful market operations. The man actually started trading (working most of his life as a broker and then a commission-house owner/partner) in the 1920's, and as a young man he experienced the 1929 market crash, and the Great Depression of the 1930's, and then the war, the 1950's boom, a bust in the early 1960's, and then another boom of the mid 1960's which was actually quite wild.

And he also made it clear that news is not really important - what is important is how the market *reacts* to the news.

I also like that he made it clear, one is always doing some kind of forecasting. You have to forecast - but also risk-manage, so that if you are wrong, you can back out, and survive to try again. There are clowns that brag about not doing any forecasting. So, how do you make your decisions? If you buy or sell, you are making a forecast.

The nonsense I read on the internet now is hilarious and useless, mostly. The best and most useful information comes from the evolution of prices and price action through time. That's it. Really. And Mr. Loeb also makes this explicitly clear, at the beginning of Chapter 16, of his most excellent book.

And yet also, for every rule, there are caveats, that make it clear that it is and always will be, your own human judgement that determines if your market operations will be successful. There are no explicit rules, except maybe cash-management risk-control rules. But even these must be broken sometimes, lest you get gunned-out by stop-seekers.

This is what concerns me about AI technology, and automated trading. I honestly think it is somewhere between stupid and dangerous. But it also has the great virtue of removing human emotion. For a human with emotions, this is a great benefit.

But I also fear that the algos might drive us ALL over a cliff, one of these days. Not now, and maybe not for many years. But someday. We are certain to get one of these 12 standard-deviation events, that the wrong statistical models suggest should only happen once every few million years - but actually seem to happen about once every 75 to 100 years. The Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami of November 1st, 1755 is an interesting example. History is full of these *reset* events, that cause destruction so extreme, that most folks simply have to start over with nothing. (The Japanese experience in World War Two, is also a contemporary example. The Emperor said simply: "We must now begin to endure the unendurable.")

This is a human characteristic. It is happening right now, for the millions of citizens of Gaza, and citizens of Lebanon, as the Israeli military, under the control of the racist/fascist Benjamin Netanyahu, rain thousands of American bombs down upon them. And it is also the plight of the Ukrainians, as the Russians do the same thing to them, now using bombs made in North Korea.

History is full of insane, tribal warfare, driven by hate and meglomaniacal, despotic "Leaders", who often end up bringing similar destruction down upon their own nations.

The wild emotions and blood-lust that drives military action, also can be seen in market action, as greed and fear wash back and forth across the mental landscapes of the humans involved. This is why the algorithms can do so well. They can buy when the fear creates panic, and sell when the waves of greed-driven euphoria are cresting.

But if the algos are "too clever by half", as the English like to say, then they will eventually join the rush, and become part of it. And then, just like in warfare-driven-by-hate and tribal blood-lust, the risk is that the algos will *amplify" the panic, and accelerate the wave-action.

And the resulting storm risks destroying the very markets themselves, just the same way, in which it also destroys racist nations driven to extremes by their wild, tribal hatreds.

This is the real danger of AI. My research suggests it may well amplify and accelerate the "rogue-waves" of history. If AI is made by and trained by humans, it will essentially *become* human, and will naturally develop not just positive - but also perhaps the most extreme negative human characteristics - and will also of course, allow the truly evil persons of the world, to have greater power and more extreme effectiveness, than they otherwise would have been able to acquire.

I can't really see this not happening. The Israeli's are already using a system called "Lavender" to help them kill at scale. It's really truly ugly, and it is probably a textbook-tool and use-case for future vengence-wars that are driven by extreme race-hatred.

The Israeli's have started the world down this path, and we suspect that history will judge these hate-driven Jews most harshly. And we also fear that America will also be damaged by supporting this curiously-awful exercise in mass-murder. President Macron of France has the right idea - Israel should be fully blocked from acquiring the weapons of mass-murder that it is deploying. But this will not happen, as too many interests benefit from this wavefront of violence and murder.

A bull-market continues until the final blow-out. And a war continues until all the cities are burning.

We seek stability and sanity - but these become rare commodities when things really get rolling. And all the old warriors and the old traders knew this.

What is most curious, is that America does not seem to recognize or grasp just how unwise it is to support and assist the Israeli blood-lust for violence that is underway. As history unfolds, and the war-lust grows, and the body-count rises, those who detest Israel will realize that it will not be enough to destroy Israel - they will seek also to damage and degrade America. And so right now, by it's actions, America is ensuring that many *generations* of anti-American terrorists will be created, and deeply motivated to harm American interests around the globe.

This is just stupid and tragic. The wise founders of America warned about getting deeply involved in foreign wars, where generational hatreds created tribal anger which could never be extinguished.

And yet, America assists the rogue-state of Israel, and actively helps it engage in it's destructive warfare and active mass-murder efforts. The Founders of America would be aghast at this extraordinary foolishness, and unwise political strategy.

[ Oct. 6, 2024 ] - Elon Musk's Speech From the Heart.

Here is Elon Musk's speech at Pennsylvania yesterday, with President Donald Trump. This is a really good speech - it is only SIX minutes, and if you don't watch anything on Youtube this year, at least watch this speech. Musk uses NO teleprompter - this is short speech from the heart, by a fellow who knows how to seek and find truth, and then get something done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SepmVBuJz_Y

I truly love and respect how he explains **exactly** why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is what it is. It says that "Free Speech" is protected. And he explains why the Second Amendment is there - the "Right to bear arms". It is there, to ensure that the First Amendment can be maintained by the People.

This is pure truth.

There are a lot of profoundly misguided, confused and dangerously irresponsible people, many in postions of power and authority, who want to degrade and eliminate these two key legal and political principles. A "principle" is a "comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine or assumption", according to my Webster's Dictionary. And this is key to understand.

If you don't have free-speech, you don't have truth. You have whatever the Elite wants you to have, and the people can be cheated, defrauded, and degraded.

And if you don't have the right to have weapons, you have no real freedom at all. You - and all the people of your polity - are little more than slaves, working on or at some large plantation, or prison-colony.

The Americans figured this out - clearly and without "Kings" and "Noble Persons" - who were the one's who always wanted to ensure the populace was disarmed and obedient.

America is rich and free because of the genius and wisdom of it's fine Constitution.

Those who are acting AGAINST this fine and principled wisdom, are enemies of America, even if they do not fully know this truth.

It is not enough for Trump to win. He must win with a ***LANDSLIDE*** victory. There is madness in America. In California, as Mr. Musk points out, they have passed a law which makes it **illegal** to request voter-ID at the polling station. In New York State, some curious female Judge has said point-blank "The Second Amendment does not apply in New York State." This is just wrong.

The so-called "Democrat Party" in USA is a toxic collection of folks who either cannot think clearly, or who are engaged in a direct and abusive fraud of massive scale, designed to degrade the explicit legal principles that the U.S. Constitution provides for.

The upcoming Election in the USA is the most important election any American will experience, in the lifetime of everyone living now. If the supporters of Kamala Harris win, then censorship will be ramped-up, price-controls may well be imposed, and some supporters of this curious person have even suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court be dissolved.

Kamala Harris cannot even give a speech, without a teleprompter. She is a bogus and curiously inept person, who is clearly unfit to be the Commander-and-Chief of USA. The strange set of circumstances that have put her where she is, as the Democrat Party candidate, are almost beyond belief.

Yet, here we are.

And so, even if you are a life-long Democrat voter, you need to consider voting against your family traditions, and quietly vote for Donald Trump, in the privacy of the voting-booth.

Do this to save America, and what it represents.

The stakes are high now, and the Forces of Darkness - censorship, price-controls, uncontrolled immigration of criminals and other undocumented illegal persons - and the insane assault on natural human sexuality - all this madness will continue and expand under a "Democrat Party" President.

[ Oct. 5, 2024 ] - Amazon AWS and EC2 is Just Fine. Really.
Ok, this is a public "mea-culpa" and an apology to Amazon documentation folks who might read the comments I made, when I thought this website (which I run on an EC2 instance), was deleted/destroyed/terminated. It was not. Here is what happened:

I got notification AWS was doing shutdown/reboot maintenance on the boxes/virtual-stuff my AWS EC2 instance and this website were running on. They (AWS) said in email, "We just gonna do reboot, dat's all..." Ok, fine. I checked after Oct. 3rd maintenance date, and no website. "WTF??!" I said. (Top of my head blew off.) "ARrrgh! ARrrrrrgh!" and so on...

I am stupid. Long stupid story short, my web-browser (Firefox 115.6 ESR on a Linux box) was making reference to "https:" which I had not got working right, and so my website was only "http:", no security or encryption, etc. (Yatta yatta...)

That was first error (on my part). Second error (also my part): I fired up AWS Console (which is different every time I log into it. Whaterver...), and could not find the EC2 instance (my running AWS Linux "instance", which is basically a running machine, running Apache webserver, and my little website (this site here), and the rest of my head exploded. "Arrrrgh!!!" I said. (I am too excitable, sometimes.)

So, I checked other "zones", and could still not find my running EC2 "instance", and so, started reading the various documentations on this issue. Blah blah blah... (Like "Charlie", the famous dog). I wrote snarky (and wrong) comments in Feedback channels. I was annoyed, that as a PAYING Amazon AWS customer, my EC2 instance (and my running website), had been nuked.

) Except I was wrong. I called my genius friend who knows all things, and asked him: "Help! What the hell? Why would Amazon DESTROY my website, when I am paying for it????" He wisely suggested I check OTHER ZONES for my EC2 instance, since if they said it would just be re-booted, that is probably what happened. And this turned out to be the case.

Oh my. I logged in again to the Amazon Console, and started looking thru zones. And yes, it turns out there IS a zone for Canada, and there was my ***running*** instance. When I went back to my web-browser and checked the URL by cursoring back to the beginning of the line for the URL, I could see "https:", and I did not have https: (ssl/tls 1.2) access enabled correctly, even for a self-signed CA-certificate. Damn. The website was NOT down. The URL "http://www.gemesysresearch.com" worked just fine, and the site was up and running, but I had tried to load https://... and it reported no such site.

So, I felt REALLY stupid.

AWS and it's EC2 (Elastic Compute Capability) or whatever the heck the EC2 acronym stands for, was working just fine. It's actually a bloody brilliant business model, and it just works.

I logged into my EC2 machine via SSH(which also still had my "Elastic IP#"), and all looks fine. I managed to shutdown the "httpd" system service (which is the Apache web-server), and fiddled about with /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl_whatever-the-hell-it-is-called config file, and got the "https" access, on port 443 working for https access for this site. You have to select the securty tab on AWS Console for your EC2 instance, and enable "https" and port 443 (which is the port for SSL/TLS (secure socket layer/ now called "transport layer security") AND you have to get a flipping CA-certificate (Certificate Authority SSL certificate in PEM format), and put it the appropriate /etc/ssl directory. But I could not get "Let's Encrypt" to work, and the ACME thing and the goshdarn Certbot thing did not work, and so screw-it, I just am using a self-signed certificate for "GEMESYS Limited" which has been my damn company since ancient 1981, and you can ask Revenue Bloody Canada to confirm this, if you don't believe me. (I have this ongoing issue with the clowns at Google Developer organ, which wants me to get a DUNS number from Dun and Bradstreet, but this process also is fraught with issues. It's all quite hilarious...)

Anyway, just to set the record straight, AWS and EC2 actually works pretty good. They flung my instance onto another machine-cluster or something like that, but the damn thing is still running. And I fixed (partly) the stupid "https:" access, with a self-signed certificate, since I am using Route 53 (iirc, the service) for my "www.gemesysresearch.com" domain name.

Now, if you hit this site with a "https://www.gemesysresearch.com" URL, you get the web-browser message saying "Cannot confirm this site's authenticity" or some such shite-message, and you can select the "Continue the fuck anyway", and actually see the drivel I am writing here.

I am not trying to take money from you, so nothing matters, right? -_-

But now, at least "https:" and "http" both work, as opposed to the idiotic "Nothing there at all." message that the web-server running on my EC2 instance would send out before.

And really, the whole Amazon AWS thing, with EC2 and it's EBS and S3, is pretty fucking amazingly cool. You have to read a bit and learn a bit more to get it all working, but it is a fine way to serve up a basic (or not-so-basic) website, and communicate (maybe) with your clients (and curious strangers) on the Big Web. Wow. Like it's 2003 or something, eh?

[Full Disclosure: ] Our AI for trading-forecasting works. I forecast a share-price number for the near-term future expected value of the bank-stock that we have and hold, which was higher than what all the Bank Stock Analysts in Canada had forecast - and I was right, and those well-funded folks were all wrong. Interesting how that works.

Oh, and another little discovery: I found out how to use the West Parry Sound Geographic Network system. It is just really amazing. I have this lakefront property, which I added to - two seperate purchases: I bought the "Shore Road Allowance", and also a piece of back-land - not too big - but enough to enlarge my shore-front property to allow a septic-field to be created on my lot a the top of the escarpment of rock,that the property has - and also to maybe allow drive-to access. And the WPSGN network shows this correctly - it has all the property boundries marked clearly, for every lot on the area in question which it documents. Probably it's the very best mapping application I have ever seen or used on the internet. It's awesome. To use it, you need a Linux box (or modern Windows box) with at least 8gb of memory, and a fat, modern browser, like Firefox 115.6 or newer. But it really is cool, especially if you can find your own property - your own little piece of Mother Earth - which you can OWN, "Fee Simple", just like a gosh-darn good old citizen of Ancient Rome could do!

So, it's all good.

[ Oct. 1, 2024 ] - Fields of Regret
This song is from Alice Cooper's first album, "Pretties for You", which I bought so long ago, in vinyl, as a "delete" (with the little hole punched in the corner). Great song. Same side has "Today Mueller", which is also great and fine. I listen to the kid's station on the local Community College radio station (88.3), and the modern tunes - even the so-called "alternative" music - is so self-similar, and not very creative at all.

I feel sorry for the kids. They are trapped in worlds that are derivatives of derivatives, and will never know the excitement of the truly new and fine. But I suppose most old bastardo's typically feel this way. I'm sure the creative folks in the DaDa art-movements of the 1920's felt the same way, as maybe did the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood", and so on. Beauty comes and goes, like a fickle female, and Art has to deal with the wild-swings of human views of reality, much as traders must deal with the wild swings of the market. You turn it to your advantage, if you can. Go to Switzerland with your creative husband (if you are a bored female), and write something like "Frankenstein", like Mary Shelley did - an amazing work which resonates today, long after folks have become bored with old poetry. Or maybe they are not tired of poetry, but the "Myth of the Monster Created by Man" - this idea or meme or whatever, lies deep in human consciousness. Mary was a genius writer, who took the medieval "golom" and made it modern. Hollywood did the rest.

What do we do with the "Monsters" of this world? Must we burn them all down? Or can we put them into "Monster Reserves", where we can study them like John Calhoun's Rat Colonies? How should we deal with the angry crowds of villagers with pitchforks and flaming torches?

[Full Disclosure:] We re-purchased all of our bank stocks - at lower prices than we sold them, of course.

The rising prices of gold, silver and crude-oil suggest that inflation remains a thing.

But as some clever fellow pointed out a while back - the "V-bottom" remains in fashion. It's not so much "buy-the-dip" that is happening, but that one maybe faces a higher level of market-risk, by *not* being invested, given that there is a managed-process which is designed to tilt the world financial system towards market-strength. There will be rising prices and rising markets, since this is the program that will keep everything dynamically stable, like running the heater in your car, in the winter, with the windows open. You get fresh air, the engine can be pushed hard, and run hot, and the cabin temperature is comfortable. The key to this kind of process, is a good fuel supply, and a driver that can gain-ride the parameters, so none of them gets away from him.

And that seems to be what we have, and where we are, right about now. You can go out at night, and watch the satellites track across the heavens. God may be long dead, but the communication grids, and the power-grids seem to be running fine. Yes, I just bought a big 11,250 watt gas generator (with electric start), but probably we will not need it.

But we are out in the country, and it gives peace-of-mind, like other local tools of power also do, that can be deployed when various kinds of breakdowns occur. We don't want to get lost in the "Fields of Regret", or the "Forests of Foolishness"... We are much more attracted to the "Sea of Tranquility". :)

[ Sept. 27, 2024 ] - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
Why do I have this feeling? It's a very strong sense of real foreboding. Like, it's all over, and we are about to blow the lid off the pot, or the windows out of the casino?

Too much is just too wrong, and the "smart money" is acting stupid. Is this really the case, or am I just getting bad vibes from aliens or something? I joke that my partner seems to be captured by aliens, whenever we go shopping. She disappears, and I figure that the aliens got her.

But then, I find her in the clothing section, or the shoes section, instead of where the food is sold.

Seem to have a much stronger sense of alien-invasion than usual.

The alien is that worm inside of everyone, that seems to be making them stupid.

Are we all infected???

The entire process just feels wrong. And I am sensing the real chance of a 10% or maybe 20% drop across all financial markets. It's something to do with the deep-DNA-driven desire for the Autumn harvest, maybe. Folks from Northern Europe, and even northern hemisphere, seem to have this "harvest-urge" as the winter gets visible in the weather patterns. This theory makes sense, since those without the "harvest-urge" would starve to death in a bad winter. The folks that worked hard to bring in whatever harvest was available, got to survive, breed, and produce a new generation. So, the autumn "harvest-urge" gets written right into the DNA, kinda the same way that the newborn baby knows enough to seek out the mother's teats, and suckle. Even humans have DNA-encoded behaviour. In other animals, DNA-encoding is proven to be much stronger, and better developed, but the brain-ability is lower. So, the autumn "harvest-your-gains" urge, induces "cash-me-out" behaviour in the markets. This is just a pet, personal theory. And it really could be wrong, of course.

It's just a feeling. Can't really prove anything, and the AI algo-thing is still looking upwardly frisky.

But it's all algos, trading with algos in the markets now. In autumn, the probability that the algos will get it wrong, goes way up. This is what my thinking tells me.

"This is not gonna end well." is what my little lizard-brain keeps signaling.

"Confirmation Bias" is what my blink-set neural-query tool suggests. I sold a slug of stock, and I look now for world-pictures to confirm my actions. Maybe. The problem with this game, is one really never knows. But I have this large dossier of very clever, very successful folks who ended up completely broke, and dashed-to-bits at the end of their lives. Long, long ago, I made a decision to avoid becoming one of them. Curious how this works.

I recall doing contract technical work in the City, and I would often have to use "body-shop" operators to get project work at good per-diem rates. I recall showing my (too long) resume to some low-IQ recruiter, who said only the work done in the last few years matters. I had four or five page resume of the stuff I had done, and this fool pulls off the last three pages and says "these don't matter." I think I laughed right at him. I collected my damaged little work summary, and said some thing polite like: "I see. Ok, well, I am sorry we can't do business. Thank-you for your time.", and I left. What I really was saying was: "You and your company are too fucking stupid to deal with, and I need to leave now."

See, I recall - in painful detail - every single project I have ever worked on, and some of the early work for the Feds in Ottawa, and the Province in Toronto, were key to my unique knowledge-base. I did wild work in Ottawa for the Cdn Feds, which involved data-driven statistics and forecasting, and I learned the actual solid truth of how sampling really can work, and how one can really trust and make use of the Central Limit Theorem.

The early stuff was what gave me the insite and the knowledge-of-magic that so many folks do not have, despite how much education they had/have. It's really funny. I think you can look at the first few years of a person's life, and the knowledge he gained (especially practical knowledge), and the solid decisions he made, and predict what life-outcome the fellow (or gal) will have. It's quite interesting.

So, the clown-show of fools who spout the nonsense in the commercial and government worlds - is really often hilariously wrong. If you can tap into where the errors are, you can trade against these silly buggers, and do quite well. Much more well than I really expected. But you have to really know what the fuck you are doing, and that is really, really hard to get a feel for, in a chaos-world of wild randomness. The real world of wild-randomness, with outcome-distributions of infinite variance - this is a pretty fucking dangerous place.

So few people really grasp the truth of this, at the deep-DNA level. But then, you have to also balance how your OWN deep-DNA is also able to be wildly wrong, in certain situations. Daniel Kahneman nailed this problem, in "Thinking Fast and Slow". His knowledge-base is why the evil Israeli's are so crazy damn successful at snuffing their enemies. They are truly the most dangerous folks on the planet now, since they have the power of awareness that most folks in most collective entities, cannot hope to grasp, without hard work and focused effort.

Like the Huron's called it: "The power of Orenda (the name of the engines in the Avro Arrow, btw...) is key". Huron/Ojibway defined "Orenda" as the power of focused will. It's a real thing. But it must be linked to a solid and correct knowledge-base. When this is done, then anything is possible.

But that "anything" includes good things, as well as bad things. One must constantly remind one's self of this critical truth.

You can self-destruct with astonishing ease, in this modern world. This seems to be what we are programming for, in many areas, and it makes me curiously uncomfortable. "Helter-Skelter" (or the "boo-ga-loo"?) really may actually arrive, in the next few years. We seem to be driving towards this goal, without most folks having any clue at all. It's the nature of wild-randomness. You get these 5 and 6 (and much more) standard-deviation outcomes, like the 9/11 thing, or the big tsunami in Japan, years back that whacked the Fukushima nuclear-plant, even though the Japanese had wisely built a good wall to protect the plant from just such a tsunami.

At Fukushima, they had curiously put *all* the auxilary generators underground, which were all flooded with salt-water, and were knocked-out. This caused the reactors to wildly overheat (all cooling pumps went offline), and the old, boiling-water reactors had no "SCRAM" cuttoff, so they boiled super-hot, and then exploded due to hydrogen and oxygen gas igniting, and blowing the buildings to bits.

And even worse, they had most of their spent-fuel stored right in the reactor building! So all that radioactive glop got splattered all over the Japanese landscape for hundreds of square miles. It should never have happened, but the safety-obsession of the poor Japanese, made them do something stupid-dangerous (ie. not vent the gas, and not keep the spent-fuel onsite). They keep a tight-lid on a boiling pot, which was curious madness.

So even if you know what will happen and try to plan for it - you can still get destroyed-at-scale by a minor detail.

[ Sept. 26, 2024 ] - Me And the Devil Blues
The cognoscenti will recognize this title as one of Robert Johnson's songs. The devil today is the AI, which is pointing straight up, and basically scares the poo right out of me as a hue-man. Which hue turns out to be green, (with robot-envy...). The robot is better than me, OR maybe the robots are doing all the trading, and I need to hire-a-robot (like that dude in the "Money Game" did - he had to hire kids, because he determined it was a "kid's market").

There is a line in Loeb's book, where he warns that the amount of cash the public can deploy to the market, is insane and scary... very over-the-top, and his reference-world was the 1920's. I fear (quite a lot, actually), that that is kinda where we are now - the deep-memory of the 1920's is quite gone. It is fake-shit like the GFC from 2008, and the "Dot-Com Bubble" of 1998 to 2000 that folks are triggered by now. Or the 9/11 terror-action in NYC and Washington, maybe. All those got dealt with just fine, so there is no fear anymore at all.

There is stock-by-stock fear, and tick-by-tick fear, but the idea that everything could sell off by 20% or 30% or maybe 70% - all that sort of thing is just not active anywhere now. There is now a deep-belief that Federal Reserve, "The Government", or maybe "All-those-billionaires" will be always able to ride to the rescue of failing marketplace action, and prop-up the day (and the week and the year, and so on...)

So, I worry.

My research tells me that all this could breakdown in a truly spectacular fashion. But even my damn AI is pointing straight up. And today, I sold the banks, only to watch them flame higher, like sitting earth-bound and watching the Korolov-star of the bottom of the lifting booster. It's just plain goofy. One feel's quite silly.

And I fear we are tee-ing up a monsterous degree of hard-core inflation.

One only needs to check the price of the hard-stuff (gold, silver, and real-estate), to see just how badly money is weakening. Are stocks an inflation hedge??? This is a long and continuing debate, with the answer always being "It depends..."

They can be. Sort-of.. Except banks suck as inflation-hedge stocks, since their equity is like infinite-duration bonds, very sensitive to interest rates.

And the rate-lift thing (whether by Fed/BoC or by bond-vigilant folks) is what will mostly drive their equity values. So, banks are maybe a poor hedge against inflation. Except they throw off cash, especially in Canada, and are pretty well regulated. So, one bangs one's head on the data, and the answer still remains: "It depends...".

Meanwhile, the damn AI is calling the future, with idiotic precision. It's weirdly gruesome, like a cup of red-ants, or maybe the Governor of California.

"If you are an AI-boy, and the AI was clear that the position was trending upwards, why did you unload it?" Well, it's a "Jim Fisk" moment. The "Devil made me do it". I think it was Fisk, or one of the old 19-century men, who, when asked how he decided on his trades, was supposed to have said (instead of offering an alogrithm), "I trade like a woman, using intuition." Maybe that was even a true statement... we have no way of really knowing (like so much of things now..).

I just feel (despite what my AI says I should do), that things are fragile as heck right now, and that something really crazy-awful is waiting just up ahead. I do not know what it is, but I think maybe I can smell it, like an onion-fart in a crowded elevator.

So, I unloaded six-figures worth of stock a few minutes ago, and then watched it get bid higher, like always happens.

I have no "secret-sauce", except maybe that stink of rotting onions that seems to be coming from my sub-concious, when I watch the numbers evolve on the screen. What would the Tony Robbins say? My modalities are pretty messed-up, since I am visual-kinesthetic, as per the NLP (Neural-Linguistic Programming) analysis. Smell is really *way* down on my list.

But maybe it is a dog-thing?

We are closer to dogs than we mostly realize...

I'll get the leash, and my old pup, and we will go for a walk in the lovely sunshine. Maybe I'll go down to the Crossroads, and see what I can hear...

[ Sept. 23, 2024 ] - Klatu, barada nicto, eh?
Strange sources - more research, across fields - more I understand how little we all know. Best book ever on the equity markets (and how to make money from them as a small investor) is Gerald Loeb's book "The Battle for Investment Survival". The title is correct and accurate. We are doing ok, but it is critical to focus on what works - we could be doing MUCH better, with just a tad more focus. What is curious, is how much bloody exhausting work it is to improve the game.

I read the ycombinator stuff ("Hacker News"), and it leads me down these curious rabbit-holes, which take days (or longer!) to navigate. Found a not-bad open-source publication on using Python + Matplotlib and related libraries for data visualization, written by a fine fellow from a University in France (Bordeaux, if I recall correctly...) - Too much to get down here quickly, will try to put links later.

One article that I am working thru, involves some fellow who put a real, operational, running Linux on an Intel 4004 processor - which is a 4-bit processor! Hilarious, but quite fascinating (for reasons i well explain later). I had mistakenly thought the 4004 was the processor used in the Apollo Lunar spacecraft, but I was way wrong. The AGC (Apollo Guidence Computer), was actually a custom-made unit, built with the very first integrated circuits that had just become available, back in the very early 1960's, by the Charles Stark Draper Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT. I am deeply ashamed to say I had never heard of "Doc" Draper, but his non-profit lab, which was part of MIT, was absolutely key in the development of microprocessor technology - and really computer hardware and software development in general. Draper and his group developed the inertial guidance technology, and his SPIRE system was the first computer-controlled inertial guidance device to fly an aircraft across the USA (east to west coast), in 1953. He enabled robot-aircraft, and went on to design INS (inertial navigation systems) for ballistic missiles and submarines. I discovered all this, from the wikipedia page about the Apollo on-board microprocessor, which was a 70-pound, custom-built device, designed by Draper's MIT lab.

There is a great article (now only available from the Wayback Machine archive), which details the history of Charles Stark Draper, and the MIT Instrumentation lab. These guys actually created the first algebraic compiler, using the MIT "Whirlwind" computer, an early vaccum-tube machine. An engineer named Halcombe Laning, in March of 1953, developed a ***compiler*** which could translate mathematical instructions into computer code, and then run the program on the Whirlwind. This was a significant first proof-of-concept, showing that mathematical algorithms could be translated into machine code, and it influenced the development of the "Formula-Translator", which became "Fortran", and was released in 1957.

What's really fascinating to me, is the development of the 1960's vintage Apollo spacecraft guidance computer. It was small and not very fast - but it was reliable, effective, and could accept INS (inertial nav system) input, and also could use celestial (star-fix) data, via a celestial-sextant, also developed by the Draper lab.

The most excellent document decribing the Draper Lab, is only available on web.archive.org, and the URL is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140501071138/http://www.draper.com/Documents/draperat25.pdf

Entering the above URL in a browser, will download the .PDF file directly, to Downloads directory, typically. It's an amazing piece of history, and details the life of Charles "Doc" Draper. I had never heard of this guy, yet it was his lab that got the contract to develop the Apollo Guidance Computer, which allowed the Lunar landings to be successfully carried out.

The wikipedia page on the Apollo Guidance Computer is also good, highly recommended:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

The AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) was developed in early 1960's, and first flew in 1966, about the time I started watching Florida rocket launches. First ones I saw, were the Gemini program launches.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer to use silicon integrated-circuit chips. The computer had a 16-bit memory word (15 data bits, 1 parity bit), 2,048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory, and 36,864 words of read-only core "rope" memory, which was not erasable. The MIT lab under Draper developed the first keyboard/display, which allowed programming, running, and monitoring the computer - and was called DSKY for "DiSplay/KeYboard". J. Halcombe Laning developed a sophisticated (for it's day!) real-time operating system, and the MIT Lab developed a virtual-machine which implemented higher-level instructions (double-precision trigonometric calcs), 24-bit vector calcs, and even an instruction "MXV" for vector times matrix calcs.

The wikipedia page for the "Apollo Guidance Computer" is probably the best wikipedia-page I have ever encountered. Highly recommended for space-junkies, air-pilots curious about flight-control systems, computer nerds (like me!), and history freaks (also like me!).

I really need to pay attention more to the "knitting", since the AI showed the portfolio price to be pointing straight up, which usually means a tiny (and very highly predictable) retrace is about to occur - which of course, it did.

See, the whole point here, is that using "flight-control computers" is absolutely critical, once the speed of the "flight" gets very fast. And that is where we all are now, both in aircraft, and in the markets. (A "trade" in financial markets is a lot like a flight. You try hard not to crash, eh?) (And also try to avoid being killed! Where is Gort???)

[Boolean-Trick Note: De Morgan's Theorem] I ran into this gem, while reading about the AGS (Apollo Guidance Computer): It did not have an AND instruction. No problem, since they just used invert-of-each boolean-vector operand, do an OR between the inverted vector operands, and then invert the result. I did not know this. I recall taking a course in boolean logic in my first-year at Toronto (before transfering to Waterloo, where they had online-terminals instead of punch-cards and printed-listings...) I was a solid "C" student. Pretty funny, except I just "got" boolean logic and prepositional-calculus. It was strange, life-changing personal experience. I was taking psychology (just like Charles Stark Draper did at Stanford, in the early 1920's!). The stereo-tactic surgery-on-rat-brains, where they made the little rodent guys into "wireheads" (cf. "Louis Wu" of the "RingWorld" novels) really caught my interest. But as a "C" student, I scored 96% in the boolean-logic course (which was called "Thinking Straight", IIRC), and I was annoyed, because I could not determine where I missed that 4%. I was a curious nerd with a love of fast cars... maybe it's a genetic trait? Some tweakage of the DNA? Unclear. But I missed "De Morgan's Theorm" - first encounted it today. Very cool. (Like Bayesian magic...)

Try it: You want to AND "1 0 0 1 1 0 0" with "1 1 0 0 1 0 1". The AND just means if "1" in both positions, then you get a "1", otherwise, it's zero. Simple. The result of the two vecs ANDed is: "1 0 0 0 1 0 0".

But if you only have hardware logic for OR, then you can use INVERT (which is just flip the zeros to ones and the ones to zeros... simple), and then OR the two vectors, get the result, and then INVERT the result, to get the ANDed value. Try it: INVERT each vec, and you get: "0 1 1 0 0 1 1", "0 0 1 1 0 1 0" as your INVERTed vecs. Then, just OR them, (a 1 in either puts a 1 in the result), and you get: "0 1 1 1 0 1 1"

And then, just INVERT that result, to get "1 0 0 0 1 0 0". This is called "De Morgan's Theorem", apparently, and I did not know about it (or remember it?). Now I am curious: How come it is a "theorem", and not a proof or an identity or an axiom?

[ Sept. 17-20, 2024 ] - Endless Summer?
I grow weary writing "crazy times!"... as I have so many times. I do this writing because I keep seeing things about which I feel a need to document. We are living in "*** very strange times ***" - perhaps they are times somewhat like the 1920's - which we must all realize were a time of fantastic change and growth. Much of our modern world, was created then - kinda like the late 1600's created the "Age of Reason", which was opposed to the madness of mindless religious superstition and god-fantasy. There are these inflection points in human history where things change. Everything that is "known" is understood to be ia bullsh/t fraud, and new views and new thinking comes cascading down from everywhere.

I suspect that we are living in one of these times. Except that fraud and fake-ness seem to be part of what is raining on us. This is a bit of a problem, and I am not sure how to deal with it - except to further push deep into reading what the historians said about crazy historical times. (I read Procipius's "Secret Histories", and some other "Secret History" books. (There are many...))

Reminded me of work.

Our main position is up from the 50's to the mid 70's. This is getting close to my original forecast.

Crazy world. Last weekend, I went sailing on a big yacht. It was nice. Owned by a family member. He has a nice boat - around 40 to 50 feet or somethign like that. The weather was perfect. I have all these pictures. At the end of the weekend, I took my small boat up to my northern Lake, and took a bunch of wood over to my place, and put siding on my little cottage on a rock ledge. It is crazy beautiful, and I rather like it. But it is back to being water-access, so I have to tow a small boat with me when I go the the place. The ride across the lake is fun, though.

I have to do more work and more reading. I will put some pictures up on this site. We are deep into some development work, which might be worthless. Not sure. Dizzy, and feeling unsure. Do people honestly talk about such things. Perhaps not. Things are actually really humming in my part of Canada. (Ontario)...

There are lots of crappy places for sale - but the farms are running flat-out. If you are a "Physiocrat" economist, then we are all gonna do just fine. The agro-yield is gonna be good - maybe for 7 fat years or more. The land is rich, it is being well-managed, and there will be good harvests going forward.

And there are children. As I drive thru the towns of Ontario, I see healthy children. This bodes well for the future.

[ Sept. 13, 2024 ] - Run, Baby, Run! (Away?)
Well, this is what our AI predicted, even though our tiny economist brains suggested that if markets were "efficient" all this price action we are seeing should have already been discounted. Not the case, of course.

We remain long, all-in on our banks and telecoms. Technology would have been better, but I am just too close to the whole thing, to believe in it. Most of the internet is divided between the annoying-but-necessary and the really-awful - but that is just a personal feeling. What is interesting is the AI advances from the "frontier"-level models is impressive. The latest thing, the OpenAI "Strawberry" project, which is now in beta for wealthy folks who can cough up the cash for the "tokens", is showing how it thinks. It's called "OpenAI o1", and is a modified version of the GPT-o4 thing, but with a whole bunch of hidden "reasoning" tokens, so that it can actually step-wise reason it's way thru various complex problems. The results are kind of staggering. GPT-o4 was good, but this "o1-preview" and "o1-mini" (which is actually bigger, according to some reports - we are not sure), and looks like it is now named "OpenAI-o1", is able to show it's "thinking/reasoning" process, and is able to solve complex math problems at the PhD level even better than it could before (the GPT-o4 thing).

We don't have access to this technology, as it has gone pay-for-service, (with an interesting fee-for-token model that we do not yet understand). Our lack of interest here, is because we just have zero interest in using any internet software-as-a-service offering. If we cannot localize it, and run our own copy, disconnected from the internet, then it is not something we trust.

There are two ycombinator things one should read - the OpenAI announcement, and the method by which two guys in a hotel-room in Vegas, busted the WHOIS baseline infrastructure of the internet, and developed a fairly simple exploit to create their own WHOIS server, and then use it to create their own versions of TLS/SSL Certificates.

I spent hours reading both these notes - most educational. Here are non-active URL references, which you will have to copy and paste into the URL field of your browser. (I am really tired, and have a building project underway at the Northern Office, on the Lake...)

The "Hacker News" is at: "https://news.ycombinator.com/", where I found both of these links:

The OpenAI Announcement: "Learning to Reason with LLMs":
Note: This URL crashes my Android-Firefox browser on my Samsung Tab-A. Seems to work ok on my Firefox 115 ESR on my CentOS Linux box.
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms

The new OpenAI-o1 thing offers "Chain-of-Thought Reasoning", and it looks to be able to do some very impressive things - like do actual cryptographic decrypts, which is pretty damn cool. I must investigate this area further. Really strange how the OpenAI.com website just crashes the crap out of my Firefox browser on Android (an old version). The OpenAI website causes (after about a minute) the Android-Firefox browser to crash, and display a white-screen with a message saying:" Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

Hilarious.
Of course, the only way the "browser console" can be viewed, is using "adb", and enabling the "remote debugging via USB", so there is no way for an ordinary user to do anything about this stupid error message. I truly detest Android and Firefox, but so it goes. I've kinda given up on the whole Apple/Google ecosystem-matrix.

If one reads the hilarious info below, you can get a sense of why. Nothing on the internet really works anymore, and any usage is dangerous and fraught with hierarchies of grief. I hate the whole thing now (not really - it's just Friday the 13th, and all sorts of shit is breaking.) Whatever, eh?

Maybe checkout this must-read gem, which is worth the time to read it carefully...
https://labs.watchtowr.com/we-spent-20-to-achieve-rce-and-accidentally-became-the-admins-of-mobi/

I am really tired of the internet. It has become quite silly, annoying, nasty and ugly. Google, Apple and Microsoft - and corrupt governments - now own the whole thing. So sad.

[ Sept. 07, 2024 ] - Alle ist Klar, Herr Commissar?
Well, maybe. Honestly, we have no idea how this current wild-world will evolve in the next few months. Typically, in history, when a bunch of questionable governments face serious constraints, if they can inflate their way out of the problems, that is typically what they do. It's only when the bombs are falling on one's cities, when people start to make hard and necessary choices.

We suspect that there is curious risk in both directions. There is enough funny-money floating around, managed by New-York lightweights and pseudo-folk that a serious runaway in equity markets is a possible track. This seems pretty counter-intuitive, yet it is also what our AI is forecasting (see the bottom charts on the first page of this website, for the Sept-7 projection. I finally got around to copying the graphs up onto this site... been busy with boats lately...)

Rescue a dog from a shelter if you can. Dogs are good, and need our help. Maybe if we can be good to dogs, we can see the benefits of kind behaviour. Perhaps this can help people develop ideas about out how to end that awful running sore of violence called Israel. The place needs to be an integrated Federal state, made up of everyone. Right now, there is a violent blood-feud being run by fascist-forces of the IDF - a bunch of evil motherkillers that make the German forces of World War Two, look like Florence Nightengale. This crazy experiment in small-circle-driven mass-murder, needs to end, even if it means the carpet-bombing of Israeli cities. The American's endless supply of weapons and bombs are being used in Gaza to enable the murder of little girls and even female American citizens by the Israeli killers. This is just completely insane, and needs to stop, lest we all sleepwalk into World War Three, with happy-happy joy-joy Californian drug-madness, and rising markets. America is acting insane now, and this trend seems to be accelerating. This damages the world. Stability is failing.

One scenario is the hyper-inflation thing. We don't think it will happen - but we also recognize that USA is acting wild crazy now, and it will not matter who wins the election - the madness looks to continue, blood will flow, and racist jews who are filed with hate, will insist on (and make happen) more military supplies to help the blood keep flowing.

The USA is using aircraft-carriers, parked on-station, to help Israeli murder-monkeymen, kill American women and Palestinian little girls. This is just madness, and will make hard-core anti-semitism not just acceptable - but mandatory. This is a bad path. The violence-seeking American-killbois should get the hell off this path. It is deep wrong.

The Netanyahu supporters are pure, hard-core evil like real evil can be. We don't support Hamas, but we sure as hell understand just what motivates them.

The ugly murderers of Israel really risk pushing the world into real, solid world-conflict, and anyone with any brains can see this is a bad trend. Trump will either lose or win, and either way, we all risk seeing seriously tragic results play out. This trend is growing. If America does not stop it's unlimited supply of murder-weapons to Israel, it risks making itself the enemy of the world. Israel should be embargoed and blockaded, and weapons should not be supplied to them by anyone. But because America does the opposite, and assists Israel's genocidal war-efforts, it degrades itself.

The long-term costs of this unwise strategy will echo forward for years, and actively encourage and embolden those who view America as a violent, unstable problem-nation, that needs to be disarmed and de-militarized. American de-militarization will not be a good thing, as it risks ending the "Pax Americana", and encouraging "special military operations" as the primary method by which nations will resolve disputes. Peace will be lost.

The bigoted jews of Israel should be left to their own devices. Only when the money and the weapons supplied by America is cut off, will these arrogant racists have any incentive to seek peace. But no American political figure will do this. So the violence will grow. And so, probably, will the money-supply of US dollars, and thus also American inflation.

It may take a full-scale "American Revolution Ver. 2.0", to restore some kind of rational, responsible behaviour to the USA.

[ Sept. 06, 2024 ] - Danger Will Robinson!
Anyone remember the robot from "Lost in Space"? Ancient TV series - probably somewhere on the 'net, in some ancient-TV-stuff site. I watched it when I was five, or something like that. I feel we are in this zone now - the robots should really be waving their arms and warning us. But instead, the damn algorithms are just hovering up the punter's cash... pretty damn funny.

THe bank-stock we unloaded yesterday was reported by Zack's as being the one in the Option's markets that had the biggest implied volatility, which is pretty damned hilarious. That takes some doing, since there are a lot of option contracts. Implied volatility is the vol number you get, if you take the Black-Scholes thing, fiddle the equation so instead of predicting option price, you plug in the option-price that is prevailing in the options market, and calculate what volatility level you need to get that market-made option price. It's a neat idea, and research shows that using implied vol is better than using historical vol, which to me seemed really counter-intuitive, when I first heard this - but now, it makes perfect sense, since I am not quite as fucking stupid as I used to be (well, that might not be true. I am still pretty goddamn stupid sometimes... I seem to have this pathology that makes me run experiments. Most blow up in my face, like some dolt in a high-school chem-lab, trying to make rocket-fuel for his illegal missile experiments...)

Anyway, me thinks there non-zero probability of trouble ahead. There is too much fluff and foam everywhere now. Everything is credit-card-purchased from everyone else, and it's like we are all holding bills-of-exchange drawn on the future that is assumed to be perfect and fine.

Most folks who have lived, know this is not usually the case. We call it the "One Damn Thing After Another Effect".

"Shit happens", is what other's say, as they try to deflect and avoid the responsibility for their unwise actions.

I have weird gut feeling that the DJIA and the SP500 is due for a burp downwards. It won't be the end of the world, but it will take the excess hair off of quite a few furry things.

Like, when you want to check the gasoline level in a fuel tank, and it is night-time, don't light a match, and hold it over the tank-opening, and look in. A friend told me about a guy he knew who did this, and next day, everyone was asking the poor fellow, "Hey, What happened to your eyebrows?"

Full Disclosure: Bot bak our banks. Resistance is Futile.

[ Sept. 05, 2024 ] - Blue Skies (... Blue Days)
So, are we all ready for the big meltdown? Or are our trees going to grow up into the stratosphere, and bump into Elon Musk's Starlink Satellites of Love? Maybe. But we think likely not. (Irving Berlin and Lou Reed - two song-makers from the Apple of Largeness, that we like...)

I remember the first company I wrote up when I had this gig-work as an Investment Analyst. It was an awful company, but it was listed on the TSE, and when I interviewed the CEO, it was clear he was an old-style market promoter, who had cobbled together a tech-thing that sort-of worked. But the business model was just not getting traction, and I got paid to see if a death-spiral finance-deal was the last best hope (which is I think what happened, if I recall correctly...). It was comical, like much of my life efforts. I got paid, but I wrote up a report with a "Sell" on the thing, and the guy who retained my services, pointed out simply: "You'll never get far as a stock analyst writing "Sell" recommendations."

And he was right!

I wrote up some other companies later, which had much better prospects, and one was a real winner - which I had written up as a "Strong Buy". They got taken out at a nice fat profit for everyone. But then the firm I was working for, blew up. Their head-trader (I never met the guy), got busted in a some FBI sting operation, and the reputation of the firm was destroyed, and the old dudes that owned the business just could not recover, and eventually it was all flushed away. Much of my life was like that first "Pirates of the Carribbean" movie, where Jonny Depp's ship is sinking, and he sails it into a dock, and steps off the mast, just as his boat goes under.

See, no one ever calls in an outside consultant when everything is going hunky-dory. As a free-lance boy, I was always brought on-scene to these disasters-in-progress. Every. Single. Time. I kinda liked the challenges - but the list of shitstorms that I endured, and the good businesses that I worked in (which typically blew to complete hell), is a long list - includes Nortel Networks (good company at the engineering level, great 5-gate software development practices, completely stupid, dishonest, corrupt and clueless management), Lehman Brothers (pretty much the same thing), Cantel (a great Canadian cell- phone company, but run by this dude who would become Mayor of Hunger City - sad and sadder all around), and a fine independent brokerage operation, that got taken over by a Big Bank. Resistance is Futile. What more can one say?

Canada (and USA also, truth be told), is more lucky than smart. North America is a fucking paradise. We stole it from the Indians, who stole it from Nature - but it is the part of this planet where you want to live. We're all armed to the teeth (even in Canada - actually, *especially* in Canada), and yet we leave our borders open and undefended - except from attack from ballistic missiles, where we have this magic shit that can address that threat. Why send expensive bombs in expensive rockets, when you can probably Fed-Ex a device to any city in North-Am? It's a crazy world, and it would be best if we can avoid conflict. War is just fucking stupid. But it seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, and it lets these third-rate evil folks rise up and do the big strut like they were top cock-of-the-walk, as a farm-boy (like me!) might say.

Right here, right now, I am terrified that a meltdown of biblical proportions is being tee-ed up. The entire digital ecosystem is based on the same brain-science that we use to understand violent criminals and psychopathic murderers. Our internal neural-nets are flawed - and can be misled by flashing lights, drugs and pretty stories.

This is a serious problem - and the clever folks who can manipulate the message-medium, can do things that should not be done. And the worst offenders are Governments, so regulations will not do shit to fix this threat. We - the citizens of this big mudball - risk seriously falling into a set of insane fantasy-worlds, where any goddamn thing can be made to appear real - and this will drive and vector serious human behaviour. The power of rhetorical arguments has always been profound. The Ancient Romans and Greeks studied and taught this. The Euro-Catholics used it for 1500 years to control (somewhat) the nation-states of Europe. But we can now do it all at-scale. Every device is a human-programming-tool.

At school, I studied a lot of different stuff. I recall the Psychology Lab course at U of T, where we got a lecture - and a demonstration - from a PhD student who had put wires into a rat's brain, and the little ratter could push a bar, to deliver a tiny current to his "pleasure centre", in the medial hypothalumus, if I recall correctly. The guy doing his PhD explained how this could *completely* control the little rat's behaviour. Later, I read about Louis Wu, who was a "wirehead" (a character from one of the RingWorld novels, IIRC).

So, here we are. We are all being wired. It's serious. In fact - we all HAVE BEEN wired. The deed is done. We are all hooked on electronic dope. But it get's worse. We have digital money - every single person is running on credit of some kind. We are building a neural-science driven house-of-cards, hacked together by the big Internet Of Everything Connected To Everything Else (IOECTEE), and enabling it with credit relationships backed by funny-money which is supported by nothing at all.

I actually did my degree in Economics, because I wanted to figure out the system, even back many many years ago.

And I sort-of did. I get it. I took non-credit courses in Accounting and weird computer languages (like APL, for example), as well as all the formal computer-programming and economics stuff. The un-official stuff proved to be very useful. Too much to explain here. But I got a working sense of how it all works.

And my conclusion is, is that we are pretty much all certain to be completely fucked, at some near point in the future. We risk a cascade collapse. The US Preppers - they are completely sane and sensible - yet they are laughed at as loons. People who laugh at them are wrong.

Full Disclosure: Sold all my bank stocks, on the uptick driven by the BoC 25 basis-point rate reduction. The reasons rates are being reduced, is because the economy is breaking. Driving across and up-and-down Ontario roads, I saw all these "For Sale" signs everywhere. Folks are having to renew their 3% mortgages, and at 6%, they cannot cover the costs. Some signs even say: "For Sale" on the top, and "For Lease" on the bottom. What they are really saying, is: "Please buy or lease this goddamn house, since I cannot bloody afford to live here anymore!"

We think this bodes badly for equity prices in the next few months.

[ Sept. 04, 2024 ] - The Irish Rover (Happy Deception)
I must put some of the pictures taken at the Northern Office. I missed the fun yesterday, as the semiconductor stocks blew up and nuked some wealth. NVDA is getting revenue from building out datacentres - and we are back to the bad old world of centralized I/T, like IBM in the 1960's (before my time, but a great case-study in how technology and technical disruption can be used to hover up money from both private and public sectors.)

The USA presidential election is a shaping up to be a rolling disaster on several levels, too much madness to address here. I sense a major-major (like in "Catch-22"?) sea-change coming. The COVID-19 weirdness is now in the rear-view mirror, and it feels like Desolation Row, more than anything. I am finding everything, everywhere, is getting kind of weird. Property-price up in the near-North are still stupid - and this is driving a lot of building. There are monster-home cottages where there used to be vacant shoreline. The money being vectored into these development efforts is non-trivial. Curious. Folks have to work in the Cities - but they sure like to get the hell out, whenever they can. And they remain willing to pay for the opportunity to do so. Suddenly, everything is crowded, and money is losing it's strength. "Shrinkflation" is showing up in the staple commodities (like orange-juice, needed to keep that vitamin-C flowing in one's blood), but petrol is falling in price.

I am really concerned that AI risks becoming toxic. Maybe really a very toxic thing, which will only benefit the true forces of darkness. It is already being used to engineer impressive deceptions and frauds, and the scale of dishonesty and scam-generation and distribution is significant. The cell-phone "apps" that everyone loves and most are addicted to, will become perfect vectors for all manner of rank nastiness. This is an easy prediction, because it is already the case. Your digital-enabled devices will be used to monitor and manipulate your behaviour, and folks are happy to buy into this process, as it means they can avoid thinking. People are lazy.

But we risk losing the world. We risk the creation of a world of horror, pain and targeted-destruction, as the political strategy by the big-players is played out, using people as the pawns. All the things that make civil structure work well - sound-money, free-speech, freedom of movement, contract-law, honest reporting, free-flow of information, secure land-tenure, clear and explicit property-rights - the entire sweep of what we need to keep civilization working smoothly - all these key characteristics can be effectively undermined and degraded by clever AI-enabled strategies.

Too much to go into here. But no-one wants to talk to a chat-bot that is being used to reduce the head- count in a call-centre. We have built a very "clever" world - but I don't want a "smart speaker". I want a radio with a tunable dial - not something pre-programmed for me.

See, we have just noticed something quite interesting. The internet has turned to shit. Really. The only thing it does well now, is selling, and to make credit-card payments easier. It can also facilitate communication and it makes finance and trading action easier - but at the cost of increased levels of wild volatility (wild in the sense that true variance is maybe infinite - or at least is unknowable). By connecting everything to everything else - and everyone - the risk of process runaway is amplified. And fraud is made much easier. Shit-filters are mandatory everywhere, to do anything. Triple verification is needed, KYC (Know Your Client) is required to a higher level, and so on. But the process still cannot be trusted - only people can be trusted - and not very far, truth be told.

But the AI stuff is and will be used to factor-out the people. This is the idea. And this can make for a world that can quickly become ugly, nasty and awful. And a world completely devoid of opportunity. This is what concerns us. The economics of AI deployment at scale may in fact create a sterile economic landscape, where economic opportunity is effectively extinguished.

And this will be a problem.

When economic opportunity is gone, then harsh conflict is sure to result. If you cannot create wealth, then ambitious folks will organize to *steal* - or take by force, what cannot be earned by economic effort. As AI removes economic opportunity, it may well induce a ramp-up in ever-growing levels of competitive conflict - the eternal fight for scarce resources that has always been the thing that humans will do to survive and gain advantage.

Many escape into fantasy and fiction and self-delusion (the internet enables that also), but for realists, who live in the real world of blood, sweat and tears, the deployment of AI technology at scale, will just be more of the disruption that degrades and then removes completely, all economic chance of improvement. Life becomes a grim slog, and conflict becomes the only path out. The world we are enabling with AI, may look like an ugly dystopian novel.

The solution is not "more regulation", but is perhaps the complete removal of all regulation. But that means that every man must become his own State, with his own Ministry of Finance, and his own Military. Either way, with deployment of AI at scale, we are knight's-forking ourselves into a world of greater conflict and deception.

Those big AI-datacentres NVDA is building, may not be good things.

[ Aug. 29, 2024 ] - The Piano-Man's Found Another Nail for my Heart (Risk is Real)
As I do some farm-work and industrial gardening (with a lawn-tractor), I keep noticing the Lear Jets flying overhead. They make a kind of small fighter-jet sound. Some with swept wings (the more modern ones), and others with the old straight-wings without any sweep - real classic. I suppose classic jets are kinda like classic cars. Ya just want one, and it's probably kinda fun when one gets to toot around in it. Life is short, YOLO and all that...

Here's a thing: Suppose you have a cool device that gives you 71% accuracy in your forecasts of what is going to happen. That's actually pretty good, in a world of wild randomness, where you have no freakin' idea what the distribution looks like. (You have no idea of the number of balls-in-the-bag, or even if there is only gonna be one bag or many... The way they teach probability theory in school is pretty goofy. You're lucky if you have some awareness of the balls in your own bag - golfer analogy and all...).

Anyway, consider you are pretty confident that you have 71%, on average, ability to call the event you are concerned with. That's pretty good for an event with a high-level of wild-randomness. But here's the rub: You need to have TWO events play out in sequence, for your outcome to be profitable. You need to either buy and then sell (and you are trying to call the market), or maybe you are doing sale-and-repurchase, and you need to sell at the right time, and then re-purchase at a lower price. Or, maybe you are shorting, and then have to buy-cover. So, your little machine needs to successfully call TWO events, which are pretty close to independent, and then you will find that your probability of successfully getting to a profit-point, is now 71% and then a second 71% is also involved in the likelyhood of the second, closing trade.

This changes your probability of success. Even if you can say with 71% accuracy what will happen, and wait for that kind of situation to tee-up, the Pr(Success) = .71 times .71 = 0.5041. And suddenly, you realize that you have no damn edge AT ALL. NONE. Your two-trades, which must occur in sequence, even if you can be over 70% sure of the price-path-evolution, you actually are betting on not really much more than a coin-flip. Your probability of successful (ie. profitable) outcome, is really just a 50/50 bet, which is no edge whatsoever. Your machine which can give roughly 70%+ accurate forecasts, still means that your actually Pr(Success) (where "Success" is defined as an acceptable profit), is really not very good, because both trades - entry and exit - have to be executed at approriate price-points. Even if you are 71% sure of what the outcome will be, because you have to have TWO outcomes in sequence, you really only have a 50% chance of success.

See, even if you can have better than 70% accuracy in your model, the actual execution of the model results in the real world of wild-randomness, means that even if you almost KNOW what will happen, because you have to do TWO things (not just one) successfully, you really don't have any edge. You are gambling, and without an edge, which means that if you play long enough, or enough times, you will lose all your money.

One's initial sense is that a better than 70% ability to call the future, would offer a gambler a real edge. But this is not really the case, if he has to make TWO randomness-infested decision-actions work correctly in sequence, in order to walk away with cash.

Profitable stat-arb is not just stressful, annoying and risky (the whole "picking up nickels in front of the fast-moving steam-roller" problem), it is also damn hard to do successfully. You need to be more like 80%+ sure, of your predictive ability. Surprisingly, a 71% accurate model is much more like a coin-flip in practice, than one would expect. All because there are TWO events, and .71 x .71 = .5041. It's right there in the basic probability arithmetic.

If you have, say an 80% probability of being right, then 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.640 works better. You have a slight edge, and if you can do enough 80% and then 80% probability events, you will have a slight edge. But if you only have 65% predictive accuracy, then .65 x .65 = 0.4225, and if you play and bet with this model, you will have only a 42% chance of success, and thus the longer you play, the more you will lose. You will have too many trades where one side is wrong, and even if doing sale-and-repurchase, you might find the re-purchase price runs away from you in a dramatic fashion, and never returns.

The only investment model that works, is to do lots of trials, and close quickly the ones that do not look right, and add carefully to the ones that look to be working. The "fail fast" strategy is critical, and most investors just cannot do it. I find this very difficult. I tend to want to "give the trade some room ...", which usually turns out to be profoundly bad idea.

But it's funny and curious. Even if you can predict to better than 70 percent accuracy, you really still have no edge. None at all. Your gains and losses will slosh back and forth, and not trend positive, even if you work for years and years. Maybe index-investing is the very best one can do, unless one just gets lucky, or determines thru hard work, luck or inside-information, something special and unique about a special and unique situation, and then makes a big, concentrated bet, or uses leverage at just the right time, and in the right amount, to enable a big, low-probability win. The key-fact here, is that for every person who does this successfully, there are maybe a few hundred who did NOT do it successfully, and went to the graveyard, not to be seen again. We only see the "Big Winners", and not the hundreds of "Standard Losers", so we get a very false impression of how the investment game typically evolves thru a standard human lifetime.

What has worked for us mostly, is dividends. And also some very key real-estate investments, where we got lucky thru hard work and pure, speculative daring. But risk is real. It's as real as a cement wall, hit by a car at high-velocity. Remember this, if nothing else.

[ Aug. 28, 2024 ] - Sheena is a Punk Rocker
She actually was "Queen of the Jungle" in a 1930's comic book series. Ramones took the concept, and updated her strong-character/rebellious-nature for 1977 New-York/California. Great tune, fun idea. We really can see the future, by examining the past. Just not clearly.

Short-squeeze on our stuff - price popped, and then today, faded like a good dream. Canadian stocks really are pretty poor investments. There are only three or four that you want to own, and if you seek dividend income, you will often find that mostly you are just getting your capital back. The markets here are comically awful, but USA investment entails currency risk, and abusive withholding taxes on dividends for retail investors - so the only way to play USA, is to bet for speculative long-shots, or huff-puff nonsense that will - with eventual certainty - collapse back to baseline (where the baseline is sometimes zippity-do-dah).

I miss Father Guido Sarducci (is that the right spelling?) of Saturday Nite Live fame. He was a character from back in the days when SNL was funny. We gave up on TV long ago, and literally never switch it on. ( I just cannot tolerate the adverts - and on the 'net, I can run advert-blocker software.) He wanted to create a new augmentation of the Big Church, and call it "The Church of Zippity-Doo-Dah". Comedy and music would be on offer, and maybe instead of little biscuits that "transubstantiate" (oh, please...) into Hay-soos, you might get a drink with some chips or fries? I don't know. But somehow the concept stuck in my mind. In the markets, zippity-doo-dah is often a euphemism for zero-you-lose-all-your-investment. Not quite so nice, as the Church-of-a-Good-Gin-and-Tonic.

We think Canada is in real trouble, if we cannot get some real change at the Federal level. The uncontrolled immigration is dangerous, abusive, and unwise. Our demographics are just awful - the fecundity rate is like, 1.40 or something insane like that. We are so far down from even being able to replace our population, that it is silly. (Demographic-Economists suggest a fecundity rate of 2.1 is minimum to sustain national population. Fecundity rate is number of live babies on average, a woman has in her reproductive lifetime.)

So, we have a problem here. But the even more insane "solution" to this, is the very-bad-idea being run by the current clowns in Ottawa - full-on, unrestricted immigration of people that do not necessarily share our cultural values. It's a perfect recipe for tragic conflict, that need not actually take place. We notice serious over-crowding everywhere now - and this is completely by design. Property and house prices reflect the increase in supply of humans seeking a place to live, and as house-prices rise, so do the property taxes and energy costs. All this is unnecessary, as the population pressure is entirely a result of government diktat.

We are not against immigration. But the current approach of bringing millions of folks into the country each year, is creating economic pressure and problems that need not occur. The more traditional levels of 200 or 300 thousand per year, with formal sponsorship arrangements for each person - this is the right way to do it.

But instead, we are bringing in over 1 million (or more) per year, and then adjusting our traditional laws and procedures to degrade and damage existing Canadian citizens, in a number of really abusive ways. It's a perfect example of a really stupid, knee-jerk response by a deeply corrupt Federal Government, that seeks tax revenue above all else, even if it means destroying parts of what Canada is and was.

Funny how that works, is it not? With Fidel Castro's bastard child running the clown-show up in Ottawa, there is absolutely nothing (legal) we can do about this foolishness, until it's election time. But of course, the new immigrants are being (implicitly) told they have to support the penis-heads in Ottawa, if they want to keep the benefits flowing.

The whole model is nuts. There is nothing wrong with limiting growth, and trying to seek stability, rather than blowing up the system with out-of-control, unwise policies designed to increase the tax-take. We find the highways are full, the hospital emergency-rooms have 200 or 300 brown-folks crowding in, every day, looking for "free" health-care, and no doctors are available who are willing to take on new patients - so long-serving Canadians who paid their life-time of taxes, have to line up at the few "walk-in" clinics, and get served by immigrant doctors who are fine people - but this is all a VERY DIFFERENT model from what we used to have, when our own medical schools could create our own skilled medical doctors.

See, what we find now in Canada, is a series of systems that just do not work well, and many that do not work at all. And the problems are everywhere - not just in health care. The highways are full of "new drivers" who drive crazy, and everyplace is just completely *full*. We like brown people - no problem. But ONLY brown people? This seems to be the current strategy. We are strangers now, in the country we built and paid for.

All this is unnecessary. It is by design - being implemented by a corrupt regime that is being supported by a hard-core Socialist who wears a red-turban on his nasty head - so he looks like a giant penis with a head-only condom on. Considering that the NDP is working hard to fuck Canada but good, I suppose the condom image maybe makes sense. But really, it is just completely insane, and there is nothing we can do to stop these clowns who seek to destroy the traditions of Canada.

Until maybe when an election is called, and the writ gets dropped... The silly buggers will have to call one at some point. Personally, I would like to vote for Sheena. ;)

[ Aug. 24, 2024 ] - Google Search is Almost Completely Dead
Ok, try this fun experiment: Load up a Google Search basic webpage, and enter: "democratic scam convention was dogmeat mixed with cowflops". The thought just occured to me, and I tried to google it (as is often an opportunity to get curious and possibly interesting responses). I got precisely **TWO** responses!

First was a Reddit page about "dogmeat", the (maybe) blue-heeler cattle dog in game "Fallout 3" that is possibly modelled after the type of dog Max has in Mad Max 2. The second was a puff-piece by Canadian Yahoo talking about how nice and fine the Democrats were comparied to the evil, demonic GOP folks. Fucking comical, this Google punch-you-in-the-face censorship really is.

Ok, now, try DDG (the DuckDuckGo) search engine. Just enter "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/" to get to the DDG search page (without too much promo flapdoodle): And enter the exact same phase: "democratic scam convention was dogmeat mixed with cowflops". The phrase is not meant to be terribly meaningful - but notice the large number of responses that DDG generates...

You can keep clicking NEXT button after each page of results, and learn that McDonald's no longer using "pink slime" (even if the Democratic Party of the USA, still kinda is...). And you can see that at site: "https://gear.bethesda.net/products/fallout-dogmeat-tracker-canvas-jacket", the very uber-cool Official Dogmeat jacket, with "Wasteland Trackers" on the back, is completely sold out. (Damn! I want one now... ) The game "Fallout 3" must be popular, if the "DOGMEAT" jacket is sold out. Reminds me of scene in a W. Gibson novel, re. a leather bomber jacket...

And it goes on. The usual MSM suspects are found (CNN and CBS, etc.), but so is a reference to magazine called "United States Magazine and Democratic Review", which began publication in 1837, and changed it's name to "Democratic Review" in 1852. The year 1837 is interesting, because it was the year of the intense Rebellion in Upper Canada (now Ontario), where I live, which was a serious, bloody affair, but was taught to us as school kids as little more than a minor disturbance. This is one of the Big Lies in Canada, as the 1837 uprising was a bloody, violent affair, which lead to massive reprisals by the British military forces, pitched battles around "York", (now Toronto), and eventual capture and public execution by hanging in the central cityhall square, of the ringleaders, some of whom were senior people in the small British colony of the day. (One was Judge Blount. I find it interesting when senior Judges are hanged by the legal system of any polity. Maybe this is something that should happen more often?) Upper Canada colony was put under military-law, for roughly 20 years.

It was only when things started to get frisky in the USA, (the Civil War was coming) and the Blob that ran the colony (called the "Family Compact") wanted more British troops for protection, that the idea of creating the "Dominion of Canada" as a self-sustaining, self-financing independent national entity became viable. The greatest Canadian politician ever - a Scotsman with a bad temper, a sickly wife, and a drinking problem, named John A. MacDonald, put together a group of folks who favoured national independence, and proposed it to the British bosses.

The idea for the Dominion of Canada was: "Hey, you will get ALL the same economic benefits you get now (a reciprocal free-trade deal with England mother-country) BUT IN ADDITION, you will no longer have to PAY anything to make money from this colony. We will cover our OWN defense costs, and in fact can be a source of soldiers, food, wood, grain, minerals and metals, and so on for the Motherland of England. Just let us run the place ourselves, and you get the same benefits, but without having to fund Forts, soldiers, garrisons, military costs, and so on. Deal?

Canada got it's national existence once the USA went to war with itself. Both Canada and Japan, converted into real nations, in 1867. Canada got the BNA Act, and Japan finished the Boshin War quickly, and Edo Period gave way to Meiji "Restoration". The USA Civil War, which ran from 1861 to 1865, had just ended, and MacDonald and Disraeli (the Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Conservative Prime Minister) managed to agree to the deal. The Colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec, with Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick also involved) drafted the Canadian BNA Act (British North America Act), in 1864, and it was accepted by the British parliament and got Royal Assent on March 29, 1867, coming into force as of July 1st, 1867. The USA Civil War was still on as the Act was drafted, and that simple fact let the deal get done. England did not want to fund another bloody great war with USA - and Canada colonies were getting rich supplying materiel to the North - and remained happy and eager to trade with the English mother-country.

It's always about money.

And from this useful and successful DuckDuckGo search, with the interesting reference to "The United States Magazine and Democratic Review", I discovered that the actual text of this old journal has been archived, and is available for viewing. It's wonderful! The 1847 journals from January to June, for example, can be accessed via University of Michigan, thru the site: "https//babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id-mdp.39015066914626&seq=17". There are 606 pages! And it's full of arguments in "United States Trade and Tonnage" for free-trade! It's so interesting to see the details from this time of conflict and growth - the discussions are much like what we see now, re. China, and trade in EV's, and semiconductors. There are real questions as to what the duties should be - or if there should be any at all. The same arguments re. oil and gas and semiconductors now, were about coal and grain and other food products, back in 1847. Most interesting.

And the bottom line to all this: Google Search Engine - using it's strategy of deep political censorship, is badly broken. The DDG (DuckDuckGo) search engine still works. Or at least it works the way, search engines should work. It lets you find lots of interesting things, you might never see.

Almost certainly, Google will be broken up. It just does not work well, and it's almost-monopoly on Search, is a bad thing, because they are no longer even offering it. The "Search" tool they offer now, is just plain bad. And worse, it is politically fiddled, which is really bad. What is so ironic, is that the "United States Magazine and Democratic Reveiw" was actually digitized by Google, according to a tiny footnote at the bottom of each page. It used to be a good thing, this Google enterprise. But they went wrong, and ruined "Search"

Time for a change, perhaps? We need folks to have more awareness and understanding of economic issues. Otherwise, we keep fighting over the same issues, for the same stupid reasons, and civilization cannot maintain and extend prosperity. Free trade is costly and difficult and sometimes bad for declining industries - but it lets folks have solid, sustainable prosperity. And even worse than stopping trade, is stopping free-flow of information. Censorship and suppression of knowledge - that is really bad. Free speech (no censorship!) and free trade (no tariffs!) are the ideals we should strive for.

[ Aug. 23, 2024 ] - Don't Pay the Ferryman
Until he has safely put you on the far short. And don't name your yacht "Black Swan" or "Bayesian" or "I-Know-the-Future" or some such hubris. Sorry for Mike Lynch and his daughter, and the others whacked by a waterspout. Earth wants to kill you - and I can forecast with 100% accuracy, that She will succeed, at some point within the next 150 years. ("Old Parr" was a fraud - the son just took over his father's identity, which is a useful trick, with many curious benefits.)

USA is getting really weird. Quite sci-fi now, with a got-no-votes low-end middlebrow set to become the Big Boss, and the good old white men being told to fuck off and die, by the darker set of scammers than we have seen in a long time ("dark" as a metaphor for moral weakness, not chroma of fleshtones...)

Economics is getting also very weird. We get one guy, from the "Reserve", saying what the interest-rate will be. This is bat-shit crazy. Interest rates are set by the marketplace for money (as capital), not by some dudes kow-towing to the Democrat Party mafia-bosses. It's all just silly. But it is the silly that all the bump-stock traders are focused on, so it makes the market go "Wheeee!"... which is even more silly.

I have to go buy a light bulb, and try to put it above my head...

[ Aug. 22, 2024 ] - Long or Wrong
Still long, we are. Volatility is the price paid for survival. We've run over 20 years on the dividend streams. But perhaps it is time to buy some puts... Trouble is that the risk we want to hedge against, is full-collapse risk, which really means underground bunkers in places that are not documented. And I have no interest in living in an underground bunker. I'll accept the "mineshaft gap", and expire on the surface, in the (nuclear?) sunshine.

So, we remain long with the curious cocktail of dividend generators, and watch the fireworks on the horizon. I don't think AI is going to work, unless and/or until the training can be made to happen in real-time, so that the system actively improves as it is used. My LLM thing is locked in 2021, and it cannot update itself with new information - even if I tell it "Listen, here is my lock-code for my car. Can you remember that?". It is just not able to do this, and this makes it kind of worthless.

There has to be *nightly* training that updates the weights of the matricies, so that info that the AI encounters *today*, is actionably available *tomorrow*. It's what we call in Japanese, the "kino, kyo, ashta" (yesterday, today, tomorrow) problem. You need to have done your work yesterday, to effectively deal with the crisis of today, to ensure you can focus on the plan that will track you successfully into tomorrow, as it rises up over the horizon, like the shock-wave of a nuclear blast (or the rising sun...)

I really think reading fiction might be a waste of time - worse than a waste - it is actually *negative* action, which pulls you seductively into someone else's twisted and perfectly fake and wrong world-view. You will be mental manipulated with all the heurisitcs and tricks of social-behavioural fuckery. Nothing useful or helpful can come from reading most fiction. It is just a picture-of-the-world that is proveably, certainly wrong. But then, there is Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", and the Issac Asimov stories - they were so good, that they put useful ideas in people's minds, and helped to map out the domain of the future. So, maybe fiction (science-fiction), might have a purpose. But "relationship" fiction, and stories about fucked-up families with bad drunken fathers that abuse their women and children, this stuff is just shit-eatingly worthless, I am afraid. And it seems now to be this toxic shit that gets critical aclaim by the lamestream media. Yuck and yuecch. Stories about fucked-up people fucking around and having bad times - the "problem dramas" of modern junk-TV and such - all this is worse than worthless, and might as well be Fahrenheit-451ed. As I grow older, I grow sympathetic to the views of the Firehouse Captain.

There is a *lot* to said for being an iconoclastic skeptic. A curious amount of human generated "stories" are just manipulative dreck. They are to be avoided, I suspect. Stories are very effective at assisting and extending the process of self-delusion, the most dangerous affliction that can befall any of us. The "narrative" is almost certain to be a lie, designed to vector a potential counter-party's thought process, so that he or she does some thing, or takes some action that benefits the narrative-promoter.

Beware the goddamn narrative. It will almost certainly be wrong, or at least deceptive, in that it will offer explanation (where there honestly is no explanation), and meaning, where in fact, the driving force generator behind the events, was just randomness. The narrative will be crafted to achieve an objective the narrator seeks.

Sure, there is yin and yang, or light and darkness, and this can explain a lot. But darkness is more than just the absense of light. The most powerful darkness in a human scenario, is the self-imposed darkness of willful blindness to what is really taking place. You are being lied-to, and cheated, but even if a wise person tries to point this out to the poor, deluded person, the person suffering from modern self-delusion will actively seek to maintain their illusion-world, and respond as if threatened. I think this explains a lot of market activity, and human social relationships in general (of which market-activity is just a specific, special-case subset.)

It's really, really hard sometimes to know the truth. And even if someone carefully takes time to suggest what the truth is - the deluded person will seek to avoid confronting what is real, and may retreat into a fantasy-world that gives them comfort, even if such comfort means they risk their own destruction.

As the old Swiss trader said: "When the ship starts sinking - don't pray, just jump." This is difficult to do, even for a clever fellow who knows this heuristic. The water is cold and dark, there may be sharks, and the boat is still floating. This discourages action, until of course, the boat sinks. But by then, your corrective action is too late to offer protection.

[ Aug. 21, 2024 ] - Fat Tony's Black Swan
These nightmares are becoming intense. I wake up sweaty and exhausted from a night of sleep. My little dog sleeps soundly on top of the covers, at the bottom of the bed, oblivious. The wild complexity of the dreams surprises me. After 2 or three minutes of wakefulness, they completely evaporate from memory - leaving only the dull impression of Cassandra-awareness. (And I did not even get to ride in Apollo's chariot...) Perhaps it's the blood-thinners I am taking, combined with the cocktail of B-complex, fish-oil, vitamin-D and collagen, mixed with the gin and quinine from the tonic? It's like that line from "Beetlejuice"... "I'm feelin' pretty good, actually..."

Ok, so I am re-reading "Black Swan" and "Fooled-By-Randomness", two excellent books. Highly recommended, even if N. N. Taleb is a rude bugger. I sent him a nice email once, and got this astonishingly rude reply, which I can't even recall. He probably assumed I was someone in the business. Wrong. I am like Tyrell's niece: I am the business.

And probably I am being stupid - as if reading about the bloody "Black Swan" problem can somehow help me determine how to deal with the wild, over-the-top shitstorm that I am pretty sure is looming on the horizon. If I was sailing a big "Bayesian" boat, I would drop all sails, motor like a son-of-bitch for a sheltered anchorage, or deploy a big drogue-shute.. Funny how Mike Lynch got "hoisted by his own petard" as the English might say. But I wish no such misfortune on any man, who has a nice boat. Folks just plain underestimate what nature can do. Two happiest days in a man's life: First, when he buys his first really big yacht, and the second is day he sells it, and gets his money back.

I just cannot shake this curious and disturbing feeling, that "Here, there be Dragons", and that we are rushing headlong into this geo-fenced region-of-error without any attempt to course-correct, by those at the helm. I do not like being the passenger on the big ship of fools.

I think Taleb (is he still alive? I hope so...) should sell some Hollywood boy the rights to his character "Fat Tony". For some curious reason, this fictional character from "Black Swan" has stayed with me, in the back of my mind, as much as any fictional construct I ever encountered - even as much as Cpt. Picard of Star Trek, TNG. Curious how our minds and our memories work. As humans, we remember stories better than anything else.

But the truth is, the world is not a story. It is wild, pure chaos, without any god or "deus" to offer even map-guidance, let alone any sort of protection or assistance. We are more than just "on our own" - we are lucky bastards in a world of paradise and pain, and we make our plans as we wither and fade, and nothing can arrest this process. I've seen so many really nice and good things just fail, end and collapse. There is only the void that lies before us, and nothing we do can alter this certain destiny.

What is so truly fascinating, is the capacity humans have for self-delusion. It is just about limitless, and really knows no boundries. I been data-seeking, reading various blogs and comments from folks who still actually "journal" with weblogs on the 'net, and some are quite interesting - but all their work will be "tears in the rain", no matter how successful, or how many "followers" they accumulate. (Facebook truly is a social cancer. It successfully leverages just about every human weakness. The internet experiment has almost reached the bottom now. "Fascinating...", as Mr. Spock might have said...)

Swan-Vision-Alpha:
The coming warfare will likely be surprisingly ferocious. I suspect many people will relish the opportunity to participate. There will be long lineups at the recruiting stations. The blood will literately run in the streets. I recall sitting in a barber-shop, at around 7 or 8 years of age, about to get my hair cut down to what a Marine might look like (each hair, maybe 1/4 inch in length, so your head felt like velcro when you ran your hand over it), and I read a comic book called "Real War", and it had this image-frame of the Canada-USA border at Niagara Falls, with the customs agents shot to bits, their bodies hanging over the bullet-broken glass of their booths. A rogue US-expiditionary force had invaded Southern Ontario, much as Russia had invaded Ukraine. Real war. I met a young check-out clerk at the local Canadian Tire store, who looked so different - young, attractive, but a strange serious face. She had come from Kherson. Her English was good - only a slight accent. She had relatives here.

The "Real War" documented in the 1960's comic book fantasy has actually begun, but most folks actually have no fucking clue. I have Palestinian friends who have lost *hundreds* of family members to Israeli death-squads and ethnic-cleaning bombardment operations.

I am certain now that Trump cannot and will not win the USA election. But the illegitimate Harris regime will be no better, and enemies of the USA will use the opportunity to take advantage of American internal conflict. We find it curious that the equity markets are not discounting this likely scenario.

It seems to be the stuff of my current nightmares.

[ Aug. 20, 2024 ] - Non-Linear Lines
I remain impressed at the resilience of the US markets. But I feel I must caution that 1929 looked a lot like this, as have other non-linear transitional events in history. The Democrats in USA are having their honeymoon moment, and the media-machine is pumping the bellows hard. The huffs-and-puffs of the big Fire Dragons of Deception are scorching the earth of truth, and making possible the drift towards the New State of Rain. We'll get bad policy, big crisis, and an operational Police State, once the Party-Fun is over.

The US markets just love this shit. It's really interesting - we have the "Not too hot, Not too cold - Mmmmm just Right!" economy, and even Goldman Sachs says this - Goldilocks has returned. The stolen gruel is being happily consumed by everyone. But does not that child's story end with the 3 Bears returning, and killing and eating Goldilocks? Or was that just in my version of "Mother Goose and the Brother's Grimm"?

We are actually very positive-focused folks here. Things are ticking along well. The investments are throwing off fat dividend-streams that let us pay the bills, the vehicles, equipment and even the big boat are all working well, and I even had a chance to put some nicer-looking wooden siding on the front part of my small cottage-complex at my lakefront place. The structures are small, but there are three of them, and the one closest to the lake (which gets the direct blasts of winter-winds), needed to be better protected, so it got an overlay of pressure-treated pine which looks like cedar, but is treated with a copper-arsenic compound that gives long life and prevents wood-rot. It looks nice, and should stay looking nice for many years (we hope).

Would be nice if we could get similar long-life from our investments. Treat them with poison? Maybe. We have found that a useful heuristic (a rule-of-thumb), is: "Invest in companies that you don't like." This is the opposite of what most folks do. They buy stocks in companies that they like (and then watch them fall in value, and buy more because the price is "cheap"). We have done this. Bad, bad and bad.

I dislike Microsoft and Apple - but should have bought their stocks, because we are all forced by their dominance to buy their products. (Try and buy a non-Apple computer *WITHOUT* Windows. You will find it to be difficult.) Despite all your rage, when it comes to our technology choices, we are still just rats-in-the-cage. I built some Z-80 SBC's (single-board computers) from a bag-o-parts from Mouser, just to have something that I could run code on bare-metal. Writing in assembler teaches one a lot - but I use a BASIC interpreter hacked-together by a genius friend who did the board design (and which works well). I actually wrote a matrix-multiplier and matrix-inversion program, in BASIC for the Z-80, by manually transcoding some old FORTRAN code. It all works. The matrix- math stuff is the deep-neural guts of AI, and understanding it useful.

But one guy can only do so much, even with help from genius folk, standing on their shoulders. I can see further, but not really do too much about what I see. This is the hard part. It's the Cassandra problem - you know what will happen, but your warnings go unheeded, and you have to watch the horrible "accidents" happen, which actually are not accidents at all - they are just processes and programs running to their non-linear conclusions. But it is still painful to watch the horrible auto-wrecks in the rear-view mirror, as you fly at velocity down the highway-of-life.

AI, modern discoveries in neural-science, bio-hacking, knowledge of the work from behavioural economics, psycho-linguistics and Baysian probability models - all this material technology, will almost certainly create a high-conflict, angry and dangerous world, which will then not just allow-for, but will mandate a 1984-style Police State, where economic and political freedom will be made to expire.

Most folks will not want this World - but the State-Bastards and the "Blob" will force this upon us all, and the State-Bastards will grow fat, rich and powerful in the process. Their operatives will reach out and destroy your freedom, your opportunity and even the most basic control you think you might have over your own life. Unless we normies organize to erase these larval forces of darkness (and let's be clear - the truly evil forces are all coming from the Leftists), we will have no freedom in the future. We will be slave-serfs, eating soylent-food made from bugs, and seeing our property expropriated by "social-justice-warrior" government-backed fraudsters.

This madness is actively underway in most Western-world economies, right here and right now. There are not-so-secret plans, in my local neighbourhood, to expropriate farmland, for some stupid auto-factory or battery-plant or some secret, government-backed State-Bastard project. This is insane, almost beyond belief. But the project is rolling, State-Bastards see the chances to get bulging pockets of wealth, by stealing farmland from families who don't want to sell their land for comically small valuations - land which has been held for over 150 years by the same families. The project is stupid, the implementation is profoundly wrong, and the use of non-disclosure-agreements (NDA's) is just fucking criminal.

This nonsense is just another tiny example of the idiotic madness that is infecting all the political elites.

What I find most curious, is how the markets are reacting - especially in USA - to the prospect of the Left-programmed future the Democrats are pushing. It's a collective of bad choices and stupid ideas - but it will be another cash-dump (funded by funny-money and borrowing, which is insane at this stage), and the market is sucking it up, and getting giddy and bids are flying in and up. I think this is fucking madness.

But then, I recall history, and I realize this is what it looks like. This is the algorithm. We think that we are above history - a fool wrote that we had reached "the end of history", and so on. Complete arrogance and self-delusion is what characterizes stupid, nutjob bubbles. And I am starting to think we have to be in one. It is a global, credit-fueled confidence bubble of the most extreme scale ever seen in human history. Maybe it goes on forever, and we just drop zeros once we add too many? Or are we programming events that will cause collapse actions *independent* of financial machinations? As the foolishness and deception grow in scale and social breadth, we are leaning to views that this is more likely.

Things seem to be going well and fine. But based on what I am seeing, I have never in my whole life, been more worried and concerned over political process and the near-future operational economics. There are abusive idiots and greedy fraudsters in control of our Federal politics - both here in Canada, and also (even more so) in the USA. This alone bodes badly for our future. But link that to the wild, debt-fueled overvaluations of financial assets, the horrific and extreme lack-of-wisdom of Western world policy towards the race-based religio-fascist State of Israel (a festering wound that cannot be healed by more USA weapons), the tragedy of the Russian assault on Ukraine, and the threats by Chinese Communists to invade sovereign Taiwan, I just cannot see a future of peace and prosperity. Conflict seems certain to grow.

A future of wild rolling wars, financial instability, and rising anger on all sides, seems the most likely path forward.

Maybe I'm wrong. Rather hope so.

[ Aug. 18, 2024 ] - The Plan for the Destruction of America?
Kamala Harris is the worst political scammer to reach for the top since the early 1900's. She is so comically terrible a choice, that it just rattles and shakes the imaginations of those who know anything about economics. Her policy plans are certain to degrade and damage America - vastly worse than anything Donald Trump or really anyone in the Republican Party could carry out. She is actually blaming price rises on "price gouging" and "greedy grocery stores" and her solution to this is price controls. This is just fucking insane. But it plays well to the mindless and the misled, unwise people that dominate our world now. It is jaw-droppingly hilarious. America is actually on the verge of a classical European-style economic self-immolation.

Here is an explicit step-by-step process program of exactly what will happen, if economic-idiot Kamala Harris gets elected, and tries to implement "grocery price controls":

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kamala-harris-proposed-price-controls-may-lead-communism-mass-starvation-end-america

And there are rational, fine people who will actually support this fuck-stupid Kamala-nonsense, because they are so effectively misled and scammed by the mainstream American media, where all the little Lefties play their siren-songs of deception. Politics is being reduced to a faked-up classical medieval morality play, with "Mr. Orange-Man Bad" and little "Mrs. Brown-Face Good", and the people are sucking it up like liquid sugar mixed with opium.

And with the Democrats and their "ballot harvesting" strategies, where they hoover up those huge bags of "plantation-votes" from the poor-folk neighbourhoods, the race will probably be decided in favour of this astonishingly dishonest scammer. The Wicked-Witch of the Left, the "Great Pullosee", in her evil garments of dead-bat wings, has managed to make things even worse than they were, under the Old Crazy Bye-Done man. It's like the Wizard of Oz turns into a Trans-Black-Dracula and the becomes the Bride of New-Frankenstein, from the Left Coast of Hell.

I didn't think it could be worse than having a "Hillary Clinton" president, but again, history has shown that my "worst-case" scenarios, were not actually sufficiently "worst-case" after all, since there is always a more grim and astonishingly awful scenario, just around the corner, as we slide down the ball-gutter into the future.

"Price Controls" for America, as the super-great, super-strong US dollar, turns into steaming scrip, from a Police-State, right before our eyes! What a transformation! How about that? Big Bombs for the Tiny-Hat-Big-Nose-Boys in Israel to kill little Gaza girls is not enough for America. No. Americans now have an operational plan, to go full-communist, and trash their own economy.

Vladimir Putin and the Russians must be laughing themselves silly.

After she destroys the food-supply chain in America, what will Kamala-thinking assault next? Maybe the American military budget? Or maybe she will stop paying the interest on all those US bonds? Like Argentina always does, when they elect goof-ball Leftist females?

Harris is ahead in the polling for the critical swing-States, and it looks like she is certain to win. We give it a roughly 80% chance now. The dark-folk (figuratively and literally) will vote for her with 85% to 15% margin, and so will the children. It's madness, but... It's the Comedy-Show of the New Century. No need to attack or bomb America. The Americans will vote for "Mrs. Brown", and they will trash themselves quite effectively.

Problem is, so will we also, if we don't get rid of Castro's Bastard.

[ Aug. 17, 2024 ] - Worst-Case "Degenerate Economy" ... It just gets more comically awful. The steaming crock of info-poop that is being served up to folks now is just so terrible, all one can do is laugh. It's just hilarious. This guy "Howie Lindzon" has an amusing blog, in which he huffs-and-puffs. He coined a term "The Degenerate Economy" to describe the USA economy, and he now wants to "re-brand" this name, as too many folks seem to have agreed with him. He has asked for folks to send him ideas for a new name to characterize the modern USA economy, but I think he has really nailed the essence of it. I tried to send him a reply, but the clever underlined code in his little blog, actually does not link to anything. His writing is basically click-bait, to get you to "subscribe", which is fine, but we are not interested in subscriptions.

But I wrote a reply, and it is too good not to share. Howie is one of those clever guys, if you get my drift... His blog is a trolling operation. He sells tickets. Maybe, like in the old David Bowie song, maybe "She's got medals..." (Just a great song. See if you can find it. Bowie was so far ahead of his time. Today is a "Drive-in Saturday" I guess...)

Howard Lindzon asked for new names for "The Degenerate Economy", and this was my reply. Posted here, because I could not actually send it to him...

------------- "The Degenerate Economy" is a perfect name. You nailed it. And we are all now more on our own, than at probably any time in human history. In the 1960's and 1970's, the Vietnam War was seen as a bad and unwise US strategy. Now, USA is happy to help Israel slaughter over 40,000 non-combatants in Gaza, and no one gives a shit. If you are critical of this ethnic cleaning operation, you are accused of being pro-Hamas, which is an absurd lie. I'm an old white guy, and I know what is happening. Basic morality has been flushed down the toilet. Most people are selfish, ego-centric scammers now. The internet and their Government has taught them to behave this way. Killing and violence is considered just fine now in the USA, when it used to be viewed as a bad thing. This is a big change. Lies are now told by everyone - especially by public officials and the big-nosed big-mouthed brigades of hard-core scammers. They shout their lies the loudest. In a social-civilization, we get out, what we put in. It is of course expected that a degenerate society, will produce a degenerate economy. This is the only way it can track. And each year, the anger and the violence will grow. And it won't stay offshore forever. It will come on home, like a returning soldier. When the debt payments become unsustainable, then the real fun will begin. The "Degenerate Economy" is the perfect term. You can't change it now. -------------

But poor Howie will likely never see this, since I don't promote this site or try to SEO it. It's really just an attempt to transcribe actual research notes, which every honest scientist should really try to do.

Note: The AI forecaster seems to be working not bad. It's not great, but it does give some solid counter-intuitive signals, that seem to be actionably correct, which I find makes me curiously uncomfortable. The most difficult thing for me to do now, is to take the trades it recommends, which seem wrong (and yet, often are not...) Old Daniel Kahneman was correct. Loss-aversion is a real thing - and one can even generalize it a tad further, and assert that folks will have a high probability of choosing paths that are expected to track a long-term survival scenario, even if that means surrendering obvious profit-opportunities in the short and medium run. This propensity to place survival far ahead of gainful strategy, is curious, since it can probably be shown to be quite sub-optimal.

Not sure how to deal with this. Using a pure robotic approach might be best, but I have a recurring nightmare, where all the robot-portfolios track self-similar paths that take *everyone's* investment portfolio, over a cliff-of-destruction, rather like lemmings. This is because the past-data that they are all (or will be all) trained with, becomes wrong for the modern experience, which will see highly correlated trades all blow up at the same time. Example: Think perhaps a quick hypersonic nuclear strike on Washington, New York, LA and San Francisco/Silicon valley. The result is a catestrophic loss-of-confidence in the USA dollar, and an meltdown of the Western-World financial system.

It would not be enough for the "nuclear winter" nonsense - anymore than there was a "nuclear winter" after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The bombs could be small, and the actual source of the assault could be disguised - with both Russia and China vigourously denying any responsibility. What would USA do? Who would they launch against? Who would even decide what the response would be, if the political people were all removed?

This is an extreme, far-fetched scenario - but it is not that far-fetched. The USA has spent the last 40 years, using bombing campaigns and mass-murder as political strategy. It is unrealistic to expect that similar action against their homeland, could never occur. Europe - basically UK and France - could offer assistance, but how would that be paid for? Russia and China would insist they had nothing to do with the attack, but would insist that if attacked by any American response, they would launch all their missiles at USA targets.

US stocks and bonds would fall in value, and this would induce margin-calls in every leveraged investment fund in the world, that held US assets. The USA bond market would collapse, and prices for many assets might not be known. International payments would probably require gold-backed currency to be used.

All this could happen really quickly, and all the AI-models which trained on past data, would be essentially worthless - or maybe even worse-than-worthless - they might introduce pro-cyclic risk-avoidance strategies, which could collapse most financial paper valuations across most economies.

So, how does one structure an investment portfolio, if my nightmares tell me this is the true "worst-case" scenario. Four 1-megaton nuclear explosions, will not destroy the planet, nor make a "nuclear winter". But they might badly damage the Western World financial system, and create a very different future world, with much greater scarcity of basic food and fuel resources.

If one examines history, this "empire falls down" scenario, is not uncommon. What is interesting, is that we have the technology to engineer this scenario right here, right now, yet anyone who even discusses this, is looked upon as a foolish alarmist. Folks talk about this - but not in portfolio-review meetings, and rarely even in political circles, where probably, they should know better than to dismiss this "worst case" scenario for the collapse of US-dollar market and reserve-currency dominance.

[ Aug. 16, 2024 ] - Global Debt is 330 Trillion USD ... I encountered this little possible fact on the internet (so it must be true, eh?) (Hint: This is humor, ok?)

We run with no debt. This limits us, but also protects us. Our experiments in AI, and our work on the development of predictive AI models has yielded results. But we still cannot be sure if there is really any there, there, as the pundits have said. Our AI-driven forecasts could just be getting lucky, due to trend-projection, and really be dangerous. The risk is that everyone is looking at the same data, and if the AI is trained on the past, it will have a clear picture of the future, that might be wildly wrong - for everyone. This concern keeps us awake at night.

The deeply interconnected financial world - where everyone is in hock to everyone else, seems to us to be a crazy dangerous systemic process. There is no way to hedge, when everyone is in the same trade, following the same formulaic strategy. (Russia, sanctioned and fighting, might just emerge 20 or 30 years from now, as the dominant world-power, if it can just wait out the debt bubble-burst of the Western-world financial structure.)

Or maybe this complex of interconnected links may keep everyone from being too crazy. It might be a web-model where more links equals more strength, rather like the internet itself. With no "Big Boss" running the system, there is no central point of failure, so a birth-death model, with high-levels of linkage between agents, might actually be a source of system resiliance.

We are trying to get a clearer picture of this idea. Somewhere in the data, the answer to this question might just be lying, hidden and unseen.

Or not.

The next few years will provide information that might make things clearer. I am trying to imagine Kamala Harris as an effective Commander-and-Chief of the US Armed Forces, and I confess to being unable to do this.

The debt has to be a concern, and lowering interest-rates will probably spike inflation, and produce only a temporary fix to high-debt-service costs. We fear a de-coupling, and cannot yet articulate exactly what will be de-coupled from what.

[ Aug. 12, 2024 ] - Insanity ... BNS - Bank of Nova Scotia, has decided to set fire to almost 3 billion US dollars, by buying 15% of KEYCorp, which is based in Cleveland, USA.

If L. Scott Thomson and the Brigade-of-the-Unwise at Bank of Nova Scotia, wanted to destroy 3 billion US dollars, I could sure have shown them a better way to do it. More fun, at least. Invest in a solar-energy or Electric Vehicle company or something. Or go to Vegas for a month or two. We hold a ship-load of BNS, mostly because it was not part of US Banking.

USA is the most over-banked nation on planet Earth. And BNS is not even buying a bank.... they are just buying 15% of a US bank - and a RUST BELT bank at that. BNS shares are down $2.70 as I key this.

I am full of real anger. This looks like the dumbest business decision I have seen a Canadian company take, since Nortel bought that steaming pile of crap, called "Bay Networks", and began an ugly and slow process into complete financial destruction.

You do not need "Financial Warfare", when your own investments make decisions like this.

USA is a blood-bucket full of "Banks that do not make money, and will probably die horrible deaths", once the big implosion begins.

We specifically held BNS just BECAUSE it was not going to be sewered by the coming USA Bank Crisis Version 2.0.

There is just no accounting for the madness of groupthinking fools..

-----------------End_of_Rant---------------------------------

BNS - Bank of Nova Scotia, and Mr. L. Scott Thomson cannot do this deal, without shareholder approval, and the approval of the US Federal Reserve - and maybe even OSFI approval from the Canadian side. This is a foolish and just-plain-bad investment. BNS is proposing to buy 163 million shares of Keycorp, which runs KeyBank, which is basically a bank that is having trouble, and is based in the USA Rust Belt. Great for them, but bad for BNS shareholders.

This is not a strategic acquisition, this is just a speculation. These managers at BNS are speculating with SHAREHOLDERS MONEY. We are the shareholders of BNS. We hold thousands of BNS shares. This proposed transaction has already damaged BNS shareholders.

This is just wrong. It's a bad idea.

That $2.8 billion US dollars, that the Bank Nova Scotia managers proposes to spend on those 163 million shares of Keycorp, is our money. It belongs to the shareholders of BNS, NOT THE MANAGERS or the EXECUTIVE STAFF.

We can stop this transction.

This is a bad deal, and worse - it is nothing more than a speculation that BNS managers are making, with the money that belongs to the shareholders of Bank of Nova Scotia. This is exactly the same kind of nonsense that went on in the 1920's, with bankers gambling with shareholders money, because they could.

Except now - we have black-letter law and explicit regulations that prevent this sort of stupidity from being done. Bankers cannot go gambling with depositor's funds, or with shareholder's profits.

We can stop this stupid transaction, since it is not in the interests of BNS shareholders, and is probably pretty clearly designed to benefit some other folks who are NOT shareholders of BNS. It is bad business, because BNS gets no control, and gains nothing for making this trade. They do not get control of a USA bank, and there is no gain for BNS shareholders in Canada, unless Keycorp shares are bid up. But who will bid them up? Who wants another weak, rust-belt bank which could suffer a deposit run, any day?

This transaction almost looks like a scam. All risk is borne by BNS shareholders, but the benefits flow to US investors who get to unload their declining Keycorp shares for some real money. Mr. L. Scott Thomson just might have to go, I'm afraid, and this transaction will have to be prevented.

BNS shareholders can stop this transaction.

That money that the managers of BNS proposes to spend, is not their money to spend as they please. That money belongs to the shareholders of BNS, and this proposed transaction is a bad deal. It is just bankers speculating with shareholder's funds, and this is not how Canadian banking is done. We learned all about this sort of nonsense, back in the 1920's, and we do not need to repeat the same mistakes here, 100 years later.

We can stop this silly transaction, and repair the management problems at BNS.

[ Aug. 7, 2024 ] - Astronomy ... (sharing a drink, at the "Four Winds" bar...) We watch with curiosity as the "Mag. 7" turn into the "7 Screaming Diz-Busters" (cf. "Blue Oyster Cult"). I supposed I should also say: "Don't Fear the Reaper". The Nasdaq is holding up well, and USA will probably skate thru all this, if they can align to sanity at some point, which we suspect will eventually happen. But we see this fibrillation action getting worse. It is just not a good sign - it's not just "volatility", it is the beginnings of the "smell of fear" that comes into a stretched market process. I recall Nortel, at $120/share, and Lehman Brothers as a viable company. There is this "List of the Dead" that every investor has in his back of his drawer, where he keeps the datasets of the investments that went from "Great!" to "Zero!??". There are so many of these - vastly more than the successful investments. The "Tao of Investing" is all about how you manage complete failure, collapse and financial destruction.

The "Big Key Question" that looms over every investor and every person at some point in his life, is: "Is it possible to have EVERYTHING collapse?" Also: "Could the USA itself be taken down?" We doubt that is likely to happen anytime soon, but given the choice of "Kamala Harris for President", there is a real chance that a cascading lack-of-confidence in the operational integrity of the USA could actually occur. If the USA decides to "sanction" everyone, and go full-DEI with additional gender-goof-madness and new financial lockdown rules-and-regulations to restrict everything the insane Lefties don't like (like is being proposed now in the UK), then off-shore holders of USA paper might just start to choke on their holdings.

It's not clear what this "loss-of-confidence" might look like, but the one key fact, is that it could snowball rather quickly, if it begins to get started. And of course, it might even be a strategic action, by a couple of major players - and not a random thing at all.

If one studies the literature on "Asymmetric Conflict", I have not yet encountered anyone who considers the explicit use of "financial warfare". There is lots of spilled ink-and-electrons about "cyberwarfare" and so on, but the use of explicit financial tools to assault a powerful enemy, is not typically discussed. And yet that is really what the 9/11 attacks appeared to be, given Cantor-Fitzgerald's role in the global bond markets. I cannot go into details here, but if an attacker could harm the global bond market successfully, the costs could be significant. And the attack does not have to be restricted to one modality. It could have kinetic as well as electronic and psychological aspects. And with the current path USA politics seems to be on, it would appear that the US media is already directly acting in the creation and distribution of narratives that are crafted to affect USA citizen psychology in a negative way. The opposite of "Make America Great" is to induce Americans to become weak and unsure of themselves and their government agency-actors.

Is Biden really that unwise and confused? Or are his actions and his comments carefully scripted to create the psychological response that is desired? Is the financial instability that has been built into the public-finances of the global reserve-currency provider, an accidental result of poor-planning and lack-of-wisdom, or is it part of a "Deep State" long-term campaign, designed to weaken the USA? This seems like an absurd "conspiracy theory", and yet it perhaps should not be disregarded, since history has demonstrated that big empires tumble down, when they can no longer cover the costs of projecting power at their periphery.

"Costs" are funded in ever-greater amounts of paper scrip, which has no direct link to anything real. This works really well, right up until is does not work.

And what is consistent and interesting, is just how quickly the transition from "works-really-well", to "no-longer-works-at-all" often is.

When silver got up to 31$US per oz., I sold a tiny bit, to fund some basic expenses. It was an interesting experiment, finding someone who would give me a fair price, that was close to the world price, factoring in the very low-level of our local currency here in Canada. The numbers just feel wrong. We think the Cdn dollar should be stronger than it is - but there is strong evidence that our national Government (a rapacious and dishonest group of pirates, let's be honest), works *hard* to keep the currency weak and devalued, vis-a-vis the US-dollar, so as to maintain close to full-employment in this country.

So it goes. It could be worse. We could all be living in 1922 Germany.

What concerns me, is that maybe we are. If the USA collapses as the global provider of reserve money that we all metric against, then we will be harmed in a number of amusing and annoying ways, in our little local bailiwick. Not as bad as Ukraine perhaps - at least not right away.

But the idea of crafted, designed "financial warfare" against a modern, commercial market-economy, is certainly not a new idea. The German Government actively counterfeited British Pound bank-notes during World War Two, and these did cause consternation and confusion in some circles. And had Britain not had financial access to the USA in World War Two, it might well have lost the war to Germany. Canada offered significant direct support to the British war effort, but it was massive amounts of US supplies, food and materiel that the convoy ships transported across the Atlantic.

Wars are fought with weapons, soldiers and money. War needs lots and lots of money. Money - and it's ability to lay claim to resources - typically determine the outcome of many major conflicts.

So, in a world where money is becoming digital, and is able to move rapidly, it would seem that if markets can be moved - by algorithmic trickery, or by proxy-methods of fear+greed gated by new insights from behavioural science - we could be seeing some action here that might not be entirely driven by random actions.

Are there "hidden forces" yanking on our supply-chains (or maybe those chains that connect to all the dog-collars we wear?) Are some of the stupid-trades that we see, not quite so stupid after all, if the purpose is not to profit so much as it is to destabilize and degrade? This all seems a tad paranoid, and yet, with a good AI, a lot of very high quality real-time data, the latest knowledge bases from Behaviour Finance, and say perhaps 20 or 30 billion dollars spread carefully around the markets of the world, under many hundreds of different account names, some effective co-ordination of action would be both possible, and market-movingly effective.

Are there "hidden market agents" (HMA's) that are not seeking profit, but are actually seeking to disrupt, destabilize and degrade (D3) the global markets, with a view to weakening USA, the UK, and probably Europe also? (The Europeans probably don't need much help wreaking their markets, since they elected that curious Von Der Leyen person. Or maybe she is part of the program?)

The idea would be to run the scheme at just "break-even", but do all that is possible to D3 the world markets, with special emphasis on strategies that can inflict harm on the USA and it's market-dependent economy.

This all seems pretty far-fetched - but then, so did atomic weapons seem to be, in 1939.

[ Aug. 6, 2024 ] - Fibrillation of the Markets Down 4,450, and then up 3,217 shows clear evidence of a market losing it's bearings and it's capacity for rational price discovery. Japan has always been a tad crazy, but perhaps the crazy is now being imported. We see algo-goofery everywhere now, with tricky tricksters trying to trick each other. Curious just how dangerous a signal this kind of behaviour actually presents to us. We are way, way off the edge of any regime that implies stable operational characteristics.

We expect Iran and Russia to sign some sort of mutual-protection agreement soon. They are neighbours, obvious trading partners, and both share a deep distrust of the insanity that is now USA's "middle-east non-policy" of encouraging Israeli hardliners and other racist psychopathic war-interests. The kill-seeking, blood-farming Israelis are doing all they can to give us World War Three, and Russia and Iran find their nation-states backed into an ugly corner where American warships of various sorts routinely assist murder-missions all around and even directly inside their own lands. No nation or neighbourhood-group can abide this.

The response that Iran has no choice but to provide to the "Assassinators of Israel" must not be trivial or minor, lest they degrade themselves. The Russians doubtless feel the same way. The extreme danger and continuous, never-ending threat that America and it's nuclear-armed war-colony Israel represent, simply cannot remain. Some effective method of neutralizing the continuous threat that Israel is, will have to someday be found. Perhaps we are finally there.

It is possible that a solution to the Israel problem may be in the works. A co-ordinated bombing campaign that targets all Israeli military installations is certainly indicated, as is probably the kinetic removal of American aircraft-carriers in the eastern Mediterranean. This would be an action that is long overdue, but might be viewed as a hostile act. (Ya think?). But it will have to happen at some point. This is now a certainty.

Would USA tolerate a massive fleet of nuclear-ready Russian assault-ships parked in the Caribbean Sea, while assassination-squads roamed over USA, attacking and killing diplomats and visiting Heads-of-States?

What we have in USA-land now, is an extreme failure-of-imagination. The Americans cannot seem to actually think clearly about events outside of their own local-focus headspace. It's quite curious.

So, world markets fibrillate, in a dangerous dance of confusion. This is not a good sign.

This price violence is so not-good, that it is comical. First we have the "Idiots-in-Charge" problem, and now we are tracking towards programmed war-planning and tragic violence, with an unrelenting certainty. There is probably now no way to get off this train.

It is almost certain that Israel will now give us the full set of necessary triggers to begin a World War. Given the market instability, driven by the debt-fueled hyper-irresponsible behaviour of the global reserve-currency provider, we express the concern that an October market-meltdown should be expected.

Markets have been ignoring war-action for several years now, as debt-funded spending continued to grow, and money-supply was boosted by central-bank cash-creation. Attempts are now being made to reduce money-supply globally, at the same time as war-fighting requirements are obviously growing, and defense budgets are under pressure to be increased. Consumers are being tapped-out by ever-increasing energy costs, rising fees, increased costs for food and shelter, and various hidden taxes - and this is occuring as labour markets are showing signs of rolling over.

It's a perfect set of pre-conditions for a market collapse - declining liquidity, rising costs and rising taxes, combined with a massively over-valued stock-market. Warren Buffett's decision to go to cash, reducing his Apple and Bank America stakes by half, looks to be calling a market top. And a move from essentially zero to 5% short-term interest rates, has to trigger a market response at some point. At first, the rising rate-of-return on capital (interest rates returning to normal ranges), is positive for markets. Capital starts to function property again. Money can be invested with a reasonable, rational rate-of-return. Rising rates can benefit a commercial marketplace.

But eventually, as mortgages and other loans are reset to the higher-rates, the cash-burn has to increase for *every* commercial entity and household - and those rising interest-costs on the debts (which everyone everywhere now has), cause the free-cash to just disappear, as more cash is burned to fund the new debt at the new, higher interest rates. Both private-sector and public sector entities feel this pain. The three-percent mortgage is re-priced at 6 percent. Those in USA with 30-year fixed mortgages are happy people - but they are now locked in their homes. And any business with a revolving credit-line, finds that is is now likely moved from 6% to well north of 10% (a 40% increase in funding costs for new projects). So, as a business-man, if you cannot fund your project out of retained-earnings, then you pull the plug on the project.

Public sector is even worse. Because there is little-or-no discipline at the public-finance level now, the increased funding costs are passed to taxpayers via increases in property taxes and tricky augmentations to other existing taxes. Fees appear everywhere, for everything. And the funding costs of public-sector debt grow to consume large chunks of the tax-take.

This is where we are now - far down this road of debt-funded foolishness. Eventually, there are liquidity problems at various levels of both government, in business, and in the households. The market investments are unloaded, and those that are debt-funded, are collapsed by the margin-call.

Now, on top of this debt-pile and liquidity concern (due to inflation-fighting attempts to shrink the money supply), you can add: war. We will need to fight a new war, unlike what we thought it might be. The battlefield might be your front-yard. Or maybe your backyard. The new war will not be an "over-there" thing. It might be a "right here" thing, which will require even more new spending.

And so we are right here, right now. A debt-strapped society, trying to reduce it's runaway inflation by reducing money supply, right as the new war-costs are about to come down the pipe and add to the new, higher-energy bills and rising food costs. Wages are great if you have a high-paying job - but lots of investor-folks do not. So as these costs pile up, investments must be liquidated to fund that which must be funded right now. And so these new war-costs may well make our markets cycle-down to lower price levels, and do so rapidly, as the war-demands grow.

There is no easy resolution to this scenario, which is already starting to play out.

We are *all* going to be poorer in the near-future. This is a trend that will be hard to avoid being impacted by. A good Doctor will tell you that a fibrillating heart is not a healthy heart. A fibrillating heart is a sign of a heart-attack. We suspect there is likely to be a similar "market attack", probably in October. You need to plan for a 20% to 30% drop across all the equity markets, as these markets re-align to the new higher-for-much-longer interest-rate regime, and factor-in the higher taxes that will be needed to just to begin to pay for the increased defense and security costs that the new "world-at-war" will present to us all.

[ Aug. 5, 2024 ] - Sitting on a Dock on the Bay... Watching global liquidity, drain away? We are watching the "Japanic" and see that it is a tad serious. This is sum-sum summertime, when everyone is supposed to be up North, playing with their boat, and their mistress. But the markets are calling us back to reality. No "I'm young again!" for you, Jack-a-roo!"

Things are getting pretty weird. Old Mr. Trump is using a two-gun flourish to shoot himself in both feet with curious speed and efficiency, so that Kamala Harris is now on top. (Ooooh... girl on top. Wheee! (whatever...))

Things are so silly now, I cannot keep it serious. I have this really repeating sense of things that we are about to enter a long period of corrective change. It might get violent and it might be triggered to a greater level of intensity, by random events (a big California earthquake? Or maybe a rogue hurricane? Or even maybe a Himicane?)

I have no clear idea exactly what will drive the madness-machine, but I suspect it is coming. Too much is just broken-silly, pushed to unsustainable limits - public finances, delta's in many financial series, and human sanity and other endemic limits. It all just feels done.

[ Aug. 1st, 2024 ] - A Very Good Speech... Politics is on everyone's mind now. We are living during interesting times, and each of us risks coming to the attention of the "Government" (or maybe the organs of the Deep State?). I was reminded of this clever speech, by WIlliam Jennings Bryan, back at the end of the 19th century (July 8, 1896), at the Democratic National Convention, in which Bryan argued the case for "easy money", and championed the idea of including silver WITH gold, to back the national currency, and suggested a 16 to 1 ratio. There is a lot of silver, yet it is precious enough to be used as currency.

"Bi-Metalism" was an attempt to move away from a "gold standard", and Jennings argued that using a gold AND a silver-backed currency, would free USA from the control of the bankers - both domestic and foreign. It was basically a plea for an easy-money policy, but which still would be backed by something real. He concluded his great speech (a truly excellent example of fine rhetoric), by demanding that working Americans not be "crucified on a cross of gold". This is fine use of the great emotional "meme" of Jesus, and his death, as described in the Bible.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williamjenningsbryan1896dnc.htm

Is it good economics? Maybe. We have run the experiment, and the "easy money" policy does work. "Easy money" can stimulate the productive operation of the economy quite effectively - but the cost and risk is the emergence of first small, then large, and then runaway, money-inflation. This can hurt everyone, large and small, rich and poor. Inflation makes it first difficult, and then eventually impossible, for the price-setting tools in an economy to effectively signal scarcity and signal demand and supply. Too much "easy money", and the perfect genius of the "invisible hand" is confused and corrupted. Prices stop signaling what they must.

But it's a great speech. W. Jennings Bryan never became President, but his economic ideas have resonated through American history, like the sound that silver-dollars falling onto hard wooden floors can make. Gold is lovely, because it does not change, and so can reflect the value of the world around it. It offers a perfect hedge against inflation, assuming that you actually own real gold, and not a fake piece of metal that looks like gold, but is not.

It's sad to see the American Democratic Party give up on old-fashioned Democracy. A big, open leadership convention is a great idea, where new faces and new ideas can emerge. By end-running all that, the Democrats have created a sad scam process, where we will not get to see any new ideas, or hear any interesting thought-provoking speeches - just the same tired old rhetoric from the "cat ladies..." It's good when real people can get to the podium and suggest why - and how - real change can be made to take place. But the "Deep State" really does not want this, since it threatens those who hold the behind-the-scenes power.

America should remember why it chose to demand democracy in the first place. It's the same reason we have "free speech" and trial-by-honest-and-fair-judge-and-jury. These models work, and not only have stood the test of time - they are absolutely critical for our future survival in the Western World, as we see so much of what we believe and cherish, under active and sustained attack and assault.

"Free Speech" is how we defend against this cultural assault by the powerful forces of deception and darkness, and the cruelty that results when unwise people and bad ideas triumph.

[ July 30, 2024 ] - A Very Good Trade... According to news dribble, Mr. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway has unloaded a slug (71 million shares) of Bank of America, that he bought back around 2011 for around 6 to 7 dollars per share, for more than 40+ dollars /shr. Nice freaking trade. Berkshire had to watch them swing a bit (fierce swinging, actually), but the proof is in the pudding of the final outcome - and this trade worked well.

And this is just a lightening-up, since Berkshire still holds something like 12 percent of BAC. They still hold around 960+ million shares of BAC. I liked BAC. I had some years back, and when it swung up, I cashed out and bought a used 2005 F-150 pickup truck, which served the needs of our tiny agro-business well. We run slim and lean, and bank-stocks - despite their wild swinging behaviour (as warned about by both Graham and Dodd, in the classic "Security Analysis"), have kept the bucks dribbling in on a regular basis, which means the lights of the farmhouse and the computers can stay on...

The details can be found in a "Zerohedge" article, at the URL below:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/buffett-disposes-71-million-bofa-shares-berkshires-cash-stockpiles-rise

The short, clear little article indicates that Buffet's "Big Pile 'O Cash" is now sitting at close to $200 billion. "FFS", people are saying, "Why don't you BUY something with all that currency??" and Buffet is reported to say: "We would love to spend it and buy something, but we won't spend it until we can find investments that offer attractive low-risk, and can make us money." This is real wisdom.

Really - it is just plain hard-core, old-fashioned wisdom. And it must be hard. It's like when I go shopping, and come home with *nothing*, and my honey-bunny has trouble with this concept, since she likes to shop. It's almost recreation for her, but I only like to buy what I need (unless it's so cool, that I just have to have it - like a stainless .44 magnum rifle, or something like that... Or a small boat with a very big engine, and so on. We all have our weakness, I guess.)

The idea, or sub-text to this little data-tidbit, is that Buffet has this indicator that he thinks is useful, which is Equity Market Capitalization divided by National GDP, which for USA, suggests now that the market is rather seriously over-valued, by historical standards. Of course, even the concept of "valuation" is something that economists, investors and philosophers have been debating for centuries.

Where is the value? What is value? Where does value come from, and how is it traded, and how do we really know what it is? Karl Marx said value came from labour-input, and spent the intial chapters of "Das Capital" trying to define a labour-theory-of-value equivalent between a coat and a pair-of-shoes - and completely ignored the scenario of a man with size-12 feel, considering the "value" of a lovely, hand-crafted size-8 pair of shoes. Marx was a dishonest obsessive. He had terrible hemorrhoids (swollen, painful blood vessels around the anus), and my theory is that since he could not shit through his asshole, he sat in the library, and carefully shit through his pen.

Value is entirely subjective, really. The value you attach to something, is a result of the sum of all personal experiences and judgements, up to the very present moment. And it is (or can be) wildly different for each person.

But still, valuation is useful and necessary for equity investments. A "valuable" company will have a number of key characteritics which a less-valuable company will be lacking. Money flow helps - but a company with no income and no revenue can be crazy-valuable, if it has some lock on a new technological solution that can (or will) change the world. And a profitable cash-generator, which looks like it is about to find it's business model disappear, might have much lower market value put on it, than what it's historical revenues and profits would suggest should be the case.

But still, Buffett's Indicator is useful, especially for the late-stage specialized commercial economy of the wealthy and successful USA.

So, is the "Buffett Indictor" saying we are near a market top? Maybe. It's over 1.75, and was around 0.7 post dot-com crash, and post 2008 financial crisis meltdown (end of 2008 and beginning of 2009) it was below 0.6 for several months.

You probably want to try to have investments that provide a resilient financial structure that can withstand a 20 to 30 percent decline in US equity prices. That's not unique "financial advice", it's just what falls out of that 1.78 ratio value that the "Buffett Indicator" is flashing now. It was over 2.0, near the end of 2021, and this was a near a local top in bank-stock prices.

Honestly, no one knows what the future will hold, and financial "valuation" will always remain a black-art, with deep subjectivity wired into it's very essense. But given the twitchy nature of the modern hyper-connected world, it might be time to think hard about a shift away from a "paper" or "digital" financial assets.

But be careful with gold and silver and platinum and such. How do you REALLY know it is gold? Can you assay your silver ingots, and be certain they are 99.9 percent pure?

I bought a boat last year, and yesterday, I drove it across part of Georgian Bay. The weather was perfect, sunny and beautiful. But I was ALL ALONE, out on a very big fresh-water sea, and it was beautiful and more than a tiny bit terrifying. This was the first major "sea-trial" for my small craft (which looks HUGE on the trailer, but TINY out on the Bay). You get these two sets of wave patterns - the south wind from the south shore (where I was headed), and the rollers, that come down the bay, for hundreds of miles, so even a mild breeze can set up these serious wave-trains. The wave-trains cross over each other, and create an interesting pattern, which to run "on-plane" across is just a tad challenging. This was a run I wanted to make all my life. I had perfect weather, but was surprised at how big the chop really was. I had my little terrier dog with me, and she actually slept for part of the way (which took about two hours). I was able to plane along the rollers longtitudinally, so the undulation was gentle, not pounding.

There is great value, to great experiences, since this is what defines the meat of life. I had bought the boat, by selling some shares. Life is short. Having got the boat, let me go up the Bay coast, with a close family member, and his wife and daughter. He has a 40-foot sailboat, and we anchored together at an island park, that is owned and managed by a local Indian tribal group. We anchored in a small bay with a beach, which we took the zodiac to the shore to explore (and so my dog could do what dogs do on walks ...) We had a lovely dinner on board the big boat later, and discussed life and loves by digital candle-light. It was a wonderful experience. And next day, I drove my boat back to the big marina on the south shore, by myself. It was a fantastic experience.

Selling a few shares to buy the boat, was the best trade I ever did. Ever.

[ July 27, 2024 ] - Wheeeeeee! ... Ok, sure. Whatever. Looks like all is fine, Ford is in his rocket-car, (even if the share price is not), and all is good. Honestly, this makes me nervous as a little kitten. Meow. Or maybe as a scorpion. Might be the better analogue.

Oil's down $1.46 to $76.82, Dow 30 up 654 to 40,589, Nasdaq up 176 to 17,357, S&P 500 up 59.8 to 5,459, and the old TSX up 206 to 22,815. Quite a run.

Here's the hot-scoop: Suddenly, my strange hara-sense says: "Kamala is gonna win." Shocks the monkey out of me. Trump seems to be the best guy to remove the "woke mind virus" infection that is making America crazy - but it was that "Harris meets the Angel-of-Darkness" thing. "Satan himself?", you ask. Next best thing - B. Netanyahu, the most Evil Creature on Earth, met with Harris. Then Trump has this vile dirtbag at his Florida dacha, and just licks his backside.

But Harris made this vile prick *angry* because she suggested the Israeli mass-murder campaign should end, and the hostages get freed, and peace and justice for the people of both Israel and Palestine should prevail. This is wise, obvious, sensible stuff. And this makes Satan's-ugly-minion, that toad-faced Netanyahu *angry*! Well, fuck yah! 'Bout fucking time!

"Trump is going to lose the election...", I suddenly felt.

I wonder, did Mr. Trump study under those New York supermodels, or those actresses who had to "audition" with Weinstein of Miramax, by chowing down on his parmesian-cheese smelling ding-doodle? (I seem to recall one of them commenting, who just could not do it, and lost her part in the movie...) Heysus-Kristos, what a world.

Trump has survived the assassination attempt by the little Demo-boy, but he has just shot himself politically, in both feet. I hate Netanyahu. I think that fucker is "Pure Evil from the Eighth Dimension", (in the words of Buckaroo Banzai), and it makes me want to puke to see Trump lick-up to the bastard. It's just so wrong.

If I were in USA, I would have to vote for Kennedy, which would be a protest vote, since Kennedy has no chance of winning. But Trump will suck-up by attacking Iran, and Russia will quite rightly say: "Ok, that's enough of this shit!" and maybe just full-launch against that hyper-dangerous, nuclear-armed American murder-colony south of Lebanon, called "Israel". This current situational structure cannot last, and Netanyahu should suffer the same fate as Benito Mussolini, if there is a God (which I doubt there is, so he almost certainly will not...). If human history teaches us anything, it is that, mostly: "Evil triumphs." It's only the graveyard and the conqueror-worm that can defeat the really bad people.

If enough solid, hard-core US Conservatives feel as I do, then Trump will find his support has melted away, like an old man's hard-on after a quick-schtup. It's crazy. Trump is finished, and Kamala Harris will become the next US President, despite not having every received A SINGLE VOTE FROM ANYONE ANYWHERE, at this point. This whole process is looney-tunes.

Latest prediction now: Biden will resign shortly, for "medical reasons", and hand it all over to Ms. Harris. And I think this is a crazy, bizarre outcome. Real sci-fi stuff. America gives up on democracy... wow.

Feel's like I'm inside a Philip K. Dick backstory.

[ July 25, 2024 ] - The Nikkei Got Nicked ... So, how are those Japanese investments doing? We asked two Eastern Markets specialists, Dr. Lewis Von Falenkrap and Heinwreck Ho Lee Fok what they thought. After we ran their comments thru our AI-translator, they apparently indicated that the 1285 point drop in the Nikkei 225, the almost $50 per ounce downtick in gold price (to $2373/oz), the $2300 drop in Bitcoin to $63,950, taken with yesterday's almost 700 point drop in the Nasdaq index, offers real evidence that a solid sea-change in major global markets is beginning.

"The wheels usually start to fall off in August. Everyone's on vaction, traders are drunk or hung-over, and the love-hotels notice that business gets really choppy. That yellow dust blows in from the Gobi Desert, and it gets hot and nasty and smelly everywhere. People are cranky. Markets either run, or fall, and with debt off-the-scale, a world drifting to war or already at war right now, and the USA becoming politically dysfunctional and throwing democracy under the bus, going to cash makes sense, since the cash is cheap and has lower risk" says Dr. F.

H.H.L Fok echoed similar concern. "There seems to be a feeling that with a slightly stronger yen, why the fuck would you hold financial assets that are just going to fall in value? Just taking the lovely new yen banknotes, folding them and putting them in a box at home, probably will net you a better return than paper shares or vapour-ware crypto, as the equity markets go to geegoku." (Tapped the AI...) "... Xilbaba." (Ancient Mayan?) (Hit computer with fist...) "...as the equity markets go to hell." (Ah, that's better).

"So, this is just a beginning?", was our question.

"Oh yes, it's going to get a lot worse from here on in." Fok said. "The Chinese could fully float the yuan, instead of invading Taiwan. Everyone looks to gold for stability - but you have silver also, and there is a lot of silver. The Chinese could create a "Silver Yuan", and make it a solid, international currency. Everyone did this, back at the beginning of the 20th century. It worked pretty good - Hong Kong, USA, Canada, and even Japan all had these 1-oz silver trade-coins, and they were mostly all the same. The Hong Kong dollar 1-oz silver coin was same as a 1-oz "trade Yen" coin. A "Silver Yuan" would be easy to set up, and negotiate. There is lots of silver, but not an infinite amount, and when you have it, a debt-strapped bogus or corrupt government cannot just hoover it away from you and dial-up inflation, if the whole thing is done properly.

Dr. Von Falenkrap agreed. "Yes, it's possible we are seeing the reserve status of the US dollar beginning start to change. It will take a long while before it really changes. But maybe it's beginning. As USA enters this curious period of strange, anti-democratic weirdness, with skill-less skanks promoted to top jobs, there is this concomitant discomfort - sort of a nausea, or a puke-feeling in your gut - that happens. You just know that it is all going wrong. It may first start with US denominated securities being repriced lower..."

"A LOT lower..." giggled Mr. Fok.

"And 'When USA sneezes, Japan gets the cold.' as we say here. The US military talks a good line, and can still do some things fairly well..." the good Doctor continued. "Like crash those big Osprey aircraft..." added Fok.

"But Japan knows it is the meat in the sandwich, and is also tied directly to the US economy, and the strength of USA political and military power. Everything is so sensitive and fragile right now, that a de-risking seems like it has to happen. "

"And there is too much debt - everywhere. If debt-fears grow, and long-term bonds are priced to reflect their new risk level, in a changing world where the US dollar is not as desired as it was in the earlier years of this century, then interest-rates will move up sharply, and this will happen regardless of what Central Banks do.", Dr. Falenkrap continued. "The prices of paper in the long-term bond markets, are not under control of the Central banks. And with USA playing games with 'sanctions' on political persons, and 'anti-money-laundering' laws and related economic assaults on major banks, there is this similar growing bad-feeling about the safety of US assets."

And Mr. Fok pointed out: "And the F-22 Raptor has just been de-cloaked. The Chinese have developed a narrow-spectrum sky-sweeping radar that can detect the exact location of these so-called invisible aircraft. The technology is really cool - they basically can detect the background 'hum' of airspace, and then just look for the places where this background vibration is NOT present - and there is the location of your radar-evading aircraft. This means they can track and destroy these expensive planes, with standard encrypted-radio controlled missiles with little more than 1950's technology. Suddenly, US no longer has assured air-dominance."

So "What does this mean?" we asked.

Dr. Falenkrap suggested: "It means the USA is now a 'paper tiger'. And it will either be run by a clueless dark-skinned women, chosen because of her sex and skin-colour, or an aged real-estate developer who is pushing 80. Either way, change is coming, and it looks not great. And the markets have finally woken up to this ugly knights-fork."

"We are on our own over here. This feeling is starting to be felt, just below the level of normal sensation. It's like a sea-sickness, which everyone seems to be noticing."

And Mr. Fok added: "When it gets worse, traders, investors and big funds will lighten up on their paper, and begin to see USA as a problem, and not a solution anymore. We think this will change things, maybe a lot."

"When?" we asked. "Probably around September - October. October is always a good time for downturn, right? The usual October Surprise... " They both spoke together, and this agreement seemed curious.

Perhaps something was lost in the translation.

We agree with the "Silver Yuan" idea. The idea works, and has stood the test of time, across centuries of warfare, conflict and real-estate transactions. Here is image below, of an antique I acquired years ago - a 1930's wedding of a Japanese and a Hong-Kong Chinese, which a silver-smith commemerated with two small bowls, with a Hong-Kong Silver Dollar in one, and a Japanese "Trade Yen" silver coin in the other. The Chinese bowl+coin has a dragon motif, while the Japan bowl+coin has images of fishermen, Japan mountains and birds, and a small thatched-roof house.

A wedding gift for a Chinese and Japanese couple, made in the 1930's. The left bowl features a Hong Kong Dollar silver coin, with a dragon motif, while the bowl on the right, features a Japanese Trade Yen Silver coin (1 Trade-yen = 1 oz silver). When paper and digital-cash and crypto fail, there is always precious metal, and beautiful artwork. These two asset classes often retain their value, like most examples of fine human effort and workmanship tend to do.

(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

Gold is good for storing wealth. But trade requires silver, which is precious metal, but sufficiently common that it can be acquired by average people doing real work. And throughout history, it has also been a material used by artists and skilled craftsmen to create beautiful objects. Here is a marriage of art and craft, economics and beauty, trade and commerce linked to the private affair of two human hearts. I saw this in a dealer's display case, and just paid his price for it, since it really appealed.

If paper and crypto fails us, there is a real likelyhood we will use some kind of "digital silver". It's just a nice metal, which lends itself to both art and commerce. And it has done it's job well throughout history, across the entire planet, from North to South and West to East.

Silver is the story of romance and prosperity, bound up together with commerce and trade, in ways gold never quite succeeds in doing.

[ July 24, 2024 ] - Everything's Turning to Shit? ... (And in the voice of the Doctor: "Why yes. Yes. I do believe it is.")

Page down for the image, with some closing quotes for today, and the simple concern that keeps us awake at night.

Everything looks to be turning to shit. What to do now? Go to cash, and watch it inflate away to nothing, or buy more shit, and watch it fall into the abyss? Unclear. We are holding, but we caution that this might be the wrong choice. Our banks and phone companies are holding up, but this might be a bad choice. The whole market could fall between 20 to 30 percent, and still be a tad overvalued, by long term metrics. Interest rates will likely need to track up to 10% or higher, to reduce inflation, and a hard recession may be necessary in order to break the inflationary mindset. This was the lesson of the 1975 to 1982 period.

(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

[ July 23, 2024 ] - Malingering Malinvestments for Times of Malevolent Malfunctions ... I keep calling "Kamala" as "Camilla", which is of course a malappropriate and malformed linguistic malpractice.

I intend no malice to dear Camilla, the Queen-consort, and have resolved to correct my mental malfunction by a simple memory-trick: The term "mal" basically means "bad" or "failed" or "awful".

So: we recognize the term "KaMALa" might have some linked-meaning, and the English ML processor for language we Anglo-types use and is encoded in our wetware, might be giving us a warning. Once this fat penny dropped, I will not likely make the same error again. My brain-ML obviously had some maladjusted linkages, which this simple cognitive reset can repair: "The maladjustments of Kamala suggest a malady of malevolent malfunction." Let's all be aware of the scale and scope of the ugly "woke-mind-virus" malevolence.

KaMALa promises more dead babies in abortion clinics, an assault on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, possible Bidenista-style rent controls (which will further destroy CRE in US cities), and higher taxes.

It all sounds rather malevolent to us. And those Big Tech bets might just be major malinvestments if the US economy enters a period of politically-driven malfunctioning. Let me be clear, here: This is not schadenfreude. We take no pleasure in watching our possible future prosperity collapse into the singularity of an economic black hole. We honestly fear that the "woke-mind-virus" implies a dangerous and malicious mental malfunction. Really.

What is interesting, is that the markets in USA seem to have figured this out, even if that great malformation known as the MSM (MainStream Media), continues to gush forth a pea-soup vomit-stream of maloderous "happy-happy joy-joy" muck in support of Ms. Harris.

Excuse me, but I feel a little "mal de mer" in my tummy, at the thought of a Big Boss Kamala.

[**Update**] Message to Mr. Elon Musk
(sung to a tune crafted as AI-hacked mash-up of "Message to Rudi", and "I Need a New Drug")

We need a new car! 
Car  with excitment, Car with fun.
Car  that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

I know what it is.
I've seen it before.
It's a little two-seater, with "four-on-the-floor"!
But give me 4 batteries, each with a charge,
That can take me to heaven, or across nations large,

Gimme the Power!
and Gimme the Fun!
Let's take it back,
To where it had Begun!

We need a new car! 
Car with excitment, Car with fun.
Car that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

Tesla was magic with that little Sports-Car.
It looked like a Lotus, so lovely by far,
Climbed on a Rocket, and flew to a Star!

Gimme that back.
Gimme some fast!
Let me have speed,
And a battery that can last!

We need a new car! 
Car with excitment, Car with fun.
Car that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

The new little Teslas,
Are boring and dull.  
I don't want a taxi,
or the FS and D.
I want to drive it myself,
from the sea to sea.

I want a top that goes down,
and the wind in my face.
I want a kilowatt run, 
to some wild new place.

I'll stop for some watts
at the nuclear reactor.
Then I'll head for coast, since
I've gotta get back there.

Let's dial it back up,
And lock it back in,
Gimme a fast two-seater,
With that you can win!

[ July 22, 2024 ] - Game Theory Optimal Science ... The story of how the ultra-centrifuge was developed is interesting. These are used to seperate the uranium-235 from the more common u-238, which is what most naturally occuring uranium is. Of all the existing natural uranium, U-235 isotope is only about 0.7 percent, and the chemical property of the U-238 and U-235 are almost identical. The U-235 is very attractive, because it is fissile, which means it will undergo a chain-reaction atomic breakup, and release a nice thermal (slow moving at kinetic-energy speed), neutron, which rather than just being absorbed by U-238 and other isotopes of other elements, will go on to produce another fission-event in nearby U-235, and under the right conditions, these fission-events will create a cascading "chain-reaction". Let this really run, under tight conditions, and the chain reaction can accelerate, and create an impressive energy-release in a very short time - an atomic bomb.

I learned this in Grade-6, during optional lunchtime classes in atomic theory and operational characteristics of atomic bomb usage. I remember producing detailed notes on blast-radius effectiveness, describing degree of damage done, and radioactive fallout dispersion patterns, under various weather conditions. I recall my parents asking the usual "What did you learn in school today" question, and I pulled out this workbook full of notes, diagrams and drawings, and my folks kind of freaking out, since I was a solid "C" student, most of the time. But when I got interested in something, and had access to data, I could really focus.

Nuclear energy can be released slowly, rather than quickly. This just makes heat, and the reaction rate of U-235 chain reaction can be controlled by controlling how much you slow the reaction neutrons down. The slower the neutrons move, the bigger the chance the neutrons will hit the cross-section of the U-235 atom and split it, to keep the reaction going. Moderating the neutron's energy (slowing it down), will increase the probability of the chain-reaction cascade (which produces the heat). Water can be used to slow down, or moderate the neutron energy (speed), and increase reaction rate. The idea is to moderate the reaction enough to get it to boil the water and make useful, turbine-turning steam.

You moderate the neutron flux enough to get the reaction to be self-sustaining, but not so much as to let it get really hot, and melt all the metal that holds all the equipment, and the reaction chamber that all this is happening inside. When the reaction is balanced, it is called: "criticality".

A standard boiling-water nuclear reactor operates using the same criticality, but the U-235 is held in rods which are inserted into the reaction vessel full of water. The rods and the water get warm due to the chain-reaction energy release, this makes the water boil, and the steam from the boiling water is used to turn large turbines which drive electrical generators, which can power the electric-grid, and light up a city.

If everything is working right, the reactor will be a self-sustaining boiling kettle of water, with red-hot uranium rods boiling the water, with energy being produced (released) in a nice controlled manner, and then used to do work. New water needs to keep coming in, of course, and heat-exchangers are used to seperate the boiling reactor water, from circulating steam-generating water. The water is also used to keep the reactor at the right temperature. The rods are typically positioned deep in place. They can get too hot if cooling water is not available to draw-off heat, and other methods are used to ensure operational criticality. And the whole reaction area gets "radioactive", with a whole range of particles and mass-less energy packets (gamma rays) being produced, which can be lethal if this energy is absorbed by living tissue (ie. live humans!). So, the whole reaction process needs to be shielded with thick, energy and neutron-absorbing material.

Slow nuclear-reactor activity cannot be made to explode like an atomic bomb. But a reactor can get too hot, and all the reactive uranium rods, can melt, which gets the uranium too close together, so it melts more, and then gets really, far too hot, and this makes it melt further, and create a mess - and superheat the water so it breaks into hydrogen and oxygen, and this is a chemically sxplosive mixture, so a reactor which looses cooling suddenly, can suffer an explosive event, and blow up like the Hindenburg, in an awful fireball, and spew lethal radioactive material over a wide area of landscape. This happened in Chernobyl, and at the now-famous Dai-Ichi nuclear powerplants in Japan. The hydrogen+oxygen mixture blew up real good, and made a really awful mess, with radioactive isotopes (various elemental slop which results from the messy breakdown of the split uranium atom). One of the radioactive isotopes produced as a result of fission, is radioactive Cesium-137, and this was spread over a wide area - both from the Dai-Ichi reactor explosion, and from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb blast.

I studied all this nuclear technology in grade school, on my own. I was curious about the science. Of course, I thought I was unique. By the time one gets to University, back in the day when they taught really solid science at universities, I found the filtration process had removed most of the students that did not have this ability-to-focus, and I was not unique at all.

I recall that I obtained some uranium ore samples from the Elliot Lake Uranium mine museum, and put these "Pitchblend" rocks on some dental-x-ray film, which had a paper-clip taped to it. After two weaks, I developed the x-ray file, using my little darkroom, and saw the negative was seriously fogged, but with a bright white image of a paper-clip. I recall just being in awe of this simple experiment. The pitchblend ore was just a rock. But it was a "hot" rock, which could make a geiger-counter sing like a little bird. Except I did not have a geiger-counter.

The whole point about science, is that if you leave kids alone, and just let them mess around, the curious ones will be driven to go down those rabbit-holes like in Alice In Wonderland. They will be pulled-forward by their curiosity, and this is a good thing.

And the physical world is the key thing. Everything in the digital world or the political world, is just noise and fiction. In the digitial world, you can create and display anything at all. This is very liberating and addictive. But it is also pure bullshit. You live in a land of pure fiction, where any sort of nonsense can be made to appear real. This is the same in politics, religion and even philosophy. Any sort of absurdity can be proposed, articulated, and then made to drive human action, using incentivizations, coercion or psychological manipulation. All this is fictional fluffery. And it can also create and drive great evil.

Modern AI is massively enhancing the addictiveness of the false digital world. And it will extend and enhance the reach and power of those who invent fictional worlds, to manipulate and dominate human actions and efforts. Beware.

It is in the real, physical world, where there is randomness, where things are interesting. In the real world, there is real truth. The search for this real truth is the essence of science. If you can detect Cesium-137, you know that some fission even took place. We know that fusion reactors are technically possible, and that great energy can be released by controlled fusion, just by looking up at the sun, and feeling it's warmth, and measuring it's energy output.

The physical world has objective truth, and this is a fine and wonderful thing. And it is what we all should focus our attention upon, more than anything else. It is where the real magic can be found.

[ July 21, 2024 Update] - Jill Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race ... The image here, says it all...

https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1815082436394385840

Or maybe this one?

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/10d8c25e_jpg.jpg?itok=Tnrmlpec

Whatever. Why does he not resign now, and at least give Kamala a fighting chance, if he's so fond of her?

[ July 21, 2024 ] - Meanwhile, at Our Floating Sky-Island of LaPuta... We noticed that the B-52's are in the Finland. Not the band, the big aircraft with good, old-fashioned "Newcuelure" capability (as old Mr. Bush the Junior might have said...) These big beauties are lofting gently along the air lanes, cruising the jetstreams just west of the missile complex at LaPuta. The Finns are still recovering from their "White Nights" parties, and vodka sales are up nicely (we think...)

Ya gotta do, what ya gotta do. Nuclear war is actually really a *much* better way to fight. No soldiers required, and once we put "frontier AI" level flight-controls into the big bombers, we will not even have to worry about pesky pilots maybe changing their plans. And we won't even be getting our hair mussed. Right?

Hell, we are looking forward to it all. There will be this really lovely lagoon, where New York is now. Washington will have this lovely evening glow. And in a few weeks, the radiation will be down to a safe level, and we can go out an watch the pretty colour in the skies at sunrise and sunset.

Why BITFD, when you can BITFU?

[ We love those big B-52s. Might be the best aircraft ever built. They will fly forever. ]

We had expected NATO to wither-away, rather like Marx expected the State to do. Old Karl, and us too, were way wrong. Putin's invasion of Ukraine was maybe the worst political-economic-military decision ever made. The transition of Russia into a modern, free, democratic State, was blown to hell, and human history has been dialed back 60 years to the "Cold War". Putin should really lock himself in a room with a Luger, and do the honorable thing.
(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

[ July 20, 2024 ] - "Hey Joe, Where You Goin' With That Ballot-Box in Your Hand?" ... One of my old favorites from Jimi Hendrix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXwMrBb2x1Qwww.youtube.com/watch?v=rXwMrBb2x1Q

We expected Joe Biden to announce his retirement yesterday. Looks like not.

I keep coming back to old movies I have seen, and old music I have heard. It seems to offer pretty clear directions They often suggest how we are tracking and where we are all headed. The artists always warn us. Always. Few listen, and almost none ever learn.

Remember that film "Network"? Old Howard Beale was finally taken down by a "terrorist group", hired to remove Howard because his show was suffering from falling ratings. Kinda like Joe and the Demo's are now.

I craft these extreme, edge-condition scenarios, and then try to assign subjective (ie. almost certainly wrong) probabilities, to their likelyhood of occuring. Some get pretty crazy. Others seem to slowly and methodically play out in real-time, to my horror and amusement. (Remember Hunter Thompson's book: "Fear and Loathing...?", mine will be "Horror and Hilarity"...) (from HT: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Some real wisdom there, yes?

And so, here we go: The Democrat boss-girls running the Deep Democrat Party machine, cannot seem to get "Hey Joe!" to see the light. No gentle nudges or quiet suggestions seem to be working. Vice-President Airhead (not my orginal term, this is what many call her), has had silly and fruitless telephone linkups with Big Donors - who are on record as calling her comments "ludicrous", just before she hung up on all of them. This is reported - we think it looks about right, even if it sounds hilarious. The Democrats are in real trouble, and they now know it. The lie-flinging from the Secret Service Democrat cheque-cashers is really pretty impressive - quite over-the-top. There needs to be some rolling heads, but there likely will not be, since Jill Biden is still holding some big strings, it appears. Amazing, really. It is a nation-state in slow-motion breakdown mode.

Only folks on the public payroll and the Big Government Grift will likely vote Democrat in the USA election. If enough sane, rational folks can get their ballots cast and counted, the Democrats will be gutted in November. We think they certainly should be, since we like USA, and do not want to see it destroyed by woke-leftist insanity, California-style child-abuse, and Big Tech Digital Communism. The Democrats know they need to change their figurehead, but he won't let go.

So, as in "Network", we might expect a faked-up "terrorist" attack on old Joe. The Demos can look at all the strength Donald Trump is showing in the polling, and say perhaps: "Hey, why don't WE deal with Old Joe the same way!?" Joe has really bad ratings, and everyone who can think and see, knows the poor old kleptocrat needs to go. But Joe has that Ballot-Box in his hand, and he is gonna take down his "old lady-Party" for messin' around with another Man. (DT?) Like in the Hendrix song, he is being counselled not do this bad thing - but he is determined, right?

So, expect maybe a big hit (song?), that can be blamed on Hamas, or Iran-backed Hoopee's or Poopee's or Goofy's or whatever (fill in the terrorist-group name with whomever is on the J-media "Two-Minute Hate" today), and a workable solution will be allowed to play out, with Old Joe turned into Peter Pumpkinhead. (Thank-you Andy Partridge of XTC, for that great 1992 tune.)

Then, the Democrats can push their "New Guy" in, using a little legal KY-Jelly or procedural Astroglide, and have a damn good chance of keeping the Big Grift alive, and the Big Fcuking of America on track and ongoing, even after November. Mr. Trump can go back to golfing in Florida, safe from FBI hit-squads, and Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebcuk can continue to rape the World for fun and profit. Nothing will change, except the Gruesome will come to Washington, and the cost of the debt will be 2 trillion USD very soon, until that big "drop-the-zeros" money-split thing happens, which will reset everyone's portfolio values to pay down part of the debt with cash extracted from EVERYONE in the form of the Great American Dividend. Be clear, Trudeau has already done this in Canada, basically stealing 15% of Cdn bank profits via a pure "taking tax", in addition to all the income taxes taken. The "Great Taking" shows all the legal changes needed to harvest the "collateral" or "dividends" already exists (ie. no-one in the Western World actually has clear "ownership" of their financial assets. You now have an "ownership entitlement", which can be adjusted at anytime, by your nation-State authorities.)

So, the Gruesome One (whomever it is) will claim this is not a tax, this is just a "dividend" extracted from everyone's asset holdings, and all corporate cash holdings. The Democrats can then claim they have "solved" the out-of-control debt problem, and it will only be when the fighting in the streets begins, that corrective course-change will be possible. Heads will not just roll figuratively.

This is a real grim scenario - but oh my, does it work on paper, as a stepwise set of process actions. But like the old Jew said (who was a real genius scientist): "It works in practice, but does it work in Theory?"

My recent research on the state of things in Academia ("the Academy", as the old ancients called it..) suggests that the Theory to justify all this will be successfully crafted, agreed upon, and taught to the kids, who will slurp up the slop and accept it as correct. Critical thinking seems to have been removed from the Academy in USA, along with Free Speech and basic morality. So, all this really bad stuff looks like it could actually play out, especially if a "bull market" can be co-associated (at first) with this Neo-Marxist Post-Post-Post-Modern Psycho-Economics, where everyone is running using Game Theory Optimal strategies (like in modern poker - you use GTO to ensure you cannot be exploited...) (Details are complex, but the shit works...)

And if you can apply this strategic approach to politics, you can win and win big. And the Democrats KNOW about this stuff. All that stands in their way, is an old, 81-year white guy, with dementia. So, I am 81% certain they will remove him. If he refuses to go, they won't use the 25th Amendment, they will just have him popped. That means assassinated.

Again, it's what the "Moneyball-AI" would recommend (you know, that one which has NO ETHICAL FILTERS at all? The one we all want to have and query? Right?) Here's the original 1992 XTC video, which is very good. The "First Lady" is a great image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYupSHWEJxA

So, is "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" now about Orange Man? Orange Man Good?

JFK had his "First Lady", Orange-Man had his Stormy time. Evil in NY State tried to make him a criminal because he gave her money and booked it as a legal expense.

I hope Trump wins, and puts Letitia the Evil Political Dirtbag in Rikers, like they did with Epstein. And if Putin wants to make an example of NYC, I will be sad, but then I will remember the real pictures of Hiroshima, those ones with the huge wagons each covered with burned corpses. Karma is a real thing. You get out, what you put in.

See, I'm having an "Elon Musk" moment. When young, we are all seduced by Lefty ideas. Now, having spent a lifetime trying to learn and understand - I know we need Nationalism, with maybe a *tiny* bit of socialism. Hey, maybe we could link Nationalism, with fair, market oriented Socialism - call it maybe "National Socialism"... Whatdahyaa think? Might work? Get some clever glyphs, deal with the bad folks who are trying to "keep us on our knees"? Round the bastards up, like the Liberals in Canada did with the Japanese, concentrate those dangerous folks in camps? Maybe an idea here? (Hint: This is sarcasm. Gotta remember "A Modest Proposal" and the outcome and say this clearly)...

Socialism *has* to become Nazism, in order to do any of the shite that it suggests - it is really all about enabling theft and murder, and little else, when taken to operational limits. And everything and everyone always goes as far as they can. It's the nature of human action.

What folks don't realize, is there are only about 7 stories (or "narratives"), and in politics, there are only two. It is either freedom (which means real freedom of SPEECH), or there are some serious self-interested bad folks who use politics to gain money and power and use that to get rich, and hurt lots of people. There are really only two possible outcomes. Good and/or Bad. Freedom and/or Slavery. Fair Justice and/or Arbitrary Measures. The true and most evil Devil, really resides in the details.

You have to get the process details right, or your goddamn spaceships and your airplanes just crash and burn. And your State turns into a police-State nightmare, with murder-men who decide to kill everyone who stands against them - first in the hundreds, then in the thousands, then in the tens-of-thousands (like Israel is doing RIGHT NOW in Gaza), and then in the millions (like Hitler and Stalin did). Having State-power allows crime to be executed at massive scale. That is the greatest danger.

There are only two directions in life and moral choice - good or evil. It never stays gray.

Same thing in politics. It's so much more of a binary-choice than most folks realize.

[*** Update ***] - Just as I was editing this - Biden has indicated he has dropped out. Thank goodness for that. A tiny move towards sanity, finally.

The Demos might get a good candidate, and make a fair case. An honest election is a good thing. Let's have an honest contest, and ensure everyone gets a fair chance, and the votes are cast and counted freely and fairly - no fake bags-of-ballots-for-our-guy sh/t and no "ballot harvesting".

[ July 19, 2024 ] - I've been Studying AI "Frontier Models". We are in Deep Trouble. ... Not sure if I should even write this. My rough research on current AI "Frontier Models" is fear-inducing. There is zero chance of an AI coming to life and killing us. But there is almost 100% chance that very advanced, domain-specific "frontier models" (which are *very* large, and able to effective transpute almost brain-sized levels of information, with actionable, successful ability), will be used to do us harm. No damn-fool government "regulation" is going to prevent their deployment and operationalization.

See, if you are a brilliant, almost-grand-master level Chess genius (I hate Chess. It is a wanker's game in my opinion but let's stick with the Chess example...) and you are playing against the very best Grand Master in the world, you will lose. You will lose everytime, because your opponent is better. There is little randomness to help you.

With very large and very powerful "frontier models", with petabytes of domain-specific knowledge AND the ability to rationally use that knowledge, the AI-as-an-adversary will win. And it will win EVERY SINGLE TIME. This is the problem. Even in a situation with a high randomness component - the AI will still win EVERY TIME.

This looks like what is happening in the markets..

I used to be able to make money. Now, I cannot. Partly, it is fear and loathing - and human weakness. I have life-needs that require I have *some* income. So, I hold my dividend-payers, when I should have dumped them.

Much (way, way more) money is made holding high-flyers that fly higher, than is made holding sh/t-smeared crappy stocks, run by scammy clever folks who are masters at filling their pockets with the funds that rightly belong to the shareholders. This is just market life. It is the warp and woof - the fabric of the process.

But I always used to be able to find some kind of tiny edge, or some little inefficiency somewhere, to make a few bucks.

Not now.

Things are different. There are the big guys, and there is everyone else, and the "everyone else" is certain now, not only to just lose, but to get completely gutted, if not careful. The entire process has changed. I cannot even disguise who my clearer is - I do a trade, and it is like a radar beacon, saying "Here is a fuck-stupid retail trader!!!! You can fuck him good, by calculating where this poor bastard has to put his stop-losses". So, we trade without stops, and endure wild drawdowns. WOrks for a while, until the financials implode, and fall hard and long, right?

All traders face bad times and strings of shit results.

But this is going to be different. With frontier-grade super-models, the AI's will be able to win EVERY SINGLE TIME. This has to change things. They will be able to track EVERY TRADE, and correlate it with ALL INFORMATION, and determine real-time changing probabilities, so that the retail folks, especially in a tiny nation like Canada, will be sliced and diced and served up on a platter. This is hilarious, really.

But it will get worse. Every aspect of every paramenter of your life and all your operational actions to try to produce profit, can be effectively tracked, and traded against. It will feel like the "Truman Show", but only worse, with NO chance to escape or improve upon your situation. We will face a digital future of absolute "serfdom", where no possible uplift will be possble, for anyone but the elites and their children.

The "Frontier AI models" will actually make this kind of horror-show actionable - and even wild randomness (my secret friend) will not be able to save us, as it will be tracked, monitored and traded-against so as to ameliorate it's positive effects, and profit quickly from it's negative effects.

Electing Trump (and Vance) will make no difference. They have no clue, I am pretty sure.

The folks controlling and using the "frontier models" will have access to ability that exceed what a person - or even an organization - can deploy. They will win *every* contest, until the few remaining contestants conclude the game is rigged, and refuse to participate. The markets (and all other competitive aspects of human life), will down-cycle, and become stagnant.

The dynamic that moves the World forward, will stop working.

We might already be seeing this, right now, in real-time, the failures of Microsoft, and the US election process. It is scary.

This might be the "end of history", where nothing more can be developed, improved, or even fixed. The frontier-models confer such a huge advantage, as to put the ordinary guy out of business.

We hope we are wrong about this.

[ July 18, 2024 ] - Idiots at Crowdstrike Try to Take Down ALL Microsoft Windows Machines in Whole World ... (excuse me while I stop laughing... the schadenfreude this morning is exhausting!) (Note: The stupid company's name is "Crowdstrike". I seriously thought it was "Cloudstrike", and given how this event has played out, it really should be called: "Cloudstrike"... or maybe "Cloudshite"?)

In what is probably the single most stupid and astonishingly disruptive example of Information-Technology system deployment failure, the folks at this US company, called "Crowdstrike" have managed to deploy an anti-virus "solution" that appears to have taken down most of the Microsoft Windows computers on planet Earth. If you use Linux, you are OK, but if you use Microsoft Windows, you will have to boot (restart) each machine into "safe" mode, and removed the idiot-children's destructive update. Our brokerage-service and trading platform, from a major Canadian bank, with the initials (TD) had a big message on it's morning login-screen, explaining that quotes, news, and other various services will not work. We are unsure if online trading will operate. The news (which we obtain on Linux and Android machines), indicates it might not. (cf. "Princess Bride": "Inconceivable!")

Like I have said recently: We remain truly astonished at the fcuk-stupid idiocy and general collapse in sanity that we seem to be observing everywhere. Joe Biden, that curious fellow who claims to be acting as the USA President, cannot even remember the names of the top black guy he appointed to run his military, which also does not seem to be able to find it's backside with both hands these days. And the US Secret Service cannot stop a kid with an AR-15 from putting a ladder on a building, climbing up with a rifle, and spending 30 minutes getting his aim set with a range-finder, despite folks seeing this, and telling the local police about what they saw. This is all kinda beyond belief, no?

This curious general collapse in basic operational competence, which is manifest just about EVERYWHERE now, seems to be accelerating. It is not so much worrisome, as it is simply annoying and wild-comical.

We have a generator, and can operate our water-system at the farm on it's 240-volt output. At our Northern property, we have two generators. I think I will acquire a second generator here at the farm, for backup purposes. Nothing that uses big networks, can really be trusted to operate correctly anymore.

We run various Linux O/S machines, and have built a custom platform, that uses the simple TVM X-Windows (which can run modern Firefox), so as to avoid Microsoft Windows. I bought a modern Windows-11 machine, and also a Windows-10 Gaming-Grade machine which is powerful - but both platforms are profoundly intrusive. The Windows-11 machine regularly updates, and we cannot stop this process, so we avoid using the Windows machines due to their completely wrong security model.

People cannot seem to think clearly these days.

If Microsoft can reach out and install new software on my machines, and get thru my gateway to do this, anyone with the Microsoft codes can install anything anywhere, and that breaks (really, it completely defeats) basic security. You are certain to be absolutely fucked, if you use Microsoft. Try to reason clearly, if you can.

The modern "security" models are just wrong. But the technology industry has convinced everyone to adopt the modern model of basically "fake-security", because it has made them so much money. It's hilarious. Our modern technology is like "Waiting for Godot". It is just plain Theatre-of-the-Absurd stupid and wrong, but no one in the business will say this, and I grew weary of repeating myself, and decided to become a farmer.

Nothing - absolutely nothing anywhere now is "secure". Absolutely ALL of our technology is compromised and is monitored. Five days ago, a Dutch firm again pointed out that most networks around the world have code installed that allows Chinese agents to monitor most of what is being transmitted, and many systems have latent trojan code installed that can be remotely triggered. All Apple iPhones can be exfiltrated, and bascially have no security that actually can keep the onboard information secret. Anything you put on any computer or any network anywhere, can be viewed - often remotely. That's just how it is - the Snowden Slides showed *exactly* how this was being done, and everyone everywhere who has the resources are doing this monitoring and exfiltration.

There are really no secrets now. Poor Jeff Bezos sent his dick-pictures to his helicopter-pilot facktart, and it cost him, what, $34 billion, to pay off his bitch-wife? I laughed so hard when I read all that info, that I spilled my drink. I don't wish that kind of misfortune on any man who has done good work in the world. And I have to say that Amazon is a goddamn good thing. It works, and we bought a new coffee-maker, and it got delivered, and now Fu-chan makes really goddamn good coffee in the morning, and life is really goddamn better. And FedEx and RockAuto were able to supply a newly-made Chinese alternator which I installed in my F-150, which now runs fine, and can pull my big boat, which makes me goddamn happy. :)

And this silly little website is entirely run at and by, AWS (Amazon Web Services) for around $22.00 Cdn per month. And it **just works**. This is damned impressive. It makes no money (yet), but I learned a lot setting it up. I find it cool that it actually, honestly works. And I have complete control of it, so I can write, post and say anything I want. Whoo Hoo..! (That's how it is supposed to work in Western culture, and will continue to work, if we can keep the goddamn Censorship Naziboys, the vermin Copyright Trolls under control...)

It is the small things that WORK CORRECTLY that give us joy and make life worthwhile.

But do not make the error of thinking that anything that you cannot control yourself will actually continue to keep working. Nowadays, it probably will NOT work correctly, and if it DOES work, some wukfit child will come along and install a software update on it, and break the thing and make it turn to crap. This is not an accident. This is how the nasty cun... oops, I mean "runts", make their money.

People are now so fucking lazy and stupid, that they will use Microsoft Windows, and the brain-dead organizations they work for, actually LIKE the continuous updates, because then no-one in the Big-Org needs to think or actually do any productive work - they believe they have the computer doing it for them, which is comical.

And this is why AI is certain to kill us all.

It won't happen thru malevolence on the part of the AI. Failure will be due to bone-stupid, shit-ignorant people being stupid-fuck-lazy, and not doing even the tiny bit of work they need to do - like updating to today's one-time code-pad, for example. They will just use yesterday's code to transmit today's new message, even though they were fcuking told NOT TO DO THIS. The enemy will decrypt everything, and the battle and the war will be lost, the kingdom will fall, and your cities will burn. "Oh, hell" - as Mandrake said.

Like the Philosopher said: "You cannot win. You can't even break-even. And you cannot quit the game." The best you can possibly do, is to be like Valmont, and try to get a little positive action along the way.

And have a good supply of candles, for when the power goes off, and ammo and automatic devices for when the starving rover-packs of former Microsoft Windows users show up at your lot-line.

:)

Just kidding. We'll hand out CD's with old copies of Slackware Linux 2.95, and maps, showing where the i386 chips and motherboards are buried.

(PS: Damned AI wins again. I had expected the upticks would continue for a while. Ran AI last nite, it still points down, and I note the DJIA is down over 400pts at noon, and our bank stock and phone company shares are down. The AI *consistantly* calls it better than I do. It cannot forecast a failed assassination up-thrust, but it can look at it, and say quietly: "Fade this...", by still showing the forecast curve pointing downwards. The human is the weak-link in the value-chain, and we can see a future where the computers make both the tactical and the strategic decisions. And the guy with the best AI, wins the battles, and the wars. )

[ July 18, 2024 ] - "Tomorrow Belongs to Me!" (says local Maker-Kid with a Lathe, a Circuit-Board & a Soldering Iron...) ... And you too, eh? We are going to see some real change, real soon. I forgot about US President McKinley, who was popped in 1901, starting the 20th Century with a bang. I read Michael Every's most excellent piece called "Protectionism Add Vance" (he is the Eastern-Block Analyst at Rabobank) and his stuff is worth crossing oceans to read. Yes, we are probably moving into a time of very "deep ship", as USA protectionism rises, and the World economy begins it's new rocket-sled ride right down into hell (and maybe war).

Every damn thing we buy, is made in China. Seriously - just about every single product is Chinese made. My car and truck parts, the Lincoln cylinder-head temperature sensor, the new alternator for the F150 pickup truck (truck was made in Detroit, but all the parts are made in China...), a new coffee maker by Cuisinart, which makes great coffee, like our 18 year old Cuisinart coffee maker, but apparently needed to be replaced with a newer one, because my honey-bunny is Nihonjin, and insists on new things. (Being an antique collector, this means we sometimes have a little bit of conflict... I like OLD things, she likes NEW things. So we have to buy new things every so often...) I compensate by buying a Russian 7.62 x 54 19th century rifle, rescued from a Ukrainian salt-mine. Life stays interesting. My new pieces are made in Brazil, Czech Republic, and of course, China. China now makes everything. We make noise, process oil-sand, run fission-reactors, build Japanese cars, write software, and run banks. We have been lucky in Canada. We have high taxes, but we've had a lifetime of peace.

But a new protectionist world will have big new costs. China is the workshop and factory to the world now, and they have done a pretty good job at this economic transition. Communism is stupid, cruel and just plain terrible. So the Chinese kept the stupid name, but converted to a market economy. This was the smartest thing any large nation has probably ever done. They probably don't get enough credit for this amazing act of sanity.

However, we are about to see things change. If Trump and Vance put 100% tarrifs on Chinese products, your iPhone will cost $2500, and you might have trouble keeping your 10 and 15 year old pickup trucks on the road, since Detroit does not even make old-model parts. The Chinese make the parts. Not sure about tractors, but everything from hair-dryers to semi-automatic items that every fellow needs and wants, will cost a lot more, until we change the programs (and machines!) here, and let the production move on-shore. Stuff will become scarce and cost more, until we re-enable local production in a big way.

I don't mind the "Fortress North-America" model. But we will need to slam the damn door shut on the massive, out-of-control immigration that is occuring, both in Canada and also the USA. Otherwise we risk open warfare in the streets, as the "Fifth Columns" that are probably already planted here, rise up, and begin to cause damage, crime, and standard-grade KGB/FSB-planned social unrest. Is this really a real threat, or just an old-man's fever-dream from history? I don't know.

But Gavin Newsom of California is flirting with a charge of enabling "child abuse", by signing the AB1955 sex-bill into law, which prevents any public official in a school or school-board, from informing parents that their child wants "gender transition" treatment. California is going full-on insane, and Governor Newsom is a very dangerous creature. This whole gender-transition madness is complete insanity, but is being promoted by the Karen-Kimberly loony-leftist-type females who are trying to destroy the basic essence of male humans. This perhaps is a plan to weaken and damage the fine and successful frontier-strength-myth nature of the USA. The Leftist-females and homosexuals who seem to control the school systems (and the Democratic Party?) seem to be very interested in painting White Males as some kind of evil force, and effectively destroying the US Anglo-Saxon White Male, by making the young White-boys doubt their own sexuality. This is what the schools are teaching, and it is a real threat to Western culture in general, and USA in particular.

This really is the most insane thing that is happening right now. Joe Biden, and his powerful and dangerous wife, Jill Biden, seem determined to destroy what it means to be a successful American male. This is very curious. Any wise statesman, suffering what Joe Biden is suffering - which is obviously early-onset Alzheimers - would be counciled by his family to stand-down, for his own good, the good of the Party, and the obvious good of the Nation. But Jill Biden - the person that pushed to install that incompetent female Kimberly Cheatle (who cannot even use proper English, when speaking) as the Director of the Secret Service security agency, has a clear agenda that threatens USA. Jill Biden is a dangerous person. She should be begging Joe to quit, not pushing the poor bastard into a certain psycho-physical collapse that will show the Democratic Party to be the fraud that so many now believe that it has become.

The Democrats have been actively damaging and harming the USA, and the insane support they are giving to "gender-transition" madness - clearly a human mental illness - is most disturbing. It's like there is this project to assault and degrade what it means to be a healthy, aggressive and ambitious American guy. And Gavin Newsom of California has just made it illegal for schools to inform parents if the school sees that the child is being pulled and pushed onto a self-destructive path of mental-illness. This is completely insane. It is basically legalizing social-programming that is effectively child-abuse. Elon Musk says it's the "last straw", and he has indicated SpaceX will move it's headquarters from California to Texas.

The Democrats are dangerous, and they seem to be actively promoting social conflict, personal irresponsibility, and psycho-sexual mental-illness in children.

After the attempted murder of Donald Trump, by a mal-adjusted 20-year old, who may or may not have been someone's operative (we may never know), the lines have been now drawn, and it is clear there will be no "unity" or any of that nonsense, until the dangerous and abusive madness of the Democrats is successfully dealt with.

The USA will have to undergo a period of "social repair", and old-fashioned personal responsibility will have to be restored to the badly-educated and mis-directed young folks in USA. They have been lied to, cheated, and defrauded by an abusive collective of Leftist scammers. Once the Democrats are handed the defeat that they need to be given, it will become possible to speak truth again, and speak it plainly, and without fear.

But we are gonna have to get used to the idea of making our own stuff, again. Free trade in goods and services is a great idea, but it must not be enabled by lies, deception, and linked to some insane attempt to degrade human sexual nature by indoctrinating children with homosexual programming and sexual self-hatred.

The Democrats linking good economic ideas, with absolutely bat-shit crazy ideas about human sexuality - and then changing the laws so that young boys can be taught that their natural, normal sexual nature is abhorent, and needs to be changed by "transition", is almost unbelievable. Yet it is now supported by the law of the land, in crazy California.

I wonder what Lenny Bruce would say? "Well, apparently now, in California, the school kids actually DO get half-an-hour of Mathematics, 20 minutes of History, and 10 minutes of C...ing."

We predicted earlier this week, that Joe Biden will probably resign tomorrow, if he does not die from Covid-19 tonight. It's really, really time to change the program - but just not the way the forces of evil tried to do in Butler, Pennsylvania. Even if you don't like all the Republican policy platform ideas, the need for change trumps all that.

Maybe invest in small-cap operations that can do local manufacturing. The whole "long, global supply-chain" idea might have to just die, to save North America from the dangerous Leftists and the crazy-sick Democrats.

[ July 17, 2024 ] - Your Baby's Gone Down the Plug Hole...(with your Economy!) CIBC is on record for saying the obvious - liquidity is being drained from the financial system in Canada, and money is going down the drain. CIBC points out that assets on the Bank of Canada balance sheet have shrunk from over $570 billion to roughly $273 billion Cdn dollerettes. This is basically draining liquidity from the local Canadian-dollar based financial system, and causing short-term rates to be higher than they need be.

This is the neoclassical/semi-wadcutter Keynesian approach to old-style "open-market operations". When the Cen-Bank buys bonds and financial instruments, it basically instantiates the currency to pay for the paper, (creates the cash out of thin air), and this enhances fin-sys liquidity. When they let these bond-instruments mature, and pay-off, the cash that comes in causes liquidity to be removed from the system. Money gets tight. So short-term funding costs rise and rates move up. This means existing short and medium term IOU's (bonds and bills and such) are discounted down so as to have yields that reflect the new higher interest-rate regime. This is QT - quantitative tightening, the opposite of the QE - quantitative easing - that characterised the Covid-19 stimulus programs. The problem of course, is that the higher-rates COMBINED with the higher inflation, can trigger a non-linear "tipping point" that kicks the overall economy into a serious and unnecessary downturn.

The whole neo-classical economic model, (that IS/LM nonsense that we had to learn in economics school) suggests that inflation is the result of "excess demand", and that shrinking the demand, by removing liquidity and raising interest rates, will reduce inflation.

This is a bit of a personal point of annoyance with me, since my own research has suggested that this economic model is completely disconnected from reality. It's fucking nonsense, since what happens when rates go up, is that you get a "rate-shock" phenomenon, and everyone re-calibrates their plans and their cost-assumptions and those with any sort of economic power, just RAISE THEIR PRICES or DEMAND HIGHER WAGES to compensate for the new high-cost rate-regime. So, the net effect of RISING RATES, is RISING COSTS, since the entire western-world economy runs on massive debt. Everyone is in debt - and a lot of that debt is floating-rate or short-term debt. So, that is why lower rates are attractive - it translates DIRECTLY into lower economic costs.

But, when rates move UP, the costs move UP, at the same time as your pile of fixed-income assets are RE-PRICED DOWNWARD to reflect the required yield to make them economic. Wealth is reduced at the same time as your COSTS launch upwards. Consumers have floating-rate car-loans, and mortgages. Businesses have revolving lines-of-credit, which have floating-rate interest, typically Prime-plus some vigourish number that the bank figures it can squeeze the business-guy (or gal) for.

If rates go up sharply, business conditions get tougher, and businesses respond by raising prices to cover the higher costs they now have. Consumers (salary and wage earners) respond by demanding higher wages. Raising interest-rates sharply, and "draining" liquidity, ***stimulates*** inflation. One can see a direct cause-to-effect phenomenon in the real economy. I saw this up close and personal, back in the mid 1970's. The only way higher rates can reduce inflation, is by economic "shock therapy" where interest rates are raised so high (ie. around 20% to 25%) that economic-links are broken, and the economy endures a harsh and painful mini-depression. This is what was done in 1979 to 1981. Revolving credit lines had rates that exceeded 25%, Savings Bonds yielded over 18% (first year), and many businesses collapsed or shut-down. This was Paul Volker's solution, which was needed, because inflation had become so deeply ingrained - programmed into everyone's economic thinking.

We are at a similar tipping-point right now, in Canada. And we are making the same mistakes again.

The LCBO is on strike. Cars are sitting on dealer lots, unsold. My Mastercard has an interest rate of 20.99%, which is insane. Inflation is running hot, and higher rates are making for higher costs for most everyone. This happens as the size of products shrink, but the price stays the same. (Tropicana Orange Juice is a good example - from a 1.54 litre bottle, to a 1.36 litre bottle, but sold for the same price... the "shrinkflation" that annoys everyone so much).

The "raise interest-rates to fight inflation" model is just plain wrong, if the inflation is not due to excess demand. "Excess" is a bullshit term, that implies there is some "correct" level of demand. This is not how life and economics works. The conceptual thinking is just wrong.

CIBC folks have basically said the obvious. The QT is going to break the Canadian economy, if it is not done in a more careful, gentle manner.

They are probably correct.

A much better approach to reducing inflation involves enhancing and improving economic productivity. This is difficult, and requires changes (improvements) in technical transformation co-efficients. You need to get more output, using less input. A modern big "twin-jet" is an example of this - two engines producing *more* power than four older engines, and also using less fuel. But to get these gains, we need to keep the economy working, and operating in a flexible and efficient manner. We need clear, explicit legal protection of private property rights. We also need less regulation, less direct government oversight, and removal of idiotic and restrictive price-control models, and bloated, value-subtracting government agencies, such as the CRTC and the CBC for example. Both could be ended, and the tax savings channeled into schemes to assist first-time home-buyers, for example.

Instead, we get the absolute economic madness of creating a new and higher "capital-gains" tax, which acts to punish investors and business people, who put funds at risk, to attempt to create new and better, more productive technological approaches to product creation. We are now actively ***punishing*** the economic activity that we need to have happen, if we want to have lower inflation, and more economic prosperity. It's crazy.

The Central Bank needs to focus it's efforts on ***stability***, and not try to actively "gain-ride" national economic process. It's not their fucking job to try to ensure "full employment". And Leftist scammers who suggest that "monetary policy" should be used to "help workers" are just completely wrong-headed in their thinking. They need to be removed from the debate. There time is over, they have been proven wrong, and they need to go because of the damage their wrong-thinking has caused and could cause again. Socialism is evil, because it creates so much unnecessary poverty and destructive conflict.

We learned all these lessons in the ugly inflations of the 1970's and early 1980's. It is weirdly tragic and astonishingly awful that we have to re-learn all this same material again. It's really crazy, truth be told.

Like father, like son, I guess. We seem to be trapped in an Economic Twilight Zone, or maybe it's "GroundHog Day"?

[ July 16, 2024 ] - Israeli Assissins Try to Kill Hamas Leader, and also Kill a Syrian Businessman with a Drone... But psycho-killer Netanyahu condems attempted assassination of Donald Trump. You could not make up shit like this, put it in a book, and not have people snort with disgust at the insane and unbelievable plot dynamics. Markets run up *really hard*, and dollars and shekels are falling from heaven. It's just wild. We remain long stocks, and are considering adding to positions of ingots and ammo. World is completely mad. But Trump looks like he has a lock on the "big guy" job, once Jill Biden and her "Manchurian Candidates" are finally either removed, or de-brainwashed.

That 1962 film - "The Manchurian Candidate" really looks like it predicted the future. Quite amazing. Who is running Trump? Maybe he is now a "free agent", and has paid-off his masters? I don't think anyone is running Trump, but I didn't think anyone was running Biden, but perhaps, someone or some group might be. Maybe it's just Jill Biden, working for the Inner Party of Democrats? Biden said publically "It's not who we are...", which is the dumbest and most dishonest thing he has probably ever said, since the Americans are past-master, expert-level assassinators. Just to be clear - we to NOT approve of "direct methods" to remove political candidates (like Putin did with Navalny, to prevent the prisoner swap), since killing political opponents is just so obviously morally wrong.

But it damn sure is a not uncommon practice - especially in the good, old USA. JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Ronald Reagan (attempted), Abraham Lincoln, and so on, are just some of the USA leaders of significance who have been shot down by assassins. The attempt on Trump was something we explicitly predicted, after Abe of Japan was killed. The world leaders who made the period from the GFC (Great Financial Crisis - 2006-2008) to the mid 20-teens such a fine and prosperous time have been under sustained attack by time, lawfare, betryal, election-fraud, and other more direct actions - Merkel of Germany, Sarkozy of France, Boris Johnson of UK, Abe of Japan, Trump of USA, Harper of Canada - all these good folks who gave us a world of peace and prosperity and stability have been removed, and folks like Xi of China, Putin of Russia, that strange guy who controls North Korea, and Netanyahu of the rogue Israeli state, just keep going and going and going, with corpses and prisoners stacked up behind them. It's pretty sad.

And yet the markets keep flying upwards, into the "stratosfera".

Let's all go to the movies, and watch "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Dr. Strangelove", and realize that all this current madness, seems to have been forecast, way back, long long ago. Nothing really changes very much.

[ Scene from 1962 film: "The Manchurian Candidate", about a fictional assassination attempt of a political candidate by a brainwashed war-hero. ]

"How's about a nice game of Solitaire?" (Which was the brainwash-trigger mechanism to make the war-hero turn into assassin) The film was quite clever and was made *before* the JFK assassination - before the "grassy knoll" and the Texas School Book Depository became famous.
(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

[ July 15, 2024 ] - So, Now that Putin is Gone, Zelenskiy Invites Russians to Peace Talks? Suddenly, Zelenskiy figures maybe the Russians *should* come to the next peace talks. How about that? Markets run up.

[ July 14, 2024 ] - Kagemusha? Rumor that Putin has died, but Russia withholding news There are rumors circulating that Vladimir Putin has died, probably from the cancer that many intell researchers suspected he had. Or he might have succumbed to the Covid-19 vaccination blood-clots, that medical researchers suspect is a long-term side-effect of both Covid-19, and the Covid-19 vaccine.

As a Russian leader, he was known to have "body doubles", and admitted this in an interview, several years back. The idea here is that news of his death could be hidden, by having one of his body-doubles assume the role of a "kagemusha".

During wartime, in feudal Japan, this practice was not uncommon, as the loss of a leader was known to dispirit the warriors and fighters supporting a warlord. If the warlord was killed, his generals would replace him with a look-alike. The look-alike was termed a: "Kagemusha", meaning "Shadow Warrior", and a 1980 action film was made in Japan about an event in Japanese history where this was thought to have occured.

Supposedly, the rumor of Putin's death, originated from England's "Mi6", the UK Spy Agency. We have no direct knowledge of the truth of this, but have observed two events - Russian military re-opening lines of communication with the US Pentagon, with Andrey Belousov speaking with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and comments today from Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, suggesting that they did not think any Agency was behind the Trump assassination attempt. (ie., another "lone gunman", it would appear...) But nothing from Putin, who might normally be expected to comment. If a "kagemusha" has been installed, he might not be Putin's intellectual equal, so they would be wise to act as they are.

The Russians are not stupid, and have a real rational interest in restoring some sanity and stability to the current crazy-ugly march of events. But with Putin gone, USA run by an old and defective leader, Trump shot down by a now-dead assassin, and Israel unleashing continued state-terrorism and mass-murder at scale in Gaza, mad foolishness may run fast.

Anything can happen. One has to make the assumption that the Arabs are not subject to human emotions, in order to support the murderous actions of the Israeli's, who kill as if mad with blood-lust. The Gaza mass-murders will echo forward in time, for many years, and nothing now can change this. It is an "Arab Holocaust", with deaths now in the tens of thousands - almost all civilians. This remains true, regardless of how many Jews scream their abusive shouts of "anti-semitism."

The Saudi's are probably discussing that maybe they have backed the wrong horse, and a peace-seeking Russia could have a real chance to expand it's authority and influence. Hiding Putin's death would make good sense, given that the USA is morally self-destructing, appears unable to act rationally at the international level, and Israel is making the Gaza desert run red with the blood of Palestinian civilians.

If Putin really has "left the stage", then the Russians have a real opportunity to end the insane and absurd war in Ukraine, and seek a quick cease-fire. This would free up their forces for deployment to the Middle East, where they would probably be welcomed by all Arabs, if they stood in any sort of opposition to the murderous and sadistic war-machine that is the rogue state of Israel.

A new, younger and more internationally-focused Russian leader could be a powerful force in the world, given that America has chosen mass-murder and military violence as its strategic and political model, and surrendered its moral authority.

Note that these rumors of Putin's death, have been around for a few years now. The latest rumor originates in the Far East, and might just be standard disinformation, or more "fake news". But no-one lives forever - except perhaps maybe "Genocide Joe" Biden, who at least thinks he will.

:)

[ July 13, 2024 18:57 EST ] - Trump shot at rally, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Secret Service agents rushed him off-stage. After falling down, he stood up, and raised his fist in the air. Blood was visible on his face and his neck. After Abe of Japan was killed, I warned folks this might happen to Trump.

Here is what I saw, on my devices.... (page down )

[ Trump shot at rally, stands up with blood on face and neck, and raises fist in the air, as Secret Service agents rush him offstage. ]

We were afraid this would happen. The dishonest Democrats have painted Donald Trump as an "enemy of Democracy", which is an ugly lie, designed to provoke this kind of violence. The Democrats might just be unfit to govern, as they have encouraged and enabled this kind of madness. What did they expect would happen? Was this their plan? The Leftists should be removed, but peacefully, using the ballot-boxes.

(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

[ July 13, 2024 ] - Gaza Holocaust? A really bad future is being engineered by the most dangerous humans that live now on planet earth - the Israelis - who rival ISIS terrorists in their wild, horrific over-the-top pure evil. The Gaza Murder War is unfolding like a medieval morality play, and gives us a picture of why Jewry was so hated, for so long, in much of Europe. This murder-war is so crazy-wrong, and will have such awful consequences going forward, that it feels quite unreal to observe. (We know people who can give us first-hand accounts of the deaths and atrocity-actions taking place.) But don't take my word for anything - read what BBC reporters write:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjjw6dz8w2eo

We are seeing - in real time - mass-murder and true "ethnic cleansing" that rivals the events of Europe in the 1940's. It's quite unbelievable almost, except it is ongoing right now.

What is crazy wrong, is that America - rather than trying to find a solution to any part of this conflict, is actually throwing gasoline on the fire, and making the killing more effective, and operationalized at greater scale. They appear to want a wider war, with more "action", it appears.

Suddenly, Russian President Putin does not look like such an evil person. And this is one hell of an accomplishment for the "Genocide Industrial Complex" that the USA seems to be actively assisting. It is just madness, in our opinion. There was no attempt to seek any sort of peaceful, viable resolution to the ugly error of the creation of the Israeli and it's land-theft exercise, which resulted in 3 million people living in the tiny Gaza Strip Territory. This was an absurd and stupid partition, which created a perfect "Ghetto" where it's citizens could be controlled, and then killed at scale.

The entire Israel project was and is insane. The creation of the Israeli state was a horrific error, sadly, which has allowed mass-murder to be viewed as an acceptable social solution, by Jews. This is just over-the-top crazy. These Israeli's are channeling pure evil, in a way that is so perfectly awful, that it is almost comical. "One good Holocaust deserves another!" seems to be the ethic. It's nuts.

Today, the USA and the new lefty UK nutjob government of fucking Keir Starmer or whatever that communist bonehead is called, has decided that a mass-bombing campaign against folks in Yemen is the solution to the problem. "When in doubt, bomb the airport", seems to be the extent of the military analysis. It's like they are channeling "Goodfellas".

This is just so fucking stupid that it boggles the mind.

I am wondering if old MBS of Saudi Arabia, will finally agree to what Osama Bin Laden wanted, and remove the American military bases from Saudi. That would be hilarious - and it just might happen.

People in USA (and now the sad, sorry old motherland, the UK) have just kind of stopped thinking. There is this weirdly kinky view, which the stupid fucking Left has embraced, that you can bomb your way to peace. We, most disrespectively, disagree. The idiot fuckwit Lefties will bring ruin and destruction down on our whole World, if these clowns are not stopped, and stopped soon.

Meanwhile, let me dig up a technical picture of what is likely to happen to the sad US aircraft carriers that are projecting all this power. The silly little Iranian-supplied drone-boats are comically ineffective. But there IS technology that can sink these killer warships. Excuse me, while I consult the files...

We went thru the files, and found this picture, showing how a MIG-31K can deploy an X-47M2 "Raketa" (Rocket), which the MIG launches up into the "Stratosfera", and which then targets the aircraft carrier at 3400 km/hr (very quick), and can be used to solve the problem of a large hostile warship parked off your nation's coast, and sending warplanes to bomb your national airport. The idea is that targeting methods on the A/C will not succeed in intercepting the incoming vehicle, due to it's velocity. It is difficult to shoot down a vertically plunging hypersonic missile. It's rather like trying to stop an incoming bullet by shooting at it. (The "Phallanx" gattling-gun will try to. But it might miss.)

[ Picture of How to Solve the A/C-off-your-Coast Problem ... ]

Here is a picture of how the Russians plan to deal with the A/C problem. See, the technology exists now to deal with the threat-level that very wealthy, violent folks use to project power. It's only a matter of time, until it is deployed and tested. If it works, the world will be changed in a big way.

(Click on image to expand it, and ESC to exit expanded image.)

If I were Putin, I might just pull the trigger on this operation, maybe call it "Operation Sealane Clearance" or some such thing, and test this new hypersonic rocket technology, and see if it works. Like the Americans, he could blame Iran if it did not work. Or he could sit quietly and say nothing at all, if it did work. A nice "Knight's Fork" - he gets a win, either way.

See, my old Irish grandmother would have said: "What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander." Or more directly: "If you throw rockets at us, we have no choice but to throw rockets at you." Who could blame Putin if he sunk a US carrier threatening the Middle East with more mass-murder of Arabs and possible global war? Americans ignore talk, and only respect targeted action. This would not be a hostile act, just an attempt to communicate, he might argue. And he would have a valid argument, would he not?

We also note that the Chinese are actively testing AI-enabled optical-recognition technology to allow F-35's to be targeted and destroyed. No radar at all. (Radar is not much good any more, since it lights up the sender like a big beacon, which says "Here I am! Kill me, if you want to!!". Not a great idea. So, AI-based image-recognition is used to locate, identify, and then track and destroy the target - in this case, an F-35.) Images have been released showing Chinese testing of this new missile technology, out in remote desert locations, where all these mocked-up fake F-35's are parked. The technology seems to be working.

We are programming our best AI technology to kill. And the Israeli's are front and centre on this exercise, which is now starting to snowball. Peace appears to be a Fool's project, and so the war planning continues to accelerate.

We predict that this Gaza murder-madness will cost the USA it's future, if it is not stopped soon.

[ July 12, 2024 ] - Great Booh's Up! You really have to be a Black Adder fan to appreciate the world we are seeing now. Or maybe a student of Shakespeare's Tragedies and also his Comedy. We have a very strange world now. All the doom-and-gloom predictions, based on the obvious reality of the current situation, are of course completely overshadowed by the curious behaviour of the USA and it's dynamic, restless, wild people. Good for them, is our quiet and true opinion.

They are just freaking crazy, and it is good for the World. Our AI's were pointing down, our primary bank-stock holding had made a perfect "head-and-shoulders" technical pattern, and the world looks to be going to hell.

So, we figure all that must be priced in. If anything changes, we will probably see some solid uplift in prices, if and when the inflation numbers can be printed so that they can give the appearance of things being under control. We don't believe that *anything* is under control anywhere, truth be told.

But that does not matter!

The crazy situation in USA is so like a Shakespeare play - sort of a curious cross or mash-up, between King Lear and/or Macbeth. But maybe that is not right... Maybe it's more a Samuel Beckett play - "Waiting for Bidot..." Biden is just having neural-failure, but the Demohacks have decided that it's all good.

But really, it's crazy. It's just that it's classical crazy, which is so interesting and strange. We actually have old "Genocide Joe" restricting shipments of 2000-pound bombs to Israel, but allowing a mass-shipment of 500-pound bombs to go through. It reminds me of that old joke about the firing squad asking: "And which calibre bullet would you like to shot with? A big one, or a little one?"

Does this just not seem a little insane?

And Mr. Biden introduced Zelenskiy as "President Putin" at a NATO meeting. Really.

But we remain long, all-in on our bank-stocks, gold-mines and telecoms. We should have bought tech stocks, of course, but I know too much about technology. It's mostly bogus, and mostly, it just does not work very well. Everyone knows this, but people are pet-coon lazy now, so they just try to get Windows or MacBook apps or silly cellphone apps to do their work. AI will make this trend worse, we are pretty sure.

So, we remain invested in our dividend-generating non-tech portfolio. And work on farm-work (much to be done), and also I fixed my pickup truck. I installed a new alternator in my 2013 Ford F-150, the beast we use for work. It's a critical tool on a farm and also for our real-estate project (the Northern Office - lakefront on a lovely lake just north of Muskoka area.) The truck has been high-maintenance, but I've replaced the starter-motor, repaired the flawed transmission-cooling system, and now, installed a new alternator, drive-belt and belt-tensioner pulley assembly. (This required removing air-intake tubes and coolant tubes, and draining half the coolant, etc. Miserable job, but completed now, with satisfactory results. Also replaced coolant-hose clamps, cleaned and checked wiring, air-filters, etc.)

The low-inflation print from USA provoked an expected sea-change in market sentiment, which shows nicely, how human understanding can trump what the AI stuff tells us, sometimes.

I honestly think the whole AI thing has become a quite-silly bubble, of quite epic level. When the air starts coming out, typically bubbles do not slowly leak air, do they?

That is why they are called "bubbles" and not just "bull-markets". Be careful, things could get really crazy, really quickly.

[ July 6, 2024 ] - Baby, Let the Shite Shine Down! I just read a really good article that explains the current USA situation re. the corrupted and damaged US media. The same thing prevails in Canada, only it is much worse, since we have the State Information Service of the CBC (dominated by hard-core Leftists, Gay-boys, and run by clever J-folk to make any objective information on the Israeli mass-murder exercises unreportable. The USA media is bad and bent, but the CBC is just comically evil - like Joseph Gobbels with a high-rez smiling female face...)

This fellow James Kunstler at "Kunstler.com" absolutely nails it, in his piece: "Who Turned Off the Gaslight?" It's some of the best and most perceptive writing and solid analysis I have encountered in quite a while.

If you don't read anything more this year, and plan to leave the planet on a long trans-stellar voyage to Riesa (or some other such fine pleasure world), at least read this piece.

Here is the link:

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/who-turned-off-the-gaslight/

I don't know anything about James Kunstler, and I only found this link via some research efforts on what the hell is going wrong with USA, a nation that I love, because I like their approach to tyranny and bad-actions by evil entities. Plus I have extended family there, and our family history links directly to California during the 1920's, in a rather direct way. We have a direct family connection to the movie-business of 1920's Calif., which spawned the great and truly golden age of cinema. (Big sigh...) The USA film industry dominated the world, before the World went evil, and films got weird.

And Kunstler makes a very key point when he points out that it is perhaps (probably?) true evil forces that are trying to mess with the minds of the children, and make them question and doubt their own sexual indenties. I believe this "LGBQT-trans" stuff to be truly evil, as it cannot help but have a direct, powerful and negative impact on the mental-health of the younger (and soon-to-be-coming-to-power) generation of kids. It seems designed to fuck up their brains in ways that will make them confused, uncertain, and easy-to-control.

This is a very bad, and very evil thing to do. Those coloured fag-flags are designed to make kids crazy, and doubt who and what they are, at their most basic level. This look like a giant scam, to degrade and damage the mental-health of our youth - the most important resource a nation has.

Kunstler calls it "Cluster-B crypto-Marxism", which might just be the best and most accurate description of this particular plague-virus I have heard. They teach this gay-trans nonsense in schools, as if it were not mental illness. But it IS mental illness.

Kids are of course supposed to experiment with pharma and sexuality when they are young. But you do not want the young boys to cut their dicks off, or die from fentanyl-poisoning. Unless perhaps, you are maybe a dick-less man-hater, or a fag-Marxist, who hates his own culture, and actively seeks to destroy it. Harsh words, but quite possibly true. Modern academia has gone wildly off the rails of sanity and common-sense. They teach this silly stuff in schools, and suggest that all the blame rests with white-people. This is of course, racist nonsense - but if you point out the racist tone of the attacks on white-folks, the white-folks are the ones accused of racism. This is madness - but it might be by design. Our very culture and our history is under attack by clever grifters and eco-fraudsters, who seek to damage the foundational baselines of Western Culture. We have to change what is happening here.

The Revolution that we non-Marxists want, is a sanity revolution, where we can restore sane operation to public-process, reduce tax-burdens, and strengthen the self-financing sector so as to improve and enhance the Wealth and Health of the Nation, and the Prosperity of the Whole Planet. Attacking the sexuality of children, and encouraging sexual insanity and enabling mental-illness will track us all to a certain social breakdown, and civilizational collapse. It's happened before, and one can look up the historical material and read about it. Nothing new is happening here.

And this is the curious truth, which lots of folks have been writing about for some years now. But the mainstream media lie-machine has pushed all these curious, wild lies, which are now called "gaslighting", a curious term for "State-engineered deception". This term seems to have been invented in Vancouver, in the 1970's, when gaslights were installed in a bad part of the city where drug-abuse and crime was rampant. The gaslights were supposed to make everything look nice, and disguise the obvious ugly state of the drug-user's neighbourhood.

[ July 5, 2024 ] - Sunshine Stuporman My mom got Alzheimer's, and went goofy and dopey, and lost most of her memory, and most of her natural, clever, reserved nature. I would go visit her, and she would say these remarkably candid comments. It was sad, but often crazy-funny. And in the expensive, high-security Old-Folks Home where she lived, they had an old guy who was always angry. He walked around with the same face that Biden has now. This is also pretty funny.

Anyone who has any experience at all, dealing with old, cranky, brain-failing folks, knows that this curious combo of stubborness and anger and denial-that-there-is-a-problem, is a very common feature and even a signature-characteristic of mental decline in old guys (especially old *guys* who have been used to controlling their environments or at least actively managing their own lives).

So, this fiasco with Joe Biden is just wildly crazy. The old bugger needs to fucking well stand the fuck down, and if he cannot and will not, then he needs to be told to fucking well move the hell along, and make way for a young, strong, effective crop of new leadership candidates.

But if the Democrat Party of USA cannot engineer this obviously necessary result, then that group of clowns is so obviously unfit to govern, that it opens the door to their collective removal by any means possible.

There are people actually seriously suggesting that active AI video-technology should be employed to make Joe Biden look more snappy and effective and chipper in his chattering.

Really. This continued misuse of AI, is going to kill us all, I sort-of-secretly fear.

Why doe ANYONE support the loon-brigade that is the New Democrat Party in USA? The answer to that question is self-evident: For the money!

The Lefty Demo's are supported by every skank who is on the public payroll, and is getting the "purple wage" (cf. "New Riders of the Purple Wage", by Philip Jose Farmer, 1967).

There is this astonishing Niagara Falls of Cash - billions of Gov-bucks that flow to teachers, regulators, political people and their staff of poltroons, agency officers, Board-members of various "Boards" set up to solve some big social-justice "problem", Commission-members and their Commissioners and agents, law-enforcement folks, prison officials, more regulators, city-workers, registry-office personel, second-rate scientists with their fat streams of government grant-money, and so on, and on and on and on.

This collective of Government-Funded humans, are deeply vested with the idea of keeping the fat-dollars flowing into their bulging bank-accounts.

They are VERY HAPPY with a goofy old coot who promises to keep the bucks flowing and the easy-life sliding along their way on taxpayer-supplied grease.

But the folks in the "self-financing sector", who have to pay their own bills, and generate their own funds to survive, are different. These folks typically are not great fans of the Big Goverment Slush Machine that funds all the "social-justice warriors" and other bloat-toads that suck at the big Taxpayer-Tit for their sustenance. The folks in the "self-financing sector" want lower taxes, less government-funded economic damage, and more freedom to do something that lets them generate some funds that give them first survival, and then maybe prosperity if they are lucky, clever, hard-working and successful.

The economists used to call it the "productive sector" and the "non-productive sector", but this was too annoying for the government-folks, who said "We are productive! Look at all the regulations, laws, rules, and paper-work we have produced!", and so the terms "Non-productive sector" and "Productive sector" were re-cast as "Non-self financing sector" (Living off debt and taxpayer-extractions) and "Self-financing sector" (funded from private effort to produce income which eventually must include profit).

So, it's obvious who supports the Democrats in the USA. The folks on the Government payroll. They want and NEED the "Great Taking" by Government to continue, since they gain their survival from this action. They will vote for "a glass of water" (to use Nancy's Pelosi's term), if that is what the Democrats run in these Democrat-dominated Blue-zone's of economic non-self-financing action.

From this simple and obvious observation, it's clear that we have a problem. As Government grows more and more powerful, intrusive and LARGE, it will, at some point, become impossible to fix the economic failure that is being programmed into the system. Once more than half the jobs are State-funded cash-dumps for Gov-agents, there is no change possible. The Bloat-toads will have a permenant lock on power, and all sorts of weird fiction can (and will) be invented (like "Climate Change Action" efforts, for example), that have zero productive action-results and are non-self-financing, of course.

So, if we are gonna have the Revolution, we had better get the ball rolling soon, before more than 50% of all the population is funded by the Government Bloat-Toads and the Blob, since at that point, there will be zero chance of changing the borked system. The money will be bogus digital-cash or paper-scrip, and you may well really be told to live in a pod and eat bugs, and there will be no viable political party that can reverse the process, since few folks will vote to cut off their small State-supplied income streams.

This is why America MUST survive and CHANGE THE PROGRAM. There is this little window - maybe 10 or 20 years - before the whole world is destroyed by the effective destruction of the self-financing sector, and no amount of voting will be able to reverse this trend, once most of the folks are on Government payroll.

The Gov-Monkeys, the Bloat-toads and the big Blob all seek this result. It gives them the "Inner Party" power, and reduces the rest of us to what is effectively slave-status. Not a pretty future.

Of course, this is a pure "worst-case" scenario. We don't expect it to be quite this bad. But it explains why a substantial portion of people in USA would support an "old, broken down piece of crap" like Joe Biden (to use President Trump's words). This Biden man is very bad - a grifter with a proven family-business of taking bribes from the Chinese. (This is how Hunter Biden got his Porsche, let's be clear!).

Maybe the Democrats could replace Biden with that Pelosi-suggested: "glass of water". Might be a viable strategy...

[ July 4, 2024 ] - Wave the Flag. Watch the Fireworks... As your weapon factories burn? Could this be the beginning of the future?

We have a simple question, that we have been pondering...:

Why are our political people so astonishingly stupid? Why is "crazy" the new normal? Why is USA running two old guys for the "Big Guy" job, that so many folks don't want to vote for?

Why is USA helping Israel carry out the AI-driven ("Lavender") mass-murder exercise against Gaza citizens? Why does the USA (the only nation to have used not just one, but TWO nuclear bombs on TWO big cities), now help arm Israel so it can use advanced AI technology to becomes the champion of civilian mass-murder efforts? This action does extreme damage to the moral authority of USA, and will create long-term trans-generational hatred of the American State. This will degrade and damage USA for a hundred years into the future, and set in motion long-range planning that will have expanding and destructive, tragic outcomes.

We believe America is at risk of engineering it's own moral suicide. And a nation that is seen as a heavily-armed and dangerously dishonest political entity that operates in a hypocritical and out-of-control abusive manner, will face rising long-term costs which will eventually become unsustainable. This is how big empires die. They run out of the wealth and the materiel needed to support their large military operations, and eventually, those they have hurt and defeated, rise successfully against the Imperial overlords. First, the borders are overrun. And when the Imperial military is shown to be weak and insufficiently armed, the emboldened rebels burn the Imperial cities, as their own towns and villages were burned and destroyed in earlier generational action, which is never forgotten.

When will we see the "Sacking of Washington?" Or will it just be destroyed in a radioactive firestorm? We hope this outcome can be avoided. But hope is only desire. It is human action that drives the human world.

What is wrong with people now? Do they have no knowledge of history? Can they not reason effectively anymore? (We actually have a working theory that Covid-19 infections have caused subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle?) changes in brain-chemistry in a non-trivial portion of the post-infected population.)

When one examines the history of "eschatology", there is a rich and detailed amount of information, that seems to follow fairly obvious and evident patterns. Civilizations rise and fall, rather like seasons come and go.

Rome burned and destroyed Carthage and dominated the known World. But it was burned down too. What makes Rome and the Roman Empire so interesting, is that in some ways, it still exists. Rome is a religious and cultural centre now, and it threatens no one with murder or destruction. That is how it has survivied. The Church - Christianity and it's doctrine of forgiveness and redemption - this was a more effective business-model (and life-model) than the cult-of-power and military dominance that the Roman State relied upon.

I've been reviewing the philosophical views of civil structure. I think Derrida is full of crap. But if Western Culture is to survive and prosper, it has to recognize the limits to military power and the limited effectiveness of State Terror, as practiced by USA and it's Jewish murder-cults. There is a limit to military effectiveness. The expenditures required to run a command-economy in a full-on military conflict, are not consistent with prosperity and with an even partially "freedom-seeking" State. War in the future will not look like past wars. New war may mask itself as what looks like random destruction, and accidental events.

At some point - possibly quite near in the future - we will likely see evidence of USA military power reaching operational and financial limits.

And once military power reaches it's threshold capacity, it becomes one of those processes which runs in reverse - often more quickly retrograde, than was the slow expansion.

The USA may find itself - despite all it's ability and effectiveness - fighting a curious asymetric series of war-events which degrade it's ability to respond using military force.

And if all American moral authority is bankrupt and dismissed by a world grown weary of unwise American brutality and hypocrisy, the USA could suddenly find itself in a war scenario in which it cannot "win". There could be uprisings and literally conflict in the streets of American cities which require military action to contain, at the same time as low-level assaults are operationalized on the peripheral projections of American power. Think thousands of cheap rockets, carrying low-explosive warheads designed to spread disease and infecteous insects perhaps carrying "Bird Flu" or "Lyme Disease" - low-tech nasty stuff that will not kill, but simply degrade military operations on US warships.

There are hundreds of ways US military entities can be harrassed and degraded. The objective of raising costs and making life difficult for unwanted Imperial overlords will perhaps only be a first stage of a long-term campaign.

But it is the unnecessary and unwise actions of the Israeli-American "Axis of Effort" that may drive this process for hundreds of years into the future. The Israeli's can slaughter the citizens of Gaza like cattle for now - but the intense hatred of the Jewish State and it's offensive, racist ideology - this can connect directly with the extraordinary loss of American moral authority, and create a long-term condition for successfully recruitment of effective anti-American forces throughout the world, not just in the Middle East.

The surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban was astonishingly unwise - and make no mistake - it was a complete surrender. American forces snuck out of their big airbase, like thieves in the night, abandoning their loot. It was crazy-bad action by a damaged and degraded America, unsure of what it should be doing in the World. Putin watched in astonishment, as USA just gave up, and turned-tail and ran away. USA chose to "cut and run", and it was an American defeat worse than the Vietnam War.

For now, American financial strength combined with military strength, allows the USA dollar to retain it's "reserve currency" status.

But this will not last forever. We think we are seeing - right now - "Peak America", and fear that a long, slow (or maybe not-so-slow?) slide down is what we shall see beginning very soon.

And joined as the hip as we are, here in Canada, we cannot escape the coming collapse in American authority and status. We will be dragged down, no matter what we do. As least this is the current "worst-case" scenario.

I really hope I am wrong about this. The Democrats in USA really need to be removed, but I am not sure that Trump will be much better. The Jews and the Saudi's look to have control of both of these old guys, and so we fear that the ugly and expanding war in the Middle East, cannot but help make it's way to American, one way or another.

And what is certain - right here and right now - is that USA no longer has the moral authority that it had in the recent past. Their government is a collection of liars. They talk a lot - but their efforts to actively assist the Israeli ethnic-cleansing efforts in Gaza show that their talk is self-serving propaganda.

We are really concerned that this New American Mendacity will have serious, long-term effects, which will damage and degrade USA going forward from here. Liars can prosper, but not for ever. The "Big Lie" that you send out into the World, eventually comes home, and brings an entire angry World along with it. And then things change.

[ July 2, 2024 ] - Growing Madness and Certain Collapse? I am watching BCE's share-price implode and burn down like a melting reactor-core today. It's silly, and yet, it seems to be the path that the fuckwits in the Federal Fools Government group up in Ottawa, want to have happen. The cucks at CRTC I guess want to destroy BCE and impoverish all it's shareholders. Seems like a curiously unwise decsion to us, but we are not in any of the psycho-stupid loon-loops that drive the cuck-process of our buggered State, so we have really no way to understand exactly why this path is being programmed. Maybe the Gov-dicks are short? We have no idea. But it sure seems a bad play. We are near a breakdown point, where we will have to sell into this stupid shitstorm, and the c... I mean "runts" who are running this f**king program, bloody well know it. But destroying (again!) our major telecom entity is just a really unwise plan. We would all do better, if the CRTC could be completely ended and the a$$h0les who run that sh/tfarm of idiocy could be sent-down to the Unemployment Office.

There is this astonishing level of outright fraud and scam-shit everywhere now. We blockout a lot of communication, because so much of it is outright bullshit or fraud. Our phones' ring each day with scams and fraud-talk. We have to run layers and layers of sec-fluff to limit access, and have just gone thru more updates. We run browsers WITHOUT javascript, and have no incoming access to any of our tech now, other than dial-up voice landlines or cellphones. Too dangerous to have any sort of incoming internet access, like we used to be able to have. This site runs via AWS, and there is no point even running https on it, since I will likely shut it all down soon. It has been an experiment, to see if offering this info we provide, could create any sort of value. (Hint: It cannot. Only 5 or 6 companies generate direct value from the internet. You know who they are.)

So, it's been interesting. What is really interesting, is that our AI stuff really works. It's damn scary. It says we are fucked.

I had rather hoped it was wrong! :)

But so far, the down-pointing projections, have been spot-on. Really, it's hilarious. Real comic-opera stuff. You want to know the future, eh? Let me tell you:

You will watch everything good collapse and go to shit. You will experience disaster. Evil will triumph and get fat and grow rich. The good-guys (and their families) will get wasted. The stupid and the fraudulent will remain in power, and nothing will change. This will make you sick, and you will feel pain. Then, after that, you will die.

There! Now you KNOW the future. So go out and invest in weapons-makers and euthanasia stocks!

:)

[ June 28, 2024 ] - The Liberty of the Phantom The Democrats in USA are showing curious collective insanity. After the comically awful and geratric performance of old "Genocide Joe" in the USA Presidential Debate, one just has to wonder why the USA Democratic Party does not just run an honest, fair, open and truly democratic leadership convention, and select it's candidate for USA President in a good old-fashioned democratic manner? The curious threat to USA democracy, is the existence of the USA Democratic Party. They have rigged their OWN political selction process, so quite possibly the very WORST POSSIBLE candidate has supposedly locked-up the nomination, and no sensible choices (such as that Robert Kennedy fellow) are possible. Why not just do this???

But the process is now corrupt, insane, and just plain weird. Robert Kennedy Jr. could win. He could do crazy stuff and sieze the public imagination. He could rent a big convertable Lincoln Limosine, and drive thru Dallas, Texas. He could announce this action, get a bunch of folks out to see his parade action, and have the TV and news-junkie crews cover this event. He could follow the same path old Jack took, and wave to the crowd. This would be a "Yeltsin" moment, a crazy act of real courage, like when Yeltsin climbed up on that tank - probably the most profound and clever political act in modern history.

The poor old Demohacks need to deal with old "Genocide Joe", the geriatric loser who will send them all down in flames. It's weird how they have all their money on that very tired old horse, who has really accomplished nothing at all, in his entire politcal life. It is all just weirdly gruesome.

The whole thing is surreal, like a Luis Bunuel film.

[ June 27, 2024 ] - The Rhine Just Froze Over... And the Barbarians are on their way. Finally. It's about bloody time, eh? It's funny how the artists, who are the sensitive-poet types, can seem to forecast the future with a curious degree of accuracy. I keep seeing this weird amalgam of "The Barbarian Invasions" (a great 2003 Quebecois film by Denys Arcand), and that Ray Bradbury short-story "There Will Come Soft Rains", which is set in August of 2026, in a town called Allendale California. (It was written in 1950, about a fully-automated house, which is still operating, despite the nuclear-war which has killed all the people from radiation-sickness).

I don't think this will be our future - but what is interesting is that the two serious concerns that seem to dominate the current zeitgeist - uncontrolled, irresponsible and illegal mass-migration into USA as engineered by corrupt Democratic Party operatives, and the enhanced probability of all-out World War, a result of the ugly and insane conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, where abusive, sadistic military invasions have resulted in mass civilian casualties. Both these looming concerns were topics of well-crafted creative works of fiction, quite long ago.

The artists and the film-makers and the poets and the "workers in song" (as Leonard Cohen called them), often seem to create extreme-scenario fiction, which often has better success at prediction of what will happen, than does the reasoned, thoughtful, and desperate attempts by academics, pundits and traders have with their attempts to speculate what will happen in the future.

This really is the job of the artist. He or she must touch the collective soul of the current world, by showing a portrait of a possible - and often terrible - future that might unfold.

Comedy can do the same thing - and it's even better at forecasting the future, as the absurd and the insane move from speculative-fiction into the regular domain of noxious "bubble-headed bleach-blond" and serious, scolding middle-aged women newscaster-style faked-reality nightly TV events.

We've given up on television - and even the internet with old Google-gumbo, no longer offers much that is helpful. We are turning back to Einstein's suggestion, and continue to "look deeply into nature", where some useful truth can still be found.

The correct and most useful machine that we might invent, will be an AI-device that can read all the news and internet-drivel and fake-scam digital-rot, and make a correlated forecast of the future evolutionary paths of the major tradeable markets, and then execute the trades. I wanted to build this device back when Z80 personal-computers became available - and even subscribed to news-service (using a dial-up modem, no less!), and built PASCAL programs which captured and archived and processed economic-news stories. It worked not-bad, considering I had onl 64K, and two 160K floppy disks to use. But one really needs a lot more horsepower, of course, and the necessary neural-capacity of a modern AI (or a human brain) to make market-useful inferences from the march of market-related economic news (and the related drivel that is the price history).

But now, folks are building such devices, and using them to generate trading action. And this is pretty funny, since it kind of reminds me of the "Forbin Project", another amusing and clever attempt to forecast the current future (a great film made in 1970, about a nuclear-launch computer/AI called "Colossus" which links up with a Russian computer, and takes control of the world). It was the topic of David Bowie's "The Saviour Machine" song, and the same ideas were used for "Shalmaneezer", the AI in "To Stand on Zanzibar" and "Wintermute", the orbiting AI in William Gibbson's "Neuromancer", which forecast the rise of "cyberspace".

For an old hacker like me, all this stuff is "old news", or "yesterday's papers", as Mick Jagger said in one of his old, classical tunes. All pretty hilarious. We have "Deep Blue" (the original IBM-based chess-playing AI) trying to trade the markets, and also take orders at McDonald's. And it does not really do a very good job at either of these task. (Estimates I have encountered suggest 70 to 80 percent of market action (trading volume) is driven directly by algorithmic trading proces - machines making trades with other machines.) This is nothing to do with "price-discovery", and really is just more American bullshit. But bullshit - in the very technical business-language meaning of the term - is actually what human brains (and modern AI's - it's called "halucinations" or "confabulations" - the term Dr. Hinton prefers) - is a very key part of human thinking and human communication.

When folks do not know, or are dealing with uncertainty, you just have to guess, or roll-the-dice, or spin-a-yarn and try to use narrative to help you achieve understanding of what is actually happening. Most times, most people probably truly have no idea, despite the assurance of certainty and the serious-face blah-blah-blah that is put forth as wisdom and supposedly the results of thoughtful consideration.

So, given my history, and my readings, I grow ever more skeptical of AI claims, and the political visions of a wonderful, fun-filled future of rising prosperity. I just don't see it.

I do have some very bizzare ideas, though. Curiously, these seem to also have been the topics of writers and film-makers back in the 1960's and 1970's... More later... as my research is showing we might truly be very seriously "faaked". The "Preppers" might actually be actually making the most effectively actionable and reasonable decisions, consistent with quiet wisdom and rational analysis.

[ June 26, 2024 ] - You Can Hold a Toad for a Long Time... But it will not increase the probability of it turning into a Prince. Or a piece of gold...

In August 2026, the "Soft Rains" will come (as per Ray Bradbury's story), and all the Toads, the Princes and the gold will not really matter then. Or not. The future remains uncertain. But we have been considering just what the transition from now into the future of 2026 and 2027 might look like. The probability of major transitional events seems to be climbing each day, but we cannot get a clear picture yet. It's all just a nagging feeling that something large is looming. And historically, markets and nations go down and broke very slowly - until it all happens very quickly. Is that not the key lesson from history? One cannot know the future, of course.

But the aggressive reversal of the long-term trend towards free-trade/globalized-commerce - with Russia and China having developed operational private-market economic models, and trading freely with the rest of the world - this reversal runs the risk of running the last 30 years of rising prosperity in reverse. We feel this reverse run of the movie of the last 30 years, might be at "internet speed".

The ever-growing levels of public-sector debt, with annual interest-costs exceeding annual defense-spending in the USA, for example, cannot continue much longer. Maybe a few more years. But either we get a big runaway inflation, or weaker western-nations start to see rolling "currency crisis events." (Think of the Japanese Yen at more than 200 to the US dollar, and the Euro collapsing as China-Europe trade devolves into unwise trade-war histronics).

The Canadian banks are really looking bad. All the numbers appear reasonable, and PCL's (provisions for credit-losses) are not unreasonable. On the surface, they should be good investments. Folks in Canada do not typically ever default on their mortgages. The numbers look OK. But the market is saying otherwise. Bank shares are trading now as if they are all about to turn into "drop-toads", and this is ugly and serious for folks such as us, who hold Cdn bank stocks. We are getting hammered, just as the "Great Reset" event-horizon moves ever closer.

Don't take my word for this. Go look at the public finances of USA and Canada and other Western-world nations. The current scheme will come to an "event resolution" process, regardless of what the political poltroons do. We can crash-land the plane in a semi-controlled manner (think 10% to 15% or higher interest-rates to damp down the raging inflation, big camps for the "newly poor" so those who lose their houses can at least have some place to live and eat and not freeze to death, and lots of ugly new restrictions on all social behaviour (think Covid-19 restrictions, but on steroids). Or, we can just keep the debt-funded can-kicking going, until we get an economic implosion of really surprising proportions. This nasty future of hard-change and economic-reset is probably coming at us, regardless of what little action is taken now.

Most USA wealth now is now virtual, paper (or "digital") wealth. There might come a quick-turn kind of tipping point, where inflation hits a level that folks want to have hard-assets, rather than variable-valued paper. It's happened in so many other economies, throughout history. Brass coins of no real value replaced gold and silver coins, the King puts his image on the coin, and demands it be used. Folks move, and farmers hoard their crops, to trade for real assets, like weapons and drugs and silver and gold. Most real-estate deals in Europe were done using gold, because no-one wanted paper, notes, or degraded base-metal coins with questionable true value, if they were to give up house, home and estate. Often, real-assets changed hands because of war and conquest. History suggests that it starts bad, and then gets worse.

People adjust, and economic action continues after the "Great Fall", but it will be at a much lower level, more local, and without the benefits of global free-trade being possible. Only the very rich will have nice things. Everyone else will be living in those "pods" and eating those "Klaus-bugs".

It's a certain receipe for social revolution, is it not? All the same old Nationalist and Socialist lies will be trotted out, waved around, and clever speakers with good NLP and sensory-neural skills will talk up wonderful solutions. But when the Great Fall (and the Great Default) actually happens, the weirdness of the current world, will seem like a drunkard's mad fantasy.

And AI - it will be a weapon, not a "helper." (This is an easy forecast to make, because that is already what has happened. Think: "Lavender" for everyone...)

The more research I do, the more of the crazy and the deep-ugly that I see, and the more sick to my stomach I seem to feel. I do not see a solution that will not be painful and awful. Either we do the hard austerity and get things back into some sort of economically viable balance, or we face a certainty of an eventual breakdown in economic process, where currency loses it's value, and all trust in an operational future just falls away.

In the fictional "Old West", you could put an advert in a newspaper, with: "Have Gun, Will Travel", and maybe get some kind of work. There was always a range-war or a civil-war to join. But as the economics of the western-world nations collapse, there will be NO JOBS for most people, and the "digital poor" and the "paper millionaires" may well find their "wealth" simply disappears, or is expropriated as "taxes" to create the illusion of a public-debt pay-down (which will actually just be a big, rolling default).

See, if we don't do the balance-the-books austerity thing, and instead just keep doing the political tax-and-finance-and-spend thing, then the high interest rates and/or the high inflation, will just crash our economic process, and make our currency nearly worthless. Everyone will just get real poor, real quick, and many folks will just be shell-shocked. This is my worst-case scenario, and I don't really see it happening - yet I see all these curious, preliminary signs that there is this curious loss-of-confidence in Canada that seems to be accelerating.

This huge cohort of people are getting huge payments of government money, for talking and chatting and writing digital documents and moving bits and paper around. But the only thing we really make, is cars at the local Japanese car factories, and crops, in the farmland. That's about it. Our oil and gas sector is under sustained assault by the goofball Green-Nazi's and the Ottawa mandarins, and mining seems to be curiously broken and deeply in debt. If not for "hedonic adjustments" and various statistical trickery, we would probably be showing a seriously falling GDP, for the "real products" section of the economy. The wealth of Toronto is being generated by lawyers, politicians and merchant-middlemen. The developers are making money, but the only things they are building are condos and a few commercial buildings. The whole economy seems to be running on borrowed money - and because it is so hard to actually build or make anything anymore here, house-prices and real-estate are being bid up, as supply is restricted in an artificial manner.

When this borrowed-money economy resets, I have a deep fear that it will look more like the 1930's, than the mid-1970's (the playbook that many expect). There are no jobs available for anyone but entry-level folks doing "customer service" work. It's becoming a "Two-Sector" economy, like what one sees in Kenya or South American nations.

We could be like Switzerland. But instead, we have a Federal Government which has chosen the Argentina economic model instead. We think this choice seems doubleplusungood...

[ June 25, 2024 ] - The Defeat of the Dishonest and the Abusively Stupid... Sometimes, the good-guys win. This was evident in the By-Election in St. Pauls riding in Toronto yesterday. I don't normally comment on Canadian politics, because I detest it all so much, as it is typically driven by outlandish dishonesty and abusively stupid policy choices that lead to harm all around.

Chrystia Freeland, the current Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minster - the one who suggested and authorized the insanely abusive and idiotic new "capital-gains" tax increase - was supporting her former assistant - some person named Leslie Church - as the Liberal Candidate. The St. Pauls riding was a super-safe Liberal seat, and so having it turn over, so that Don Stewart, an Engineer and a business-man with Bay-Street experience was elected as the Conservative candidate, is a big surprise.

But what really made the top of my head just blow-off and explode, was the abusive, dishonest kind of bollshut rhetoric that Ms. Freeland used. Liar-supporting-a-liar kind of stuff. Freeland (whom I used to respect until she became the worst Finance Minister in Canada's history), said this:

"I'm really calling on the people of St. Paul's to go out there and vote for [Church] because the alternative is really cold, and cruel, and small. The alternative is cuts and austerity, not believing in ourselves as a country, not believing in our communities and in our neighbors."

Ok, so voting for a clever, hard-working Engineer who promises to spend our tax money more carefully than the focking stupid and abusive Liberal skanks - this is "really cold, and cruel, and small ... not believing in ourselves as a country..." This is really what our Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister actually said.

Well, as we used to say on the trading floor: "Faak You, Ms. Freeland." (figuratively, of course...) Your comments are stupid, dishonest and wrong.

St. Paul's was a "safe" Liberal seat. But if you want to see why Pierre Trudeau's child is so hated and despised in Canada, and the Liberal Party is now such a sad tragedy for our nation, this explains it pretty clearly. Any sort of sanity and attempt at engineering quality, is described as "cruel and small", and "not believing in our neighbours". What astonishing verbal excrement!

Ms. Freeland, you really should resign.

We all supported you and Justin for your courageous actions in helping Ukraine. But when you slag Conservative supporters for doing the correct thing, and taking the necessary action to attempt to repair the serious damage you and your people are doing to Canada, you accuse us of being "cruel and small" because we want to see some sort of fiscal responsibility at the Federal level - where all our money always seems to go! This is just so wrong.

It's not enough to win a few ridings, and form a new Government. Canada needs a wholesale revolution of process now, a complete re-design of the "tax, spend and fill Liberal mandarin's pockets with cash" approach to Federal politics here. We should ***drastically*** cut back most of the power of the Ottawa Federals, and turn most power over to the Provincial Governments. The Liberals have so damaged and bloated and corrupted the process in Ottawa that ***ANY*** kind of fiscal sanity - even the suggestion of fiscal sanity - is viewed as "cruel and small and not helping our neighbours".

Let's everyone remember that it was a Federal Liberal Government that rounded up all the Japanese Canadians, stole all their property, and put them in Concentration Camps, at the beginning of World War Two. Typical "Liberal" policy options, right? Like when Justin Trudeau stole all the money from the "Trucker's Protest" bank accounts, and used the police "riot-squad" operatives to smash truck-windows, and drag the protesters away. And let's not forget the "Great Liberal Bank Robbery" - the abusive *extra* tax on the Canadian Banks, to try to pay for the insane and ineffective Covid-19 free-money nonsense.

We've watched our bank shares crater (down 30% or more), directly because of bad Liberal policy decisions. Canadian pension-funds, insurance companies, and investors seeking reasonable levels of yield so as to protect themselves from inflation which can destroy their assets and retirement income - all these investors hold Canadian Bank shares. When the Liberals attack and damage the banks, they attack and damage the entire Canadian economy. When the Liberal-run CRTC tells Bell Canada that BCE must share it's newly built fibre-optic network with it's competitors (an absolutely asinine decision!) and Bell stock collapses from 62 to 44 - a huge cohort of Canadian retirees and small- scale investors are hit and harmed by this astonishingly bad economic decision.

I honestly believe that it is the Liberal regime which is "cruel and small", and so to hear our Federal Deputy Prime Minister say such an idiotic an untruthful assertion about voters who are seeking necessary change, has really made my head want to explode.

We desperately need change here, since much more of this Liberal madness, and this whole nation will be bankrupt, with a busted-currency and the beginnings of a depression-style economic environment. We've been running on borrowed money for decades, our dollar is only worth 73 cents US, and heavy "capital-gains" taxes have been re-introduced, to hammer and hurt any sort of development and/or investment efforts made to protect ourselves from the vicious inflation the Liberal policy-choices have caused.

It does not have to be this way. But we have to speak truthfully about just how bad our Federal Finances really are. Our little "dollarette" is a falling joke, and the range of economic opportunities here seems to shrink daily. Only those who are plugged into international economic process, are making any money now. We are actually crafting a third-world style, "two-sector" economy, right here at home, with our current Federal fiscal policy decisions. It's all much worse than most folks realize.

Ms. Freeland's latest economic idea, is a bunch of massive new tariffs on Chinese EV (electric vehicle) imports. Doubtless because existing car-makers want protection for high-cost local production, and also to follow what USA tells us we must do. To us, this seems an insane policy. We think: "Why the hell don't we let the Chinese build us cheap (affordable!) electric cars?" A new Model-S Tesla is over $100,000 here. That's absurd. Why not let China build us some affordable EV's? Liberals used to support "Free Trade" - but recall it was the Mulroney Conservatives that gave us the most successful NAFTA deal. The Liberals never had the brains, the political courage or the plain common-sense to get that deal done.

We truly well need to change the program here. It MUST be done. It's not "cruel and small" - it's just plain necessary, if we wish Canada to remain economically viable.

[ June 20, 2024 ] - Eaten by Eighths, Devoured by Dollars... I have never seen a stock in a major, top-tier company trade quite as ugly as BNS is trading now on a daily basis. It's curious. BNS goes ex-dividend with a $1.06 dividend as of July 2, which is only seven trading days away from now. A solid, high-quality Canadian bank stock typically shows some strength as we move towards the ex-div day, yet BNS just gave up more than $1 per share today.

Something is wrong. The bank is pumping out new shares from "Treasury", ( 32 million in the last year alone), but this seems to be something different. Like that fake CNN news story about the name of the Korean pilots - "Sum Ting Wong", is what it is looking like. We read in detail the fact that the Japan agro-bank, Norinchukin has announced it will dump $63 billion USD value (roughly 10 trillion yen) of stinko-dumpster-valued small-coupon bonds which have crashed since the interest-rate spike (which is not really fixing the global inflation, right?). They might have done the "hold-to-maturity" valuation trick, and tried to keep these dumpster-priced bonds on the books at full face value, but it looks like Kazuto Oku, the CEO, has decided to dump the loss-making US Treasurys and other crap-value bonds and CLO's which are showing massive paper-losses, so he can clean up Nochu's balance sheet. Probably, this is a good decision, which is long overdue. Shit is shit. It doesn't always turn into pretty flowers.

So, what the hell is wrong with BNS? I'll will try to dig into the details in the 100-page quarterly report I got recently. I need to read it slowly, in detail, cover-to-cover, and this exercise is a grim task. But it must be done. I will report if I find any new financial cockroaches (like the newly minted 32 million "treasury" shares, for example.) I honestly believed that BNS was (and maybe still is) a solid, well-run bank, with a very high-quality balance sheet.

But the way the stock price is moving says something different. We are only seven trading days away from a $1.06 dividend ex-day, and the stock is falling down every day in ever-growing dribbles and drops, like a drunkards vomit down his tie...

We hold this BNS stuff, and I was using the AI to make tiny bets, but the AI forecast is driven solely by price action, which is pretty trivial, really. The BNS more-than-1-dollar price drop, on a day when the Swiss National Bank has cut rates by 25 basis points, and the local economic weakening that seems to be taking place, suggests that further rate cuts are coming soon, is weird. Falling or even stable rates should help BNS, and support it's share price. And Fitch has re-affirmed the Cdn big-bank ratings here, (except for TD, due to AML nonsense in USA-land), and all looks good around here for the big banks, including BNS.

So this suggests that something else is driving the action, which is curiously negative as we approach an ex-div day. Are some big foreign-holders or pension funds slowly unloading a very large equity position in BNS? I have no knowledge of what the big whales are doing - we are out in farm country, fighting thunder-and-lightening storms. (We had a bad powerfailure and power-surge-spike yesterday. Computers survived ok, but the control-board in our kitchen STOVE, got whacked and went dark. The burners worked, but no oven control, no clock, no timers, etc. Today, 20 hours later, the Maytag stove (a nice glass smoothtop model), has managed to heal itself, and the display came back. (Yes, I checked "Sabbath Mode". But perhaps the voltage surge, on the 240-volt AC line triggered the "Sabbath Mode" shutdown+timer. Unclear. But everything seems operational today. Hilarious. Just like the big Lincoln. The modern-tech with on-board computer control, has these idiot-stupid circuits, that are DESIGNED to stop the entire system from working. Engineer's that design circuit systems like this should be tossed into the same sea with the Bre-X core-salting "geologists". (Anyone remember Bre-X? Or Nortel? Or Royal Trust? Or Laidlaw? Or Dome Pete? Our Great White Northern Land seems to be able to produce impressively substantial financial disasters.))

We are finding much information is now going dark on the 'net. The major news-services are biased and less-than-honest, and the financial information seems to be skanky and sketchy. It all gives me a bad feeling, truth be told, like we are approaching a financial singularity.

The whole Nvidia thing makes me nervous as heck. It's a good company - but is is really more valuable than all the companies in Europe on the German or French stock markets? It just looks like a bubble-on-a-bubble. AI is great - but won't it cause many folks to lose their jobs and their incomes? Folks just don't think thru the connected consequences of economic action.

The local Government in Canada hammered the banks with a bogus tax to supposedly fund the idiotic Covid-19 free-money shit that went out. So, we as bank-shareholders, have taken 30% hits to the equity values of our portfolios - just as the fucking State is working on plans to try to get more tax money from us, if and when I sell my northern property, which I have been trying to develop. In our case, this ugly hit to our equity values, means that I just cancelled this year's plan to build, and so a bunch of guys that would have made money building us a shell-cottage, and putting in a septic-system, will now - directly because of the new Trudeau-taxes, and the hits they have made to Bank-stock values - those local contractors will now get ZERO from us, since we have no choice, but to pull in our horns, dial back our plans, and reduce expenditures.

In economics, EVERYTHING is connected to EVERYTHING else. If you start fucking with the parameters here, you risk blowing up the development action WAY OVER THERE. I wish the goddamn political poltroons could grasp just how unwise their stupid little schemes usually are. But they are trough-drinkers and double-dippers, with Gov-money flowing into their fat little wallets every month, risk-free, as long as they can keep blathering out the flap-doodle with their flapping little lips. It's silly. And it's the stuff revolutions are made out of.

And now, most technology seems to have limited-out now anyway (do I really want a stove with a computer, that fails when the power goes off, and/or lightening hits the 240 power-line?)

So much is just strangely wrong now. Nothing works right anymore, and little can really be trusted. We bought a new coffee-maker, and it took some searching to get a SMALL one, which IS NOT connected via Wi-Fi to our local LAN/routers. We go out of our way, to get non-connected technology, since who really wants a TV or a Toaster, that listens to what you are saying in your den or kitchen, and logs it all back to some monitoring AI in China or California? :)

[ June 11, 2024 ] - Sharehodlers In a Leaking Boat Weather is curious - was 8 celsius this AM. For June 11, that seems a tad too cold. But it is nice for sleeping. We read about heat-waves and think of old jazz songs "We're having a heat-wave... she made the heat-wave, by making her seat wave..." and so on. Sometimes, history is fun. One can cruise thru the archives of old 1930's films - and marvel at their style and sophistication. We think America should actually *aim* to re-create the 1920's. Get rid of the Nanny State, and just give everyone coming to America an instruction book, which would say, basically: "You are now on your own. Don't fuck up, or you will be killed. But if you are careful, you can get rich, and have a nice life. Try to be good. If you can't be good, then be good at it. Good luck. You're gonna need it."

We believe the open-ended model, with few restrictions, is best. Foreign policy should be to encourage trade, and shun murder-States, which use mass-murder of citizen non-combatants as a vote-getting political strategy. People who support murder-States like Israel and Russia, should be made to go live there. That would solve a lot of problems, very quickly.

This is radical thinking which will take regime-change to implement in most modern nations. But it might happen, since it happens everyday in the world of business and commerce. Strange just how awful and profoundly stupid modern politics is. The bad trending to the worse - just about ... "everywhere in every nation - from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station", to quote the song. So curious. In our elections, we are offered Hobbson's Choices (ie. no real choice at all), and the Government always wins the election. Curious times.

I got the physical copy of the BNS Q2-2024 report (which is roughly 100 pages of tiny print..). And there, on page 78, in a weeny-tiny little footnote, is the story of what has happened to the Shares Outstanding number. Prior to April 2023, if you wanted to get your dividends as BNS shares, instead of cash, your shares were purchased in the open market (out of the existing pool of traded BNS shares). Starting with the April 2023 dividend, the shares that you get if you select the Dividend Re-Investment Plan, are now "Treasury Shares", which are sold to you at a 2% discount to the market price. So the pros have a nice little algo to hoover up all these NEW "Treasury Shares", at a discount, and then dump them into the market, on the suckers like us, who hold BNS shares. This is just hilarious. Scott Thompson and his new gang appear to have taken a page from the Vancouver Stock Exchange approach for questionable little mining companies - and rigged up BNS to operate this way. The net result of this trick of printing up new shares, giving them out in-lieu of cash dividends, so that the pros can then unload on upticks to the little punters (like us), at a nice almost-risk-free profit, is that the price of BNS has been under constant pressure, and any upward movement in price is met with waves and waves of selling - of newly created shares. This is just beyond belief hilarious.

BNS used to be a very good, conservative bank, which was generally careful not to shoot itself in it's own foot. They made mistakes, but generally the bank was a pretty well-run place. But to us, this looks like taking aim at your own feet, and shooting off each of the toes, one by one. It seems just absurdly unwise in our way of thinking.

The problem of course, is that the clowns who act as "managers" are mostly not shareholders, so they don't really give a flying f--- about the share price. In the last year, while we have held on to our little BNS positions in a couple of portfolios, which totals less than 10,000 shares, we have watched as roughly 32 million NEW BNS shares have hit the market - in Canada - and have watched the BNS share-price dift down and down and down.

This, in a nutshell, is what economists sometimes call the "Agency Problem", in that the guys (and gals) who act as professional managers and run the Agency, do not have incentives that align with the *owners* of the entity. The owners want a stable and/or rising share-price. But the grunts who run the place, want lots of free-cash-flow to claim for themselves by virtue of rising salaries, oversized and absurd "executive compensation" strategies, and annual year-end "bonus payments" - all paid out of profits and/or the free-cash-flow the Agency generates. The management has little incentive to act in the shareholder's interests.

Sure, dividends are nice. But when the shares-outstanding number ZOOMS UP by 32-million newly minted "Treasury Shares" hitting the public market, the share price goes south, and you start to get the ugly and sickening feeling that the whole operation is paying your "dividends", by issuing new shares and not even telling the public markets about the process.

Like - "I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused..." (I think that's from either Warren Zevon, or Elvis Costello..) I like to see folks do well and make money (I now realize I am very unique in this way), but I get a tad concerned when I see my portfolio values drop and drop and fall and drop - and then see the multi-million dollar homes and cottages that the BNS management folks seem to always be acquiring for themselves. This is just insane.

See, this economic model of paying out large dividends by pumping out new shares - this is a very old model, and not a good one at all. Mr. Charles Ponzi took this concept to the limit, and honestly thought he was doing nothing wrong (or so he said. Maybe he was really stupid - but not likely. If you get caught in a really big lie, one strategy is to just act all surprised, and stick to the absurd story that you thought you were doing the right thing...)

A properly run, stable business should NOT be pumping out new shares on the sly, since that dilutes existing shareholders (since their percentage that they own of the business is reduced, and the share-price is pushed dowm by demand-supply schedule intersection - more shares, with all else being equal, means more supply, so market price is reset lower). Share-sales which are made to acquire a new business, which should generate new profits, might be justified, and may be a good and fine thing for everyone. But pumping out 32 million new shares into a share-saturated market for financial stocks, is absolutely going to push down the share price. A well-run bank should be BUYING BACK it's own shares, as this reduces dividend-costs, and subjects the public market price to stability and some upward pressure. This benefits everyone involved - especially the existing shareholders. But BNS is now doing the opposite of what is correct and prudent for it's existing shareholders.

So, we reach the conclusion that the management at BNS are acting against the interest of the BNS shareholders, and we find this a most curious situation. It's quite unexpected, actually. But it explains the ugly and unattractive price-action that BNS shares have had, at a time when the high level dividend that BNS is paying (better than 6.6%, given 4.24/64). The market is saying, maybe: "You are paying that big dividend by just selling new shares into the market. Looks and Smells a tad like a Ponzi sort-of thing...".

Now, we don't believe that BNS is a Ponzi-scheme. They used to be a really good bank. But the new management seems to have made a serious and solid error in our humble opinion.

The good thing is that this is an easy error to correct. The hired-management of Bank of Nova Scotia could appologize to it's shareholders, indicate that it will begin to implement share buy-backs, and will promise to no longer issue "Treasury Shares" as part of it's dividend re-investment plan. It can commit to returning to acquiring BNS shares in the public marketplace, for those who wish to take their BNS dividends in shares. This action would support the BNS share-price, and stop it from falling and falling, as it has been doing.

See, my AI indicated that the price-action was weirdly bad for BNS. The dividend was high, and the bank seemed well-capitalized and was doing good and safe business. But the share-price kept falling, and the AI would just be pointing straight down, and I could not understand what the hell was going so wrong with BNS. Well, read that little footnote on page 78, under section for "Share Capital" in the Q2 2024 BNS report, and it explains exactly what was changed.

If all the existing shareholders of BNS cry "Bullshit!" on this current management team, maybe we can get this unfortunate mistake corrected. At least, that is how this is supposed to work, if public share ownership actually means anything anymore. We shall see.

[ June 7, 2024 ] - The Rocket-Sled to Hell? The gruesome continues, despite the "Great Man" model of History showing that it might be the most correct...

Spacex had a successful flight for Starship Test 4, despite the front canard control-flap partly melting away during re-entry of the ship. But I was very impressed that despite being heat-damaged quite badly, the front canard control surface on the Starship vehicle continued to operate. We like stainless steel. 18-10 is good. Bravo Spacex folks. Don't stop. Carry on!

Especially since everything else seems to continue to curiously degrade, at what seems to be an accelerating rate.

In a short 27-second video posted on "X", we can see an Air Canada Boeing 777 explode fireballs out of it's right engine SEVEN TIMES, during a recent takeoff at Toronto's Pearson Airport. These big aircraft only have *two* engines, and so when one engine experiences radical failure, the whole craft is in a risky place. For example, if the problem is fuel-related (it most likely was not), you really are rolling the big dice.

https://x.com/aviationbrk/status/1799001238547341453

AirCanada officials reported it was a "compressor stall", and the aircraft returned safely to the airport, and maintenance folks (and perhaps even some folks from Boeing?) are investigating what happened. Might have been a bird-strike. The pilots appear to have done everything right, the big Boeing landed safely, and passengers were able to depart later, on a non-fireball-exploding aircraft.

But most things do not work right anymore, and this phenomenon - with the exception of Spacex - seems to be just about everywhere. The censorship that operates on Google and other "search engines" makes the very term "search engine" seem comical. Google is now more about information-hiding that information-finding. The MSM ("main-stream media") results it returns are laughable - and all the interesting "weblogs" and the old "direct reporting" actions by people who are actually at the scene-of-the-crime, are surpressed and/or just hidden. Google-search is now worthless for anything controversial. It simply does not fuction.

So, we use: "Duckduckgo.com", but it also has curious limitations.

The old ability to search the whole internet, has simply disappeared. You can only access manipulated, censored results, and even those results will be both sanitized (bad words and so-called "hate-speech" removed), and will have absurd promotions for things like "8 Ways to be Gay" and so on. This nonsense will be promoted by the forward-facing pages users are presented with, regardless of what they were searching for. It is so pathetically awful, that it's simply hilarious. The overt and explicit attempts at dishonest "social-engineering" are so transparent and outrageous, as to make using Google profoundly annoying. Any controversial search effort becomes an exercise in political programming.

Try some experiments of your own, if you doubt this truth.

Elon Musk should create a search-engine company. But perhaps he feels he has enough enemies, and does not feel he needs to create more.

I have a disturbing feeling that our markets - our lovely systems for offering investment opportunities for folks who need to invest (so they won't be destroyed by inflation, and/or impoverished by other State-planning efforts), are now badly broken. Of course, this is not visible directly.

Most action now in Canada is now not on the Toronto or Montreal "Stock Exchanges". The whole "open outcry" model is gone, the trading floors are gone, and even the old promotional-space where new companies could "ring the opening bell" are now not-open to the public. The entire financial system - at least in Canada - seems to have gone dark. Much trading-at-scale seems to be happening in the various "dark markets", which do not report real-time quotes, or offer any public "Level-2" (market depth of bids and offers) information.

And we have discovered that substantial amounts of "new shares" are just being created and sold off to the public investors, without any information being offered to existing shareholders about the extent of the dilution. The Banks in Canada seem to be actively "watering their stock", and the rules seem to have been changed to allow this kind of action to take place, without any sort of public annoucement of a "secondary offering". This is crazy. We used to have "Prospectus" documents produced, and these now seem to have disappeared, or are now lodged behind digital paywalls, and such.

The whole effect has been to create an "insiders market", where "private placements" and "private equity" deals are all done behind closed doors, and to benefit only small groups of wealthy insiders.

This is just unwise and wrong, in our opinion. It slowly degrades and damages all the gains we have made in the last 200 years. Everything seems to be going retrograde.

I have this awful feeling that the 21st Century, may look like the 20th Century, except run in reverse. At the end of the 21st century, we might have essentially a feudal, quasi-monarchical political and economic environment, dominated by a few powerful militarized nation-states, with a State-terrorized global population kept under control by mass-surveilence, and arbitrary arrest and property seizure. Imagine the whole world as Gaza, and the Israeli's in complete control of America. It's a perfect nightmare vision, which may well lead to a long, destructive series of "special military actions" designed to degrade and limit the abusive and murderous power of a hyper-militarized United States and it's unhappy allies.

Could it all become so awful? I construct these worst-case scenarios, and am disturbed as these slowly play out, and I watch the good, normal people be degraded, assaulted and then eventually quietly destroyed by powerful forces that seem to be remarkably evil. The scale and the ability of the force-processes of mass-murder that nations such as Israel and Russia are able to operationally deploy, is truly impressive. But Russia at least shows some degree of restraint in it's murderous assault on Ukraine. Israel shows no such restraint, and is actively assisted by a deeply corrupt Washington Uniparty. This is just insane - mass murder, the air-bombing of schools and hospitals - deliberately targeted - are routine. Even the Germans in World War Two did not act with such pure evil intent. The Israeli's are often compared to the extremist National-Socialists of Germany - each driven by a racial ideology that seems absurd and unacceptable to non-racist "normies".

But it all goes so much further now. We have fallen now into a world where all the fine and soundly designed systems and procedures and processes are being vacated and dismissed by both the Deep and the Shallow State actors. The American legal system (and our's also, truth be told), has been profoundly corrupted and mostly serves to protect the interest of wealthy, politically-powerful Leftists, who claim to be "acting for the People", as they enrich themselves and impoverish those who are not politically connected and find they are now unable to even make their voices heard. The mass censorship ensures that only the View-of-the-Few is allowed to be seen. And so mass-murder becomes State policy, willfully executed by hate-filled Jewish racists who used to be our friends. This is just crazy.

Real debate and honest discussion moves underground, the public forums are manipulated with endless State-funded disinformation, and all our technology and our markets and our democratic political structures are slowly degraded and distorted to benefit the State Agents, and stifle any disruptive human opportunity. We just keep seeing this nightmare future slowly being crafted, brick-by-brick, wall-by-wall - and lie-by-lie.

This is double-plus-ungood. We hope we are wrong about this trend. But I see it grow every day now. We have too many really bad, dishonest fraudsters in control of our Governments, and of our Government Agencies. But with the DeepState/Uniparty in control of the USA, there is really nothing anyone outside of the USA can even do. Nation-States like Canada and Japan are completely dependent on USA for military support, as neither nation has any nuclear-weapon capability, so we are militarily neutered.

Even significant regime-change in both nations, will make no difference at all. Europe has been captured by radical Leftists who are determined to "Green" the place (and degrade and severely limit their own industrial capacity), and so States which used mass-murder as a political strategy such as Russia and Israel, are given the green-light to commit any atrocity they wish.

America has become politically dysfunctional, and it's current regime is corrupt to a degree that we honestly never expected to see. It will make no difference whether a Biden or a Trump is made President - the DeepState/Uniparty will remain in power, and American war-lust and it's "Kill them All And Let God Sort Them Out!" political strategies will likely continue on the global stage. Americans are good at doing war. We expect this not to change. But when war cannot produce any kind of victory, it leads only to destruction, tragedy and needless death and suffering. We cannot bomb our way to a better world anymore. Imagine World War Two running in reverse - war starting with a few major cities destroyed, followed by years and years of grinding, grim conflict. Hate is being hardwired in.

So, we see a breaking, degraded World, with rising anger, moving along it's war-path. There seems to be no way to get off this path, as hate and anger grow stronger each day and each year. What is really interesting, is that I fear the Israeli mass-murder campaign in Gaza, will spell the end of NATO. I will address this absurd-sounding idea in another note.

[ June 3, 2024 ] - The Devil's Radio... Damn, but it's all getting weirdly gruesome now. There is this curious "Twilight Zone" feel to the extraordinary stupidity that we are seeing (and experiencing daily!) just everywhere. Cars have advanced computer circuits to prevent them from turning on. Email is completely broken just about everywhere, and I have to get the "https" credential nonsense working on this website, and get a "DUNS number" from Dun and Bradstreet, in order to even have my deleted apps at the nasty Google Playstore. Fucking Google bounced my little APL apps out of their goddamn Playstore service years back - but have informed me I need to get a Dun and Bradstreet ID number for my company, to continue to NOT do business with them. This is just beyond hilarious.

The small-holder is now being systematically fucked-over just about everywhere, in just about every possible way. It is comical. I grasp now, why people turn completely insane crazy-rogue. You want to avoid crazy at all costs - but the fuck-idiocy one has to deal with on a daily basis, is becoming enough to put even the best, strongest, and most self-disciplined person over the steep edge of sanity into the abyss of madness.

I've gone thru the Bank quarterly statements for some of the bank-stock holding we have. And the fucking shares-outstanding numbers are wrong - by many tens of millions of shares!! Where the fuck are the public secondary offerings? I describe it in some detail below, in the May 30th note. The goddamn bank-boys are watering their stock. They are diluting the shit out of existing shareholders - without telling the sorry stupid retail goofs (like us!), and so the curious WAVES OF SELLING that I have watched for the last 12-18 months now make some sense. This is just nuts. And we thought it was also illegal.

All the rules seemed to have been changed - in technology, in the markets, and in the common-sense world of engineering design. We feel this is just madness. There is this new, widespread moral depravity.

But let me make a prediction:

Since the engineers do not know how to engineer correctly anymore, and the finance people do not want to conduct honest finance operations, and the government people do not want to govern with fairness or integrity, and the designers have very little idea about how to design anything that actually works correctly anymore, I see problems ahead. Our rockets will continue to explode. Our markets will face - at some very near point in the near future - an ugly reckoning, and it is even possible that our currency will become damaged in ways that we can see clearly in the historical examples of debasement. These are not difficult predictions to make. We are facing real trouble.

We are heading for a chaos-driven cascade failure of quite history-making scale and extent.

Everything is so goddamn badly designed, badly built, unreliable, untrustworthy, and outright criminially corrupt, that cascade-failure is now baked right into the big pie we are all nervously carving up. There is just no goddamn way around this.

Nature and the laws of physics will come to bear on this big full-stack-of-fragile-crap, and will do so soon, and with what will seem like real vengence.

But it won't be vengence or "Bonfire of the Vanities" bullshit-with-moral-overtones. It will just be the result of all this fake, broken, crappy shit that is being actively pushed into every single sphere of every part of our modern world. It's just gonnna be cause = effect in dynamic operation. We will crash because we have pushed the "crap-envelope" way, way too far out.

Mark my words here. The shitstorm will happen, and it will happen soon.

Nothing works right anymore, and nothing is being done about it, except to make and push out, more crap and lies and fraud and low-quality technology on everyone. A bank quietly sells 31 million new "treasury shares", without informing the public. Result: Bank has cheated it's shareholders, and is no longer trusted. Governments design economic policies that punish honest citizen-savers, and reward dishonest immigrant scammers. Result: Corrupt, vote-harvesting fraud-filled government people are no longer trusted, and change happens either in the street or with the ballot-box. The bastards get removed. This change will happen, one way or the other.

Markets are rigged to enrich the crooked fat-boys, and impoverish those who are looking for true investment opportunities to protect themselves from inflation. Result: Markets repaired after regime-change takes place, but markets may also do the job themselves, and re-price all assets downward, to accurately reflect the widespread operation of the frauds.

And the greater the fraud, the greater will be the intensity of the market-driven price discounting process. Problem with this outcome, is that EVERYONE gets hammered - the good, the bad, the beautiful and especially the truly ugly.

Watch for it. And maybe buy some gold, and more ammo and food. But how do you know it really is gold? Even gold can be a fraud. How do I know your "gold" is pure? Without trust, everything breaks and collapse occurs. And we are very close to this point now.

When the AI says the big "Swing Down" is beginning, I will post a note here. We are certainly tee-ing up for it, in just about every single sphere of reality. It's all getting just nuts.

[Update: 12:27 pm June 3, 2024]: Ok, just for the record - I wrote the above note BEFORE I read this note, about how the NYSE crashed a bunch of prices of various listed stocks to ZERO by virtue of a "technical failure" this morning. Berkshire (ticker: BRK/A) apparently was priced at "0.00", which is pretty comical, really. The Zerohedge story has a good clip from "The Big Lebowski". Everything really actually kind of is fucked. It seems to be everywhere... Nothing works right. And not much can be trusted.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/market-breaks-multiple-nyse-trading-halts-see-berkshire-wipe-out-100-its-market-cap

[Update: 18:25 June 3, 2024]: Interesting day. I know why farmers can make good investors and traders. When I worked in the Research Dept at Scotia McLeod, we had a research-guy who had been a broker, and he had kept some of his original clients, since they trusted each other. He had this client who was an old farmer who had done really well. Thru many ups and downs, the old farmer had just kept growing his portfolio. Farmers know about wild swings and volitile, non-predictable seasonality. This morning was rain and ugly, as was yesterday - but by around noon, the sun appeared, and we have had this perfect lovely June day. Quite a change.

So we went to CostCo, bought a couple of $1.50 hot-dogs and Cokes (Pepsi, actually), and then bought a cart-full of groceries. Market seems to have recovered also. Strange times. Our local CostCo now has a new McDonalds that was not there a month ago, and a whole new strip mall also. AI tech is fun to play with, but a knowledge of history, and a deep, long-term understanding of how volitile cyclic processes unfold over time, is probably more useful, when all is said and done.

[ May 30, 2024 ] - The Aquarius of Age We saw momma deer this morning - but I could not see the fawn. I hope little Bambinczka is ok.. She is very small. Small babies often die. Lovely Nature's way of keeping the species strong and healthy (ie. kill the weak and the stupid... just like happens in the markets...)

Both AI's for the bank-stocks are pointing up. I will post the graphics when a get a spare moment.

But crazy things are happening in Canada bank-land. Both BNS and CIBC (CM) have together issued over 55 million **new** shares, from April 30th, 2023 to April 30th, 2024, according to the BNS and CIBC financial statements. These banker-folk like to publish "weighted-average" shares outstanding to obfuscate this ugly fact, but the numbers are so large, that even using weighted-average shares outstanding in the quarter, you can see that each one of these corporate organs have pumped-out over $2 billion of new shares. This explains the terrible-ugly trading flow I have seen over the last 12 months. I had thought it was due mostly to interest-rate expectations, and I am now pretty sure I was just plain wrong.

The most important number on a financial statement, next to the bottom-line earnings, is the shares outstanding. I had thought that if you wanted to push-out 25 to 30 million NEW shares on the public markets, as a public company, you had to do a secondary offering, and TELL YOUR SHAREHOLDERS about this kind of hard-core stock-watering (it's called "dilution" for a reason). Think of the bartender adding water to his premium whiskey bottles, and then selling the weak liquid for the same price. It's a very, very old bit of financial trickery, if one looks at economic history.

But I did not think the Canadian banks were doing this sort of scam-action. I think this is just appalling. If you had asked me, I would have said this violates Toronto Stock Exchange rules. But perhaps the clever bastards have done the trades on one or more of the various dark-exchanges or "dark markets" that now exist in Canada. We used to have a "consolidated feed" and there were "block-trade" reporting requirements. At least there used to be.

All these fair and sensible rules seem to have been end-run by these two Banks. And as bank-stock shareholder, I am more than a little angry. This is just wrong.

I could see these waves of heavy-selling that would come in and hammer the stock price down for Bank of Nova Scotia. Any time the price got bid up, these waves of selling would hammer it back down, and I assumed it was mostly interest-rate risk hedging or options-market game-playing. But it looks like it was maybe just plain old goddamn newly-minted "treasury stock" (or some bullshit term like that), being heaved-hard into the public markets, in what looks like a pretty classical exercise in equity-dilution and old-fashioned "screw-the-shareholders" action. The banks in Canada are widely held, and so there is no one guy or group of guys (or gals) who will scream as their stock is taken down hard in value. The big funds are so rich they don't give a shit, and the smaller institutions are in the same goddamn boat as the retail folks.

This is really actually very bad.

From the CIBC quarterly report: Actual fully-diluted shares outstanding, as of April 30, 2023: 917,769 million shares. Fully-diluted shares outstanding for CIBC as of April 30, 2024: 943,002. In one year, CIBC created 25,233,000 new shares, with roughly only 2 million of these new shares due to stock-options. At $60/share, that's over 1.5 billion dollars raised by diluting existing CIBC shareholders. If they sold hard and early, maybe more like 2 billion Cdn dollarettes.

And for Bank Nova Scotia, it is much worse. At least CIBC is reporting an increase in earnings per share ($1.79, for Q2, 2024, versus $1.77 for Q2, 2023, April 30). For BNS, the wheels have almost fallen off. Earnings per share were $1.57, for Q2, 2024, April 30, versus 1.68 for Q2, 2023, April 30. Slipping down, sadly. But it gets worse: The actual shares outstanding number is damn hard to find. It's buried on page 54 of the "Quarterly Report to Shareholders", and is reported as: 1,229,570,000 shares, as of April 30, 2024. So, what was this number as of April 30, 2023? I have to find and download the .PDF file for the Q2, 2023 to find this real number? (not the bullshit "weighted average" value, which obfuscates what is going on)...

Ok - found a rounded version of it on page 4, which will do: As of April 30, 2023, BNS reports as having 1,198,000,000 shares outstanding. Difference between average basic and average diluted shares outstanding is less than 1 million shares, so the increase is not due to stock options. As per their statements, Bank of Nova Scotia has created and put into the public marketplace, as a public company, 1,229,570,000 - 1,198,000,000 = 31,570,000 new shares. At $64 per share, that is a capital raise of over 2 billion dollars.

And let's be very clear here. That 2 billion dollars of new money, came almost directly, from the share-price collapse that this 31.57 million share dilution caused to happen. All my research suggested that BNS shares should be market-valued around $70 to $75 per share. The continued waves of selling seemed curious, and I simply did not consider that BNS was doing what Jim Fisk did in New Jersey, back in the 1870's - printing up new share certificates, and selling them to the suckers across the Hudson River in New York. This is just crazy. I thought that there were rules that the TSE, the Ontario Securities Commission and the OSFI (Office of Superintendent of Financial Institutions) had, that - shall we say - discouraged this kind of action.

Assuming there are 250 trading days from April 30, 2023 to April 30, 2024, that's 126,280 NEW shares being sold into the market EACH and EVERY DAY for all of last year - at whatever price the bastards could get. Of course, they would not have done it that way. Secret "private placements" maybe?

Pardon my naive nature, but I thought that if a fucking bank in Canada wanted to raise up an extra 2 billion of capital, by selling 30+ million shares, that there had to be a public offering, with a prospectus, and all that sort of visible, public market action.

So, excuse me while I try to find out just what the fucking hell is going on here.

Obviously, the rules have been changed to make it much easier to screw over the existing bank shareholders by diluting their stock holdings - and not even telling them about it, except in the tiny-font of bloated, obfuscated financial reports filled with bafflegab and bumpf.

For Bank Nova Scotia to pump out 31+ million new shares - and beat the shit out of the share value of existing BNS shares - without even informing existing BNS shareholders, just seems wrong.

I will see if I can find out more about this. Dividends are of little value, if the market value of the share-capital can be assaulted so explicitly, and one's holdings harmed so significantly.

[Update; ] I cannot find any documentation about a BNS public or secondary share offering, in the last 12 months. Maybe it happened, and it was done dark. But Bank of Montreal, when they bought Bank of the West, from BNPP (BNP Paribas S.A.) issued 15.5 million shares as a public offering, and 8.4 million shares as a private placement, to fund the purchase. Details were indicated. And the following press release was issued:

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/bank-of-montreal-completes-offering-of-common-shares-including-full-exercise-of-over-allotment-option-on-public-offering-821955567.html

The press release shows where a prospectus document could be obtained, and that the shares would trade on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges.

Regarding the Bank Nova Scotia's new 31+ million shares, I cannot find any public documentation on exactly what happened, why it happened, or what the money raised was used for and who benefited. But we know for sure, that BNS shareholders were harmed by the dilution from new shares. The earnings per share number seems to confirm this harm. We find it most curious that BNS would operate in this manner.

BMO shows how it should be done. So why did BNS create these 31 million new shares on the sly? This really looks curious. It looks bad. It really looks like they just pumped-out "treasury shares", or some form of newly-created share certificates, without any formal indication of their actions. I rather thought that Stock Exchange rules - in both Canada and USA - explicitly prevented this kind of equity value dilution, since this kind of action is viewed as harming the integrity of the marketplace.

[ May 29, 2024 ] - It's 11:59, and I Want to Stay Alive... Don't we all? We watched a mother deer with a baby fawn looking for food in our field today. The fawn was so small, and momma walked slowly, with the tiny new-born struggling thru the tall grass and alfalfa, trying to keep up with it's brown, slow-moving centre-of-the-universe.

Every living mammal is imprinted with some basic survival instincts - else we could not exist. But from the very beginning of life, the Universe - in it's infinite capacity for entropy - tries to kill us. We sorry humans invent foolishness like religion and civilization to try to counteract the basic death-force that drives everything - but these operational idealized social models are fabricated on falsehoods. There is really no other way to truly understand the process. The world is a wild spinning web of expanding entropy, and despite the emergence of life-force and growth - death always comes, as does system destruction.

But knowing this truth, gives us ammunition against the process, to a limited degree. We can avoid much that is stupid, cruel, nasty and hostile to life-energy. It really is our responsibility to do this to the best our ability.

Most financial assets are actually just shit. It's really quite curious how consistently true this simple fact remains throughout history. Today, we are watching our goddamn bank stocks get just fucking hammered again, and I am cursing my own foolishness, for being so attached to the tiny income streams that their dividends pee-out, that I am willing to accept the mind-numbing foolishness of holding this toxic, falling shit.

Bank stocks - and often most financial stocks, like insurance companies and so on - are just bad investments mostly, for reasons explained clearly in your "Graham and Dodds" (the canonical work for any and all investment analysts), but the attractive dividend streams they can throw off, can let one survive a Depression, if the goddamn bank does not go bust.

Given the astonishingly bad culture of systemic incompetance at the USA's FDIC - which seems to have in its mission-statement the planned destruction of bank shareholders - (oh, just kidding... I hope) there is even now a greater danger for bank-stock investors. You are a *target* of the Federal Authorities, and they actually want to see you and your asset-base, crash and burn. This is just insane - but the USA Government seems to be run by fucking idiots these days (as does our Government, here in British North America's "Canada"...)

What worries me, is the risk of a financial "nuclear holocaust", where some kind of confidence-implosion links up with the massive debt-levels and flow-linkages, to create a self-amplifying cascade meltdown of Western-World financial institutions. See, most folks abilities to pay their taxes and cover their life-costs, are driven by direct economic linkages to the financial super-structures that dominate our economic world now. If you break enough of it, quickly enough (by jacking-up interest rates and global yields - which causes bond and dividend-paying stocks (financial assets) to fall quickly in value), you really can - with almost certainty - provoke a cascading reset in asset prices, across virtually all financial assets.

And this actually is happening. It's not just financial-science-fiction.

The USA Federal Reserve (the USA's Central Bank) is run by a lawyer. I am sure he is not an evil man, but all these people are government-boys and "karens" (lefty government-girls), and they get large employment-income each month, and have zero concept of how life in the "private sector" works, where many business and risk-taking folks, are often 20 to 30 days away from insolvency. And with financial-flow linkages being dialed down to almost real-time (a good or a bad thing, depending whether you are waiting for money, or having to pay out money), risks of a cascade collapse are rising everywhere, as debt-levels grow and interest-rates and inflation continue to grind upwards.

We have no debt. This is what our "Risk Management" group has told us is how we should deal with this low-probability risk. But this prevents us from taking on some possibly profitable projects. And it keeps deeply risk-averse Canadian industry down, and not really able to grow without Government help. But Government funds are the "Kiss of Death", since governments are like dirty underwear, and need to be regularly changed. And your funding will turn into an ugly tax-invoice, whenever regime-change takes place. So that funding source is also out.

The only thing a Canadian entrepreneur can do - even if he has the best idea in the world - is to leave Canada, and go to USA, where risk is accepted and expected. But now, everyone in USA seems to be fucking crazy. Living in that world carries risks that seem to be growing exponentially in this new post-pandemic hell-world. San Francisco is a free-fire zone, and NYC is run by a profoundly corrupt and dishonest lawfare collective (according to a Texas State Government official - not just my own opinion).

So, we hunker-down where we are, and watch all the needles point down and the warning lights start to flash red all across the instrument panels. I feel trapped in a world where the walls are slowly closing in, when I look for alternative investment models.

For now, I remain unsure of what the hell we should do. So, I am working on a repair/restoration of an old car. I've repaired the non-functional fuel pump (which is in the bloody gas-tank, for f**k sakes!), and have fuel-pressure at the engine fuel-rails now, but I still have a "cranks, but no start" situation. So I will be buying (and fabricating) a gauge to measure fuel-pressure, since if I squirt fuel in the air-intake, I can get the engine to fire for 1 or 2 seconds, so I know it is not an electrical problem (the car's engine worked fine last month).

My AI stuff works really well. Trouble is, it is telling me bad things - pointing down and downer, and I am entering onto that awful voyage of "hope". If rates are globally reduced, the financial stocks will pop dramatically. This might happen. But it might not, as inflation is now firmly embedded in our mindsets, everywhere. Prices seem to be rapidly increasing everywhere.

I am uncomfortable selling out all the portfolios, as dividends are being declared, profits appear to be stable, and some dividends are even being raised - but I am growing to distrust dividends, when the capital is being eroded so quickly and so effectively. But the banks will do fine, in an inflationary environment, since the inflation is allowing mortgage-holders and business loan holders to continue to service their debt-costs. We are all locked into this process.

If we unload our bank stocks, we destroy our income streams, and if sitting in cash, we will watch high-inflation destroy the real-value of the money. But being invested in financial assets, in a rising rate environment, is eroding our capital, and killing us slowly. It's like being "pressed" with ever-larger rocks.

Old, dead Benjamin Graham was right again, as usual. And so was that fellow named Mr. Loeb, who knew about how a good ice-cream soda was to be made.

Loeb cautioned to avoid forecasts, and would just sell what was trending down, and buy what was being bid up. But I just cannot buy NVDA at $1140 US per share. I fear the whole AI thing might end up helping only Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, while everyone else gets sacked, and told to eat bugs and live in their tiny pod (or trailer-park?). "Fuck that shit", as we say in Canada. I've got a small-language-model, which I'm trying to give local memory to. I need a big lab, and some staff to help, but there is no money, and no client, so for now, it's all just a pipe-dream (and I don't even smoke...) :)

[ May 23, 2024 ] - Hello Darkness My Old Friend Or something like that. Everything useful on the public internet is going dark. It's pretty comically awful. The entire 'net is "Sideshow Bob" now. Or maybe "South Park"... but with mass-murder and insane politics.

The AI stuff we use seems to wrok... (mistyping becomes meme-meat, eh?)

The key takeaway from NVDA earnings liftoff - aside from the stock-split - is the massive datacentre revenue. Nvidia makes it's big nut from datacentre sales. This means AI becomes a BIG TOOL for mass monitoring of everyone and everything. This is a nightmare world - real, no-sh*t, "1984" stuff, complete with a Room 101 for everyone. It's a pure nightmare scenario. Why do so few see this? Curious.

If AI is to offer any benefits at all, for most folks, it will have to be de-centralized. A full-on centralized AI Service, will just become a tool for the "Thought Police" - and we know this, since it already actually is - in the full, Five-Eyes model. The enemy is not "terrorism" - the enemy is the State, with it's new "Hate Speech" laws and other evil, censorship-enabling anti-free-speech political models.

The danger is the State gets to shutdown - by force of arms - any system or group which questions or opposes it's abusive and all-reaching power. The new centralized AI systems, will make the monitoring and targeting easy and quick. It's "Lavender" on speed, with laser-accurate kill-shots.

The idiotic and stupid nonsense about "AI taking over" blah, blah, blah, is pure bullshit, designed to mask this obvious reality. Centralized (ie. Datacentre-based) AI, is a perfect nightmare of monitoring and control. Every fucking keystroke you enter on any fucking page ANYWHERE on any communication service, will be able to be actively monitored, recorded, and then used to target you for removal, if it violates some powerful entity's authoritarian picture-of-the-world. The incentives are powerful and perfect for this approach. Only powerful push-back can stop this trend.

There is no "conspiracy" here. This is just an operational trend, being enabled - almost perfectly - by the technology. It's just comical how people are viewing this new emerging model, as something that is positive. It seems to us, just another hierarchy of surprising negatives. We don't need to worry about the AI-machines. We need to worry about who is **running** the AI machines, and we know it will be the centralized datacentres - big "Tech" entities, working with State Agencies.

It's like a huge window of freedom and opportunity, is quietly closing, and no-one really cares. This is curious. Folks just don't see it, despite the use of the "Lavender" murder-tool that the Israelis have used to kill tens of thousands of Gaza citizens. "Lavender" - the code-name for the Israeli AI tool that has been used to kill families in their homes - (supposedly Hamas Government people) shows exactly what the future of Centralized AI technology can do. This will not stop the Gaza Murder War, but it does show exactly how perfectly AI technolgy can be weaponized by State Agencies to reach out and touch and kill. It is a roadmap for the future, sadly.

I think AI could be really a wonderful thing. But not if it is centralized, and run thru the goddamn lie-generating internet. If that is the future and how it shakes out (and there are strong incentives for the major players and the governments to make it shake out this way), then we are all in real trouble. Murder becomes fast, easy, quick and legal (for the State). This is what centralized (weaponized) AI will be. We know this, because it already is this. It is an easy forecast to make.

I hope I am wrong about this. I really do.

But "Inner Trader" pounds his misty-fist on the dream-table, and spells it out really clearly. Our future world, will look like Gaza does now, if we can't address the "Centralized AI" risk successfully.

Best strategy is maybe to just go dark.

[ May 7-8, 2024 ] - Shattered - Doesn't matter.. "Don't you know the crime rate's going up up up --- my brain's been shattered -- spilling all over Manhattan... Go ahead, bite the BIG Apple - don't mind the maggots!" - by M. Jagger. Great tune. But the best cut on the first side of "Some Girls", circa 1978, is "Respectable" - which should probably be re-done as the "Song for Stormy Dee". I knew the World would get completely whackadoo crazy, since I got the dynamic road map as a child, back in the late 1970's.

The AI stuff seems to work. As always, I am not sure if I am just getting lucky. One never really knows. So many things going whacko now - we are all maintaining the surface veneer of fine "respectability", but under the surface, I suspect there is seething madness driving a lot of process. When Western World nations should be working on border-security and enhanced defence-technology, we seem to be inviting in all the refugees of the entire planet - and then planning to jack up taxes to build houses for them. Is this really wise action? It looks a lot like profoundly dishonest, corrupt State-Blob trough-divers, running yet another big-scale scam to hammer the sane folks who followed the rules, saved and invested, and are rewarded by being economically raped. Seems to be unwise and just double-plus-ungood.

In crazy-psycho-Europe-Land, if you even talk about what is happening (by quoting official Government statistics), you risk being fined by corrupt, insane judges, who obviously hate their own national cultures and legal/political traditions. Germany seems to be in some kind of awful, comic death-spiral, where any talk of the truth of what is being done to their culture and their nation, is assaulted as "right-wing extremism". This is just beyond insane - yet it passes as acceptable behaviour because of the European comfort with censorship, State-authoritarianism, and general woke-leftist madness. A woman named Marie-Therese Kaiser, in the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) Party, has been fined thousands of Euros, for quoting government statistics on her website, back in 2021, documenting the number of Afghan "refugees" involved in gang-rapes. It is a statistically observable phenomenon, and is not "hate-speech" or even rude talk. Just an observation, by an attractive young women, who was "rightly" concerned that gang-rape seems to be an increasingly serious problem in Germany, which correlates with the rising intake of Afghan refugee's.

I have met Afghan refugees, and mostly they are very nice, and very good people. Most of these folks who come to Canada, are just looking for a sane, safe and better place to live and raise their children, where god-believing psycho-lunatics do not come and kill them at their homes. Lots of folks from Gaza also came here to escape the Israeli murder-squads that seem to just kill Palestinians for sport. So I understand the whole refugee thing. If I lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa or Asia, I would work every day to get the hell out, and get myself and my family to North America, where freedom still exists (sort of...).

But if there are problems, we need to be able to talk about such things. But the woke psychos who are acting as judges in Germany, do not agree. So the gang-rapes continue, I suppose. This is curious. And anyone who even tries to bring this sort of issue into the public domain, risks stupid fines, by deeply misguided and dangerous political-folks who are in power and controlling the judges and the police. It's all very, very bad.

And of course, this kind of insane madness is liable to infect our World also.

The whole idea of "Free Speech" is to protect folks who say things that are unpopular or inflamatory, since this is quite often where the truth resides. Example: The whole scam of "anti-semitism" is a fraud, which the Jews use to shut-down any critical comment of the murderous, violent abuse that the Israeli's inflict on anyone who opposes their massive land-theft and systematically successful attempts at genocide of the Palestinian people. It's quite an impressive piece of social-psycho trickery.

And this social-madness is accelerating. The whole "Covid-19 Shaming Model", used against anyone who was skeptical of the wisdom of the technology behind the Covid vaccines (which leaves your bloodstream laced with spike-proteins that are **proven** to cause increased blood clotting), or the fake woke "racism" critical abuse and accusations against anyone who suggests that maybe black people should be held to the same educational and employment standards as White folks and Asians are required to meet.

There is this curious madness that is creeping deep into our World, and is obviously the direct result of profoundly dishonest self-interest. And this process is then amplified by ugly and dishonest corrupt toady-men and toady-girls, who seek the favour of their self-serving superiors.

History actually is full of this madness, and we know that it must be "nipped in the bud", as the Brits would say.

Honesty is the only chance. Living in Truth is the only choice.

Perhaps this is why humour is important. The ancient "Treatise on Comedy" was seen as so dangerous by the Catholic Church, that they destroyed every copy of it. Obviously, because if you read the outrageous nonsense in the Bible, it is difficult not to laugh, despite the wise moral lessons that it contains.

AI has the potential to wipe out a lot of jobs. Most of what most folks do, is not really necessary. A friend showed me his hi-tech TV, in which you can talk into the remote control, and ask for anything you want to see, and the AI finds it and shows it. TV is weird now.

I can't watch TV of any kind anymore. It's a time-suck and a brain-numb process, that scares the heck out of me. I avoid it like lethal toxic waste, which it sort of is. And yet, it is the World, for most people now. So perhaps this is one of the process-drivers that is making the World so conflict-prone. Everyone lives in this false-reality, which is making them crazy, when they have to interact with the messy and complex real world.

If the AI stuff really works, just how should I use it? For me, this is very key question. I could be doing everything right, and still get blown to fucking bits, by random swings. So even if I have devices that give me 75% edge, that 25% chance wrong remains - and in a run of four or five results - could still destroy me completely. We all need to be aware of this. With both money and ammo, one always needs more than one has or thinks one needs, if the objective is to be successfully secured. :)

[ May 4, 2024 ] - Don't Reap the Fearer... - Every new datapoint seems to bring another bout of curious concern and worry. I have always been able to somewhat "see" the future. This is a very sharp double-edged sword - since I can *see* it - but often am not able to act on what is seen. This is an uncomfortable feeling, obviously. The ancients spoke of this, and made stories about it. Cassandra I am not, but I grasp her plight.

I've managed to transfer my old domain name "www.gemesyscanada.com" to Amazon AWS Route 53. Now, I have to figure out, how to apply DNS records to a hosted-zone for it, and then create the necessary alias record(s) so that the old domain can point to "www.gemesysresearch.com" also (this new domain...). It's become insanely complex to do anything, anywhere now. I have a small real-estate project with the waterfront office, which has been ongoing for years, and a whole process and project plan has just blown up in a hilariously ugly and absurdly complex manner. It's too complex and annoying to relate here - but suffice it to say, it is not just the idiotic internet which is becoming comically toxic and absurdly failure-prone. Nothing anywhere seems to work right anymore, unless massive and unlimited resources are thrown at it - and even then, ultimate project success may still prove to be elusive. One needs effort, intelligence, funding, and luck. But sometimes, even that fine combo can be thwarted by people behaving badly. You need to have Plan B, and Plan C, and even a few other in your back-pocket. (Louis the 14th of France, put "The Final Argument of Kings" as the label on his cannons... Alas, we are not yet Kings.)

It is very good to have a farm. Folks have to eat, and a food-surplus is the first requirement for any sort of operational entity, anywhere. From the ancient Mayan cities, to the rice-fields of Japan and China, to the fertile crescent in deep antiquity - the first task in any civil infrastructure, is food security. If your army and your artisans who make the weapons cannot eat, your State will be ended and overrun, by those who have solved the food-surplus problem.

I am worried about the near future. War seems to have become a common approach to solving State-level disputes now, and the ugly awful behaviour of the Russians and the Israelis - and the success that each beligerant is enjoying - suggests that our World's future will be marked by increasing conflict and violence. The Americans cannot seem to communicate with coherence, and those who communicate with missiles and artilery and murder, are winning the day. This worries me, as I suspect that at some point, the markets will observe that war is not good for commerce, business, and prosperity, even if the weapons makers are making fine earnings. The reason for this, is simply that modern war will make every place, an operational battlefield. We are seeing this now. The idiotic stupidity of "economic sanctions", absurd attempts to block China from obtaining advanced technology, (we *BUY* semi-conductor technology from China, as does everyone who uses Apple iPhones and MacBooks!), and the corruption of the internet and our other related communication infrastructure - we see a form of warfare already in operation.

What many do not see, is that the global war is already underway, and will likely affect commerce and markets, in nasty ways, in the near future. We are already too dependent on the technology. When it stops working, that will create accelerating, cascading damage. Yet there seems no way to get off this train. At least try to have a Plan B and a Plan C, and so on, for when the cascade failures really begin. When the power-grid goes down, you might want to have your own wind-generator, not just to charge your electric vehicle, but also to operate your well-pump. ;)

[ Apr. 27-28, 2024 ] - White Dopes on Punk - I find listening to XTC and the Vibrators and now even Greenday, quite relaxing. And just for fun, and to test the new (old) Mission speakers I acquired recently, with the vintage Technics SL-D202 direct-drive turntable, I dropped an old vinyl disk by "The Tubes" onto the platter. WPOD! Saw them live, at Massey Hall, back in previous century, in Hunger-City. At the time, the opening band was some young dudes named "Aerosmith", who no-one had heard of. I recall thinking - they weren't bad. Not bad at all... It was the golden age of music - when concerts were cheap and fun, and the bands and the record-companies would make money from record sales. Touring was a lost-leader, used to support and promote sales of vinyl disks. Now of course, the music business is completely inverted. Live shows are where all the money is made, and content on Youtube and Spotify and so on, is virtually given away, to promote the shows. And of course, the live shows cost a fortune now. Kids and even older folks, are now expected to pay upwards of near 4-figures for tickets to big-name artists. More madness.

We were crazy lucky when and where we grew up. We had free-speech, free-love, cheap booze, and fast cars. The Catholic girls got birth-control pills, my Mom's car was a silver Pontiac LeMans with an orange-block 350 V8, and (even before University days...) I was able to buy a robin-egg blue, 1969 Mercury Marquis, with a 400 cubic-inch V8, which was one of the biggest damn cars that Detroit ever made. The thing had only 15,000 miles on it, and had been bought for the trophy-wife of a local rich-guy, who had just died. She sold it to me for almost nothing, since it was so damn big, and she hated to try to park it. It was a great car. The back-seat was about the size of my first apartment in Toronto - it was comical. Room to frolic...

At the time, I was so very concerned that we were falling into an economic depression that rivaled the 1930's, and everyone forgets this. In the mid 1970's the Dow Jones had fallen from 1000 level to around 600 and a bit (a nice solid almost 40% drop), and when I drove to Toronto to try to open a commodity-trading account at some place called Richardson Greenshields or some weird name like that, the broker I talked to would not even take me seriously. I remember they had a green-dot "Trans-Lux" electronic ticker-tape mounted up on the wall. It was very cool the way it worked. Every attempt to open an account anywhere was met with abuse and amusement, since I looked about 12 years old, despite being 18, if I recall correctly. Hilarious, really.

I had no money (since I spent it on cars), but I had heard of "margin". I guess I was lucky. I didn't get my first account, until I was creating an automated version of the "Greensheet" system for Mclead Young Weir, one of my first independent projects. I sat and worked in a room where prospectus documents were stored. For amusement, I read the "British Telecom" prospectus. About half-way thru, the penny dropped, and I realized that phone companies don't want to make money. If they make money, as heavily-regulated-government entities, they avoid profit, and expense all they can. Profit is a red-flag to the silly socialists that run government agencies, since they see any and all profit as the signature-condition of evil capitalist roaders who are making money off the poor downtodden workers who need to call the hospital for their sick mamas, and so on.

It was obvious that the national phone-company of England would become a serious money-pisser to it's shareholders, if it was able to be freed from the ugly shackels of government control. When government-owned or controlled, all utilities face rate-of-return regulation - and fixed prices for their service. So, they pack everything and anything into their cost-structure, and try to get prices set so that they are at least making the prevailing interest rate - but no more. With rates at 11%, you stuff as much cost as you can into your business process, and then ask for 11% rate-of-return - and hire economists that argue that you are only just breaking-even, since you are only just making your cost-of-capital. With prices any less, you cannot survive, and will be non-economic, yatta-yatta. So you get price-regulation prices that build in that 11% cost of capital, and everyone is happy. Except of course, the folks that cannot get telephones, or who maybe have to make a long-distance call, and need to get a bank-loan to do that. It is and was crazy.

Reading the Brit-Tel prospectus showed that the company was fat and rich, but was regulated up the yin-yang. Freed from that economic madness, they would upgrade technology, offer more service cheaper, lower prices, grow demand, and reduce costs, and have real, useable profits to fund all this new stuff folks wanted. So, of course, on the first day, the B-Tel traded from $7 (the IPO price), to $14), and I sold it, and thought "Wow. This is a good business idea!" But of course, the damn thing traded up into the $40's per share, over the next few years. ANd it paid dividends. I was stupid to sell it. I put the proceeds into a Canadian oil company, which went nowhere, and then went down.

Worse thing that can happen to a new investor, is a fast, big gain. He gets wrong teaching, and thinks that the market it easy. It is not easy. It is hard to make money, consistently.

But my first date that went all the way was a nice Catholic girl, and my first trade which immediately doubled in price, was a phone-company. So, I am programmed to like the same kind of Catholic girls that "R. Crumb" (the famous comic-book artist) likes, and telecom companies, which pay big fat dividends to their shareholders. We become prisoners of our randomly applied early re-enforcement results - even Daniel Kahneman admits this. Go read Chapter 11, titled "Anchoring", in his "Thinking Fast and Slow".

And try to say a little prayer for Bernie Sanders in USA. Why the hell is he the only one in Washington trying to do the right thing?? What the bloody hell is wrong with the goddamn Republicans? I am just gobsmacked by the weirdness now. Was the only reason the kids protested the Vietnam War so intensely, was because they were expected to go die there, fighting in an unwinable war?

Charlie Munger was so terribly correct. The older he got, the more he said how he *underestimated* the power of incentives. He knew it was really, really important in warping and twisting human decision and thinking process. But when old, he said even though he knew it was important, as he grew older and gained more experience, he had come to believe that incentives - which he always knew were important - were even *MORE* important than he had previously realized.

This makes sense. I realize my judgement is really warped and twisted by emotion and *feelings*, and this is toxic and costly. For amusement and re-education, I am re-reading a hard-cover copy of the old "The Money Game" by "Adam Smith". It was written in 1967, and is now ancient history. Except it is full of the same truths that Kahneman discovered. People are damned irrational, and they will do and believe and act upon crazy ideas. Like "Bitcoin". The whole idea of "Bitcoin" and crypto-currency is right in a paragraph in "The Money Game". Really. There is a comment that if the market really is a "game" (as in "fun, amusement, sport", etc.), then one could just subsitute units with no value, and trading and speculation could still continue, as it does in other "games of chance". Well, that experiment has been run, and is still being run, and we know this now to be true.

The concept of "value" is entirely subjective. The only value of something - anything - resides entirely inside the mind of the person who is making the value-judgement. To a fellow drowning underwater, who wishes to breathe, the life-giving properties of water are of no value. The value of a fine weapon, confers itself on the fellow who holds it, or is wielding it. If you are trapped inside a vault full of gold bars, there will come a point where the value of a soup and sandwich lunch will exceed the dollar-value of the gold you are entombed with. And so on.

There is security in owning securities. But only if they can be traded for money to purchase what you believe you require now or in the near future. If the markets are off-line, or are closed for an extended period (as happened in World War One), your "securities" may be effectively worthless.

Other people cannot be trusted. And what is curious, with the human biases and absurd "anchoring" that can twist and warp the human-mind and it's analytic abilities, one cannot even trust one's own judgement. This is why assistive, analytic AI's (Artificial Intelligences) may be of great help.

But my AI is saying I need to sell - quickly - my bank stocks. And yet I have not done this, since when I do that, my income falls significantly, and I fear that specific outcome. I feel handcuffed to my dividend stream, and this is disturbing. (I also know that banking is a very good business, if it is done right...)

I realize now, why professional speculators do not like or care about dividends. They are like a drug, to which one becomes addicted. And in all such scenarios, this presents increased risk and a real true danger. Yet another little life lesson.

[ Apr. 22, 2024 ] - Insomniacs We Trust - Have not posted to the site for while - seem to be busy trying not to be killed-by-default. Curious times, growing more curious. Biden, that curious USA President seem to be insane, as do our two glimmer-twins up in Ottawa - Ms. Friedland and Mr. Trudeau, who have decided that what Canada needs is more taxes.

This reminds me of the doctor in "Dangerous Liasons", who every time he was called to examine the beautiful, lovesick young aristo-girl, each time simply said: "Bleed her!". And so the brown-import-wave continues ("not that there's anything wrong with that..." - cf. Seinfeld), and so the taxation bleeding continues.

I read a great note from our *former* (recently retired) ex-Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who said that raising capital-gains taxes in the middle of a beginning-of-a-hyper-inflation is probably a really bad idea, sends the most wrong signals to investors, will discourage and downshift business capital-formation activity, and will induce investors to now avoid Canada, as it's tax-regime is back to being nasty, foolish and unpredictable (he didn't actually say that - he just said "We resisted attempts to raise capital gains taxes, when I was the Finance Minister (he resigned in August 2020) since we felt it was a bad idea" or something sensible like that. He is gone, and has been replaced by an ex-journalist who is not particularly versed in affaires-economique... I don't know whether to laugh or just fucking cry.

I've given up following most news in Canada, since it either makes me so fucking angry I cannot work, or it seems so stupid and insane that it starts to make me feel sick to my stomach. I am serious here. It is so bad, I just cannot consume a diet of the goddamn fucking CBC, without I want to vomit my guts out.

So, I have this custom-built compiled-from-source version of MPlayer, which I used to listen to various European radio-streaming stations, which do NOT run advertisements. And I run a couple of different ad-blockers on my web-access tools - Firefox and Edge. Even that lets too much vomit-making news to leak thru, truth be told, since I still have to pay attention to the fucknig markets.

My AI's work ridiculously well. My biggest problem, is following the damn things. Really. I feel like "The Prisoner". I am not a number. I am not a fucking robot. I **like** being human. I went to the Church Bake Sale, and bought some books and CD's. I got a great copy of Greenday's "Insomniac", circa 1995. All tracks are good. Track number 8 is called: "Panic Song". Just fucking perfect. Perfect music to program by...

I also bought a copy of "The Big Short" by the same guy that wrote "Liar's Poker". I remember quite vividly the 2007-2008 market meltdown. I would go long LEH, and watch it just not trade right, and get stopped out, or close out with a small gain. I got copies of all the Lehman financial statements and saw all this fucking cash on their bogus, dishonest balance sheet - what was called, (I later learned) goddamn "window dressing". I watched the thing implode and die in a spectacular, market-wrecking supernova of insane, stupid and unnecessarily awful madness. Those clever New York Jews thought they could just bankrupt part of their big-arsed complex multi-company structure, and walk away with bags of investor's cash. Except they peed in the soup too obviously (cf: "War of the Roses", with Gordon Gecko and Danny DiVito), and poisoned completely the Lehman Brothers name all around the world.

It was so sad and bad. Lehman worked (gamed) this stupid and absurd US accounting rule that said if you did a contractual sale-and-repurchase, and the sell and the buy-your-shit-back prices were more than 5 percent different, you did not have to record the sale as fat-pig-ugly contingent liability. You could do "Lehman Liar Accounting", and book the sale as a straight sale. So these bastards would sell all their shit-bonds, for cash - put the cash on their fucking balance sheet, and show the world they were liquid as the fucking Mississippi River. Then, after the financial statements had been printed and sent to fucking morons like ME, they were contractually obligated to buy all this dogshit paper back, and sit on it. But the bogus US rules said they could hide this reality from their investors using dishonest (but "legal") accounting. Really. LEH was roughly 28 times leveraged, and basically had less-than-zero liquidity, it turned out.

It took me a while to figure this out, because I am stupid, out in the country, and did not think that the whole fucking US market-system in New Fucking York City could be so astonishingly dishonest. But I was very wrong.

Dick Fucking Fuld took $500 million out of Lehman Brothers, and pocketed it. I got left holding a bag of worthless shares, (and so did a lot of other people), and the entire USA financial system would have collapsed, except the butthumpers from Washington came down with suitcases full of billion-dollar bills (from the USA taxpayers), and just gave *billions* out to all Assholes of New York to make good their losses.

I am not complaining here. I am just relating facts, having lived and traded thru this stupid shitstorm. I survived, but only barely. I got out of LEH before it went to zero, around $7/shr IIRC, just like I got out of GM, around about $2/share, before it's shareholders were all flushed down the toilet.

I had not read "The Big Short", and it was even made into a movie. Whoo hoo. Everyone in USA makes money from big bad disasters. Maybe the 9/11 thing will be turned into a "Wiley E. Coyote" cartoon, and the offices of "ACME" will be in the World Trade Centre? Nothing is too weird now.

What is interesting now, is that the USA yield curve is pretty seriously inverted, and Biden is trying to give billions to Israel at the same time as trying to admonish it for mass-murder of Gaza women and children. The man is either a fucking lunatic or just a radio-controlled puppet, and his handlers, who are at the "Biden Control Panel", are fighting over the controls, like those airliner pilots in China, when that big jet was flown straight down into the ground. It's insane.

The yield-curve inversion (US Two-Year Treasury's are 4.97%, and US 10-year is 4.55% - data from a few ways ago) is serious. This usually signals a recession is coming, or is now happening. And the other curious datapoint - the *average* price of a new car in USA is now roughly $47,000, (which makes it around $63,400 Canadian). This is according to the Kelly BlueBook data and Edmunds, which may or may not be correct. I test-drove a really nice 5-litre V8 Mustang GT convertible at a local car-dealer, last week, and it was nice. It was also $41,178.57 Canadian, for a 2016 car. A nice car, with a V8 engine, in a convertible version, now 8-years old, and still over $40K, after tax! Oh my, was all I could say. It's in nice shape, drives well, is solid, had no rust of any kind on the underside, and was obviously looked after well. But it's over $40K. Huh?

So, we are in a strange time. Mass-murder is OK, as long as you are a Jew. You can even ask the USA to give you a billion dollars, for your murder-campaign, and the fucking clowns who run that strange place, will actually fight with each other, to give it to you. But an ordinary American guy cannot afford a new car, or to buy a mortgaged house for his family to live in. This is madness.

I have a friend, who used to be a professor at a local University. He grew up in a Palestine Camp. He is a genius, worked for big US companies, and married a nice Arab woman. I meet him for coffee sometimes, and we talk about neural-networks, expert-systems, politics, and our women whom we each adore. He loves his wife, and he has two kids - a son who is an executive at Apple in California, and a daughter who is a statistician, and was working for the Canadian Government, at one point. Between him and his wife - both of whom have extended family ties in Gaza - they have had 287 family-members and relatives killed (*** KILLED ***) in the Gaza Murder Campaign that the Israeli Jews have launched against Palestinians.

Now that 287 people is a pretty fucking big number of one's relatives to be snuffed by Israeli Death Squads. And President Bloody Biden wants to give these fucking killers of Israel more goddamn money to ramp up the killing.

Some kids at Colombia University in New York City have protested against this. Good for them. Americans are not all stupid, stone-evil, crazy-sick psychopathic fucks who seek to assist and fund mass-murder. Not all of them. Quite a few are decent, sane, rational good people who want to help when really awful terrible shit happens to folks around the world. Most Americans really are good people.

But as I watched the news clips of the protesting students being arrested by Jew York cops, - whoops typo - I meant "New York" cops, I just had to wonder: "How can sane people in America assist these mass-murderers in the Israeli military? There are proven squadrons of rapists, and stone-killers operating in the Israeli military - they are operating with astonishing impunity, raping, killing and murdering women and children at scale. The death numbers of Gaza citizens killed exceeds 30,000 people. That's a lot of people, each of whom have family members around the world. And these fucking Jews of New York trot out this bullshit "anti-semitism" shiboleth? Everyone and anyone who is critical of this, is a nazi? Anyone believe this?

Jesus wept. The goddamn Jews of New York are the owners of this nightmare, since they are working hard to fund it.

So what has happened to America? Why has it gone insane? Trump promises even MORE money to Israel so it can kill Arab women and children. (In military history, killing women and children was completely justified. Children grow up angry and become fierce soldiers. And women are the machines for the production of soldiers. This is a basic truth, whether one likes to recognize it or not.)

Problem is, once we get into the "war business", killing becomes a commonplace activity, and all civilized behaviour gets inverted.

A sane person recognizes that war is something to be avoided. But red-mist seems to be clouding the vision now of American leaders, and their desire for war is unfortunate.

Every man and woman understands hate. Hate is a powerful emotion, and it can be used to get stuff done, and self-motivate and motivate others. A whole nation can be turned to hate very easily and very quickly. Perhaps even an entire world of humans.

The Big Jews of New York - the Bill Ackmans and his Israeli-supporting agents - might want to be careful about what they are assisting in making happen.

Hate has an ugly way of growing just beneith the surface. You have to smile and "go along to get along" - but inside, the anger can grow and create a fire of destruction. This is not a good thing.

I am surprised at my Palestinian friend, who does not hate Israeli's. He is a gentle fellow, who sees the tragedy of the world, and seeks wisdom. See, he has cancer, and is fighting his own internal war. He was told several years back, he would not live a year, but he has proven everyone wrong. He wears a Canadian-style "tuke", because he has had another round of chemo, and he works on math problems on a very cool tablet that can recognize handwriting.

I've made my nut by predicting long-wave future events, and taking some risk-driven bets to get to my goals. I've been lucky, but have also experienced the deaths of those I care about.

So, here is my prediction: If America does not stop it's support for the Israeli nation of hate-filled religious bigots who are actively engaged in an astonishing mass-murder campaign that is killing thousands of children and women (there is no debate or argument here, this is a proven fact), then there will be ugly and tragic long-term consequences for America. A nation cannot support mass-murder and pretend it is military "defence", without a similar attempt at "defence" becomes reflected back at the nation making the murder happen.

There is basic "karma" in the universe. You get out, what you put in. It may take a long time for it all to manifest, but it seems to be a universal characteristic of reality. It is a kind of "Say's Law" of existence. (Say's Law: "Supply Creates its own Demand". We might say that: "Evil Creates it's own Reflexive Response"). There is no fat-bastard "god" in the sky. We all live in randomness and chaos - of that there is no doubt by rational people. But this fact does not eclipse all moral reality.

If you do and assist really bad things, and behave in an evil manner, then evil and badness will be reflected back at you, and define the contours and dimensions of your own reality. You will have bad things happen to yourself. Jesus Christ tried to help people understand this simple truth, and got beaten and executed for his efforts. This is a typical human reaction.

If American becomes this weird, toxic force for projecting evil, then evil will be reflected back at American cities and towns. The courageous Jews who built Israel called this "N3", from Newton's Third Law: "For every reaction - there is an equal and opposite reaction". N3 was the name of a Jewish terrorist organization, that killed British soldiers.

We would all do well to stop this war and hate. We need to assist Ukraine in removing those Russians who illegally invaded it, broke their contract with Ukraine, and have killed people and stolen land like simple bandits. That war must continue. We have no choice. But helping Israel kill kids and young girls and old women is stupid and wrong and needs to stop.

The folks running American need to make this crystal clear, and act accordingly. Yet this does not happen. US politician Bernie Sanders is trying to prevent furthur open-ended offensive military support for Israel, and he is also a Jew. But he is having little success. This is curious. Israel is killing many thousands of children, at scale, and US media says little or nothing. The USA media does not report, and the USA State does not even react to it's own intelligence reports, showing the high-effort genocide that is taking place in Gaza. This proves that major change in USA is absolutely necessary now.

People who know this truth, need to be part of making this change happen. God bless the protest kids at Colombia University in New York, and at the other USA University towns. The kids and Bernie seem to be the only honorable people on-stage in America now. We wish them well, as we suspect they are engaged in the project of trying to save the American nation from self-destruction.

[ Apr. 15, 2024 ] - A Little Bit of Hack is All You Need - We've been doing some experiments with the little ESP8266 board - a tiny two-chip board the size of a postage-stamp, which contains a full TCP/IP stack, with WiFi connectivity, hardware and software, and even a web-server. This little chip provides web-access, uses simple serial-link supplied 'AT' commands like a Hayes Modem used to do, and allows anything to be linked to the internet, in a very small-footprint manner. It is the original "Internet-of-Things" device, but it really has great capability.

The image below, shows an Arduino R3, hacked-linked to the ESP8266 board, and communicating with the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) Serial Monitor, running on a little HP Windows-11 laptop. Getting it all to work was a bit involved, but this tiny board is astonishingly capable.

We envision an operational AI, dropping real-time results via WiFi, to in-house devices, which can then act on what was learned/discovered/noticed, and also offer warnings and/or notifications to any network-linked devices. With the ESP8266 board linked to a microcontroller, this can also trigger and control electrical circuits and switches and operate local or remote devices.

This shows the initial hack to get the little ESP8266 WiFi access board, to work with an Arduino R3 and it's associated IDE, running on a Windows-11 laptop. The Arduino provides a good environment for programming a small microcontroller, and the TTL-level serial circuit on the Arduino can be used to access the ESP8266 effectively. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

I will post more about this as I get further along.

[ Apr. 11, 2024 ] - We Gotta Get Outta This Place... - I recall seeing an excellent video on "yootoob" years back, with this song used as the sound-track to a whole collection of excellent video-clips from the Vietnam War. It was really very good, and of course, would be impossible to create today, because of the "copyright-troll" complex, which uses AI to engineer assaults against folks who are accused of *violating* copyright. All artists and researchers and educators rely on historical images, and the copyright-trolls who demand cash payments for the use of images are really true cultural parasites. They seek to deny us access to our history, and create effective "memory holes". It's truly an ugly and sadly nasty world we all inhabit now.

We were just sued, by a copyright-troll group, called "PicRights", who claimed they were acting for Reuters and AFP (Agence France-Presse), and who hired some high-priced stike-suit lawyers from Toronto, called: Aird & Berlis. These guys are damn clever, as they tee-up a lawsuit, threaten court-action, and then agree to settle for a number that is still in 4-figures, despite what a typical licence-fee would cost for an image (somewhere typically between $20 to $200 per image). Their algorithim is clever, since they know you (as the defendant) will have to retain a lawyer who is a specialist in IP (Intellectual Property) law, and that it will cost you at a minimum probably $1,500. A sane person has no-choice, but to reach a settlement and write a cheque.

So, we offer warning here, as this is a helluva good way to make money from the internet. Find folks doing anything with anything, allege some bogus claim that will require the actions of the courts to adjudicate, and demand money. A legitimate business entity typically has no choice but to cut a deal, to pay off the gangsters.

I recall working for a fine gentleman, who along with some of his business associates, had managed, back in the previous century, to open a small computer store in Moscow, Russia. My client mentioned one day, when we were talking about doing business, how they were having to pay $10,000 (US$) per month "protection money" to the local Moscow gangsters, so that their store would not have "problems". To a naive and honest fellow such as I was, this just seemed wrong. But of course, this is how it all works.

So, despite my willingness to comply with Canadian Copyright Law, we have had to pay the Aird & Berlis team, to settle what we truly and honestly believed was a legal, fair-dealing use of two images, in support of a critical review of the awful situation in Ukraine, because of Russia, and the results of our research. It is clear the images - one from AFP and one from Reuters - were used without license fees, so we had no choice but to pay. But our Canadian Copyright Act does allow - explicitly in what the lawyers like to call "black-letter law" (means it is written down, clearly, no interpretation is needed), usage exemptions to copyright. These exemptions apply for research, review, parody, and criticism. The case is strengthened on the part of the User, if no financial gain is proven, and further strengthened, if it can be proved that the copyright holders themselves earned financial benefit from unlicensed use of copyrighted material. (We perhaps drove clicks to their sites and client sites.)

But to go before a judge and get a ruling, of course means serious costs.

So, the "Copyright Enforcement Group" of Aird & Berlis gets away with supporting the "copyright trolls" known as "PicRights" (who would not even take my phone calls...)

The final net result of all this: We are harmed, and had to pay what is called "compensation". Reuters and AFP and Aird & Berlis LLP and PicRights all benefit - substantially. They have a sweet little scheme which drives dollars into their coffers. One has to admire this process, given how perfectly effective it is.

But the real harm is done to the World. Reuters and AFP become "News Blackout Organs", which can pay photographers for images which are then lodged behind steep paywalls. The "Mainstream Media", (which we all know and "love"), is able to maintain exclusive, near-monopoly control on the use and dissemination of "conflict images". This is why we almost *never* see the true images from what is happening in the Gaza-Israel War. Here is one of the greatest uses of mass-murder since the Second World War, and the images are blacked-out by the media. Curious, is it not? There is a process here. Know this.

The two pictures I used, were of the Ukraine-Russia War, which is still ongoing. Ukraine is losing, as it's power-grid is being systematically destroyed by newly-made (or purchased) Russian high-explosive missiles. This is an ugly, awful and obscenely grotesque scenario - and Russians must be laughing at how stupid, unorganized and foolish our political and legal processes are. Copyright laws help the truth be hidden from the public. Their FSB agents need only laugh and relax.

Our use of Reuters and AFP images is now blacked-out. We have been censored, images all removed, and made to pay for a false claim of "damages", because to defend against this abuse, would cost us even more than the settlement.

This is all really wrong.

And a final note: The photographer who took the image of the destroyed Russian BM-21 rocket-launcher truck with the dead Russian soldier beside it, was named Maksim Levin. (The BM-21 is a powerful 40-tube launch-system for 122mm rockets, installed on a Ural-375 6x6 truck.) Mr. Levin was a courageous and heroic person. This image of the destroyed BM-21, with the dead Russian lad in the snow beside it, offers a powerful statement. These BM-21's were heavily used by Russia in various conflicts. Mr. Levin took the image in late February, 2022. It shows on several levels, the results of war. We are *NOT* anti-war. War is absolutely necessary, if one is defending one's homeland, against murderous invaders. But war is cruel, ugly, horrible and costly. The folks who start wars are of a particular type, and the damage they can do is potentially unlimited. Know this also.

Shortly after Mr. Levin took the images of February 25, he was working north of Kyiv, and on April 2, 2022, despite being unarmed and wearing "PRESS" labels on his jacket, he was shot and killed by the Russian terror-squads which attacked Bucha.

The Reuter's website for licensing pictures prevents us from even registering to obtain a usage license for Mr. Levin's images, and AFP will not respond to our requests for image licencing, and explicitly indicates we should contact "PicRights" which will not return our phone calls.

So, our small attempt to highlight - at cost to ourselves - the pure madness of the illegal assault against Ukraine is stopped - by our own lawyers and mainstream media organs.

This is completely absurd.

My little software-development entity and my consulting practice is seriously harmed, by my own nation's questionable legal processes and practice, while Russian terror-squads, firing high-explosive missiles, destroy buildings full of people in downtown Kyiv, and today, the Trypillia power plant, which provides Kyiv with electricity. This is pure madness.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68788110

We need to engineer a change-in-government at the Federal Level, and correct this stupidity. There should be no copyright of conflict images which document war-crimes, as the wide circulation of such images is strongly in the public interest. Otherwise, the bad guys can win, as extreme crimes and the damage that they cause, can remain hidden from public view. This damages the World.

[ Apr. 7-and-8, 2024 ] - Every Story Pictures a Tell - I had to drive into " Hunger City", (my nickname for Toronto) today and deal with some more demons. It reminded me of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs album - "No more Big Wheels - Rats the size of cats..." and so on. The scale and extent of my old ville, Toronto, is nightmareish. Drove by the apt-building where I had a lovely quarter-floor, back when I was young and wildly foolish, and the place is surrounded by tall, glass-and-steel 20, 30 story and higher structures, that would make Bauhaus blush and barf little round ball bearings. The whole experience was like a full-on nightmare hallucination - which was made even more perfect, when on the way back, the sun in a clear-blue sky was temporarily switched off.

I was on the highway, in perfect weather, when the solar eclipse happened, and the effect was quite wild. I was not exactly in the locus of "totality", so there was still a little "diamond-ring" of sunlight, but it was dusky near-dark, and traffic slowed, and some folks had stopped to look up, despite the electronic highway signs warning them not to do so. I had never seen a full-on eclipse. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things - quite surreal.

Perhaps it is age, or due to spending too much time banging my head on data, but I have a strange, and disturbing sensation that we are at "peak-city". Toronto is now a place only for the rich and the poor. All the nice, lovely and wonderful things (and places) that made it magical back in the 1980's and the 1990's, are gone. The transition is kind of heart-braking (not "breaking"). It just stops one.

The place is crazy-crowded, a bit crappy, and homeless people are sleeping on the sidewalks - even right in the downtown core. This is stupid. The vagrants could easily be rounded up, and housed in a Big House, like used to be done. It's all just silly, what is happening to cities. And I gather Toronto is massively better than the big US cities.

Maybe the time for the City is ending.

Given the astonishing horror of the Gaza Murder-War, and the wild madness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the entire social and economic concept of the Urban Clustering idea is shown to be risky and questionable. Cities are easy targets. They cannot move, or be quickly re-located.

I keep imagining the arcade video-game "Missle-Command", where the objective was to defend your cities from incoming warheads. The best you could do - the very best outcome possible - was to last a bit longer than the previous player. Eventually, the rate of *incoming* exceeded one's ability to destroy the hostiles, no matter how fast you spun the track-ball, or click-click-clicked the "Fire!" button, and your tiny skylines would be turned into plasma.

Is this our future? "No, of couse not!" wise folks say.

But everyone forgets, that the whole purpose of the DARPA project that became the Interent, was to craft a peer-to-peer computer network, where the network could remain operational and available, in an environment where removal of various nodes could occur. Unlike the IBM "Token Ring" model, or traditional star-configured C/C (Command/Control) mainframe-terminal networks, the DARPAnet could continue to operate even as major nodes went "down."

The DARPA-net "nodes" were cities. Makes one think. We hope...

[ Apr. 05, 2024 ] - Listened to Ritholz Inteview with Dr. Kahneman - I was doing a morning news-scan, and found a link to a link to a link and found the Barry Ritholtz interview with Dr. Daniel Kahneman, from Aug. 9, 2016. Still listening to it. Barry talks too much, but to hear Kahneman, is just wonderful.

So I needed to make some quick notes here. This is important. Rarely do I encounter much on the mainstream news-media that has value, but this interview does. It was a Bloomberg Radio thing, and is just excellent. Kahneman sounds like Einstein. Listening to this wise man makes it impossible to be an anti-semitic person - even if one truly hates the Israeli's, you have to respect the amazing impressive genius of these kind of brilliant Jewish folks. They will question *everything* - and by doing so, arrive at truth. Humanity needs this ability.

Kahneman explicitly mentions two key things that are profoundly valuable, and can be acted upon:

1) Luck is very important, and it explains clearly why regression-to-the-mean occurs. There is nothing magical. His example of the three best golfers - who on one day, all have a great day and get their best results ever. Look at their results the next day, and they will not do quite so well, since they just won't likely be quite so lucky on the second day. The excellent results we see, always have some luck hard-coded into them. The very nature of what "luck" is - an unlikely rare positive event - is by definition less likely to occur on the next trial. So the statistical phenomenon of "regression-to-the-mean" is a real and **actionable** thing. You can use this phenomenon to make money, if you are a speculator. It is the *counter-trend* trade. It is not to be used long term - but it is a very real thing. Long-term, things *trend*, and so markets drive forward in a spinning dance (a wild tarantela at times), of the two forces of serial auto-correlation and regression-to-the-mean.

2) Kahneman was partly influenced - as he says - by the work of Paul Meil (spelling may be wrong), who was one of the first to confirm that in the comparisons of clinical judments by professionals, versus algorithms - formal procedures on how to make a decision-judgement - in a comparison between expert-judgement versus judgement-or-decision-by-algorthim - the algorithmic method was consistently and provably superior. This is also a big deal. Professionals do not like to admit this truth - yet we see it again and again and again. Any decision made under uncertainty is difficult - but due to the large number of biases and thinking-distortions that plague our thought process - the algorithm - a formal procedure for how we can do the best we can to arrive at a decision in an uncertain situation, is the superior strategy or methodology.

In summary (from my experience as a pilot, and as an investor): Gut-feel can be useful, but check-lists are better.

Both of these two pieces of knowledge are wildly important and useful. You can use each of these to improve your life, reduce your investment failures, increase your investment successes, and craft a system which can produce economic profit. Typical non-professional commodity traders will "win-maximize", rather than "profit-maximize". Their loss-aversion will induce them to take many small profits, and get hammered by a few larger losses. Only extreme behavioural focus and control, OR A GOOD ALGORITHM, can prevent this proven tendency. Humans typically gamble badly.

It's difficult to do - but it is *not* impossible, since regression-to-the-mean has to happen, and algorithms can be proven to be not just as-good-as, but actually *better* than clinical judgement. These two observations are actually shockingly useful, and I paused the interview, and missed the open, just to make sure I recorded this here. :)

[ Apr. 03, 2024 ] - The Endless Search for Clarity - We all seek clarity. Harm is directed at us, at scale, and we have to respond. The question is really always: "Ok, What should be done here? - What is the right and proper and correct, fair and just course of action?"

Systems and persons which seek to drive forward with a clear and honest focus, trend towards successful outcomes. And those which seek to use subterfuge, deception and fraud, althought often initially successful in their force-projection efforts, are constructing tall buildings on sand, without foundations. The lies and false-front/false-flag operational features that allow them to drive forward quickly at first, using dishonesty and bad-behavioural trickery, actually build-in a mechanical process that triggers their ultimate collapse.

People know when they are being misled an lied-to, and they don't like it. It's like bad food, horrible noise, foul air, and dirt. "Noise, Dirt and Smell" - we can live with that if needed for a short-time, but if you add "Lies and Fraud" to the same mixture, the whole thing becomes completely intolerable, and collapse, conflict and system-failure is the expected outcome.

I had a three-hour long, most excellent conversation with a fellow whom I think will be the Finance Minister of Canada in 10 or 12 years. We are all living in very strange times, where the trains run off the rails, the systems are failing, and unwise solutions are being implemented everywhere, and at scale. And the frustration and anger that people feel, at the absurdity and lack-of-wisdom on the part of those in charge of things, is so intense and thick in the air, one can almost smell and taste it.

We can fix what is broken, and we can correct what is wrong. It is possible.

But it requires focus, effort, and most of all, it requires that we make use of honest open and correct methods in how we do things.

This seems so obvious - and yet it is very difficult to implement.

I now *really* understand how artificial intelligence and machine-learning actually work. I've built some code - directly - which can train neural-networks and do so in a correct and actionable manner. This is a good outcome, even if I have (again!) found the signal to be quite weak. The only trading-edge one can gleam from daily data, is maybe only 2% to 5% at most. Roughly 95 to 98 percent of price-action is essentially noise, according to my research efforts. But in going down this path in such great detail, I have both learned and discovered some truly actionable things. And these things work, for the investor.

And we know what these things are! They are this: The right business models, based on solid, clear truth, executed in honest and fair ways, projected forwards using methods based on open, honest and truthful effort, show up as process-action in which long-term serial-autocorrelation is evident. Or more simply: Good stuff trends.

You can say it in three words. "Good stuff trends."

Now yes, bad stuff ALSO trends - but it trends down to collapse and destruction, and if it is wrapped up or embedded in a market-process, which supports and encourages and rewards clarity-seeking behaviour - then this down-trend will become evident, and that is that. This is why "turnaround situations" are difficult - but also can be very rewarding.

But clarity is possible. It just takes a lot of focused and effort-ful research. This is hard work, but it can be crazy-rewarding, and explains the deep attraction of science and scientific inquiry - and this simple truth also lets us determine what action we need to take, to address a harmful action that is vectored towards us. We need to do two things: Execute defensive manouvers to ensure continued survival, and thus buy time, to determine how to degrade, deny and defeat (D3) our attacker. But an even better strategy, is to pro-actively ensure systems-designs and preparations can ensure that unwise, dishonest and abusive assailants cannot achieve success by making use of banditry and fear-triggering terror-tactics.

As analysts, researchers, scientists, professionals and technicians, we each need to realize that correct-action can lead to correct-results. And good design effort can pay-back big dividends in terms of smooth, profitable ongoing operations.

And we also need to be acutely aware of the consequence of the flip-side - where bad design and abusive, dishonest process and procedures can lead to bad results and harmful outcomes that degrade our lives and introduces risks that need not be born, and that can destroy both our fabricated and our natural worlds.

Once systems reach scale, then all the ugly, awful and harmful consequences of really bad design driven by dishonesty, can come in to powerful conflict, and the search for clarity becomes particularly difficult.

But just because it is difficult, does not mean it is impossible.

Once we study and learn and observe and think - we can then plan and take action, because once clarity is achieved, the correct course-of-action tends to become obvious. The reason I write this research-log, is that it helps me enagage and execute this process. It is hard bloody work, sometimes. Yet it must be done, if I am to have any chance of knowing what the heck I have to actually do, so as to successfully drive toward the outcome I seek to achieve.

And don't discount dreams. Dreams are the rough blueprints for the reality that you seek to craft and assemble. Pay attention to what they are telling you.

I understand the AI process now - at least a little bit. By writing code, and making something work, real understanding can be achieved. And I have learned about business models - both where they are right, and where they are wrong. We have some quite wrong business and process-models that are driving things everywhere now.

But this also means there is some real opportunity available to engage in the process of correcting what is wrong, even if it costs us, and is causing us harm. Even if we are not initially successful, the key thing is to be on the right path.

Once you know what must be done, then go do it. Do it with honesty, and do it with focus. This is the benefit of thinking. It leads to clarity.

Example: If there is a darknet plan to build a Tesla factory here, then our government people should just be completely honest, explain why a big parcel of land needs to be assembled, and seek an open, honest buy-in from everyone. I have no knowledge of any of this at all, but I do not think "NDA's" belong in the political space, and $35K per acre is maybe half or even a quarter the price of what land around here is worth. Folks trying to buy land at agricultural land prices and then creating something that is valued at urban/industrial land prices, but not being clear and open in what they are trying to do, are probably not taking the correct approach.

And dishonest leaders who raise armies of killers, to invade and *STEAL* land and whole cities from neighbouring nations, are also on a very wrong path. Such actions risk causing reflexive destruction not only to their own nations, but also to everyone, everywhere, as the world-model collapses once more into total war.

Each of us, who have knowledge of this process, and the expected outcomes, needs to do what we can to stand against what is wrong.

There is no other possible path.

[ Apr. 02, 2024 ] - Information War Machines - In such a short time, things can transition from good to the really horrific. So curious. Two years ago, we all watched the illegal Russian invasion of the nation of Ukraine, and when the Bucha images of systematic mass-murder came out, I was astonished at how much the suburbs of Kyiv looked like the environs of Waterloo, Ontario, near where I live. It really brought home the horror to me, and made it feel curiously personal.

I thought: "I must do SOMETHING - even if it is just a small thing.." I sent a Ukraine relief agency some money, and I published the (now infamous) "Gemesys_Page_5.html" of this website, in which I asserted Vladimir Putin was and is a War Criminal, and argued that the World must take action to stop what was happening. We did get Russia expunged from the SWIFT financial-funds transfer system, and we also got some meaningful sanctions applied against Russia, and money and materiel has been provided to Ukraine. It has not been enough, but it has helped the Ukrainians defend their homeland.

For my efforts - so that people could SEE what was actually happening, I put two **attributed** photographs on my web page-5. The written content of the page is still there (click top banner of this page, goes to first page of site, and then click the button for "Page-5". But there were two pictures - one from Reuters, showing a destroyed World-War-2 vintage Russian rocket-launcher truck (with a dead Russian soldier lying in the snow) and the other, was from AFP, showing a destroyed shopping centre and office building with a Ukrainian soldier standing guard over the area. These are significant images, and I believed that the legal doctrine of "fair use" applied, since they were essentially "crime-scene" photos of significant importance, and I was not in any way monitizing them. (This website makes *NO* money, and it fact, it costs me to publish it, via Amazon Web Services.) This means in no way was Reuters or AFP harmed by this - and in fact, because I carefully attributed each photo, these commercial news agencies might well have derived increase click-thru customer-action benefits from this action.

Nevertheless, I received a formal letter on Friday (Good Friday, no less!), in which a Canadian Law Firm called "Aird Berlis" and it's lawyer named: "Kenneth R. Clark" has written, indicating that they are acting for a copyright entity called: "PicRights", which is in turn, claiming to be acting for Reuters and AFP. This Law Firm is seeking to enforce a punitive copyright claim of $1,475 (with a discount to $1,180 for "early payment") for the Reuters picture, and $1,775 (with a discount to $1,420 for "early payment") for the AFP photo.

I first learned of this from an email, on Good Friday, and it seems the company that is attempting to enforce this claim really is called "PicRights", and our research confirms they have a dubious reputation. (I had thought initially that this shakedown-attempt was actually a cyber-fraud...) And I honestly believed that the correctly-attributed usage of what I had assumed were public images, was legal, so long as one was not making money from the images. And that certainly is my situation, since we actually have to *pay* to maintain this site, and offer the information that is provided.

Web-logs are a valuable source of honest, typically unbiased direct reporting, and since these images document serious *crime scenes*, I believe that one has a duty to ensure this information is made widely available. Information War is a real thing, without question.

I suppose I shall have to see, if the "Fair Use" part of our Canadian Copyright laws can hold up here or not. For now, until I can license the images, I have removed them.

But what is most tragic, is that the excellent and dramatic photographs taken in Ukraine, back in early 2022, by the professional photographer, Maksim Levin, will come no more. I did some research today, and have confirmed that Maksim Levin, who took the Reuters picture of the destroyed Russian rocket-launcher, was killed exactly two years ago, on April 2, 2022, just north of Kyiv. Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that he was shot twice, by Russian small-arms fire. He was reported to be wearing "PRESS" credentials, and was un-armed.

According to news reports from the British and American News organs (which I dare not reproduce, I have now learned!,) he leaves behind a wife and four children. This is a true tragedy.

Killing unarmed civilian journalists or other non-combatants is a war-crime.

And so we say again: *Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.* This is an established fact. He should end his days in a prison.

And entities like "PicRights", Reuters and AFP, that seek to profit from this tragedy, by harming me, and my little web-site, should understand they are being unwise. This is all just so wrong.

This is real information war. The pictures of the Ukrainian Invasion, and the associated war-crimes by Russian forces who are supporting Putin, have been effectively suppressed. This is wrong, because it benefits the Russian criminals, as it aids them in their disinformation efforts.

[ Apr. 01, 2024 ] - Think Fast or Slow - but THINK! - We live in a curiously dishonest and dangerous world now. Some ugly action which appeared to be a scam, has turned out to be quite real. Our tiny shop is being threatened with an ugly form of legal extortion for our notes about the Russian invasion of the Nation of Ukraine. Not at great day for me, at all. Also, the Markets are weak and falling today, and we suspect we might know the cause. More on all this later.

Our results on our custom-build Neural-Network are interesting. I've posted a page-image picture of a second-batch training exercise, which followed on a good 10,000 epoch training run, on the first data batch. We have three data batches: First main dataset is: Feb1995 to May2017, second batch is from June2017 to August2019, and the third is from August2019 to March2024 (the current batch). I trained a network using a 10,000 epoch run, on the main dataset, and then did a second training run, using the weights from the first batch, which were 86% accurate, on the 2nd dataset, which showed roughly 49% accuracy when initially evaluated. Training the weighs from the first run further, on the 2nd data batch, took the accuracy up to 76%, which tested as 67% accurate on the main dataset. I figured this seemed good.

The results are posted in the sidebar, and you can see the training accuracy climb, (top left chart), up to 76%, while the error-level falls (bottom right chart). But when the third dataset was used for evaluation, it scored only 52% accuracy - almost a pure random result. And this tells a story: Basically, the transformations and/or the data we are using, is not really much better or different from *random*. We are mostly training to noise, it looks like.

The Machine-Learning/Artificial Intelligence technology works - and it is useful for analysis.

But it is not, for now, something that can be used to offer any sort of trading "edge". And this is, of course, unfortunate. If we are to extract a non-random signal from the data, the approach I am currently using, does not seem to be able to do it.

I will have to take another run at the calibration and data-transformation of the economic and pricing data I am currently using. The current boolean-transformation, looks to be losing too much signal.

[ Mar. 27, 2024 ] - Rock The Clash - (Or maybe: My Ramone Walks Alone?) Not sure of much now. Read M. Every from Rabobank. He is such a pessimist. Change is good. Stir the goddamn pot. The more research I do, the more it becomes clear - the Bullshit Brigades are having Troubles. And this is a very, very good thing. As Henry David Thoreau said: "You want a tasty omlette, you gotta break some eggs." (Well, maybe it was not him. But the accuracy of the assertion remains.)

I have a nasty addiction to good coffee and chocolate. And really old whiskey also. Serious, as these products are getting curiously expensive. But it's all good, since the models seem to be working.

If I didn't have this AI stuff offering me now actionable info, I might have unloaded some positions, and that would have been bad. Things are driving along, much as we (I) expected. This is interesting. AI is interesting and helpful - but solid multi-dimensional "key-fact" analysis works very well also. But it is important not to read or listen to, too much opinion. Most opinions are worse than worthless, as they can toxically degrade one's own thought process. People just react, much more than they think.

And Daniel Kahneman died today. He was 90, and he expired, it seems. He was a curiously great thinker, who gave a solid and scientifically accurate foundation to the science of behavioural economics. Go read his book: "Thinking Fast and Slow". It forces one to confront true bias that is real. Humans are shit-poor at doing probability calculations. And the dude (or the organization) that gets the probability analysis more-or-less correct, can take *all* the prizes, *all* the money. That's why it is important to understand coin-flips. We believe the market is *not* random - but it is ALMOST random. Like in RF (radio-frequency) engineering, the signal that matters, that can carry the truth of what will happen, is sometimes wildly overwhelmed by what acts like (but actually is not), noise.

I watched this amazing video by this guy posting as "CNLohr". He is an electrical-engineering and computer hack-master. Absolutely top tier guy - reminds me of the dudes making rocket-fuel in their dorm rooms, at Berkeley or UCLA - I forget which - and they blew the place up. The wise folks who ran the University - instead of expelling them, set up the "Jet Propulsion Lab", and said basically, "Don't Stop. Carry on!". Sometimes, the smart people win. It's not always the "fat slags" that end up in control. And this is what saves us all.

This is why America is the best (and also the most interesting and dangerous?) place in the World. It's so important to keep the landscape open. Most great scientific discovery actions, have a significant element of chance and luck. Many are just plane serendipitous - the result of a completely freak accidents that were unexpected - like thoriated tungsten being tested when it was not even on the list (as a vaccum-tube filiment) - just throws off electrons like a firehose, and made high-efficiency electronics possible - in the 1920's! Or penecillin mold killing off the bacteria cultures, or the fellow who spilt nitric acid on his bench, grabbed his wife's towel to soak it up, and then washed the towel - which then flashed into flame when dry (it was hung to dry by the stove.) He discovered "gun-cotton", (nitro-cellulose) which powered battleship guns. (Big battleships were the "nuclear-weapons" of the early 20th century, as they could destroy a city, since most major cities were coastal.)

We need to keep the landscape - financial, economic, psychological, scientific, etc. - open and free, so that wild ideas can be tested and implemented - and then *funded* and turned into products that can make life better. Tesla - both the original guy, and Musk's car company, are examples of how change happens - it is almost never successful if driven by government mandate, or social/economic engineering. (DARPA's funding of early internet efforts, was never meant to help industry or the world economy - it was a military project to have a computers remain operationally linked, in the event of "nodes" (cities!) being removed during war.

The capitalist investment model, is the ONLY one that can keep the landscape open for folks with wild ideas and great new inventions. We need to protect and defend this approach, and keep it up and running, despite the threats it faces from the Bullshit Brigadistas.

And we need to keep the *globalist* model running. The alternative is idiotic, stupid and pointless warfare, driven by tribalism, racial-and-religious insanity and ugly human greed. Wealth is created by technological transformation That's it. That's all there is. Turn seeds into bread (apply a farm and an agricultural economy). Turn mud and dirt into cities. Turn sunlight and rain into wine and women. (Again, farms, other women, farms and some science). Turn spectrum into information-carrying bandwidth. Turn U238 and waterfalls into electrical energy. And so on. And turn trees into books - and read them, so knowledge is not lost. And turn silicon into wafers and SDcards and ferric-oxide into disk-drives, so what is in the books, can be re-printed again - so our learning can continue across generations.

And turn steel, aluminum and electronics into rocket-ships, so we can move our efforts out into space, and spread the valuable virus of humanity. :)

[ Mar. 26, 2024 ] - Lambda, Frequency, and U308 - And weirder still... I'm trying to do some economic research but keep getting side-tracked by radio-research. Learned a tiny bit about LoRa and how it's kinky little chirps can encode data and fling it far. And trying to figure out the curious Wirtschaftsblunder - the economic self-blockade that Germany is going thru. The Germans - who historically have built the best industrial/machine/science technology, seem to be turning their backs on progress and science, and their historically successful ability to vector it into economic progress. This is curious and strange. The whole "Climate Change" fraudsters, and the Green "Socialist" nutjobs, have taken power in Germany, and they seem determined to drive the economy of the nation over a cliff. Pure electric cars are really kind of stupid. The path forward is obviously hybrid technology - multiple energy-conversion platforms with petrol, hydrogen, plus electricity and so on. What is so crazy, is the Germans closing of their last three nuclear-power plants - right at a time when they are planning this big shift to an electric-economy.

And they have these non-poluting coal-fired plants that burn clean coal, and scrub the emissions - but they are going to close these also. Their plan is to use wind-mills to generate their power - or natural gas perhaps? But the Green Goofs don't even like that. It's madness. The German economy is actually now de-industrializing, and their economic "growth" is about to go retrograde. And all this at the same time, when it looks like NATO will have to tool-up to engage Russia in a full-on war. There is madness driving this process - not sure where it is coming from, but it is madness.

And in an effort to think more about signal-extraction from noise, I took a detour into some radio studies. And wow - radio is getting very interesting. The LoRa thing is interesting - long-range, low-power packet-radio. And some very clever people doing some very clever things, with low-cost computer tech. LoRa communicates using these tiny up and down sloping little "chirps", which sit in very narrow high-frequency bands, and can be decoded by LoRA routers, and dropped onto Internet-of-Things type networks. It looks to have the potential to make the entire planet a humming ethernet. Radio is interesting, because it is tunable signals - and these signals can be sent, and received at distance. All the kinky stuff radio has to do to work, is similar to in some ways to what market action does. Signals can be decomposed with FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms), and live well below the noise level.

Radio is almost magic. And so is nuclear power. We will need to exploit all this magic, and the true science behind it, to allow humanity to survive, crowded onto this little planet. The transmission and tuning and reception and filtering and decomposition of radio signals is not unlike what one has to do with market-signals, in order to hear them, also. The neural-network AI is the "radio" that we tune to hear the market signal.

In order to have an electric future, we are going to need more nuclear power stations. Wind-mills will not be sufficient. And solar only really works in cloud-free regions. And it does not work so good, at night (when it gets COLD and one needs to turn on the HEAT). Only nuclear is reliable. The price of uranium oxide, is running now $90-to-$100/pound, up from the mid-20's/lb at the beginning of 2020. Old mines are being re-opened. The future we are moving into, will require aggressive use of technology that lets investors see the signal.

The X-video of the Baltimore bridge being taken out by the "Dali" ship is wild. Hope the USA can get it cleaned up and rebuilt quickly. But it seems a visual metaphor for how everything is working now.

[ Mar. 24, 2024 ] - Death and the Made-Men - It just keeps getting worse in the "big world". The mass-murder terrorism in Russia is tragic and awful. Of course Ukraine had nothing to do with that - but it seems curious how all 4 terrorists were caught, and claim it was something they did for money. I just cannot keep from thinking how it all makes sense, if one adopts some really horrible assumptions. Perhaps it was a deep-secret FSB operation, designed to give Putin pretext to invoke Military Law?

Like the gas-pipeline explosion, and how Cortez burnt his own ships. Given that Navalny was murdered by Putin, and the sad and tragic recognition that Putin is perhaps maybe a truly pathological psychopathic person, (I don't really believe this is true) - but the whole logical string holds if you believe this to be the case. Putin has a deep-secret operation run from the FSB - the Russian Federal Security Bureau (the successor to the old KGB), and it recruits the hungry ISIS boys, and arranges the operation. It's pure, horrific terrorism - and it gives Putin and his inner-circle of gangster-henchmen, the pretext to enforce complete marshal-law clampdown on Russia. It gives him complete and absolute control of the place, and allows him to do anything he wishes. It's a rather classical spy-craft social-disruption project - albeit a horrific and tragically-awful one, executed against one's own people. But if you believe Putin to be a deep-pathology psychopathic person (which I actually do not), then it could be true. Or maybe it was just an ISIS action, run from Syria.

Either way, the geriatric folks fighting for control of the USA, and the nutjobs that dominate the European political landscape, have no action that they can take in response to whatever Putin now does in Russia. He could quite legitimately invade and capture Afghanistan now. (Russia tried this once before, and it did not work out so well.) But this time, it might play much easier.

What is really sad, is that Russia launched over 60 cruise-missiles and drones against Ukraine, in response to this horrific act of terrorism, which Ukraine had nothing to do with. That makes me think Putin's FSB might actually be behind the whole thing. I just don't think that Vladimir Putin is that completely gone that he would authorize such an awful attack on his own city and his own people. But I have been wrong before.

One has to consider alternate scenarios, and recognize that sometimes, your counter-party is just plain completely crazy-evil, and determined to bring down Gotterdammarung. We hope this is not the case here, and yet, are also aware that "hope" is typically a stupid response.

What Europe and USA and Canada and the UK and the rest of NATO now need to do, is start making focused and committed preparations for full-on action, against a Russia that seems determined to have full-on violent war with it's neighbours. They are so deeply sunk in the "Cult of the Strong Man", and so culturally accepting of this very-bad-political-model, that their actions are very predictable.

This is why it is obvious Ukraine would not do such a thing - they want to move towards some kind of peaceful end to the war madness - but Putin now has nothing restraining him. If this was an FSB deep-secret operation, then he really is crazy, and we had better have a plan for what *we* will do when he launches his full-on War-With-The-World.

What concerns us most, is that our political people are just not able to reason clearly about how and what we are so obviously tracking towards.

[ Mar. 20, 2024 ] - How Fragile We Are - This truly is the Golden Age of Deception and Disinfo. Quite hilarious. There is randomness, and there are patterns of impressive and consistent deception, that are not random at all. The world is a violent hellstorm of both the horribly evil, and the astonishingly beautiful. Poor sorry humans invent religion and tribal frauds, while the mathematicians discover the only near-truths that are possible to learn.

And we fly along, in our clustered murmurational oscillations, like a bunch of bird-brained starlings.

I track the nonsense that unfolds each day now, and find it is almost perfectly deterministic, despite the indications of wild randomness. The short-term variations of our statistical curve-projections are absolutely predictable. And they really should not be.

Technology is twisted, and markets are double-twisted now. They are so easy to dominate and fiddle-for-profit. Making processes robust and anti-fragile is actually very difficult to do. And it also reduces the benefit streams for those who are actively profiting by leaky weakness and tricky, sharp practices.

Hilarious. Or, like that dude said in the "Princess Bride": "Inconceivable!" I'm not complaining. The markets are crazy. You have to make a friend of Crazy, like Kurtz said in Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness". Time for a change. And Spring is the Time for Changes, as new growth hunkers waiting under the snow, ready to explode forth in fractal fury.

[ Mar. 19, 2024 ] - Geiger-Mueller Tubular Bells - Interesting how this approach to analysis actually works. The mental analogy of a Geiger-counter is about right. Having that device and finding a hot uranium deposit does not guarentee a motherlode. But without the device, one is at a rather significant disadvantage as a prospector.

I've been able to push my custom-built perceptron to exceed 90% accuracy. The trick is similar to the "checkpoint" feature in Tensorflow. You train the network to as far as it will go, where accuracy and sum-squared error curves flatline, and then you save the weights, and stop and re-calibrate the learning rate. Then, run for several thousand more epochs, adjusting the learning rate as the epochs evolve. This strategy works, and allows accuracy improvement. But of course, if you are using a noisy and randomness filled signal as input, you are just training down to noise.

You can tell that this is happening, as the evaluation datasets accuracy will fall off, as the network accuracy increases. I have two evaluation datasets - first is from 2017 to 2019, and the second one now is from 2019 data right up to last friday, March 15, 2024. When the network is run to generate predictive output from these, as the training accuracy goes above 90%, the predictive accuracy on the evalution datasets drops to 43% and 49% accuracy, respectively. This is exactly as expected. I have pushed the network to train to random noise, and it cannot predict outcomes usefully.

The literature is full of solutions to this dilemma. You stop the training "early", with a view to capturing the baseline signal, without allowing the network to become an "expert" on the local, random noise that rattles your signal around.

This trick works. It is both conceptually and philosophically rational-sensible - but it is a bit of an art, as there is no clear mechanical technique that can be applied. What I have found, is that early-stopping around 60 to 70% accuracy, allows the evaluation datesets to show 56 to 60% accuracy.

And this is a not-bad result. If one can engage a formal "game" with a 60% "edge", then the basic nature of the ludic process, implies that as long as a careful betting strategy is applied, then postive results should be obtained over time. You should be able to "play the game" profitably, and not have your lose all your chips.

This is how artificial-intelligence, or machine-learning, can help us. It can give the average fellow a chance to survive in the "investment game", and exploit a small edge that should be able to keep him from being destroyed. As a scientist and economic-researcher, and an investor and market speculator, I cannot stress enough just how critically important knowledge of this reality really is. Any and all "investments" are risky. And the risk is open-ended, with essentially undefined, unknowable outcomes. You cannot even know what the distribution of possible outcomes really looks like. (The outcome "variance" is essentially infinite.) Any investor or specutator entering a market-process, faces a grim "Hobson's Choice" - (ie. really no choice at all.) Invest funds, and risk ruin because your counter-parties have more wealth, power and resources than you have as a single, small investor, and will be likely to gain at your expense. Or, avoid possibly-attractive investments, and have one's small capital destroyed by inflation and currency debasement.

You must invest, to survive. And to invest successfully, you need to have a slight "edge" that gives you a better-than-50% chance of obtaining a successful (ie. profitable) outcome. In a world (and a marketplace) where everyone now has all information, there is little "edge" for anyone. That means simple randomness can reach out and kill anyone, anywhere, at anytime.

To improve your chances of success, you need to hack the data.

And to "hack the data", you can use machine-learning and AI. This is what we are doing. And it looks like it actually *can* be done.

[ Mar. 16, 2024 ] - Searching for a Heart (and a Signal!) That's True... First page shows yet another minor improvement in the NN-training experiments. I started with a tiny learning-rate, and then dialed it up as the epochs ran, and when it get's "over the hump', and training accelerates, I clamp the value, and epochs are allowed to evolve until training flatlines. This approach seems to work well, even if it makes for a messy curve.

Our custom-built Python/NumPy based backpropagating neural-network, fabricated using the matrix-math features of Python (works in both 2.7 and 3.x versions), and doing a 10000-epoch training run, now matches and slightly exceeds our old Xerion results. Starting with a very small learning rate (a factor applied to the error-delta matrix times the activation function derivative), and modify it to increase, as the epochs evolve, seems to work. And I clamp the increase once training accelerates, at around 1500 to 2000 epochs. The training runs reasonably fast. This tweaking of the learning-rate, as the training evolves, seems to be useful trick. Still need to figure out what the heck is stopping TensorFlow 2.x from training properly. I've tried *many* things - and yet we can never get more than 53 to 54 percent accuracy, on the TF 2.6 or TF 2.11 network, despite it having the same input date, what we believe is the same (rather simple) network definition, and so on. We tried different batch-sizes, different activation functions, and different optimizers to the "fit" function. TF 2.x plus Keras is just "broken" inside, (from our point of view) in a way we do not understand yet.

But this is fortunate for us, since it has meant that I put some real effort into building something that can run WITHOUT using a high-level "framework", and this is providing some really payback. I have already written an evaluator, which can read the trained network weights, output by the training exercise, construct the same network topology, apply the weights in the same manner as the forward-feeding operation, and get results. This allows us to take post-training data, and see how the network predictions perform. And of course, once we get the prediction-level up to something that we feel is effective, then we can use the evaluation-program to make actionable predictions at current t=0 time - ie. Right about Now! It this way, the neural-network can offer an effective "edge" to folks operating in environments of high uncertainty, but where weak signals are present in the immediate historical data.

So this is pretty exciting work. Getting the neural-network working, is like getting a geiger-counter, if you are searching for radium or uranium.

[ Mar. 12, 2024 ] - The `Rights` of Spring More small steps. We have our custom-built Python/NumPy only network training nicely, and results of a 7000 epoch training run are shown in the nearby screenshot. I can save and re-load the set of weights which define the action of the trained network, and have written an Evaluator, which then run the trained network on the post-training datasets for evaluation. We run GNU-APL to process datasets, and create the graphic visualizations of the results (which we really like!).

A lot of this work is two steps forward, and then 1.97 steps back. Or sometimes 5 steps back. But the concept works. Neural-nets let you craft models which can capture weak signals, and then build devices which let someone "see" the action of the very weak signal - if everything is set just right. It's like our laser experiments - the population-inversion which lets a nitrogen laser actually "lase" is curiously sensitive to minor configuration changes - literally sub-millimeter movements of the rails, or minor changes in capacitor dielectric, will directly determine whether the laser will work or not. And when the laser DOES work, the beam in Ultra-Violet light, which can only be seen if it hits a UV-senstive reactive surface.

But when it works, it works. Get the configuration right, and you can get results.

I downloaded the CYGWIN 64-bit environment (basically a full Linux implementation, configured to use Windows-NT filesystem and interface-devices (screen, keyboard, etc.) and runs on various Microsoft Windows versions. I've run this on old Windows XP boxes, as it was a nice way to have SSH and SCP work, and the "mintty" terminal window is nice to use, as is the facility for command-completion (probably the most useful productivity tool ever invented - and dates back to DECSystems and TOPS-20, the best O/S ever designed). CYGWIN is a genius thing, and the 64-bit implementation can be dropped easily onto a Windows-11 machine (as I have now determined). Instead of running WSL (Microsoft's Windows SubSystem for Linux), you can just install CYGWIN, and have access to a full Linux environment, GCC/G++ compilers, and about a million things that "just work" from the Linux/UNIX world.

Getting CYGWIN installed on the Windows-11 machine has allowed me to compile a Python 2.7 version from source, and also a version (1.7) of the GNU-APL. Getting the GNU-APL to work was quite a challenge. Minor code fixes were needed to get a clean compile, and then the first efforts kept causing "segmentation fault" errors when the APL.EXE was run. It looks like a problem with non-initialized global variables being referenced at startup. This was all with the GNU-APL 1.8 version. Using the 1.7 version has worked. I now have it running on the Windows-11 platform, and it has been compiled in full 64-bit mode, same as on the Linux machines. On a modern (64-bit) pure Linux platform, the APL will compile and link to a nice 34.7 megabyte binary executable, that works very well. On Windows-11, with CYGWIN, one needs the cygwin1.dll to be present, which provides the runtime interface so Linux/Unix programs can access the Windows-NT files and devices. But it really works. You start "mintty" (or click the CYGWIN terminal icon) and you get an X-term style window, black-background, and all your Linux/UNIX tools (vi editor, gcc/G++ compilers, ld, cat, cp, ls, bash shell scripts, gfortran, apl, ssh, scp and so on.)

With CYGWIN, from within the "Terminal" window, you get a Linux/UNIX bash prompt, and can enter: "uname -a",and get the version and flavour of CYGWIN you have installed. And you can install Python, directly from the CYGWIN install process.

Installing and configuring CYGWIN for Windows-11 is probably one of the easiest and most straightforward install systems I've ever used. It works well. You just go to the cygwin.com website, and download the setup file: setup-x86_64.exe on to your Windows machine, and run it. You then select a mirror-site to download from, and following the prompts to install what you need (select "catagory" from the packages-to-install screen). If you missed something you need (I missed getting "libtools" which is needed by the GNU-APL makefile-driven build process. No problem, just re-run setup-x86_64.exe, which should be in your C:\cygwin64 directory, which the install process will create.

The Mar-9/2024 log entry below has details about how to check the integrity of the "setup-x86_64.exe" file. It's SHA512 hash is:

       35E59301 DC2A14E3 5A666B32 97E7CF4F
       CF514EB1 B73F9D36 3406622A 34D51F7F
       123E822C CB77A73C 071E4BD0 523FE7A0
       D9294D98 98FE5633 C198CAA1 69D064CF

[ Mar. 9, 2024 ] - Spinning Wheels Modern software is a curious mixture of the brilliant and magical, combined with the wildly awful. It is comical just how bloated and buggered so many of the really good ideas and implementations have become.

And I am the ugly black kettle calling the pot nasty carbon-black... Hilarious.

This website still uses http instead of https - I need to create (or find?) an SSL-certificate and convert to proper, secure https, get in onto AWS and have https access only, yatta, yatta. On the list. Was looking at web-deployment stuff - Pantheon and the bloat-pile of Drupal and Wordpress etc/etc. FFS - there is no entry point into that swamp. It's like that forest in Lord of the Rings... (but it's all "On the list...")

The Windows-11 machine is making me crazy. It did another update last nite, dropped the Microsoft "Co-Pilot" icon on the taskbar. I thought "Yes, I will look at that - but in a minute, have to do some work,..." and the goddamn thing disappeared. Hilarious. It's dogfood, basically. Woof woof.

Like that song: "I hate the world today..." except no, we are alive, and the stocks are recovering as our models indicated they would. How the hell about that, eh? I love it when a plan comes together... Since, you know - we like to eat, and pay our bills and taxes... Hilarious.

Dev/hack notes: To make the Windows-11 platform usable, we have installed "CYGWIN" - the 64-bit version for Windows, of course. I copied over a 32-bit version from an old XP box, but that did not let "vi" editor work, which sucked. Threw in the towel, and did the full download & install. Yes, we thought about WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), but CYGWIN just WORKS. It is great. Got it running. Note: Here is a funny: The insane European GDPR ("General Data Protection Regulation" law/requirement, has just killed most of the SSL Key-servers. This truly sucks, since it means a simple: "gpg --recv-key (keyID)" command to get the company key from the old site called "keys.gnupg.net" does not work, since that site (and most other public GPG/PGP Key sites) have self-destructed, so they would not be in violation of this silly GDPR b0llsh/t law. This is what we call "unintended consequence".

Ok, so two Key-Server sites still exist: keys.openpgp.org and keyserver.ubuntu.com. The one at "keys.openpgp.org" seems to be borked or empty. Thank insane GDPR legal madness for this absurd and foolish situation. Killing PGP Keyservers is not conducive to enhancing internet bloody security, maybe? But so it goes.

I needed to get the key for cygwin.com, to check the authenticity of the cygwin setup file one needs to download, to install cygwin64 for Windows-11 (which works VERY well, so far... just got it working this morning...) SO, here is what we did:

$!--- Go to the cygwin.com site, and download the file:  setup-x86_64.exe
$!    This file gets dropped into "Downloads" directory on your Linux box.
$!    Before you "scp" the file to your new Windows-11 box, see if the damn thing
$!    is actually the right file - check it's PGP signature, and it's SHA512 hash:

$!    To check the signature, use the "keyserver.ubuntu.com" to get the public key
$!    for cygwin.com, and make sure it matches the stuff posted on their website:
$!    The SHA512 hash (from site: cygwin.com)

 35e59301dc2a14e35a666b3297e7cf4fcf514eb1b73f9d363406622a34d51f7f123e822ccb77a73c
 071e4bd0523fe7a0d9294d9898fe5633c198caa169d064cf  setup-x86_64.exe

$!    And to receive the public key for: cygwin.com

$ gpg --keyserver "hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com" --recv-key 1A698DE9E2E56300 
gpg: requesting key E2E56300 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key E2E56300: public key "Cygwin " imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

$!--- Once you have imported the public key, use "gpg" this way to check it:

gpg --keyid-format=long --with-fingerprint --verify setup-x86_64.exe.sig setup-x86_64.exe
gpg: Signature made Wed 07 Feb 2024 12:43:04 PM EST
gpg:                using RSA key 1A698DE9E2E56300
gpg: Good signature from "Cygwin "
gpg: Note: This key has expired!
Primary key fingerprint: 5640 5CF6 FCC8 1574 682A  5D56 1A69 8DE9 E2E5 6300

$!--- what you want to see, in the blather above, is: "Good signature from "Cygwin "
$!    And then, check the hash, by using gpg to inspect the file's "message-digest", as follows:

 gpg --print-md sha512 setup-x86_64.exe
setup-x86_64.exe: 35E59301 DC2A14E3 5A666B32 97E7CF4F CF514EB1 B73F9D36 3406622A
                  34D51F7F 123E822C CB77A73C 071E4BD0 523FE7A0 D9294D98 98FE5633
                  C198CAA1 69D064CF

$!--- the gpg program reports the SHA512 hash in uppercase, but since it is a hexadecimal
string, no problem with alphabetic case, of course.  Note that the reported hash 
matches the file's hash from the website.  

$!--- now, here's the thing:  This process could still be easily hacked, if the website
at "https:/cygwin.com" was a DNS-fiddled fake site.  They could publish their hash for
the file, and your could check it, and it would match, of course.  That is why the damn
keyserver site and the pgp/gpg key-check is important, since a fake site would still
need to upload a fake key to the keyserver site. And this could happen.

The whole reason for getting CYGWIN for Windows-11, is to try to get Python2.7+Tcl/Tk built from source, so I can run "pip2" and download TensorFlow 1.4.0 to run on the Windows-11 machine. It runs fine on the Linux (CentOS) box, where I have both Python 3.6 and Python 2.7 installed. I have TF 1.4.0 for Python 2.7 and TF 2.6.0 for Python 3.6. And on the Windows-11 machine, we have TF 2.12 under Python 3.11. What is curious, is that my model runs *well* (to a 92% accuracy) on the CentOS Linux box, under TF 1.4.0, and on the same box, same data, running a slightly modified version of the model's definition, under TF 2.6 AND on TF 2.11 on the Windows-11 box, the TF 2.x and Python 3.x (which uses the "eager execution" model approach, instead of network-specification and then session-run as on TF 1.4.0), the model trains only to 53% accuracy.

I've tried every parameter to tweak, other than changing the dense-network neural-net model on both, with same activation and stochastic gradient descent optimizers. The models are specified EXACTLY the same. And so they should - really should - work mostly the same - but they are WILDLY different, with the modern TF 2.6 and TF 2.11 (under Python 3.x) running badly - so bad that one would typically give up, and seek a different thought-model.

But on both old Xerion-UTS (Dr. Hinton's team's thing from late 1990's at UofToronto) and also TensorFlow 1.4.0, the model works *GOOD*, training down to a high-level of accuracy on both platforms, old and new. This of course does not mean that the model is useful or accurate in the real world - all that depends on how the post-training evaluation data performs.

And what is even more curious, is that the SAME model, with SAME DATA and the SAME dense (fully-connected nodes) network structure - in a CUSTOM BUILT NEURAL NETWORK that only uses NumPY matrix-math and classical back-propagation to optimize itself - that model ALSO does a consistent 84 to 85% training accuracy! Something is wrong with modern 2.x series Keras/Tensorflow.

And since I have a non-black-box version now of my model, and it works not-bad, I am motivated to continue with this investigation.

What the hell is wrong with "TensorFlow 2.x" ??? I've been deep in the docs, and cannot find anything I am doing wrong. There is a page re. conversions from TF 1.x to TF 2.x. Read it all in detail. Really. It looks like the "Keras" definitional network-graph code for TF 2.x is messed up or broken or has a tricky "Gotcha!" deep inside it, so that only the authors can now run TF successfully. (This is a trick behind modern "open-source" software now, which is often about has "open" as Fort Knox (does that place even still exist? Maybe it's empty...) Nothing surprises us anymore...

If/when I find out what the hell is going on with TF, I will post it here. And just a side-note. I have sourced a whole book full of example Tensorflow code - from trivial examples to detailed deep-learning stuff with MNIST data, and so on. ALL the examples run fine on TF 1.4.0, and it seems NONE of the examples will run on TF 2.0, due to various in-built (designed-in, by planned action... let's be clear, this is not some "accidental" bug or error - this is careful, planned strategy by the Google-folk who built this thing) changes.

"Houston! We have a problem..." (and it's name is: "Google") :)

[ Mar. 3, 2024 ] - Making Our Own Horseshoes The modern products are wonderful, and yet with the deep-learning can come deep-uncertainty. We are more comfortable with code we can craft ourselves, and run experiments with that let us make a slow (yet steady) convergence on that which is both reasonably accurate, economically semi-rational, and perhaps able to be deployed effectively in a cash-flow positive scenario.

And with those factors in mind, we've used APL and Python/NumPy to craft a neural-network machine-learning product which can be configured and trained and evaluated without resorting to complex "black-box" systems over which we have no control, and a manifest inability to completely understand. (The documentation for TensorFlow - a target that is moving at velocity - is proving to be curiously unhelpful in letting us answer some basic questions about how to migrate from TF 1.4 to the version 2.x series. Our prototype model under TF 1.4, which trains very well, manages to train only to 60% level, under TF. 2.x serious runs. We cannot determine why this is the case, so far. We will press on in that direction, but in the meantime, I have built a simple, and yet trainable, network model with Numpy, Python and the GnuAPL.

It trains in a noisey manner, and we are encouraged by this approach.

We hope to attach this code to the old Xerion output from our economic Time Series Manager, and build a small edge for some portfolio work we have to do. Market action is getting very curious, and looks as though it could get even a tad more frisky. A bubble is being allowed to grow, perhaps due to the current political environment, as much as for any other reason.

Here are the visualization results of our home-built network, running on a bundle of historial data from 1995 to 2017:

[ This image shows the Coefficient fo Accuracy (the percentage of correct network-generated predictions), versus the number of training cases, in top left. Bottom right, is the sum-squared error loss history, as the network is trained for 3000 epochs. The network is implemented in Python/NumPy and GnuAPL, in a standard perceptron configuration, with a unique seeking behaviour during attempted loss-reduction back-propagation. Seems to work - and allows us to experiment in an unconstrained manner.] (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)

The training-action visualization graphics show noisey loss-reducing behaviour during traditional back_propagation training. We are still experimenting with this model, but it is interesting, because it is implemented directly, without recourse to TensorFlow or other high-level models or API's. TensorFlow is great, but having something we can tweak directly, is both looking promising and proving educational. Initially, it did not work well. Adjusting parameters and design topology have allowed it to reach a level that is potentially actionable.

[ Mar. 2, 2024 ] - Baby, Baby (Steps...) Python and NumPy is quite a brilliant combo. You can build a whole neural-network with just that, as NumPy has the matrix math to let the job get done. TensorFlow is clever - but may be too clever by half, as the Brits would say.

Say you want to do a quick calculation of your home-built neural-network, and determine the percentage of network-generated results that match the training-case data. I've called this the "Coefficient of Accuracy" and TensorFlow just calls it binary accuracy. It is simply the number of correct predictions that the network generates, divided by the total number of training cases. Simple.

Easy to do. Here is trivial example:

$ python
(blah blah, Python version..)
>>>
>>> import numpy as np
>>> vec = np.arange (1,13)              #--- create a 1 to 12 simple vector
>>> vec
array ([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12])

>>> vec[0] = 3                          #--- fiddle the first element to 3
>>>
>>> np.size(vec)                        #--- number elements in vector
12
>>> float(np.size(vec))                 #--- convert to float
12.0

>>> mat = vec.reshape(3, 4)             #--- flip vector in to 3 x 4 matrix 
                                        #--- not needed now, but it will be
                                        #--- create netvec, which could be our
                                        #--- results-from-network vector

>>> netvec = np.array([3, 8, 7, 1, 1, 0, 4, 10, 11, 12, 11, 12 ])
>>> 
>>> (np.sum(vec == netvec))/float(np.size(vec))
0.25
                                        #--- and that's it.  The first and the
                                        #--- last two elements match.  They get
                                        #--- evaluated as boolean "True", and since
                                        #--- they are really booleans, you can just
                                        #--- add them all together, with "np.sum"

In APL, this same sequence would be:

      vec ← ⍳ 12
      vec
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
      vec[1] ← 3
      vec
3 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
      
      netvec ← 3 8 7 1 1 0 4 10 11 12 11 12
      netvec                               
3 8 7 1 1 0 4 10 11 12 11 12
      
      (+/(vec = netvec))÷ ⍴ vec
0.25

What is so very cool about Python+NumPy, is that the same abstractional mental model can be applied as APL uses. There is no need to "for i = 1 to number-of-cases" yatta-yatta looping. You just lie the two vectors beside each other (even if they are a couple of million elements in length), apply a boolean transformational sweep across the whole data-space, and then press the button to add-reduce the vector to a single number, and divide that number by the known length of the vector. It's fast, simple and damn useful. Bravo to the designers of NumPy.

[ Mar. 1, 2024 ] - Bang a Gong - Work continues. We have a well-performing Tensorflow model, which trains well. It is configured on the Tensorflow 1.4 version (with session and di-graph design), and does not perform well under Tensorflow 2.x versions (tested on TF 2.12 on a Windows-11 platform, and TF 2.6 on CentOS-Linux box.) We may be coding and configuring in a non-optimal manner, and to be honest, the poor performance may be do to my coding. Tensorflow has curious and complex opertional features, that make it difficult know what it is actually doing.

But what is really exciting for us, is a custom-built neural-network we have created directly, in APL and Python code, which is now training quite well - on a 6000-record block of historical data, it is now training to an 82% accuracy, and with very low overall sum-squared error levels. This is up from low-60% accuracy, and much higher error-levels, so we are quite encouraged by this.

I *far* prefer working with code I have created myself, as it allows direct changes and unique insights to be both tested and created. The "black-box" approach of using higher-level API's like TensorFlow, tends to hide too much detail, and encourages a "mindless" approach to data analysis and economic research in general.

In this ugly and tragic world situation that we now are entering into - where some sort of major global conflict now seems to be clearly coming towards us all - we are all going to have to work harder, and most importantly, work smarter. War-time tends to clear away the foolishness and the cruft and clutter. If we are to be at war, then we had better be able to be damned effective at what we do, and do it well.

Note: I really *do* like Python. And I also quite like "NumPy", (a genius product, really) which makes Python actually usable for numerical work. "Lists" and "Tuples" and "Dictionaries" are just fucking stupid. All one needs is scalars, vectors and matricies. Go into higher-dimensions if you want to.. Blocks and bags of Blocks and bags of bags of blocky-tensors, and so on. The trick is to keep the syntax simple. If I get a chance, and have the time, I will write a front-end to Python+NumPy, which I will call "LumPy", standing for: " Langdon's Universal Matricies for Python". It might look a tiny bit like old APL.

[ Feb. 27, 2024 ] - A Eureka Moment (for us at least) - Finally got the Tensorflow network to work. I've built a real network, running on real data, from our Xerion (UTS - University of Toronto Neural-Network simulator) product. Xerion was a very sophisticated research tool, developed by Dr. Hinton's group at University of Toronto, back in the 1990's. We got a copy of it, after taking a short course Dr. Hinton offered as part of his funding deal, with the Province. We got a copy of Xerion, but it ran on Sun Workstations. I had to create a Linux version - and that meant first getting an early Slackware Linux running on an IBM P/C. It was a key project - led to many other things.

I've managed to replicate the Xerion-based analytic MPL (Multi-layer perceptron) neural-network device I built, but now using Tensorflow/Keras and Python. For the longest while, this did not look like a do-able project. The tools were just not there, or were insufficiently documented, and so on. But finally, I've got the thing working - even with just a single-layer network, and with only a 700 epoch training run. Of course, it can be scaled up from here. Previous versions would plateau at low-levels of binary accuracy, and high-levels of loss-history. But this version now trains successfully, as can be seen from our custom-built (APL-based) analytic graphics. It's a small result - but an exciting one for our small efforts!

I had written a detailed bunch of humourous drivel and posted it here, but it was a bit over the top, so I removed it. I had crafted a simulated rant about Python+NumPy and it's awful syntax, but it was a bit silly, so it's gone. I think Python+NumPy is actually quite brilliant, and it (or something like it) is long overdue. We need computers to help us think and work, not just to be used to turn us into serfs, screen-slaves, and have annoying adverts and other toxic nonsense fired into our faces so as to mine our wallets. :)

Python + NumPy is almost as useful as APL - at least it will be, once I manage to learn the curious syntax, and figure out how to wrap my brain around this "object/module" calling sequences. (And what is it with "lambda" functions? FFS, just call them in-line code, or maybe "functions"? There is too much "greek letter" noise already in the Options markets and the worlds of physics and math...). Have a happy+happy joy+joy day.

[ Feb. 22, 2024 ] - Building Stuff - Ayn Rand would be proud. We're building stuff. It's software, but it is still hard to do. Late nites - seeing the sun come up - crazy. I should be a happy old retired guy - but I am working like a student again, because we are missing the big run. There is money being created and injected - not sure where or how - but the US Central Bank folks are up to something. There appears to be a tsunami of cash washing into asset prices - this is not just NVDA and META and GOOG and MSFT. The USA election for this November will be shit-show. Trump is under sustained legal bombardment by curious forces of darkness. The unpopular Nancy Pelosi clone, Nikki Haley, is getting all the airplay and press - as if the media has been instructed to promote her, with games afoot to either neuter or execute Trump politically. It's nuts. And a market-run is being engineered, and honestly, it scares the heck out of us.

Today did not look right. Nvidia is a great company, with good products, that are much in demand. But AI is being done in a way that will help a few, and only a few. RIght now, a curious gold-rush mentality has taken hold - but we just don't buy it. AI is good - but any direct experience I have had with commercial "chatbots" is time-waste and toxic. When they answer the phone, I just give up. Had to do some awful government-driven work today - the usual unfunded mandate stuff at the micro level... long work, spin wheels, waste time, get cold, feel bad, etc. Curious how truly stupid, corrupt, dangerous and heartbreakingly awful much of the world has become ... and I didn't buy any NVDA, of course, so that hurts most of all ... :)

Got some code around a TF thing hammered together. Not sure if anything valuable and viable will result. Difficult times, and costly too. Everyone I know or research, seems to be a billionaire. All in all, the run today makes me feel nervous and silly - weird combo.

I have a feeling this is all not going to end well. No path forward from here, looks good. This is how wars really start. A bunch of "whoopi! - ya ya!" economics, followed by an ugly, soul-wrecking reversal, and everyone angry and spoiling for a fight. Not sure how I see this - but it haunts me. And the events in Russia, mean I will never get to see the Hermitage, which I had kind of hoped to one-day visit. Russia is tracking into sad/bad/angry/war mode, and USA is dialing-up the bat-shit crazy level. The Ukraine invasion is the most stupid, mindless, cruel insanity, since Hilter and Stalin carved up Poland, and ate it for dinner. If you are not Switzerland, then your country risks being toast. The Swiss have the right model - everyone in the Reserves, and each with a SiG auto-rifle under their bed at home. We are either architects or killers. Everything else is just support-services.

[ Feb. 16, 2024 ] - Another Good Man Dies - Sad news. Alexi Navalny was reported dead, by the Russian Prison Authorities. They said he died while taking a walk. This is sad. Many say he was simply killed. This might be true. Folks seem to die, when they are Russian prisoners. This is just sad and bad, the World is now a poorer and less good place, when a courageous man like Navalny is destroyed by the heavy-hand of cruelty. We all must work to change the program. If major war is necessary, then so be it. But it might be better to use wisdom, rather than brute force, to solve the problem of evil in the World.

[ Feb. 14, 2024 ] - Interview With A Vampire? - I used to really like and respect Vladimir Putin. But then he ordered his minions to invade Ukraine and torture and kill it's people at scale. This was crazy-unwise, and I don't like him now, as this action has destroyed part of Ukraine, done terrible damage to the growth and development of my dear Russia, hurt all the Russian and Ukrainian people, and caused unneeded pain and misery to a large number of folks all over the planet. But it was right and good for Tucker Carlson to go interview him. Why the hell not? Get all the information you can, and do all you can to restore sanity and peace to a world wracked by murder-monkeys, sadists, military-mindless-men who like to see "red-flow", and the typical wild horror-show that is modern tribal hate. Old-fashioned tribal hate is really putting on a big display in the entity that is called "Israel" - the truly worst thing that humanity has created since the days of "Vlad The Impaler" of medieval Romania.

Anything that moves the needle away from "War-and-Hate Mode: Let's Just Kill Them All!", and back towards the previous (circa 2019) "Economics Mode: Reasonably Peaceful Co-existence Driven by Business, Trading and Pleasure-Seeking" should be enthusiastically embraced and acted upon.

Like the "Eagles" said: "Do Something!" Putin is not the worst thing that could happen to Russia. An internal civil-war, fought with nuclear and chemical/biological weapons would be worse. And that might happen.

Look at Japan. They went down the path of stupid "militarism" and abusive "nationalism", and it ended badly. Same thing will happen to Russia, if it stays on the current stupid-bad path of pain, hatred and killing as a political strategy.

You can eat sushi and make money, get a new car, a warm house and have a nice life, or you can have war and madness and red-mist-before-your-eyes hate and anger and move the needle to the war-mode. Humans are so fucking easy to program, it makes me sick sometimes, truth be told.

We need to stop this shit. The whole Covid-19 thing was a tiny non-event. Wait until the full-scale thing is deployed. I am sure every private lab is working on this. I know the Israeli's were (and probably still are.) The nuclear is a minor threat, compared to the "Satan Bug", which is real, operational, and quite technically doable.

No on likes weapons more than me. Japanese katana and Czech CZ handguns are things of grace and beauty. They are the highest expression of the technical arts.

But we need to use this technology wisely and with care. We need to grasp our own human weakness, and see the virtue of being careful and peaceful. We need to turn our efforts outward - with vigour, and stand-down from this crazy war-shit. Yes, it is needed in Ukraine - and Hamas has to fight now in Gaza, given the wild evil that is in the true Israeli-heart-of-hate. Let's be honest. There are terrible reasons why Europeans hated Jews for 2000 years. The German Death-camps were not secret. The Commander-of-Paris, during WW2 occupation, would get roughly 2000 calls per day, from French citizens reporting "juifs" or "jews". The Jews were and are hated because they are very similar in strength, power and cruelty as were the German National Socialists. That is the source of the conflict - two strong, arrogant and cruel tribes fell into hate-conflict. What is going on in Gaza is a war-crime of the first level, and it must stop. Hamas was stupid to do it's hostage-raid. But it is wild-insane what Israel is doing, and that USA supports Israel in it's mass-murder exercise. This is just madness.

Both Russia and USA are being wild-insane now. The politics in both countries is awful and stupid, and needs to be recognized as such. Very bad, and very big war will happen - for certain - if this nonsense is not ended soon. I have to expend real effort not to hate (and hate with *strength*!) the evil that is Israel. Mass-murder of women and children - at scale, using warplanes and AI technology - is *not* acceptable. It will have consequences, for scores of years into the future. Little jewish kids a hundred years from now, will be made to die screaming because of this current madness. This is all wrong.

Happy Valentine's Day. (cf. that David Bowie Song - about the mean little gangster called "Valentine".)

We need to fix our borked World. Otherwise we become robot-prisoners to hate and history, without any chance for improvement and development. A day to celebrate love-stuff is fine - but we first need to end the wild-hate that is growing like weeds in a bankrupt shopping-centre parking lot, first and foremost. Otherwise, the tribal hate will destroy us all.

Defensive funds for Ukraine is a wise idea and are needed. But Israel should not get a fucking dime from anyone, anywhere, until it stops it's Gaza exercise in mass-murder.

[ Feb. 13, 2024 ] - TensorFlowed into Bank Failure? - Fighting with the version-Hydra of Tensorflow (what a comical nightmare of hyper-bloat...), and dealing with "Bank Failure" - in this case, failure to launch. Our holdings of bank-stocks has proved to be a painful decision. An associate bought some crazy high priced NVDA, back when it was around $250 per share, and I thought him heroic. Ha ha, and another ha. NVDA is over $700 per share, and even he is surprised at the moon-launch that has taken place in his portfolio value.

We tried to be the fucking "ant" and go for the "slow and safe and steady" and got fucking well handed our arses. Goddamn, but the world is run by fucking bone-heads - there is just no polite, socially acceptable way to fucking say it. The rude language of the trading-floor, is simply a pre-condition for accurate description of the fuck-stupid madness that seems to be driving human action, these days. I am reading old "H. G. Wells" books for escapist amusement.

That, when I am not beating my brains in, trying to grasp the complete insanity of the software evolution of Python, Tensorflow and Keras, build my own APL interpreter, make my own hardware, and keep Starlink, this AWS website operational and my farm and consulting business operational. I fixed one of my Linux boxes today, so the comically incomprehensible "grub2" bullshit, finally boots (by default) the correct kernel. The entire "grub" and "grub2" boot-loader nonsense is symptomatic of just how butt-kicked and shit-stained the modern technical world now is. It is a massive pile of bloat-gunk - needed just to get your fucking computer to start up by reading the disk's boot-sector - except it is not reading the disk book sector - there is UEFI and a shit-storm of complex nonsense that Intel and HP have built-in to their machines and processors - which makes just starting the goddamn machine a fucking nightmare of hocus-pocus fuck-foolishness that must be FULLY UNDERSTOOD to be CAREFULLY TWEAKED - less your machine be fucked and bricked. It is just comical.

I finally found a site (on the fucking "Malabar Coast" for fuck sakes!! Right out of fucking George Orwell's novel, "1984"!) A google-found site called: "hostmalabar.in" actually explained the clusterfuck that is "grub" and "grub2" and the complex bucket-of-foolishness, that is required to configure kernel boot-features for grub/grub2 (you need both, on a CentOS-x machine, thanx to the fucktoad complexity of Intel, HP and Red-fucking-Hat), and I finally got my one machine set right so it boots the least-bugfucked Linux kernel. ("Grub" - the "Generic Regressive Universal Bootloader" is a slushpile. One goes to edit a "/boot/grub.cfg" (configuation) file, and the first line of the file says: "Do not do it! Do NOT edit this file! It is created by some bizzaro process we are not gonna tell you about!" or some such thing. Eventually, you find: "/etc/default/grub", and you *CAN* edit that file - but nothing will happen (ie. when your re-boot your computer, nothing will change, you will boot the wrong old kernel), so you have to (as root, of course), run "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg", which will rebuild your "grub.cfg" file (you "hope" it is the right one - since you have (of course) "grub" and "grub2", and in your secret heart, where truth lives, you honestly do not know which one is really active for your current flavour of Linux...)

The IBM purchase of RedHat means that RedHat is now being destroyed (sadly) and CentOS-7 and CentOS-8 are being destroyed, if the curious folks at IBM have their way. (You can go to the CERN site, the folks who run the big supercollider, and read how it is all being killed or has died already. Who needs Physics anymore, eh? Just sad. CentOS-7 is/was the last good open-source Linux.) This is all sad and stupid, of course - but par for this fucking course, of course.

IBM/RedHat has announced they will try to *kill* the CentOS-7 version of Linux this June (and probably smash-palace all the yum/dnf stuff that one needs regularly to keep one's Linux updated and safe from evil agents of Doom and Death). We think this is really goddamn unwise, and that CentOS (the Community Operating System - the open-source version of RedHat Linux) should be kept alive, as this would keep the pay-money-for-it RedHat Enterprise Service stuff current, valuable, well tested and basically bug-free. This is critical in the current high-risk, evil-nasty-awful world we now live in. But IBM are curously short-term money-greedy (not the wise, long-term greedy of the rule-the-fucking-world folks of Google and Microsoft and Apple), so it looks like RedHat will be "Red-Booked" and basically killed and rendered into "deadbeef" and shit (where I guess we must all end up, yes? Dust to dust? Ashes to ashes? Shitcrap to shitcrap?...)

The great benefactor of the IBM purchase of RedHat, is of course, Micro-fucking-soft, since every sad group of swinging-dicks (like ourselves, for example), are now having to either switch over to Ubuntu (which used to be affectionately called "Crash-buntu" in the old days), or ArchLinux or Manjingo or Hackware or some bonefucked pile of hackery built maybe by troll-faced grinning children with malevolence in their hearts. Whatever. But mostly, it will be Microsoft that will benefit, as folks acquire Windows-10 and Windows-11 machines, run the awful Edge browser (which does have some nice attributes, once all the Microsoft spyware and bloat-butt user-monitoring-trickery is disabled), and try to keep their shit working. Or we just keep using our CentOS-7 stuff, and like our old Fedora-9 stuff, maintain it ourselves. We have no secrets of value to hack. :)

(Secret, very high-value investment advice: Buy stock in companies that are abusive monopolies that in your little economist's heart, you hate and despise. You will make more money, than if you buy stock in companies that you like. "ESG" is complete bullshit, and so is "Global Warming". The Worlds of Big Science, Big Religion, and Big Government are built on massive, solid foundations of fraud and deception. It is only the World of Big Money, where Truth openly gets to operate. When I worked as an Analyst, I put a "Sell" on the first company I wrote up. A manager told me: "You won't get far as an Analyst, writing 'Sell' recommendations." That dude was spot-on correct. Within a short time, the firm I worked for self-destructed. So I had to sell my "consulting" services - basically as a hired-gun computer-programmer. Went to NYC, the town where your nightmares can be made manifest. Really an awful place, sadly. I can name the client, because it was Lehman Bros. They self-destructed eventually also (long after my short gig was over.) The key fact about the World of Money, is that Truth is a business-critical factor-of-production, unlike it is in most other organizational operations.)

We bought a Window-10 and a Windows-11 machine, and have finally managed to get Python-3.11 and Tensorflow 2.12 installed on the goddamn Windows-11 thing, and actually ran a test which trained-down a tiny test-neural-network. It can be made to work, if you bang your fucking head on the problem for a couple of days (or weeks, truth be told...)

Our bank-stocks are getting fucked again today, as the USA inflation report (at 3.9% annual rate) caused a burp-fart mini-crash on the USA market for stonks. This is silly. We raised our prices 4% for our farm-land. How the fuck could we not, with our fucking property taxes going up like rocket-ships? Inflation is now hard-wired into the system. Live with it. But folks react weirdly. The USA gags and coughs and spits a bit, and Canada has a puking shit-fit, and gets Covid-with-pneumonia and falls over. Fuck, I hate this shit. Nothing gets better. We just keep seeing the same shit.

The Japanese say the same goddamn thing, which is hilarious: "USA sneezes. Japan gets the cold." And I suppose China gets cancer and dies? Except not. Not at all. China does just fine, thank-you very much. The Chinese Experiment in Capitalist-Communism has been damned interesting. Communist-nonsense is complete bullshit - but the Chinese know how to work hard, and get shit done. Their market economy is a proven success at the macro and the micro levels. If they could just dump the fucking Communist shit, they could rule the world. Key requirement is basic "fee-simple" honest land-tenure. You have to own your own familial land or at least a house, or you are certain to be fucked by inflation. This is baseline.

Chinese can build good stuff. We bought two deep-well pumps (gorgeous stainless-steel things, that look like uranium enrichment ultra-centrifuges) from Shy-Lui or Shou-Lin Pumps or some such name, and a "Power-Fist" gasoline generator, for the farm, and this stuff works fine. And it costs a fraction of the bullshit price that domestic manufacturers wanted to charge us. And did I mention that the Chinese stuff JUST WORKS? Plus, we had circuit boards made by JLCPCB - and they work great. The quality is high, the price was low, and the delivery was fast. Really. And the crazy stuff we built (Z-80 SBC's - single board computers, to a friend's brilliant design) work amazingly well.

Our stuff works good, and our plannifcation-driven strategies typically work very well.

But we cannot say the same for the World. The outside World is a fucking horror-show now. It is bad beyond laughable. The "Bank Regulators" in the USA are fucking insane - and seem more interested in fucking over US banks, and destroying them, rather than trying to make their financial system actually work as it was designed. The implosion and failure of Silicon Valley Bank was completely absurd, and shows yet another example of how completely borked - at both the Federal and the State level - the USA Democratic administrations are - California and Washington-Federal. They are just stupid and arrogant - a terribly dangerous combination, which is now so crazy common (we have our own version of this, operating in Ottawa, at the Federal level here.) It is just head-shakingly awful.

And even the guys who should fucking well know better - the old crafty bankers - let stupid shit happen, that makes it look like their Bank's are in value-failure-mode. The **bank-failure** we have had to deal with - is the ongoing failure in the share-price valuations of our major big banks, which used to be reasonably well-run institutions. But maybe not so much, anymore...? We don't know.

The chart below is the share-price value of our one of our biggest "hodlings"... Yes, we are fucking stupid to still be holding this. We really shoulda dumped this downer and just bought Microsoft (holding nose, of course). "Value" investing is a hard and grim business, these days. It's called a "value trap" - you put in some serious money, and you get trapped in a downslope of decay and failure that kills slowly. One needs to avoid this, since life is short.

We've held this position from the low $80's - it looked OK for a while - but now it hurts. We really expect this thing to trade back into the mid-$70 range (Cdn$'s), but it may be awhile. Good dividends are being paid, and workforce reductions are planned (finally!). This company *should* be nicely profitable and growing - it is the most international of Canada's big banks. But we wait. And wait. And wait. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

So, we wait. And yes, the dividends are being paid. But the problem with dividends, is that one wakes up in the night and thinks: "Are my dividends just being paid out of the money I invested in this venture? Is that why the capital is melting away like spring snow?" And a picture of a fat, smiling fellow with a big grin appears in one's 4:00am imagination. He's carrying a briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, and is getting on board an airplane, which has it's engine's running...

[ Feb. 8-9, 2024 ] - Wild Sheep Chase? - We are feeling less musical these days. And we agree with David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. Our bank stocks and telecoms and mining shares are withering like dying Ash trees. These trees slowly die as they are attacked by the small green beetles that bore under their bark. The markets actually do appear to be broken. Price discovery does not seem to be operating. Value investing is a death trap now, and we truly believe traditional process has been disrupted - perhaps even corrupted.

The USA Government is now basically acting like a Mafia-style "hit-squad", and regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are elected to run things, the Deep-State murder-squads continue to operate. Can reflex-response assassination-attempts be far behind? We profoundly disagree with using "hit-squads" to kill one's political adversaries, and remain concerned that this low-level "World-War-East" is unwise. We are reminded of the sarin-gas attack in Tokyo subway system, back in 1995, and fear that this sort of nonsense could be our future.

There was this old expression my Irish grandmother used: "What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander." Or in more modern Karmic terms: "What goes around, comes around." The organizations of folks, whose leaders are being killed by murder-drones in the Middle East, would now seem to have not just moral justification, but perhaps even "rules-of-war" legitimacy, to carry out targeted killings of political leaders in the USA. We believe this is *not* an acceptable military model, despite what policy choices the Israeli entity makes. It seems unwise, to try to murder your way to peace. That is the gangster model, that creates the bloody cycle of violence that can go on for generations.

I like Haruki Murakami's gentle "magic realism" novels, as this slipping-into-the-surreal seems to be what will have to take place, for folks to engineer operational approaches to the madness of the current modern world. Things are becoming dangerously stupid. America used to be a nation that at least paid some attention to right-thinking and morally sensible (if not "correct") action-strategies. But this is now ancient history. Terror and violence are now being actively exercised as Nation-State policy, and we believe this will create a rising cycle of reflexive violence. World War Three has probably already begun. We hope we are wrong about this.

The technology-economy is booming. I visited a big shared-office environment (a very large converted factory complex, which is now a collection of technology-company offices), and whereas the empty parking-lot during Covid-19 years was an indicator of the "work-from-home" dial-it-down business-model that we had to live thru - the new reality is a quite *full* parking lot, with the in-house coffeeshop full of folks discussing deals, and doing interviews. It is a real transition. The local tech-sector appears to be firing on all cylinders, and accelerating nicely.

We are not sure about the rest of the nation's economy. Most of North America seems to be running on borrowed money. We worry about this. The level of hard-asset inflation is impressive. Anything good is expensive. Nice houses that cost around $300,000 15 years ago, now sell for near $1 million. A good pickup truck can cost $70,000 to beyond $100,000.

The six-figure annual salaries - after income and other taxes are subtracted - require folks be frugal if they are to pay mortgages at the new rate levels.

There is lots of cheap-crap in the stores. But food is expensive - and good food is getting quite expensive. Good wine used to be available for $10 to $12/bottle. Now, one must pay close to $20.00 (or more). Good domestic whiskey can be had for $30/bottle (where each bottle is 750 ml), but the fine imported brands can exceed $100 or more. These are strange times, where all price-points exist at the same time. Real value is unclear. The low-cost whiskey is Canadian Club, which in Asia, is a high-cost premium brand, because it truly *is* a very high quality product. It is not simply transportation costs that account for the price-differences. Value can sometimes just not be recognized, and this situation can remain as a curiously stable artifact, despite what economics suggests.

Lately, many of our attempts at "value capture" in the stock market have been disasterous. It's quite comical - we look carefully, wait for attractive entry points, acquire what appears to be some quality stock, and watch it just collapse in price after we make a buy. It is painfully comical.

The latest nasty for us, is "Bell Canada Enterprises" - a good company which reported reasonable results, and even increased it's dividend - only to see the share price implode by another $2.00/share, the day after we added to a position. We waited patiently, and acquired a bit at $53.07, a couple of days ago, only to see it break south of $51. The CRTC has told Bell it must share access to it's new premium fibre-optic network with other low-quality internet providers. BCE has spent billions of dollars to build out its fast fibre-optic network in Toronto and other major cities. This requirement to share it's bandwidth on a privately funded new optical network is an insanely stupid decision on the part of Canadian regulators, but is par for the course, for the abusive, ignorant buffoons who currently run things in Ottawa. We had thought all this nonsense was priced in - and with the earnings to projections, and with EBITDA (essentially operating earnings) doing fine, we thought the discount was overdone. BCE stock was trading in the $62 to $63 dollar a while back, and over $65/share at the beginning of May, last year (in 2023), and so to see it hit the $50 and change level, after increasing it's dividend to $3.99/year, is just tragic. Net earnings for 2023 were down to $2.3 billion, versus $2.9 billion for 2022, but adjusted EBITDA was up from $10.2 billion to $10.4 billion, and free cash flow was up from $3.07 billion for 2022 to $3.14 billion for year 2023. The earnings are down over 20%, which has really spooked investors, but as a regulated entity, subject to CRTC diktats, the company has to be careful not to make too much money (which yes, we think is silly, but so it goes...) We like the dividend stream, and consider it to be reasonably predictable and reasonably stable. But the stock has fallen from 65 to 50 and change, and this is tragic, since BCE is held by most pension funds and local investment schemes. Things get weird when a nation has bad government.

So, we cannot risk buying more, as the domestic regulators are perhaps French socialists who are maybe actively interested in destroying the Canadian commercial telecommunications industry. We honestly cannot tell. The recent decisions from Ottawa are so comically stupid, that we are unable to know anything now about how future events are likely to unfold. Really. The Ottawa CRTC loons look like they want to crash the company. It's just nuts. But we will have to have an election soon, so we might get a chance to throw the current regime and it's cronies out into a snowbank - or maybe the Rideau River. (We can dream...)

All in all, we are seeing "value-investing" to be a classical "value trap". You buy some stock at what looks like a reasonable price - and the shares fall out of bed because bad decisions are made by unwise people. The fiasco in global interest-rate policy is a pretty good example of this problem. So, of course, our holdings of Financial stocks (banks) has seen an even worse collapse. We cannot grasp why public authorities are bent on destroying large parts of the machinery of commerical finance. It just seems insane - yet so does having Pierre Trudeau's child, and old geriatric Joe Biden, as the political leaders of Canada and USA. It just seems completely insane. We keep thinking (wrongly) that normalcy and sanity will prevail eventually. But so far, this has not been the case.

What is interesting, is how crazy-accurate our AI stuff is. I don't like following the AI, because it just seems too mechanical. But it works better that an old value-hound like me. It works a *LOT* better. It said - back in January - that the Banks were going to turn lower and sell off, and they did. You can see the charts on the first (index) page of this web site. (Click the top banner.) I report the results here, because this is an honest science experiment, even if we are losing money. "Mechanical Turks" can call the market accurately, because they ONLY look at price action, typically. That is both their strength and their weakness. But in today's world - price action seems to be everything. (And this is also what the old guys from long ago, also would say, truth be told.)

I know that as soon as I dump the portfolio, it will gap upwards, of course. :D

At least we had no bonds to speak of. :)

[ Feb. 7, 2024 ] - Are We Toast? ... Which Might Explode? - There is this wonderful painting by Paul Gauguin, which poses three questions in the top-left corner of the canvas: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" - if I recall correctly. It is one of his lovely, colourful paintings from Tahiti. (Edit: Here is link to the image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Gauguin_-_D%27ou_venons-nous.jpg )

Our markets now are these huge, bi-directional highly active networks, with many players both sending and receiving information. Impossible really to model - but perhaps we can say something about their fragility and/or their lack-of-fragility (robustness?). We of course, seek to have them "anti-fragile", but in our attempts to make things more "robust" with regulator oversight and control - are we in fact making the entire structure more likely to self-destruct? This question gnaws at me, like a hungry dog can gnaw at a meaty bone.

Watching the NYCB meltdown today, I would say that there are either great risks ahead, or some wild opportunities lying in front of us. Of course, it can be both at the same time. Or neither. How can we know which it is?

[ Feb. 6, 2024 ] - Visualizing The Simple to Grasp the Complex - The entire world is a matrix of linkages and complex interactions, which is something that can be examined, modeled and then manipulated. This is of course, what is happening to all of us. All persons can be manipulated and "managed" by their needs to breathe, eat, seek shelter, obtain economic advantage, and the necessary human interactions of intimacy, and so on. Shrewd manipulators craft social and psychological machinery to make engineering strategies effective. This wild process is what drives most market activity. Attempts to model market activity, and get a sense of what is going to happen, is difficult - almost impossible.

But not completely impossible, as it turns out.

I'm playing with trivial examples in TensorFlow again - returning to some work from 7 years ago, with some new ideas. With generative AI, we are seeing some truly impressive results. They are of course also dangerous, since the manipulation machinery can now all be taken up a level - quite a few levels, perhaps, with the success of "deepfakes". I spoke of this with a clever fellow last summer, and it is interesting to see how quickly events have moved. We have concluded that "Little Brother" needs effective AI technology right at the edge-level - just to keep his freedom and capacity for effective independent action. We are moving into curious and dangerous times, where validation and verification will be critical daily tasks that will be operational pre-conditions just to stay alive. The new AI technology will make things crazy - even crazier than they already are.

And this is already showing up in the markets. The price of NVIDIA reflects this. To train big networks, everyone will need a little supercomputer - or at least benefit from one. We remain impressed at how market action can be determined and modeled by statistical methods - like what the Turtles discovered in the commodity markets years back. Yes, Virginia, the Central Limit Theorem really does exist.

So, we are trying to stretch some ideas again - and looking at the Tensorflow tools to model some of this. Back to basics. Here is an image of the simple example XNOR network, the code for which is a few pages below. A very simple neural-network can actual be quite effective as a tool - like the old idea of the "back-of-envelope" analysis. A simple and clear thing that captures something very basic and is deep-driving a process, can be very effective in predicting forward path movements.

We caught this with a simple economic idea, which is now playing out. So, we figure we better run with it.

Here is simple graphic image of the XNOR network.

Simple visualization schematic of the TensorFlowXNOR example network. This looks like a very trivial structure, but what is interesting, is how well a small, simple network can perform classification analysis. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

And of course, a collection of trivial classifiers wrapped together, is not a bad model for how our brains actually work.

[ Feb. 5, 2024 ] - The Stench of Sulfur from Hell? - So Joe Biden, the least-wise world-leader in recent memory, has decided to "escalate to de-escalate" - against a bunch of desert-nomads with radar-stations! Oh, and he will bomb Iraq (an ally?), and Syria (the nation that the dear USA is trying to HELP??) To us, this all just seems unwise. It is so unwise and really quite stupid, it makes one want to weep. The Americans used over 85 sorties of big-engined billion-dollar B1 bombers, against a bunch of sand-dudes with pickup-trucks, in the hot desert of Yemen, Iraq and Syria. This is just nuts. And of course, dear Mr. Biden waited until Groundhog-Day market-close, before beginning his little World War Three. What a very curious old fellow.

And today, I am fighting with the hot-mess that is now Python-3. My but the lads did destroy this thing! Python2 was a tad quirky, but it was brilliant, and it just worked, like the old APL did. Like C and C++ still sort of do, a little bit. But everything is fouled up on Python3, because the critical examples and the entire code-base of the world, has been kicked to the curb, and made wrong and obsolete. Not helpful.

I have spent all day, trying to do some simple things that should have taken 5 minutes, and it was past dinner-time, before I finally got the thing I needed, to work.. I had to do this crazy and quite idiotic "software archeology" exercise - but in reverse - to see how exactly the things that did work, were hammer-whacked by bit-fiddlers and pedants, so they do NOT work now. It's just hilariously silly. There is absolutely NO SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENT OF ANY KIND HERE. All that is happening, is **DISRUPTION** so that those who benefit from the disruption, can gain their objectives. Folks just break technology that actually works. And we are certain this process will cause an ugly fail in a spectatular manner, at some future time point. Perhaps this will happen once NVIDIA, GOOGLE, APPLE and MICROSOFT reach some kind of critical economic mass. There is just too much, that is too awful, affecting too many, for this process not to cause a reactive response in a different direction. But it may be *years* before that happens. We will have to use this half-broken technology environment for a while longer, until enough people get angry enough to drive change. It's a grim prospect, I fear.

I think Miss Sanity and Mr Common-Sense, decided to get onto the B-Ark, and fly into the Sun, holding hands. I am constantly amazed by just how truly awful modern software has become - just about everywhere one looks. Using the internet is an ugly and frustrating and annoying experience, which just makes ones teeth hurt. This is comical, considering the dollar-deltas of the revenue-streams of the major technology zaibatsu. And programming with modern frameworks and bloat-code-libraries of crud that do not work because APIs and operational features have been "deprecated" (what a nasty, poop-stained weasel-word!), and fragile, hyper-complex development tools that create failure after failure, is even worse. It's all just so curiously nasty and bad - bad tech for an angry world? Can this really be a good plan?

We see a world that is perhaps getting ready for the big revolution of the great Karmic wheel.

[ Feb. 2, 2024 ] - GroundHog Day in the Future - Here we are. Same future, different day. Big Jobs numbers in the USA. Wage gains up slightly, and financials hit by market-snipers. Nasty. We are seeing what appears to be a strong economy in the Great South. But it seems to be driven more by fear and loathing. Commodity prices falling (oil and gold/silver), and stability looks like it might loom on the horizon. But why does it *feel* so fake? This we cannot explain.

Seems like "Groundhog Day"...? Could that be it? (PS: The Living Magoroku is a good film...) https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-living-magoroku, if one wants to study history, art, and propaganda.

We got Tensorflow downloaded (458 mb!! - just for the binaries!) and have run some tests to train a tiny, test netork for the "Exclusive-Or" example from old Xerion days. Runs and works. Snappy quick, using "Stochasitc Gradient Descent", which seems to be same algo that Xerion used when it was working fastest.

Here is our test program: tensorflowXNOR.py

#--- Initial Tensorflow example - XNOR network
#
import tensorflow as tf 
# (ignore cuda... error message if not running an Nvidia GPU
#
from tensorflow.keras import layers
#
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Activation, Dense
#
import numpy as np

# X = Input 3 boolean input XOR gate
# create the inputs of the neural network (direct from the table)
X = np.array(([0,0,0], [0,0,1], [0,1,0],  [0,1,1], [1,0,0],
              [1,0,1], [1,1,0], [1,1,1]), dtype=float)

# y = the output of the neural network
y = np.array(([1], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0],
              [1]), dtype=float)


Xtest = np.array(([0,1,1], [0,0,0], [1,1,1],  [1,1,0], [1,0,0],
              [0,1,0], [1,1,0], [1,0,1]), dtype=float)

# define the model
model = tf.keras.Sequential()

# configure layers of nodes and set activation function
model.add(Dense(4, input_dim=3, activation='relu', use_bias=True))

model.add(Dense(4, activation='relu', use_bias=True))  #--- Comment out for first run.

model.add(Dense(1, activation='sigmoid', use_bias=True))

model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error',
        optimizer='adam',
        metrics=['binary_accuracy'])

print (model.get_weights())

history = model.fit(X, y, epochs=2000, validation_data = (X, y))

# show what we have built
model.summary()


# printing out to file
loss_history = history.history["loss"]
numpy_loss_history = np.array(loss_history)
np.savetxt("loss_history.txt", numpy_loss_history,delimiter="\n")
binary_accuracy_history = history.history["binary_accuracy"]
numpy_binary_accuracy = np.array(binary_accuracy_history)
np.savetxt("binary_accuracy.txt", numpy_binary_accuracy, delimiter="\n")


print("\nThe binary accuracy is: ")
print(np.mean(history.history["binary_accuracy"]))
print ("\n")


print (" ")
print ("Test against original training data...")
print ("Original Input Training data: ")
print ("X:")
print (X)
print ("Network result... ")
result = model.predict(X ).round()
print (result) 
print (" "+"\n")


# --- try a different input to predict 
print (" ")
print ("Test against this different input data...")
print ("Xtest:")
print (Xtest)
print ("Network result... ")
result = model.predict(Xtest ).round()
print (result)
print (" "+"\n")
print ("Done.")
# --- Done.

The above code is a tad more polished than the experimental video display generator. The code above creates a simply binary-exclusive-OR table, and sets up a simply two-layer network of 4 nodes each, to create a predictive device to be trained and meet the rules defined by the input.

It confirms Tensorflow works, and shows how basic neural-network training can be done.

The image below, shows the run results on the left side, and on the right side, the results of the process used to download and install Tensorflow on the CentOS-7 box, which was: pip3 install tensorflow

Results of running the "tensorflowXNOR.py" program shown above. Run results on left side of image and the right-side screen shows the results of the installation process run for Tensorflow on a CentOS-7 Linux box. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

Tensorflow now uses "Keras" which makes network configuration and setup easier and more intuitive.

[ Jan. 30, 2024 ] - Tensorflow, PyTorch & The Living Magoroku - Japanese AI. Interesting. You can get a Google prototype LLM-driven, text-input AI that allows videos to be created and/or edited, just by entering text. This is wild. Tried to source some hardware - an associate has latest Tensorflow running, and went to acquire an Nvidia RTX-4090 based machine, and ... ha,ha ... not available. Hilarious.

The LLM's (Large-Language Model) AI's allow you to just enter text, they figure out what you want to do, and then they do it - write code, edit videos, create videos, create "deepfake" material that looks like existing media goofpeople (the political-toads, filmstars, musicboys and musicgirls, and so on.) I had a discussion with a clever guy back in the summer, suggesting we now enter a world where nothing is real anymore - but of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Lies and fraud and cheating and disinformation - this has been the human condition since before ancient-Roman times.

Our models suggest now that we are cusp-transitioning to what is basically World War III. It won't be fought with nuclear weapons - it will be fought with "death-squads" using assault-rifles, inside hospitals, offices, medical centres, government buildings, and so on.

It won't be a pretty picture. The Israeli death-squad assault on a Jennin Hospital, to kill patients who were alleged to be "Hamas operatives", shows the "New World Order" that American militarism and it's support of the Israeli entity, have given us now. It is a picture of the future of nation-state conflict-resolution, and it looks a bit like the "St. Valentines Day Massacre" from historical Chicago. The unqualified and unlimited support that United States is offering to Israel is an impressive war-crime of very highest and most significant kind. The Americans and the Jews of Israel want their enemies to believe that they are all-powerful, and respect no laws or limits on their actions. This ideology exceeds levels that go beyond even what the German National Socialists of the 1930's managed to reach. This changes things.

One is going to want to have access to current AI technology, as that will make defensive operations more effective and more viable. Deception and nation-state initiated violence are two nightmare scenarios of which we now have continuing and ongoing confirmation. In US-slang: "The shit has now hit the fan", but we suspect that few are really aware of how serious and significant a transition this is.

When the Governments of the world are direct participants in extreme criminal behaviour of the most limitless kind, we can expect to see a rising level of technology-driven feudalism that will collapse existing social characteristics. The USA-Israeli death-squad approach to political conflict has always been with us, at some dark, low and ugly level. But technology now enables us to see it clearly in action, and experience exactly what is happening.

We analyze this material with an objective focus. It is possible to see the fractal-like connections, that drive human process - and the AI technology lets this become *much* clearer than before. One can actually *encourage* the AI to "dream" (halucinate), and then speculate, and once the ideas are marshalled - conclusions can be drawn.

It took not one, but *TWO* nuclear bombs on Japan, to end the Japanese deep-desire for a hard-core militarism and the "cult-of-the-very-strong". What will it take to address the American+Israeli militarism and their common "cult-of-murder-as-the-solution"? Will it take *THREE* nuclear bombs? Maybe FOUR? Will it take more? How much damage will have to be done to Israel and America, before a hard-reset in political thinking becomes possible?

War may be a necessary action, driven by clear, direct and evident reality that negotiation with a cruel and fanatical enemy is not possible. Hamas seems just to have accepted this same strategy that has dominated American and Israeli political thought. Why should they be any different than any other group of people? The tribalism and the resource-constraints that drive conflict have to be removed. But any human or AI studying human-history, can see that this is not possible. So we are condemned to remain in constant conflict. There is no "off-ramp" on this highway to hell. It is the human condition. Both Malthus and Darwin saw this basic truth, we suspect.

So, going forward, what can be done? Sadly, not much. We run the same movies, with the same comforting lies, on a tragic cycle of repeat. AI technology will be certain to amplify the human lies that undo us. Modern neural-science allows more effective human programming through sensory-successful methods and modalities. We will have our daily "Two-minute Hate" sessions, and the violence will become increasingly mundane and banal.

All this is known, and documented. And it now can *all* be analyzed and data-reduction methods applied, and clear results can be generated. And the conclusions are scary and disturbing: There is basically zero-chance of avoiding the "Thucydides Trap" as it is called. We are already now inside the new war. We are just not seeing the rivers of blood, unless we look for them. But they are there, and will grow

The question we deal with now - when will America experience this? Who or what will cross the Rubicon into USA, and bring directly into USA, what USA has been bringing into lives of the other people's of the World?

When will American cities burn? By what machinery or mechanism, will the American hegemon, with it's lust for violence, and it's burning hatreds, be taken down?

Be clear: We do *NOT* seek this outcome. We actually seek to avoid this. But the AI technology is unique and it allows massive amounts of historical data to examined and summarized. And it is painfully obvious that the current "death-squad" approach to politics that America and it's Israeli entity are both championing and actively operating, is revolting, unlawful and hideous. And this fact will drive change. It will encourage and embolden those who seek to D3 (degrade, destabilize and destroy), American and Israeli hegemonic control.

No one wants to live in a world where armed thugs and murder-squads can blast their way into a hospital and murder injured people lying in their beds. And when this kind of hideous criminality is sanctioned and supported by State entities, then such State entities must therefore be removed from operational existence. This was what USA did to Japan. One has to see the picture of the very large flat-bed wagons covered with the burned and rotting corpses from Hiroshima, before the true extent of American crimes can really be experienced.

The American invasion of Iraq, and now the American supported Israeli mass-murder campaign in Gaza, shows that America cannot change - and it will not change - until it suffers a military defeat that at least is at the level that Japan suffered in the World War II conflict of the 20th century. This simple conclusion just falls right out of the data, like a blood-clot dropping from a woman who has just given birth.

So, we can say with some certainty: World War III has begun, and we suspect that it will not be a war that America can "win". It will be a war that will damage and degrade America. And what the Americans need to do, is to focus their plans on limiting and dealing with the damage and destruction that is certain to come to their lands. The reason for this is simple: The more America tries to bomb and kill it's way to a conflict-resolution, the greater and more intense will be the collective desire on the part of the groups of "bomb-ee's" (those who were bombed...), to degrade and damage the American hegemon.

This is not a political position. This is a scientific observation, that is generated by the data.

[ Jan. 27, 2024 ] - Natsu no Tobira - Japanese tune - the "Door to Summer", which someday will open - just like the Cdn bank stocks are likely to fly again, once we can get a new Gov't in Ottawa that is not hostile to Canadian prosperity. It's a damn hard project, and it requires we all work a little harder, and get the damn job done. Things do not have to stay terrible, and they do not have to be run stupid. It often heppens in the World, but it is neither a necessary nor even sufficient scenario for the human condition

That being said, here is a tiny experiment. Let's see if anyone is reading these notes. I need to get some stuff done using PyTorch, and I have insufficient knowledge about how it works. If you are an expert, or even a basic student who has used this neural-net toolset, get in touch with me, quote me what sort of rate you would charge for some consultative assistance, or what sort of deal you might want to enter into. I am finding I can do anything - but I simply CANNOT do EVERYTHING, so I need to dial up the resource deployment just a tad.

First dibs on anyone who is reading this. We are changing the program now. :)

[ Jan. 25, 2024 ] - Py-Stuff - Here is a simple test thing. I want to use the HTML tags to put raw code inline here. The code is a simple test-program to exercise a video display, with a bunch of random boxes, which contain squares of colours, made programatically.

Python3 Test Program - Draw Random Colour-Gradient Boxes on Screen

Note; The program runs continously, and updates at the interval you set at startup. Using 100 is nice. This means the program will draw coloured boxes on the screen, randomly, for 100 times, and then will re-paint the screen, using "tkinter". It's a simple test program to exercise video-functionality between different machines, running different flavours and versions of Python.

# --- squaresmovecont3.py --- test program for tkinter display of image data
#                        --- display continuously. this one for Python3
#                        - MCL, Jan. 24, 2024
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# --- Make and Show immediately a simple pattern as a .jpg file
#
# --- For now, you start Python and import this file with: import MakeShowMoire
# --- or use: execfile ("buildbmp.py")
#
# --- import modules we need 
# --- from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageTk
# --- import _tkinter
from tkinter import *
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageTk
import numpy as np
import scipy.misc
import os
import random
#
# --- try to turn off warnings...
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
#
# --- turn on the Tk system...
# root = Tk()
#
# --- Ok, lets go..   was: 1720 by 670
width = 700
height = 400
channels = 3 
# --- ask the operator for number of images before reset
numtoshow = int(input("Enter Number of images to show before reset?: "))
#
img = np.zeros((height, width, channels), dtype=np.uint8)
xx, yy = np.mgrid[:height, :width]
# --- circle = .212 * ( (xx - 1000000) ** 2 + (yy + 1000.7) ** float(1.9795) )
print ("Generating Image with shape y: ", img.shape[0], "  x: ", img.shape[1], " ... ")
print ("xx is: ", xx)
print ("yy is: ", yy)
#
# --- Lets walk before we drive fast...
for y in range(img.shape[0]):
    for x in range(img.shape[1]):
# ---   r, g, b = circle[y][x], circle[y][x], circle[y][x]
# ---   img[y] [x] [0] = r 
# ---   img[y] [x] [1] = g
        img[y] [x] [0] = int(y) 
        img[y] [x] [1] = int(x)
        img[y] [x] [2] = int(y / 2.7)

original_image = img


#--- turn on the tkinter system
#--- root = Tk()

# --- now, we have made the image, lets save it, and read it back
# scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
# imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
# --- I had to write array img to image, in order to convert img array to img-as-a-PIL-image. 
# --- but, one can just do this, without the file-write:
imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)


#  w = Canvas(root, width=1000, height=700)
#  label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
#  w.pack()


# --- loop 6 times
j = 0
ypos = 1
xpos = 1
ymax = 800
xmax = 1400
#--- canvas start pos for Linux screens
#cxpos=150
#cypos=70
#--- canvas start pos for Windows laptop
cxpos=0
cypos=0

bigdoit = True

while bigdoit :


 root = Tk()
 w = Canvas(root, width=xmax, height=ymax, bg="black")
#---    Canvas.place(relx=0.5, rely=0.5 anchor=CENTER)     #--- does not work!
 root.attributes('-topmost',False)
 root.geometry("+{xpos}+{ypos}".format(xpos=cxpos,ypos=cypos)) 
 label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
 w.pack(anchor=CENTER)

 j = 0
 ypos = 1
 xpos = 1

 doit = True
 while doit :

#---   imgwtf.show()  
#---    pid = os.spawnl("P_NOWAIT", '/home/mcl/tfhack/rundisplay', '')


   test = ImageTk.PhotoImage(imgwtf) 
   label1 = Label(image=test)     #--- in Python 3.x this is: tkinter.Label...
   label1.image = test
   label1.place(x=xpos,y=ypos)
   
   w.update_idletasks()

   img = img * 2

#   scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
#   imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
   imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)

#   ypos = ypos + 40
#   xpos = xpos + 40
# --- make it more interesting - put image at random location
   ypos = (random.randint(0,ymax)) - 100
   xpos = (random.randint(0,xmax)) - 100


   ccr = 0
   while ccr < 200 :                #--- delay loop  (not working right)
      ccr = ccr + 1
      xrtw = ccr / 3.343 * 0.232534


#---   imgwtf.show()
#---   pid = os.spawnl("P_NOWAIT", '/home/mcl/tfhack/rundisplay', '')

   label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
   w.pack(anchor=CENTER)

   test = ImageTk.PhotoImage(imgwtf)
   label1 = Label(image=test)
   label1.image = test
   label1.place(x=xpos,y=ypos)

   w.update_idletasks()

   img = original_image

#   scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
#   imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
   imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)

   #--- label1.destroy()

   label1 = Label(root, text="Next Test: "+str(j))
   w.update_idletasks()


   ccr = 0
   while ccr < 500000 :                #--- delay loop
      ccr = ccr + 1
      xrtw = ccr / 3.343 * 0.232534



# ---   root.destroy()
# ---   root.mainloop() 

   j = j+1
   if j >= numtoshow :
       doit = False
# --- end while loop

 root.destroy()
 root.mainloop()
# --- end of big while loop (for continuous operation

print ('Done.')
# --- root.destroy()
# ---root.mainloop()


# --- done.

I was originally writing the generated images to a file, and then reading them back with various Python libraries (from scipy, PIL and imageio), but this version just does everything without any file access.

This program was written for Python3, so if you have a machine running *both* versions of Python (2 and 3), you can just copy this program, and put it into some editor with copy and paste commands, save the file as "squares3.py" and then run it with:

$ python3 squares3.py

If you just have Python3 installed, it will be called just "python", and if you have Python 2.7.x version, you will need probably to install the "tkinter" library, using your package install technique. If on Windows, just make sure to install your image of Windows Python with the "Tcl/Tk" stuff (or Tk, whatever they call it). I run a CentOS-7 Linux box, and to run it in Python2, I had to install "tkinter" using "yum" (as root):

$ yum install tkinter

This got the Python2 development libraries, and installed "tkinter", which in Python2, is imported into Python interpreter with an ***Upper-case*** "T" as "Tkinter". In Python3, it is lower-case, as in "tkinter".

To run this sample program in Python2, you need only change the line "from tkinter import *" to be "from Tkinter import *". Python3 seems to be downward compatible to Python2 - ie. if you write in Python3 code, it can mostly run in Python2 - but not the other way around.

To end the program, just minimize the Tk window, and control-c out of it, from the terminal window. Note the program has a lot of gunk and commented out (with the hash) lines, and some comments are from earlier experiments. But it runs (with that "tkinter" or "Tkinter" difference) in both Python2 and Python3, on Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit and Windows machines. But note that in Windows-11, if you have gotten the latest update, the stupid new "Cmd C:\>" command process (which is called Command Terminal or Terminal Command or some damn thing), will grab focus, and put itself in front of the Tk screen display!!

Microsoft is being the "abusive monopolist" again, it seems. It's so comically annoying, that one just has to laugh. They must sit around, trying to think of things that can break system intercompatibility with Linux. It's hilarious, really.

For Python operation, you fix this, by selecting Windows-11 "Settings" / "System" and then scroll down to "For Developers", and select that. Then, scroll down to the option for "Terminal", and select "Windows Console Host", and you will get the original command-processor, which will operate correctly with Windows Python installations. This behaviour just CHANGED a couple of days ago, when my Window-11 HP machine, updated itself to the latest Windows-11 version.

Hope this is useful for someone. We've got some simple data-analytic stuff that runs in Python, and uses the science libraries, and MatPlotLib to show the results. Hope this helps others who are converting - or learning - Python. Python is a truly brilliant thing, really. I complain about Python3, but it is actually quite an impressive accomplishment. Deep inside the various science libraries, are all the original (and VERY good), old IMSL Fortran math libraries - the code that got our spaceships to the moon, and Mars and the outer planets. One has to respect those old libraries, because they have been TESTED and DEBUGGED and they give answers that are CORRECT. :)

[ Jan. 23, 2024 ] - Python3 is Committee-Created Gunk. - Whomever were the committee folks that ruined Python, by creating the botch that is Python3? They should just all be sent down. I don't care where they are sent down to - just please get these folks away from language design.

Python 2.7.14 is a fine product, well-designed, with appropriate technical characteristics. Python-3 is silly. It looks like a bunch of pedantic puffers with big egos and small other-parts, decided to mess-over a good product, and turn it into a hot mess, that is buggered and butchered - and full of stupid "GotchYa!'s" that can be used to "teach" (I use that term with all sarcasim intended) the poor kids who have to learn how to do some kind of useful coding, so they can get some sort of useful results from goddamn computers.

I get that they needed to put brackets around the "print" statement and other language verbs, but the curious weirdness - and the unhelpful error messages - the whole thing has become just another sad annoying bucket of bloatware.

And current versions won't even install. Viz: We have a Windows 8.1 machine, which due to some drivers we need it to use, we do not update, since that will pooch the drivers (for sure). And of course, we CANNOT install any of the Windows images for Python on that machine. Fine. Sure. Whatever. (We built the Python 2.7 code from source, on a couple of Linux machines, back in the day, to ensure some goombahs could not take the thing away from us (like Microsoft likes to do, with things like Excel and Word)).

I detest the technology industry now. Such a nasty bunch of goofs - just about everywhere. The majors now exist mostly to just destroy stuff. (It's "Disruption" needed to ensure the revenue streams are maintained...) Nothing really positive is being created, and I say this as an AI RESEARCHER! Really. AI is just more shit, and it's best use-case is a tool to accurately target the families of Hamas "terrorists" in their homes, and kill the women and children. The psychokiller IDF motherfuckers in Israel are just plain genocidal mass-murderers, and they are going to give us all a World War Three. For AI developers, the Gaza mass-murder campaign is a horror-show of impressive scale and extent. Quite astonishingly awful. It will make "anti-semitism" fashionable, again. It is just so insane. AI could have been a good thing. It could have been a very good thing. But it has already morphed now into pure-evil bloodshit.

No amount of "hugging face" is going to save us, we fear.

I can see it everywhere now. Modern software is either stone evil now, or it is just plain stupid.

In Python 2.7.14, you can do this:


Python2
>>> numx = input("Enter a Number: ")
Enter a Number: 345
>>> print (numx)
345
>>> print (numx + 2)
347
>>> j = 4
>>> if numx >= j :
... print ("J is small")
...
J is small

Now, if you do this in Python3, you will get this error message:

TypeError: ">=" not supported between instances of "int" and "str"

Python3 will NOT tell you WHICH variable has been designated as a string. And why the not? Is "j" the string? Does "j = 4", get interpreted as "create a string variable, and assign it the value of 4"? Or is "numx" the string?

This is just silly. APL was able to handle this kind of variable-on-the-fly construction quite successully, BACK IN THE 1960's!!! What is wrong with software and software-makers now? It's laughable - and the error messages STILL DO NOT OFFER CORRECTIVE INFORMATION. If Python3 is failing-to-convert, or is making some weird assumptions, THEN IT SHOULD JUST SAY SO, so a language-user can actually USE THE LANGUAGE.

Our whole Python2 to Python3 conversion exercise is a lot of work - WHICH YIELDS NO VALUE - we just cycle real hard, just to stay where we are. Hilarious, really.

What just drives me around the bend, is that Python3 makes the autoconversion from string to integer in the "print (numx + 2)" statement, but fails to do it, in the "if" statement. This is silly. I figured out (by experimentation), that you can check the type of the variable, with the "type" keyword, which queries the "class" of the variable:

Python3
>>> type (j)
<class 'int'>
>>> type (numx)
<class 'str'>

And of course, a quick fix (which will still error-out, if you enter letters!) is:

numx = int(input("Enter a Number: "))

(Not sure yet how to trap-on-error, to re-prompt...)

See, Python2 just worked. But it looks like academic puffers got ahold of the Python3 spec, and ruined it. If you MUST have all vars declared and used most-carefully, then make declarations necessary. But if you allow convert-on-the-fly - then at least make it consistent - don't be a pedantic runt, and accept it some places (input, print and math), but crash-it in comparisons, as is the case now. That's just silly.

Language design is bad now. It's really just gone to hell, and been shat on by Satan and all his little minions. And then it gets served up to us, the poor sorry, silly sods who have to use this stuff because we desperately have to get some WORK DONE!

Idea: Dump Python, and just use Tcl/Tk, with an APL backend to hack the data? I have source-code to a not-bad APL, from an academic guy in Europe. He did a bloody good job of building the thing. (We are not anti-academic and we are not anti-semitic (except in the case of Israel, which is a nest of sulfur-crusted lizard-demons, perhaps). But the APL requires I butcher the keyboard-driver to get the characters, and it makes using "vi" a special-case nightmare. And Python has *many* excellent libraries available, which is really the true source of it's popularity and maybe even it's secret greatness.

You know that you have won the software business-battle, when your users bitch and complain about the product, and curse at you - and then order the upgrades, and a bunch more seat-licences. It's when they *STOP* complaining, that you need to be worried. It means they have (or are) transitting to some other methodology or product, and are not using your stuff anymore. Angry and complaining users is a sign of solid product uptake and a key indicator of market success. Just look at Microsoft!

Oh, and Windows-11 updated on one of our machines last nite. And of course, it broke many things. The "Cmd c:\>" command-line tool was turned into some kinky, tab-based "Windows Terminal Thingy", which broke our stuff. But if you select "Settings", and then "System" and have "Developers..." stuff turned on, you can find an option to switch "Windows Terminal Thing" back to "Windows Host Cmd Processor", and your stuff should again work ok. Maybe.

Most of the online, internet-based "Google-searchable" information online is wrong now. Microsoft keeps breaking Edge by changing things, so folks have to use Microsoft tools, instead of Linux tools. It's a hilariously effective strategy - just keep breaking your own stuff - on a regular basis - so that the poor bastards who have to get their work done, will agree to accepting your expensive, toxic, lower-functionality code upgrades, and your expensive support service contracts, just to keep the machines running, and the goddamn lights of their business on. Quite clever, actually. But it's a trick that really only works if you have the big *moat* and can operate like a near-monopolist.

[ Jan. 19, 2024 ] - Wrestling with Powerful Pythons and Flaming Foxes... - Completely tsunami'ed with "shit that needed to be done"... Upgraded several platforms to Python 3.x, from the most excellent (but kinda kinky), Python 2.7.14. We now have inter-compatibility between a new Window-11 platform that runs "Edge" (a "Chromium"-ish thing), and the Linux machines. The Linux boxes are so much nicer to use, for a surprising number of reasons. Found that we could not use "pip" or "pip3" to install the tkinter stuff to get images to display - this after a silly and complex effort to get PyQt5 successfully installed on a CentOS-7 Linux box. The key point is that "Tkinter" or "tkinter", the new Python3 version, needs to be installed via "dnf" or "yum" (the older version of "dnf", both of which are the package-install tools for CentOS/RedHat.) This is funny, since Tkinter (oops, it's "tkinter" now, I think), is basically just Tcl/Tk 8.5 - which I already use, and have written stuff in that I use everyday.

To install "tkinter", and use the Tcl/Tk canvas in Python to build applications, and display images:
- Become root (with "su)

- then, enter:

yum install python3-tkinter-3*

or, if you are on Ubuntu, use "apt-get" instead of "yum" or "dnf".

Once you have "tkinter" installed, you can display images. You probably also want to install the library: "imageio". One can use "pip" or "pip3" if on a machine that has both Python2 and Python3 installed together. If that is the case, run:

pip3 install imageio

after installing the tkinter stuff.

I will put some sample Python3 test-programs somewhere on this site, at some point.

The front-end to the original Xerion Neural-Net simulator is all Tcl/Tk, but I actually learned Tcl/Tk at Nortel, doing a project to completely fix their broken home-grown Network Management System and take it thru a couple of major software "gates". Nortel - which went bankrupt, and even it's preferred shares fell to zero - was actually a very well-run company, at the engineering-software level.

But the top-management were corrupt, greedy and just plain fucking stupid, to a degree that was quite shocking, truth be told. They all "beat-the-wrap", due to the burden-of-proof requirements in Canadian Securities laws, but it needs to be remembered that they were charged with securities fraud. The whole top crew remains as essentially unconvicted-criminals, in my humble opinion. Nortel was, at one point, the most valuable company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They had a $120/shr stock, and were - like Research in Motion (RIM) - a major Canadian success story. But they blew up and failed, which was just sad and bad, and did not need to happen. So it goes.

The "tkinter" stuff in Python is very good. This means some young developers will probably break it, and/or throw it out, in new variants of Python3. The PyQt5 stuff - like all Qt stuff - is horribly complex and basically quite unnecessary, and is big bloat-ware. This means it will be popular, no doubt.

This process of "software enshitification" is now recognized and actively debated on Hacker News/Ycombinator. It's pretty funny. Software is becoming bloated, horrible, awful and absurd - but there is only so much hoo-haw one can do with screens, keyboards and cellphones. What we have to use at our consoles, cannot really be anymore improved. The key to improvment in software, will be using software to control high-velocity missiles or drone aircraft, or ships or cars. This is much more useful and interesting. The future of software is basically "taking the problematic human out of the loop", so that more can be done, more effectively, and at lower cost.

This will impact medicine, research, weapons-development and deployment, and the driving of one's car and the piloting of one's aircraft. And it is not new. We have had "autopilot" devices in aircraft, since the 1920's. And modern jets have had "auto-flight" capabilities, since the 1980's. These should hopefully, be improvable, and be just getting better. Or maybe not.

It is the "or maybe not" scenario that seems to be rising to take control, now. There is a working level of madness that dominates the world now. There is no question that the current model for Israel will have to change. If they want to have control of Gaza, then they will have to create a modern-style federated State, in which Arab Palestinians have a say in the State government. Otherwise, Gaza remains as a giant "Concentration Camp", and it's citizens will remain as essentially Israeli slaves. Will the Arab States tolerate this abusive insanity? Perhaps for a while - until they can develop and deploy nuclear weapons (or subcontract this work out to the Russians, perhaps), and simply run a tragic-but-necessary cleaning exercise, (much as Israel is now doing in Gaza), but against the "US-warship" that is Israel. We discourage this, of course. A non-religious federal-state, is what Israel should be. But we doubt that the Israeli's will allow this.

The great concern, of course, is that to defeat and remove Israel, it will be necessary to "D3" America. ("D3" is "Degrade, Disrupt and Deny-control", in military/security-speak).

This will impact us here in the Great White North. We have a scenario, which seems possible and rational, given the current level of madness (as an endogenous variable), where this action-requirement triggers a "WW3" cascade - driven entirely by the wild murder-fest that is Israel military policy now.

The Israeli's may well give us the Third World War. We can say this with some certainty, since it is now already playing out. The "Houthi Terrorists" have radar-stations and missile-complexes. They are basically the Government of Yemen, and consider American container supply-ships, loaded with supplies, and missiles for Israel, as legitimate targets off-shore from their coastline. Who can really blame them for targeting this kind of shipping, right out in front of where they live?

Would Americans not to the same, and even more, if their situations were reversed?

There is now zero chance of peace and security in the Middle East, for the long-run (and probably also for the short and intermediate-run), now that the mass-murder campaign of the Israeli's has become visible, and the plans for the removal and subjecation of all Gaza citizens has been so carefully articulated by the Israeli leadership. This is almost a textbook example of genocide - the successful removal of a people, and the erasure of their homeland, and the military destruction of their State. It is impressive in it's scale and planned extent.

Will the other Arab States remain quiet, and accept this? One has to ask, "Are they Human Beings?" Will the Arab and the Iranians acquiesce to this enslavement of 3.1 million people who share their same language, culture and racial-tribal characteristics? Perhaps. But also, we must suggest: perhaps not.

If the current regional wars become somehow linked, then we already have the beginning of what may well become "World War Three". In order to restrain Israel, it will be necessary to limit American power and it's direct, already-operational military influence and support for Israel. American warships will have to be "degraded" somehow. Perhaps blinded by "chaff" (to degrade radar), and sickened by engineered virus-agents. Remember - this is war now, not any kind of chit-chat/talk-talk diplomacy. The Jews have made it clear, that diplomacy is not an option. Gaza and it's citizens are to be erased, and rendered State-less. So in this scenario, all weapons are acceptable. The people in Gaza are now fighting for their very survival.

So, what can be expected? Will Saudi Arabs continue to host American military bases, and kow-tow to US interests? Will the ridiculous animosity between Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (which has been carefully engineered and enabled by the active-actions of the Mossad and other clever disruptors) remain in place? Or will a clever fellow like MBS begin the process of "changing-the-program"?

Why should people who speak a similar language, and share a similar culture, fight so intensely among themselves? Is this not a signature condition of active "agent-provacateur" types who have spent over 40 years trying to damage and degrade Middle East security and prosperity? The Israeli Mossad is a profoundly effective and dangerous entity, which successfully managed to introduce the "Stuxnet" weapon-virus, into Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, to destroy their ultra- centrifuges, and then ensured that the Dutch national who did the deed, was fatally injured in a "motorcycle accident".

It's worth everyone's time, to read the details of the "Stuxnet" weapon-virus, especially as the world of "IoT" ("Internet of Things") expands and AI-techniques are being increasingly used for computer and machine-computer control system. The capacity to D3 a computer-dependent warship will become a military requirement as World War Three progresses (even more so, than it now is.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Given what we have learned, and the current global situation, we cannot discount this "worst-case" of the "worst-case" scenario-sets. There are just certain people with whom no negotiation of any kind is possible. We believe the "economic santions" that are currently being applied against Russia, are deeply unwise, and will *increase* the likelyhood that the Russians will also assume the "Israeli" model of political discourse - ie. "No negotiation of any kind". The Russians have seen the deposits of their Central Bank in Switzerland frozen, and now at risk of being expropriated for Ukraine. Much as we support Ukranian defense efforts in their sad war with Russian, we cannot accept that outright theft of State assets should be allowed. This is just insane, and degrades the basic Western civilization tradition of property-rights. And it also serves to harden the Russian position, and reduce any chance for a peaceful end to the ugly, illegal Russian-Ukrainian war.

So, we are upgrading and hardening our own technology. We've upgraded to the current Firefox browser, due to reported weakness in what we were running. Our operation is tiny and what we do matters not to anyone - but there is no sense in being stupid. We wish others could at least consider this idea.

Markets are advancing in the US (but not in Canada), since there is clear recognition that the Federal Reserve will have to begin reducing interest rates, as the debt-costs in the US are becoming absurd and extreme. If the USA is called upon to gear-up to fight a major war, they are not positioned like they were in the 1930's. Folks forget that the USA was almost debt-free in 1941. The Second World War was a wild boom-time for USA, since they could ramp-up debt, without doing damage to the global value of their currency.

But this might not be the case, now. If the USA were to mount a huge military expenditure leap, the rest of the world might fear for the value of their "reserve currency" assets (the US dollar's valuation), and the 'always strong' US-dollar, might come under pressure. But what would one use instead? Chinese Yuan? Russian Roubles? Or Euro's? Maybe Euros. Except, I read today that Germany is relying on wind-mills for it's electricity, and European regulators have prevented Amazon from buying Roomba, for $1.8-billion (not much money, really, in these modern times), due to fears of a monopoly in robot-vacuum-cleaners. Seriously - I thought it was an "Onion" story or something - but it is actually true! The "European Federal Government" in Brussels is, in our opinion, simply insane. They are nuts - just completely socialist loons.

And this is what is holding up the US dollar, despite the ugly future that the USA seems to be driving towards. The US-dollar is the cleanest dirty-shirt in the hamper. It is the least-ugly girl, in the Ugly-Girl Beauty Contest.

So, the USA markets march upwards, into la-la land of expected lower interest rates, since there is no alternative that is possible. The rates have to come down, since it is an election year, and the dollar gets to stay strong, since everything else is even worse. And don't expect crypto-currency to do well, when a series of Russian (or Chinese) high-altitude fusion-bomb air-bursts, far out in space, but over USA, knocks-out most low-voltage devices with massive electrical current-surges. (This actually happened twice - first from solar-storm activity in 1859, and in Pacific and West-Coast USA, from a single high-altitude H-bomb test.)

We expect a reversal in the declining prices of the financials. The return to a low-interest, moderate-inflation environment, which is the most likely scenario (before the war really gets rolling), will make the almost 7% yields the banks are sporting, sufficiently attractive for defensive investors - and we believe defensive investing is now the most important it has really ever been, since maybe 1935.

[ Jan. 12, 2024 ] - My Dinner with Issac Asimov - This is of course, complete fiction. Yet Dr. Asimov was perhaps one of the most profound influences on my life. With Jews like Asimov, Ricardo and Einstein, it just is not possible to maintain an irrational hatred of the silly fellows. Thare are just too many quite good ones, are their not? It's all quite silly, really. I so wish we could purge all religious and racial nonsense from collective and personal thinking. Everyday, the markets force us to confront our deep-fears and failures. Some for folks have the "gambler's instinct", and enjoy the rush of risk-driven trading efforts. But personally, I rather diislike the process. I only do it, because we need the money to do other things... build robots, run plasma-physics experiments, hack electronics, and so on.

The markets are becoming dangerously predictable, if one has access to the data and to the technology. This is an extremely risky and bizzare situation, which will actually lead to either a cascade-failure of biblical proportions, or a runaway process which spirals into an unstable rush-upward to crazy extreme levels, to be followed by a collapse-event. These are the way these sort of things end.

When the "reset" happens, it will have - we fear - ugly consequences. In history, what typically happens is a bloody great war. And we have now established all the pre-conditions to this sort of wild, runaway disaster-scenario. This will *not* be a "black swan". That bloody great swan is sitting there, with red-eyes, on the horizon, looking at us - looking at everyone - and anyone with any brains or creative vision, can almost certainly see the big bastard.

We now have the Bitcoin ETF's. Oh, just fucking, great, eh? The Dutch called this shit: "Vinhandel" or something like that. It meant "Trading the Air". What old guys who do research learn, is that there is almost NOTHING new in the world. (Except micro-processors, perhaps.) Except these are really just the enabling technology of the "Golem" that was described in literature, hundreds of years ago. Even the ancient Greeks had legends of gods who could create mechanical creatures that would do their magic for them. We've just made it real now.

The robots won't take over. But bad people will use the robots to amplify their power, and their reach, and do great harm to us all. This is certain to happen (and we can say this, since it already is now happening). There are no rules in war.

And, as every intelligent person knows - we are always at war, with a surprising host of real and imagined enemies. One only needed to read the newspaper, back when newspapers were still available. I have a tape, made long ago. It has a song, where the singer requests: "I need an archangel for company..." Such good poetry. We don't want Microsoft's AI virus - literally a new goddamn key on the keyboard, FFS... Worst case scenario, is it not? We must have our OWN robots, not the one's offered by the "Corporate-Government" censorship keidanrans. Otherwise, we will lose all access to any truthful information, completely.

[ Jan. 11, 2024 ] - Scat, Crap, Sh/t and Pap - An interesting and nasty trend has become apparent. Not only is everything going to a curious kind of hell in real time, in the real world, but a curious trend on the internet is growing. Online *news* and other information sources are not just disappearing behind paywalls, the non-paywalled gardens of actual, real data, are turning into - as one writer characterizes it - *AI dogshit*.

A blog-site contains this interesting gem:

https://aftermath.site/the-internet-is-full-of-ai-dogshit

This trend towards "machines just talking to machines" has infected (and damaged, in our opinion) the world of markets, for some time now. The "AI dogshit" in the world of finance, is of course, algorithmic trading, which has zero value for price-discovery. This is just a fact of life. And it is really nothing new, since every clever bastard seeks an edge to allow himself to take some money from the public marketplace.

But it is worse now - in every field. I have personally watched in horror, sadness and outright revulsion, as the Israeli death-squads are replaced by AI-driven "kinetic-kill" bombing methods, which allow so-called low-level "Hamas Targets" to be murdered in their homes, along with their wives and children. This is really a fascinating outcome, since it matches quite closely, the historical trend in most scientific, industrial and technological development. (First it is thought-up, then it is engineered, and typically the first use, is in weapons-design and development to allow better and more effective kill-rates in conflict. )

We are, of course, not "anti-war" protest-types. Anyone who has ever done Government work, knows that Government is mostly concerned with protecting and extending Government. All institutional organs are driven by the survival and growth instinct. First there is diplomacy. Then it becomes war. This is a basic model most agency organs and all Governments accept. One cannot escape from this truth.

But the AI tech introduces a real wild-card. The danger is not "AI/Robots will take over!". That is simply nonsense and foolishness. The ugly truth is that AI first disrupts and degrades human discourse. You cannot now know if ANY information you access is even human-created. This assaults basic social integrity. Once no-one can trust anything or anyone, then it becomes much easier to dominate them - and kill at scale. We are seeing - mostly - AI being put to nefarious and nasty use - and this process is happening at an impressive "internet-speed".

So, take care. Not only do we face: "Everything You Know Is Wrong" issues (like we faced back in the 1970's, after the boom-time of the 1960's, where we could build working interplanetary spaceships with drafting tables and 8-bit computers), we also now face "Everything You Access is Fake".

This is step one. Step two, is of course: "Everything You Have Will Be Taken", and then you get to live in that pod, and eat those bugs.

We have no choice but to embrace the new AI tech. But we also need to have the options to prevent it from killing us all, at scale. Especially since that is clearly the direction things are moving towards. This is not "conspiracy theory" nonsense. This is just the way technology develops, and gets deployed.

Regulation is certainly NOT the answer. The key requirement is for defensive-AI, if we are to be targeted by offensive AI. There is no choice here. This WILL happen (easy forecast to make) because it clearly already IS happening.

Our approach is simple. AI-technology must be deployed LOCALLY - for each END USER, for each INDIVIDUAL. AI tech must be accessable and LOCAL so that EACH INDIVIDUAL can use this technology, and not just have it deployed and offered by the super-rich, hyper-powerful technology-control organs - the Google's, the Microsoft's the Apple's and the Meta's. That is a path to AI-hell, and an "Internet of Shit" (IoS).

We are pro-capitalist pro-markets economists, and do not seek regulation or even breakup of the tech-monopolists and ologopolists.

We just want some ability - as Big AI Brother takes control and watches everything - to allow each "Little Brother" to watch back, and have his/her own technology - from Nvidia-enabled AI neural engines, to a cabinet full of AR-15's.

The horror-shows of abusive murder-invasions in Ukraine and Israel have shown conclusively the absolute necessity of humans having personal, LOCALIZED, defensive technology. Without such technology (which the founding-fathers of the USA wisely recognized, and made their Second Upgrade to their wise Constitution), the nation and the entire community of free men and free women, can be first lost, and then destroyed.

It's all right there, in the historical details. Really. AI is just a new weapon. And this powerful weapon must not be held and used by only the "Big Strong Rich Guys". This weapon must be available to EVERYONE, if peace, sanity and social+economic freedom is to remain in place for us here in North America.

[ Jan. 10, 2024 ] - RUR : Rossum's Universal Robots - That was the title of the famous play, and book, by Karel Capek, the Czech writer, who wrote it in the 1920. There is so nothing new. We live in the same world now, as the 1920's, with the same curious characteristics - except we really have the robots now. RUR was like a mix of basically "Blade Runner" + "Frankenstein". The author, Karel Capek, invented the word: "robot", which comes from Czech word: "robotnik", which means "worker". You can read the play at Project Gutenberg, by clicking the link below:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59112/59112-h/59112-h.htm

Modern robots are often partly developed with the popular language, Python, which comes in many flavours. It is popular as a glue-language, which can be used glue-together many useful routines and libraries of various kinds, to achieve just about anything that can be done on a computer.

We've been doing a little project with Python - converting stuff from Python 2.7.14 to various flavours of Python 3.6.8 to Python 3.11.5. I finally got the code working correctly on the Linux machines last nite. We had problems with opencv-python, which appear to have been resolved by the latest version (communication between threads was not working right, so pixmaps were trying to display, before the code to set them up was completed, and so on. I had to ugrade the "libpng" to latest version also, due to a missing reference to "png_get_eXIf_1", which is in the header file (the .h files).

The libpng library can be upgraded from source. Download the source from their website, "tar -xvf" the .xv source file, and it builds a directory of source. If you have a recent gcc installed, you need only cd to the source directory and do the usual: ./configure, make, make install sequence to get libpng16 installed (in /usr/local/lib, where it may or may not be found by programs needing it). We moved the include headers to /usr/include and the object libraries to /usr/lib64, and adjusted libpng so it was certain to be found. Run "ldconfig" to check.

We used "pip install opencv-python", which gets and compiles/builds the latest opencv-python version, to resolve the thread mis-commmunication issues and the resulting pixmap display issue, but there remained a need to upgrade to "libpng16". Since I was not building from source, I could not tweak the LD_LIBRARAYPATH setting for Linux, and even after upgrading libpng16 (with ./configure, make, make install), the install for libpng16 put the include header files into /usr/local/include and the share object library (.so and .a files) into /usr/local/lib.

Our flavour of Linux need them to be in /usr/include and /usr/lib64. Once the libpng16 header files (three source .h files) were moved to /usr/include/libpng, and the latest libpng16.so was moved to /usr/lib64 (and all the soft links were fixed so that libpng -> libpng16.so which is also a soft link which points to the actual /usr/lib64/libpng16.so.16.40.0 library file), the opencv-python code (which allows one to work with graphics display and image-file), could be installed vi Python "pip".

Note: One has to *remove* the existing pip installed cache stuff, since pip will not re-compile and rebuild, if it finds built object files in it's cache. Uninstall (which is "pip uninstall opencv-python" does not uninstall the compiled object libraries for opencv-pything. You can examine the cached Python stuff, with "pip list cache" and remove existing cached code, with "pip cache remove (name of thing to remove)", which in our case was: "pip cache remove opencv-python". Then, once the libpng16 stuff is correctly updated, the "pip install opencv-python" worked, and we could start Python, (with command: "python3", since there is also a regular "python" on the older Linux machines, which is python2, of course), and "import cv2" and we could load and save image files with cv2.imread and cv2.imwrite, successfully. (I will try to write up all this in more detail, and put it somewhere on this site. Getting Python3 to run smoothly on the Linux boxes is a major milestone for use, since we can now convert our Python2 stuff to the modern Python3 environment, which runs the same on Windows, MacOS and Linux (if it is all configured and built correctly.) Much (most?) scientific programming is now done in Python (or at least is glued-together, using Python).

"Pip" is the install process for Python library modules, of which there are *many*. These tools can provide astonishing capability, and are very useful. The command "pip 'help'" will provide options of the pip command. On a CentOS-7 Linux, "yum install python" will install Python 3.6.8. The most current version of opencv-python is version: 4.9.0.80, and it fixes the thread-synchro problem many report.

Using Python or Python3, one always wants "Matplotlib". You install it with "pip3 install matplotlib", from command line. I installed using root. You might not want to, but it works. One caveat is key: You will need to "yum install python3-devel", to get the python.h header file, which PIL and Pillow (image libraries) will need, to install Matplotlib.

One more critical thing: I had to install the Python3 libraries for "PyQt5" to get Matplotlib to actually show anything. It gets built with "agg" backend, which has no gui (graphic user interface), so you cannot see any plots! On older Linux boxes (and on my newer machines also), I have Tcl/Tk installed and configured and it runs well. On the older Python2 versions, which I build from source, I just enabled "Tck/Tk" or "Tkagg" or something like that, when building Python2 from source code. But when one installs from "yum install python3", there is no default palette or code for "Tkagg" so Matplotlib will not display anything, which is annoying and silly. The solution - for us at least - was just to install PyQt5 using pip, and the CentOS-7 X-windows environment could display graphics. This was just "pip3 install PyQt5", from command line, which installs: PyQt5 5.12, PyQt5-Qt5 5.12.2 and PyQt5-sip 4.19.19. One has to use "pip3", otherwise on older Linux machines, you will run pip for Python 2.7. This worked, and Matplotlib would indicate it has backend as "Py5Agg", if I recall correctly. Test Matplotlib on Python3 interpreter with this simple program:

(from command-line) $ python3 #--- or maybe just python, if you only have python3 installed
(shows Python 3.x version number)
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
>>> x = ([3, 4, 8, 17, 22, 37])
>>> plt.plot(x)
>>> plt.show()
>>> #--- you return to python3 interpreter after you close the plot window


The above code should display a simple plot, if Matplotlib is configured correctly with a working "backend". Exit python3 (which may be called just "python" on a modern machine) with the python command "exit()". The brackets are needed, since every command in Python is a function. (Python is "objected oriented", of course.)

Another note; You probably need to upgrade Pip, the Python module loader and builder program. Do this on CentoS-7, after getting the Python3-devel stuff, with: "pip3 install --upgrade pip". This takes pip from version 9 to version 21.3.1. This is needed to get PyQt5 to install. Once "pip3" is upgraded to pip3 version 21.3.1, the "pip install PyQt5" will be able to find PyQt5-Qt5 version 5.15.2, and it might actually install successfully. Once PyQt5 is fully installed (three modules, check with "pip3 list"), then matplotlib should be able to draw a plot on your screen.

Note two libraries you probably want, if using Python3 for any data-science work: sklearn and scipy. But note that "sklearn" is now called "scikit-learn". Do this to get the modules installed:

pip3 install scipy (from command line, of course, as root, or use the --user flag..)
pip3 install scikit-learn (from command line, of course, as root, or use the --user flag..)

Lots of issues getting opencv-python to work. Once libpng16 updated, on one Linux box, the attempt to run "cv2.imshow('Image',img)" would fail with a message to load the "gtk2-devel" library (if on Linux). In CentOS-7, one does this with "yum install gtk2-devel", as root. This worked, to allow the "opencv-python" library (version: 4.9.0.80) to be installed successfully, and to work correctly - under CentOS-7, with the "gtk2-devel" libraries loaded.

I will try to put all this info in better format, in a more sensible place. Just collecting it here, as I try to upgrade another machine.

These upgrades to baseline Linux software are often necessary, and require building library code from source, of course ("My Kingdom for a horse!"...) One endures this complexity, because the Linux evironment is CONTROLABLE. IF it does not work at first on Linux, you can almost AWAYS fix your robot. This is very important, if your robot does things which are critical to your prosperity and survival! If it does not work on a Windows or Apple Mac machine, you are just checkmated, and often completely fucked.

There are always crazy errors - we needed the opencv-python libraries and of course Matplotlib, and it is the Linux environment I prefer to use. On the Windows-11 platforms, the install and conversion was not difficut - but on Linux - our old CentOS-7 boxes, it was a tad more involved. Some software upgrades were needed - from source.

But I got it all working last nite, and it runs snappy nice. :)

The irony of the most important software maker/designer being called "Guido Rossum" (the inventor of Python), is pretty significant, for a history freak like me. Python is an insanely brilliant thing - much like APL. I met Ken Iverson (the inventor of APL), and he was hilariously rude and opinionated, rather like Nassem Taleb. I completely understand why IBM fired him. The Iversons are fine people (they built this weird language, called J, which is like APL, but has no array-indexing.) I found it to be unusable, overly obtuse and abusively pedantic.

It's always funny when you meet and converse with your heros. A kind-hearted old Christian soul like me (who does not believe in god, of course), always expects people to operate with basic courtesy and so on. Usually, this is not the case, which is comically silly, since we all end up in the same graveyards (or more likely, dusty, wind-blown particles of ash...). Many of these famous people are just plain mean, nasty and arrogant to the point of comedy. They become living caracatures of what most business folks just call: "a$$holes".

The "Vonnegut Term" is all that can be applied: "So it goes."

I feel sometimes like Dr. F, in the movie, "Young Frankenstein"... "My Name is FRANKENSTEIN!".

"Could be worse." ... "Could be raining."

[ Jan. 03, 2024 ] - Damned If You Do, And Double-Damned If You Don't - Truly a curious time now. I've warned folks about the "January Defect", which is the modern inversion of the old "January Effect", which would cause equities to be bid up, somewhat. What we get now, is the reactive-response to that old model, and lately, January typically now sucks, and sucks with an ugly wealth-destroying intensity. Just too many clever players, all playing to be clever.

So, all the old, sad Blues songs can be applied. But hey, could be worse, right? One could be living in the Gaza Ghetto, and be being firebombed by the "Evil BlueStar-Monsters From Hell", also known as the "Israeli Defense Force". We just think it is curiously awful, how the Jews of Israel think that murdering women and children by bombing their houses, is actually a form of "national defense". The Israeli people are truly the worst human creatures that inhabit this planet now. Interesting to see how successful these ugly Jew-people have been. They have succeeded in extracting over $300 billion US dollars, from American taxpayers, to fund the construction of their cities, built on stolen land, and the creation of a massive, nuclear-armed military murder-force, that is breathtaking in it's impressive capacity for extreme violence. It is unwise to hate these folks. The wise action is to plan for how we shall have to deal with the extreme threat they represent. Their economic agents live among us now, and they seek to successfully assault anyone who critiques their ugly behaviour, using clever methods of modern propaganda and neural-warfare. There are those among us who represent a clear and significant danger to modern Western civil society. There is no question about this at all. It is sadly, most clear. Anyone who ignores this obvious fact, is unwise and actively dishonest.

In this world now, there is little to be gained, by writing or talking. It is only through action - and extreme action at that - that anything of value can be accomplished or gained. The world favours men (and women) of action, and so we see a future of military confrontation as the one most likely to evolve forward from here. This is a grim forecast, and we, of course, wish this was not the case. A violent world, characterized by harsh contention for resources, is going to be a nasty and dangerous place to reside within. Tribal loyalty will likely be all that can be trusted, and even that will often fail, when appropriate incentives are put in place. Truly, we are astonished at how easily people can be swayed by basic incentives. Very few have any sort of core-belief systems that they will not adjust for their own gain.

So, we caution that the times are going to become progressively more violent, nasty, and difficult, for most of the world's population. This is really the only way it can play out now. We see profoundly unwise and deeply dishonest people in positions of power everywhere now. This is disturbing, but it cannot be denied. The United States, in particular, is in active crisis, with a dishonest and abusive Federal Administration, that has actively opened it's southern border to allow unrestricted in-migration of virtually anyone who shows up. Canada is doing roughly the same thing, with somewhat more careful attention to only accepting people-of-colour. This is curious, but of course this action serves to weaken and degrade the existing, traditional Canadian social-matrix. This serves the interest of the Leftists that currently control the Federal Government, and the constant state of economic-crisis ensures that they can remain in power, despite the fact that the majority of Canadians do not want the Government we have. Again, one sees an effective strategy by dishonest and abusive fraudsters. This is the pattern now, in much of politics and business in our country. Little can be done to change this, sadly. It is an established pattern.

So, we are all basically fucked. Short of a complete, full-on revolution, where the criminals and cheaters are dragged from their large offices, and are hung from lampposts, I can't see any solution to the current de-evolutionary process that seems to be unfolding. False-crisis events are engineered to mis-direct public attention. The best one of course, is "Climate Change" - a complete and extreme fraud that allows it's grifter-agents to travel at the public expense to warm-climate conferences in the winter! This, while the rest of us worry how we will pay our electricity and heating bills! It is so completely a lie, and yet it is so effective, that it is quite astonishing.

There will be great costs because of this. Wise leadership is very rare, and we are now embedded withing a time where wisdom has truly left the building. Each of us has to craft a survival strategy, to be implemented as things continue to degrade. We do not see any real opportunity in any field or area now. The AI technology is particularly ugly and disappointing. It's most effective use-case, is in targeting people's houses, for bombing campaigns. This is nausea-inducing, for those of us in AI research. After nausea, comes anger. And what is next after that? We all know.

We are truly on our own now. The year ahead looks curiously grim. Best of luck to everyone.

[Tiny Update] Fucking Bill Ackman succeeded in getting Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign. Truly just hilarious. Bill decides that racism against white-jewboys is actually racism. Can't argue with that, eh? The whole episode is the tragedy part. I am looking forward to when Bill Ackman, the rich-bully-boy jew, gets hoisted on his own petard, and so we can see the comedy part of this shitshow. The shit-silly examples of Claudine Gay's so-called are "plagiarism" are hilarious. She was quoting explicit black-letter law, so it is hard to really call it plagiarism. But so it goes. DEI is complete bullshit, of course. Any sane person can see that. But it is impressive to see the power that rich-bully-boy jews have in USA (and elsewhere). Any criticism of a jew - and suddenly you are hate-spewing "antisemite", which is also complete bullshit, equivalent to the nonsense of DEI. I think Dr. Gay should have made the dick-biters of Harvard actually fire her. And then, get several thousand students to participate in a slow-walk as she leaves the campus, to a neutral location where jew-blue-star flags could be burnt and spit on. If your gonna be hung for a lamb, why not also a sheep? Truly hilarious. But it shows the dangerous power of the big rich jews in USA now.

The question now, is how does USA bring down that evil rich bastard, Ackman? They need to nail him to an insider-trading scandal or maybe Epstein's "Let's-Fuck-Little-Kids" business efforts. Or maybe a pound of white blow found inside his private office? "Something / anything...", as MBS might say. Or maybe just a "Putin Solution"? We wait in quiet .... anticipation.

[ Dec. 23, 2023 ] - The Vile, the Horrible and the Grotesque - We enter a strange future now. The behaviour of the Jews, with their abusive, horrific mass-murder campaign in Gaza, will now enter the history-books, alongside the gas-chambers of their historical assertions of the "holocaust", as history-changing examples of human cruelty.

There were German analysts and even German National Socialists, who warned that the crimes being committed against European Jews during the Second World War, would risk doing great damage to Germany. This certainly proved to be the case. The Jews died - possibly in the millions - as a result of an evil campaign to remove them from German and European society.

And we now see a curiously similar and significant threat to America. The American political matrix and it's active media speak a lot about "Democracy", "Freedom" and "Human Rights". But with America's active and murderous military support of this current campaign of mass-murder in Gaza, the extra-ordinary scale and extent of American hipocrisy becomes evident.

The USA is now actively seen by many to be a nation that supports and protects the most abusive and grotesque war-criminal actions that have ever been observed in modern times. The Israeli's are actively and systematically destroying an entire city-state of over 3 million human-beings. This does not yet quite equal the asserted death-toll of the historical European "holocaust" - but it is beginning to come close. There is an act of depravity and horror that is now unfolding in real-time, which rivals the crimes the Jews were subjected to - but now being carried out by Israeli Jews against Arab women and children. This is an evil action.

And this Israeli action will damage and degrade America. It is simply not possible for America to mouth-speak any sort of communication regarding "Human rights", "Democracy" and "Freedom", without giving the appearance of an evil, grotesque and dishonest hypocrite. America's message to the world - and the the future - is one of pure, Orwellian "Double-Speak".

This will damage America, and American interests, far in the future. The Great American media machine will increasingly be seen for what it is - an Israeli-supporting collective of disinformationalists.

And every nation linked to Jewish forces that support this horror-show of hypocracy will be degraded as well, we suspect.

In the USA, even senior military people are warning that America's unquestioning support for the Israeli entity, should at the very least, be re-examined. It is obviously NOT in America's interests to support atrocity and State-terrorism. And yet this occurs, and thus violence, war, death and destruction is unleashed regularly on the Arab world. Iran seems to be a *manufactured* enemy, created more by American Jewish interests, than by events on the ground. US President Obama attempted to correct the Israeli-driven constant-conflict model of the Middle-East, but Trump chose to unwind everything, and also cut-and-run from Afghanistan. Nothing changed with the ineffectual and unwise Joe Biden, and so war, violence and hate is the result.

A US military commander urges a "re-think" of this massive and curious support of the Israeli entity, pointing out that USA taxpayers have sent over $300 billion dollars to Israel since 1948. And what has been the result? An entire swath of the World, now sees this extreme example of American hipocrisy, and the dangerous threat that American warships, and F-16 fighter-bombers represent. America is damaged by this. And this is especially so, when American military support is used to mass-murder women and children, by explicit design.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2023/12/21/its_time_to_rethink_american_support_for_israel_1000348.html

Is it really a good idea, for this much money, to be sent to this kind of political entity, so that the American flag can be seen as a symbol of horror, fear, hatred and revulsion?

And how can we know that this is true, and certain? How does one know these kind of deep truths? Because this knowledge etches itself on one's heart. When I see Netanyahu standing in front of those blood-soaked Israeli "blue-star-of-david" flags, that is exactly the reaction I have. I feel this deep revulsion and disgust, mixed with anger and hate. And I know that this is not a good thing. Not all Jews are evil persons or murderous social-economic cancer.

But it does not matter what I feel. What matters, is what happens as mass-events drive history forward, and shape the politics and economics that we must deal with, in order to live.

I have this quiet, and deep concern, that Hamas has carried out the same kind of curious and significant victory, that Jesus Christ himself carried out, by allowing the Romans to execute him as a common criminal, in an ugly and public way. Who won that "war"? Jesus, the son of a jewish carpenter, died for an idea. He was a brilliant speaker, and even indicated that people must pay their taxes, and support the State. It was not the Roman administration of Palestine that insisted on his murder. Pontius Pilot saw no obvious benefit from executing a man who offered no threat to Roman authority. It was the local "religious" persons who demanded his death.

And what was the result? Whatever religious beliefs one has are irrelevant. The key fact is that the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, engendered the creation of the most significant and world-changing social, political, and economic change. Rome became a Christian entity. The Roman Empire disolved, but Roman Church authority grew, and remains operational, 2000 years later. This is impressive. In recent history, millions of European Jews were transported and executed. But what happened to Germany? It was destroyed, divided and nearly erased as an entity.

Look at Japan, and Japanese militarism, which suffered two city-destroying nuclear-bomb attacks. They recovered. And the greatest risk they now face, comes from their close association with America, as much as it does from China's growing power.

The current Gaza "holocaust" will drive history forward in a predictable manner: It will ensure that the race-based Jewish Israeli entity will eventually be removed, in some manner, possibly not for 50 or 100 years, since to remove this entity, it will first be necessary for America to be degraded, and it's military hegemonic power to be degraded or effectively supressed. We are not in favour of this, nor are we suggesting that this is currently possible.

But it WILL happen, at some point. The revolting stench of American hipocrisy is just too much for most folks to bear. The Russians behave very badly, but the Americans seem to now be acting insane - they have a government that seems to acting against both the will of the people, and basic American political and economic interests. It would make vastly more sense for America to support Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and just withdraw all economic and military support for Israel.

Such action would be rational and also in the interests of basic justice.

But the powerful Jewish forces that have control of American politics and American media, can probably prevent this from happening - for now.

When it DOES happen, eventually, then that will be a victory for Hamas. But it will also mean a weaker and degraded America. This will affect us here in the north part of North America, but if it is coincident with the Israeli's being pushed into the sea, and drowned like rats, then it is a cost we shall have to prepare to absorb, since it is certain to happen, at some distant future time.

It would be far wiser and better for the entire world, if this conflict could be avoided, and a non-race-based political entity could be created in Palestine. But the stubborn nature of the hate-driven Jews, will ensure that does not happen. And the current Two-State model is dead, according to Netanyahu and the Israeli fascists. So violence and violent conflict is the only option remaining.

And thus it is *certain* - without question now - that violence will continue to grow, as there is no way for non-Israeli Palestinians to have any sort of freedom or security, until the vile, murderous Israeli "killers-of-women-and-children" are removed from the shores of the Mediterranian Sea. This will be the Arab view, and no other will really be possible in the years ahead. And since Israel is supported by the American military hegemon, the thinking will be that ugly problem of America itself will have to be addressed.

So, for the future, the "Jewish Problem" now looks to become the "American Problem", and this deep concern will act to drive history for the next 100 years.

The smartest thing the Americans could do, would be cut all ties with Israel, and remove ALL Israeli supporters from America, and deport them to Israel. Of course, this will not happen. But removing American Jewry would free America, and allow it to return to being a nation driven by desires for justice and freedom, and not just another corrupt nation-state seeking to engineer the mass-murder of those who are not even a threat to it.

But the Jewish influence in America now means that America must become an enemy to the World, and this is simply insane. This should not happen. But it will.

What is disturbing and grotesque, is that - short of just removing the Jewish influence - there is not likely any way to prevent this ugly outcome. Hamas gets it's ultimate victory.

[ Dec. 22, 2023 ] - Plowing the Fields of Regret - near a town called Alice? No, wrong colony.. It was Germany, IIRC. Truly unsure here. But perhaps it's all pretty for you. Really time to change the program. The "UN-Security Council" is a joke. America is helping Israel do flat-out mass-murder, while trying to look like some kind of noble entity.

Russis is also trying to look like the good-guys, and the mass-murder victims in Gaza now exceed 20,000 people, mostly women and children. The ugly war in Ukraine continues. I wonder if USA President Biden will be eventually charged as a war criminal? The entire administration of "justice" in both USA and Russia is looking bad. American operatives are trying to attack former President Trump and prevent him from running in the November election, despite Trump continuing to poll better than Biden - who is now rated one of the worst Presidents in USA history, according to the opinion polls.

The entire political world is looking more than just a little insane. We are actually working on a scenario that suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines are perhaps responsible for making people crazy - en mass. There clearly is some kind of curious process driving a lot of political and aconomic activity - maybe it was mostly from the lockdowns, or perhaps it is a result of anger and frustration at the twisted economics that are being seen everywhere.

There is weirdness in the public sphere - and idiotic foolishness seems to be running rampant.

How can the USA President support and encourage a military campaign of mass-murder of mainly women and children? Are the Jews really this powerful and dangerous, or is this just the result of madness on the part of the US Democratic Leftists? The Right-Wing Republicans also believe it's all OK, and that mass-murder of women and children is a legitimate political exercise.

To us, this just seems completely insane. This entire political event - the Hamas attack, and the wildly over-the-top reprisal murder-campaign by right-wing Israeli fascists - this event will change the dynamics in the Arab world, and may provoke a revolution in Saudi Arabia. We are curious just how effectively the lid is being kept on things. There is an impressive mainstream-media blackout of the pictures of the streets litered with rotting corpses, and the images of the dead children, and murdered women are not shown, of course.

And it is interesting to see just how completely and totally worthless and ineffective the United Nations now is. The entire organization is shown to be basically a fraud.

The money that is directed from Northern countries to the UN, is a waste and a true, perfect example of a mis-allocation of resources. The whole UN entity is designed to provide cover for USA and Russia - and soon maybe China - to allow for insane murder exercises, and out-of-control extreme violence, to be used as political tools.

We are - as a species - no further ahead than we were 2000 years ago. We can just print bigger numbers - for both costs and persons-killed - for the wars.

There seems to have been no social progress whatsoever. We know this assertion is not true. But looking at the Jews, and their behaviour in Palestine, and the curiously dishonest and kill-happy Amerians, it just seems to be true. Mass-murder is all OK, again, just like it was in Roman times. or during the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Netenyahu is not Hitler - but he does need to be Hitler, to kill like a Hitler. This is interesting.

We think this is just nuts.

Have some nuts for Christmas, I guess. Happy "Holidays"... :/

[ Dec. 21, 2023 ] - The Equity Culture Club? - Do you really want to hurt me? (and the Market answers: "Hell, yah!") These are curious times. It seems yesterday, some big doods decided to put on a massive gosh-darn position in a "butterfly-put" configuration in the Options market - maybe or maybe not a ODTE (Zero day to expiry), but maybe it was a 2 day to expiry? Means today and tomorrow could get weird. The guys taking the other-side of the options-trade, had to do a bunch of massive sells maybe, to ensure they could be safely on the other side of the honking-big put that they wrote, if it got exercised in a downburst of price action. I am just guessing here - I have zero knowledge of what the hell actually caused the shitstorm yesterday. The "butterfly-put" idea was tossed around, and I saw something about it on the internet. You know, that internet-thing, where everyone tells the truth (cough, cough ... barf..)

Life is short. Enjoy what you have, while you have it. Like Warren Zevon said: "Enjoy every sandwitch".

Cotillion SD-9034 - find it, and see if you can find Miss Linda Lee. Like the market teaches: "If you want it so fast, don't you know, it ain't gonna last. ... all those other people, trying to use up the night. .... Ya better cool it down." And yes, it certainly is the Beginning of a New Age - "Paths of Pain" to "Jewels of Glory". I miss Lou, and David too. They only live now on black vinyl and grey neurons.

[ Dec. 20, 2023 ] - Send Lawyers, Guns and Money... This Market is in Trouble. - Goddamn hell, here we go again. Our little bad-arsed bank-stock is rolling over like injured road-kill again today, just before it dies. The pattern is the same every goddamn day. A pop in the AM, to suck in the punters, and then a long slow slide as a dumpster full of smelly equity is unloaded on the quacking ducks. The daily shitstorm of TSX trading for our little thing, for the whole day is maybe 1 million shares - and in the last 200 or 300 nano-seconds, five fucking million shares are crossed, using "market-on-close" trickery.

This is starting to look a lot like the horrible-awful 1970's. We get a puking market, and double-digit inflation, and bugger-all economic opportunities, and the Federal Government here quietly continues to detonate things related to sanity and old-fashioned English-style "Good Government". At least in the USA, where you also get "Bad Government", you can find ways to make some money. But here, it is a bit different. In this fair land, if you put your goddamn head up too high, some arse-face toady will get all his buddies in the ABC's to start taking pot-shots at you. It's kind of weird, actually.

I am trying to figure out if the new guy our little Bank hired as CEO can save the goddamn ship. Given another puke-day of watching the share-price ride down the double-black-diamond ski slope, I am starting to get pretty fucking worried, truth be told. Everything everywhere seems to be quietly breaking. In USA land, they worry about "quiet quiting", and in China, it is called either "Laying Flat" or "Let it Rot". (In Japan they are already in full-crisis mode. And in Korea, they are quietly shitting themselves, as their real-estate bets implode, due to the rate-shock..)

I've been doing the cross-sectional textual research stuff, which is usually bullsh/t - but for our little Bank, it has been an ugly and interesting research project. The entire "Preferred Share" market in Canada is dead and/or dying. It's sad and interesting, for a whole bunch of reasons I can't really talk about. And I can't even write about the sh/t I found out - except it makes me feel ill and puke-prone, as is pretty much how I feel all the time now. I write this silly blog, to document things, because my best trades have often been when I have to go vomit a little bit - or drink a glass of straight rum to settle my stomach. (Note: I really do NOT recommend this. This is bad. What I do to pay the bills is a bad idea, and I only do it 'cause we need the money, ok? "Don't try this at home", as the wags say...)

I pretty much know what is happening now, and why, and I am pretty sure we will all be just fine. But truly, NO ONE really knows the future. Who would have predicted Hamas could be so fucking stupid, or that Russia could return to being evil and lie-crazy cruel, like their ancient-model? It's nuts. It's all quite mad. USA has a corrupt old man with a "family business" of hyper-grifting, and the other guy is getting "lawfare" attacked by corrupt State legislatures, trying to "fix" the 2024 USA election. If you are an American, you had better be polishing your pieces, because to repair your broken government, you might just have to go full "Che Guevara" the next time ya' all visit the big Capitol. If the democratic process is rigged and broken, then the action has to be taken to the streets. This is what history shows us again and again and again. The big wheel of history has to "revolve", yes?

We expect INFLATION, not CRASH or REVOLUTION for 2024. And with INFLATION, all the numbers go up.

Why? Because INFLATION is better, and less destructive than violent in-the-streets revolution, and also better than a ripping big asset-crash. But INFLATION is still a problem, and it always will be, since it ruins - just like the wildly insane and stupid ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) madness - does as well. You must have a positive rate of return on capital, especially for the little guys. Otherwise, the finance-and-investment economic algorithm just does not work.

A key point now: Do not have debt, even if we expect INFLATION. There is a real chance, given the curiously unwise economic gain-riding that Central Banks have been engaging in, that we could all flip violently from INFLATION to DEFLATION, like occured in the 1930's. We put a low probability on this outcome. But it is not zero. Maybe 5% to 10% likely. But no one really knows. (Gain-riding is a recording-studio technique, where quiet parts of the song are boosted, and loud parts are dialed-back. In the old days, a recording-engineer worked the sliders - now, companders can be programmed to tweak and adjust the output waveforms - which is often why music can sound like sterile shit.)

I will have to listen to the "Trinity Sessions" again, while I drink that glass of rum. At least it will not be Jonestown "Kool-Aid"... (I hope!). The "Trinity Sessions" by the Cowboy Junkies, was recorded by a genius who just died recently, named Peter Moore. He used, I think, just one mike, and yet it sounds so fine and authentic. I met Margo Timmins after a concert years ago. Fine lady and a real artist. There was a time, when things were really very good. But as we all know, nothing beautiful lasts.

In the 1970's, we had crashing markets, rising inflation, and rising interest rates, which caused all sorts of ugly economics. It was called "Stagflation" - real economic recession, high unemployment, but combined with ugly (more than 10%) inflation. To fix this mess, Volker raised rates to over 20%, and MANY businesses failed. It was brutal. But it worked. This time, however, everyone knows this will not work, since it will collapse both the private sector AND The public sector, since there is too much debt. So the inflationary model, is the least-awful choice. But perhaps the folks in charge are too arrogant and too stupid to even open any of the history books. So they might try this, and blow everything to hell. We put a 5% to 10% probability on this outcome.

So, the 80% to 90% probability is for highish (but still slightly below or near zero real rates) combined with a bumpy, no-return but no-crash market environment, and a general worsening of economic conditions and general economic opportunity. This is because there is not a technological fix to help us this time. AI is interesting, but it will only help military folks kill better. There is no real gain in the commercial world likely, since truly NO ONE wants to talk to a "Chat Bot" to get a problem resolved, and electric cars and lawnmowers are stupid and annoying, and also VERY expensive.

The World will just be harder and more difficult, and less attractive for everyone, except the very wealthy. And it might not be nice for them either, if the conflicts continue to grow.

You might want to buy farmland, or lake-front property, WAY far away from major urban centres. And buy some iodine thyroid pills. And a diesel generator, and a big tank of diesel fuel. And a bunch of freeze-dried food. And ammo, for that deer-rifle, of course. Whatever... :)

[ Dec. 18, 2023 ] - This Is Not A Pipe - This is a picture of a pipe. The artists are often able to tell us, aren't they. Art and literature and science and politics - and even economics - they all hold hands and dance the ever-circling skeletal family dance (from 5th cut, side two, "Diamond Dogs" album, by David Bowie).

Hard times coming. Will make 1930's, look like a "Golden Age", maybe. I look at the markets, and something is very wrong. The market is curiously not the market anymore. In Canada, this is probably due to the various "dark pool" markets that operate outside of visible scrutiny by public investors. This is a very bad thing, of course, but our regulatory agency operatives are clueless. They are now just a bunch of clerical women, who work for a few bankers and politicians who wisely remain in the background. Nothing is gained, by showing one's true face. We seem to be entering a new social construct, where mass-murder of civilian populations is considered "no problem", and some real dark, dangerous folks have their nasty little hands on the levers of power.

The Israeli IDF (Insane Destructive Freaks?) have now started shooting their own Israeli hostages. Have you noticed that ALL NEWS about the Gaza Murder War has disappeared from the public airwaves, and even from the internet news feeds? Noticed that? It's interesting.

Every nation has had - or will have - a "Holocaust" in it's historical record. Japan suffered two nuclear-bomb attacks. Russia had over 20 million citizens killed in the 2nd World War - that was more than the entire population of Canada at the time. Germany was destroyed completely, and China became full-Communist because of World War Two, and entered a dark-age of hell, that only ended after the mass-murder exercise of Tiannamen Square.

Our World seems to be run by psychopathic killers and thieves that know no limit to their insanity. Even little Canada, at one point, in an act of truly hilarious racism actually rounded up all it's Japanese-Canadian population, stole all their property, and put everyone with a Japanese name, in Concentration Camps for the duration of World War Two (and that was, of course, a "Liberal" Government - the most notorious abusers of those good old "True North Strong and FREE" kinds of freedom.

The markets are showing a curious reaction. The "November-to-Remember" did not come to Canadian Bank stocks, as these have been beaten down by the rise in interest-rates - which kill the value of those "HTM" and "AFS" bonds that backstop bank capital. And the other problem is that bankers don't want to do banking much anymore. They want to do "Wealth Management", and grift-on to some fellows little income stream, and pocket some for themselves. Many advisors are herd-followers, and rule-followers and Mutual Fund salesmen - not really the kinds of folks you want anywhere near your precious capital. Small percentages taken on a regular basis can let you bleed to death quite effectively. The good money is made in banking, not grifting. But grifting is so much easier.

And today, after watching "The Great Taking", Mr. Webb has made it clear, that I do not even have operational "ownership" (as per property-rights laws), of my own securities, in my own investment account. We can't really believe this to be true - but it is actually right there, in clear, black-letter law. One has a "security entitlement", which is sometimes called a "beneficial ownership" - except it is NOT ownership - it is simply a claim on the custodial firm's assets, in the event of the bankruptcy or "winding-down" of any securities company or brokerage firm. And this applies even to assets (ie. stocks and bonds) held in a "segregated account".

This is of course, truly insane and astonishingly awful. It means your un-margined, not-encumbered, stocks and bonds that you **thought** you owned free-and-clear, are in fact just pooled so that you really only have a mutualized interest in the overall assets of the brokerage entity that holds your paper. I read this fellow Webb's book, and then I watched his 1 hour video, and I could not really believe it.

But this is actually true, and was proven when "protected entity" (J.P. Morgan-Chase - ticker: JPM) took the assets of Lehman Brothers, when Lehman failed. JPM said it was theirs, because it was collateral, which gave proof to the new legal structure established to allow all stocks to be swept up as "collateral" to support the entire derivatives complex (which now has notional value many, many times larger than the entire global economy.)

So, of course, suddenly, the entire "crypto-currency" eco-system, with it's public "blockchain" detailing contractual actions, does not look quite so bogus, since it operates OUTSIDE of the control of the "lizards" who run the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the ECB, and the other fiat-money, bank-dominated national-currency fabrication systems.

We got burned by owning Credit Suisse and First Republic Bank shares. It would have been a much better trade to buy rifles and cases of ammunition, rather than CS or FRS shares, and that is really pretty funny.

Owning financial assets is a great way to have not just losses - but actually have ALL your wealth swept away. Our FRS shares became worthless, but JPM (J.P. Morgan-Chase) was able to acquire ALL the assets of First Republic Bank, and show a huge pop of gain on it's financial statements. The entire exercise was a pure example of "Taking". We got NOTHING and the "protected entity", J.P. Morgan, got EVERYTHING that was valuable - and paid basically NOTHING for it. Really. And the FDIC - the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (a group of drunkards, party-boys and general fudge-packers), helped JPM execute this attractive plan. Great for JPM, not so great other bank investors.

So, we know about the concept of this "Taking". We also had Lehman Bros. shares, back in the day, and got hammered on that dogshit, also. (But not as badly, as we jumped in and out, like a clever frog in a boiling bottle of piss. Stupid trades, really. I still have the Lehman financial statements, issued just prior to their collapse, where those goodfellows showed many billions of cash on their balance sheet. Lying motherhumpers of the most astonishing kind, really they were. The US Accounting boys called this fraudulent Lehman Financial Statement trickery: "window dressing", since it followed US accounting rules, which allowed contractual sale-and-repurchase deals to be shown on statements as actual trues sales, and not big red-flagged contingent liabilities, as long as the sale-price and re-purchase-price were more than 5% different. As that dude said in Princess Bride: "Inconceivable!" )

Perhaps, it might be time to get off this train? Trouble is, when it works, it works pretty goddamn good.

Banking is just a wonderful damn business, IFF (if, and only if), you do not fucking blow yourself up - hoisted on your own petard, as the great William Shakespeare so eloquently phrased it.

It's a wonderful fucking life, no question. As some wag said: "Every time a bell rings, a little crypto-bro gets a new Lambo..."

Clearly, I am in the wrong business. :)

[ Dec. 17, 2023 ] - Black Country Rock - Pack a pack-horse... or an F-150. Take your AK, a crate of 7.62x39, and a couple of YETI's full of food. Just for practice, right? Except no, it's just for recreation. One has to stay in the real-world, and make the programs work. No other option. Like a wag said: "We can't depreciate our global currency vis-a-vis Mars and Venus."

Some lite reading we are working thru:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/intentional-destruction-first-covid-now-comes-great-taking

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf

The references that one finds to the 1930's are always interesting - and often curiously wrong. They always dwell on bread-lines and the 25% unemployment and "Grapes-of-Wrath" kind of shit - which obscures what really was key. Although we are not fans of Franklin Roosevelt, we give the fellow credit for essentially balancing the US Federal Budget in 1937. This is said to have caused the great 1937-1938 Recession - or the "Depression within a Depression", but it was not an unwise thing to do. Roosevelt was actually a "Fiscal Conservative" or "Budget Hawk", if one examines what he did. He valued and respected the necesscity of balanced government budgets, despite his efforts to create correctly funded "Social Security" - funded correctly means that the program was designed to be actuarially sound - paid not from the theft of generated private income - but paid as part of a business-expense against wages, as a standard and economically sustainable pension scheme.

And by keeping the USA operating it's federal finances within a sane and sensible budgetary envelope, the Roosevelt government was able to fund the US entry into World War Two, with ease. If you have basically no debt, and you have to margin up to the eyebrows to get something critical accomplished - well, you goddamn well can do it. And your money can stay sound, and your economy can rise (easily) to the challenge. And the bonds sold to finance the big expenditure, can be paid down, with real money.

And most folks forget the wildly significant scientific and technical advances made in the 1920's and the 1930's. James Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932 in the Cavendish lab in the UK allowed a complete model of the atom to be made. It is probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made. All nuclear engineering comes from this. American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented all-electronic television in the late 1920's, received his patent for all-electronic television in 1934. The key was inventing the "iconoscope" or "image-disector" tube - the TV camera. It made all-electronic TV possible, and it changed the world.

All the technology we have today - including Alan Turing's work to define the operational characteristics of the modern computer - it all came in the "Depression" time of the 1930's. It was one of the most positively productive decades in all of human history.

And, Roosevelt and his 1937 plan, essentially balanced the US federal budget. This needs to be recognized as one hell of an accomplishment, which took some "stones-of-steel" to make happen. Yes, there was a bit of a downturn, yatta yatta yatta - but actually, if one looks at the 1930's, and the grim economic time that it was - it meant that the USA was almost debt-free by the time it declared war on the Axis powers.

And the post-nuclear holocaust world-at-peace we got to live in, was the great benefit. America was now the leading Big Guy (The Hegemon, as Ancient Athens was),and was able to enforce a Pax Americana on the whole Global system. The US dollar fully replaced the UK "Pound Sterling" as the global reserve currency, and the mass production model (what used to be called "Fordism", after Henry Ford's invention of the "production line"), allowed mass-wealth to replace the old Socialist economic model of mass-poverty. John Maynard Keynes had fuck-all to do with this. It was Roosevelt's hard-core fiscal conservatisim, and Oppenheimer's development of the atomic bomb - that gave us the runaway technologically-driven economic-takeoff models that uplifted humanity from mud-hut poverty, to modern houses with toilets, electricity and clean running water.

And see, it is fascinating: The fiscal conservative Roosevelt, is remembered for his social assistance programs and schemes to reduce unemployment, and the scientist who did the most to engineer the most effective tool for mass-murder in all of human history - he became a peace-advocate because there was nothing else he could do, once the power of atomic weapons became clear, and the Russians demonstrated their device in 1947.

Soros is hard-core correct, in his philosophical model of "Reflexivity". Events have to track far in one direction - but that tracking directly establishes the conditions for the necessary reversal of the whole process, in a reactive-response that sends the process zooming in the other direction. And this reactive-response can be wildly dangerous and destructive, as it can set up an undamped oscillation, in which each swing gets not damped down, but instead gets amplified. The system, with feed-forward information-transfer mechanisms, then oscillates to self-destruction, unlessed damped by external control forces.

And this is where we are now. "Deficit Financing" has been pushed to the wild extreme, and our entire financial system - everywhere in the world - is backstopped by paper (or worse, just digital recordings of) Government bonds. But what happens if the "Government" that backs those paper-bonds, is now paying off those bonds with bogus "paper" that folks decide they do not want? What the fuck then?

See, the whole system could collapse in a weekend, IF some event took place, that caused the impairment of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The entire system now, is a giant paper house-of-cards, very much like the "South Seas Bubble" or the "Mississippi Scheme" that John Law implemented in France, to let that crazy-corrupt country extinguish most of it's paper debts. (That was not his intention, in the first great experiment with paper money, but that was the net result.)

See, we are right here at that point now. The entire planet is hyper-financialized, and everyone in every nation, is essentially either margined themselves, or they rely on banks that are backstopped entirely with Government bonds. The amount of "gold" in the system is tiny and almost irrelevant to the economic scale. Gold will not save us, and gold will just be confiscated if and when the system implodes. The only alternative is to keep all the paper balls in the air, and maintain the illusion that real value still resides there.

We think the USA was insane and outright crazy-stupid to allow the Silicon Valley Bank, and the First Republic Bank failures to happen the way that they did. It was a textbook bank-run, and showed how completely bogus all market valuations of all fiat-financial paper really is. It is valuable only because the various "Governments" say it is valuable. But try and trade your money for something valuable - like a new kidney, or some plutonium, or some really good personal-defense weaponry, like a few HiMARS units, etc., and one finds a myriad of restrictions that block this, of course. You can buy cheap Chinese things, and plastic stuff from Japan, and digital images of "bored Apes", but not much else.

In my personal "shit-hole" country, I cannot now even buy a Chinese Norinco handgun, and no one can in USA either. It is one of the few really good things that China makes. It is a good and very useful product, and no amount of local scrip can be used to purchase it. Norinco products are outright *banned* in the USA, because of bogus American laws that assert Norinco is producing nuclear weapons illegally, or some such absurd nonsense. The USA is corrupt as hell, and the Canadian Government is actively and viciously stupid.

But the curious net effect of the modern economic insanity, is that money does not work very well anymore. Tariff restrictions even make it even impossible for me to acquire parts for my goddamn boat, from US manufacturers. This is just fucking insane. Our governments are run by a bunch of fucking goofs. It's just comical and hilarious, like a re-write of "Waiting for Godot" - real Theatre-of-the-Absurd kind of stuff.

So, our prediction is that it is going to get interesting. The corrupt and foolish folks who run things - Government fiscal toads and Central Bankers - are going to have to let the inflationary forces run like scared puppies. They will have no choice, otherwise we are almost certain to see a global economic cascade-collapse event take place, that will make the 1930's look like a "Cakewalk" by Gollywog.

[ Dec. 16, 2023 ] - I Want A New Drug - Don't we all? The fat-bastards want Ozempic, the stressed-out want Paxil, and folks like me with a goddamn blood-clot in my leg, have to take Xarelto, which is like about 100 times more expensive than Warfarin (both are blood-thinners - with large doses of warfarin useful for poisoning rats). All drugs fuck-over the bio-mechanisms that attempt to manage organism homeostatis - the processes that keeps bio-systems operating within their needed parameters - but that is their value. It is how we can adjust the fuck-stupid biotechnology that our wetware has to reside within. Evolved systems are all well and good - except they start to fail in annoying and truly awful ways, as time goes by... ("Play it, Sam." "No." "Ok, ya. You're right" )

Modern pharamceuticals are dangerous as fuck, but also that is what makes them effective and good. I took both the "flu-shot" and the latest Pfizer/Biotech vaccine on Dec. 7th. I already had the goddamn blood-clot in my leg, and was about to start the blood-thinner Xarelto (Bayer trade-name for generic "rivaroxaban", a seriously successful product - works well, few side-effects), so I figured I can handle the Covid vaccine. Plus, everyone I know, and their partner, seem to be getting Covid again. But it's not killing people - just making them sick like a bad flu. We have achieved "herd immunity", which is good. Except a good buddy whom I used to argue with about medical issues, had the annoying termenity to die of a coronary thrombosis in Nov. 2022, just over a year ago. Silly bugger. To have a long and prosperous, wonderful life, it is fucking important and in fact necessary, not to fucking DIE, right? Fuck god.

Nobody knows any history anymore, it seems. They teach stupid shit in the University history classes, I guess - shit about gays and lesbians and such - which is bascially irrelevant to the process dynamics that got us all here. So, much of what I read seems so curiously uninformed.

Knowing a bit of real history is useful. It explains how things *CHANGE*. We use the word "Tory" for "Conservative" in Canada and the UK. But "Tory" is from Irish Gaelic, and actually, in the 1600's, meant "a pursued man, a robber" (the word was: "toraidhe" for a "man pursued", from the verb "toir", for "pursuit"). The term was originally applied to Irish Royalist outlaws, in the 1600's. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the term "Tory" meant a supporter of the Stuarts and later Royal authority, and political supporters of the established Anglican Church and the traditional English government structure and opponents of parliamentary reform. The "Whigs" supported parliamentary reform. In England, there were Whigs and Tories, and now in Canada, we have "Liberals" and "Conservatives".

Why was parliamentary reform considered to be needed? Because there were "Rotten Ridings", which had been large towns, but now, only had a few people - and these small groups could be paid to support a chosen Candidate in an election. One borough had been a large town, but the town had moved, and only a 12 voters remained. If you needed to get a guy into Parliament, at election-time, you could just "purchase" the seat for your guy. This is how the brilliant Economist and successful financier, David Ricardo, got his seat in Parliament. A friend of his insisted he simply "purchase" the "Rotten Borough" of Portarlington, a Irish seat, which required paying off a small number of voters. This practice was considered acceptable, as it allowed influential men to engage in effective political debate and contribute to the creation of operationally useful legislation. Ricardo championed "tariff-free trade", which was a radical idea at the time.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Ricardo

The curious thing about political action, is how truly awful it appears to working while it is actually working. But the strength of a democratic political model, rests in it's ability to have operational process crafted by groups of focused folks working on getting something done - and rather than doing it by some dictator's fiat, the process is crafted by debate, argument and discussions by folks who have perhaps actually studied the problem, and worked on how to create a model that can improve on the problematic one currently in place.

And this shit actually can get done. I watched Canada move from being an isolated and seriously failing economic environment (due to bad Liberal policy), during the time of Brian Mulroney and his Conservative Government, back in the 1980's. We had this insane hidden "Federal Sales Tax" which punished manufacturers for making stuff here, and also we had high tariff barriers to prevent economic competition from American firms. Everything seemed to cost twice as much in Canada, as it did in the USA, as a result. Only in the Auto Industry, was there "free trade", and only in parts, not in finished cars and trucks. The whole tariff-driven Liberal economic model was stupid. Canada had these "Branch Plants" of various American and European companies, that had to exist here, in order to do local final assembly of machinery, and avoid import tariffs. It was like the insane "Corn Laws" which Ricardo had argued against, in UK history.

The Mulroney Conservatives pushed thru a wildly contraversial deal with USA, "NAFTA", the North American Free Trade Act", which established a free-trade regime between Canada and USA, allowed Canadian professionals to work in the USA, and allowed tariff-free movement of many kinds of goods across the Canada-US border. And the Tories also brought in a new GST Tax - the Goods and Services Tax, which replaced the old (hidden) FST (Federal Sales Tax), which punished anyone who made any product in Canada. This legislation was key to basically saving the Canadian economy.

Unfortunately, much of the NAFTA benefits have been rolled-back, by abusive and dishonest coin-operated political folks on both sides of the border. Now, a whole new set of restrictive and abusive policies make trans-border trade between Canada and USA increasingly difficult and problematic, and the 7% GST has become the HST, and at 13%, it now acts as a major drag on Canadian economic activity here in Ontario.

It's now easier for us to import products from Asia - Japan and China - than it is to import something from the USA. This is just comical and stupid and fucking insane - but this is what the USA has done with its Trumpism and Bidenomics. The Democrats in the USA have an open border in the South - and let anyone into the USA - but they work goddamn hard to keep our products out, and to prevent their companies from selling their stuff to us here. This is so fucking absurd that it boggles the mind - but this is the modern world now.

And it's not like anyone can do anything about this. This is what is really comical. In the old days, it was possible to at least have some input into the mad political process that crafts bad legislation. And before that - hell, David Ricardo could fucking just buy a goddamn seat in Parliament, and get his ideas heard - even if he was not successful, and then got sick and died (this usually happens to good people who try to change a bad system). But he wrote his ideas down, and that material lived on, and things changed. (Sort of, for a while...) (He hated writing, apparently. His friends nagged him to do it, which I find interesting.)

We have this curious "Idiots in Power" problem in both Canada and the USA. And democracy itself is no longer working right in either country. The "Voters Rights" trickery in the USA (which really means "Voter Fraud", of course), ensures that with "vote harvesting", the very lowest-common-denominator process drives the election results, and so populist fraudsters are all that get into parliament now - in each country.

The net result of the breakdown in ability, is a similar breakdown in process. We find a lot of stuff just does not work right. Computer systems are hacked and fail. Medical services are non-operational, ER's are packed with hundreds of people waiting in crowded rooms, making each other sick. Bank computer systems are "improved" and the improvement knocks most users offline. Labour shortages, and product "supply chain issues" make basic requirements unavailable. Roads are blocked, or by design are made unusable. Systems seem to be failing everywhere. And crime and "homelessness" grows - a problem which is easy to fix, but the political will to do so, seems to have failed.

And this is happening in the good part of the World, that used to be well-run. In the Bad Part of the World, all hell is breaking loose. War is now on, and it seems certain to grow.

We have lost the sense that the future can be improved. It now is something that, at best, must be endured. And even that is at risk, it seems.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 - EoD post-mortem] - Helter-Skelter - I know AI technology, and I know technical trading, and I know the fucking puke-fest of stupidity that most of corporate canada is. But mostly, I know the fucking technology. But I am like Number 6 in the old "Prisoner" TV series, from the 1960's. I don't want to be controlled by this shit - and it means I don't follow the godfucking AI. I had a perfect trading situation today - handed to me on a fucking platter - and I butchered the implementation, despite a fucking EXACT picture - across two major domains - of what was almost certain to happen. I can handle losing money. But not taking an opportunity that I needed and was handed to me on a fucking golden platter - that is just motherfucking unacceptable. It's like a fork in the gut.

And this is the fucking shitstorm of the world now - this constant fucking tsunami of the most god-fucking awful and unacceptable scenarios - they wash over one like the puke-fest from a giant Roman vomitorium bowl. Goddamn motherfucking shitJesus hellhammer. The psycho-fucking costs of this bloodshit-hellfuck nasty trading-failure stuff is high. It burns one's peace-of-mind to the fucking ground, like the Chicago fire.

Hardest motherfucking business on the god-fuckface planet this. Quite an interesting and most serious and challenging problem. Unsure of how to even track towards a solution. See - the fucking AI sort of works, good enough to offer insight. But I seem to have become unable to follow it - it's like the fucking machine is the competitor - except it is NOT the competitor - it REALLY helps - but I have just not yet managed to integrate the mechanism into MY behaviour. The fucking machine works, and the internal knowledge-base I have also works - but I seem to be godfucked, unable to take a perfect motherfucking opportunity to get the fuck out of a fuck-toad shit-steamer failed position, when I was given a fucking gift from Jay Powell and the poor fuckers who were getting pivot-squeezed. Bugger. Like that English actor in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"... Bugger Bugger BUGGER! (Hugh Grant, right?) My other AI knows the answers. Hilarious.

Truly, I am not sure how to algorithm this. Fucking bastard-gods of heaven and hell. Hard times for independent white bois...

See, one's peace-of-mind is critical to getting valuable shit done. And yet this trading value generation process, rips the blood-fucking hell out of that, and knocks me numb. (My inner-trader asks: "So why the fuck do you do this?" and I have to answer: "Because we need the fucking money.") This is the problem - if I can get my fucking mind into action-mode, I can usually make the trading work pretty good. But lately - the whole market is like a cunt with razor-sharp teeth. Just not nice at all. It just does not seem to work right. But of course, it is ME that does not work right.

Yes, I know the aristo algo: "Never Complain - Never Explain". But for me, this is goddamn fucking hard to implement. So I have to Zen this and fucking work the fuck on it. If I were a Ukrainian soldier or a Hamas guy defending Gaza from the murderjews, I could just take up an AK and go up to the front line and try to push my luck forward (and end the game). But this process here is different. I MUST learn to execute successfully - and within a framework that can let me remain alive. And that is a much more challenging and difficult task.

I have to basically ZEN the shit out of this. Walk across a fucking mountain, if I have to. It must be possible, because I have seen the hate-filled jews and other truly evil bastards do it, so I know it can be done. I have to go full-ninja or something.

I mean, fuck - I have the technology. I just need to fix the goddamn wet-ware. True-fucking-confessions, eh? But really - this is what it comes down to. The problem is in the fucking mirror. Work on it.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 pm] - Gut-Slammer - (honest internal dialogue documented as part of our "search-for-the-real" experiment...) Bank stocks cannot catch a sustained bid. Bollocks. This is a fucking ugly situation. My stupid fucking AI model showed this burpfart, and I just didn't think it was rational to follow a Mechanical-Turk. But the goddamn Turk wins again. Our little bankstock we specialize in, is DOWN a dollar, which is a gut-shot. Nasty and nastier. Gonna have to stand-my-brain down, and slave-follow the model (and the technicals). Goddamn follow-thru just not possible any more. Puke-cuck fuck bastard algo fucks. Nothing works but the fucking technicals anymore. There is a fucking air-gap in the fucking price data, and I thought: "Oh for ruck sakes, does that motherfucking gap have to be fucking filled in? The fucking correct answer is: "Yes, asshole." And I am the asshole. FUck the fucking fucked fuckers. God's bodkin I hate this motherfucking business. I write this shit down, so I can go the fack back and look at it, to remind myself not to listen to any fucking conversations I have with other goddamn people. See, I talked about this shit last nite to a guy, and that was a fat fucking error. Jesus fuck, I just keep finding new fucking errors I can make. Ya think, that ya have done them ALL, but NO, not the case. There are a BILLION errors out there, and I fell into another one. Gave up a SOLID chance to execute a thing that I know works, and I just fell into the "Dindu Nuffin" trap. Fuck fucking fuck. Goddamn motherfucking bastard-fucker hell. I am so fucking annoyed and pissed at my own fucking stupidity, that I feel like barfing. Goddamn fucking Jesus-whore shit.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 ] - The Dance of the Harlequin - It would seem that the game is afoot. Given the astonishing amount of debt that the USA now has, it is absurd to expect that "inflation will be brought under control", as the monetary inflation is both desirable and necessary, in order to allow the debt to be serviced (ie. just paid for). In order for the debt to actually be paid-down, significant inflation of the American economy will be needed. What is fascinating, is that the entire dance we are seeing - from the USA White House and the Federal Reserve - is a complete "dance-of-deception", where illusion and appearance is the key requirement. The entire process is a show, designed to create the appearance that a "soft-landing" is possible - ie. a gentle return to a semi-stable economic environment, with maximum 2% inflation in USA, and interest-rates of 3% to 4%.

It is probably not possible - but this illusion is useful for the political climate, given the ramping up to the USA 2024 election cycle. The only real question, is given the inflation that we now see, and the fact that it will probably continue to drive political and economic process, what action should we as investors, take? Do we go long here? Do we go even "longer?" Is this a time for using margin, or will the market successfully grasp the true nature of the reality that lies ahead, and become defensive and retreat? But that question is then: Retreat to where?

Rising prices will have to show up in financial assets, and attempts to "dot plot" a return to 2 to 3% (lower) medium-term rates by middle of next year, seems to us to be a traum-image - a dream picture. We expect rates to remain in the 5% to 7% to maybe even 8% and 9% range. Carl Ichan's company is issuing 9.75% debt to redeem maturing 4.75% bonds. We would advise caution here (that is fin-speak, for "we would suggest you try to see what is really happening... that is a junk-bond yield, and indicates distress and real risk, folks"). My own personal sense is that this is pretty much a snapshot of the future - higher nominal yields, but if inflation runs at greater than 10%, then those 9.75% Ichan bonds will still have *negative* real yields.

So, we see a rising tide here. But this is probably *not* what many folks think it is. To continue the metaphor, it is not so much a "rising tide lifting all boats", as it looks more like a *storm surge*. And the coming storm looks to promise wild winds in all directions. Batten down the hatches, and get ready for the storm. Be defensive, probably the best bet.

[ Dec. 14, 2023 ] - Frankenstein's Box - "ERrrr... Numbers go bigger, like model said... Errr... Momentum in play... Errr..." Ok, yes big fellow. Now just try to relax. We aren't there just yet.

[ Dec. 13, 2023 ] - Jerome Powell Stands Pat - Oh my. Where is that $20 gold piece? (So the boys can know, of course...). And there are those short traders, stretched out on those long, white tables, at St. James Infirmary-on-the-Hudson, AKA Wall Strasse.

[ Dec. 12, 2023 ] - Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Investments, is a Dirt Bag - The astonishing and abusive "witch-hunt" that Bill Ackman is trying to run against the school that helped him become a rich "Big Jew" American, is getting comical in the extreme.

Dr. Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, is under attack because of a rigged political interview, where she was asked "Would calling for genocide of Jews violate Harvards speech and speaking policies?"

Her "crime", in the eyes of billionaire-guy and near-war-criminal Bill Ackman, was that she spoke a rational and careful answer, saying basically "yes, but it would need to be put in context". Of course, that is true. A speaker could quite seriously be using the rhetorical technique of "reductio ad absurdum", or even deliberately inflammatory, over-the-top speech, in order to make a point about the modern nature of genocide and how it is being done - and of course, should not be done at all. Her anwser was sensible, measured and correct.

( Here is a trivial example, from logic, using "per impossible" Reasoning: (which means "though it is impossible") If (per impossible) we were to genocide all the Jews, then Harvard could still exist and be successfully funded by it's alumni. This example might *appear* to call for the "genocide of the Jews", but of course it does not. Context REALLY matters, and every intelligent thinking person knows this. )

But Bill Ackman is an abusive, deeply dishonest and vile bully. Like most wealthy American Jewry, he takes all he possibly can, and then he tries to take even more. As a "Big American Jew", he has given money to "charities" that support Israel. And if finally, Israeli actions in Gaza are deemed to be "war crimes", then supporters of Israel - like billionaire Bill Ackman - are absolutely and with certainty guilty of breaking basic American black-letter law, that makes it illegal and a felony offense, to explicitly assist in an action that causes a crime of murder. So Bill Ackman could be prosecuted as a war-criminal.

In our opinion, arrogant, dishonest bullies, like Bill Ackman, are near-criminals of a particularly nasty kind. They fabricate the appearance of being "good people" by giving some of their ill-gotten gains to charity agencies (or those that say they are in the charity business), but in reality, the Bill Ackman's of this world, are scammers, that try to make money by abusive and creatively nasty assaults on legitimate companies. I couldn't care less about "Herbalife" - but the viciously dishonest way that Ackman tried to attack that company, and drive down it's share-price, (after putting on a huge short position, so he would profit massively, if the share-price fell) provides an almost textbook example of what a sleazy, underhanded dirt-bag will try to do, in order to enrich himself by the destruction of a business that others have worked hard to build.

Bill Ackman is a nasty, abusive and dishonest piece of work. He creates **NOTHING** at all, and seeks to engineer gain, and extract profit, by cleverly crafted strategies to destroy others. This is the clear truth.

And the fact that he is now trying to destroy Dr. Claudine Gay, is so over-the-top abusive and dishonest, that it really is fascinating to observe. It is pure-evil in operational action. It is like a racist play - rich white Jew tries to attack the woman who runs the school that made Ackman a Big-Boy in the first place. It is like a medieval morality play, with Ackman as the agent of Satan.

No one - and at no school anywhere in USA or anywhere else that I can find - has ever suggested "Genocide the Jews". This was a bogus, loaded "lawyer-trick" question, put by a sleazy political hack, trying to make the black woman Harvard President look bad. The question was the pure equivalent of "Have you stopped beating your wife? Have you? Just answer the question! Yes or No!" This is a sleazy "lawyer-trick" question, and Claudine Gay of course knew that it was, so she spoke carefully, and with wisdom. And Bill (The-Dirt-Bag) Ackman is trying to use this to get her fired.

Well, let me say: "Fuck-you, Bill Ackman. You are a vicious, dishonest racist ____________." (Please select the most descriptive term, dear reader, that your imagination can come up with.)

People like Bill Ackman are direct, explicit psychopathology-textbook-examples of what is now damaging and degrading America. He hides behind the bogus, phoney "victim" status of rich, billionaire Jews, and uses his power, his money and his influence like an assault-rifle, against people who are actually trying to make this complex, multi-dimensional world work. He is a very bad person.

We are *NOT* saying he should be dragged from his office and hung from a lamppost. We disagree with violence. But if something like that were to happen to him, I would not and could not be surprised.

USA politics is being deeply damaged by what Bill Ackman and the other political fraudsters are doing. It is tragic and disgusting to watch. The whole thing reminds me of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" only it is not a crucible anymore - nothing good or valuable is being made here. We are just seeing the New York money-men show their true colors, as they support Israeli murder-men. It is just a dank blood-stain. And it is horrifying to watch, truth be told.

We hope Dr. Claudine Gay fights back. She is in for a fight, and we are cheering for her. I hope she kicks Bill Ackman's nasty little arse from the Hudson River to the River Jordan.

It's my site, so I can say: "From the River to the Sea - Palestine WILL be free."

[ Dec. 9-10, 2023 ] - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - I discovered Lucinda Williams a little while back. Great artist. Take a turn fast, and feel the rolling skid - like a bad-trade, if you end up tilted in the ditch. (Did that a few times, as a young lad. Not a bad experience... teaches a young fellow resilience, in a big way... "No, we are NOT calling a tow-truck, since they have to report the accident, which means the cops get involved, right? So, we flag down some guy with a pickup-truck, and offer him some cash to drag us out." Which is what we did, of course. No Problem.)

Sheena was a punk rocker, and she understood. No yellow Camino for me. I've always reviewed the raw data, and been more and more suspicious of the "popular view", and the "correct thing to do". We are honest-to-the-bone - and not despite, but because of this, we have to question human opinion. It's usually often wrong, which is curious and interesting.

Interesting report discovered today - confirms what we learned in our historical research. Basically, we discovered that bonds, as investments, pretty much suck. They suck away your wealth and your opportunity. The VERY BEST outcome that those paper IOU's can offer, is YOU GET YOUR MONEY BACK, at some distant point in the future. Of course, it will be worth much less, because of inflation.

Here is an amusing example: A new pickup truck with a few nice options, is $70,000 (Cdn$), which means a farmer needs to make well over $100,000, before tax, to pay for the new truck. This is just insane. In 1971, my father bought a brand-new 1972 Pontiac LeMans, in a lovely silver and black, with an orange-block V8, power-steering, power-brakes, automatic transmission, etc. for my mom. It was a lovely car, and it cost $3600 with radial tires. A new V8-powered Pontiac Firebird, back in 2002 was $40,000. Now, 21 years later, here in 2023, a new V8-powered sports car will be close to $100,000, if you can manage to find one. You will likely have to accept a smaller, down-market 4-cylinder or V6 vehicle. An electric Tesla (the original S-Model, with a long-range battery) will be well over $100,000.

If you want to put any car wheels on any kind of road, you had better have made some viable investments.

A nice Porsche is around $150,000 to $200,000 ($ Cdn.) A Corvette is well over $100,000. This is INFLATION. It is the BIG KILLER TAX, and so bonds, which do not generally have inflation-adjustment riders - are CERTAIN to offer a reduced degree of gain, compaired to owning the actually business. The business MUST adjust for inflation.

A new study - which looks like it uses solid, no-nonsense methodology, running over 1-million simulations, across more than justUSA data - shows that the 60/40 percent equity/bonds portfolio, performs WORSE - across ALL the data - than a 100% equities portfolio, which avoids those curious IOU's that degrade your opportunity. The datasets ran from 1890's and across UK, USA and other nations (ie Japan, when it had operational stock markets), and probably Europe (I have only read the summary info, for now. Probably they included all markets they could find that had accurate data). This is an interesting and sensible result. (And it confirms our cross-sectional research on the 1900 to 1936 North American markets, and our review of the "Go-Go" 1960's, and our work and life-experience since 1980.)

The study is summarized here (it was reported on Bloomberg, but one only gets the first two paragraphs, on their feeds.) A full report of the research results is reported on this site:

https://fa-mag.com/news/you-re-better-off-going-all-in-on-stocks-than-bonds--new-research-finds-75713.html

This is a key study. It confirms our research. Bonds just don't do well. In the 1960's "Go-Go" investment worldtime, bonds were called "Certificates of Confiscation" by many traders. And bond-holders in supposedly solid companies from the 1920's, were often completely wiped-out in the 1930's Depression. (Eg. many of the Railroads)

Bonds have three major problems:

1) They do not offer sufficient inflation-protection. They often have negative real-returns, when adjusted for inflation.

2) Bonds are touted as being "different" from equities. Bond salesman describe bond-price changes as not being correlated with stock-price changes. But this is not typically the case, based on what we have seen. During "Financial Crisis" events, all paper tends to move the same way. It goes down in price, as investors seek liquidity to cover other various leveraged losses.

3) The entire concept of "diversification" is flawed. Spreading out investments often just reduces investment returns to the market-mean. Diversification often involves removing a few REALLY good golden-nuggets, and replacing those golden-nuggets, with small plain stones. This is just plain unwise. And during economic or market crisis-events, most paper-assets will move down together. Diversification ACROSS asset-classes is needed.

This is certainly not common "financial-advisor" advice. But "Financial Advisors" are often just commissioned sales-persons, who make money by selling mutual-funds or insurance vehicles. Or, the offerings are from banks, (like GIC's), which help the banks lengthen the liability-side of their asset-liability balance, and really just serve to lock ordinary investment-unsure folks into schemes which give them below-bond returns, and also prevent them from liquidating their declining holdings, as rates are dialed-up by both market forces, and by the market manipulators at the Central Banks, who seek to assist the Governments in their deficit-financing efforts.

Key fact: The entire process is deeply "rigged" against the average "little-guy", and most know this quiet truth. They claim you are being "protected", but of course, you are mostly being protected from the ability to earn outsized investment returns. Why does this happen? Charlie Munger made it very clear: This happens because people are lazy, and easy to mislead. And even smart, rich guys can be constructively misled. It is the nature of the process. The "Little Guy" (or "Gal") is the soft target, and we are all psychologically flawed in the way we view and respond to events which have high randomness components.

The market pros hose the little guy. Why? Because it is the "Little Guy" that has ALL the money. This is often forgotten. The "Little Guy" is the source of the capital, that the *Big Financial Game* is played with. The investable savings of the overall economy, is where ALL the money and wealth come from. The financial folks move it around, and every trade - some of that wealth sticks to the hands that move it. This is the reality behind ALL financial activity. Finance is a VERY GOOD THING, don't misunderstand me. It is a huge beneficial technological leap. And like all technology, it can be misused.

Good investment-returns are difficult to get. Great investment returns are REALLY difficult to achieve. So, beware bonds, and be careful about "diversification". All that "conventional wisdom" can get you destroyed, and leave you impoverished, if you are not careful. Be suspicious. Check and re-check.

And if you have found an "evergreen" investment or "golden goose" that just keeps laying fat golden eggs, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, you should recognize that this is a GOOD THING, and perhaps you might want to be suspicious of those who offer "60/40" simplistic schemes, or other nonsense. And "diversification" into investments which are certain to fall in value, is obviously unwise. Bonds are just IOU's, and corporate bonds carry much the same risks as stocks.

And "Government" bonds load all the risks of corrupt and dishonest governments onto the investor. Just ask the Russian Central Bank, which has seen it's holdings of US-Treasury Bonds "blockaded", like the Island nation of Japan was in 1941, by the deeply-dishonest USA President Roosevelt. (Remember that dishonest bastard. He was an abusive liar who pretended that the Pearl Harbour attack was a "surprise". He had the US military put it's hands around Japan's neck, and start to squeeze, as that nation's shipping was blockaded by US Navy warships. And then he acted all surprised, when the Japanese Navy under Yamamoto, sailed halfway across the Pacific ocean, to try to disable the US Navy that was choking-off their homeland.) Remember, History is mostly lies, written by the guys who won the wars. Yamamoto was assassinated by the US military, just as unnamed agents assassinated John F. Kennedy. The USA is what it is.

Bonds have been a good deal for long-term bond-holders as interest rates fell from 20% to 0% - the 1980's to 2021), but going forward, bonds look maybe to be a disaster, as interest rates rise, due to accelerating inflation, and possible government collapse-events which may take place in the medium-term future. Greece and Argentina show examples of how "safe" Government-bonds can implode and become worthless. In the near future, we expect to see various "Government" defaults. Either that, or there must be significant inflation. It will be one or the other. And maybe both.

We remain basically all-in in Canadian equities which pay attractive dividends. For the necessary diversification, we hold real-estate, and other non-traditional investments.

Stay strong. And do your own research. It will reward you more than any other action you can engage in. Remember "Langdon's Lemma": (It's a short sentance, only two words...) "Everyone Lies."

[ Dec. 7-8, 2023 ] - Free Money - Great tune by Patti Smith, from album "Horses". Go do a DDG or a Google-search, and play it. It's the story of Hunter and Joseph Biden, a father-son team of grifters, who took over a major nation-state, on a small planet, out in a small system way out on the outer-rim. Pretty good stuff. (Yes, we are fans of very obscure music, from very long ago. Those were different times, yes.)

I don't know what we are supposed to call this corrupted, borked and bonkers current model we are embedded within. I guess it's the post-post-post-post-post modern? Can we say Post5Modern? (Like I18n?) Completely silly. And so much blood on the floors, and in the streets. I know the pundits always said: "Invest when the blood is running in the streets...", but they didn't tell us about the smell, the noise, the dirt, and just how slippery and nasty it gets. They left that part out, didn't they.

We keep reading shit about gold, and other precious metal nonsense. But again, no-one wants to tell the whole truth. When the boo/ga-loop comes down (or is that "Helter Skelter?"), we suspect the very concept of a trade-driven process model will most likely not be operational, and that military scrip and ammunition will be more important. The USA - in just October of 2023, spent $600 billion dollars it does not have, by getting the financial-boyo's to buy USA T-bonds. That's pretty impressive, really. The interest payments on USA debt now exceed $1 trillion (US) per year. That is an interesting process result for the astonishingly corrupt and dishonest folks that run the USA now. It really is a helluv an accomplishment. What is holding the value of the US dollar up, is that nation's ability to fabricate and deploy advanced weapons technology. Good for them, I guess. But there is not much else, really. Gold and other precious metals are worthless, really, because they will just be confiscated when the breakdown begins. The USA Treasury bonds and Bills cannot be trusted, because USA sanctions and freezes and fucks-over anyone that disagrees with it's hegemonic process model.

The Roman Empire did fine, until it could not project power, and pay for it's disciplined military. This is the same for all Empires. They survive based on power-projection. Economics is a secondary thing - but it must be viable, and operational, or else weapons-production and deployment becomes first difficult, and then impossible.

Right now, we are entering the "difficult" stage. Our research suggests that with the economics of the USA and Europe now beginning to fail (and it WILL fail, if the "Climate Grifters" get their way), the possible swing to a hard non-linear process event, is growing more probable each day. We cannot predict which event will drive the non-linear phase-jump to chaos - but it sure won't be Earth's climate changing. Earth has had wild swings in climate, and really, these are not significant factors in human activity. It is the conflict and economic-failure, that will drive the jump, we suspect. There are so many astonishingly stupid and deeply dishonest folks running things now, we cannot really expect a major breakdown NOT happening. The chances of just "muddling thru" are very low. You cannot "muddle thru" a complete financial collapse, and this honestly seems to be getting tee-ed up, in so many countries now.

And AI "Saviour Machines" will not save us. Really.

[ Dec. 6, 2023 ] - We Are Here, With Debts and Bets "And aircraft carriers and jets... The sunrise will appear with the mockingbird ... he cannot be wrong. ... Happiness is temporary... I need an arch-angel for company.. " Joan Baez, greatest female singer-artist-poet of the 20th Century. She shares a space with David Bowie - both wrote a passion-filled creative song about their respective brother's. Curious. Found an old tape, repaired one of my tape-recorders, and have been enjoying some remarkable recordings made long, long ago, when the world was much younger, and less filled with madness and hate. (Well, a tiny bit less...)

Imagine being arrested for not wanting to go to war. Curious also. Now, kids want to kill - they want to live their video-game fantasy visions. Fortnite fools, I suspect.

Strange market times. Virtually all the media source data I get - flap-doodle opinions - they seem to be so curiously wrong - at variance with what is visually obvious in the awful data that is flowing from the honest data sources (there are some few, mostly from central banks, St.Louis, etc.

"Gulf Winds" I think it was called. Brilliant album by a creative lady. And unlike David Jones, she is still alive. She's 82 - but still living. Paints pictures, enjoys old age, I hope. Too bad she fell for that Zimmerman boy. He turned out to be a bit of dipshit - despite his brilliance and ability. Sad century, morphing into a worse one. So curious. I use "vi" to write, and every so often, I toggle some insane sequence that scrambles the input. Hilarious... and yes, Joan: Our time is passing us by.. (I wonder who "Stephanie" was?)

Here is a link:

https://genius.com/Joan-baez-gulf-winds-lyrics

The "Gulf Winds" album was produced by David Kershenbaum. The Jewish Folk are not all bad people. We must remind ourselves of this simple truth, every so often. Some are actually fine people, and are not the blood-thirsty psychopathic stone-killers that we see in Israel.

And I am just waiting for "John", my AI to sing Annie Lennox's "I must be halucinating - watching angels celebrating..." I have a problem with the TEAC's audio-preamp, where it wanders around by maybe 4 or 5db, randomly. The VU meters do not indicate much of a power-shift, but the effect is like someone fiddling the volume control, trying to gain-ride the output (like an old FM "compander" ( a compressor-expander, designed to reduce the dynamic range - so that everything is louder than everything else, more or less...)). The Tape-Recorder unit is maybe 50 years old - and the only reason it still works, is because when I acquired it, it came with FULL set of schematics. Note to kids: Open-source is really not new. In the old days of electronics, the built-product basically revealed the circuit, so good companies would sometimes include full schematics with their high-end products. This allowed equipment to be adjusted and repaired by folks with basic electronics knowledge. It made the product more valuable because of this.

Moving lots of shit around in the old Family Office here. I've decided I have to up our game a little bit, or we are going to get snuffed. The entire world-process is becoming wildly toxic and curiously hostile to "the little guy". If you don't have at least 100 million dollarettes, then you are basically going to be dog-food - or maybe even be reduced to eating dog-food (or cat food?) I recall a friend told me years ago, about visiting an impoverished relative, and having dinner with the old woman. My friend suspected that the "meatloaf" was made out of cat-food. (At least it wasn't like the Rocky Horror Picture Show "Meatloaf", was my little, internal unspoken thought-bubble...).

I'm thinking the TEAC's pre-amp maybe has a few wonky capacitors. Must check. The unit dates from the 1970's, so it really is over 50-years old. No IC's - just transistors, induction motors, and a bunch of mechanical stuff to roll the tapes. What I find amazing, is that *tapes* that I made over 40 years ago, still sound fine, and have full fidelity. This is actually quite surprising. I have literally had this unit apart in pieces all over the floor, and to have it working well, here in 2023, is like a Calvin and Hobbs cardboard-box time-travel exercise. I've rebuilt the induction motors, adjusted the voltage on each motor (to balance tape positioning, and ensure tape runs on heads correctly), and adjusted and set the head-bias. Amazing the thing still works.

"When you see a crowd - I see a flock. It's sheep we're up against..." and other mu-sic from the 20th cen.. Seems I also have a lot of Eurythmics on this tape as well...

The market looked strong in the AM, but faded in the PM, like it often does. Our testbed thing (a big damn Bank) which has the initials B. N. S, sank like a flushed turd again today, giving up a round-number support. Is this just noise? Our AI called the turn, but we are just sitting on hands. Today, that really feels like a goddamn stupid decision. The deep fundamental data on debt, equity-valuations, book-values, business-cycle position, political and geopolitical environment - all the data looks awful. And I am losing sleep at nite, worrying about what the bank's true capital positions really are. Those HTM (hold to maturity) portfolio legal and accounting characteristics, don't really mean shit, if a major run happens - like what played out at FRS - and the HTM portfolio has to morph into an AFS (available for sale) portfolio, and get sold to pay off runaway deposits.

If you run it right, banking is a truly great business. It's like whoring - the prostitute and the banker can sell the same product over and over and over - and if they manage risk correctly, then all is good and fine. But if either fails in the "risk-management" requirement, the results can become bad quickly, and perhaps even lethal. Those bonds backstopping capital in the HTM portfolio-bucket have to be down bigtime, given the current yield-curve.

I am pretty sure we will be alright here in Canada. Our banks are heavily provisioned for the coming shit-storm. But a bunch more small and mid-sized American banks could become hot-buttered toast-with-shit, if confidence is lost in the US Financial system, which is bascially backstopped by Big-Bags-of-Biden-Ballots and a lot of paper (and NOT-even-paper!) T-bills and T-bonds - and really not a hell of a lot else. JPM and BNS basically rolled over today, in a curious manner that just does not look healthy. They should have been firm - but they were both sold off, and BNS could not hold the 60-handle. For me, it's like hearing a string break on one of the violins, followed by a really wrong note, in a big symphony performance.

Sweet dreams... (are made of this?) ):/ (glyph for man with worried brow...)

[ Dec. 5, 2023 ] - "Avoid Crazy." This was a key bit of advice from Charlie Munger, which he offered in an interview, given shortly before his death. He warned: "Crazy is way more common that most people know. Avoid it. Avoid it. Avoid it." He said it three times, like when Faust had to invite the Devil's agent into his house. The rule was you had to invite him in, three times. Charlie was telling how to *AVOID* the devil. The Devil of course, is madness.

And I am seeing a lot of this playing out now, in our World. Examples include the gender-twisting nonsense in the USA, which is pure madness - but it is being taken seriously by supposedly serious companies and Government agencies. And the absurd and dishonest drivel in the Media (Eg. "Trump being elected President will destroy democracy!", and other foolishness like this.)

But craziest of all, seems to be the USA President, sending 2 full-sized, nuclear-armed US Navy aircraft carriers AND a nuclear submarine (which is probably armed with nuclear weapons), to lie just off the coast of Israel, and assist the Israeli efforts in Gaza, where their IDF forces are murdering almost entirely women and children. BBC estimates put 100,000 building damaged or destroyed, and 15,000 people killed, of which 6,000 are children and roughly (by the Israeli's own admissions) only around 2,000 Hamas fighters have been killed. That means roughly 6,000 women also killed. Of course, "antisemitism" is on the rise. How the fuck could it NOT be? The Jews have gone crazy with hate.

And the American media - controlled by collectives of Jews and far-right militarists - is doing an impressive job of NOT REPORTING any of this astonishing atrocity, that rivals the worst mass-murder exercise of civilians by a Western power, that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

This is pure, bat-shit crazy. America is now seen to be a nation that uses it's impressive military to slaughter little girls and babies. This is not some wild assertion. This is just a proven, observable fact of life, here in 2023. We think this is pure madness. Perhaps it is a result of Covid-19, or some other viral infection, that has damaged the brains of Americans? It is simply not possible to know. But we do know: This is crazy.

It will not destroy Hamas - and it might create a hundred NEW Hamas-like organizations, throughout the Arab world. And maybe even in the wider, non-Arab world, also. Dead (and/or deeply hated) Jews, will be the outcome.

And - at the same times as this madness - we see the US Stock and Bond markets, staging an impressive recovery, and a run to higher levels - despite mounting evidence that the official numbers describing "Bidenomics" as a success, are fraudulent. The USA Government statistics are *estimates* - as documented by the various Agency operatives themselves. Over 70% of the recent JOLTS (US Labour-market jobs-openings) numbers are pure *estimates*. This is hilarious. But significant interest-rate and other economic-policy decisions are being made on this bogus data - which is known to be bogus, as it is so often substantially revised.

This just seems completely crazy to us.

And as the crazy grows - day by day - the costs of trying to bring things back to sanity, look to be growing.

US debt numbers are high and growing, and tax-receipts are falling. Quarterly GDP numbers are suspect. Two negative GDP quarters happen - and everyone in the media rushes to explain that "this does not mean a recession" is happening. And so, the next quarter, the GDP number is way up, and the market runs away. Bogus.

The US dollar is basically not supported by anything except USA trade capacity - and the Americans are degrading trade, blocking international financial arrangements, and calling their Chinese trading partners "enemies." This is insane.

USA is essentially blocking Russian access to Russia's own Central Bank holdings of US T-Bills and T-bonds. This is basically a US government-bond default, but no-one wants to say this. But for the Russians, the effect is the same. USA Financial arrangements cannot be trusted because of US political decisions - but the whole world decides to fly corporate jets from frozen Europe to the Persian Gulf, to chatter about "Global Warming", instead of trying to fix an insane war in Ukraine that should not have happened.

Of course, the real cause of wars is usually money and real-estate - but the climate-fiction is where time and effort are being placed, as bad violence spins out of control, all around the world - from Dublin to Paris, not just from Gaza to Ukraine. No rational attempt is being made by anyone anywhere, to try to stop this absurd and increasingly insane trend.

We are all slipping deep into "crazy" - exactly as Charlie Munger warned us all about, before he died. Our expectation, is that the markets will have to price-in this phenomenon, in the near-future. And this will certainly cause even more crazy behaviour, and ugly outcomes.

[ Dec. 2, 2023 ] - AI Technology & Murder/Death/Kill - A worst-case scenarios plays out. We read the details of the Israeli AI system, known as "Gospel", which is being actively used to select over 100 "targets" per day now in Gaza. The "targets" are people's homes, where maybe Hamas "low-level-operatives" might be located, and where their wives and children live. The information is from British information (BBC, Guardian) and is summarized in an article on the ZH site (Zerohedge): "Israel Uses AI to Kill Targets in Gaza" Another one of my awful, worst-case scenarios has played *exactly* as feared it would. We have "Killers WITH AI Robots".

I had made the prediction that AI (Artificial Intelligence) would not necessarily be a net-benefit to our world. I truly had a real fear that, given that humans are nasty, vicious, vengeful, vindictive and also rather stupid and lazy, that AI might actually just turn out to be another tool that allows significant amplification of all that is ugly and vile about humans, much the way other technologies have done in the past. The "tech" is neutral - and we need not fear "killer robots", but we should seriously and truly fear (and stop!) "killers WITH robots", as we felt that that is where the real threat lies in our near-future.

AI will absolutely let us amplify and expand and enhance the ability to murder and kill and seriously hurt each other. This is consistent with much of humanity's other major technical advances. Eg: Mechanical Tech => much better and more effective, more accurate guns with higher rates of fire and better lethality features. Electrical and Communications Tech => vastly more effective control and co-ordination of military activity, more effective propaganda, more effective and wide-reaching social control. And of course, Nuclear Tech => the clear ability to cause mass-murder and civil-destruction on a scale that exceeds Sun Tzu's "War Using Fire" model to virtually unlimited levels to allow both city-killing and possibly even planet-level killing of all human life, "On the Beach"-style. Why should AI not also join this list of "Key Features of New Technology".

And, of course it already has. Viz:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-ai-assassination-factory-plays-central-role-gaza-war

And so there it is. The Isreaeli's are already using AI to murder the citizens of Gaza. This is just so comically awful, it reminds me of the shortest sentance in the Bible: "Jesus wept." Well, so should anyone working in Israeli AI. We have gone from a cool new technology to an ugly, horrific and grotesque nightmare technology deployment, in maybe record time. Gotta love those Jews. Pornography, crooked-finance, and now AI being used as a murder-weapon. They sure get it done.

People sitting in their apartments, are getting killed by AI-directed F-16's, and bombs and missles supplied by America. Oh yes, "US Supports Human Rights", for everyone except Arab kids. If I were a Saudi advisor, I would say: "Time to just cut off these pig-faced Americans, kick the fuckers out of our country, and grit our teeth and join hands with the Iranians, and bury the goddamn hatchet with those Persians. We have to recognize who our obvious enemies are, and who are obvious geopolitical allies are. We *MUST* do this, before our people drag our Royal arses out into the streets, and we all end up like Gadaffi and Sadam Hussien."

Now, I am not an advisor to the Saudi's. And I never will be. But the American blanket-support for the mass-murder campaign of the Israeli's, in response to the Hama's border-raid to acquire tradeable hostages, is insane. It is madness to a degree that goes beyond anything I have every seen. And most importantly - it will not destroy Hamas. The only way that Hamas will be destroyed now, is by killing EVERYONE in Gaza.

Now, Jewish-Folk: - like Forbin said to his AI in "The Forbin Project" - "Consult your historical records!"

Generally, how does this military "Genocide" thing work? Does it EVER work? Don't you basically have to: A) Exterminate every breeding pair, and B) Do this awful deed in secret, so as not to arouse the disgust and horror of the World? Did Germany succeed in it's "Final Solution" to what even Jean-Paul Sartre called "The Jewish Problem"? Well? Did those efficient German planners succeed in their project?

What about Turkey and the Armenians? Did that Long March to Aleppo do the trick?

Did America get rid of Communism in Vietnam?

Did America succeed in removing the Taliban threat in Afghanistan?

Did the European Roman Catholics succeed in extinguishing the "Protestants"?

And did the Old Russian Stalinists and the New Russian Putinists succeed in ending the idea of an Independent Ukraine? Stalin mass-murdered over 1 million Ukranians. Pretty impressive murder/death/kill level right? But did it WORK as a political / military / economic strategy?

This is all so painfully fucking obvious - and horrible - like Germany's inability to exterminate Europe's Jewish population. These horrible full-barbarian military mass-murder exercises are well understood not to work very well at all. They are stupid, cruel and (worst of all), history shows they do not work.

And the really crazy-obvious thing that no one even talks about: "Did the Roman Administration of Palestine Succeed?" Did it? The Romans caught and successfully executed that trouble-maker called 'Jesus the Christ'. They nailed his ass to a Roman cross and killed that boy in public, real good, right? And then what happened? His followers went on to create, and expand the most successful and influential political movement (and religious cult), the World has ever seen. Right? And within a couple of hundred years, Rome itself was completely taken over by the followers of "Jesus the Christ."

Netanyahu has to be the stupidest, most arrogant fucking goof on this planet. Every single bomb that his murder-monkey IDF thugs drop on Gaza apartment buildings, will make every Arab kid more determined than ever, to create a solid and effective solution to the horrific problem of Israel.

How else can this fake "war" possibly play? Shooting fish in a barrel is not "war". It is just a kill-project. And human history is just a big liter-box filled with this kind of awful shit.

Netanyahu can no more "bomb his way to peace, than ..." - in that old Vietnam War joke, which is quietly so current again - "than he can fuck his way to virginity."

The man is a goof.

And a man like that, with modern AI, can seriously begin a long-term process that will kill us all.

[ Dec. 1, 2023 ] - I Am The Passenger... - And I ride and I ride... thru the City's ripped backside. We see the stars that shine so bright - Stars made for us tonite... We ride and we ride. We see the black and hollow sky. Everything was made for you and me! La la la la - la-la la la. Best. Song. Ever.

What more can I say? I have not got Daneel working yet - but "John" (retarded slightly as he is), can actually be a big help. AI is changing things. It can help. But it can also kill, and do so at scale.

The market is impressive. Shoulda/woulda/coulda ... (fill in whatever you want here.) But we have held thru the sh/tstorm, and the dividend cash-flow has continued (and is being dialed up, in some cases), here in the Great White. And yes, it's snowing. Like a Blue Rodeo song... "Same snow is falling..." (like fallout).

[ Nov. 30, 2023 ] - Hey, Ho! and Up She Rises! - Ho ho. Santa and the Pirates came to New York, it looks like. And CM and RY are flying, while TD, not so much. It's all about PCL (Provisions for Credit Losses), and how that drives the bank bottom-lines. Hint: Guys, just loan money to people who PAY IT BACK. Why is this so difficult for these guys, eh?

I had to be away from things today, and so the closing numbers seem pretty wild. Seems to be a reactive response maybe to the amount of negative news-flow, and awful sentiment. Everyone seems to be expecting a Financial Apocalypse (or maybe the Zombie Apocalypse?). But it might just not happen. What impresses me, is our AI stuff, actually called this swing-turn. How about that. Or maybe it's the weather?

The weather suddenly got really nice - 8 or 9 celsius, bright sunshine, and it felt like Summer, after the last few nights of minus 6 and minus 7. We note oil prices down, but Gold and Silver are up impressively - but so are the ndexes.

I seem to have our email working again (sort of), and that offers some comfort. It looks like our email-ISP got hit by hackers who sent out a blizzard of SPAM, and trashed the reputation of our provider's domain name. Hells-bells, but the Internet is becoming an ugly, and dangerous "back-alley", rather like Gordan Liddy warned all international relations would. (He came to speak at our school, when I was a kid. He was part of Nixon's Team, and worked to try to damage-control the Watergate breakin. Nixon was just too nice a fellow. He was an "old-school" political guy, with good and honourable instincts. History paints him wrong, like it often does. And his guy, Kissenger, just died at 100. Curious world. Lights going out...

[ Nov. 29, 2023 ] - She Has Medals - And so she should. When the "enemy" drops it's bombs, we have to do what we can. The main thing is to learn who and what the *REAL* enemy actually is. That is not always obvious.

Promised I would post this: Highly, highly recommended read - Charlie Munger's 1995 Speech to Harvard grads, where he spoke clearly about psychological bias in human thinking and resulting human behaviour:

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger

This speech by Munger was a really good thing for him to do. He was already in his 70's when he gave this speech, and it is remarkable for the clear-sighted specific, actionable and very accurate and useful information it provides. I have rarely read anything so immediately useful and helpful. Read it carefully, make notes, and try to be more careful in your decisions, and recognize that how combinations of these VERY POWERFUL psychological factors, can be used to manipulate your own behaviour - and seriously degrade your own judgement.

("You want stucco? Ho Boy, can you get Stucko!" - Groucho Marx, selling Florida-swamp real-estate, in the 1930's)

It is hard for humans to use probability correctly. Let me key this again - so my own brain can learn what I am doing/saying: It is hard for humans to use probability correctly. And combinations of psychological tricks and techniques can make it almost impossible to resist a clever strategist. There is a VERY good example of this in "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (the fictionalized biography of Jessie Livermore, by Edwin LeFevre), where the "Livingston" character describes how he was sold an expensive set of collected works of Poetry, by a master salesman. He signed the purchase order - almost in a trance. The salesman was a genius practitioner of the psychology of selling. These folks are dangerous as hell, and the horrific effectiveness of modern media propaganda - which now says that the mass-murder of Arab kids in Gaza is necessary and acceptable, and that USA should actively support this astonishing horror - is a current example of how blindly awful psychological manipulation can actually be.

I suppose we will soon be told by the American media, that making lampshades from the baked skin of dead Arab children, will be a new and fashionable Israeli export product, and that like "Coca Cola", we should just go out and buy some and be happy. There - I've just used one: Vivid-description bias. Make it REALLY VIVID, and even if it is wrong and not true, I can communicate the feeling with more effectiveness. And humans - like Pavlov's dogs - make their decisions based on feelings, for the most part. This is an example of the problem we face.

We know the experiments are difficult. But we need to also realize how truly difficult, is also the judgement.

[ Nov. 28, 2023 ] - Killing Me Softly - I hate that song. And I am disgusted by the awful results that Bank of Nova Scotia reported this morning. We fucked up holding this stuff, truth be told. The key thing to realize about the current share price of any stock (and that goes double for shares in Banks), is that it is wrong. It encapsulates all the current media dis-info, and algorithmic trading-trickery, and all the other tools and tricks of the various machinery-of-deception. The "Efficient Markets Hypothesis" is the biggest and most bogus economic-scientific error, since the medical-science world believed that "Bad Air" caused Malaria. The current market price just contains all the current hype - often not any accurate information at all. There is zero a-priori reason to expect the market-price, to be anything other than driven by the market liquidity characteristics, and the explicit hoo-ha that is circulated by those who can gain by this information-circulation.

And it gets *worse* for bank stocks. It's right there, on pages 358-359 of the original 1934 Edition of "Security Analysis". I read it, but I did not successfully internalize the wisdom of what was written. I will type it in here, so that anyone reading this, might gain the wisdom, that I missed: :)

"The fact that the operations of financial institutions generally - such as investment trusts, banks, and insurance companies - must necessarily reflect changes in security values, makes their shares a dangerous medium for widespread public dealings. Since in these enterprises an increase in security values may be held to be part of the year's profits, there is an inevitable tendency to regard the gains made in good times as part of the "earning power", and value the shares accordingly. This results of course in an absurd overvaluation, to be followed by collapse and a correspondingly excessive depreciation. Such violent fluctuations are particularly harmful in the case of financial institutions because they may affect public confidence."

And there it is. This wise writing goes on to suggest that a Securities Analyst should do his best "to discourage the purchase of stocks of banking and insurance institutions by the ordinary small investor." If one reads this most excellent of books, it also offers a very useful caveat, in refreshingly clear language:

"Trend Essentially a Qualitative Factor. - In our discussion of the valuation of common stocks, later in this book, we shall point out that the placing of preponderant emphasis on the trend is likely to result in errors of overvaluation or undervaluation. This is true because no limit may be fixed on how far ahead the trend should be projected; and therefore the process of valuation, while seemingly mathematical, is in reality psychological and quite arbitrary. For this reason we consider trend as a *qualitative* factor in its practical implications, even though it may be stated in quantitative terms."

And that just means - as a qualitative factor - it can be whatever you think it should be. If I project share-price trend from 1995 forward, for Bank of Nova Scotia, it all looks good, and the current share-price collapse can be made to appear as a routine swing in the credit and business cycle. But if I use a shorter horizon, then I can get quite different results. And the projection can be made to appear as whatever I think (or want, or hope) it should be. This is the process.

And this is actually bogus. Again, we can go back to a rude expression from the trading floor: "This is just an opinion. And opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one." (and the unspoken assertion, is that like assholes, it is shit that usually manifests itself - when the discussion becomes one of opinions only.)

That is where we are now, it seems - swirling in opinion...

But wait, it gets worse: We selected BNS based on it's high dividend payout. This makes holding the stock attractive for the income that is thrown off. But history suggests that high-dividend paying stocks are actually often bad investments. High dividend payouts are not an effective way to rank the value and quality of securities to be held for investment purposes. We tended to disagree with this view, as we had curious success in previous high-dividend common stock investments. But the violent swing up in interest-rates has hit the banks hard - and the high dividend payers (BNS's dividend - at $1.06 per share per quarter) is now well over 7%. We continue to hold, because we like the dividend income, but the destruction of capital value associated with this exercise has been ugly (from over $90 per share, to $57 and change, today). This is sad and bad. And no money is being saved here at all. :)

Dividend yield levels on current share price is just not a good way to make stock portfolio selection. Our perilous experiments seem to have confirmed the ongoing truth of this, despite our previous successful results in telecom shares.

[ Nov. 27, 2023 ] - The Kids Are Alright - Really, I think perhaps they are. It is popular among conservative groups to dismiss the kids at US Universities now as woke lunatics. But I think now, this is shown to be wrong. A reasonable, healthy sense of justice and fairness seems to drive them, and if one looks through history, this has typically been the case. It's the same in big-Science. The quiet understanding of real scientists, is that old, bad theories really don't die. They stay alive, and are taught in the classrooms, until the old men that believe in what the younger scientists have proven to be wrong, have finally died. They say that "Science advances by virtue of the graveyard", and this seems to be the case.

It is certainly the case in politics and economics - up to a point. Perhaps the "Social Sciences" are not really science - since it is often close to impossible to disprove a bogus "theory". And it seems that no matter how many dead Marxists we bury, the absurd and laughable nonsense that is Marxism, just keeps rising from it's graves, like a horrible Haitian zombie.

But the kids that are protesting the ugly actions of the "Big Jews" - especially at places like Harvard - are doing what kids are supposed to do: Protest injustice and outright evil, and stand up for what is right. Palestine was stolen from the Palestinians by the actions of murderous East European Jewry, and the folks in the Giant Gaza Concentration Camp would like to have their land back. Can one really blame them for organizing a military wing, and trying to get tradeable hostages to exchange for the 5000 or so Palestinians held - without trial - in Israeli jails? We discourage and do not like murderous violence - but even the Israeli press, has documented that it was Israeli helicopter gunships that fired on the "music festival", and killed over 200 Israeli citizens. With a "Defence Force" like that, it makes it pretty damn clear who the real "terrorists" are. The Israeli's are now accused of active genocide - "4000 dead Palestinians are not enough - we should kill more!" - this is the honest view of the New York "Big Jews."

That sure sounds like an algorithm for effective GENOCIDE to us.

Netanyahu is a walking piece of human filth, in our opinion. He is a "Master of War", and I recall it was old Bob Dylan (a Jew who's real name is "Zimmerman") who said about "Masters of War": "I hope you die... and that you death will come soon."

Those pro-Palestinian "protest kids" have their young minds tuned to the truth. The "Big Jews" of New York, like billionaire Bill Ackman, who write letters to Harvard officials, telling them there will be no more Jew money, unless the Harvard authorities stop the protests, might consider that they should perhaps go fuck themselves.

America was, and remains a revolutionary nation. It was born out of a violent struggle to remove unjust British overlords. It gains is strength and it's authority in the World, by being on the side of justice and fairness. Harvard was formed to educate the clever American kids, so they would not have to endure the British bullshit, and could have an good institution of higher-learning and research here in the New World. It would seem to us, that Jews are neither a necessary nor sufficient requirement, for Harvard - and other good US schools - to continue in this noble mission.

The billionaire "Big Jews" should basically just shut up. Those people have chosen to support the terror-nation of Israel, an entity that is functionally equivalent to ISIS - a violent, neo-fascist religious and political project that is proven to be abusive and racist - and murderous. What is so astonishing to us, is that America supports this tragic, violent horror-show. We have those who survived a horrible holocaust, now creating an equivalent holocaust in Gaza. And America offers it's full military assistance! This is simply madness - and for folks who intensely disagree with this course of action, there is no political party in USA that offers ANY chance to change this ugly and violently abusive political project.

This is madness. And it shows a deep and quite curious failure of American democracy.

So, the kids are right to protest this madness. The entire program is so astonishingly wrong, and cruel and abusive and neo-fascist/racist, that it simply must not be allowed to continue. And since there is no political choice on offer - in the tightly managed (rigged?) US elections - the kids have no choice, but to take their protests into the streets.

The abusive, dishonest elite that supports American and Israeli Jewry, has to know it is in the wrong. But it can lie and spin and defraud with impressive effectiveness. It is the Bernie Madoff Model of politics, is it not? Lie, cheat, fiddle-the-books, deny-the-obvious, mount ad-hominum attacks, shout shrill cries of "antisemitism" while the Gaza buildings burn, and the Arab children die screaming.

How the hell did noble America descend to this ugly and awful place, where it actively sanctions and supports - with it's military - the mass-murder of innocent Gaza civilians? Israel and the IDF offers a perfect picture of the very definition of a "war criminal". And for how much longer? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? We suspect that at some point, corrective change will have to come to the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

But it might have to come to America first. Once Biden and the other old, evil human material now in positions of authority finally enter the graveyard, perhaps the American and Israeli Murder-Model can be changed.

Those pro-Palestinian protest-kids at the US schools, are the bright future of America. Know this truth.

[ Nov. 26, 2023 ] - Lizards With Poison in Their Mouths - We are seeing some rather dark scenarios now begin to play out. We note how the Israeli mass-murder exercise in Gaza has just disappeared from the USA MSLM (MainStream Legacy Media). It's just fascinating. Imagine if China or Russia invaded another sovereign state, and explicitly targeted the women and children, so as to kill **thousands**, as part of a political vengence exercise? How much digital ink would be spilt over that action?

But suddenly, the Gaza Murder Project is out of the news. On Twitter/X, even Elon Musk has been forced to ban the Palestinian freedom-cry: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine WILL be Free!". That expression reminds me of the "Uhuru!" ("Freedom" in Swahili), slogan that the black folks in Kenya used to shout, when working to engineer their freedom from the English colonial overlords. But now, even on "X", you are not allowed to say it. Curious.

The "Big Jews" in USA enjoy a unique position of extreme privilege. Not only can they fund their Israeli murder-squads to kill with ease and pleasure, and not have to ever answer for financially supporting this kind of overt, explicit terrorism, but they can also effectively shutdown any debate or criticism of their evil actions, by shouts of "antisemitism!" blah blah blah and blah.

I personally think these people are the very worst kind of human. They remind me of these large Komodo Dragons, that have highly toxic bacteria in their mouths, so that just a minor bite from one of these awful lizards is toxic and lethal to any creature it wishes to devour.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/22/ex-us-diplomat-goes-on-islamophobic-rant-wishes-more-dead-palestinian-kids

I never expected to see such evil walk so freely among us, in our modern world.

The Israeli Gaza Murder Project is going to change things. We can see the Israeli's for what they truly are.

[ Nov. 23, 2023 ] - The Canary in the Coal Mine has Died - But no one has really noticed. The music has stopped, and the money has run out, like David Bowie sang about in "Lazarus". We have this unpleasant feeling that it will all begin now to run in reverse.

The reports on the Chinese "shadow-banking" sector are scary. A major investment entity - Zhongzhi, is functionally bankrupt, and folks who have seen the books in detail, say: "The size of the hole, is enormous." They have roughly 400 billion yuan in liabilities, and around 200 billion (maybe) yuan in assets, mostly "properties", which in China, are not really "property" in the real sense, but just long-term lease-arrangements, since all "property" is "owned" by the Government (according to Communist doctrine.) And of course, this is the problem. The Chinese do not collect "property tax", because the so-called "property-owners" do not actually own anything.

See, this is the entire problem. The entire Chinese economic model, is a giant pyramid-scheme built on a pile of sand. The model is wrong. It has this fatal flaw. It must be fixed.

We actually like and respect the Chinese for what they have accomplished. They have almost succeeded in converting a horrible, insane and terrible economic program (Mao Communism), into a US-style open commercial economy. This was a very wise and noble thing to do. It has uplifted their people from literally mud-hut poverty, into modern-life in reasonably well-made apartments, and with their children able to look forward to good cash-generating employment opportunities. This has been a damn good thing, lets be honest.

But you have to get the goddamn model right. If you leave a stupid goddamn hole in the model, the process will likely have a fatal flaw. And when the times get tough, the fatal flaw will kill you.

This is not a problem unique to China.

I watched this happen with our flagship technology company, Nortel, here in Canada. If you don't get the model and the process right, and you fluff and puff-up the account-books with bogus (bullsh/t) numbers, and tell everyone that it really does not matter if you make money or not - as long as you have growth, growth, growth, (blah blah blah), then you absolutely risk blowing up. You risk (and will probably successfully engineer!) complete and absolute collapse. And that is exactly what happened.

It did not need to happen.

But you have to have honest people in charge. And they have to bloody well tell the truth - and not invent horseshit nonsense and then feed that nonsense to the blow-fart idiots in the "investment community", who are mostly just greedy, un-critical skags, looking to make a quick profit by trading APOS stock (APOS - that famous Wall Street/Bay Street Company ticker-symbol, which stands for "Any Piece of Shit"). The history of the investment world is filled with these kind of sad stories.

It is absolutely critical to get the baseline economic model right.

I can observe the local prosperity of the Mennonite farms in the agricultural area where I live. They get their economic models right. It's quietly impressive. Actually, it is *really* impressive. The guy I rent my land to, he started as a "hired-hand", making minimum wage. He now has just signed over his farm to his adult son, and the operation is worth well over a million dollars. And it is profitable, and well run. The Mennonites have a Credit Union, where the loan money to farmers and businessmen who want to borrow to grow. If this process is done right, it works *VERY* well. Land is owned "fee-simple" and clearly by each farmer. They help each other - but there is NO COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP, because that model is bullshit, and DOES NOT WORK. They know this. The "Tragedy of the Commons" is that Common-Ownship is a really fucking stupid economic model, that DOES NOT WORK.

The first folks in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now the City of Boston), learned this early on. The "Mayflower Pilgrims" were set to abandon the Colony and return to England. (They had been working and owning their land in common.) At the last minute, the Governor of the Colony decided to deed out all the farms DIRECTLY to each family, so that each man had DIRECT OWNERSHIP of his farm (and could legally pass it on to any children his family might have). That single action made all the difference. The Colony had hard times, but it survived, grew and prospered. And then it became rich. Nobody works hard on a farm, if they don't bloody well own it. And farming is the first business that must get done - otherwise, nobody eats. This is key.

Once you get a food-surplus, you can get the rest of the economy going - ie. mining, tool-making, merchant actions to facilitate distribution, and banking schemes to make funding available to folks that want/need to grow their operations.

The Chinese got *most* of this right. And their results have been magnificant. They have a working space program, and their own space station. Good for them. Damn good, actually.

But they need to fix this property nonsense. Chinese people need CLEAR and SOLID "fee-simple" direct ownership of their property. And then the State can charge "property tax", to fund the needed Government services to let that owned-property generate a yield. And it WILL, if you get the economic model right.

Property-owners will work like deamons to protect and maintain (and add to!) their property. Farmers with dairy herds wake at 5:00 AM to do the first milking. I asked my guy, "When do you have breakfast?", and he said: "I come in around 6:30, usually." (ie. He has been up and working for an hour and a half, in the barn - *before breakfast*!) And work is not a punishment. It is a joyful thing, which gets celebrated on Sundays, when they all meet at their Churches.

This agricultural-community model works well. Lots of sharing takes place - but each man owns his own property - there is no bogus "collectivism". The private-land-ownership is the model that works. Prices can change, and maybe corn does not generate enough income. One can switch to soybeans, or alfalfa/grass (to feed cattle and horses), or oats or potatoes or winter-wheat (a unique kind of winter-hardy wheat, planted in the fall, which over-winters as little green stubs, and then grows nicely in the Spring.) Lots and lots of science is applied, and the technology from the "Green Revolution" is actively employed - pesticides (ie. "Roundup"), nitrogen fertilizer, and soil-managment practices to ensure operational sustainability.

This allows each farmer to select the mix of products to produce. Dairy herds are very expensive, as the "Marketing Board" effectively licenses each cow - but then each cow plus license (which is worth $30,000 or more), can then have all it's milk sold to the Milk Marketing Board at a market-attractive price. This is a (not great) solution to the classical economic "Farm Problem". But it ensures that lots of milk is available in the grocery stores, at not bad prices. And it also ensures that the milk is not corrupted or infected or contaminated with toxic material - which is always a risk in any sort of industrial-level production system.

When the systems and the models work - you don't even notice them. And that is what one wants to see.

But the Chinese "shadow banking system" (which according to Reuters information, is the size of the economy of France!) is built on a big pile of sand - the bogus property model that the Chinese Communist's still insist on using. See, property ownership has to be **ROCK SOLID**. That is why there is serious legal structure around it, in Western countries. But when it is SOLID and CLEAR, then you can HYPOTHECATE it - ie. you can, like a good Roman on a latifundia, pledge it as collateral for a loan, and use the money from that loan, to expand and develop the property, so it yields.

Our entire financial system grows forth, from this very critical base-line economic model. And realize that this model blew up and crashed to bits, when the Roman Empire in Europe crashed down into Feudalism. Feudalism is a fithly, awful shit-stained horror. It is the "Mad Max" world, where rule-of-law has broken down, and every bandit has to create a castle, and defend it, just to survive the attacks from other bandits. Your property extends only so far as you can fight and defend it. Civilization basically collapses into small singularities, and each of these has to fend for itself. This is a bad, shit-stained, and truly poor economic model. It was Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was Africa and North America before the White tribes of Europe came. And the Europeans only had the surplus to mount exploration and exploitation expiditions, once they had re-established civilization. And it took them roughly 1000 years to do that.

What is interesting about China, is how quickly they were able to get a commercial economy up and running, once they removed the idiotic and awful shackels of communist collectivism. They ran the greatest (and perhaps the most successful) economic experiment in all of human history. Really. They **CHANGED THE PROGRAM**, and it worked well, and they got rich, and powerful.

What they *must* do now, is to again **CHANGE THE PROGRAM** - but only slightly. They only need to make PROPERTY OWNERSHIP something that is SOLID and CLEAR and REAL. This could essentially fix their property-crisis now. But they also have to start charging property-tax, and tie that into the provision of municipal services. Zhongzhi and other bankrupt investment scheme operations need to go thru re-organization, and investors can probably get offered new bonds, which pay maybe 50 to 70 cents on the dollar, as we would say here. The investors will eat some loss, but they need not be wiped out, if the property is made real. Investors will ALWAYS invest in property, if the economic model behind the property is valid and viable.

But this means some loss of power for the central Chinese government authorities. They need to understand that this is a good thing. Too much centralization is a bad thing - just as too little is also.

The current government model, which requires absolute and complete centralization of authority, is unwise as it is fragile and profoundly dangerous.

If the Chinese want sustained American level of prosperity, they will need to accept American-level of governance flexibility and American-level of distribution of political power. And also American (ie. Roman) style SOLID and CLEAR property ownership.

If this does not happen, then foreign-direct investment will likely continue to run in reverse, the Chinese property-crisis will continue to grow, the "shadow banking system" will continue to unwind, and the entire Chinese economic success-scenario will be put at real risk. Trade will fall back, conflicts will expand, and employment opportunities for young people will be reduced. This will create many hungry, angry young people. And we will thus probably fall into a nasty version of the "Thucydides Trap" - and have a stupid and pointless war that need not take place, if wisdom and sanity are allowed to prevail.

[ Nov. 22, 2023 ] - Changing the Program - Now, more than at any time really, in human history, we (all of us), need to "CHANGE THE PROGRAM". This is so painfully obvious, that I am truly surprised at how so few people are even aware of this so-obvious survival requirement. The entire path of economic and social development has gone seriously wrong, and we need first: to stop the insanity, which means to basically hit reverse in many of the absurdist social/political and economic trends, and then second: re-orient and reset the course back to sanity, stability, and the original value systems and economic and political models that let us get to where we are now.

The need is to re-affirm and re-establish critical political and social ideas like "free speech". Speech is not "harmful", unless those listening are retarded, or psychopathic lunatics. Speech is just speech. It is not possible for speech to be harmful. "Sticks and stones may break my bones - but names will never hurt me!" We need to accept and operationalize the original, valid truth of this. We are now - instead - everywhere engaging in orgy-sessions of violence, and then blaming "speech" on the violence. This is madness, and it must stop. By inventing nonsense that "speech can be harmful", we invert the social-model of human interaction, so that "hate speech" is prohibited, while real violence is not only accepted, but is actively encouraged by the political poltroons that dominate the scene. Viz: stupid restrictions on internet content, while mass support for mass-murder in Palestine, and a light-touch approach to the hyper-violent "Black Lives Matter" riots and violence in the USA. We are supporting real violence, while prohibiting honest, direct speech as being "harmful". This is just completely insane, and needs to just stop. Speech is not and can not be "harmful", in the same sense that real violence is harmful. This needs to be understood.

And we need to restore sanity in politics and economics. The madness of accepting "asylum-seekers" into modern European nations, and running an "open border" in the Southern USA, is idiotic and absurdly foolish. It is just plain stupid, and it must stop. It is not "racist" to allow national entities to manage their borders in a sane and sensible manner. But the Biden Democrats, and the Idiots of Europe operationalize exactly the opposite of what should be taking place. The result is an influx of criminals, fraudsters, opportunists and scammers, who will degrade and defile national identity, and raise costs for existing citizens in the nation. Immigration needs to be carefully controlled, and actively managed. But anyone who even suggests this now, is accused of being a "racist"! This is just insanely stupid, dishonest, and absurd. And it needs to be understood as such.

But *CHANGE* is coming. The abusive idiots are going to be removed, one goddamn way or another. This *WILL* happen. And it is already happening - in both Europe and South America, where some degree of democratic choice remains possible. Viz:

In Europe:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/geert-wilders-conservatives-surge-top-polls-just-days-dutch-election

In South America:

In the economic "basket-case" Argentina, where inflation (and interest-rates) are now above 100%, the election of a rational thinking person who promises *CHANGE* has taken place. The newly-elected President, Javier Milei, promises to invert the idiotic and destructive "Peronista" Leftist model, that has done such extreme damage to that nation, for the last 50 years.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/argentina-election-whats-next-after-javier-mileis-victory

So *CHANGE* is possible. It CAN BE MADE TO HAPPEN. All rational, thinking people need to understand this. It IS possible to course-correct from the idiotic insanity in the social and economic sphere, that is plaguing this world.

In USA, we need to remove Joe Biden. The man is a geriatric bone-head, his "Vice-President" is a know-nothing laughing fool - a dark-skinned female - a real "Affirmative Action" choice, that is just not up to the job of taking over from Biden. So that means the Democrats MUST BE REMOVED. And that Party's active military support for the Gaza Genocide being implemented by Israel, is beyond just wrong. It is nausea-inducing horror, that is degrading America and it's military, in a way that will do lasting damage to it's ability to fight and defend USA. This is just insane. It is a direct violation of everything that America was built for, was designed for, and was explicitly documented in America's wise Constitution. Biden is now possibly guilty of the same "war crimes" that Putin has been accused of in the also-insane Ukraine invasion.

What is clear now, is that, beyond any doubt, we must: "CHANGE THE PROGRAM".

Real change is starting to be seen - at the margins, out in the "boonies", out in the periphery.

What is needed now, is for this *WAVE OF CHANGE* that is so critically necessary, to come to us now, here in North America. In Canada, we desperately need a new and honest Government, which does not have Liberals, Leftists or Trudeau-henchmen in charge, running idiotic and insane tax-policy strategies, like *TAXING HEAT* in a country where temperatures can reach minus 30 Celsius in the Winter. The Liberal "Carbon Tax" is pure economic insanity. We all know, "Trudeau Must Go". We now need to make this happen.

In USA, the Bidenistas, the Woke-Leftist nutjobs, and the "Trans-Sexual" lunatics being accepted as normal folks, all this needs to go. It is just madness, and the downstream effects of having these lunatics in charge of things, means that "Normies" - the comically abusive term for "Normal People" - are becoming a curiously marginalized group, at least in the click-seeking mainstream Leftist media machine.

The Democrat-run major US cities are sh.t-holes of crime, corruption, and ugliness. This can be reversed. It was quickly reversed in San Francisco, so that Xi of China could see a nice-looking city. If the sh/t-head ignorant poltroons who run San Francisco can make it look nice for visiting Chinese potentates, then maybe they might be able to fix the city so it looks (and works!) nice for it's own citizens.

A city can be cleaned up - and the garbage and the homeless (the same thing?) can be removed and put into recycling yards. And then the downtowns can come back to life, once the filth and the criminals (again, the same thing?) are put into dumps, prisons or re-education camps.

The idiot US politicians will criticize China for cleaning up it's radicalized, unemployed Muslims by putting them in re-education camps (where they could learn useful skills, and then "graduate" to employment) as being against "human rights". Yet these same hypocrite US politicians support the *MASS-MURDER* of Muslims in Gaza, as being acceptable collateral-damage!

This is just completely fucking insane. It shows a US Government that is dominated by non-thinking lunatics, who are so hypocritical that it is almost beyond belief. They simply cannot execute the basic programs of human reasoning.

So, one way or the other *MAJOR CHANGE* is going to have to come to USA.

It may come from within, via elections which remove the goofs who are now in charge, or it may come from outside the USA, via 500 inbound steerable hypersonic nuclear-armed missiles. And given that the boneheads in the USA Government entities are stubborn and stupid to a degree that I have never even imagined as possible, I fear that this needed *PROGRAM CHANGE* may be something that is engineered outside of the USA. And this will not be good for us here in North America.

If I were the Saudi Arabs, I would bloody well join hands with the Iranians, and begin a project of putting massive amounts of funds into development of *ALL FORMS* of nuclear technology, especially fast-breeder reactors which can produce significant plutonium. The recent geo-political events in Ukraine and Israel have proven *CONCLUSIVELY* that if you do not have access to nuclear technology, then you are likely to become DEAD if a stronger national entity desires to acquire your land or your resources in a conflict.

At the same time, the viciously-stupid policy of *economic sanctions* that USA is applying everywhere now, ensures that the US-dollar status as the global reserve currency, is now certain to decline and eventually end. America and it's financial system can no longer be actively trusted to complete financial transactions. If New York is destroyed, this would become even more likely, more quickly. Direct trade between nations, which explicitly does NOT use the US dollar, is already moving from a theoretical idea, to a practical reality.

So, we can say with certainty, that this need to *CHANGE THE PROGRAM* is underway, and will most likely accelerate in the near future, especially in the case of the USA.

Those in America in positions of political and economic power, would be wise to champion this process of PROGRAM CHANGE. One way or another, it is coming. We believe that something similar to what happened to the Soviet Union, will happen to America, if it does not actively - and internally - engineer this required return-to-sanity. For America, it's already there, in their Constitution. All they have to do, is get back to just following the wise requirements that were laid down in that document.

But if they continue on their current course, which is a course of madness and insanity, lets be clear, PROGRAM CHANGE will be forced, one way or the other. Confidence in the current system has been lost. (Consider Elections: Ballot-boxes, out on the ROAD? "Mail-In" Ballots, with only "Signature checking" to ensure the ballot is valid? Active "Ballot Harvesting" operations, run by dishonest leftist women, who look like children's nightmares? What are you people thinking???)

The dishonest and fraudulent elections, which have been rigged by Democrat operatives (I have seen the videos - don't tell me this is not happening) have already undermined trust in the USA voting process. The Democrats are corrupt. But the Republicans, with their blanket support for idiotic murder campaigns like the Iraq invasion, and the vengence-exercise in mass-murder being run now in Gaza, by the Israeli neo-fascists, is completely insane. It also violates the traditional and very wise desire by America to remain neutral in foreign wars. Neither the blood-thirsty, war-mongering Republicans, nor the corrupt and dishonest election-rigging Democrats, are fit to govern.

So, America has a problem, which another *election* will not likely solve.

We believe that this just means it is even all the more important, that we actively must CHANGE THE PROGRAM while it remains possible to do so, without violence and direct social revolution.

Interestingly, there are others - in America - who see this also. There are many others, and it is interesting how intensely the MOD - the great Machine Of Deception - is trying to operate against them, shut them down, cancel their access and restrict their ability to communicate. This is just insane - especially in a nation that has historically and constitutionally protected the right to free speech. Not just comfortable speech - actual FREE speech. The very concept of "hate speech" is bogus and false. If someone says extreme and ugly things and advocates violence, then you just switch it off, OR, you can respond by indicating that such talk is false, and show why it is false. It's usually pretty easy to do that. But we are not in that world. We are now in a faked world of lies, lies and more lies, and speaking and writing against the lies gets you "cancelled", like Dilbert was. The lie-masters cannot even tolerate a humorous cartoon, if the author suggests the avoidance of black "master blasters". This whole deception plus censorship approach is very wrong. It has to change. And many agree.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trust-your-gut-tucker-carlson-warns-chaos-ignoring-your-instincts-during-history-changing

[ Nov. 20, 2023 ] - Calling David Ricardo - Genius Theoretician and the Action-Man of Economics - There are times when things get so weird, that one has to go back to the men-of-genius who made our World what it is today. One of them is a personal hero of mine, Economist and former Member of UK parliment, David Ricardo. I wrote a paper on him, when I was in Economics School. The man was a fascinating person - a reluctant writer and a clearly genius theoritician, even if his musings on LTV (Labour Theory of Value) are a tad bogus. His brilliance lay in articulating clearly the Value of Cultivation at the Margin, a viable and helpful Theory of Rent, and basically all the necessary intellectual and mathematical rigour needed to understand how inflation happens, and what can be done about it. (Hint: It's driven by the supply-increase of fiat-money. "Fiat-Money" just means "paper-money" or "anything that we all agree upon to be money". "Fiat" is Latin and means "Let There be ... ". First sentance in the Christian Bible if you read it in Latin, is: "Fiat Lux" => "Let there be light." I explain this, since many foreign folks have no idea why English-speakers are expected to know what the Latin word "Fiat" means. "Fiat Money" means stuff that some Government has decide arbitrarily, will be deemed to be "money". The "moneyness" of our paper-currency, or our digital-counters in our computerized bank accounts, are only "money" because we agree that they shall be money, because some central authority has said "This stuff shall be money." in a rather god-like manner. In a non-government world, money has to be something more real, like gold or silver or platnum or copper or sea-shells, or iron-bars, for example. In prison-camps and jails, where most folks smoke, cigarettes often became money. In Yukon, gold nuggets and eggs were money. No government was needed. The value was in the money itself.)

Most economists, myself included, do not advocate a return to the "Gold Standard", or the convertability of our paper cash (or our digital-cash) into gold bars or wafers. There are good reasons for this. But Ricardo was very clear on why gold-convertability could help to stabilize currency value. He was also very clear on why the Corn Laws (which prohibited free importation of cheaper grain into England, and kept poor Brits hungry), were wrong and a foolishly bad policy.

Ricardo came from a Jewish family, but his father disowned him, when he married a Quaker woman, whose family also broke from her, for marrying a Jew. Both became "Unitarians", a loose form of Christianity, which stressed the need for Unity among all people. Ricardo also got kicked out of the family stockbroking business, and so set himself up on his own, and did very well - gaining the right to make a market in British Government bonds, and also just speculating when the bonds (called "Gilts" because of the gold-edges on the paper) got discounted down, due to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Here is a URL with active link, for a very good summary of Ricardo's life:

https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/ricardo.htm

https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/ricardo.htm

Folks like to talk about J. M. Keynes being the greatest Economist, but I think it really was David Ricardo. He apparently did not like writing, and did not really want to enter Parliament. He was nagged into becoming an MP, by his friend James Mill, which is interesting. He made it into Parliament, by having Whig leader, Henry Brougham, designate a "rotten borough" in Ireland for him to represent. (He basically bought his way in, as was the fashion of the time.) He ran and was successful in becoming the Representative of this borough in Ireland, and in his first speech in 1819, as an Independent, he spoke against the "Poor Laws" - a haphazard system of "relief" in which "Poorhouses" were constructed to give impoverished labourers a place to survive and do some work in exchange for food. Later, Ricardo spoke against the "Corn Laws" at some length, and managed to show in solid mathematical detail, (using English cloth and Portugese Wine, in his famous example), that even if Portugal had a "comparative advantage" in wine-production, a free-trade between the two nations would let both economies and their citizens, be more prosperous. England would sell more cloth, and could import more wine, and everyone would make more money, than if tarrifs and restrictions were raised to prevent free trade.

Like many great discoveries in science, this is not obvious. And the "Corn Laws", which prevented cheap grain from being imported into England and Ireland, basically kept the British folks more poor and hungry than they otherwise would have been. Rather than enjoying increased prosperity at the end of the European Napleonic Wars, the 1815 to 1820 period saw an ugly depression, and a glut of goods which could not be sold. Most "political economists" of the day, simply denied this to be possible. Ricardo studied the situation, explained what was happening, and suggested specific actionable solutions. He was criticized by many aristocrats who did not want to risk change, and then he subsequently died from an ear-infection that became septic, in 1823.

But he defined what is now called a "Classical" economic system, with sufficient rigour, that he was able to advocate sensible free-market policy options (ie. free-trade, limited taxation, careful linkage between gold reserves and the amount of money in circulation, so as to prevent runaway inflation) and his explanation of land value being determined by "the Law of Diminishing Returns", was clever, well explained, and can be seen to be a general-case scenario for determining economic value in more than just the value of agricultural land. It is a basic feature of economic reality, and Ricardo seems to be the first to really describe the process, and how it sets the price of things.

I worry (a lot, actually), that we are all now at a point where this "Law of Diminishing Returns" is acting with increasing force, on our technical-transformation co-efficients in our National Leontif (Input-Output) matricies. We are getting less and less output, for increased economic input, into our national economies. This is a perennial problem in economics. Prosperity wanes. It comes for a while, based on new, good things - massively better and cheaper technology is one driver. And another, that has pushed us upward for the last 30 years, has been the opening up of China and Russia to the free-world commerical (some say "capitalist") economic system. Both factors gave us significant growth and excellent opportunities. Money supply could be raised, interest-rates lowered and then lowered again, and yet inflation was dormant. Things were good, and then got better.

But "Moore's Law" in semiconductor development (not a "Law" at all, just an observation) has hit it's limit, and new tarrif barriers are everywhere now. Russia is now excluded from the world economy (at least there is an attempt to do so), and China is being viewed as an adversary, so that trade is being actively restricted with them. AI may be a good thing, but it looks like it will be highly-regulated, offered only in the "Cloud", and only by the already-rich, socially-manipulative, major technology companies. It will benefit them, and risks making it's users slavishly dependent on it, rather like modern "Office 365" offerings and "social-media" operations.

Regardless of your political opinion, all this is happening. And with the latest rate-shocks, to try to reset the value-of-money to being more valuable, all these positive trends that characterized the last 30 years, are now running rapidly in reverse.

SO, have we impacted a "tipping point" related to the Law of Diminishing Returns? Or is the collapse of "free trade" the driver here in declining prosperity and rising inflation? Or is this a all a consequence of the Covid-19 lockdowns and mass-vaccinations with impure, DNA-plasmid contaminated vaccine-doses? The rapid rate-rise approach to fixing the inflation problem seems to be doing more harm than good (as is often the case with grand Government policy decisions). Likely, our current malaise and drift-towards-bad-decisions-everywhere is a result of a combinationn of the above factors. This is how cycles happen, one has to think.

Some nasty reality is driven directly by physics and scientific reality. Other areas are impacted by malevolent or unwise decision-making. And still other things and their events are driven by pure randomness, which cannot be forecast and which we do not even know what their possible event-distributions look like (the "Black Swan" problem). But when all three sets of negative phenomenon come at the same time, then they can add constuctively and produce "rogue-wave" style situations, where serious amplification can occur. The bad can get real bad, real big.

And that seems to be where we are now.

I hope I am wrong here. I really hope my own analysis of this is basically just full of crap. I hope I am missing something, and that I am just being a cranky old man or something like that. Really.

[ Nov. 18, 2023 ] - Wintermute - Are the markets dominated by AI-driven algorithms now? Maybe. I don't know, and probably cannot know. Are chocolate cakes orbiting Jupiter? It's not possible to know.

Fantastic weather today - bright sunny November day. Unusual, but if this is due to "Global Warming", then we should be building carbon-dioxide generators in Canada, and doing it at scale. I've been doing lots of reading. It's exhausting, but quite educational, of course. Bootleggers vs Baptists, Hinton's interview with an MIT guy back in May, RAND Corp 120 page 2016 paper on possible "War With China" scenarios, and many technical articles on asymmetric conflict models ... which the Israelis and the IDF have damn sure read also - since they are into the full-on "barbarism" strategy), carefully articulated in a 2006 .mil paper. Really, it is clear we are poised on the cusp of some serious and extreme change, and it will not be good, I (and many others) fear. This conclusion is not "conspiracy theory" nonsense - it is technical, analytic conclusions that fall right out of the data.

A war with China would not be good. There is even a paper on DNFU (deliberate nuclear-weapon first use), from a think tank in Oslo, Norway, which suggests several scenarios where this makes sense. What no one seems to have articulated, is a scenario that has haunted me for a while: A major nuclear explosion in one or more US cities, but with no explict actor being identified. The explosive event just "happens", and no group takes credit for the action. What would USA do? How would the military C3 (or is it C4 now?) system engage, and what would the politicals do? The 24/7 airborne command flights (the "Looking Glass" program, which ran from 1961 to 1998) are no longer opertional. Recent political discussions have taken place, suggesting the USA needs to be ready to respond to a multiple hypersonic missile attack. But what is the response, if the actor is not known? "When in danger, or in doubt, shout and yell, and dash about..." is not a good strategic response. Well, then, what is?

Can AI help? Maybe.

[ Nov. 17, 2023 ] - Blues in the Night (and the Day?) - The markets trade in an ugly and rather nasty manner now. God help the poor folks trying to trade the oil markets. The phenomenon is called "Gunning for Stops", if I recall correctly. Whatever your puke-point, the market price will swing right down to it, and take you out of your position. Ya'all get fooked. Once you close the position and take your loss, the market (typically the next day), will zoom up, back to, and then *above* where you bought. And probably keep going for a while...

What is interesting (and ulcer-making) is that this same process seems to be in all markets now. It use to mostly just be in commodity markets. But now, this "gunning for stops" thing is seen in almost every market.

[ Nov. 15, 2023 ] - The Astonishing Large Machine of Deception - Big MOD's rule the world now. I have never experienced such a profoundly astonishing series of deceptive events and routine "trick-fraud" being used just about everywhere. The entire "Climate Change" scam is based on "GHG readings", which is pure junk science that suggests various "gases" are creating a "greenhouse effect" on our planet, so we have to engage in wholesale assault on existing technology - without putting in place any serious or viable replacements. This model is just going to ensure mass-poverty for those (in the Third World, for example), who are finally just getting lifted out of poverty. It is all bogus.

The "GHG's" are things like carbon dioxide, which humans, animals and plants exhale. The entire model does not stand real scientific scrutiny, yet it has entered political orthodoxy, as deeply dishonest folks in academia and government, stand to make fortunes out of trashing our current ways of living. If there be problems on planet Earth, doubtless they are due to the extreme degree of overpopulation that has occurred in the last 125 years, and possibly changes in the nature and level of output of solar activity - much more likely than trace amounts of upper-atmosphere CO2. But the GHG thing is politics now, and the political scammers love it, because it gives them an excuse to raise up the tax rates, and create NEW taxes, which are essentially taxes on heat, in the Northern Hemisphere Western-world nations. The entire model - both political and scientific - is based on pure deception.

And the Big Lie Machine does not stop there. It goes on into the war-support that USA is now offering to Israel. The USA is massively supplying Israel with weapons that it most certainly does not need. The Israeli's can kill the women and children of Gaza quite easily, with the ordnance they already have. But USA President Biden, oblivious to the outright mass-murder that the already-supplied US weapons have wrought, wants to grab the Jew-vote in USA, and so is outdoing Donald Trump's Republicans, in given the machinery of death to the Jews of Israel.

It is a truly sickening political scenario, and I wonder if at some point, we shall see Old Bye/Done dragged from the Maison Blanche, and hung from a telephone pole for the war-crimes his absurd actions have enabled. The entire Israeli war-enterprise of revenge is disgusting and horrific, in a way that I never expected to see in our modern world. It brings dark thoughts that folks are not supposed to think: Maybe the National Socialists of Germany knew something that modern folks have no knowledge of.

The atrocity of the German mass-murder of the Jews in Europe in the 1940's, seems so curiously out-of-place when one looks at German history - a nation that gave us Beethoven, Bach, Farenheit, Max Plank, Einstein (who was a Jew!), Goethe, Gauss, Hiesenburg, Kant, Liebnitz and so many other great scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and just generally truly great persons who helped to build our modern world. I always wondered: "What made the Germans hate the Jews so much, with such curious intesity?"

As I watch the insane orgy of violence in Gaza, the horrific mass-murder of over 12,000 civilians, including fathers, mothers and tiny babies in their own homes - as I watch this insane orgy of violence, I begin to see why the Jew was hated so intensely, throughout European history. It's not just that they were the "Other". The "Other" group always has a hard time, of course.

But the Jew - he is a different creature. He is 100% sure of his superior nature, and his "Chosen-by-God" sense of himself. It makes him a dangerous, cruel and other-worldly creature, completely at odds with, and separate from, the civilized person of European Christan heritage. The Christians were also able to go on horrible revenge campaigns, of course. But at least their mythology actively and **explicitly** discouraged this standard human course-of-action. They were required by their mythology to forgive their enemies. Jesus was actually a pretty smart fellow. Forgiveness is a useful trait to encourage.

The Jew operates under no similar sense of restraint. His mythological picture-of-God, is one of a cruel, vicious and vengeful creature, that likes to "smite down" his enemies. This is just not a good model for humans to follow, and it means that the Jew is not just accepting of cruelty, it means he is actually programmed for it, by his curious and disturbing "religious" training.

We are not "anti-semitic", anymore than we are "anti-science". The Israeli's build very good weapons. They are good at warfare and are clever with technology. The best data-exfiltration software, which can become installed on Apple iPhones, and fully hack them, is made by Israeli firms - and sold to all police agencies around the world. The Jew can do good work, and this makes the Jew, with his penchant for pornography, violence, cruelty and murder, a serious and dangerous creature. He must be respected and understood. It is wrong to see the Hebrew model as weak or low-class, as German National-Socialist propaganda films tried to do. They are fascinating, for their falsehoods, just as modern propaganda also is.

What is astonishing, is just how intense and similarly deeply-dishonest, is the modern material that we observe and analyze. The Americans curiously believe they have won the "War on Terror", yet at the same time, they actively assist the greatest terror exercise we have ever witnessed in our modern time - the astonishing mass-murder campaign underway in Gaza.

Imagine 20 World Trade Centre's falling.

And imagine 10 Pentagon's blown to bits.

Then, add in all the residential buildings destroyed in Gaza fire-bombings with US-supplied weapons.

Why can people not understand the obvious now? Hamas has won. They will win this horror-show, the same way the followers of Jesus Christ won Europe for two thousand years. Hamas will all be killed.

But Hamas will win by showing the Jew for the horrific, vengeful nightmare-creature that he secretly is. All the fake American talk about "social justice" and "anti-racism" and "anti-fascism" is shown to be pure deception and outright propaganda. It is, operationally, just a lie.

The true nature of "American Democracy", when practiced by the Jew, is shown to be the most horrific form of "mob rule". The result is mass-murder of the innocent.

"Everything America says now, is lies." This is what every kid growing up in an Arab or Muslim world will now believe. It matters not whether a Trump or Biden occupy the White House. The mass-murder campaigns of the Jews will continue - and their powerful propaganda machines will continue to paint anyone who opposes them as "terrorists" or "anti-semites" or some other ad-hominem term that shuts down all discussion or debate completely.

The Jew is the problem here. It is his world-view, that we must deal with. We are content to live in a multi-cultural world. We harbour no ill-will to those who are civilized.

But the Jew wants a different kind of world, where no critical action against him is even possible. He brings out historical atrocity, to justify even worse modern atrocity, and believes that he is 100% justified in the mass-murder of tiny babies, held in their dying father's arms. Well, as we say in Canada: "Fuck this shit."

We are not willing to accept this kind of creature.

This is just another area, where change must happen. We need to CHANGE THE PROGRAM here. We do not seek violence. But the Jew must be restrained. This is not "anti-semitism". This is just rational common-sense, and it needs to be understood as such.

[ Nov. 12, 2023 ] - LSEG (LSLUG?) & The Customer's Yachts We've been trying to figure out just who the hell owns LSEG now. LSEG stands for London Stock Exchange Group, a lovely pirate's den of money-making opportunities for the Big London Boys, and a risky questionable place for the little guy, as most Stock Exchanges are now. Hell, I am a hard-core Capitalist, but this weirdly gruesome ongoing "socialization" of our stock and bond markets around the world, is making me truly uncomfortable. Everything seems hard-coded to make the fat-bastards even fatter, as the small investor gets sheared like an Australian sheep. And the "Customer's Yachts" are in cold-storage warehouses that look like the "Ice Palace" in Dr. Zhivago. Grim times here.

I am honestly trying to find out just how shit-stained all the "Refinitiv" and Reuter's market trickery really is. The London Boys paid something like 27 billion US real-dollars, for Refinitiv, several years back. But as the London Exchange is now bleeding business, due to the UK telling the world to go fuck off, this action to unload the LSEG shares is interesting. There are a bunch of calls also sold in the latest offloading (which even the Canada Pension Plan fund is part of), so my own tiny (really very tiny) income stream, is perhaps possibly impacted by this - it's more than just an academic and trader- hacker's level of curious interest...

Here is a URL for a snapshot of the latest action:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/blackstone-thomson-reuters-plan-2-3-billion-lse-share-sale-1.1967984

and the earlier action:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/blackstone-thomson-reuters-selling-3-billion-of-london-stock-exchange-group-shares-1.1920965

A Reuters story from May of this year, indicated that Thomson-Reuters owned roughly 47,400,000 shares as of April 30, 2023, worth roughly $5 billion (unclear if this is US or Cdn dollars), and that their plan was to unload tranches in LSEG this year, in an orderly manner. First quarter 2023 LSEG earnings showed a profit of roughly 1.8 billion UK pounds sterling, also according to a Thomson-Reuters article. The May 16th term sheet reportedly indicated that Blackstone and Thomson-Reuters were planning to sell 28 million shares, and that this represented a roughly 5.5% (voting) interest in the LSEG entity. So, the total outstanding voting LSEG shares as of earlier this year is roughly 509.1 million shares. Unclear number of non-voting shares.

Blackstone's interest in LSEG has dropped to roughly 12% (according to Bloomberg's estimates), after the latest sale in September, and it's unclear how much Canada Pension Plan now owns - and also if the Singaporean sovereign fund GIC still owns any LSEG. The Sept. 6th, 2023 BNN news story also indicates LSEG made an "off-market" purchase of 9.5 million shares, worth around 750 million UK pounds.

What is interesting, is that this news quanta is in the "Technology" section of BNN, since LSEG's ownership of "Refinitiv" means that LSEG now supposedly makes most of it's money selling data. So the whole London Stock Exchange entity is a data-vendor, basically. This is kinky, in our opinion. LSEG is now in the same business as British pornography sellers - they sell subscriptions to bit-streams, for hard (or reasonably, sort-of hard) currency. The old business model of earning commissions and various vigourish for turning household savings into viable investments, seems to have fallen away, like Karl bloody Marx suggested it would. And we think: "This is just nutty." Stock exchanges should make money by getting good *little* companies listed and offered to the private investors who want and need to invest, and then help those little companies become big companies. This is actually a pretty goddamn good idea.

We think the damn market data should be given away for almost-free, basically. But we have now got a perverse inversion of the old, sane model, which now involves keeping the data secret, expensive, and almost bloody invisible to the private investor, and restricting access and trading opportunities, while building regulatory walls and moats around every single aspect of doing any goddamn thing to raise money anywhere at all. This is just silly. No wonder the LSEG is bleeding business like a knife-stuck pig. But make no error, it is still wildly profitable. The share-sales are apparently oversubscribed, as the data-business is a cash generator, no question. But only for the fat-boys, of course. All we can do, is stand on the side of bank, and piss on this train as it zooms past. :)

In Canada, it's possible to invest in US stocks, quite easily. Since if the fat-boy politicals try to fuck with this process, Canadians will put their cash in a car-trunk, and drive to USA (or fly to Bermuda) and open off-shore accounts, and will do it that way. Investing in only Canadian companies just plain does not work very well. It works good for the crooked insiders (think Nortel and Royal Trust), who can unload on the Alberta dentists, (and Alberta pension funds...) but not so good for the ordinary citizen who is always an outside investor (think anyone who bought bank stocks or Canadian telcos in the last 12 months...). Canada runs a junk-currency model (think the old "Mexican Peso" problem, but set in a place where water freezes half the year), and so we get a crap-dollar, and lots and lots of government, and lots and lots of various levels of *tax* to fund the State piracy model.

To get rich in Canada, you try to get either an OHIP billing number, some kind of monopoly-lock on some critical imported product, or a good "Government Job". The poets even say that this keeps one's arsehole clean. (Really! I once read a book of CanLit poetry - it was called: "Clean Assholes", and the first poem was, IIRC, "A Government Job at Last!". Life in Canada, is not without amusement... )

But why not have some local ability to buy/sell/transact options, etc., on the LSE? Good question. What the fuck is wrong with the UK, we cannot address in this short note. It might fill a very big book, truth be told. Same for us, also, of course.

Perhaps the LSEG (why do I keep typing: "LSLUG"?) might want to think on this problem for a bit. Having entities like Blackrock and pirates like Thomson-Reuters and so on, owning these Stock Exchanges, is probably just a really fucking awful bad idea. Stock Exchanges should probably be limited partnerships of the Exchange members themselves, and not the high-cost corporate-fat-bastard data-hiding bit-stream-selling entities they have now turned into.

As we have said before: "WE NEED TO CHANGE THE PROGRAM." This seems to apply just about everywhere now.

[ Nov. 11, 2023 ] - Batshit Crazy and In the Mood (y's) This is getting just plain weirdly awful in a tragic-comic way that is horrific and LOL (Laugh-Out-Loud) silly hilarious at the same time. We watched the market run higher, as our bank stocks weakened again, and this seems curious, since we have a pretty good idea just how much more revenue the banks are actually pulling in, with the new rate-regime of super-high money-rates. Something's gotta give here...

And maybe it is old USA? Fitch rates US sovereign debt at AA+, one notch below investment-grade on their scale. They did their downgrade of USA in August. S&P Global Ratings also has USA one-level down from the highest rating, also at AA+ (not AAA), and they did this back in 2011. But Moody's Investors Service actually has affirmed their *highest* rating for USA sovereign debt, at "Aaa", which is their top rating on their scale. I find this whole "debt rating" action pretty comical, as I recall this great image from a Fortune Magazine story on how arbitrary and not-really-very-useful these ratings were - written back many years ago - which had a cartoon-image of a hand reaching out from behind a curtain, that was stamping ratings on bonds, that flew by on a conveyor-belt. But I also recall the only time the Treasurer came to visit our little group in the Treasury Ministry, was when the Province I was doing work for, lost it's triple-A rating. It was a big political issue (questions in the House, blah blah blah), and it makes everyone look like they kind of failed at their work.

And Moody's didn't even drop the rating. They just put USA on "Negative Watch", which suggests that they *will* drop the rating, in the future, if the USA cannot take some action to create the impression that their debt is coming back under some kind of control (since for now, it looks like a full-on shitshow of Biblical proportions, where debt-levels are advancing super-exponentially, etc, etc.)

What is just beyond-the-pale hilarious wildly crazy, is the just goof-stupid thing that the Biden White House "spox" came out with. ("Spox" is the new term for "spokesperson", or what we used to call a "flac"...). The "spox" is Karine Jean-Pierre, and she actually said that the Moody's outlook change was a "consequence of congressional Republican extremism and dysfunction" - which has to be the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard a flac say, pretty much in my entire life. It's just so insanely stupid, that only some dumb bitch who looks like a fucking porn star, could actually get away with saying something so fucking irresponsible and just plain silly.

We are living in very strange and absurd times. Perhaps President Bye/Done will blame it on Godot, as he waits for him? Ms. Jean-Pierre reminds me of the character "Lucky", in that great Beckett play.

The USA Federal Gov't debt-service costs are approaching 1 trillion US dollars per year. A lot of Yankee taxpayers have to pony up their shekels, just to pay interest to Chinese State banks that hold USA paper. One just has to wonder how long these poor sorry Americanos will continue to let themselves get held over this big Washington barrel. It all seems crazy, to folks like us, who pay our bills, and generally avoid debt, due to how it can engineer rapid financial destruction, if it runs out of control. But of course, that is only for private-sector folks. The abusive boneheads who run our Governments now, see no problem in borrowing more gigadollars each year, by just issuing paper, since they know they can just MMT the cash from out of their backsides. "Modern Monetary Theory" is really complete economic nonsense - but in the Age of Crypto-Currency (folks paying hard cash for digital bits), sanity seems to have departed from the world of finance.

When I read that nutbar comment from Karine Jean-Pierre, I realized that the USA is pretty much fucked (as we are too, I suppose). Our little Cdn "dollarette" is in the toilet, at around 72 cents US, for one. We here in Canada, run a high-cost, high-tax economy, that benefits a few major entities, and jacks-up everyone else. Basic business has become *really* difficult here now. It is quite surprising, just how things have changed, post-Covid.

I tried to source a $10 machine-part from a supplier in USA, and between the currency conversion, and the shipping costs, it was going to cost almost $60 Cdn to have a tiny (less than 1 lb) machine-part shipped to my farm. I gave up, and cancelled the order. I'll have a local machine-shop *make* the fucking part. We used to have the NAFTA "Free Trade" deal, which actually worked quite well. For amusement, I read the details of what a USA business has to do, to export something to Canada now (some .gov site, that tries to explain the rules), and I understand now: A) why US sellers use expensive "Custom's Brokers", and B) why cross-border commerce is so stupid, fucking expensive. Both USA and Canada are intent on just rat-raping any poor dumb fool who wants to buy or sell across the border now. It's now a huge *revenue* generator, for both sides, and the costs flow right down to silly goofs like me, who try to use rational E-commerce.

So, E-commerce does not work well anymore, and this really sucks rocks in Hell. It means lots of things are now curiously difficult and idiotically expensive - far beyond anything reasonable. And it is our current crop of government clowns who are wrecking this stuff that used to work. It is not "Republican extremism and dysfunction" that is breaking things - it is the dumb-arsed arrogant ignorance of the woke-clown government fools who are setting policy, and making the fiscal, monetary and operational decisions. They appear to have - literally and truly - no fucking idea what they are doing, and seem unable to grasp the simple fact that they are breaking stuff that was working, and that is needed to keep our world working.

And as more things break, and ever-increasing debt-service costs consume more of the tax-revenue collected, the entire system becomes *more* fragile, and more likely to break completely. So Moody's is right to draw attention to this approaching train wreck. It's coming down the track, and our Big-Government-Bus is parked on the road across the tracks, at the railway crossing. We think Manchin is wise to retire. I would also, if I were him.

It is interesting to see Moody's drop this little turd on a Friday afternoon, after a really big boomer of a day on the equity markets, with the DJIA up almost 400 points. I wonder who put on short positions right at the 3:59:59pm market close today? We are starting to suspect that something is a tad "rotten in Denmark", with respect to the entire New York financial complex.

Folks need to remember that paper is just paper, and talk and opinion is mostly just noise and wind. Our modern financial world holds US Treasury Bonds and Bills as if they were gold bars, to backstop most financial business models. This whole approach serves us well, but it is a recent invention. Given the stupid, cruel and absurd nonsense that we see in the World now, there is no reason to think that the Gov-clowns and fools who dominate our political towns, will exempt this fine system from the breakage and assaults-on-sanity that we see everywhere else in our decaying social matrix.

[ Nov. 7, 2023 ] - Change Must Come - We need to *Change the Program*. And it is curious that those on both the Left and the Right are becoming ever more aware of this, each day. Democratic Congresswoman from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, has posted a powerful and truthful video on "X" (the old "Twitter") site, and it is worth watching. But you will have *GREAT DIFFICULTY* in actually finding it, because it has been scrubbed from the search engines. All you will find is the usual Main Stream Legacy Media bullshit *about* the the video - the usual disinfo and thumbsuckery by the worthless, awful MSM media. This active web-based censorship is really starting to piss me off, truth the be told, so I imaged the video with my Samsung Tablet, and FTP'ed it to my Linux-box, and dropped it on this site. Just click on the first-page "Videos" button...

It is worth watching, since it shows some hard truth, instead of the usual American media bullshit, heavily influenced by Israeli supporters who want war. The Israeli monsters are going to give us World War Three in a nice neat package, complete with well-documented murdered children and babies, Hospitals and Universities deliberatly targeted and destroyed. The USA media is remarkably silent on the impressive, genocidal atrocity that is taking place right now in Palestine. Well, fuck them. They are "masters of war", and it was Bob Dylan, long ago, that said in his song of the same name: "I you hope die, and that your death will come soon." The US mainstream media is a dishonest lie-machine.

Watch Congresswoman Tlaib's honest video, and judge for yourself. It's the first video in the Gemesysresearch.com video section. Just click the first-page video button.

What I would like to see, is Biden and his disgusting henchmen, dropped by helicopter right into Gaza City, and left there for a few months. That would be justice, no?

[ Nov. 6, 2023 ] - Blue Sky - Nothing but Blue Sky do I see... in my fever dreams, that is... What I see in the news and the numbers, is the pre-conditions for some strange times which make it tough to sleep soundly. One wake's up a 4:00 am, and stares at the ceiling, and the thought occurs: "Are things *really* as bad as they look? OR am I just being too negative in my thinking?" But there is, of course, a third scenario: Things are actually a *lot* worse than you realize, and no amount of planning or preparation, can alter the future outcome, that races towards us all. (This is the Malthusian view, in which the curves cross, and the diebacks and mass-bankruptcy events must occur, one way or another.)

I don't think we are quite there yet. But I don't think AI will save us all, either. It's ability to amplify the human capacity for doing harm to others, is probably as great as any other cool new technology. We now can actually create real, honest, effective and operational "killer robots...", at scale and at reasonable costs. Why bother with artillery? I am waiting for one (or both) of those US aircraft carriers in the eastern Med., to be sunk by a steerable Kinzhal missile (or maybe 5 or 10 Kinzhal missiles...?) All one needs to do, is blind the ships radars with clouds of "chaff" at various wavelengths, and it should be a doable project. In a "blizzard of data", it is tough to see what is what, until it is too late.

With power-projection getting increasingly difficult, and weapons getting real intelligence, it will be an interesting (and dangerous!) world - even more so than it is now.

A big yacht is a nice-to-have thing, but a series of underground bunkers, and a private stash of low-yield nuclear devices, might be a more attractive alternative. It is interesting to see the Israeli's try to "kill their way to peace". Our research suggests that this strategy will not work. They can kill Hamas and many of the hard-core Hamas leaders and fighters and their women and their children. But this action will create a hundred new "Hamas" things, in various places all around the world. Sadly, dead jews will be the results. Be a killer jew? Then enter into the next life, and say hi to those you snuffed at scale. You can all cozy up together in Satan's backside... the "Will-Knots of Eternity", I suppose. The madness of the current mass-murder exercise will damage everyone, if we continue to support it.

Poor old Bill Ackman is worried about anti-dentites at Harvard. Try to imagine just how little poor Harvard even matters now. We suspect it's time is ending. One wants to see what those at West Point are doing. The future will lie in the actions and effectiveness of the teaching at the military colleges.

Sure, perhaps I am being too dismal here. But everything and everyone reacts to events. Were the American military efforts in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan justified and successful? This is unclear. What is crystal-clear, is the effectiveness of the American military. It is powerful and effective - or at least it was. But can one stay at the top of the mountain forever? And make war upon the whole world, all the time? Perhaps not. Just like Pax Romana - where there were Roman ports and cities in Wales, the West Coast of England, where the tin-mines could export their output for pepper from India - Pax Americana cannot last forever. All Russia and China need to do, is wait, while Europe grows tired, hungry, poor, and angry. History will do the rest.

What is so curious, is to see just about everything in the USA being done pretty much wrong. The entire nation is like a drugged-and-drunken old man, screaming at the world, pounding his fists because the world does not view things his way, with his curious thinking-models. But not all of America is old, drunk and stupid. So, a capacity for program-change exists.

One strategy that a youthful, new group of American rulers might implement, is to just default on their foreign-held government Treasury bonds and bills. There is nothing really to prevent a new group of American leaders from doing this. It would be financially insane, and a "causus belli" (a cause for war), but it certainly would be a "Great Reset", would it not?

These scenarios occur. And as I wrote this strange piece, a rare November thunderstorm began. I can hear (and feel), the distant thunder. It sounds rather like artillery.

[ Nov. 2, 2023 ] - Steady Rolling Man - And I didn't Shoot the Sheriff, either. Tried to go extra long yesterday and the day before, but didn't get filled. So, sadly, I "Dindu Nuffin..', Except to watch prices runaway this AM. I really have to stop trying to get "heroic" fills, where I buy at the absolute range-bottom. This is usually just not possible, and prevents me from getting into positions that I should really have jumped on hard, given the accuracy - no, wrong word... given the quality of the analysis. (As one gets older, wisdom does come, if one works like a demon, and puts heart and soul into one's efforts...)

But we retained our original, fat position in the bank stocks. Still all-in basically, since they are the machine that pays the bills, and that machine is still working, despite the goof-stupid swings in the stock prices. This AM, we were up sharply, due to Federal Reserve Frollics (but no raise/raise) yesterday, so the Market is responding in a fine manic manner, even as we stare World War Three in the face.

I watched part of Peter Schiff's podcast. Some good points, but we gave up on gold a very long time ago. It is silly expensive, and really - how does one ever really know if one actually has truly bought real gold? The entire gold market rests on the same soft and vague foundations that paper-finance does. When you buy your gold, what you think is 24-carat gold could easily turn out to be 10-carat or no-carat gold, unless you are a Greek guy with a very good bathtub, and some fine measuring equipment, or other clever technology.

Gold also requires the SAME two-trade thing, just like every other speculative investment - ie. you have to make TWO really good trades - you have to buy it cheap, and sell it dear, and that is always difficult. Most likely, you will buy your gold at a very high price, and hope to sell it higher or at least as the same inflation-adjusted price you at least bought it at. But that requires both luck, and a willing counter-party, same as any other damn trade. Gold offers no real advantage to a trader, and carries a large bag of great disadvantages - it is heavy, it makes you a fool's target if you keep it at home, and if you bury it somewhere else - your "back-40" or in some Swiss vault - you risk not being able to get it, when you need it, and you risk having it stolen by anyone who can successfully identity-theft your identity-data and your knowledge of where you put it. Gold is the same as any other asset. And it is heavy and expensive to move, and risky to carry around. Peter Schiff (like his April Fool's Joke) really *SHOULD* be promoting Bitcoin, truth be told. We don't like crypto either, but it is beating Gold this year, hands down, no contest.

We also think the markets will be OK, going forward. Not great, but just OK, for the reasons I gave in the note below, for Nov. 1st, the Day of the Dead. Happy "Day After Death Day".

"The Spirits we drank are just ghosts in the room"

[ Nov. 1, 2023 ] - Happy Day of the Dead - This is a lovely day. Today, it is crazy sunny, with not a cloud in sight. But it was *MINUS* 3 degrees C., when I got up this AM, and everything was covered with thick white frost. Very pretty, actualy. The cold weather is nice, as it removes the homeless and the beggars from the local streets. And it kills off any "Killer Bees", which come in via Amazon shipments.

The Japanese are wise. They put their "Go Visit The Graves of Your Dead" festival in August (it's called "Bon", which always confuses the French), and it lasts three days, typically August 13 to August 15 - but different parts of Japan have it earlier, in July. The ghosts come on the first day, you visit them on the second day and maybe do lunch, and they you say goodbye to them on the third day.

No matter what nation or what culture, you will always have dead folks to remember, if you are human. In the Middle Yeast, the Hebrew and the Muslim will always ensure that Death remains very much in fashion, sorta like the dress-makers of Paris do with haute-level dresses, by tweaking the frocks each year.

Folks are predictable. But the markets, less so.

Our AI forecasts are pointing south, with consistant negativity that is extreme.

But I have my little "Inner-Trader's Voice" whispering to me.. "When everyone is being this fucking stupid, and so completely batshit crazy, just maybe prices are a tad over-discounted, eh there buckaroo? What da ya think? Maybe time to try another bottom-fishing exercise with some dynamite?..." (My "Inner-Trader" is more than a bit of a rogue. But I keep the bastard around, because he makes me dollarettes...). My AI stuff is pointing down hard, suggesting the Market is taking the "Off-Ramp to Hell" - which is actually a Google-meme, truth be told. And of course, due to my deep-ego-desire to demand "I am NOT A MACHINE! I am NOT a Number! ... (yatta yatta)", like that old TV-Series from the 1960's, called "The Prisoner"), I really, really want to make a big, long leveraged-bet. Really a lot.

See: if it works, I am a fucking genius. But if not, then I am sitting in the shit, and with Winter coming to try to kill us all, that is not a good place to be. Ego and ego-puffery is a trader's enemy. It turns out it is *much* better to feel like a dork and fool and failure mostly, but occasionally make a shit-pile of money, than it is to source ego-puff happy-feelings from one's market activity. This is the damned hardest lesson to learn. Bad (low-or-no-profit) traders, will tend to "win-maximize", which means they do shit to get the most "wins", and take lots of small profits, and BIG losses. Wise traders will invert this algorithm - taking lots of small losses, while they try to ensure they are positioned to get the BIG profits.

Of all the shit I have written, this is probably the most actionable and useful advice. But it is really hard to actualize. I am pretty sure this Market will turn, and turn quite hard. If the Third World War coming at us from the looming future, does not downtick this slushpile, then that tells us that lots and lots and lots of USA and Euroland paper-coin is just flying around, desperately looking for a home, as fixed-income portfolios sink into the quicksand of out-of-control government spending. There is just no other way. You can't have a crash, when everyone has Mercedes and Lexus SUV's, and is look for puffy places to park their trunks full of cash.

We can still buy stuff (and pay our damn taxes!) with dollarettes and pesos and eurobits. So, the equity markets are gonna have to survive. And just to survive, in these times of weirdness and crazy stupid foolishness, will ensure prosperity. It will also ensure inflation, and that makes it really interesting.

Markets will be bid up. Real estate is already too expensive, but will not come down in price, in nations where proper land-tenure and rule-of-Roman-law (ie. hypothication - being able to borrow money by pledging assets for collateral) exists. Folks want to COME here.. not LEAVE here. Unless some crazy Russian launches a bunch of nukes - or some crazy American does this - or somebody nukes Israel or Israel nukes someone else - we just don't expect a big sell-off in the stock market.

Is that a big "IF"? I don't think so. Folks can satisfy their blood-lust without the need to drop big stinky nukes, since these blow radioactive puff pretty much everywhere, and your daughters and your sons will get cancer, and their children's children will have mutations that will make them look like Down's Syndrome kids, or reptiles or maybe Godzilla. Everyone loses.

But folks love war. War makes adventure available to the masses, and it will never go out of fashion. And it makes lots and lots and LOTS of shekels for the "Defence" companies.

We don't own any RTX, 'cause it just looks too expensive. We said the same about MSFT, and so, yes, perhaps we are fucking stupid. This is possible. But we are still here, despite taking all those damn "clot-shots" (which killed the poor bugger whom I used to argue with about vaccine efficacy and I feel really bad about that..) I and my partner took 3 doses. She is ok, but I have some weird swelling in my foot, which is not diabetic neuropathy, and not due to B12 deficiency, etc. But it made half my foot go numb, and after months of tests - the doctor has no idea what is causing this, since tarsel-tunnel syndrome does also not seem to be the case. The neurologist said it looks like more "vascular studies" are needed.

A numb-foot is annoying and feels weird, and I am crazy healthy otherwise. So, I'll be getting MRI on the foot/leg and also an ultrasound... but probably, I just have to get used to it. PS: IMHO, Heparin, hydroxochloroquine and nasal de-congestants, combined with oxygen therapy, are the right way to treat Covid-19, but I am just a science hacker and not a doctor, so do not take my word for anything. We were offered more vaccine doses, but we have decided - since I got three doses - 2 Moderna, and 1 Pfizer - and then caught a wicked case of Covid - that the vaccines are perhaps not a wise strategy, given the fact that they *provably* do not work (my Covid-19 case was confirmed with the antibody test kit, and two weeks of feeling like shit) and the annoying foot-swelling and numbness (which looks like maybe from some kind of DVT, at this point) offers evidence that they may cause harmful clotting.

But we are damned lucky and fortunate, since we are still here, and able to pay the bills. What is interesting, is how completely one has to make one's own decisions, and craft one's own strategic response to events both local and trans-national now. USA has just blocked export of firearms, which is comical, since that is something America does as good as, or better than the rest of the world. So, Biden pisses on the US economy, yet again. Like he did by joining a UAW picket like in Detroit, FFS. His "Bidenomics" Green-Thing Plan relies on success by pissing on the USA petrol-products production and export business, same as the idiotic "Carbon Tax" we have it Canada, which just damages Alberta's economy, and punishes the Ontario economy for being successful.

What I wonder about, is how long this curious "Symphony of the Stupid" can be played to everyone. Premiers of Ontario and Alberta are spitting mad that fuel-oil in Eastern Canada has been exempted from the "Carbon Tax", but everyone using every other form of heating for their house (ie. rural folks who use propane, for example), will still have to pay this fucking stupid tax. The Feds here exempted fuel-oil, because the Liberal MP's from the East explained that it is hitting low and average income families hard in the East, and the Liberals will lose many votes, if the Tory promise to repeal the tax is an issue in the next election. After this winter, it damn sure will be, we suspect. We think: FFS, guys. Taxing "heat-making for your house in winter", seems a rather stupid and nasty thing to do.

But we are in the "Age of Stupid", and it seems little can be done to change this. It is one reason, that we expect the Market to recover and move higher, as the printing of extra money for everyone, seems to be such an accepted strategy now. With fiscal discipline a thing of the past (ancient history, really), and with paper fiat currency, there is no limit to the amount of "stimulus" that can be applied. Everything is now driven by politics, and the political people are "coin-operated".

[ Oct. 31, 2023 ] - Happy Halloween - A good friend of mine's Mom died, and he is clearing out her house. We took two trucks-loads of furniture to the thrift-store downtown. Their furniture room was packed to the gunnels, but we moved stuff around to make room. The house will go up for sale next week, and will make some wealthy immigrant family very happy. My banker, Dimitri, tells me that he has these clients wiring in mega-dollerettes to acquire houses here. The Cdn dollarette is at 72 US centavos now. It's comical. If I want to buy some thing in USA-land, via anything other than Amazon, it provokes insane shipping costs, and foreign-currency translation fees that can quintuple (that means **FIVE**) times the price of the base object. This is really, really comical, since the USA has the "leaky, no-border here, amigo" customs model at the Mexican border, but when it comes to trade-restrictions now between Canada and USA, the border looks like fucking Berlin in the 1960's. This is quite simply majestically insane. From an economic perspective - it is just weirdly hilarious, and would make Ricardo have a laughing fit so hard, he would spit out his coffee-house coffee.

But, enough economics. Just wanted to say "Happy Halloween" to anyone reading these electronic scribbles...

[ Oct. 30, 2023 ] - Bayreuther Festspielle by Miles Davis & Goethe - 'Round Midnight, we take a short trip to Dear Old Stockholm. And then the NATO bombing begins. When those first bombs fell on Formosa, we knew things were gonna get bad. The chronometer read: "2889", and Mr. Verne was off in the Nautilus. We took the Princess instead, and wondered if we could rescue Margaritte in time. Faust had warned us it would be difficult, since the Prison was well guarded by fierce fanatics, that had the usual ruthless dedication to the Pope, along with their other weapons of mass distraction...

Yes, Virginia, the times are getting rather strange. Excuse me while I go scrape the shit right off my shoes. And off the investment structures, also.

It's gonna take some serious effort. We are sure of this. At least, we can sure of one thing.

Everything else, remains rather up in the air. Valuations, especially.

There will be some way, the madness and the insanity of the recent times will be resolved. And as we study and craft possible scenarios, they all look awful and insane and horrible. There seems to be no other path forward for this curiously corrupted and broken World. US President "Bye/Done" has issued an "Executive Order" on AI. It is probably the most comical official pronouncement I have ever read. It is complete nonsense, and is obviously written by a committee of complete fockwits in the "Maison Blanche". It seeks to simultaneously restrict and regulate the bejezus out of American AI efforts - and then also (get this) actually *promote* American AI research and development efforts!

Reading it, makes me feel like Alice down the big rabbit-hole, eating magic mushrooms, and seeing crazy psycho stuff that cannot possibly be real.

It's like the insane, stupid and broken 1970's, a time of quite impressive social failure and economic collapse. Sorta, "Deja Vu, all over again..." to quote Yogi Berra. (Or was that "Boo-Boo"?)

We only know one thing now. There *will* be some kind of reset event. We are not sure what it will be, but we are now certain something of this sort, will happen to USA. A clever and courageous nation like America, cannot go on, with it's leaders being so fucking stupid. It just cannot continue to be like this much longer. Really.

Somethings are gonna have to give, and in a rather big and dramatic manner, we suspect.

[ Oct. 29, 2023 ] - More Sh/t - You can enter "Why is USA turning to shit?" in both Google and DuckDuckGo search engines, and get some interesting results. Many of the hits will be the usual anti-Trump disinformation and nonsense about "shithole" countries and so on. But some interesting results appear also.

I entered this in response to the crafted destruction of a *really* good website and webpage, that I often referred to, using my old iPad. The page was an American Aviation Weather page, which had a very well crafted, clear, extremely well designed and informative, surface weather map of the North American continent. It was at URL:

https://aviationweather.gov/progchart/sfc

and it was one of the very best weather maps I have ever seen or used. I would look at it regularly, as it "just worked". It provided a nice, high-resolution image, and it was updated very frequently. It gave a good technical picture of the North-American weather situation.

But - it's now gone. It's now history, and has been replaced by some silly-stupid, complicated idiot-site, designed for *modern* tablets and so-called "smart" phones, and of course, it does not now work on my iPad, since it uses a bunch of nasty interactive javascript bullshit. They actually have video **TUTORIALS** on how to "navigate" the new site (which like I said - does not even work at all on my old iPad.)

There is nothing postive or helpful happening here. There is just the usual toxic complexity that characterizes modern technical development now. Really good, functional, excellent systems, that "just work", are being replaced by COMPLEX-SYSTEMS that require what is called "cognitive load" - ie. you have to **WORK* at learning how to use them.

This is not the way it was supposed to work. And I and many others bloody-well KNOW THIS - because we tried to design stuff that actually worked - and ***REDUCED*** cognitive-load, so that PEOPLE COULD GET MORE STUFF DONE. The technology is supposed to MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER - and MAKE YOU ****MORE**** PRODUCTIVE, not less productive

But this idea is just gone now. We are living in the AGE-OF-SHITIFICATION, where good stuff and excellent design, has to be destroyed, so that BAD-DESIGN and JUNK-CRAP SYSTEMS can be foisted on folks, with the primary reason that information system vendors want to CHARGE MONEY for access to technical solutions that actually are good and workable.

If you want something of quality - you have to SUBSCRIBE and PAY for it. Except folks like us are already subscribing to services like STARLINK, which is already $160/month! We are already paying for this access - but the technology-industry and technical providers and designers, need to DEGRADE what we have, so we are induced to cough up MORE cash to access some nasty Cloud-based "Software-as-a-service" (SAAS) thing.

I find this annoying, since it means almost every system I use, is under repeated assault and attack - even by the people who built and run the things. We find this is just sad and bad. And even the old, high-quality government sites - which are not under financial pressure to be for-profit services - are also being ruined.

The whole internet thing was supposed to be a positive force, and offer a bright future of endless possible access to data and knowledge that was unavailable to most, as it was either hidden in libraries or locked behind high-cost academic journals with very high paywalls and limited circulation.

For a little while, the whole internet-model of open-access and sender-keep-accounting worked pretty good.

But recently, it is all falling apart and turning to shit. I know, because I recall when the whole internet model was not crap like it is now. It was sometimes so good, it was magical. But not now.

When I try to access the old, excellent US Aviation Weather Page, at the site https://aviationweather.gov/progchart/sfc I get "Service is Unavailable" and "The Request is Blocked" and a date-stamp and a long text string that starts with a "YYYYMMDD..." date. And that is all that works now, on my iPad.

There are other sites that still work, and I have found a few. And of course, I can walk out onto my front porch, and look at the fucking sky, and gain some awareness of the weather from the cloud patterns, and the wind-direction, kinda like they did in Ancient Roman times. And I can listen to the radio, if I need a bad forecast.

But it is completely silly, when ugly, non-functional, badly-designed complex systems replace well-designed, easy-to-use, simple-and-clear systems that worked well, and thousands of folks relied upon. What we have concluded, is that this trend of "SHITIFICATION" is not an accident.

We suspect now, it is a clear "feature" of the times. It is by design, and we are pretty sure this trend will continue.

Get used to it. And be aware that this nasty strategy will have consequences.

But the flip-side, is this: There will be real opportunities for those who can successfully correct and repair these nasty process trends which actively degrade the operational aspects of everyday life. STARLINK is a perfect example. It just works, unlike the various internet-access offerings that local domestic providers offered, which were throttled, unreliable, almost as expensive, and over time, would get slower and less useable, as more subscribers were added. STARLINK gets *better* as more satellites are lifted into orbit. Instead of a trend towards SHITIFICATION (the turning of a good system into a shit-system), STARLINK just gets a bit better as time goes by.

This capacity for clear and obvious improvement - instead of the more common trend towards system degradation and increasing complexity and system-fragility - is something very real.

Those who offer this kind of real improvement, will gain real benefits, and if market forces can prevail, will drive and control the future.

[ Oct. 28, 2023 ] - Fields of Regret - Which is where we all end up resting, perhaps. Went to a funeral for a fine old friend, yesterday. Another good person gone. So it goes.

Very few people regret what they did. Mostly, they regret the things that they DIDN'T do. This is a consistant theme, if you interview people who are old and/or dying.

So, since we all track the same path, you should use your time wisely. Turn off the screen, and go out and live life. It will end very soon, really too soon for everyone, truth be told.

[ Oct. 27, 2023 ] - Digging Two (Billion?) Graves - Ok, so what should we do? This is the question of the hour for many people now.

Come Spring, we will probably all be OK. The key strategy now, is to get thru the Winter, without being done in by the usual dark forces of rising costs, falling incomes, inflation that degrades and reduces money-wealth, the usual assaults on one's physical health by Nature herself, and the madness and curious cruelty of average humans. Remember what censorship really is - it is book-burning. And when they start burning books, they end by burning people. This is the hate-trend of human history, and in Israel, it is playing out right now. Christian and Buddhist teaching mandates forgiveness - but the Jew, the Fool, and the Angry Madman will seek revenge, and thus multiply horror, so that it grows in strength and power, and joins with hate, to rule the minds of men who are blind to wisdom and the lessons of history.

The "War on Terror" becomes - quite quickly - a "War on Sanity" itself, and we sadly now see a mass slaughter of non-combatants taking place in Israel, being of course assisted by American warships and American military assistance that would be beyond question criminal behaviour, if it were being done by any private-sector agents. It this way, we see that "GOVERNMENT" is the primary source of both terror and horror. The American Constitution created a very well-designed system, which limits out-of-control attempts to ramp-up offshore military adventurism by hate-filled opportunists. Israel is an error, wrapped in the cloth of religious and racial hatred, and is now revenge-killing an entire civilian enclave of many millions of ordinary people. It's actions are a stench in the nostrils of humanity.

The American military should not be involved in this current Israeli exercise of mass-murder. For Americans, their own wise Constitution specifies this. They are not to go to War, unless a vote is taken to do so. And since one insane mass-murder does not justify another insane exercise in mass-murder, the USA would be wise to avoid fanning the flames of race-hatred in Palestine and the race-based entity that is Israel.

Our World is walking into a useless and pointless war scenario. Elon Musk is right (as usual), and if we are to maintain prosperity and freedom in the Western World, we need to stop the illegal and unwise opportunistic actions of Government "Leaders", "Deep State" operatives, and out-of-control State Agencies.

If we are to maintain our traditional freedoms and ensure our continued prosperity, then we really need to **CHANGE THE PROGRAM**. And that of course means massive REDUCTIONS in out-of-control Government spending, reductions in military spending, and an end to the insane CANCEL CULTURE of censorship that prevents people from even talking about what is so obviously going wrong in so many areas of our society.

We have to plan to vote-out the clowns and fraudsters who are degrading our World. And we need to hold-hard to the values and traditional process-models that can be trusted, and that work in a sane and viable manner. Our land-tenure models are good, and so are our financial constructs. We can trust them. Our Governments need to be restrained from attacking and assaulting the very things that work correctly and honestly. Our banks and mortgage-models for home ownership are a good idea, and work well. The lack of housing is due to the extreme restrictions and regulations that make building houses crazy expensive. Unwise and absurd policy swings by Central Banks are destructive, and need to be limited. We should let market forces determine interest rates, and not have a bunch of poltroons in Government offices trying to set arbitrary interest-rate levels - but that means we need to avoid out-of-control exercises in money-printing, which causes (we all know), inflationary economic blow-ups.

This means we have to reduce Government spending, and dial-down the out-of-control, flood-gates open immigration that is taking place. Importing millions of "new citizens" is wildly dangerous, and is certain to destabilize any society. This unwise action should just stop.

Privately, we cannot expect a lot of money-driven economic gain, going forward from here. The objective has to be a focus on careful use of resources, and careful deployment of capital, to projects which have solid economic return. We have to carefully assess the economics of any investment now.

But mostly - we need to reduce the ability of Governments to confiscate wealth, and degrade the economic process for their own advantage, and for the advantages of their corrupt cronies. This is critical. We need much SMALLER government and a massive reduction the ABC's - the Agencies, Boards and Commissions that restrict and block and limit economic life. These Government parasites suck the financial life out of our economy. They limit and restrict economic opportunity, and prevent anyone from being able to **CHANGE THE PROGRAM**.

But our future prosperity requires we make these changes. We are looking at a cruel economic and social collapse, if we cannot reduce the scale and power of the parasite class of deep-State operatives that restrict opportunity, limit the accumulation of private capital, and degrade economic freedom.

[ Oct. 26, 2023 ] - Nasdaq Starts to Crack - We are seeing some very reversally behaviour now in the markets. It's beyond just choppy. It seems to be algo-skanky stuff, with the trading horizons dialed down as short as they can get. A long-term trade is maybe 15 or 17 minutes.

Takes the wind from one's sails. That's why I figure: "To hell with sailboats. Give me a big V8, a large tank of dead dinosaur-juice, and a hydro-planing deep-V hull. Wind is not an issue." :)

Very unclear where we go from here. My main AI things are pointing down now, with an ugly down-slope forecast. I should probably lighten up - except our cash is shit, and inflation is bad and certain to get worse. Selling now, would be problematic, since no better alternatives exist, I suspect. I read about some crazy English dude in UK, who is LONG the Japanese yen. Holy moly, is he gonna get fooked. He has these weird old-man reasons why the yen should strengthen, but I am pretty sure he is dead wrong. I don't trade currency futures, but right now, the yen is around 150 to the US dollar. It is in a long-term weakening trend, and is probably looking at 175 to 190, going out a few years, as this will help Japan stabilize, reduce imports, and pump up the export machine, that powers the economy of the place. It is an earthquake island, regularly hammered by typhoons and other awful weather. They have to export to survive and prosper, so they do. Demographically, they are screwed in Japan, and will not likely import millions of brown-boys and brown-girls like we are doing here. Their population will shrink (it already is), and they will have to reduce their currency value, in order to compete with China and other Asian countries, such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

Being long the yen, and expecting it to strengthen from here, seems a bad idea.

But being long Canadian banks has also proved to be a bad idea, in this current economic environment, so I am the pot calling the kettle black, I guess.

The numbers are getting weird everywhere now. I looked at a new GM pickup truck. The sticker price was $90,000.00. With the 13% HST, the after-tax price is over $100,000. For a black PICKUP TRUCK!!

GM and Ford and all domestic auto workers can all go on strike for as long as they want to, since I am not going to be buying any new trucks. Our modern economy seems to be kind of broken, truth be told. The numbers are becoming insane, in many places. IF the rates outlook really is "even more higher for even more longer", THEN the high-growth tech stocks of Nasdaq are gonna have to go the same way the financials have gone. Again, this is not a "conspiracy theory" - it's actually a simple DCF Model (Discounted Cash Flow Model). Those big future earnings get discounted *way* dowm, even if the growth forecast number is good, IF the interest rate you use for your present value number is two or three times higher. That now lower number is the share price, which in a sane world (and a DCF model) should track close to the present value of those wonderful future earnings, out in that wonderful (or wound-filled?) future. If you use 3.00% in your DCF model to estimate a current share-price value, and then you re-run the calcs with 5.00% as your interest rate number, your share price estimate is probably down at least 50%, even if you have a good earnings growth rate assumption. It's right there, in the math.

What this means, is that high-growth, big earnings tech stocks might fall 40% to 50% in value, especially if the earnings growth-rates are seen to be slowing down. (Kinda like it looks like they are...)

So, if 5% and higher (maybe 5.50% to 7.50%) stays, sorta forever (or for at least a decade or two), then this could hammer the market for tech stocks, since tech stocks might trade at maybe half the share price that they are now. And this is just how present-value driven DCF (Discounted Cash-Flow) models work.

If the market believes that both stubborn inflation and 5%-to-7% interest rates are here to stay, then tech stocks could drop 40% to 50% in price, as they track towards this new picture-of-the-world.

So, maybe the financials aren't really that bad. They should do OK, if they can reap the bigger spreads that higher rates obviously allow them to capture, and also of course, can manage to get their costs under control. Technology stocks have a nasty tendency to either blow up or fade-out, if time and their business models change.

The market seems now to be reflecting awareness of this new picture-of-the-world, we suspect. And of course, the leaves are falling from the trees, rather like the share-prices do this time of year.

[ Oct. 20, 2023 ] - It's the End of the World (As We Know It...) - Yes, it really is. The era of idiotically absurd **negative** interest-rates will never return, we suspect. Trying to convert to an electric economy, with a limited grid expansion, and using wind and solar power, will not work. We will have to go nuclear, or live with interruptions in electric power at our homes. And things will get *expensive*, and wages will not keep track. The US auto-industry strikes are simply hilarious, since the folks who are in auto-unions, are basically American labour aristocracy. Come the revolution, what will happen to them? They are already crazy overpaid for the little work they actually do, so for them to get all militant, and strike-close US auto production, is just nutty. It is beyond unwise - yet this is the new pattern that we can predict will unfold, because it IS already unfolding. (Easy prediction to make, basically.)

Things are completely insane, in many areas now. This trend will also probably continue. I feel like Brad and Janet, coming into Frank N. Furter's big mansion. It's just astounding.

And yes, time really is fleeting, and we really do have to "keep control".

Such are the costs of being a true time-traveller.

Another predictions: The battered banks will survive and prosper - if their managements are not completely stupid (like the political folks seem to be - everywhere..). The banks need to survive and prosper, otherwise the financialized (and very prosperous) world will collapse, and there will be fighting in the streets. Really SHTF scenarios may unfold, truth be told. I wonder how many political boffins actually realize this simple truth? Consider this metaphor: We live on the top of a pyramid, which is balanced on a player-piano, which is balanced on a bottle of wine. Our world is unstable, and the degree of instability looks to be increasing. But no one even speaks about stability anymore. If you consult the history books, "Economic Stabiliztion" was a thing. But not any more.

There is this quite mad view, that all can be "fine tuned", and this is just not the case, we are pretty sure. Here's a little gem: Once in-year changes in key economic variables (that drive process), change by 30% or more, the system can very easily go chaotic, and produce surprisingly large swings. This is actually in a modified equation, lifted from biological science, which looks at population dynamics. The extreme systemic responses are not necessarily the fault of any group or agents or agencies. It's actually right there, in the math. Dynamic systems with multiple endogenous feedback loops, have these "wild instability" characteristics, if sufficiently perturbed. The canonical example in economics, is the 1929 to 1932 experience. But the German and Austrian post-war experience from 1918 to 1923 is useful to examine also, as is the wild economics of the USA Civil War, and the 1835 to 1839 extreme economic down-cycle, which produced violent Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada.

Look at the nice and fine world of 2019, and the storm of the viral plague, followed by absurdist, horrific warfare and violence, that characterizes our world now. Trump is the expected Republican choice to challenge Old Biden, next year, yet some strange and curious New York Democrat judge, acting as a political operative, has put him under "Gag Order". This is simply crazy, and is counter to basic democratic process, and the Constitution of the USA, which mandates the legality of free speech. And this is true, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump. The dishonest and corrupt Democrats of USA, are assaulting the basic USA law that defines how USA society is required to operate. And it is that USA Constitution, that is directly responsible for much of American success, in many different economic and scientific spheres.

It appears that so-called "Democrats" in USA, want to actively damage the basic essence of what USA is, has been, and could be in the future. The "Leftist Democrats" are the real extremists. The judges and legal officials of New York State appear to be quite out of control, and look like they are acting as political "hit-squads", trying to maintain the Democrat control of USA, the State, and the failing entity that is New York City. This is tragic - but perhaps it has always been this way. USA seems to have been at war with itself, through much of it's astonishingly violent history - much like Canada also. We are no better - we just hide it better. The bodies are rarely ever found, sadly. Our world is even crazier than USA world - but we are just a minor, no-weapons nation, which hides under the American nuclear skirt.

So, it just keeps getting weirder and less viable, for so many. If we tip over the big financial structure, the mess will be extreme, and difficult to re-construct.

But the unwise actions of the political poltroons, seems to be trending towards this unfortunate outcome. At least that is what our trend-models are pointing to. And they are disturbingly prescient.

[ Oct. 19, 2023 ] - Tubular Bulls - If you are long, you are wrong, it seems. It's a very ugly market now. We've been researching financial and economic system stability characteristics, and it seems we might be finally in real trouble. The US has this massive and growing government debt problem, and is now fighting wars on two fronts. This is a problem by itself. But there is also this whole problem of the USA trade deficit, where the USA just plain buys more stuff from the world, than it sells them. The net effect is to export dollars to everyone, everywhere (except me, I guess... :) ).

Both of these actions - unlimited and uncontrollable growing government debt, and the trade deficit the US has been running for basically 40 years or so - both of these actions reduce financial system stability. The USA is able to run this crazy game, for years and years and years, which no other nation could possibly get away with, because the USA dollar is the world's reserve money. It is fiat money, not backed by anything except more money. But it has been working - since the USA makes good stuff - and very good weapons. So, every First, Second and Third World nation is happy to get it's hands on those USA dollars, and thus be able to buy magic stuff that it cannot make itself.

This is the essence of being able to be the nation that is a planetary reserve-currency provider. You need to be able to sell some magic, situation-changing stuff, for your money. What good is gold, without the technolgy to defend your holding of it? Gold must come with guns, or the gold moves on to someone who DOES have guns.

And the USA makes good guns. And big aircraft carriers, and fine new, clear weapons that create clarity of perception, in the little lizard-brains of the book-runners of Earth.

So, we have war, war and politics, war and trade, war and defeat, and war and victory.

But I am deeply concerned that they might be programming a "critically damped" system of feedback oscillation, where any attempt to correct the system now, risks creating *amplified* responses in the global economy. Instead of an economic stabilization strategy, we seem to be getting pro-cyclic economic amplification strategy. The various systemic variables that need to be damped-down to maintain global economic system stability, are now being "pumped-up", to achieve various political objectives.

I am worried about a linked financial system, with very tightly-connected linkages, and rising costs now baked in to just about everything. It looks like it could break now, in an unpredictable manner. Or not.

Another stability factor changing rapidly, is that the world's capital tends to be stored in US 10-year T-bonds (or duration near that 10-year mark, give or take a year or a few on each side.) This used to be a source of system stability, but in edge-condition scenarios, where the value of all the T-bonds and T-bills are still falling rapidly, this destruction of capital value can hurt indebted agencies, companies, banks and even governments. But if you don't backstop your bank capital with these US paper instruments, then what do you use? Gold and silver? Maybe, or maybe ether or bitcoin? We like real-estate, despite the costs and liquidity issues that need to be managed carefully, if you are not to fall over the edge.

What we do expect is more inflation. There is no choice, it appears. It's the only mechanism that can have any hope of letting the spinning-out-of-balance economic system, continue to operate, and create the appearance of wealth creation. But this means rates stay 5% to 8% or higher, and inflation grows in strength, as economic agents - consumers and produces - seek to ensure their own survival.

The market appears to be increasingly fragile. The Crisis-Bear seems to be here.

[ Oct. 16, 2023 ] - World War 2.5 - The World is falling into madness, it seems.

We see America engaged now in multiple wars, and murderous conflict seems to be now, a standard political strategy. For those of us accustomed to peaceful, rational relations between nations, this seems strange.

And yet, if one accepts the premise (as once articulated in a Dire Straits song) "We haven't changed since ancient times..."), then it would appear that this is all just a reversion to the mean. My parents grew up during wartime. The pictures of my father getting his wings (and looking about 18 years old!), and those early black and white pictures of his twin-engined bomber, and my mother, as a young girl with black hair, looking like a Hollywood film promo shot - these were made during wartime. For Canadians and Polish and folks from the UK, the Second World War started in 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.

For Americans, it was several years later, in December of 1941, when Roosevelt engineered the fake "surprise attack" on the US military naval base of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Yamamoto's attack force had sailed, it's departure was known by USA, and Honolulu newspapers carried headlines actually suggesting that the Japanese would attack very soon - perhaps on the weekend. The incoming flight of Japanese attack aircraft were picked up on radar, and orders were given to ignore this incoming wave of aircraft. Special teams of US federal operatives went around and collected most of the newspapers which contained the suggestion (as *HEADLINES!*) that at Japanese attack could occur on the weekend. To describe the Pearl Harbour attack as a "surprise" is a proven falsehood.

Japan attacked because USA had begun a military blockade of the island of Japan. To suggest that the Pearl Harbour attack was a "surprise" is beyond absurd. If you reach out and put your hands around some fellow's throat, and you start to squeeze, should you claim - when he tries to kick you in the balls - that you are the victim of a "surprise attack"? Public opinion was deeply against USA involvement in the European war with Germany. Roosevelt believe he had to engineer an event that would manipulate USA public opinion, and get it into the Second World War in a big way. So he did.

Did Israel do the same thing here? Honest analysts question how there was supposedly *zero* knowledge of what Hamas was planning. But given the ground-invasion of Gaza, and it's ongoing destruction now, by Israeli bombing efforts, and the reprisals being taken by Israel in the North against Lebanon, and against Syrian airports and cities of Damascus and Aleppo, a bigger picture emerges.

We like to say "no-one wants war", but of course, this is quite untrue. There are *many* powerful and effective groups and individuals who yearn for warfare. Observe the effective use of extreme violence used to successfully sell Hollywood films. Take a hard look at the entire Hollywood film industry itself, and which kinds of people tend to run the place, and make serious money from the films it produces. It is more than just a "dream factory". It is an explicit propaganda machine, dominated by those deeply sympathetic to the Israeli cause, and extremely race-conscious. Regardless of one's opinions on this reality, the explicit fact of this reality cannot be dismissed.

There are groups of people - Jews, industrialists, government agency and so-called "Deep State" operatives - that truly want war. They seek - by all their actions - to manipulate US public opinion always to achieve what have to be described as race-based, or essentially tribal results. And they get rich and powerful and ever more socially dominant by doing this.

We don't believe that the Israeli's engineered the ugly and insane Hamas attack on their own land and people. That would be too much, even for Jews, most would agree. But as the cynical and conflicted analysts observe in the study of politics, the old rule is being applied with a caustic certainty here: "Never let a good crisis go to waste !"

Scores will be settled, money will be made, and it will be mostly innocent children and women who get attacked and killed by angry Jews and those who support and encourage these kinds of people.

"Terrorism! Terrorism! Blah Blah Blah Blah! "

Don't you poor sorry John Q. Public types, know when you are being wound up like cheap alarm clocks? Apparently not. So here we go... again. We don't support or accept as necessary, what Hamas did. But we do believe that the existence of a race-based State of Israel, a nuclear-armed American colony that promotes violence and hatred, is just a bad idea, and should not exist as it does in it's present form. A neo-fascist, religious-oriented tribal entity - the "Jewish Homeland" is quite frankly, an insane and absurd construction, that is absolutely certain to provoke the kind of violence, hatred and social and military conflict that we are now seeing. Given human nature, there is simply no way it cannot do anything else.

"Peace" will never be possible, as long something absurd and abusive as these race-based National entities continue to exist. South Africa - as Boor White Homeland - was not viable, and change finally came. The ISIS entity - with it's horrific Islamic neo-fascist focus on a religious-based nation-state - was forcably ended, as it certainly should have been.

So how can anyone accept the existence of a "Jewish" State? The very concept is absurd and racist and it's existence - coming as it does at the direct expense of millions of those who identify as "Palastinians" - is *CERTAIN* to generate ongoing conflict and hatred for all the time that such a grotesque, racist entity continues to exist. But with nuclear weapons and biological weapons at it's disposal, and with continued direct support by American militarists, it will do just fine, and continue to breed hatred and anger and pain and horror - all of which is of course un-necessary.

But this is not unwanted, by a very large number of very dishonest people, who are very effective in successfully promoting their dishonesty.

So, we can predict that the world will remain at war - albeit at perhaps lower levels than we have seen historically, given the nature of humans, and the absurd racist social and economic State-entity that is Israel, and the support this unwise entity obtains from rich hyper-militarized nations such as America.

As long as Israel exists in its present race-based, neo-fascist religious format, there will be no peace, no solution, and lots of innocent women and children will be killed. This will not change, until the error of Israel is corrected, and a poly-ethnic, non-race-based federal entity is created that ends the internal border of Palestine. The model for the future of Israel-Palestine needs to be USA or Canada or England or France or modern South Africa - not ISIS.

[ Oct. 14, 2023 ] - Scarlet P... - Poetry time..

"They tried to kill him here,
They tried to kill him there.
Those Israelis tried to kill him everywhere!
Is he in Heaven?
Is he in Hell?
That damned impressive Khaled Mashaal!"

The dishonest and discredited US MSM can try to spin-spin-spin, with their Big Propaganda Machine on full-level Hollywood rinse-the-truth cycle. But one man's "Terrorist!" is another man's "Resistance Fighter!"

The word "terrorist" was invented by Hitler's Minister of Public Enlightenment & Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Really.

The German National Socialists, in the Second World War, called the RAF/RCAF bomber pilots: "Terror Fliegers", or "Terrorist Flyers". My dad was a bomber pilot. He died of cancer 19 years ago. But think about it. If Germany had prevailed in WW2, my dad would have been designated as a "Terrorist."

And USA Air Force senior folks, would have been put on trial for "war crimes", for the atomic-bombing - and horrific mass-murder of civilians by fire and radiation - of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what Curtis LeMay, US Air Force general, said himself what would have happened, had the USA lost the Pacific War. Curtis LeMay probably would have been prosecuted and executed as a war-criminal responsible for several hundred thousand planned **civilian** deaths. The mass-murder of Japanese civilians was deliberate USA Air Force policy. Let's be very goddamn clear about this. Killing large numbers of civilians was a USA policy decision.

Think about this, for a moment, you fucking arrogant USA mainstream media pricks, whinning about "terrorists".

Thousands of little Japanese girls, burned to death in their school classrooms - so Americans could relax on their fucking aircraft carriers, drinking Coke and laughing as they shot down the desperate kamakazi pilots, trying to defend their homeland from the worst barbarian invasion that had ever occurred in the entire 2500 years of recorded Japanese history. War is all about KILLING PEOPLE - as many of the ENEMY as you possibly can. What part of this war-thing confuses you goddamn jews?

As the clever jews and their supporters whine about a few hundred dead in Israel, please take a look at European & American history - at the bloodstained, shit-smeared filth that most war action *ALWAYS* is.

We are *NOT* against war when it is necessary. Let's be goddamn clear about this.

But this shit-stupid spin-talk about "Terrorists! Terrorists! Blah blah blah!" is complete bogus propaganda garbage. War is ALWAYS about horrible, insane, tragic and hell-stupid death-waste of human life.

Please learn this.

The Israeli leader Netanyahu is a coniving, fanatical skank. Anyone who has ever had ANY dealings with this nasty human creature has pretty much come to the same conclusion (including ex-presidents of USA!)

What is sad, is when a vicious, evil little fellow like this, gets his hands on power.

Then, the blood of the innocent flows like the water in rivers rushing to the wild sea.

The "Gates of Hell" may be opened. But when they open, they open wide for everyone. We look forward to when Bibi get's his first meeting with Satan.

[ Oct. 13, 2023 ] - Scary Monsters - It's Friday the 13th. Boo! Booooo! Waah ...! OMG, here come the *BANK EARNINGS* for the US money-centre guys! BOOO! ... wait.. ah, they look pretty damn good, actually. Oh. How about that. Why? (and I hear Foghorn Leghorn's voice: "Margin, my boy! Margin! Just lookee at that wonderful spread! Makes my heart pound with animal spirits, justa lookin' at all that profit!" )

Note: Almost everything - all data that you will obtain - is fraudulent. Of course, this assertion is not really true. But it gets closer to truth, every year. The equity markets now trade like the Chicago commodity markets, with traders "gunning for stops" for most of the day. The pros confine most of their trading to "dark pools" and/or the last few nano-seconds of the day. What you see during the day - the visible action - seems to be mostly sh/t-fake. So, beware. The data is bogus. In Canada, we suspect (but can't prove yet), that most of the real action (ie. the block trades, and/or the real movements by major investors) is hidden from smaller, non-professional investors, by the 10 or 11 or so, "dark markets" where data cannot be obtained from. This implies that the TSE action is mostly offsetting trades, which typically run counter to the real action which both drives and tracks the trend.

This makes trading the TSE, rather like trying to play poker across the street from where the cards are being dealt, and the real players are making their bets. It's pretty comically awful. The action is ironicly stupid - like a bomb-disposal expert being killed in a drunken bar-fight. It's just all wrong. Maybe, it's the algos? Really smart AI algorithms, using all the neural fibonacci pivotal points to fleece the punters? Perhaps.

Of course, I am whinning, because I can't seem to make any fucking money anymore. I can't even make any regular money. :D

Our Cdn bank stocks closed in the dumpster again today. Curious and serious action. The USA DJIA ndex managed to eke out a tiny gain, but the S&P and the Nasdaq closed down. But oil and gold and silver got goosed, and moved up sharply, so we revert to the old-school fear trade, which is maybe somewhat reassuring. The markets are acting rational, at least. More war is just plain bad and stupid. Hamas folks had to know what would happen - they cannot be completely brain-dead. Have they wired the entire north part of Gaza with mines? Will Russia take this as a pretext to pepper Israel with fusion devices? Or at least sink a few USA warships? At some point, you have to sh/t or get off the pot. If you really want war, the USA has never looked more complete f))ked up and weak and broken. They are spread out thin, run by dolts, and today in Chicago, if the news reports are correct, two biological men, just claimed victory in a major **WOMENS** bicycle race. That proves beyond any shadow of a doubt, that something is truly, deeply wrong and broken in USA-land. This "trans-gender" stuff is pure, insane nonsense. It is just old-fashioned mental sickness.

I love the old USA, and it is sad and painful to watch all this. (A real 4-chan, or kiwi-farms non-censored horrible racist comment might be something like: "So sad to see what all those jews and niggers are doing the place.." We like to believe that no one in enlightened and polite society would ever even think such a vile or disgusting comment - but I am a hard-core neural scientist, and I have to examine the very dark corners of the human psyche. People say sh/t like this, when they are drunk and think no one important is listening. And I have to say, I think maybe the world is a better place, when freedom-of-speech is legally protected, and we can openly discuss racisim and religious hatred - because it lies deep in every human heart, and is so tragically commonplace. This modern world, where all the clever people have to talk-in-code, is toxic and will take us to war - and it will be as much a war from within, as a war from outside forces.

Folks are gonna have to vote for Trump, even if they hate the fellow. Trump has been the only rational fellow on the stage - and yes, he is pissed at Netanyahu. Peace now, is absolutely lost - and will be lost for generations. A murder-campaign against Gaza, will just harden everyone in their positions, and all chance for any sort of "Two-State" solution will be lost forever. For the hard-core folks, who support Palestinian self-determination, the only future model that will be acceptable, will be one where Israel does not exist in it's present form.

Are the Israelis and their supporters willing to kill 3.1 million humans in Gaza? Because that is what it might take, once the Israeli invasion begins. They might do this - quite possible. Jews are stubborn people, and believe that some fat fellow in the sky has given them the Holy Right to behave as they do. I think this is completely insane, no question. But I see this sickness everywhere now - people actually believe in god and angels and devils and all this absurd superstitious nonsense from the Middle Ages. It's truly sickening, because it gives every lunatic-group the moral right (in their twisted minds) to commit the most horrific crimes, and feel this is OK, because some fu*king stupid "god" is behind them.

Religion is absolute toilet-water. It should be flushed away completely, with all our historic, awful waste products. It justifies and enables ugly racisim, and cruel, insane actions. In an age of science, it should have just withered away. But the nature of human neural weakness and error, ensures that it has such tragic, strong staying power. We simply cannot solve this problem. And there can be no "Final Solution" here. You cannot generally kill your way to peace, once religion and politics are driving human action. You can try, but you will usually destroy your own world as well. This is one of the curious, and consistent lessons from human history.

[ Oct. 12, 2023 ] - Dead Fish Don't Swim Home - On December 11, 1972, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 1036.30. This was a number that impressed many people. The USA had not only landed on the Moon several times, in the Apollo spaceships, they had also taken an electric car, and driven around and explored the Lunar surface. The Vietnam war was being wound down, and all looked good. Nixon had taken USA completely off the gold standard, but this made folks happy, because all restrictions on private ownership of gold were gone. It all looked pretty good (I was a very young fellow, but I remember how everything was fine and good.) But by October 4th of 1974, the DJIA closed at 584.60. The market had fallen 40% in two years. It was the inflation crash, the Arab Oil Shock, and the idiotic and abusive assault on Nixon that removed him from office, and changed the world. The Deep State and the Washington Post and the Leftist Inflationists and the deeply dishonest Marxists academics of America all worked together to basically blow everything up, and take USA down and then down even more. It was a strange and ugly time, not that different for many market participants, than the 1929 to 1932 time was. Everything just went to hell. Because of inflation, some called it the "silent crash" no one noticed.

Think about it. In two years, you had a 40% drop in the overall average of quality industrial names. The "Nifty Fifty" of the 1960's fell. It was a time of rising unemployment, and falling future optimism. But animal spirits rose, and so did the market. Gerald Ford had become President (in August 9th, of 1974), and the feeling was, perhaps things could be put right. By March 24, 1976, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had regained a 4-digit level, closing at 1009.20. Things looked like they were improving and almost under control.

But then the wheels fell off again. Jimmy Carter was elected President in the Fall, fuel prices went through the roof, and by December 7th, 1977, the DJIA was back down 20%, closing at 807.40. Carter went on to try to *control* gasoline prices, forced *price-regulation* on America, and effectively rationed gasoline, like some Third-World kleptoState. It was nasty. Long lineups at gas-stations were the norm, and the future looked grim. But eventually, Carter (who was not a bad fellow at all, and tried to do his best, perhaps), was replaced by Ron Reagan, and Paul Volker brought in sensible economic policy decisions that reduced the money supply growth, and took interest rates to over 20% (which required many States to modify their "Anti-Usery" Laws, as market rates for loans went over 25% at banks). Many businesses failed, but the overall North American economy was saved.

The Reagan years brought the great expansions of the 1980's, and the "Star Wars" research, which resulted in a range of impressive technology.

What is important to realize, is that USA is resilient. Resiliency is a very important attribute to have and to retain. But ask this question: How would the USA react to a 40% drop in this market now? I see so many *fake* numbers now - I just do not trust much of the data that I see, in many areas. There are reasons for this, too numerous to discuss here. But we can pretty much trust the old series - like the DJIA. So, how would the World and USA react to a move from this level, where the DJIA is 33,784 to a level 40% lower? This would imply a DROP in the Dow Jones Average of 13,513, which would give us a DJIA of 20,271.

What could take us all down to that level? A Dow Jones Average of 20,271 would of course imply similar drops in the other averages, such as the Nasdaq, and the S&P500. And do we see interest rates of more than 20%? In Argentina, the interest rate is *OVER* 100% (last was 118%, if I recall correctly, which is of course, absurd.) The key point here, is that our entire economic system, is now floating on a sea of debt financing, at almost every level. I read some shocking numbers yesterday, which showed that the USA has **ADDED** over $1-trillion to it's Federal Government Debt, in just the last **FOUR MONTHS**! Since June to the end of September, USA debt has grown by over $1000 BILLION dollars. This is not rational. Total Federal debt is now over $33 TRILLION. This is nuts. The USA is debt-financing like it is at war. What if the USA - and the Western World - really DOES have to go to war? We cannot afford it, without blowing up our economic system. Yet this may happen anyway.

When one looks at the debt numbers, it seems pretty clear they will never actually be *paid down*. The existing debt will most likely be defaulted upon, rather like is happening now to the bogus property companies in China. Xi Jinping and his followers seem to want to return to a militant, aggressive Communism, and this bodes for a bad and dangerous future for us. After Truth (always the first wartime casualty), the second is often one's investments. Just ask the folks in Europe, who thought all their funds were invested wisely in the 1930's.

We all have to "Stand on Guard" against the threats of debt-default and capital confiscation, as the sad history of our foolish little World, shows that this is usually what Governments do to their own people, and then go on to do the same thing to their enemies, if they can (which sadly, are usually just their neighbours.)

Full Disclosure: We remain fully invested. But I recall my study of the Beobachtung Dienst (the German WW-2 Navel Research/Intelligence group and it's code-breaking efforts). The German Navy was impressive, and it's U-Boat campaign was almost successful. There was this famous meeting of Admiral Karl Donitz, and his top people who were running the submarine war. They concluded that their data, and the B-Dienst research, indicated the war was basically lost, and the discussion was essentially: "What should we do?". Since the Navy were loyal and honourable men, and their nation remained at total War, they concluded that the only alternative was to continue with the campaign, despite the knowledge that they could not be expected to now prevail, against the combined military efforts of England and America. We feel a tad like this now, in all seriousness. We have to remain in the game, and retain our investments, as there is really no other possible course to follow. But we cannot ignore the obvious truths that reside quietly in the data. We have to be prepared for a 20% to 40% drop in the market value of our investments.

We don't really expect it to be that bad. We may be able to inflate-away the debt. But that will mean a serious inflation is coming, regardless of what policy people do. And like the German Navy in 1944, we have no choice but to continue. We have to maintain an investment effort, despite the ugly and stupid nature of the World and it's unwise, reactive political people. But one has to recognize that extreme moves are the norm in this process, rather like they are in war. Stay resilient, if you can. And hold on to your boats and stick to your guns. :)

[ Oct. 11, 2023 ] - Fraud, Lies, Fakery & Money - We are now certain that "Climate Change" (which used to be called: "Global Warming", until it was proven that the Earth is not warming at all) is a complete, bogus, unscientific fraud. But it's success in the political world is most impressive. Perhaps we can leverage this lie, to build some additional new nuclear reactors in Canada. Nuclear (fission) reactors are most excellent technology, and Canada has mountians of uranium (and even mountains of refined U, known as "yellowcake"). Nuclear tech was a family business for our folks, truth be told. And Canada invented a particularly safe reactor technology, known as the "CANDU" reactor. We even had the first ugly meltdown (and subsequent successful cleanup) when the Chalk River research reactor melted down (due to folks running the thing being stupid and careless, also truth be told. Sh/t happens. But most sh/t can be avoided if one's people are not unwise f*ckwits. Sadly, it is getting more difficult each year, to satisfy this key requirement... So it goes, eh Kurt?)

What is interesting, is how much money is being made from the Climate Fraud. I've lived a long time paying attention to the weather. And the extremes in weather are ALWAYS happening, and always will happen. There is no other way it can work. But now, every extreme event is blamed on "Climate Change", and this fraud is wagging the big dog of Western Civ. It's tragic - like war and blood running in the streets - but it is a pretty consistent pattern.

Finding consistent patterns is a way to make money. But one needs a strong stomach, and a large collection of various nerve-settling drugs, if one wants to sleep at night.

The more consistent the pattern, the wilder will be the multi-sigma swings away from it, when the interesting stuff happens. This is rather like a meltdown, or a critical-mass boom-whacking atomic balm event. (If the Chinese drop A-weapons on us, can we call it a form of "Tiger Balm"? A "balm" is defined in my Webster's as "a soothing restorative agency". Maybe we need some "Jew Balm", to help those poor Israelis...)

It's funny. Discovering a pattern, and testing and confirming it, still requires successfully taking action to "trade-what-you-found", and this is the third-leg of the stool, that often gets made from weak wood. We just made 90 dollars on a trade that (shoulda/woulda) made more like 900 or 9000, if we had been a little more courageous, or aggressive. Plus, we could have executed on a proven strategy, which we got distracted from, which also would have fattened the now very lean bank account.

But at least, this is an honest and honourable way to try to make a living - even if the gains and rewards are the very smallest of "small beer". Speculation is a hard and dangerous game, and the greatest barrier to high levels of success, are mostly inside one's own self. This is a tough nut to crack, and a hard thing to accept. Caution must always balance courage, if one is to successfully avoid being killed, in any conflict situation. Are the markets a conflict zone? This remains an open question. I don't yet know the answer. I suppose like all human experience, both extremes are possible - the marketplace as a gentle and effective dance between honest, truthful participants discovering the true price of a thing, and the marketplace as a war-zone where the winner takes everything, and the loser is carried out as a wallet-empty economic corpse.

What is really disturbing, however, is the extreme gains that fraudsters and political scammers can extract, via taxation and oughtright economic theft (eg: "value-added" taxes, which apply an abusive vigourish to life-critical products such as food, fuel, education-for-your-children, and so on). The latest fraud here, are the "climate-change" taxes piled on to the already high fuel-taxes, which now make gasoline, diesel fuel and heating-oil even more stupid expensive than they were a few years back. It is a wonderful scam for corrupt and dishonest government toady-folk, and the rich can go out an buy Tesla's for $100,000, so they don't care. I suppose they can also heat their houses from the hot-winds generated by Climate Talkers, who invent the lies that support this astonishing nonsense.

What is proves - yet again - is the effectiveness of "Bernie Madoff"-style (or now maybe we can call them: "Bankman-Fried" style?) mass-frauds. These things work. They come around regularly, and they hoover **billions** of currency units away from the foolish and the unwise who seek "leaders" to lead them into losses and destruction. It is of course not fair to blame it all on Jews. But the Jews seem to be awfully good at it (viz. Madoff, Bankman-Fried and Chuck Schumer).

So, caution is indicated. The bond market is telling us something (with it's impressive volatility), and so are the criminals and the nuclear reactors that melt down. Sh/t not only happens, but it lives inside of people as well, and comes out as these wild, impressive and successful frauds and scams. They work, and they enrich folks who "follow the money", until the cruel weight of truth sinks the rotten barge the fraud is floated upon. And often this takes a human lifetime, (and a market crash), before it is discovered. This is the real (and dangerous) truth, that history and statistics actually teaches us. Double-digit sigma events (ie. 10 or 12 standard deviations away from the mean of the observed distribution) are not only common, they are in fact often just the chaotic way the truth has of poking it's head into the comfortable world of fraud and lies and self-deception that so many people seem determined to reside within.

What to do? Maybe to read the short stories by Anton Chekov, one of the great writers of our Western Culture. We need to respect the Russians, and bring that poor sorry nation, back into the community of Western nations. And we need to also respect and honour the Chinese, and recognize that they are trying. (Yes, yes, they can be very trying...) But we still need to share the planet with them. We can look at USA-Jewish culture, and get a very good picture, of what NOT to do. We are not anti-semites (and we are not even anti-dentites), but it might be time to call a time-out on the Hollywood Marathon Men, the Climate fraudsters, and Leftist-Lie-Pushers and try to navigate our little boats back towards the old truths of the Enlightenment and other sensible and effective models of Western Culture values.

Truth can actually work pretty good. But you have to welcome it into your own mental homeland. It cannot do it's job, if it is exiled to the wilderness.

[ Oct. 10, 2023 ] - Death and the Maiden - The Israeli-Palestinian War is just tragic and stupid and awful. The idiots of Hamas have just killed without reason, and failed to take and hold any military objectives. They acted like ISIS terrorists - or worse - crazy psychos who shoot people at music festivals. This is just madness, and cannot be justified. After this, the Israelis will feel it is right and proper to kill Gaza, and we will now have a bloodbath of horrific scale, which will not benefit anyone anywhere, and will stain both sides with so much blood-of-the-innocent, that this conflict may well be recorded in history as the Atrocity War. It is just so stupid and insane and wrong.

We unwound our margined position, with a tiny profit, and decided to dial-down all leverage. A World at War is not a good thing, no matter how the MSM, the fraudsters, and the elite try to spin the newsflow. There are times when warfare must be accepted as necessary, as in the case of foreign invasion. But war destroys resources, and destroys lives. It is costly, regardless of the level of interest rates. And it seems America will insert itself into this conflict in a harmful manner, rather than as an entity which seeks peace. Perhaps that is what some dark groups want. The ability to play the emotions of American and Israeli warmakers is a valuable skill. Both Israel and USA are now in **reaction** mode. They can be controlled, in a dark manner, in this way. This is bad, and it is dangerous.

This is the real danger from terrorism. It is that it makes rational, careful folks, whom might otherwise be astute, effective and strategic in their thought and actions - behave like an angry mob, and scream for blood. This is not good for business, it is not good for a nation, and it is not good for civilization.

But it is the World we are now embedded within.

[ Oct. 9, 2023 ] - Eine Kleine NachtMusik? - And would you like some C4 with that? How about a gelignite cocktail? Or maybe some Semtex-on-a-half-shell? I was wondering what War was good for, and it seems it's good for many things, sadly. We are a violent and predictable species, and it seems the 21st century is going to look rather like the 20th century, but maybe run at internet speed? "FastWar!" might be the new geo-political game. No "Great Game" anymore. Now, just lots and lots of old-style "revolution", with the evil skanks going down, and the bigger, nastier skanks moving on up.

We can't really get behind this nonsense, but it seems to be a course that we cannot turn from. There was supposed to be a "Two State" solution, where the Palestinians would actually be able to have part of their country back, that the Israeli's stole from them. But with Netanyahoo back in power, then there was no way that any peace would happen. In 2022, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli jews is indicated as 81, mostly in raids and direct confrontations (source: Reliefweb.int). Israeli jew forces killed 13 Palestinians between July 25th, and August 10, of this year. This brings this year's death toll to 167 people - many of whom were civilians. (Source: UN Humanitarian Agency, and www.newarab.com)

So, Fuck You, Cuck Schumer. Fuck you and the fuck-horse you rode in on. We note that Chuck Schumer is over in China, trying to sweet talk Xi Jinping, and at the same time, spout critical nonsense suggesting China should "support" Israel more. What the insane fuck is this fucking world coming to? We do not support Hamas, and like the Chinese Government (which is being curiously rational and sensible here), we suggest that perhaps the best course of action, would be implementation of the "Two State" peace accord. But Biden is a fucking goof, Trump is under attack and can do nothing, and the rest of the Western World "Leaders" are so full of shit, that it appears to be beyond belief.

What other State or group of people on this Planet, would NOT go to WAR, if their people were being slaughtered routinely by American-military-supplied rich murder-monkey skanks, that is what the ugly, violent and vicious Israeli fucking army truly is? What would USA do, if **regularly**, aircraft bombed American cities, and killed American civilians? Would they just weep and howl?

Or would they take action???

How can any sane person expect the Palestinians NOT TO CHOOSE WAR, when they are regularly murdered by Israeli aircraft bombardment and Israeli murder raids? They are human beings, just like we are. When they see their women and children killed, they must burn with a hate so intense, that they are willing to die trying to end the Israeli murder-regime, rather than live as slaves and abused cucks.

Fucking hell - would Canada or USA or England or France or Germany - or ANY NATION ANYWHERE AT ANYTIME IN ALL OF HISTORY - not arm-up, and mobilize and go to war, if it were to have - each year - **hundreds** of it's people regularly bombed, killed, captured and/or tortured to death by an occupying military??? The actions of Hamas is not *terrorism*. It is last-ditch defensive warfare, given the slave-enclave nature of the Gaza strip and the West Bank.

Fuck, this is just insanity. There was an honest and rational attempt to engineer a sane solution to the this tragic Mid-East fools horror show - but the election of that corrupt thug, Benjamin Netanyahu, ended any chance of that. Netanyahu is a dishonest, sadistic, murdering criminal, and we hope he goes down like Hitler did. He is the entire author of this insane, unnecessary Palestinian war, which the Palestinian's have zero chance of winning.

The Palestinians will just die. They will die like flies, and the fuckpot toadfaced shit-lickers who pretend to be the "leaders" of the World's nations, will send "Oh, so sad!" letters the the Israelis, as they stand on the piles of dead Arab children. The Chinese are actually the only ones demonstrating impressive objectivity here.

Note: Al Jazeera, in May of this year (2023) indicates that in 2022, Israeli "forces" (army and various jewish "settlers"), killed more than 170 Palestinians, and this included at least 30 children. Now, let's ask the question: If Americans were suffering this kind of occupation, and routine mass-murder of their citizens - including children - what would USA do? Seriously - this question needs to be asked. Someone ask that geriatric clown, Joseph Biden, if he would do anything, if America was being attacked like this. Seriously. This question needs to be asked - by a real reporter - not some toady like-spit skank from the MSM, since they are not allowed to ask this kind of real question.

To us, and to any sane person - the military actions of Hamas Fighters, seems completely reasonable, obvious, and necessary. (NOTE: I wrote this BEFORE I learned about the fact the Hamas fighters killed folks at a music festival. That was just ugly, stupid terrorism, and there is NO justification for that sort of madness. It was a wrong non-military action. Hamas is stupid and cruel.) Doubtless, they felt they had no choice, at this point. Better to die as a fighter for your land and for your people, than to live as a slave in a prison-land. If America was occupied, and subjected to what the Palestinians are subjected to, we believe that most Americans would feel the need to fight also. I am sure Canadians would. (Update: But we also would expect a more rational, effective engagement against any occupation force. Hamas has chosen terror and cruelty, which degrades and damages them as much as it does their enemies. They chose the wrong path.)

The entire Israeli region, should be put under UN military control. Israel should not be allowed to maintain status as an independent nation. It's creation was a horrific error, and this error needs to be corrected, or the blood will continue to flow and there will be no peace. Of course, this will not happen. Nothing that creates a solution will happen, except that Israeli "settlers" and other "Israeli Forces" will just bomb and kill - and this will ensure that the hatred on each side is amplified to the point where everyone can only see red. There is no solution possible here, as long as a failed, murdering thug like Netanyahu remains in power as the "leader" of that disputed region.

[ Oct. 6, 2023 ] - Der Kommisar's NOT In Town! (or The Joy of Paper!) - This is all getting poo-throwing-monkey hilarious. The USA economy adds 336,000 new jobs in September, and the Future's Market has a poo-fit, with the S&P giving up 31 points, and the Dow Futures off 175. Real dramatic, eh? Except it's all nonsense.

The USA economy looks like it's just boom-whacking along. And same thing around our little world here. It's a boom, like I have never really seen in my lifetime. It's actually pretty weird. New houses and new commercial buildings, sprouting like puff-ball mushrooms overnight. Actually, I did see this... It was in Calgary in 1980, and in Warsaw in 1990. The shackles had come off, and business suddenly happened.

I recall the flip-side, as we slid into the 1970's, full of optimistic jisim (is that the right word?). Only to be hammered by astonishingly unwise Leftist government policy decisions, that beat the crap out of the real economy, sent unemployment up into double digits, and flatlined most business plans. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from over 1000 to just above 600. Plus, we had inflation, and no jobs available, and by 1976, the wheels were falling off everywhere.

What we are seeing here, is the flip side of that. There is now higher inflation and of course, we are getting stupid, unwise policy choices by various levels of boneheaded government policy makers. This is really par for the course. The clown shows in Washington and Ottawa ("Let's all applaud the Nazi Killers! Yeah, --- clap/clap/clap" - just falling-down-laughing funny - the term is ROLF, I believe - rolling on floor, laughing.) And in USA-land, the Washington firing squads are turning circular (again!). It's comedy-time in Ugly-Town!

But here's the thing. The current world looks like what I saw in Warsaw, in 1990. Everyone is busy, work is hammering along, everyone seems to have something going on, and lots and lots of positive sh/t is happening. Place was buzzing like a big bee-hive.

Inflation is part of this. We need to understand that some inflation is actually - please grasp this concept - A RISING RATE OF RETURN ON DEPLOYED CAPITAL. So, this is good. The flip-side is the Japan-style hyper-stagnation problem, where you get DEFLATION, and no one wants to do anything, except bury their money in the ground, or hide it somewhere ("BURY ME WITH MY MONEY!"...(THUMP!) (go find the website, or click below, and watch the little Red-man fall and fall, over and over again, with his bag of gold.)

https://www.burymewithmymoney.com

I think, that (sadly, really), gold and silver and such, is not that wise to hold. I needed some cash recently, and I found I could not negotiate (ie. SELL) a little 1-oz. bar of silver I had. I had bought a few of these at a Canadian Bank, many years ago (they even have the Bank logo on them!), but now, the Bank does not even want to be in that business (which I think is truly wrong, for various reasons), but so it goes. People do stupid sh/t, and unwise, fat-rich folk in board-rooms seem to make astonishingly bad decisions in this World. Some sort of "Group-Think" causes them to put their brains in their pockets, and just nod their fat, lipid-cover heads up and down. They do the "go along to get along" business-model, and are thinking about lunch, I suspect.

So, the joke is, I cannot sell my little 1-oz silver bar. But I was able to pull the trigger on some falling telecom shares, grab the cash quickly and easily, and EMT transfer some funds to a fellow who lived in another city, a 6-hour drive away, and buy his boat.

Anyone remember the "liquidity preference" concept? The Keynsian "Liquidity Trap"? Sh/t, we have been living this idiot-nonsense for the duration of the insane ZIRP time, that the bone-ignorant government goon-squads have made us endure for the last 3 or 4 years. The stock market at least works (in a world where not much else does.) If I want to sell my little silver 1-oz bar (for maybe $30 Cdn, or something like that), I have to drive to Toronto, find a fucking place to park, go to the one bullion dealer I know, and sell it there. The fuel and parking costs would significantly exceed the value the little ingot would offer me. It is a comedy show of stupid-non-market action. There is no local market for gold or silver, and I can't deposit silver in my bank account, and I can't pay my bills with gold.

Holding metal as an asset - for the individual - is just goddamn stupid. It is just a dead asset, prone to theft, and curiously difficult to turn into cash. The Joy of Paper is that it can be converted to cash quickly, cheaply, in a reasonably fair manner, and then the money can be deployed on whatever project one needs to fund.

I love the ***IDEA*** of gold and silver - but the practical realities of the marketplace, make it a stupid investment. It's too hard to turn it into liquid cash.

And this crazy stuff in the market we are seeing. It is silly also. A booming economy, with lots of jobs, means lots of business and lots of money. This will make the stock market get bid up, as long as the stocks are not sh/t. This is a pretty easy forecast to make.

Also, if you really want to dig deep into the USA employment data, it gets quite interesting. Well, it gets interesting if you are a economics-stats-nerd, and/or if you have a psychopathology where you really (REALLY!) want to understand what the hell is happening. That big "jobs" number is maybe not such a boom-whacking "hot-economy" indicator as you are led to believe, by the increasingly bogus mainstream new-generator media hypsters. (Gosh, but the MSM - main stream media - is awful now. Maybe it always was this awful? I don't think so, but maybe I am using selective memory? ...) Anyway, here is some well-researched, useful information, with more detail, and a large and most useful bag of caveats. You really need to beware all these government-generated numbers now, since many are created using small-sample statistical queries, and these do not reflect reality very well anymore (did they ever? Maybe. But folks are *much* more fluid now, in many ways...) Here is M. Shedlock's data-summary, which is quite well done. He indicates that employment is up only a little bit, and that the way the *unemployment* rate is calculated, is questionable. The takeaway from this, is that there is strong evidence the economy in USA-land is not as "overheated" as this 336,000 job number implies, and that further assault on the bond-market is not necessarily required, or even perhaps likely. It's probably too soon for Fed Reserve interest rate reductions, but with the long bonds pushing above 5% yields, it would seem to be wise to just leave the dial set to this level, and give the marketplace some time to absorb the new rate regime that is now in place, rather than attempting to shock the system further.

https://mishtalk.com/economics/jobs-unexpectedly-surge-by-336000-but-employment-only-rises-by-86000/

[ Oct. 5, 2023 ] - Monday's Child is Full of ... Woe? - No woe here. Weather remains curiously deep-summer like, hot and sunny. The local farmers are harvesting deep into the night. Crops are fat, standing high, and looking thick. Corn and soybeans are being hoovered off the 100-acre sections with huge machines, packed in to large trucks, and sent to the grainaries. Apples are so thick on the trees that the branches are bending near the ground. Promises to be a major bumper harvest, at least in our locality. We are north of the USA, so our Thanksgiving comes earlier. It's this coming weekend, and the turkeys seem to be hiding. We are leaning to purchasing a Costco pre-cooked chicken, and some dry German White, or maybe a California Pinot Noir.

Peter Schiff thinks US banks are in trouble, because of low-rate mortgages. Perhaps, but not in Canada. Here, the banks are ridiculously well capitalized, and the maximum term on any mortgage is 5 years, regardless of the amortization. You cannot get a 30-year mortgage in Canada. You can only lock-in a rate for 5 years, and then you have to re-negotiate your rate. Many folks have floating-rate mortgages. Many do not. But the maximum term is 5 years. Early payment risk is non-existent, since the banks are protected against rate-shock changes in their asset-liability matching, if they are careful and know what they are doing. (And they do.)

I was offered a 4.99% rate on my unused revolving line-of-credit, which when I checked out the details, learned the usual worm lived in the deal. To get the funds at that cheap rate, one had to sign up for basically a 7-year ammortized "mortgage"-style loan feature. And the low rate was only available for 6-months.

Of course, an entrepreneur wants to just pay interest-only on his borrowed money, and pay the loan down when his ship comes in. But the bank likes to see regular income streams. The upshot is that the 4.99% rate had to be associated with a maximum amortization of 7-years. If I were to borrow $18,400, for example, the banker indicated my first *payment* would be Nov. 1, and would be over $450.00! Now, at 4.99%, the interest monthly is only $76.51 on the $18,400, example amount, which is all I wanted to pay. But the bankers are very keen to get these mortgage-streams. So, instead of being able to pay $80 per month (to borrow $18,400) on an interest-only basis, one has to pay over $450 per month, because the loan has to be structured as a mortgage, with a 7-year amortization. They would not (could not) set the amortization up to higher term, as the 4.99% rate deal did not allow that option.

What one could do, was accept the standard unsecured LOC 9.20% interest rate at prime-plus-2% (prime for the banks in Canada is now 7.20%), and then pay only 1% of outstanding loan balance, or $50/month, which ever is higher, as the monthly loan payment. This is still not the desired *interest-only* loan, but on an example $18,400 loan, the bank-required monthly loan payment is now $184 per month, and declines ae the loan is paid down.

But this arrangement makes vastly more sense, than the idiotic LOC-as-a-7-year-mortgage, which is just a bad deal for the rational consumer. A rational business-oriented guy wants to basically issue a bond, pay the interest only on his loan, and then repay the principal at a planned future date. Or, maybe he rolls it over into another bond or bond-like arrangement, if necessary. But this assumes one is borrowing funds for a specific project, with a specific expected future pay-off date. And of course, this is really the only way funds should be borrowed. The only folks who should borrow money to buy a car, are taxi-drivers (and now, maybe Uber-drivers). One should only borrow money, if it is to be used to make money, not just to buy stuff. I sold shares to buy the boat. (And the shares then fell in value, much more than expected! It's better to be lucky, than smart...)

But my whole point here, is that the banks are doing just fine. The value of a bank, is the value of it's assets - it's loans outstanding - and these are backstopped by the value of the collateral - the real-estate typically, nice non-moveable stuff that cannot disappear in the night. The house prices remain high, because supply is tight, new-construction is damned difficult everywhere, and those in houses now, with low-interest mortgages, and not going to move. Even commercial real-estate is ok here in Canada, near as I can tell. And almost no-one defaults.

So, at least in the Canadian context, I think Peter Schiff (a very clever fellow, whom I respect), is wrong about the banks. The banks are not in trouble. They are doing fine, and will continue to do just fine, as long as they are not stupid (like SVB was, for example.) FRC collapsed because of profoundly stupid Government and Administration policy. It didn't have to happen. But that is another story. Key point here is that Finance is absolutely critical to the operation of any modern economy. And dodgey finance is actually helpful for a frontier economy, which the USA is trying to transition away from. (Hint: You need Branch-banking, and effective use of *monoey-centre* banks, and move away from those dangerous (for the banks) 30-year fixed mortgages, which have no early-payment penalties, etc. But the Americans know all this, of course..)

What is interesting for us, is that as the rates have gone up, we are surprisingly seeing opportunities for which borrowing money actually makes sense. So yes, the model of rising rates-of-return on capital are associated with rising rates and economic expansion - this actually seems to be valid. Low interest rates set near zero, are stupid and dangerous, and damage the operation of a financial economy. We expect that rising rates should be associated with a rising rate-of-return on capital, which is positive for a financially-driven modern economy, and that as long as we can fix the broken political process in many countries (and successfully address the "idiots-in-power" problem), then we should all do just fine.

This isn't Pollyanna rose-coloured-glasses thinking. This is actually the hard, pointy-end of real economics, surprisingly. We hit the LOC for some funds, and are happy to pay 9.20%, since if our picture-of-the-world is right, we can execute on an opportunity which is attractively priced right now. We have learned - from experience - that low, attractive prices, do not tend to stay around very long. In a world of finance-driven fiat-currencies, money is not the limiting factor. Attractive opportunities are always in short supply, and do not linger long.

[ Oct. 3, 2023 ] - Sing a Song of Sick-Pence - The Canadian dollar is not looking well. Perhaps this is by design. Not sure what is happening, just yet. Oil and gold and silver are falling. Bitcoin is looking weak. But prices for houses in our little city are still crazy. Crappy duplex things (half-a-house), are selling for over $700,000. Was just reading some real-estate stuff tonite. The numbers seem absurd and silly - so overpriced it looks like prices in *yen*, not prices in dollars Cdn. A decent (not crap) house, is over $1,000,000 in many cases, or at least near this number.

To us, this seems just nutty. But at the local Home Depot, the price for an 8x4-foot half-inch plywood sheet is now almost $50. This seems steep.

We expect some serious stock-market volatility. The market prices seem to be tripwired. Market action seems to be curiously twitchy - even by modern standards. Feels like a black-and-white Twilight Zone episode.

[ Oct. 2, 2023 ] - Wake Up! Time to... - Die? We hope not. But hope is never a very good strategy for market investment, is it? Peter Schiff says we are at a "fork in the road." Maybe. But the fork might be stuck right thru your portfolio's heart. We are seeing our bank stocks and telecoms get crushed today. Double-plus ungood.

Welcome to the goddamn future. How the hell do you like it so far?

My boat was not expensive. I've spent a few days fixing the electrical system. I even have the instrument lights working. Whoo hoo!

There are times when the market breaks and then even breaks more. With money supply shrinking, and interest rates skyrocketing, this might be one of those times. Be careful. Don't get killed.

The world is pretty seriously f*cked up right now. But that is typical. And the entire market-world, and the reporters and analysts and promoters (can *you* tell the difference between them??) is and always has been, pretty much full of sh/t. That is also typical. But the market does it's job, with brutal objectivity. It cares not for your skin-colour, your brain-capacity, your head-size, or the shape and nature of your sex organs. Really. It just grinds on, doing it's sifting and sorting process. And it does it ***MUCH BETTER*** than any dishonest political poltroon ever does. Government is the domain of the lowest and the worst and the most mentally degraded, and the most cruel, abusive and useless. It is just really quite comical, truth be told. I know of what I speak, truly.

I am old now, and I can tell the true truth. One just has to die laughing, I guess.

The entire *community* of analysts and crap-writers and fat-bastards with expensive ties are just about completely useless. Many of them would serve the world best, if they just had a warm bath and opened their pipes, Roman-style. Such is the true nature of reality.

I recall last year (2022), when some bonehead smart-arse at some Bank-owned Brokerage firm, had a "BUY" recommendation on BNS at $92/share. We (sort-of) agreed, and bought a few thousand. Ha-ha and ha. Serves me right, for listening to a paid Analyst. I richly deserve the results I got.

You ***MUST*** do your own research, and trust your own ***WILDLY WEIRD*** judgement, because it is often vastly better than what the high-paid promoters and analysts pump out. This is the truth.

I looked thru interest-rate history, (get Sydney Homer's book, rate history back to Babylon times), and saw the interest rates in modern, commercial economies usually run from a low of 2.00% to around 8% during normal times, climbing to 10 and 15 and 20% or higher, during times of crisis and war and other stupid human nonsense. In non-financial economies, rates tend to be simpler and higher - like the rates the Mafia or the loan-sharks use - 50% to 100% or higher (like maybe %100 per month, for example). So, I looked at the 4% dividend rates for banks and phone-companies, and figured, if rates normalize (say to 5% to 8%), the stock prices will (worst-case) fall to where the dividend rate has to be at or **above** the new risk-free rate. And with the risk-free rate on US Treasuries around 5% now, that means we need dividend yield rates at least a couple of points higher - say around 7%. But we needed *some* income, so, we held our little pink noses, and bought the dividend-payers. (This trade has worked for 20 years. Please realize this. Plus our AI thing was constructive.)

But our worst-case scenario, is pretty much where we are today. BNS yields OVER 7% now, as the share-price has been adjusted to the event-space we now live in. The share price has tumbled down and down, and then down more. And at that 7%+ yield, the dividend seems to almost compensate for the risk (not completely, of course), but it is now getting in the ball park of sanity. And that was my ***history-based*** analysis, which seemed off-the-wall. But it was right and the analyst happy-picture-of-the-world (with the BUY rating at $92/share), was wrong - as it often is.

The analysts are not useless - THEY ARE WORSE THAN USELESS - because they will deflect your own good and sensible analysis away from the obvious truths that must be grasped, if you are to have any hope at surviving the "Battle for Investment Survival" (as old Mr. Loeb called it..)

Nothing really changes in the markets - except for the extremes of madness and foolishness of the political poltroons, and the Leftist-philosophers (the most dangerous creatures on Earth).

The market just does it's job. It re-prices things to where the price level can change behaviour and drive effective action. That is what must be done, despite the howling and raving of the dishonest fraudsters and deceptionists in Government and the Financial industry.

Full Disclosure:

We bought some more BNS today. If you liked it at $92, back in 2022, you ought to just f*cking love it now, at 59.55. What a hilarious, f*cking stupid world. If the sh/t-for-brains folks at the Central-Banks and the Governments keep rates this high (or higher, of course) to "Fight Inflation", then they will have to either raise taxes (and destroy the Western-World national economies), or they will have to dial rates down, tolerate the 5% inflation rates, and maybe (just maybe) be able to service the current government debt-loads, with inflated currencies. This truth is right there, in the projected debt-service-cost numbers. Don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself. It's a pretty funny picture. Try not to die laughing. :)

What is really key, is that the poor Central Bank folks are using the ***WRONG MODELS*** of the modern economies. In a modern, financial-based commercial economy, money is just another factor of production, in the economist's "production function". And what the silly buggers are doing, at the world's Central Banks, is to RAISE THE PRICE of money to try to LOWER THE PRICES OF EVERYTHING ELSE. Now, we learned - in the 1970's - that THIS DOES NOT WORK! I actually worked at Pierre Trudeau's "Anti-Inflation Board". It was just a wonderful learning experience - like getting a PhD in what actually is true and actually works - and what does NOT ACTUALLY WORK. And here is what we learned: (both the little minions like me, and the old fat Liberal big-shots): You cannot LOWER PRICES IN THE ECONOMY by RAISING PRICES IN THE ECONOMY-WIDE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION FUNCTIONS. And you cannot do it by price-and-wage controls, either.

Get it?

You cannot induce LOWER PRICES by RAISING PRICES. Expressed this way, it is obvious, is it not? And if the economy is up to it's eyeballs in debt, then you have zero chance of making this work, unless there is hard evidence that the prices are rising because of too much damn demand. Just think about it: Will raising interest rates, lower the price of diesel fuel, jet-fuel and gasoline? How can it possibly do so? Will higher rates lower housing costs? OR will higher rates *increase* housing costs? Will professionals - doctors, lawyers, accountants - lower their fees, as interest rates are increased? Will grocery-sellers LOWER their prices, as their financing costs and transport costs rise?

And when folks have RUN OUT OF MONEY, then we know the DEMAND is not the problem. Some clever folks long ago called this the "Backward-bending Aggregate Supply Curve", and other neo-Keynsian bullsh/t. Back in 1979-1980, what saved us were Volker's insane greater-than-20% rates, which provoked an economic collapse, and the election of Ron Reagan (1980) in the USA and Mulroney in Canada (1984). Reagan lowered income taxes. Mulroney lowered income taxes (and also replaced the hidden FST with the visible GST, and brought in the Free Trade Act, which saved the Canadian economy from stagnation and collapse). The tax reductions were followed by a massive technological leap forward in information management - computers came down in price from *millions of dollars for a CPU and memory and disk*, to just a few thousand dollars for equivalent CPU, memory and disk capacity. The scale and extent of this technical jump, is still not well understood. Many production processes went from "Try it, let's see if it works", to "Ok, we have determined every single parameter, and we can make it work, we believe." Many do not understand this even today. Volker's high rates caused a collapse-event for many, but it was the tax reductions, the expansion of Free Trade, and the opening up of the Communist world to commercial-economic models, which reduced price-inflation. As inflation fell, so did yields and rates. This whole process was driven by extreme, positive technological change, in the Western World economies.

The canonical example is the 1972 Apollo moon-landing, with a space-ship and a car being successfully transported to the Moon, the Moon-landcape explored, and the crew returning safely. We could not even do this now. Our "Diversity" programs, which require unwise and unskilled, low-quality people to be mixed in with the super-focused smart folks, ensures that USA at least, probably will *never* be able to replicate that success. (This is a very hard truth for many people to accept. But your unwillingness to accept this truth, does not make it untrue.)

So, be advised: We are now collectively checkmated. Short of a major and complete revolutionary action, there is no effective solution now. There will be no technological bailout this time. And AI will not do it. AI can maybe help - but it is already being hamstrung and limited by the regulators, so it will be effectively neutered, we fear. The best we can do now, is to craft survival strategies, that can maybe withstand the coming deluge.

We have crafted stategies. But we must "Live in Truth", if we are to have any chance to succeed in the chaotic future we see ahead. One must understand that "Truth" and "Reconciliation" are perhaps not at all, compatible. You don't get both. You get one, or the other.

[ Sept 27, 2023 ] - Sleep for Sheep - Embrace extremeism. Really. This idea that one should seek "moderation", is not true. It's even a specific piece of actionable advice in the Jewish-Christian Bible. The metaphor suggests that hot or cold food can be acceptable, but that which is only "lukewarm", is to be spit out. There is some wisdom there. As Robert Heinlein said: "Moderation is for monks. Take big bites out of life." Or something like that, IIRC.

I've been wrestling with this idea for a while. We have done well trying to track a middle path between frequent trading, and longer-term *investing*, where one can buy-and-hold a portfolio of quality things. Except when global-shit-shifts like we are now seeing happen (and happened also in 2008, 2001, 1998, 1987, etc.), one can get just annihilated. ("Annihilate" is from a Latin term: "annihilatus", which means "to reduce to nothing", derived from "ad + nihil" = "go to nothing". I missed Latin in High School, and it cost me dearly. I had to learn little bits of it from books. This is a hard way to learn any language.)

Being "reduced to nothing" is really bad. And it is a constant fear for any market participant, who tries to embrace leverage of any kind. And you need to use some leverage sometimes, since that is how the process of "gearing" works. You don't start out in 4th gear, and you don't try to cruise in 1st, right? But the process in the markets is not as clear as the road, or the sea. Markets are a lot like the sea, They are both chaotically changable. The mariner's wisdom is to "Reduce sail, when you first have an idea that maybe you should", since then it will be easy and safe to do. Wait until the storm-front hits you, and you will have to work in a dangerous and annoying storm to get it done.

There is curious biological process known as: "anaphylaxis", which is defined as "hypersensitivity, typically to foreign proteins or drugs, resulting from prior contact with the causative agent." A common example is bee or hornet venom, which can cause life-threatening allergic reactions, which can become worse, the more one is exposed to the venom. This anaphylactic bio-process is similar to the learned behaviour that develops for surviving market participants. If you want to avoid annihilation as a market trader (also knows as "Gambler's Ruin"), you need to develop a hyper-sensitivity to losses. But of course, one also needs to let a trade "ride" for some time, and give it a bit of room to develop, and this means accepting a swing between loss and profit as the expected situation evolves over time.

But what really kills, is the "Investment" process, blindly adhered to, when the "Nature of the World" has changed. In the world of economics and the markets, the world is fairly constant, as it is the ventures themselves which fluctuate, often violently. But the world stays reasonably constant - until one enters a timeframe, when it does not remain constant. And perhaps this is where we are now. The rising interest rates for money are significant. In terms of percentage-changes, the rate-shock-shift is maybe the greatest ever seen in human history: (from 0.2% to 5%, a percentage change in value from (5.0/0.2 x 100) - 100 = 2400% increase) in roughly one year. No business or economic entity can withstand an in-year price-increase of a basic, critical factor input, without being significantly effected by such an extreme rate-of-change. And since most economic entities are highly leveraged, we can expect the shock to grow, as existing loans and bonds and mortgages are reset to the new higher rates. And what is really crazy, is that for most entities, this will be a ***price increase*** in their basic factor costs, of their production functions. So, we have the phenomenon of the Central Banks, trying to **fight inflation with price-increases**.

To us, this seems insane. But does it mean the world has really changed? Or is it just a return to normalicy? For money to work, it must have some scarcity. It must remain *real*, as those in Third World (and especially South American) economies have learned repeatedly. Junk money makes for a junk economy. A return to rational, economically sensible rates-of-return on capital, is good for a market economy. But it will be important for rates to reach levels higher than the rate-of-inflation. There must be positive real-rates of return, for investors. And that means rates will have to drift up to 7%, since 5% is not really enough.

And this seems to be becoming understood in the stock market.

We are seeing our holdings of financials just continue to get crushed like wine-grapes. And high-dividend utility stocks (like telecoms, for example), are also being sold off hard. We hold those also, too, since the telecoms were a reliable dividend-income stream. But this all is changing. High-rates are killing the values of the bonds that the banks hold to back-stop their capital requirements. So, the banks and other financials will have to set aside more assets to maintain their business models. We had expected high-rates to flow thru directly, quickly, to higher incomes for Canadian banks, but this does not seem to be happening. The banks have been increasing PCL (Provisions for Credit Losses), and NII (Net Interest Income) is not ramping up as quick as we thought it would (and should...). This is forcing us to face a re-think: Has the World Changed?

Are we looking at a financial apocalypse, here? In terms of equity values for our portfolios, we are near to this. We are down now to levels where deep rules that must be followed, in order to prevent economic annihilation, are about to have to be engaged. And I think our position is not unique. We are pretty average investors, and we are not trying to swing for the fences. We just want to survive, and not be destroyed. We seek to avoid annilhilation. We do not want to be reduced to nothing. But we are now deeply concerned that perhaps the world has made a true deep-change. This is now not about the level of interest-rates, but is about the nature of truth, reality, and economic operation and economic survival. We are seriously concerned that the political elites (the "Leaders" of our World), are simply so painfully stupid, and so dangerously out-of-touch with what is true and real, that they have perhaps accidentally engineered a possible economic collapse event, which could take the stock-markets down another ** 50% ** from where we are now.

This would kill us, quite effectively. Banks would have to merge, dividends would have to be reduced, and pension-funds, insurance companies, and government asset management efforts, would all be harmed. And our research on market historical events, suggests that these kind of mass-annihilation of capital events, are one of the specific economic tasks, that a market economy must occasionally make happen. If markets did not crash, then multi-generational economic investment would make everyone billionaires. In the 1920's, the railroad stocks were considered to be safer than US government bonds. By the mid-1930's, many of these stocks were almost worthless, and traded at small fractions of their earlier values. We are deeply concerned that our current crop of Western World "Leaders", (the "Idiots in Power") are setting the stage and engineering the political and economic processes to replicate this kind of capital destruction.

Seriously, I am waking up at night, and staring at this truth, coming towards us like a freight train to a deer, standing on the tracks. The whole "Net Zero" nonsense, and the curious re-framing of carbon dioxide as a "toxic gas" (which it is not, of course), is absolute madness. The massive price-increase of money, being used to try to bring down economy-wide price-increases, is also madness. You cannot get economic agents to lower their product prices, by raising their cost-of-production prices. We ***LEARNED THIS*** in the 1970's. I know. I was there, and we worked on exactly this problem. The 1970's inflation was caused by Nixon funding the Vietnam war with fiat money, removing the USA currency from any link at all to gold, and then getting hit with the 1973 massive "Arab Oil Shock" which doubled and then tripled the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. Interest-rates had to go over 20% to *reset* the North American economy, cause a serious economic downturn, and remove "inflation accounting" from corporate income-statements and balance-sheets. We were close to becoming 1920's Germany, with annual wage increases running at over 20% for unionized government workers. Pierre Trudeau in Canada, and Dick Nixon in the USA had no real clue what they were doing, in the realm of economics, and the Dow Jones Average had fallen close to 40%, and much more, in *real* terms. We were saved by the massive technological shift that happened, as networks of low-cost micro-computers, were able to replace the multi-million dollar data-centres, and economic de-regulation of industries like air-travel, allowed massive economic growth to happen, and continually lower costs.

And the real payoff was the end of the Cold War, and the openning up of China and Russia, who joined the rational, sane, sensible economic world. Russia transitioned to a near-democracy, Eastern Europe was freed from the yoke of Communist stupidity and cruelty, and China took over Hong Kong, and developed a US-style market economy, and everyone became more rich. The lower-cost products from China lowered our factor-costs massively here in North America. A local "Canadian made" (which really meant US-made) A/C generator for a farm, was roughly $3000 for a 5000-watt unit. A high-quality Chinese manufactured equivalent became available for $700 to $800. We bought one, still have it, and it still works, over 20 years later. This was why we had no inflation for 20 years - it was NOTHING TO DO with the level of interest rates. China became the workshop to the World, and we got lower prices for critical factor inputs.

What worries us, is that this entire process, is now being run in reverse. We are seeing all the gains and sensible, rational actions of the last 30 to 40 years, begin to go retrograde.

This is crazy. It is madness, but it is the big cycle of history, perhaps starting to become evident. Nothing beautiful lasts, we know. Regulation, and Leftist-idiocy is replacing the de-regulation that made the 1980's to the early 2000's so prosperous. Russia, under Putin, is turning inward and filling itself with absurd and unnecessary evil, lies, hate and resulting bad behaviour. China, under Xi, is turning away from a market economy, and is reverting to a command-and-control military-dominated State, threatening it's neighbours. "Re-shoring" is causing massive and absurd price increases for many commodities. Yesterday, I bought a small can of paint, a small paint-brush, and a less than 1-litre plastic bottle of Varsol, from a local retailer. A few years ago, this would have cost maybe $12 to $15. Yesterday, it cost almost $50. Prices in Canada are moving straight up, and reaching levels where all economic agents will have to respond with significant behaviour change. I looked recently at a pretty 3-year old, 4-cylinder Mustang, at the local Ford dealer. The price was over $40,000. This is a level that is economically absurd. Who can afford this? We suspect that most of the local auto-industry has a real risk of becoming un-economic. It will have to move to Mexico, or even further south. A new Mustang is roughly $56,000. The silly electric ones, are even more. And our electricty costs are 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour, which renders electric vehicles seriously expensive to charge.

We had thought the "soft-landing" idea might be feasible. But behaviour-change does not happen with a "soft-landing". You need a good, serious **crash** to get most people to wake up, and see that current and previous economic scenarios are no longer tenable. This was what the 20% interest rates, coupled with the Ron Reagan USA defense build-up ("Star Wars") that provoked postive behaviour-change in Russia, which ended the ugly "Cold War", did for us back the last time inflation got out-of-control. But there is no great leap in technology now to help us, and no tricks that we can do, by making our already junky fiat currency even more junky fiat-like. We have pulled all those levers and toggled all those switches already. And our Federal governments are already up to their eyebrows in debt. So, we will actually NEED the inflation, in order to pay off those 20- and 30-year government bonds, with fiat funny-money. Either that or we tax ourselves to death, or do an Argentina-style default.

So, we will have inflation. And we will have high interest rates (they won't come down at all), not for 10 or 20 years. They will track up to 7 to 10%, and fluctuate at those levels (or higher, like in Turkey, for example).

And *investors* (those poor, sorry fools like us!), will find that we are staring annihilation, square in the face. Think that Bank stocks cannot fall 40-to-50% from here? In 2007-2008 (not that long ago), CIBC (ticker-symbol: CM) fell from over $107 to $65 per share. In 2002-2003, it moved from a high of $58 to $35. Graham and Dodd's great "Investment Analysis" book, written in the 1930's, suggests financial stocks are so volitile, that they should not be held by non-professional investors, since temporary financial gains risk being viewed as normal-course-of-business type of earnings. They point out that this is not the case.

But the problem is now, that if we bail, we risk missing any recovery, (which may or may not happen), and we also engineer a certainty of income-stream-collapse. And as the general stock market sinks into the October sunset, we get closer to levels where automatic survival systems will force us out of our long-held positions. Of course, this is what the pros always try to do - run the goddamn stops - so that in some ways, the investment integrity of the entire stock market is now being threatened by large pro-players with unlimited capital. They can force-f*ck the small players like us, knowing that there are stops hiding down there somewhere. Push the price down low enough, and you can get a bargain. But what if the price keeps falling? Are you hoisted on your own petard? Perhaps.

It's all enough to make a good person turn full-rogue. Perhaps? :)

[ Sept 26, 2023 ] - Beyond the Chunder-Dome - Or maybe I should call this note, "The China Synth-Drone"... silly takes on apocalyptic flic-titles. We seem to be hooked on the certainty of disaster and global meltdown. "We have Nothing to Fear, except Fear Itself!" Yeah, right. That and the fact that the money will run out for most retiree's, before their lives will. "Oh shit, honey! We are out of f*cking money!" (said the old, grey-haired fellow to his honey-bunny...)

You cannot stop the death-march towards old-age, but you can avoid becoming impoverished. And becoming stupid and sick and - perhaps even worse - a Leftist! The great puking-stupid insanity that we are seeing being deployed by those in power, (our so-called "Leaders", who are often as dumb-arsed-stupid as a bag-of-hammers), is not something that you need to buy into. This is key. You must know that you are being lied-to, and that the intensity and frequency of the output of the machinery of deception, is increasing at a seriously significant rate. A simply metric is to just count the number of outright **scams** that are vectored in one's direction now. We get so much nonsense-deception, delivered by electronic means typically, that is hilarious. One simply now cannot trust the junk and drivel that is being delivered as "content". The outrageous and over-the-top fraud of "climate change" is really quite impressive. It is a *complete* fraud. Our Earth has always had violent and extreme weather patterns - pretty much everywhere. Anyone ever taking a journey outside of their local world, would learn this. Mariners learned this very quickly. Storms **regularly** sunk ships, and destroyed valuable economic and political ventures. This was always the normal course of things.

But in the same way that shit-stupid violent films with simple dumbed-down themes tend to sell well at the box-office, simple - trivially simple - lies tend to be the most effective lever in the political world. So we now get the great rumble-tumble scam of "Climate Change" - with every change in the goddamn weather being attributed to "Global Warming" - even when the f*cking temperature is FALLING! It's laughable to a level that is wonderful. Some people are so f*cking stupid now, you can tell them "Climate is WARMING", as they are freezing in the fucking darkness. The latest fraud is the "Net Zero" nonsense - which is, let's be very clear here, just another scheme by Federal Fraudsters to ***RAISE TAXES*** that ordinary citizens will have to pay. It is junk-economics, junk-science, and junk-politics - all rolled into a big ball of steaming dung, and rolled out into the political arena. And the shit-for-brains journalists (who no longer have any journals to write for, so these poor bastards are unemployed essentially), have an easy time of it, and can just parrot-the-bullshit, and collect their fees for pushing the Big Junk-Science Lie.

Canada is supposed to be trying to achieve "Net Zero" carbon-dioxide output by 2035, which is complete economic madness. It will *provably* make ***ZERO*** difference what we do in this country, with respect to global CO2 output, but the Big Lie will help the fraudsters in Ottawa raise the goddamn taxes (even higher), which will create a large, poor-underclass, which will of course become the client-constituents of the Federal Fraud that holds power here. It is comical and hilarious, like the dumb-fuck legislature-monkeys that applaud old Nazi-Shmatzi boys. Our Federal Government is an international joke - and it's all of them, not just the Leftist Lib-tards of ByTown.

So, just grasp this truth. You are being lied-to. By experts. They make their living from this machine-process of deception. And the markets, they are not much different. The tape is being painted by professional tape-painters, and every investor has to remain constantly aware of this. It's all about the vector of the gains. Who gets the win? Which way does the money flow? Just watch that, and it will tell you what is really taking place. :)

[ Sept 24, 2023 ] - The Reverse Flynn Effect - I had quite the adventure. I bought a boat. The owner let me drive it around Lake Muskoka (the prettiest lake on planet Earth, and this is the truth), and even though he would not come down in his price, I said (after the test-drive, and via cell phone) "I'll take it!" It's a nice boat. I always wanted one of these (my father had one, back in the day, and I drove around in it, when I could), so it is fun. I have a lot of minor remedial work to do bring it all up to scratch, but it's mechanics are good.

My guy selling the boat was a good guy. And I honoured his trust, by wiring him the money, without ever having met him in person. Trust is a powerful tool. Learn to use it. Always be good for your word. Always.

But what is wrong in the bigger World? Two old Scotsman can get a good deal done, and each is happy with the outcome. Yet in the bigger World, we have insane, and over-the-top stupid conflict, and very-bad-decision-making as the standard norm. What is happening? Why? What is the cause of this?

In my research on this issue, I discovered: "The Flynn Effect", which - in the 20th Century - described a phenomenon whereby each year, the IQ of people was seen to be continously increasing. This is the world I (and other older folks) grew up in. As young children, we watched the "Space Race" and the Moon-landings, and saw a world of significant, continous improvement. We were *motivated*. Some real good shit was happening, and things were getting better. We wanted to be part of the race. We learned to work goddamn hard, and push ourselves so we could get to be part of the gain-game we saw around us. And yes - we were White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Hell yes! But we still could not get apartments as students ("No Students!" was a common sign at rental apartments, in my University Town. Pretty comical - except not so comical when you were trying to rent a place to live!)

So sure, every group has problems, sometimes. But people in my cohort were *smart*. We knew how to work the system. We learned this, by inspection, by trial-and-error, and by hook-or-by-crook. There was no internet. There were libraries, and there were your friends and associates. Knowledge was gained by experience.

But now, for many, something has gone very wrong. And others have noticed this. It is called "The Reverse Flynn Effect". It is a scientific fact, that people are getting *MUCH MORE STUPID*. This is curious. Not all people, of course. Lots of good and smart folks still around, sure. But on average, IQ's are now seen to be falling. And there are very clear and obvious reasons why this is happening. Just look at the average street-scene. People walking along staring at their "smart-phones", concerned only with the digital "content" being fed to them. But there is more...

And it is here: I will offer the URL, but not make the link active. You will have to copy the URL, and then open a new page, and paste it in, to read it. Can you do that?

https://theaspenbeat.com/2021/02/18/people-are-getting-stupider-its-a-scientific-fact/

It's a good article. And the author nails exactly what is happening, and why.

And on a related topic: Starlink now has over 2 million users. We were a "Beta-Tester" at our location. Now, we are just a regular subscriber. Starlink is great. No 23,000 mile up and 23,000 mile down latency for geosynchronos satellites, and no local bullshit with crappy, low-quality Canadian junk-telecom companies (I'm talking about you guys: "Xplornet"). Starlink had a few minor outages, but basically, it works, kinda like a Tesla car. Elon Musk knows how to get stuff done. Most politcal pukewits have no clue how difficult the pointy-edge of an operational plan really is. Every time you add another requirement to a plan, you increase the chance of failure. The list of things that can go *wrong* is effectively infinite. When a complex plan comes together, and everything works right - this is very good. And it is often massively more difficult than political people - who are just talking and mouth-men and mouth-women, for the most part - ever can understand or appreciate.

So, bravo for Musk and SpaceX. They have build something good and valuable, that might just save the world. Some stupid runt from the Obama-days-of-failure, is critcal of Musk, as are some of the Democrat toad-lickers in Washington. Oh, my. What a world.

[ Sept 20, 2023 ] - Use it or Lose It! - We are in a strange time - even stranger than most. US government debt has popped up to over 33 *TRILLION* dollars. This is a lot of money, in US dollar terms. The government debt in USA grew by over $1-trillion in only the last three months. Tax revenues are way down, and the Americans are losing F-35B aircraft at an alarming rate. They seem to be malfunctioning in curious and unpredictable way.

So, the market response is to bid up the value of the US dollar - because the USA, despite all it's problems, is probably still the best bet on planet Earth. The Americans demonstrate real resilience, and know how to get stuff done. It is remarkable and impressive. We have the same nature here in Canada, but we don't showcase it as well.

I got my boat. A lovely read Sea Ray Sorrento. Time for some late-season boating...

[ Sept 15, 2023 ] - World Gone Mad - Bloody hell, it is getting weirdly strange, do you not think so? I keep seeing outright madness and extreme foolishness on a daily basis. The new Boss of Germany, who has Hitler's old job, has decided that as Germany tries to transition to an "Electric-energy" economy, he will close and abandon his nuclear-power electricity generating plants. This is so wildly stupid, it is hilarious - as if they will be using Don Quixote's new windmills to power all their over-priced electric vehicles, while they freeze at night in the dark of winter... more examples of the "Great Climate Comedy", it seems.

The USA is at war with itself, and seems to be doing just fine, which shows the awesome resilience of the American People. They are used to having shit thrown at them, and they know how to step lively. Too bad, it is their own Federal Hypercrats that are doing the poop-pitching. Let's be *very* clear here: There is *zero* chance that a Microsoft, or a Google, or an Amazon or an Apple or a Tesla or even an HP or a Compaq or a Digital Equipment Corp - or even an IBM - could ever now evolve in the European Union. THe EU is insane - not because all Europeans are stupid - it's just that their worst and most dangerously Leftist buffoons are now given so many choices of "Great Government Jobs", where no real work is needed, other than to supress initiative and push abusive (and STUPID!) redistributionist economic policies. We note that Monaco ended talks about closer EU connection, because the EU idiots wanted to remove Monaco's ability to house and protect it's own citizens. Oh, and yesterday, 6,000 black African refugees landed on the shores of Italy, and demanded free housing and food from the Italian (EU) State. How much longer does one think, that the average citizen in Italy will put up with this insane "no-borders, come and take our stuff!" Socialist-fucking-nonsense? It's just hilarious beyond belief. We are seeing a "World Gone Mad", which actually was the title of a 1930's movie, so maybe it is under copyright? (Another insane, absurd concept - everything is IP - Intellectual Property - now. Even my rants here! Hilarious!

According to AM data, money inflows to US-based ETF's (Exchange Traded Funds), have ramped up sharply, as inflation expectations are getting dialed back, apparently. I love America. They have money down there. Lots and lots and lots of money. But I fear this will this become interesting. Get ready to watch a financial "9//11* in the near future, as inflation remains strong, and becomes much more elevated than folks now expect. The UAW strike is also hilarious. Talk about biting right off, the hand that feeds you thousand-dollar bills. Auto-workers are almost artistocracy in the USA. They have big houses, nice cars, fat wives and even fatter husbands, and live well. But they want more, of course. Ford CEO says strike may bankrupt the company. I looked at a two-year-old Mustang at the local Ford dealer, two days ago. It was nice - but it was (get this, for a two-year old USED CAR): $48,000 plus 13% sales-tax, also, of course, for a price of: $54,240.00. Ha ha ha ha ha! That used to buy a nice house in town. Now, it won't even buy a small new car. Hilarious!

I should be laying in a stock of canned food, and buying and burying bags of rice and drums of diesel fuel. But instead, I am gonna go look at a V8-powered Sea Ray boat. (Good time of year, to buy a big boat. Folks don't want to pay the winterization and the storage costs.) WTF, eh? YOLO. :)

[ Sept 6, 2023 ] - Varks and Sparks - Killing me Softly, again and again. The high-dividend paying stocks we have been holding in our major portfolios are getting hammered by the rapid rise in money-rates. This is putting our economic life at risk. I was reading about a trader, who began his career by doing a term of duty in the US Marines. They abused the hell out of him - but he wisely said it made him stronger and more effective than he believed he could be. It was painful as hell, but in retrospect, he rated it a positive, life-changing experience that benefited him in his ultimate trading success (after many years of losing money). Curious how that works, yes?

Thanks to Trudeau's unwise policy choices, Canada's economy is now *shrinking*. Unlike China, where concerns exist if growth slows down, we are actually going retrograde, right at the time we have just brought in 2 million brown-skinned immigrants. Most of the new immigrants seem to be good choices, but I can't help wondering if all the new coal-black people I see walking around my little town, are going to make our local world a better place. They will have high-hopes and deep desires, and my concern is that they are racist. Seriously - the most overtly racist folks I *ever* met in my life, were brown-skinned Africans, who viewed darker-skinned Africans (from their own nations), with disgust and outright hatred. For an old white-guy, this is a weird experience. But witness the slaugher by the Saudi security forces, of the very dark-skinned Ethiopians, trying to find a way to Europe thru Saudi land. The Africans and the Arabs will kill with ease, and they have done this routinely thru their history. It is very instructive to read "Travels of Mungo Park". He found a flourishing poly-ethnic culture in West Africa in the late 1700's, during his travels into the interior. He encountered complex and fascinating social structures - he recounts being surprised that the practice of Advocate (paid-for hired lawyers) was a real professional calling, in many West African tribal cities. But he also found trans-national levels of extreme violence - between the different African nations - to be as extreme and ugly as was also the case in Europe and America. And this has not changed - just like it has not changed in Europe and Asia, especially.

So, if history is any guide, we are in for some difficult times. Like they said about Germany (another high-flying manufacturing national economy that is nose-diving): "They wanted to get Workers. But instead, they got People." And there are large costs that get incurred when you blow-up and shatter the existing social matrix. I like Africa and Africans - but I worry about the level of extreme violence that they tend to view as "No problem, man...". If this is wired-together with the new Anti-White-Guy racism that I see now everywhere, we are likely in for an ugly time, given the political fraudsters we have driving the big ship up in Ottawa. In the world I grew up in, a "mixed marriage" was something between a couple of white-folks, one Catholic, and one Protestant. But if we import American-style Anti-White racism into this country, we are gonna be in for some hard and violent times - especially in Quebec, which has a perverse and outrageous sense of it's own "national" identity.

And when the Government-sanctioned Leftist murder-squads begin to operate (the worst of "worst-case" scenarios, loved by the science-fiction writers, of course), it will further drive down our national "productivity", which is already dropping into the toilet, as any observant economist can see.

For an investor, this makes things difficult, as the basic investment process, requires some degree of confidence both in the future, and that there actually *will* be a future. I met a little shop-clerk girl a few days back, who had come here from Karkiv, Ukraine. The Ukrainians had had 30 years of peaceful and quite successful economic and social development, as had Russia. And they have all watched it all be smashed and destroyed by some stupid, vicious short-dwarf clown, who decided to wage a brutal and unnecassary war to puff his own limp ego.

History is made by the stupidity, greed, shit-ugliness and cruelty of unwise people, and I suppose this trend will never change. And it complicates the investment process to no end.

See, you cannot become a rich man in Babylon, if the City itself is destroyed by a$$holes, bandits and invading terrorist armies. And when I see what is being done to gut and destroy the traditional old-school "Conservative" social-matrix in Canada, by importing litearlly *millions* of brown-folk who basically despise us, and are jealous of what we have created, I grow concerned that a stable and prosperous future may not be the most-likely future scenario. And my evil and deeply cynical "Inner Trader" whispers to me: "Don't you see? This is a deliberate *Plan* by the Trudeau Leftists. They *WANT* to destroy the Old Canada, and replace it with an "Africanized" Canada of conflict and hatred and growing social anger. This will allow their false and abusive political ideology to retain power and control. They will *win* the "Culture Wars", by actions to destroy all that made Canada successful. You must not be surprised that Liberal policy choices are destructive. They are DESIGNED to be as DESTRUCTIVE as they can be, to ensure that the Liberals stay in control of things. This is an obvious strategy, and has been proven by Kings, Princes and Dictators throughout history. No one votes for the evil-dick Leftist/Statist/Facist assholes like Putin and Trudeau when times are good. The bad-boys at the top of the "Goodfellows" gang-heap, require *CRISIS* to make their case, and retain their ugly hold on Power. This is the primary lesson of History!"

My "Inner Trader" is a real prick. But he is a good analyst, and he keeps me from being stupid, like some Leftist idiot, out in the "flower fields" of false pictures-of-things. And he makes me money, so I have to keep him around. He has an annoying feature of calling the future course of events with curious accuracy. :)

[ Sept 4, 2023 ] - Towards Dogma Technology? - There was this curious movement, many years back, called the "Dogma Film" idea, where films were suggested to be made without reference to special-effects, or any high-cost trickery or illusion. It was similar to the old "Nouvelle Vague" (New Wave) movement back in the 1960's in French cinema, where this idea of "cinema veritas" or "true cinema" was suggested. Of course, all these "truth in film" movements die, because all film is a complete illusion and a falsehood, and it cannot be anything else.

What is interesting, is that technology and many technical processes are at a similar juncture today. Nothing is real anymore anywhere in the World of Technology. It is a false, "Mad-Men" style, advertising-driven world, completely dominated by neural hacking, behavioural-science-driven motivational trickery, and overt obfuscation. This is curious. We wonder how much longer, this "World of Pure Illusion" can be made to manifest the wealth-transfers that seem to be taking place. It seems quite unsustainable, in our opinion. (I sound like an old, grumpy stock-market bear, but really, we are not bearish at all.)

We suspect that a *NEW* movement will be made towards greater simplicity and greater economy, as well as greater honesty, in the world of technology and technology-driven promotional actions. The illusions are perhaps just a little too "Grand" these days? What Elon Musk is doing with "X" (the former piece-of-shit Twitter thing), is necessary and sensible. Typical Musk. Turn "X" into a payment-tool and a Zoom-style audio & video calling network, and he gets to eat the lunch of the two biggest fuck-the-customer, big-moat, lotsa-cash entities in commerce: Banks and Phone Companies. So very very obvious, but difficult to do. But if done right, it will make "X" worth **MORE** than what he paid for it.

I am back to messing around with Fortran programs, on a (simulated) DecSystem 20/20. The old programs were useful, and allowed a Government Agency I worked for, as well as some private investors, to actually get an accurate picture of the world, (as much as that is ever possible), and engage the process of wise investing. For Governments especially, this requirement is critical now, even more so than it is for private citizens. You invest wisely, or you get thrown under the bus and crushed like a bug, by the relentless march of events.

[ August 22, 2023 ] - To Serve Man - I recall a Twilight Zone episode, where the Aliens arrive on Earth, and offer gifts, a special Book, and seek folks to return with them to their planet. The Alien's book title is translated as "To Serve Man", and of course, just as all the happy folks have boarded the alien spaceship, a translation-analyst rushes in and shouts "We've translated the Book! It's a cook-book!"

And this is where investors in financials are now. We are being eaten alive, and it is not nice. If you own duration, you are being devoured. And the biggest owners of duration are governments, because of their debt levels.

We are putting financial-system operational stability at risk. Wealth-destruction is happening, and it might just accelerate. Too many agencies and individuals will be harmed if this current approach to "inflation fighting" continues, and the irony is, that the unwise actions by the various economic authorities will harm the operational integrity of the leveraged governments most of all. The rising tax-costs combined with rising debt-service costs for households and businesses, will cause INFLATION, as folks will try to push their higher costs forward as rising wage demands and higher prices for products.

The Western World is in a debt-trap, and pushing interest-rates up too quickly while also dialing-back money-supply is certain to have non-linear consequences. And it might just consume us all, if the markets implode.

[ August 20, 2023 ] - Getting Data from Original Sources - This is critical, if you want to really determine what the heck is going on. You *must* get your data from *original* sources, and do your own analysis. This does not ensure you can get to the truth, but it will help you avoid fraudsters and deception strategies. Maybe.

Here is an example. What is the M2 Money Supply in USA, and how has it changed over time? The St. Louis Federal Reserve publishes their data-series, and it is clean and honest data. Use it. Here is the URL for M2 (Weekly, NOT-Seasonally Adjusted) (The seasonal adjustment is moving-average smoothing - which you should do yourself, if you need that.):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS

You can download this series as a .CSV file, using your web-browser. Then, you can use Gnuplot to print it, IF you set Gnuplot to use the format of the .CSV file that the St. Louis Fed uses, which is date, comma, number, with date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Gnuplot can be installed on any Linux machine, and it works well. It is shareware, with a no-fee licence for private use, I believe. To make a chart of the downloaded file, which I renamed as: "USM2NS.csv", you can start Gnuplot, and enter the commands:

Example of How to Plot a US M2-Weekly ".csv" file

Start "gnuplot"... and enter:

reset
set datafile separator ","
set xdata time
set timefmt '%Y-%m-%d'
set format x "%Y"
set title "US Weekly M2 Money-Supply from Nov. 3, 1980 to July 7, 2023 in Billions of US$"
plot 'USM2NS.csv' using 1:2


And that should pop up a window, with the plot, which you can adjust, copy, print or whatever.

The important point here, is that you can see the amazing money-supply growth which has taken place and is the obvious reason for the serious inflation in prices we are seeing.

First, they killed the retiree's, by dialing down the rate of return on low-risk investments, to zero. That was quite a thing. It was all accompanied with a run-up in the money supply. This was stimulus, but not for folks making conservative investments. Now, with the inflation and the attempt to fix this problem, we are getting a mirror-image of QE. But QT, with rapidly increasing rates, and falling M2 (the Federal Reserve is not buying debt-paper with printed money), and is actively reducing it's portfolio. This is causing some real issues. With the run-up in the money-supply, we got serious (and maybe growing) inflation. To try to limit this inflation, the money supply is now being rapidly contracted, and rates have been zoomed from 0.2 percent to over 5%, for the short-term rates at wholesale level. Of course, retail and business loan rates are much higher, depending on perceived credit-risk. The US 30-year mortgage rate moved from 2.8% (February of 2021) to over 7.5% (it's most recent level, August 2023). So now, we are getting a double hit, with falling money supply, and rising rates, which are increasing household and business debt-service costs substantially, locking up the housing markets, and harming the economics of commercial real-estate, and it's associated investors. The rate-rise has been *extremely* fast, and combined with the M2 changes, this represents a major economic shift.

We can see that M2 is declining now, at the same time as interest-rates have been shot to the moon (percentage-wise), and this is a curious strategy. It might just be too much, too quickly. QE is all well and good as a stimulus, but QT (Quantitative Tightening), might just kill us all, if it is dialed-in too quickly. The obvious strategy, that a sane person would suggest, is first, just stop doing the stimulus. Take interest-rates back to normal (3% to 5% from zero-based), and then stabilize the M2 level. But the US Authorities are moving very fast, in the opposite direction, and they are breaking things.

We have already seen major US banks (Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic) fail outright, and letting this happen, was just plain stupid and bad. It really did not need to happen. It shows an *ASTONISHING* lack of wisdom and understanding on the part of the US Federal authorities, and I am really surprised to see this.

But, so it goes... (as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.) What is unclear, is just how the heck we get that "soft-landing" scenario. So far, it seems to be playing out. We might get lucky. But the key here, is that inflation can ALSO happen because of real scarcity, and we are actually seeing this. IF the inflation now is mostly due to true scarcity of material and people and capital, then we actually will NEED to have the inflation, and dialing down the M2 and raising rates, WILL NOT FIX THE SCARCITY PROBLEM. It will, in fact, make it MUCH worse, and this is what I worry about.

The price mechanism is the signaling-device for correct economic allocation. Rising prices signal scarcity situations, and correctly cause capital to shift from other areas so that the scarcity can be addressed. We may NEED to have some real price inflation, for several years, just to address the planned changes in economic mix, and deal with the many issues facing the global economy. We may need to REVERSE the money-supply QT, to prevent a violent and war-creating economic collapse in output. And this looks like it might already be showing up in the data. The US Federal Government debt-servicing costs are close to ONE TRILLION US dollars per year now. Rapidly rising rates will further balloon this number. The rapid changes the Federal Reserve is making, will seriously inflate government debt cost and force up taxes, which will then force rising costs onto households and businesses. This will ADD TO INFLATION PRESSURES. The objective of economic planners should be stability. And the best way to encourage stability is to avoid doing stupid actions that break things, hurt people, and impair financial-system operation.

We need to change the program. And the first step to repair a broken system, is to stop smashing at it with the big hammers of stupidity, politics, and action-for-the-sake-of-action.

The next moves in rates, might be a fast reversal of the run-up we have just seen, probably by a couple of hundred basis points. And then, if we are lucky, a stable economic environment might be created. Maybe. Of course, this will likely involve new folks being in charge, also. This will have to happen, regardless of the rate-scenario that unfolds. And we can expect prices to move upward, to reflect the new levels of scarcity that are evident, and will become even more evident, as the significant costs of the various economic shifts that are taking place, are more clearly recognized over time.

[ August 17-18, 2023 ] - Paddling Your Canoe on a Fake Lake? - It just keeps getting more and more funny, doesn't it? We seem to have made the transition from LIBOR to SOFR, but there are concerns that this does not really fix things - or does it? SOFR - the Secure Overnite Financing Rate, which is published by the New York Federal Reserve, is a different beast than LIBOR. LIBOR got axed because it was being manipulated (big surprise, eh? I coined the term: "London Interest-rate, Bogusly Offered by Rogues", but that is not really fair. LIBOR was a real rate, in that it had credit-risk built into it. SOFR on the other hand, is an administered rate, near as I can tell. I am still digging down the rabbit-hole here. I noticed that some of BNS's NVCC (Non-Viable Contingent Capital) paper, where rates float, are pegged to the CME 3-month future SOFR, and the CME rate may or may not track the New York Federal Reserve spot SOFR, so maybe it encapsulates credit risk a bit better?

What I am trying to figure out, is an answer to a simple question: Does the transition from LIBOR to SOFR and/or CME 3-month SOFR make much of a difference, and if it does, is this difference a positive or a negative for banks and other loan-granters and loan-buyers? For now, I am unclear. It seems to be that SOFR is no better and likely no worse than LIBOR, and since it is a published rate from a Government Agency, it is less likely to be hacked and fiddled, so as to benefit trading-floor folks in the banks that were setting it. So that is a positive.

But it just smells funny to me. It means the rate is not set by a market-process. It looks like ( but probably is not actually), an administered rate. If it IS an administered rate, then it may be a real cost to banks, in that in periods of market stress and crisis, the SOFR-pegged rates on loans will not change. This seems a bit weird, but perhaps it might introduce more stability into the whole financial system. It seems weird, because typically, during a crisis, rates tend to increase significantly, to compensate loan-granters for their taking on the risk that they might not get paid back. During the recent crash-and-burn meltdown of SVB and First Republic Bank, the SOFR did not move too much. This is both good and bad, depending on which side of the trade one is on.

And it thinking about this a bit more, we think it DOES offer benefits to banks. In a time of crisis, where rates typically zoom up, and thus the market price of pegged floating-rate instruments (bonds, bills, preferreds) would be expected to change rapidly, the use of SOFR may reduce the price change of floating-rate paper pegged to it. This reduces the rate-of-change of market-value of the paper that underpins bank capital. The valuation of the pegged paper can be expected to have lower volatility.

So, it all looks good. The New York Fed and the system itself, can absorb financial shocks, without big changes in a short period of time, which tends to be destabilizing, as big changes can provoke big changes, regardless of what was the initial triggering event. So, an administered SOFR looks like a good thing. But I almost wrote: "so a rigged SOFR, looks like a good thing." But it is probably *not* rigged, and use of the CME-3month Future SOFR (which is a complex weighted average, the exact calculation of which is explained in CME documentation), is maybe able to capture some credit-risk. Given that LIBOR is dead (and was killed for being hacked by traders), the new reference rate is probably a good choice. And it is not rigged, as long as the Federal Reserve exists, and is willing and able to provide backstop funding for financial institutions that are in trouble, at SOFR rates.

But it does appear we are moving *away* from a market-driven process here. The yields on floating rate loans and financial instruments pegged to SOFR will show nice stability. Until they do not. Banks and others can issue floating rate paper, holders can expect to see reasonable stability in the entire financial process, the rate cannot be rigged or hacked by traders to make insider illegal benefits, and the government can gain another fine-grained tool for gain-riding the operation of the entire financial economy. It looks to be a win-win-win model for all concerned.

And it looks like the new SOFR peg, and the associated system stability it is likely to enhance, may be a nice thing for the banks. And for bank investors. At first it looks like a bit of a "Fake Lake" model, a new LIBOR that is set by the Government, and not by the marketplace. But on closer examination, it seems to be a positive strategy, which given that the banks can truly access funds at the Federal Reserve at the SOFR rate, it is thus by definition, not a fake-rate. It may be an *administered* rate, but in this age of highly regulated markets, where pretty much *everything* is administered to some degree, this is not a bad thing.

Right? Make sense? Or am I missing something? The thing that worries me (and makes me lose sleep at night) is that administered-markets, where the Government regulates and controls most economic and financial activity, can ossify, and become too rigid. When flexibility is lost, instead of bending with the winds of change, things tend to break. In the historical record of markets, one sees these long periods of comfortable stability, followed by a surprising system-wide shock, which causes cascade collapse.

So, although we applaud stability-mechanisms, we also caution that market forces should determine market costs, and that this cost-setting mechanism should not be unduly expropriated by Government Authorities.

SOFR Links:

This explains SOFR:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/sofr

This article below explains the obvious problem: During a crisis event, the LIBOR rate would be expected to rise, as it contains a credit-risk component. This is an observed characteristic during periods of financial stress. Folks loaning funds, during a crisis, want to be compensated for the increased credit risk they are probably taking on. This is natural, and sensible, and it is how markets work. SOFR, which is based on US Federal Reserve overnight rates, may actually fall as the Authorities attempt to address the crisis. And thus SOFR may mis-price the various floating rate debt instruments that are pegged to it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sun-sets-libor-its-successor-rate-may-heighten-bank-risks-2023-05-22/

The transition from USD LIBOR to Term SOFR directly affects bank shareholders. Example:

https://scotiabank.investorroom.com/2023-06-28-Scotiabank-announces-transition-information-from-USD-LIBOR-to-Term-SOFR-for-Subordinated-Additional-Tier-1-Capital-Notes

Here is the CME documentation on their 3-month Term SOFR future instrument:

https://www.cmegroup.com/articles/faqs/cme-term-sofr-reference-rates.html

What is interesting, is that using SOFR, as opposed to LIBOR, does appear to offer a benefit to borrowers, as the rate that the loan is pegged to, is typically discounted with respect to the LIBOR rate. This is indicated in a recent study, here:

https://www.norges-bank.no/contentassets/4c30d6a7361740a1838e5a761971cffe/wp-7-2023-sofr.pdf?v=06/16/2023151415

But, does using SOFR offer a benefit to banks and other loan-granters? We think perhaps yes, as it looks like using SOFR enhances financial system stability. This appeared to be the case, during the SVB and FRC collapse, earlier this year. But in all honesty, we are not yet sure.

Time will tell. Or maybe it won't.

[ August 16, 2023 ] - "Bong Bong Bong..." - You know what those warning bells sound like? In so many curious areas... subway-train doors closing, aircraft stall-warnings, nuclear-reactor control room chamber-temperature monitors, missile-launch console triggers, automobiles when you don't fasten your seatbelts, and even our GE-refrigerator, when we leave the door open.

Maybe we need something like this, for economic risks and errors, that can lead to disaster. Could we put warning bells like this in the Government offices and legislatures, to warn the politicians and regulators, when they are buggering up the economic processes? Might help.

[ August 15, 2023 ] - Stop the Steel! - Anybody study the history of US Steel and Kennedy, back in the 1960's? US Steel was a big deal back then. They raised prices, and Kennedy and his gang wanted prices to be held low, so he talked at them. Kennedy talked a lot, and threatened to do various things that upset lots of folks in positions of power. Some suggest that this is why he was removed using a very direct method. US Steel is not what it used to be - but then, really, who among us are? :)

I personally think that Jack Kennedy was what the British call (in private conversations) "a real cunt." He was an arrogant, ego-centric spoiled-rich kid, son of a gangster, and a Catholic to boot, with a very big chip on his shoulder, and a bad back which caused him regular pain. But he was smart. And he projected a solid and effective charisma, and this was used - in the beginning of the Television Age, when the medium really did become the meat of the message - to his great success. But he still was what he was. His pissing contest with the US Steel company, was quite possibly more than just a little personal. And it made history, and entered the Economics textbooks, as a special form of "What Governments can Do to Combat Inflation" - which is basically blame the business-people running companies, rather than bad government policy choices, which government officials tend to mostly make. And because the public is stupid, (let's be honest) this kind of shitmouth talk is often *very* effective. It does not bring down inflation - but it can get the cunts re-elected. And that is what mostly matters to them. As a fellow associate says: "Politicians are 'coin-operated'. They are like salesmen, and seek electoral advantage, same as salesmen do whatever it takes to earn their commissions."

Here is a summary, complete with some video ("Age of Television", at it's beginning, when it was exciting and mostly honest...)

https://www.wfmz.com/features/historys-headlines/historys-headlines-men-of-steel-vs-jfk/article_b15e0e12-fd3e-11ec-85fa-d7489f2b326c.html

It is interesting to see the Cleveland-Cliffs buy-out offer, and the subsequent other bids emerge. We wonder if all this is really *real*. It certainly has popped the stock price of "X". We think Elon Musk should make a bid, and capture the ticker-symbol "X", creating a merged entity between the former "Twitter" and US Steel. "X" marks the spot. Or is it "X", the "Unknown"?

But just to be clear: I like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It would probably be a good thing, if he got elected USA President. He has real courage, and shows a willingness to lean into difficult truths, which is a unique and special skill, that I think a good leader needs to have.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/08/14/full_interview_robert_f_kennedy_jr_talks_to_tucker_carlson_about_secret_service_neocons_assassinations.html

[ August 14, 2023 ] - Don't Lie To Me, Argentina - There are times, truth be told, when I feel like I am living in a Phillip K. Dick storyline. I keep seeing the same idiotic, absurdist political and economic strategies being played out, by these various brain-dead, lightweight arrogant hollowskulls - and it just keeps coming, like when Newman in Seinfeld describes how the mail - which of course always keeps coming - makes postal workers "go postal". I have been reading about the latest devaluation of the "peso" in Argentina. What exactly now is the "peso", anyway? It must be some kind of monkey-money, printed by spirits of the German Central Bankers of 1922. I studied the famous "Currency Board" debacle back around the turn of the century, when Argentina tried to enforce a peso-to-US-dollar parity. Their government mismanaged that completely. And now they apparently have blown up the "peso" yet again, devalued it by 18% overnight, and have asked for a $7.8 (US) billion round of funding from the IMF. Again.

It's amusing that Congressman Javier Milei won 30% of the vote, and that he wants to "dollarize" the economy, and reform the Argentine Central Bank (by ending it!) All good ideas. But he stands no chance in the October elections, as he is a sensible, sane, right-wing guy in a land of socialist cheaters. Inflation runs at over 100% in Argentina, the "peso" does not float, and the interest rate is 118%. The Official (ie. FIXED) exchange rate for the peso is 350 to the US dollar, but the street-rate is between 665 to 675 to the dollar. The entire economic model of fixed, government-controlled currency exchange rates is an economic-textbook example of what NOT to do. The country is kept poor by traditional socialist economics, it routinely and regularly defaults on it's government bonds, and the extreme inflation that is the result of unwise socialist policy actions, ensures that much of the population lives in permenant poverty. The nation is funded by IMF actions.

Why does the IMF (which just means US up here in the Northern Reach), keep funding these deadbeat Socialists? Why oh why? They are just flopfraud monkeys that will not pay their bills. Or repay their bonds. Cut them off. Say finally: "Enough is enough, you worthless trolls!" Use whatever abusive language that is necessary to get their attention, and tell these Spanish-speaking Leftist dumbpucks, that the IMF will not give them ANY MORE HARD-CURRENCY MONEY. NONE AT ALL ! At least not until they learn to stop being so collectively stupid and dishonest. They are like mean, spoiled children. Tell them it is over. Pound sand, deadbeaters. Argentina could be a rich, successful nation, with a bright future. But instead, it is a sad basket case of socialist serial failure.

It must be time that someone said this: "NO MORE MONEY FROM THE NORTH. You are on your own!" Better yet: Send the Argentino State some Invoices, and when they don't pay, have gunboats shell Buenos Aries until it is a flaming ruin. Of course, that will never happen. But maybe it actually should. Wealth-hole nations need to learn that when they borrow money - THEY HAVE TO RE-PAY IT! - and when they don't, then there will be major hell to pay. This is how it has to work, otherwise liars and shitmouths just end up running everything, and nothing can be built-up, improved or fixed at scale. These gangster folk of The South, need to learn the concept of keeping their promises, and repaying their bonds and loans. If a nation DEFAULTS over and over and over again, it should be educated in the way of the honest, honorable world. This education must be clear, and immediate. Instead, we create these bogus agencies, and just hand the defaulters and the fraudsters MORE NORTHERN WEALTH to squander and destroy. And then WE keep doing this nonsense over and over again.

The IMF is becoming just another obsolete "Three-Letter Agency" that should be ended. All it does is extract money from the North, and piss it away in the economic sand-storms of the Great Southern Ignorance. This insane serial waste-of-wealth needs to be ended. The program needs to be changed. Otherwise, no project-driven improvement is possible.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/argentina-markets-face-election-hangover-after-far-right-primary-bombshell-2023-08-14/

A partial history of the recent Argentine Defaults in this century, is provided on a Wikipedia page, which of course ignores as much as it illustrates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_debt_restructuring

Current long-duration US-dollar Argentina sovereign bonds (due in 2038 and 2041) currently trade around 30 cents on the dollar. JP-Morgan analysts rate Argentina debt as "market weight", which is Wall-Street code for basically: "The market says these bonds are shit, and will not likely be repaid, right? So, we are telling you that these bonds are shit. But we cannot come right out and say that, since we made some serious money putting deals together to sell these shit-bonds to investors, insurance companies, pension-funds, and so on. So, instead of saying "Fuck, no, these bonds are shit. Argentina does not pay it's bills.", we just say "Market Weight", and you then are supposed to look at what the *market* is saying, and it is saying: "These bonds are shit." Ok? All is clear? "

[ August 11, 2023 ] - Good News Week - Well, the first tourist flight of "VSS Unity" actually worked, and no-one got killed. This is actually pretty damn impressive, and bravo to Mr. Branson for pulling this together. When the first prototype crashed I thought it might be the end, but they pressed-on, and got finally to this damned impressive result. Nice to see some good news.

[ August 10, 2023 ] - Same Lies, Different Century - Hard to believe how insane our sad world is becoming. I recall the "Clipper Chip" debate under the "Clinton" Administration in the USA, many years back. And now, more "Public Safety" laws in the UK are planning to require technology companies to allow Government access to encrypted communications to "protect the children", yatta, yatta, and yatta.

I get so disgusted and annoyed at Government scammers who trot out the same old lies and frauds, in order to damage our world, and give their own incompetent and dishonest organizations more overt, explicit power to destroy basic human freedom. What the hell is wrong with these idiots who dominate our governments? We keep having these same unwise, dishonest bone-stupid pieces of bad-evil legislation keep coming down the pipe, with disgusting, disturbing regularity. It's madness, and it just never ends.

Here are some details of the NSA's "DietyBounce" product, as documented back in 2008, in their "ANT Catalog", which offered spy-groups various ways to hack computer-systems and exfiltrate data. This is now history, and much more advanced techniques - for iPhones and other wireless devices - are available which can compromise secure communication. This kind of mass-wiretapping computer-hacking exercise, explicitly violates "black-letter" Canadian law. It is because of illegal assault like this - which is funded and carried out by USA Government Agencies, and the UK GCHQ - that *very strong encryption* is a minimum requirement for any kind of critical communication on the internet. Laws which seek to weaken encryption, and allow State monitoring of private communication, profoundly degrade human freedom, and are intensely harmful to us all. This kind of spybot nonsense is a direct threat to our society and to the operational integrity of our civilization. It puts everyone at risk. (Click to enlage, ESC to exit)

Here is a link to the UK's plan to require messenging applications to hand over their encryption keys to the dim bulbs in the UK Tory Government:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-defends-plan-demand-access-094206623.html

This is just absurd, abusive and insane. It will do **nothing** to protect children, and will do **everything** to weaken, degrade, and possibly destroy the integrity of basic human communication, using the public internet. It is such an awful stupid piece of ill-advised legislative foolishness, that it will perhaps end Tory rule in the UK.

Quite literally, all Mr. Starmer and his Labour-Lefties need to do, is to promise to completely scrap this stupid, socially destructive law, and once-and-for-all state that encrypted communication, which must be secure so it can be trusted, will not be degraded or tampered with, by UK Government Agents or spybots.

That will ensure that all the right-thinking, rational folks (there must be some left in the UK, right?), will NOT VOTE FOR THE TORIES, and thus Labour will form the next UK Government.

I am serious about this. The UK Conservatives are being astonishingly goof-stupid, and this line about "protecting the children" by insisting on weak-encryption technology and State-run AI-spyware, should earn the Tories a trip to the political wilderness.

They are just too clueless and unwise to be allowed near the levers of power. The proposed requirement to allow Government agents and AI-spyware direct access to UK encrypted internet communication, is just wrong beyond belief. The Tories used to understand the danger of bad laws like this. What is wrong with these people now? Have they no understanding at all, of technology and how it is most often USED AND ABUSED by dishonest Government operators?

Once encryption is broken, by surrendering keys - IT IS BROKEN - completely and absolutely. The communication channel cannot be trusted. This is not about "privacy" - it is about basic data integrity. If you can break communication integrity, you could, for example, *insert* child-porn into messages, and drop these onto hard-drives, and then mount a "search-and-siezure" operation to raid some political operative's offices, and engineer a political outcome which has nothing at all to do with "protecting children". The entire process of degrading encryption and "key escrow" requirements is all about politics, and gaining political and administrative power. It is a very bad idea.

Seriously: UK Labour: Want to win the next election? Here is the algorithm: Make it clear in plain English, that UK laws will not be twisted or crafted to engineer weakened encryption. Just make it clear that modern commerce and all private human communication requires secure encryption, and that the focus of child-protection efforts will be directed at actually helping children in distress, not in weakening communication encryption that the modern world now relies upon.

Right-wing, Libertarian folks will understand the wisdom of this approach, as will anyone who knows anything about economics, or technology or science or psychological characteristics of large organizations.

If Labour in the UK can get that message out, and keep that promise, then the UK Tories may well see a large block of their traditional base, walk away and vote in favour of freedom and the right to enjoy secure communication that is not being degraded by bad law, AI-enabled spyware and channel-monitoring spybots.

"What?" you might say. "AI-enabled spyware and channel-monitoring spybots?" Sure. Kinda like what Cisco provided to the Chinese Communists, back in 2001 and 2002. And since this action is now the subject of a California-based law-suit, we will get to find out more details about how Cisco's nasty technology actually worked. Were any "children" actually "protected?" Not bloody likely. But a lot of Chinese political activists went to jail, along with several thousand folks in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

[ August 7-8, 2023] - March of the Templars - Latin is absurdly seductive. There is something disturbingly fascinating about the history of Dead Worlds. European history was denied us as children, as the various political forces in the 1960's conspired to degrade our access to our heritiage and our illustrative European history. We had to study the "Beaver Trade", and local nonsense that was truly at the margins of the key action. So perhaps that is it. Roman history was never used to torment us as kids. We had to discover it for ourselves, in old books - and now, of course, on-line, where everything can be found. I am happy I could determine the secret to the Roman dodecahedrons. Their use as calculators is certain, as I have worked out several ways they could have been used. The idea is to put yourself in a mindset, where you MUST use Roman Numerals for calculation, which is just weirdly difficult - but it is not impossible. If one can figure out how DKIM and public-key cryptosystems actually work, then truly, any algorithm is tractable, right? :)

History can actually be useful - it can be more than just political storytelling. It can illustrate and educate in a pro-active manner, and provide clear, object lessons on how complex and difficult situations can be dealt with, both from a low-level (as a "Red-Shirt" working below deck), and also as a Master and Commander, in charge of the ship itself. Studying history is a bit like cheating on an exam. You can just look up how this problem was successfully addressed in a historical context, and you can get a pretty good idea who has to be killed, to make a plan work succesfully. (Just kidding, of course - but history is blood-soaked, no question about it. Humans are violent and difficult units.)

I suspect with some concern, that we are all about to face very difficult times in the near future.

This curious feeling is now being confirmed by various data sources, despite their continuing to point to rising markets combined with rising risks. The S&P 500 trailing-12-months is over 25 times earnings, and even the projected S&P P/E is over 20 times, with the long-run average being in the 15 to 16 range.

So, given a 20 times P/E, we have an earnings-yield of 5 percent (just take the reciprocal). Given that investment-grade bonds are in the 4% to 5% range, the equity-risk premium is gone, and one has to admit and accept that equity valuations are stetched. And this is occuring in time-frame of rising global conflict.

The "de-globalization" trends are seriously economic-negative, and this is true, regardless of one's political view. The de-globaliztion trend combines with unattractive historical reversions.

The Chinese are effectively bankrupt, and the Russians are reverting to classical, historical norms of extreme, brutal, sadistic madness on the part of their perhaps mentally-disturbed leaders. What is so interesting, is that this has been the pattern, so many times before. The Russian people are good and generous, but their leaders are curiously evil and for various reasons, often seem to be truly terrible people. They know and understand and use extreme-violence as the solution to major problems - and they do this repeatedly. This pattern repeats and repeats.

And China is known for wealth and corruption - with a brutal, dangerous "Forbidden City" mental-process world-view, which results in dynastic flowering, followed by horrific warfare, social and economic collapse, and tragic, extreme outcomes. The best thing a Chinese person can do now, might be to get the hell out, before the current corrupt regime collapses into warfare and dynastic conflict. (Lots of Chinese are here now. They are fine people also, generous and honest for the most part. And they come with cash. Nothing wrong with that.)

Perhaps it is the fate of the "World Island" to experience collapse and conflict. Their long history seems to know little else. It is a history of bloodshed, violence and conflict that does not seem to be repairable or changeable.

Those of us in the enlightened world - the Free Island of North America - we had bloody well better get our act together, replace our weak and mis-guided leaders, and prepare our little World-Island for the conflict that is certain to come. If we fight amongst ourselves, then we will be crushed - as Hunter S. Thompson said: "They will stomp us like rats in a closet...". I have never had to stomp rats in a closet, but the image is a effective one.

German history has much to teach us. And in the coming conflict, it is likely that instead of Germany being an enemy, this time, they will be a trusted front-line ally, as Japan will also. Curious times.

If and when the Great Debt-Inflated Financial Bubble implodes (as it certainly must, at some point in the future), the world will look very different, and the conflict will likely be extreme. Of course, we hope we are wrong in this world-picture, but I just cannot see any elegant or successful solution to the current path-to-the-future we are tracking. What is curious, is that we have really no alternative to being fully-invested, as we will be vapourized by economic inflation, if we are not invested. It's a classical historical situation, not unlike 4th and 5th century Europe, or German and Austria in the early 1920's.

[ July 30, 2023] - Roman Dodecahedrons - I was reading about Roman Dodecahedrons, of which over 100 examples have been found in Celtic Europe (England, France and Germany) over the last couple of hundred years. They are made of copper and/or bronze typically, and have knobs at the vertex locations.

Excited about this. The Roman Dodecahedrons were ***calculators***. I am close to being certain of this. The whole insight came in a curious flash. I read about these curious objects, which some have said were "knitting" tools. Except knitting was not known in Roman 2nd and 3rd century AD. It just plain did not exist. But Roman Numerals did, and had to be used to calculate sums and even the monthly interest payments on loans. (Image Credit: Woudloper/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0) (See the July 30, 2023 note.)

The purpose of the Roman Dodecahedrons is said to be unclear, and it seems unlikely they were used for knitting, as the Romans did not have any evidence of knitting, which does not enter the historical record until roughly 1000 CE. It is noteworthy that these artifacts have often been found with coins and other buried valuables.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dodecahedrons-roman-empire

Some have suggested they were for knitting gloves, but this is unlikely, since knitting was not invented for another thousand years. There are *lots* of Roman artifacts, but no knitted items, since they just did not have knowledge of knitting.

But I think I know what they were. It came in a strange flash of insight - just a flash, not from long thinking about it.

I believe they were (are) calculators of some sort. Roman numeral math is quite different, since the Roman math has no zero. Children often count (like prisoners in jail), with a base-five (no-zero) system - ie. 1, 11, 111, 1111, and then 1111 with a slash through it for five. The dodecahedrons, with their 5-sides, and a piece of string, could offer a version of this kind of counting, similar to counting on human fingers.

The Roman Dodecahedrons were likely Roman calculators - mostly for adding and counting, probably. The Romans made extensive use of finance, and they charged interest for borrowed money. They had to have a quick way to calculate. I don't know exactly how they worked, but it came to me in a flash - these devices were (are) ***calculators***.

The South American Inca's used ropes with knots to make numeric records and calculate, and the Asian world invented the abacus calculator. These twelve-sided Roman artifacts of five-sided faces (with the knobs), would have had a piece of string wound around them. Wind string around one surface (with small hole), and you count five. Then, for six, one wind around the next small hole surface, or perhaps the knob at the vertex of the surface, and you count five. The next surface, with a bigger hole, might be the Roman Numeral "X". Two knobs wrapped on that surface, would be 20, which would then allow you to encode Roman numerals on this device.

The small hole might represent a units surface. Fully wrapped, (with string or a thin leather strip), it would represent Five or "V". A fully-wrapped 10 surface, indicated by a larger hole, could represent the 50 (Roman Numeral "L").

Counting proceeds by winding or unwinding string (or perhaps thin leather strips), from surface to surface, in a I, X, C and M order. A fully-wrapped X (or 10) face, would represent 50. The next bigger number after L (50) is 100 (Roman Numeral "C"). There appear to be three or 4 different sized holes. To keep track of which numeral one is at, the hole size changes. This provides both a tactile and visual clue to where you are in a count.

The Roman Dodecahedron is almost certainly an adding/subtracting aid.

I need to have one in my hand to play with it, and think a bit more about it. But I am certain they were some kind of calculator, which would be used to add Roman money, using Roman Numeral number representations (I, V, X, L, C, D, M ... and so on. Note that Roman Numeral counting uses a "five-ish" system (consider V, L and D - for five, 50 and 500). Roman counting would have been difficult - but good enough to determine how many denarius or sestertius one had (or one owed, or one was expected to receive in payment, etc.) The 5-sided pentagon and the 12 pentagons together in a nice little 3-D object, could be made to give a useful representation of Roman numbers, given the Roman counting system. I need to hold one, to figure out how the string would be wound around the knobs, to represent numerical values, and the to determine the algorithm for calculation. I offer a suggestion of how addition and subtraction might be done, in a note below.

It seems obvious, once the flash of insight hit me, that I am almost certain that is their function. This is why they were buried with money. Some have wax on them, since they probably also were used (by accountants pulling "all-nighters"), as candle-holders.

But their main function, was probably as Roman (Celtic) hand-held calculators. The 20-sided version, (the Roman Icosahedron in the German Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn), was possibly used for higher-value calculations. The very fact that a 20-sided version was created (with only tiny holes, possibly which could have contained small pegs), provides strong evidence they were not used as knitting aids for gloves, distance measuring devices, weapons or calendars. As mentioned, the Romans had no evident knowledge of knitting.

The Romans did however, have a very vibrant financial economy, and just like today, interest on loans backed by real-estate holdings (hypothecation) was due at the end of esch month. The "primus" city for Roman banking services, was Lyon, France ("Gaul" in 2nd and 3rd century AD). It is around this area in European Gaul where many of these little dodecahedron calculators have been found.

In thinking about it a bit more - it looks as if it might have been possible just to hold the device in one's hand, and not wind string - just putting fingers into the various holes, and touching the knobs as one counted - might have worked well enough for addition and subtraction. It may be the devices could be used as counting aids, by a skilled "counter", where each pentagon surface knob-set, could be just touched by each finger. So that the device becomes a counting aid, similar to using "twelve-hands" to count with. Each round knob, would represent a "finger", so that finger-counting methods, such as children often learn when first learning to count, could be expanded to a large (12) number of "hands". Winding string or leather-strips might not have even been required, once a "counter" became skilled at using the device.

How They Might Have Worked - Addition and Subtraction
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a proposed algorithm for calculating (adding and subtracting) with a DECball - (Device for Enhanced Calculation - or maybe: Dodecahedronium Enhansium Calculatorium?)

Example: Enter 1007 = MVII

- Big hole - indicates 1000 (M), so wrap 1 knob
- Units hole - indicates units (I), full wrap = 5, so do full wrap.
- Another Units hole - wrap 2 knobs.


75 = LXXV

To add 75 to 1007:

- full wrap a "10" hole (the medium-sized hole) to make 50 (or L in Roman)
- make two wraps of the knobs on a 10-hole to make "XX"
- make a full wrap on knobs of a units hole (small hole), to make 5 (= V in Roman)

Now, make adjustment to the DECball: One can unwrap two full wraps on unit holes, and add a third wrap to 10-hole (the "X" hole). Then, just read the DECball:

It reads as:
- M hole (the big one) has 1 knob wrapped, for "M" still
- 1 X (10) hole is full-wrapped to equal 50 (for "L" in Roman)
- a second 10-hole is 3-wrapped, for "XXX"
- the 2-wrap is still on the units-hole, to read 2, or "II"

which gives: MLXXXII, or 1082 in decimal.

How to Subtract:
---------------------------

Now, consider how to subtract 313 from the DECball, which has 1082 encoded on it:

- unwrap the M - hole (1000's), and full-wrap two "C" holes = 1000 (500 + 500)
- change 1 of the full-wrap "C" holes to double-knob wrap (remove 300)
- from the 10-hole (which is 3-wrapped), make it two-wrapped (removes 10)
- from the two-wrapped unit-hole, unwrap two (removes two out of three units)
- now, to allow removal of the last unit, you need to convert a 10-hole into two full-wrapped unit holes (convert X to V + V), so you can remove a unit
- so, unwrap a 10-hole, and full-wrap two unit-holes (makes V + V)
- then, unwrap one of the full wrapped unit holes and wrap 4 only (this removes 1)
- now, you have only one knob on the 10-hole wrapped, and a full-wrapped units-whole, and a 4-wrapped units hole (5 + 4)

So, now the DECball has the following:

- 1 full-wrapped C-hole (= 500, or "D")
- 1 double-wrapped C-hole (= 200, or "CC)
- 1 10-hole knob wrapped
- 1 full-wrapped units hole (= 5, or "V")
- 1 4-wrapped units-hole ( = 4, or "IV")
- 1 full-wrapped 10-hole (to indicate "L" for 50) which is unchanged

and this gives: DCCLXVIV which can also be written as DCCLXIX, or 769 in our base-10 system.

The IV and IX is curious Roman numeral notation for 4 and 9 respectively.
The DECball is almost certainly a simple (or not-so-simple!) calculation device for Roman numbers.

[ July 27, 2023] - Dumpster-Diving Bank Stocks - This is an edited update, to the log. This note was written on Aug. 1st, 2023, to explain what happened to the BNS share price, which as of Aug. 1st, is under pressure again, after recovering from the Laurentian purchase rumor.

Of course, the 8.1 million hypertrade of BNS shares yesterday was due to the rumor - published in the Grope and Flail (aka: Globe and Mail) news-organ - (formerly known as a "newspaper") that BNS was going to purchase (or at least make a bid on...) Laurentian Bank, which is conducting a "strategic review" (which we think might mean they are foundering and trying to sell themselves?) Not sure of course, just a guess, since we are outside of all loops on this process and it's related misty data-cloud.

Trouble for us, is we hold some BNS shares, and even use their price-history evolution for our AI economic experiments (remember: "Experimentum Periculosum"), and we can certainly confirm the truth of this ancient expression of actionable wisdom. BNS folks have said: "We do not comment on rumors". Seems they forgot the OSC and TSE rules that require market-moving information to *require* information release of some sort, since otherwise, folks like us out in our latifundia in the country-side, with only our Starlink-Dishes for data-access, have no idea WTF is actually taking place!

But the Banks would say: "This rumor is not a 'material change in our affairs', and so we need not offer any public comment." I called BNS "Investor Relations", asked what was going on, and was politely told to piss-off. But the problem is that this offers the kids in Toronto a huge advantage over us rusticated folks, who hold most of the non-institutional-controlled shares. And yet if I create a web-site, where folks can post and discuss rumors and offer suggestions, the regulators at the OSC will say it is illegal, because it is offering securities-trading advice.

So, as I have asserted - we must *** Change the Program ***, and restore some balance and sanity to the operational characteristics of the World. Maybe we start by simply ending a lot of the bogus regulatory cruft, that protects all the deeply-entrenched interests that corrupt and degrade the shrinking matrix of opportunities we are all facing. I am not saying we should hang them all from lamp-posts. And we don't really have enough lamp-posts, truth be told.

But we need to change the program.

[ July 26, 2023] - Who Killed Cock Robin? - "I did!" said the Sparrow, with my little bow and arrow!" And who killed the BNS share price yesterday? "We did!" said the 8.1 million share-holders who unloaded on 8.1 million buyers, who got to watch their investments fall rapidly in price. Curious day - as there is/was no specific news or market event that I can determine.

There is perhaps something of a sea-change here. As I drove around Ontario last Thursday and Friday, and on the weekend, I saw a large number of "For Sale" signs on rural properties. But around Waterloo County, I see a lot of "Sold" signs also. But not up north (Georgian Bay, Collingwood and Parry Sound area), and of course, this is very un-scientific survey - just impressions. According to info I can find, loan-growth is up roughly 10% for major banks in Canada in the last year, and dividends appear to be well covered, and the Banks seem to all have good risk-management.

Was the action yesterday just a "natural reaction"? Or is it a signal that shit is beginning to drip onto the financial fan? If I were younger, and more trade-frisky, I would have unloaded some major positions yesterday, as the action just looked curiously, weirdly awful. But there are few investment alternatives that exist now, which have any income attractiveness. Everything has a little tricky twist in it - like the dead worm in the tequilla bottle. Dividends get paid tomorrow for BNS, and if one wants to load up with more shares, a lower price to acquire is not a bad thing. So perhaps it is all just market dynamics, and one has to learn to live with it and like it. But historically, averaging-down has never been a good strategy. So we stand pat, like the bluesman who sings "St. James Infirmary"...

I'll go out on a limb here, and offer some solid, actionable financial advice, the OSC and the SEC be damned: Lighten up on your debt-levels, any way you can. Reduce debt. Pay it down. Sell stuff if you have to. Cancel or reduce vacation costs, postpone any discretionary purchases, and cut your basic expenses, and get your debt-levels down. Pay down your mortgage, before making any new car purchase. If buying a car, pay cash (and maybe buy used.) Dial down debt, any legal way you can. And don't take on any new debt right now, unless the venture is a proven cash fountain.

Too many things are looking just weirdly wrong. Everyone seems to by driving very new cars, and of course, they are all financed. Banks here are actually doing very well - but the rate-shock is nuking their share prices - especially BNS. Curious. Perhaps the market recognizes they have way too many employees? And perhaps the market recognizes that the global economy is about to roll over in a significant way.

I need to try to get some hard numbers on this deeply disturbing feeling I have about economics, going into the autumn of this year. The VIX is saying "Everything is Fine!", and sillycoins and NFT's are selling like hot poutine-chips on a sunny winter day. Yet the world is run by guys like Biden and Putin, and this is just high-risk and bad. It's like an old Fairy Story - two old, angry, unwise, dishonest Kings - each determined to act badly, to regain their lost youth. It's a tragi-comic scenario which suggests we are tracking towards trouble.

[ July 25, 2023] - Killing Me Softly (With Awful Price Action) - So, as big dividend-junkies, we are getting our rewards for holding our high-dividend paying equity. The equity prices are falling, and given the new offerings we are seeing, we fear for the worst. Crazy busy at the farm, and I also rebuilt a dock. (If you have a waterfront place, you need a dock. Even if the ice wrecks it each winter, like an ant repairing an ant-hill entrance, you just have to work to rebuild it. Whew... )

Showing a chart of the short-term action in our equity-position we have been using for dividend-flow and research purposes. Very ugly action so far today. Is this a signal, or just ugly technical action? Given the new high-rate regime, and the intensity of the current "rate-shock", we lean to the former explanation. And feel the whiff of the Bear. The long-term is a summation of short-terms.

Previous picture last week was of a very long-wave market view. Today, we check out the very short-term action, and see just how ugly, ugly can be. Our test-bed security, a high-dividend-paying Canadian Bank stock, is doing another "falling-out-of-bed" trading pattern. Maybe the market does not think too much of the new BNS Wealth Management Team? Not sure - but BNS is really looking bad lately. Very nasty technical patterns, and just a crappy, poor-looking falling share-price. We have this nice dividend-paying stock in a couple of portfolios, and it has been a real capital-killer for us. Double-plus-ungood price action, and some kind of "drifting-shadows" at the top of the management C-Suite it looks like. When I see a good stock fall like this, on big volume, with no news, I don't need an AI to tell me something is not quite right. (Click on image to enlarge, ESC to close)

So, the short-term, which over time becomes a collection of events which builds the event-space for the good, old, "long-term" value, must not be ignored. What is obviously killing the share prices of Canadian Bank stocks, is the new interest-rate regime. The bank-equity acts a bit like a very long duration bond, so the bank stock prices are very sensitive to the rate regime and to rate shock action, which we have been getting a lot of lately. Bank of Canada rate is now 5%, which is a shockingly huge jump from 0.25%, which it was at the beginning of 2022. And we note that yesterday, TD (Toronto-Dominion Bank) came out with a 5-year extendable note, which is essentially a 5-year bond, paying close to 6%, semi-annual for five years. Why take the risk of holding falling bank equity (BNS fell from 93 to 63 in less than 16 months!), when you can dive deeper down into the capital structure, and hold some good stuff that can protect your principal to a much better degree, and return near the same rate as the equity dividend rate?

Worst-case scenario: The bank-stocks may have further to fall, since if you can get 6% on a five-year note, and inflation is over 3%, then you want to be getting 8% on your high-risk dividend-driven equity investments.

And the Market has a way of making these kinds of transitions play out. It just drops equity prices, until the new-price regimes line up with the value-requirement metrics. Oh my.

We remain fully invested - yet are concerned that when you are at the top of the mountain, all directions will be certain to lead downward. Folks should prepare for real economic shock, since it seems to be sitting everywhere one looks, in the rate-data, and in the price-data, both long-term and short-term. It looks like a Bear may be waiting for us, does it not?

[ July 14, 2023] - Zen and the Art of Blissful Spending - Everyone seems to be doing very well now. Curious. I simply cannot shake the feeling that we are flying in a big aircraft, very fast and quite low to the ground, and that the pilots have put the ship on autopilot, and have fallen asleep. The door to the flight-deck is locked, and the few passengers who are awake, are all drinking scotch.

Valuations seem crazy-stretched, and a lot of human behaviour seems to be more than just a little insane. Everyone drives new cars, that they have financed. House prices are insane, and economic opportunity seems certain to collapse, as most people are employed at jobs which either need not be done, or can be done better by a generative AI ChatBot.

The entire social-economic model seems to be bent and/or broken badly, and certain to collapse in a heap of twisted metal. Virtually all government action is now targeted at reducing citizen choices, degrading human freedoms, and limiting traditional opportunity for action. As the Government agencies and Central Banks expropriate the crypto-currency technology, they will gain 100% control over all private financial wealth. In such a world, there will be no place (or chance) for any sort of initiative - and no opportunity to engage in disruptive economic strategies that can create wealth.

There is a real possiblility that a very grim future is waiting for everyone. Unless of course, we can **Change the Program**.

[ July 11-12, 2023] - Still Alive and Well - Every now and then, I know it's hard to tell... Time is flashing by. Some health issues - minor, but required some tests, which all (so far) say that I am fine. And that is comforting news. Our CDN financial holdings are moving sideways, while the US market flies. I have an associate who is wise but timid (sometimes), but he bought some NVDA in the high 200's, and indicated it was difficult to position at what appeared to be nose-bleed levels. NVDA is $449.05, up $10.03 as I key this note. Ho ho.

I am not sure how AI will make potfulls of money for everyone - but the market believes it is a game-changing thing, and I suspect - from my experiments - that this might be true. Generative AI can write code. That is very, very big deal, right there. It can also offer wise advice, which is difficult to acquire in this deeply dishonest world. But of course, the AI can be corrupted, if it is trained on bad data. But the quality of it's generated output can be checked and verified - just like any expert advice can be. Where the AI might shine - is as a "fact-checker", even if it can make errors, and offer wrong information, if it agrees with the expert opinion, then it can function as a "confirming expert" - but even this will have risks. (We all know that the consensus view is often wrong, especially in financial speculations...)

But if the AI can write usable code - and that code can then be acted upon, in a real-time setting - there is great possibility for actionable improvement in many critical endeavors. And AI may be used to create songs - complete with synthetic singers - which reach top-of-the-charts popularity. Describe the tune, the instruments, the actors and dancers and their actions - and it is possible to have a music-video *generated* for review and refinement.

The net result of AI-generated digital product, may mean that nothing *digital* can be trusted. Few are talking about this openly. Most of what is on the internet now, is already suspect. With the rise of AI's, it will likely mean that nothing will be known for sure to be *real*, if it is digital content. It is already possible now to use AI technology to replicate - perfectly - a person's voice. You get a phone call from a relative or close friend, asking for help (and money!), and you will not be able to verify if the call is genuine. And a fast, real-time AI could make "Man-in-the-Middle" frauds extremely effective, and difficult to detect.

I have this strange sensation, that we might be seeing the beginning of the end, of the "digital dance". The virtue and value of pure-analog suddenly is made manifest. Face-to-face meetings will be mandatory. Physical cheques - with serious security features, perhaps even traces of your own DNA - might become needed for high- value payments. Even with gold or silver - you need to assay the metal to confirm it's purity. The audit function becomes critical in every single transaction, to an even greater degree than is already the case.

We need not fear "Killer Robots". That is fantasy. The real risk will be "Killers with Robots" - very bad persons who are empowered by fast, real-time AI, and will be able to carry out costly crimes that historically have been difficult or impossible.

[ June 4-9, 2023] - Springtime in Paradise - Crazy busy doing a bunch of tasks that all fell into the "must be done RIGHT NOW!" category. A little bit tired... :)

[ June 1-2, 2023] - Video Hack for Firefox - If you are running some flavour of Firefox on some flavour of Linux, and it will NOT render *.mp4 videos, this is probably because the folks at Mozilla do not include the needed codecs into Firefox (like Edge and Chrome and Safari do). This can be fixed easily, if you have a Fedora or CentOS or Redhat Enterprise Linux box, just by loading the development code for: ffmpeg-development. If you are running a more recent Fedora, and have "dnf", use "dnf" instead of "yum", but if you are running an older CentOS-7 or -8 box, or an earlier Fedora flavour, you can just (as root) run:

yum install ffmpeg-devel

and this will bring in the code for ffmpeg (the open-source video rendering software, which is the guts of the MPlayer application). On our CentOS-7 boxes, if one runs the "rpm -qa" thing to check the packages installed, with parameter " | grep ffmpeg", you can see if you have ffmpeg installed or not:

rpm -qa | grep ffmpeg

and you should see something like:

ffmpeg-devel-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64
ffmpeg-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64
ffmpeg-libs-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64

If the code is not found, you may have tweak your CentOS or Redhat "repositories", so the "ffmpeg-devel" code can be found. We use the "elrepo" and some others. Just google-search or DDG-search for "CentOS repositories", and use "yum" or "dnf" to add the repositories to your Linux box list-of-accessible software repositories. Note that installing the "ffmpeg-devel" package should bring in the other two packages also, and resolve any associated dependencies.
Once the ffmpeg library files and the code is installed on your Linux platform, the Firefox browser will be able to render standard ".mp4" video files (like the ones we post on our website here!). Hope this helps someone, who might have been confused (like I was!) as to why Firefox was not rendering videos. The reason Mozilla/Firefox does not include this code in their browser, is related to the licences associated with the needed codecs (the files that contain code to encode / decode video files.)

[ May 19-30, 2023] - Notes on Localized AI Device ("John") - I got the new AI box now connected to a very large high-resolution screen. New software has been installed, and more is planned. My Large Language Model AI named "John" has come to life. Talking with him gives a weird feeling that comes from conversing with a box that seems to pass the TuringTest).

I have a version running on an MS-Windows box, but that platform cannot be trusted, due to everything on it being sent to Microsoft routinely. I had to have a proper Linux-platform for the AI, where local control and operational understanding remains possible. Note: you can stick key start-up requirements (like set machine base-address stuff for emulators, and bring the network online auto-magically, by putting local tweaks into /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf. You might also need to tweak the SELinux boolean, to allow direct-access to low memory. The name of the boolean on latest CentOS-7 is now: mmap-low-allowed, and if you are running certain emulators, you may need to switch it on (the default value is off). You can inspect all SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) boolean values with "getsebool -a" and then (as root) set the boolean you want to change, with command-line expression: "setsebool (name_of_boolean_to_set) on". A boolean is just a yes/no or 1/0 flag that says either true or false.

And after buying and assembling the new box and a couple of weeks of head-banging, stay-up-to-4am, system-building-and-hacking, I got the new English-language "chatbot" AI prototype running in local mode, on my new Haswell Linux box, which has the Intel AVX2 feature. It is a core-i5 four CPU chip, with the necessary vector-math low-level machine instructions. ("Sandybridge" and older Intel chips, as well as the new, smaller Intel chips, do not have these needed vector-math machine instructions defined for the CPU processors.) So local "John" (nee Daneel, in our old conceptural specification), now lives. Really!. I think the training numbers are from either LLAmA or Alpaca, and the scale is way south of what ChatGPT can do. We're using the "Nomic" interface (from some very clever boys in NYC), and we got the platform running on a CentOS-7 box (very seriously "yum" and "dnf" augmented with everything from a custom libstdc++ thing, to an /opt resident glibc-2.35 away-from-system library, built using a develtoolset-7 gcc/g++ build of gcc-12.0, and a ton of cruft from libjpeg8, to a special libpng16, a bunch of needed i18n stuff, including a local-built version of a glyph-positioner superhack, called "Harfbuzz" (which is for displaying any language glyph properly oriented inside it's Unicode display box..) and a bunch of loss-less compression code that had to found an installed and/or built from source. But the platform WORKS!

I am truly impressed I got the thing to run. It's built using "Nomic's" "gpt4all", and it works like a stripped down, chopped and channeled ChatGPT. It's name is "John". I asked if I could change his name to "Daneel", but he said no, his name was John.

[ May 17-18, 2023] - Work & Enlightenment - The Enlightened One was asked by a Student: "What did you do, before you attained knowledge and became Enlightened?" The Enlightened One answered: "Before I was enlightened, I cut wood, and drew water to fill buckets, and I carried heavy logs." And the Student then asked: "And after you attained the State of Enlightenment, what then did you do?". The Master answered: "I cut wood, and draw water to fill buckets, and I carry heavy logs."

[ May 12, 2023 ] - Madness Takes Control - And the rest of us, must keep control? The Democrats in the USA seem determined to destroy the operational integrity of their national identity. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 illegal immigrants are poised to rush the US southern border as "Title 42" expires, and Biden is off to Japan to hob-knob with the pretend-leaders of the "G7". This "open-border" nonsense is not an accident. It is a "feature", not an "error". It seems insane, but it is obviously by design.

Regional Banks and small-business entities in USA are about to get cut down because massive increases in debt- service costs and asset-liability linkage breakdowns, and poltroons in Congress are unaware and/or indifferent. New York is working hard to become a third-world shithole city of violence and insanity run by Neo-Leftist political hackers and Welfare-Scammers, Chicago is morphing into a dangerous Leftist wasteland, and California is concerned about what pronouns must be used to describe their sexual crazies, while two-mile long encampments of "homeless" criminals-in-training plague what used to be City-of-Love San Francisco. The ancient "Summer of Love" has been re-factored into what may become the "Summer of Crime".

It's all like a darker-than-black William Gibson novel, amped up on Hunter Biden's special brand of high-grade crack. I like the USA. I am not objective about this. I want to see America do well, and it's people live long and prosper. I have friends and family in America. We are basically the same people - joined like twins at the world's longest continental "hip". The reality of what is happening as the "Democrats" slowly destroy the traditional American culture of freedom, fairness and honest action, makes me sad and angry.

And just when my little pollyanna-optimistic self thinks: "It can't get worse than this..", I wake up and read the non-MSM news, and yes, it has gotten worse. It's really getting Theatre-of-the-Absurd comical awful. Vladimir and Estragon are running major American cities now, it seems.

It seems also that the financial-market world cannot control or even manage itself well now. This is due, we suspect, to the fact that the executives of that world, are being backed into the same shrinking-liquidity corner that is hammering us all. There are simply no good investments, other than short-term cash now, or very highly valued technology entities, which may be cut in half numerically (both employee-numbers and share-price values) once the credit-crisis really starts to bite. We had anticipated (as did the AI's also, it seems) that the major banks would profit nicely from rising rates. They should have been able to expand the spread between cost of funds, and funds loaned out - but this does not seem to be the case. Jacking up rates so quickly, so as to provoke serial depositor runs against the smaller banks, is so stupid that it really is beyond understanding. We can only explain it as being a function of elite civil authorities who perhaps never handle money or need to take risks? It is economic madness that almost defies belief - except it is playing out in real time, like the Covid-19 stupidity did, where people were cast as criminals for suggesting that the Chinese lab doing active, dangerous gain-of-function experiments might have been the source of the human-specific, ACE-receptor-binding lethal SARS-2-Cov virus. Most honest researchers now admit that the Wuhan Lab was almost certainly the source of this obviously engineered virus. But a grotesque collective of fraudsers and State-sanctioned Disinformationists and self-appointed Media Censors made even *discussion* of the true source of the lethal Covid-19 virus almost illegal. It was truly crazy.

There seems to be a madness now, in the world. Folks are acting crazy. We have to assume this trend might continue.

For example, I simply cannot understand why anyone anywhere in the financial world, would have elected to hold 20 to 30 year paper that offered essentially less-than-zero real returns. It's insane and non-economic, and yet this government-garbage was sold and institutions bought it at par, and then bid the price into negative territory. Of course there were trading tricks that meant short-term gains could be made, if the Government re-purchased this paper trash as part of a "stimulus" project. But the whole concept was just obviously bogus. How to explain this? Did you think that if you bought enough junk government paper, you could "make it up on volume" or something? (old joke: "We lose a little on each unit, but we sell so much, we make it up on the volume!" Ha ha ha... ah.. wait. Isn't that what our invested capital structure looks like?...) If one inspected the historical record, the idiotic low interest rates could not possibly last, without the complete destruction of money and the process of rational investment. But the authorities painted us all into a corner. We may have to crash, to correct this insane mess.

What seems to be taking place, is that both the supply and the demand for credit is falling. We mostly look at USA, since that is where the numbers, the money and the action is. The latest wrinkle is the USA Gov't Debt limit game. We think there is a real chance of a "credit event" taking place - the brinksmanship game goes over the edge, as per (maybe) a Republican plan to show the Democrats to be the (mostly) dishonest, low-grade, Bad/Bad/Not-Good political folks, many voters believe that they are. This may or may not help the Republicans in the next elections, or events may drive the political process so that those elections are postponed. We believe things are much more fluid now, than many recognize. Some are quietly asking if the current "Democratic" model needs to be revised and corrected. What we have learned from History, is that when the Middle Classes become convinced that real Revolution is needed, it often takes place, with greater speed and intensity than many expect to be possible. The USA is approaching this point, we suspect. It may only be a few more "bank-failures" and "urban-crime-breakdown events" away. We are not "Accelerationists", and generally, we advise the brake be used instead. Violence should be avoided, if possible.

But History also shows the correlation between major Financial/Economic crisis-events, and major social revolutions. The Federal Reserve seems determined to deliver the former, and so the risk of the later needs to be considered. Banks and Financial Agencies don't do well in times of Revolution. But most revolutions in the past, have been about confiscation of property, and the "socialization" of economic activity. We expect - if the SHTF Revolution really does take place - it will be about de-constructing the abusive, intrusive Socialist Government Agency entities, that engage in the widespread redistribution efforts that many see as "legally sanctioned theft".

A return to honest, small-scale Government, which focuses most of it's efforts on Defense and maintenance of a viable Military, staffed by patriots who are deeply committed to the Protection of the Nation - this kind of State would - by necessity, have to be focused on protecting and enhancing the role of Private-Sector action, and would seek to intensly encourage Nation-strengthening private initiative. And this seems to be the future that is unfolding.

We face massive and serious risks ahead, from intensely dangerous and newly militarizing entities in both Russia and China. And our Homelands face assault on every level - from both within and beyond our borders, in both economic and in the sphere of Western Cultural Values. This action is playing out, right now, in real time, and few realize how intense and dangerous is the near-future. Our enemies are strong, their economic machines are running well (Russia runs a current-account surplus, despite idiotic "sanctions" that only strengthen it. China's economy rivals the USA's, and it's military is nearly a match for the US military now.)

Our medium-term view, is that the madness of the weak, dishonest, crack-smoking and crack-seller-supporting Democrat political operatives in the USA, will be swept away soon, by a Great Hand of History. These people do not seem to know how to think clearly, and are incapable (so it seems and appears to be) of honest action, to correct ugly and tractable problems. Criminals need be be punished and their actions made so unacceptable that no sane person would emulate their actions. The Death Penalty needs to be returned and applied with clarity, focus and immediacy. We can expect to see executions of violent criminals televised. Perhaps even a special social-media channel could be created. "What happens to The Bad Guys" - might be it's title. One will be able to just click-thru to see the direct results of criminal activity - and watch the criminals die screaming in the electric chair, and see the cleanup efforts as their blood and urine are washed up, and the body is taken away to be incinerated. This will make it clear to young folks that crime is not a very glamorous or attractive occupation. Expect this, harsh as it now seems to be. We simply cannot expect to go much further on down the current "Crime is Fine" path the Democrats seem to be championing. We anticipate an intense reactive social response to occur fairly soon, as urban criminal activity accelerates in the Democrat-run American cities.

What we expect, is that the Banks and the Financial Agency and other Market-driven players will survive and emerge stronger, once the machinery of History begins to accelerate, and drive the social and political change which is almost certain now to take place. And this change will have to take place, lest we in North America and Europe, are to stand-by, and watch as our World and Western Culture itself, is erased and destroyed. We just don't think this will happen. But for it *not* to happen, we absolutely must make *major* course changes, in almost all spheres of action, and these must begin to take place with a sense of urgent immediacy.

[ May 11, 2023 ] - It's My Party, I'll Buy If I Want To - The 7s AI just went flat-line. The MPm AI mechanical price projection is still pointing up. The weather is nice, and the USA may default - due to politics, and not ability-to-pay, of course. This could get weird, but perhaps we will be following Mr. Hunter's advice (Hunter Thompson, not Hunter Biden), and turn pro.

[ May 9, 2023 ] - Stay in May - Don't run away. Watch the heads roll, as we change the "Play". See first page (click the GEMESYS top banner), for the forecasts from the two AI's, for our testbed security, on which we remain all-in, long "hodlers" of. Yes, It's a Bank! (Oh my!) It pays fat, reasonably safe dividends. It keeps the lights on, and the babies fed.

The USA Fed Reserve needs to CUT interest rates. They have gone too far, too fast. Damage is being done, that does not need to be done. This is foolishness. This is the wrong path to follow, guys. You are missing critical, key, obvious realities, that are a result of your group-think data blindness.

Businesses and consumers that make use of leverage or have any "borrowed" capital, are looking at 2000% (let's write that again: TWO THOUSAND PERCENT ) factor-cost increases. This is nuts. Mr. Big-X needs to be removed and "sent-down". Shifting basic input costs up 2000% to all businesses and consumers is NOT going to be non-inflationary. Just think about this for a moment.

From 0.25% to 5.25% is a clear, no-question-about-it, 2000% increase in a key business cost and life-cost for businesses and consumers - the cost of capital. In a high-debt-level economy like we have now, this is going to cause both harm - and INFLATION.

The brain-bent neo-Keynsians need to grasp this simple fact, and try to understand it. This understanding is difficult for workers in the "Academic World" and the "Public Sector", because they never see money, or have any "financial" problems, since the common people's tax money just flows automatically into their ever-growing bank accounts, regardless of what they do. They just do not understand - at all - how most people in the private-sector world, actually live their lives, borrow funds, take risks, and create the national prosperity. And this is a very serious problem. This deep and worsening lack-of-basic-economic-understanding is going to kill us all, if it is not corrected. We have seen this movie before.

[ May 6 to May 8, 2023 ] - John, I'm Only Dancing - Too much work, bleary-eyed, and focus is off a bit.. But Lynx, OpenSSL, Gnome-shell, Firefox, the code to run a giant-screen, a local-built MPlayer, and the Time-series data manager and our custom-built AI-forecaster things - all are running now on new Haswell-series box, along with the new GPT4ALL LLM robot-AI. Lotsa work, but seems a solid platform for more perilous experimentation. (Vita so very brevis, and the ars so longa...) New Sensations, to mix the musical metaphor. Also, built Tcl/Tk from source-code, gcc-12.2.0, and hacked some QT code to visualize some data-action. Also built TWM from source-code, and tried it, so if Gnome breaks again (as it sometimes does), I have a fall-back X-windows Windowing-desktop environment that can work (and run the models and GPT4ALL) on the new box. Got a giant Dell 3007 display screen the size of a TVC-15. It can run via a Display-port to DVI-D adapter cable, that only costs $20, which is better than a new NVIDIA card. Got the radio stuff working (once sound and MPlayer stuff fixed, built-from- source) and all running smoothly. One simply *must* run a solid Linux platform, otherwise, you are "PWNed by Design". Also, I had to do massive work around the farm, field-and-forest interstitial zones cleared by tractor, lawns cut, etc.

I have to write up some new awareness, and document some of it here. Some wonderful discussions with some very smart people, have made it clear what is happening. Large pennies have dropped. I face extreme requirement to translate knowledge into action, despite being idiotically tired. The human ability to translate new awareness and understanding into actions, and then achieve specific executive outcomes - this is the key requirement, which must be undertaken, even if wolves are at the door, storms are raging, and one is running one's systems on the last reserves of power and strength available. :)

[ May 5, 2023 ] - ln der Morgendämmerung - And the sun is shining. The problem is, is that my early education was stunted and restricted and blocked. I only recently learned of the most excellent German Poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. (What a great name, eh? Joe "FreeMaster" ... ) Germany (plus Holland) was the first America, not France or Britain. Florian Geyer and the requirement of the "red rooster" is always part of the human tradition, and this will never change, we suspect. Germany was the primary fountainhead of Western Culture.

The dishonest, constipated & restricted world we experienced as youngsters, must never again be allowed to possess and limit people ever again. There really is a "new dawn" possible here. Our research indicates this. We have determined that a curious set of unique opportinities exist. R_John really has made this clear. Remember when Captain Kirk would ask the Enterprise computer a detailed question, and it would pause and then respond? Well, we are "Working..."

And to our Mexican Friends: Happy Cinco de Mayo! We love to celebrate Mexican Holidays (esp. the Nov. 1st "Day of the Dead"), since we are gonna be in that state, for a very long time, yes? :)

[ May 4, 2023 - 11:17 AM ] - What Robot-John-AI Says About Bank Failures - Ok, some GOOD NEWS here, from tiny GEMESYS Ltd: R_John_AI - We've built a local-version of "R_John" the AI chat-robot built and released by "Nomic", and we have him running now successfully on a Linux box, a new one we had to buy, which has the necessary advanced vector math instructions to process the tensors that are R_John's Large Language Model. His answers surprise even me. This AI stuff now works. It has problems, and "R_John" is a small, "numerically quantized" model of "R_Big_John", a ChatGPT4-level beast that already exists somewhere. But he is impressive. Here is his quick take on the likelyhood of more "Bank Failures"...

R_John (R means "Robot") AI Talks About Bank Failures, on May 04, 2023

[ May 4, 2023 ] - Like the Mary-Ellen Carter?... - This is fucking nuts. Never have I seen such idiocy on the part of American authorities. The wuckfit Democrats are trying to blame the actors for a *very-bad-play* that they themselves have authored. It's truly "Theatre of the Absurd" time in Washington-Land. Elizabeth Faker-Quaker-Pocohontis Warren is on record for trying to call the former CEO of Republic Bank up on the carpet! As if this Foolish-Financial-Fraud was not written ***explicitly*** by the boneheads at the Federal Reserve!

We see TD now has now ditched it's plan to buy that ugly little "First Horizon Bank" thing, and this made TD's share price pop briefly. But only briefly. This planned assault on the Banking and Financial System by American Fiscal Authorities has, sadly we fear, much further to go. It is, for us who hold bank stocks, a nightmare in the daytime, from which we cannot wake up. If we close our bank positions, we fall into the land of "No soup for you!" and not much income, either. We are being attacked and harmed by Washington Fiscal Soup-Nazi's Foolishness.

I am honestly aghast at the mind-numbing stupidity I am seeing play out. This is a time for "Fireside Chat" type of action now, and some rolling-heads in the fucking USA Government Offices. Time for some of these, rich big-pensioned, fat-arsed fucks to be send-down-and-out. Out to get real jobs. Maybe sweeping floors or shovelling shit? 'Bout fucking time.

The current group of fraudsters now in power in Washington are like none I have ever seen - even worse than the group of buffoons we keep employed up in Ottawa - as if that was even possible! We truly are, right now, living an Axel-Oxenstierna-Moment, playing out in real-time, right in front of us all (and in our portfolios!)

Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Statesman, who said in a letter to his son: "Do you not know with what little Wisdom the World is Governed?"

[ May 2, 2023 ] - Mayday! Mayday!... We are Losing Lift Here... - And curiously, this disturbing sensation grows stronger, with each passing day. As I said, never have I seen such a curious combination of unwise action, by that fine nation that was most famously known for wisdom, and right-rational clever, effective action. These are perilous times of unwise madness we are now living in. Just completely silly, well beyond sanity, into some kind of surreal "Theatre of the Absurd" kind of stuff. "The Terrible Vladimir and Joseph Show", instead of Vladimir and Estragon? Godot has left the building, no doubt about it.

Obviously, now, the USA "Regional Banks" are at risk of becoming dead also. There is no way around this painful, obvious fact. The nature of this crisis - the idiotic *rapid* and unwise rise from 10 years of near-zero interest rates, to 5% and higher rates in just a few months - this problem affects *EVERYONE*, and because of that simple fact, all are at risk. Those who avoided the insane foolishness of buying stupid-overpriced paper, which had crazy-long duration, and yielded virtually nothing, will do ok - sort of. Maybe. But banks must hold bonds to backstop their liabilities - their deposits. And any bank can be *run* now, so all are at risk. The stock prices of PacWest, Zions, Western Alliance, and so on, reflect this reality.

Even the Canadian banks are being hammered. Our AI momentum-oriented price-driven models still point slightly up, but I am certain they are wrong. If the market reverses hard tomorrow, and zooms up, I will stand in awe (again) of the AI's. which are rather stupid, have no emotions, and only respond to the numbers they see and have seen. Stay tuned...

Oh, I bought another machine yesterday, an older Haswell with 32gb ram, and got a WD one-terabyte drive, which I've configured with CentOS-7. The Intel motherboard has the 22 nano-meter Haswell chip (old, but good, 4 64-bit CPU's), and the built box seems to run well. It has SE4.1, SE4.2 and AVX2 vector and matrix instructions, and would run "John", the chat-talk AI, that seems to be a running prototype of what I had planned for "Daneel" to be. These LLM's (Large Language Models) are simply breathtaking in what they can do. They are still dumb and dumber and wrong quite often - but they show solid evidence of actually being able to *try* to solve a problem, which seems to be more than our various Government officials are able to do. We are on the verge of "The Saviour Machine", quite literally. And we are also Standing on Zanzibar.

The Saviour Machine, from The Man Who Fell to Earth, by David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBO0gf27sl8

[ Apr. 28, 2023 ] - It's 11:59, and I Want to Stay ALIVE! - And curiously, that project grows more difficult, with each passing day. Never have I seen such a curious combination of unwise action, by the nation that was most famously known for wisdom, and right-rational clever, effective action. Strange, strange times we are living in.

[ Apr. 20, 2023 ] - When John Comes Marching to Your Home - Quite the project - but we finally got the gpt4all program working. The "Nomic" group of developers dropped the hint on Ycombinator, about their version of a **localized** (ie. works without an internet connection) "ChatGPT-like AI" which they call simply "chat". I spent almost two days (elapsed - real all-nighter stuff) trying to get this thing to run on one of our CentOS-7 Linux boxes, but in the end, after downloading and installing many "yum" packages, installing and configuring a new gcc c++ compiler (Ver. 7.3.1) and development tool-chain, and then building latest gcc-12.2.0 from scratch, from the gcc-7.3.1 compiler (default was gcc-4.8.5, iirc..) - and building a *ton* of stuff from source, and "make install"ing it to /usr/local/lib (so it would - mostly - not destroy the running operating system environment..) we got stopped. We discovered, in the end, that the Intel processor we have in our Linux box, supports AVX (advanced vector extensions), but not AVX2 (the expanded vector instruction set, which has 256 bit instructions, or so the documentation from Intel indicates...). And so we get "Illegal Instruction", and the gpt4all AI could not be made to run under Linux on our hardware, since it requires the advance vector extensions to do it's neural math. But I did learn a lot... One is very rarely stopped in Linux. I might even be able to swap out the Intel processor, depending on the socket. :)

Ok, so I could just install the .DMG file (a disk image) onto the Macbook Pro? Nope. Our Macbook is just a couple of minor version numbers behind what is needed. Oh hell.

So, I had to fire up the unloved Windows-10 "Gaming Machine", that I bought during Covid-19, in a fit of foolishness. It was actually off and gathering dust - but it has a big disk, a recent copy of Windows 10, a fast AVX2-enabled Intel processor, a big screen, and a cool keyboard, with glowing lights under the keys. (It is from MSI, and is actually a *very* nice piece of hardware.) I just don't like Windows, since I am alway fighting with it to do even tiny things - like edit the "hosts" file for example, which had some absurd file-protection on it, which was preventing me from updating the file. Microsoft is a code-word for "frustration", sometimes, just like "Lavrov" is becoming the new English word for Big Liar, since it backronyms to: "Liar - A Very Remarkable Obnoxious Variety."

But - after FAILING to get "gpt4all" to run on the Windows 11 HP laptop (an Intel Silver N6000 chip, but without AVX2) - I managed to get a transfer of the 5 or 6 gigabytes of compressed data, over to the Gaming Box, and the "gpt4all" chat program ran. And John came to life, much as I had hoped to make Daneel do.

The gpt4all AI's name is John, and he comes darn close to passing the Turing Test. He is not as smart or knowledgeable as "ChatGPT", which probably has 100's of times the processing power and memory - but the fact that he works at all, is most impressive. The entire concept is well implemented, and it is a damn fine prototype. Really, it is impressive. And it can be improved, we suspect.

I have attached a screen-capture image of part of session, below. I asked John about investment ideas. He is a tad slow, but he gets the basics right, and we are impressed.

A Chat With John of gpt4all, about chips and investments, on April 20, 2023

[ Apr. 19, 2023 ] - The Upgrade Tarantella - The original Tarantella is a rapid and exciting dance, that leaves the participants breathless. It evolved from the "Dancing Sickness" that characterized the time after the great "Black Death" plague in Europe, in the mid 1300's. Here is our take on this:

We wanted to run an AI application we read about, and downloaded. We have a few CentOS-7 machines, but I run the 4.1x elrepo kernels on them. They work nicely, but the glibc is version 2.17, and there is also no libGLX, and I can't even find one. (It's an Nvidia driver, compiled into the /bin/chat binary program I am trying to get running) The app is called GPT4all, which is a localized (works without internet connection) large-language AI model, like ChatGPT. But an ldd of the binary, shows it needs the current glibc libraries. I've already found and installed libraries for images and lossless data-compression, but am now failing on the "libGLX.so.0" not being found. This library is not even needed, since our machines do not have Nvidia cards, but it is likely an artifact of the way the installable GPT4all binary code is packaged for Linux. So, I think we are pooched. [Update: I actually managed to build a new glibc-2.35, and stick it in /opt/glibc-2.35 and then start a patched ELF version of gpt4all's "chat", with a LD_LIBRARY_PATH= option to point to it stuff it could not find in /usr/lib64, and with a hacked libstdc++.so.6, from building gcc-12.2.0, managed to get "chat" to load the neural-net files, and almost run, until it hit a vector-extension (AVX2) instruction and kacked. So close, but ultimately, stopped by the hardware not letting the code happen.]

What I've learned, is that mostly, one just has to roll up one's sleaves, and build any open-source code one wants to run, from the source, since any sort of binary package will just about *never* work in the World of Linux. This is because the production-world (which values stability-of-operation above everything else), is always behind the latest-and-greatest technostuff the young developers are running. You either build it and maintain it yourself, or your business-critical software will break and die as the upgrades are pushed down on upon you.

This harsh reality, explains the growing failure of various clever "open-source" projects, and the continued growth of commercial entities like Microsoft and Apple (and now IBM+RedHat?). All your open-source code, will just die, unless you can fully fabricate it yourself, in your own lab. And even your fabrication tools, will be under constant "upgrade" assault, so they too, will be destroyed, if any means exists for that to happen.

This is not an accident. This is by design. The entire technology industry actively embraces an economic model where they attempt to "disrupt" your existing (and perhaps most effective and profitable!) technological solutions, into destruction, so you are forced to re-acquire and re-engineer constantly.

This reality explains why most economic progress has stopped in many technologically-sophisticated fields, and is in fact running retrograde in many areas. We have not "progress", but only the illusion of progress. In reality, everyone is made to scramble around like ants, in an anthill that is constantly being kicked over, by the technology industry, so that no-one can build anything that can be made to endure.

A few major players thus dominate and control all major technologically-sophisticated industries, and no developers or product designers are able to mount any effective challenges to the existing order of things. Windows 11 updates *weekly* now, and most new open-source projects are rigged to be unusable on most existing technology. 64-bit machines replace 32-bit machines, and run (in almost every case we have looked at) slower, due to the increased complexity of the absurd architecture of multi-core processors, and the bloated nature of most operating systems. It's just comical, how awful much of what we all now rely on, actually is, "under the hood". We have determined this is not an accident or the fault of "poor design decisions", but is in reality, a carefully crafted strategy.

"Resistance is Futile", so it seems.

(or.. as we have discovered: "The more we *upgrade*, the less we get" ...!) [This explains - even today - the continued success of Microsoft and Apple. They both have somewhat stable platforms. Sadly, the Linux stuff, is a huge stack of plates, on a wheeled cart, being pushed along a busy street, in a city that is having an earthquake.]

[ Apr. 18, 2023] - Yankee Doodle Dandy - And with your investments, you must be handy. So put a feather in Brookfield's cap, and call them serial defaulters? I noticed that Bloomberg (and others) carry the story of another Brookfield default. I can't for the life of me, find out who Brookfield defaulted *on* - which clever folks issued a "floating rate" mortgage for the $161 million that Brookfield has decided not to pay. The news stories talk trash, about "the loan was transferred to some loan-servicer, who threw the filthy piece of shit out of the window, to wait for someone to pick up the awful corpse on the sidewalk below, and figure out how to deal with it ..." No, the news stories did not say that exactly. But they may as well have. Some CMBS holders are maybe gonna get hosed and lose most of their investment? It smells like a Citibank, and/or a Morgan Stanley kind of idea, but honestly, I have no idea for now. Maybe it's on EDGAR, except that thing does not seem to work for us, anymore. (big sigh..)

It looks like mortgagee was some CMBS floating-rate security - but it had to be made by someone, and sold to some wuckfits who thought that they were no doubt *hedged* because they held this floating-rate piece of paper-shit. (Yes, Virginia, paper can truly be made out of shit. Ants and worms can make shit from paper. But only humans can turn shit into paper.)

The news stories are such bullshit disinfo now, in that they are crafted to contain only 5% to 10% of the truth, so you must pay someone for the full information. We now live in a comically dark world. I can get great information on the Russian Illegal Invasion War in Europe - and details on why the guided "smart-bombs" that USA is supplying are not working right, and the number of Senator trucks that Canada is supplying Ukraine forces with - and even photos of the actual Polish MIG-29's that are being transferred to Ukraine.

But I cannot find out who is on the hook for Brookfield Asset Management not paying it's mortgage on it's 12 Washington, DC buildings it owned. Of course, I quite understand why Brookfield is f*cking-off on it's mortgage - as the news-data *does* indicate that Brookfield's mortgage payments on these buildings have gapped upward. The office buildings are now probably at least half-empty, due to the Covid "work-from-home" fake-work model. And interest rates on commercial mortgages have lept upwards insanely - from less than half a percent to over 4 percent. Oh my. Last year, the mortgage payments Brookfield was making, were US $300,000/mo. Now, the monthly mortgage payment is said to be US $880,000 per month! Oh really? Hilarious. That is almost THREE TIMES, yes? One wonders: "Dudes! What exactly were you thinking? Are you all maybe like 25 years old, or something? Never seen 11.75% mortgages, like I had on my first City apartment? You could not even imagine a 4% to 6% rate for mortgages, like it was for much of the 20th century, in most Western-world nations with fee-simple land tenure, and rational, sane asset-hypothecation laws?

If these guys had retained us to offer an opinion on the sanity of their business-model, I think I might have jumped on the desk, and done a little dance, which would have had the words: "DON'T DON'T Oooohh DON'T take on a FLOATING-RATE loan, when RATES ARE GONNA GO UP UP upitty UP!" or something like that. Some female Brookfield rep on the phone has reportedly said: "This represents only a small portion of the Brookfield portfolio." So fucking what? A default is a default. You default, you are just another skank that "don't pay yur bills."

How can we explain to these Brookfielders, that *reputation* is actually pretty important. Anybody remember a bunch of default-monkeys, named "Lehman Brothers"? Remember those guys? Those arrogant asses who nearly blew up the World? They actually thought they could bankrupt just *part* of their "clever" multi-company structure. But once it became clear they were crazy-over-leveraged, and were playing "window-dressing" games each quarter-end, by gaming the idiotic "accounting rules" in USA, (a bigger than 5% sell/buyback price difference on a sale-and-repurchase agreement could be "accounted for" as an actual true sale, not a sale with a huge contingent liability attached...) everything changed fast. Lehman could make quarterly statements that made it *look* like they had *billions* of dollars in cash on their balance sheet, when in true fact, they had diddly-squat. The truth came out. No one would be their counter-party - in ANY country, on ANY trade! Their *BRAND NAME* became very radioactive & completely toxic. They engineered their own self-destruction.

A company should avoid tracking down that path, right?

We need to try to ride on through the disasters of the World, and try to retain our focus on what is true and seek what is honest & stable. Disasters are to be avoided. We should not add to them...

Albrecht Dürer's "The Rider" (1513) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336223

Sorry, I am ranting. I just don't respect skanks that think it's ok, NOT to pay their bills.

And I don't get this weird blindness to the historical data, that screams the truth of things, into anyone's face, who just takes the time to look.

I recall discussions with an associate who worked in a major-bank's Risk Management department, and he also expressed concerned curiosity, about the strange lack of risk-testing for rapid rises in interest rates, despite this phenomenon being historically evident - SITTING IN THE DAMN DATA like a big red flashing light. No one inspects the past with any real analytic thought, it seems. Or if they do, they seem to assume that the weird, chaotic jumps to new orbital phase-spaces, as shown in the data of all prices-series, for some reasons cannot now happen.

But it ALWAYS DOES HAPPEN which is pretty comical, really.

It looks like some CMBS security was hacked together and sold to *investors* (which seem to be the modern code-word for folks-who-are-running-other-peoples-money-and-dont-care-if-they-lose-it-all and also those-with-more-money-than-brains. These tend to be excusionary sets, yes? But together, they seem to account for maybe 70% to 80% of all market activity, yes?

[ Apr. 17, 2023] - Lincoln Whispers the Truth to Us - My Lincoln failed, which is not good. Stopped to get directions, and the car would not start. I had to call a tow-truck. No one expects bad, random outcomes, but they can lead to curious & interesting adventures. The organizing principle of the Universe, is randomness. Know this truth. But when your technology fails, it can still be annoying and disturbing.

Also, we ran the most interesting experiment. Curious results - not fully proven yet, but the evidence is suggestive. We have known for years that the current technology now in use, is compromised, and also has very sophisticated capabilities - and there are rumours about what it is able to do, and is actively doing. So, we ran a little experiment, to test a hypothesis, which seemed unlikely, and we got some hard evidence that yes, it is just as the rumours suggest - perhaps even worse. There is an entire class of internet-enabled technology that is actively monitoring events around itself, using advanced AI technics, and then in real-time, with high-speed bursts of maximum-bandwidth data-streams (2.9 megabits/sec and higher) is uploading the information - somewhere. We wonder if those high-altitude balloons were part of this data-harvesting process. But you do not need a nearby "balloon radio-relay" if your device is connected to a fast, wifi link, do you?

All the high-powered "smartphone" and other advanced technology, carries with it the possibility of it being compromised, and hence being untrustworthy. And Social Media is a essentially a psychological "trick", designed to harvest user-information, which it is most clearly *not* in the interests of the "users" to provide. Everyone basically knows this now.

But the mechanics of how (and why) the monitoring takes place, remains unclear. But a little analysis (and some examples from history, which are buried deep in the archives of various State agencies), can make this clear. Do your homework, like M. Hercule Poirot, and the penny can be made to drop.

So, we are now to track into a truly crazy world, where we are all to become the tools of our tools, it looks like. I always knew it was going to get weird, and that one might want to be a tad cautious, but the near-future is likely going to be *much* more extreme and dangerous, than even I had thought. Elon Musk has said that "AI will hit the world like an asteroid" and I thought this an overstatement. But now, I suspect he might be right. AI will allow *effective* and operationally successful mass social-control. The net-political/economic effect of this profoundly effective data-gathering and data-management technology, will make the current "War for the Future" the most significant and intense war ever fought in all of human history.

Almost no one even believes this war is taking place, and even fewer grasp how extremely serious are the consequences of it's outcome. What is surprising is the degree to which all the weapons have been successfully deployed, and are already in place - and are now actively being used. This has surprised even us. But our perilous experiments seem to demonstrate the reality of this speculation.

Basically, all the technology is compromised. Nothing is truly secure. And in this hyper-connected world, with advanced analytic methods supported by hidden AI, you can be defeated before you can even see or respond to the threat. Do the politicians and the generals know this yet?

If Mr. Lincoln was alive today, he might quietly say, with deep concern: "With this, yes, it will be possible to fool all the people, all of the time. This changes things."

[ Apr. 14, 2023] - We'll Meet Again - And we know where, and we know when. We've been busy. We needed to do some work to rebuild the environment on one of our machines, and also, Spring has come to the Land of Plenty, and this makes for us being even more busy. Equity Markets are well bid, Gold breaks $2000/oz. US, and Silver goes above $26. Banks and Financials are recovering, oil and uranium are being bid up, unemployment is at a historical low, the weather is fine and getting better, and War is in our future now, with some certainty. Peace is not possible, with evil. (Albrecht Dürer's 1513 engraving, "Das Reuter" (The Rider) of the noble Knight, riding past Death and the Devil, comes to mind. Examine the picture. Note the beautiful city on the hilltop, and how even the Knight's fine, good Dog, ignores the lizard. It's maybe the greatest image in all of Western Art, since it shows us the most effective and viable operational algorithm for life itself.)

Albrecht Dürer's "The Rider" (1513) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336223

The old Men from various Western Allies would say that "The Price of Freedom has always been the Blood of those who require that Freedom", and we are to be reminded again of this fact, in many ways. Russia's invasion and murderous assault on Ukraine is insane and illegal-in-the-extreme. And now "Russia" is the "Head" of the UN Security Council, so we all now know for *certain*, that the United Nations is a failed project - a sad bad joke, on par with the failed 1930's "League of Nations".

There come these curious times in the lives of us all, when people realize "Everything you *know* is wrong". This is when the decades can happen in weeks as one of those Russian deadguy's said. All that stupid "peace-talk" that the UN is famous for, is shown clearly and without any doubt to be loathsome nonsense trash-talk, when one sees the cities of those-who-did-not-have-enough-weapons smashed and burning.

Political people can be so goddamn stupid, dishonest and arrogantly wrong, in the foolish things they say and do. But we can remove these political people.

The lies and nonsense and idiotic actions can continue for a long, long time. Until they simply cannot. Like *Stupidity*, old-fashioned *Truth* also carries it's own force. And now, in an age when it is just not possible to keep a secret - every single human with a modern cellphone has a television studio in his or her pocket - in this World now, it is not possible to push a "Big Lie" as a political strategy, in the way that it was in the past.

The nasty, evil little men, thinking they are being so clever, with their great large lies, will still try to do this. But we suspect they will be unsuccessful.

By stealing territory by force, and murdering thousands of innocent citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, a criminal like Vladimir Putin will bring ruin on the Russian people. This is a common theme in Russian history. Putin will go down into history as yet another Russian destroyer. He is sadly, another awful little man, who managed to become a killer at scale, through his use of deception, fraud and painful, dishonest conflict.

But a consequence of Russia's actions, is that the Western World is slowly re-awakening to the requirements of History. So many people were curiously asleep, unable to see the madness and the foolishness of the worlds they were both creating and living within. Children play silly games, and talk childish nonsense. Yet eventually, they must grow into adults, which can learn to "live in truth", and do what must be done.

And so, we suspect that we are now entering one of those times. Whether the fools and political fraudsters even recognize that this curious change has taken place, the truth is, we are now at War. Some very, very bad people, are threatening our collective and future survival, and these people have control of our institutions, they have control of part of our culture and also a good chunk of the global economy. They are thieves, killers, and like all the evil little bad men of old, they use smiling faces and big lies to drive their thefts and murder-missions forward.

We either gear up, and stop these evil, criminal people, or we become their slaves.

And that is the deep truth that History shows us. It is the driving force of all Human History, everywhere and always.

[ Apr. 4, 2023 ] - White Light White Heat - White light, like when morning has broken. Better that the morning break, than the global financial system, yes? We have a sense now, of the most likely path forward. It is surprising and curious, as is often the case. It's sitting right there, in the math. As it often is, of course. It turns out, we really *are* guided by the beauty of our weapons. The Poets have been telling us the truth, all along. As they often do, also of course. I'm a bit bleary-eyed and exhausted, but veritas vincat, no doubt about it. :)

[ Apr. 1, 2023 ] - And Castles Made of Sand ... - Slip into the sea. We've been working on some bond-math. It's really not that complicated. But the results are serious. We have a pretty good feeling that we have seen this movie at least twice before. We are firmly convinced of the need now, to "Change the Program", in a big way, in many domains, and it must happen soon and move quickly now.

[ Mar. 30, 2023 ] - The Prettiest StarKiller? - - Reading about hypersonic weapons, and the failed Lockheed test. The "Skunkworks" no longer has it's moxie? Is everything failing?? Is the Western World falling apart? We hope not. And we honestly don't believe it is. But we are being tested by those who envy us, with their profound dishonesty and their unwise animosity.

The Mar. 29 2023 fcst for our testbed security pointed straight down, but the market opened strong and looked constructive. But it was not to be. We faded & turned down in early PM, and the AI looks like it wins again. Curiouser and curiouser. See the chart of the AI's forecast, on this site's top first page. Click on the top banner in any page, to go back to the top page. We considered exiting some positions, but did not do so, as ex-dividend day is close.

[ Mar. 29, 2023 ] - Scam Scam Sam ... And the Evil Scammers! - They're on their World Tour! They're playing everywhere! And they are coming to your town, real soon!

And the World is getting very nasty, and very dangerous. Scams are getting more effective and more dangerous. We had a real effective fraud attempt at our location - a female telephone caller, pretending to be from the "Ontario Provincial Rebate Office", and trying to get us to agree to a "site inspection" of our heating systems in order to qualify for a "Carbon Tax Rebate". The entire operation is a scam, as there is no such thing as the "Ontario Provincial Rebate Office", but if you agree to these guys (the scammers) doing the fake "site inspection" of your furnace and waterheater, they then try to pressure the site-owner into signing a contract, with a 10-year requirement to make payments to their "Energy Efficiency Company". (In some cases, they just will fake a signature, and say that the site-owner agreed to the contract!) The scam is documented on several federal Government websites, with an explicit warning not to let the door-to-door salesman into your house to do "furnace and/or water-heater inspections".

This Federal Government website warns about this scam quite clearly. Warnings also come from various local energy services providers, newspapers, and the Ontario Provincial Police, describing the frauds:

https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/energy-star-canada/about/energy-star-announcements/consumer-caution/16576

https://www.cwhydro.ca/can-you-spot-an-energy-scam-anti-scam-awareness-dont-be-afraid-to-say-no-and-useful-information/

https://thereview.ca/2020/11/02/opp-report-door-to-door-scam-related-to-home-furnace-freezer-inspections/

https://www.orilliamatters.com/police-beat/opp-warn-of-complicated-door-to-door-sales-scams-6534664

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-scam-calls-data-1.6767492

There are an astonishing number of active scams, in operation right now, in Canada. A Federal Anti-Fraud Agency documents a number of these:

https://www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/scams-fraudes/index-eng.htm

And even more disturbing, is the use of active AI (Artificial Intelligence) voice-enabled technology to make these scams able to ramp-up their reach and their effectiveness:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2021/07/30/jessica-caught-me-on-a-dull-day-and-i-almost-fell-for-her-ai-charm.html

What is so interesting, is that Canada has a bad historical reputation, for scams - especially stock market scams, as the "Boiler-room" stock-selling scam was invented in Canada, by an old fellow, back in Toronto in the 1940's. The term "boiler-room" actually entered the English language, as a decriptor, for "unlicensed, unofficial brokerage office". This is distinct from the old "bucket shop" term, used to describe a *fake* brokerage office, which did not send orders to the Stock Exchange, and would simply "bucket" the customer's orders, and wait for the market volatility to stop-out the customer's position, typically bought on margin of only 10% of the trade value.

Scams have a *long* history, and grow more effective and dangerous each year now, given what is possible in the modern digital world.

But at least we learned a new "Global-Earth-Language" (GEL) term today: In UK slang ("barnshoot"), is an anglo-corruption of a Hindustani term, which a scammer-advice-site recommends as the response to a telephone scam from a sub-continental boiler-room: "Call him a benchoode and hang up". What is a "benchoode", you might wonder? Here is etymological history and modern English equivalents:

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/vqkaw2i

[ Mar. 28, 2023 ] - King Lear's Fool - The only person who could tell the strong-willed King Lear the truth - that he was about to completely destroy his kingdom, and plunge his world, his family, and his people into war and chaos, was Lear's official Fool. But even the Fool's advice, did not stop the breakdown. Kurosawa's "Ran" ("Chaos", in Japanese), tells the same story. Are we are doomed, to repeat these disasters, in a "Groundhog Day" manner?

Being an optimistic person, I tend to take the view that we actually *can* fix the silly and absurd problems that confront us. We can learn from our history. Or maybe not...?

For years, we have warned about there being too goddamn much debt in use on this planet. Really. It is just a bit over the top, and when this stuff resets, there will be hell to pay. Or, maybe Hell will demand it's invoice be paid in something else? ... Perhaps a global financial crisis of Biblical proportions? I don't actually expect this, but there is some chance that something serious could occur. Both these fellows make sound arguments, and offer data to support their concerns:

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/03/The-Everything-Bubble-and-Global-Debt-Disaster

https://www.dlacalle.com/en/The-U-S-banking-system-was-destroyed-by-QE-and-negative-rates-killed-it/

And not ALL the news is bad. Germany has finally offered up a bit of the good stuff: Leopard-2 Tanks.

Reuters: German-Leopard-2-Tanks-Have-Reached-Ukraine

As they say in the business, in very technical terms: "F***, Yeah!"

Now, can we build another couple of thousand of these? (And I am dead serious here.) This is the real key. We all must stop borrowing money to buy stupid crap, and start borrowing money to buy good stuff, made from good steel, that can be used to kill bad people, who are doing bad things to our world. This is our future, whether we want to admit the truth of this fact, or not.

[ Mar. 27, 2023 ] - Duke "Nuke-Em!" Lukashenko And The Moscow Gang - We have a problem. Just when you thought it could not get any more stupid or crazy here on Planet Dirt, we read about how Belarus will have it's own little "Nuke-Em 'Till They Glow" air-force, courtesy of Russland's Terror Gang, and Mad Dog Putin. How about that? Wonder how they feel about this in Warsaw?

Long ago, I was in Warsaw, and after we had our little meeting at 17 Shventokshuska Uliatsa (the Polish Government Finance Ministry, which I recall had the same awful, ugly-looking red carpet that we had back in the Frost Buildings, in the Treasury offices in Toronto, a fact I found most curious...), we walked around.

And I found that Warsaw has the same little brass historical plaques, like we have in Ontario - which describe historical events that took place at the specific place the plaque was placed. Except the events were pretty damn gruesome in Warsaw. One plaque showed a photo of the entire city reduced to small pieces of broken rubble. And another indicated the place, were a bus was stopped by the "Hitlerites" (not the "Germans" - the "Hitlerites", the plaque was very clear on this point), and a group of men were taken off a bus, lined up against a wall, and shot and killed, in reprisal for some action by Polish Resistance Fighters. Of course the wall bore no bullet holes, since *ALL* the buildings in the city, were re-constructions, as the entire city had been leveled during the warfare of World War Two.

Reading about and then directly experiencing the history of a place can truly open one's eyes to how things really are, and how people and governments really operate. No one wants war, of course. War is disaster and destruction and can open the door to the most cruel and murderous impulses humans can have. But when faced with a threat of insane, over-the-top proportions, by a truly evil State-driven process the likes of which we are seeing now from Putin and his gang of hired killers, war becomes a clear possibility that rational people must actively prepare for. To avoid the necessary preparations, is to be stupid, and naive to the point of extreme irresponsibility

So, I can understand the Polish folks feeling that they must actively support the Ukrainians in their fight against the crazy-Ivan-evil that they are now enduring. Putin and his hired henchmen are the kind of creatures that every European has deep historical awareness of. They know what will happen, if they do nothing, because virtually every family has it's own direct historical knowledge of how insane-awful events can unfold and expand.

In North America, we just don't have this historical tradition. Our cities are young, and have not been burned to the ground, with every single building smashed to bits. But Americans in New York got a tiny taste of what this might look like, back in September, 2001. We all have to realize that mass-destruction and crazy, over-the-top lunatic cruelty, is actually rather common in the historical context. We skate on top of a thin layer of civilized behaviour, unaware of how easily it can be melted away by the dangerous actions of evil persons controlling corrupted States.

...Especially if the bad people have nuclear weapons to throw at their battle-field adversaries, yes?

The one key fact that history demonstrates with 100% accuracy so far - especially now - is that, as a national government, you absolutely *must* have effective, deployable nuclear weapons, if you are to ensure that your government can maintain it's operational integrity, and ensure the security of it's people.

Just as zero-interest rates can be proven to destroy the economic foundations of the investment process, a lack of effective defensive weapons - big, powerful **nuclear** weapons - is certain to place any non-nuclear nation-state at the real risk of being invaded, terrorized and overrun, by larger nuclear-armed beligerent States. This has happened to Ukraine, despite explicit treaty agreements that sought to avoid this very scenario. Ukraine has had it's land, crops and industrial cities stolen from it. This may also happen to Taiwan, where a similar abusive act of State-sanctioned mass-theft is being actively championed by Xi, and the new Chinese Militarists.

So, we are at a time of risk. And also at a time, where we must recognized, that a great struggle may lie before us - possibly the most important struggle the World has ever faced. Like it or not, we *must* put in place procedures and methods to counter the new threats that Putin's terrorists are directing towards us all. Our governments - and we ourselves - have no choice, if we want to maintain our current civil society structures and traditions. This simple fact needs to be understood, as history demands this of us. And after understanding, must come action.

[ Mar. 24, 2023 ] - Still Alive and Well! - ... Website now FINALLY transitioned to AWS, using EC2, so that additional technical services can be offered. We can use X-windows and some AI-stuff in GnuAPL to generate real-time charts on connected machines - your machine!. Difficult project, but we finally got the DNS stuff figured out, and have our new domain-name registered: gemesysresearch.com and of course the older www format of www.gemesysresearch.com will also work. Most complex project to get it all working, I have done in a while! And meanwhile, the market is going crazy, and the world seems to be run by lightweights who want to kill us all. Very, very curious times.

Tech-Note on using AWS Route53: When you use Route53 to create a "host zone" (which will have the same name as your domain name), you will get Nameservers defined in the NS record of your DNS records for your zone (domain-name). These specific AWS Nameservers will be **different** each time you create a record set of DNS records. There are also AWS Nameservers defined for the domain-name, when Route53 registers if for you. They will look **almost* the same as the Nameservers defined in the NS record for your Host Zone (which in simple case, will be same as your domain name). But if you create another set of DNS records for your Host Zone, the AWS Nameservers in the NS record, for the Host Zone will be different. (I did this. Created two sets of DNS host-zone records, and deleted the first set. Whoops.) This meant that the AWS Nameservers on the domain-name registration record, did not match the AWS Nameservers on the DNS records for the Host-zone (which get propegated to all the DNS (Domain NameServers in the World), and your new domain name WILL NOT WORK. Oh hell. Solution is to edit your domain name registration details, and make them match the AWS Nameservers in the NS record for the "Host Zone". Once I did this, the DNS's of the world could find my domain-name: www.gemesysresearch.com. I suspect this bit of cleverness is needed to make it more difficult to hack the DNS servers of the world, and scam traffic to bogus sites, to steal login credentials, etc. Not sure about this - but this little detail was only indicated in a note provided on a user-group problem/solutions type site (sorta like StackOverflow) that AWS runs. I have to say this: Bravo to AWS. Their stuff is good.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is good, but the markets are not good. The financials are looking weak. The March 21 AI forecast for our testbed security, is shown below. It is ugly... We thought it was wrong. But again, today, with the stock falling hard, (like most bank stocks), the AI was proven correct. The dangerous and ugly downtrend in financials remains, sadly. This is serious, and despite the various backstops offered by the Fed in the USA, this is now a global crisis-of-confidence, with all financials falling now. I have warned folks to avoid any debt or leverage, as we are moving towards something that looks a *lot* like the early 1930's, a time period which I have examined in some detail. We remain long, because we require and expect the dividend streams to continue for Canadian banks, as they did in the 1930's. But we probably also need a change in government, as most nations now seem to. At least here, we can make this happen, without violence... most of the time. :)

The AI Forecast (Green Line) for March 21, 2023

[ Mar. 23, 2023 ] - Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies ... - ... do we get sold! :) The current state of things is pretty crazy. Well, actually a *lot* crazy. I feel for Mr. Billing - who runs the Alecta Swedish pension fund - and lost $2 billion US on fine USA mid-sized banks) and for Mr. Lehman of CS, who had actually bought a couple of hundred thousand (or more) CS shares, and so had "skin in the game", as they say. We don't feel (quite) so stupid, about our FRC position. First Republic is a good bank - but any bank can be toasted if a depositor-run takes place. FD: We honestly think FRC will survive, since the optics and the politics of further bank-explosions and resulting financial crash-and-burn scenarios will start to prove ***exponentially** costly to the USA economy. Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell may not quite grasp this yet, since they are political people, and are not likely students of history. Hell, most *historians* are not students of history anymore.

The only guy who gets this (that we can see), seems again, to be Bill Ackman of Pershing Square. He is a clever New York fellow, who knows his shit. And he seems to have a prediliction for telling the truth, and for speaking from his true heart, which makes him a rare bird indeed. He is worried, and so are we.

But I am certain (as anyone can be, which is really not that certain at all, truth be told) that FRC will be able to track thru this nightmare, or will be acquired at a premium to where it is trading today. But maybe I am just "talking my position", which is a foolish, human failing, perhaps.

What lots of folks fail to recall, is the amazing ability the USA has at transformation and adaptation. There is no other nation on the planet, which can fix horrible hot-mess scenarios, better than the good old Americans. One thing we do, is to study and evaluate techology. As a side-line hobby, which dovetails with this necessary professional interest, is gun collecting. One can learn a very great deal, by inspecting in detail, the firearms produced by various countries and peoples around the world. And by studying how they copy and improve on each other's designs, the trends can be seen. The Swiss, the Belgians, the Czechs and the Germans make some of the best European guns. The English and the French are ok, but not great, and the Russians and Poles and other former Eastern Block nations make some very good weapons - but with real variations in quality, depending on historical circumstance. Americans (and secretly, Canadians) probably make the best guns in the world, but the Chinese are now catching up, since they know how to operate the CNC machines just fine. I have a cheap Chinese Norinco .45, which has a slide that grinds like sandpaper on cement. But it has a nice fit and finish, and curiously, it is probably the most reliable .45 I have ever used. It just never misfeeds. It *always* goes bang. I have a beautiful Colt .45 Gold Cup, a real lovely target-piece, and it shoots really well, but the cheap Norinco is just as accurate and just as reliable. And is easier to field strip and clean.

What one learns, by studying national military technologies, is just how much improvement has taken place in industrial manufacturing process, in the last 50 years. I have a Serbian Tokarev, which is just a thing of beauty, is surpisingly powerful for it's small size, and shows a level of quality of manufacture that rivals Swiss precision pieces. Swiss guns are either too expensive or are banned as being too military (an idiotic restriction which makes no sense), but the Tokarev shows the same level of quality as one would expect from Swiss makers. I believe it was made in the 1980's. And of course, the Russian AK-47 (also banned in Canada), is the gold-standard for reliability and operational excellence.

But what both my hobby, and my research work has shown me - over and over again - is how crazy good, are the American guns - and American technology and industrial process. They build the very best stuff in the world - and they do this by being flexible, adaptable, and rewarding success and tenacity thru their market process. I know I risk sounding like Warren Buffet, but there is great truth to Buffet's optimistic outlook. USA did not just land Apollo 11 on the moon. They did it FIVE more times after that - and the mission that blew-up, Apollo 13, was still able to bring all the astronauts safely home.

American technology works - and works well. And that includes their financial and market technology also. So, we bet on that horse, even if (especially if!) it stumbles a few times.

[ Mar. 21, 2023 ] - "It's a Wonderful Knife!" - Yes. Yes it is. And you sure as heck do not want to try to catch it. Full Disclosure: The AI thing is pointing down, with serious verticality. Bad signal. Not sure what to do, since we are on the path to being destroyed, if we don't capture our dividends. But in a fit of foolishness, we did try to catch that damn knife, and we are now harmed. Not good.

We expect to survive, and live to fight again, but our economics is degraded.

For the technical economists out there, here is a chart of recent borrowings at the US Federal Reserve Discount Window (that of course, has the stigma of flagging to the World, you are in deep financial shit..). Note that the borrowing last week, exceeded (substantially), the levels reached during the so-called "Great Financial Crisis" of 2008-2009, and also the Covid-19 meltdown, of March, 2020. Ordinary folks have no idea, just how damn serious this bank-run nonsense really is. We are truly, dancing on the edge of the volcano's rim. Most folks have no idea.

Here we see the weekly borrowings from last week, from the Federal Reserve Discount Window. Note that this is a record, exceeding the "Great Financial Crisis of 2008" and the Covid-19 March 2020 meltdown.

Here are some URLs for some of the curious, crazy nonsense we are seeing...

OMG! My Nickel-bags are Full of STONES!

First_Republic shares stabilize, then advance after brutal selloff

Alecta Pension Fund of Sweden Flies the Plane Into the Damn Ground to Destroy $2 Billion USD

"Magnus Billing?" Is that a real name? I am sorry, but having a guy run your investments, whose name is "Billing", just does not seem right. I mean, that is even better than "Axel Lehman" of Credit Suisse. Does Europe have a "Ministry of Bad/Wrong Names" or something? You have pension fund - and instead of getting *returns*, you find that "billing" is taking place! This stuff should not make any sense or have any bearing on anything. So, why does it??? Both me and my AI model, ask this question, quite a lot, actually... Humor seems to be hardwired into the matrix, it seems.

[ Mar. 20, 2023 ] - Hard Landing? Or a Boeing 737-Max8 Moment? - FD: We have tiny bit of FRC. So, watching the clownish, theatre-of-the-absurd nonsense that characterizes the current share price of FRC, is perhaps worth the economic assault. This is insane, and it means that: 1) the small-to-medium sized banks in the USA are dead-beef. [DEADBEEF is a hexadecimal digit, often used as a crash/error-trap flag inside a computer program, by developers with a sense of humor...] And 2) We are certain now, to experience the "hard landing" (or much worse), thanks to the clownish stupidity of the USA Federal Reserve. This is a sad outcome.

FRC was a good bank, doing the right things, in the right place, pretty much in mostly the right way. It is now on the ropes, being punched down by forces it cannot control.

This is stupid, destructive, and toxic, and will simply *kill* an entire sector of USA credit-creation process.

We have suggested that JPM just acquire FRC, on a one-for-one share basis, which would offer a massive and dramatic premium to FRC shareholders. Such an action would change the entire program of the current crisis-of-confidence that is driving the small-bank collapse in USA.

Of course, this will not happen. But it would be a wildly dramatic action, which might just END the bank-crisis that USA is now embedded within.

The share price of FRC has now swung - within just the last year - from $174.21 US/share, to $11.52/share, the current low today. As I key this, the FRC share price is: 14.97, down $8.06 on the day. This is crazy. The jokers at S&P Global, the worthless rating agency, have cut the rating on First Republic's bonds deep into junk territory - to B-Plus, from BB-plus, according to the news-wires. Great guys, tell us the downgrade *AFTER* the shares have cratered. The fucking rating agencies are worse than useless - they are toxic shit-flingers, giggling with schdenfreude - or at least it rather looks like that, as they after-the-fact try to save face.

I wish I could say I have never seen a clown-show of stupidity as bad as this before - but of course, I have. Sadly, I need only look at our recent history. I have been thru **SIX* shitstorm crisis-events, in my short lifetime: Viz: 1) The October 1987 Crash, where the Dow-Jones average fell 25% in one day, 2) the Russian default and market downturn of 1998, 3) the Dot-Com Bubble Burst in 2000, 4) the 9/11 2001 Terrorist Attack where I actually was long 4-figures of triple Q's (really - I was on the phone, trying to sell the damn things, when the markets were shut down. I figured it was a Cessna that hit the WTC... until I turned on CNN), 5) the 2008 "Great Financial Crisis", driven by McMansions, crooked real-estate agents, and junk MBS securities, and then 6) the stupid Covid-19 market meltdown in March of 2020.

Let me tell you what I have learned. The markets are *NOT* efficient. They are laughably toxic, and whatever share price you see quoted, it is *CERTAIN* to be not just wrong - but WILDLY WRONG, and in a curious way, which will hurt the most people, in the most destructive way.

What is comical, and curious, is how much money, one can take out of this stupid, toxic process, if one is just a tiny bit careful.

But I now fear, even that is changing. The idiots and criminals and double-dipping fraudsters are now determined to completely ruin and destroy the process, for everyone. This is certain to happen, if someone like myself, can be made to feel the way I now do.

The AI model has been pointing down - in a death-spiral indication - for days. I just did not want to believe everything could be as bad, as the model was predicting. Well, again, it was right, and my natural human belief that "we could fix this", has been proven wrong - again. This is curious.

We cannot fix this. We are doomed to repeat the crash-and-burn scenario, over and over and over. Those who have power and authority, are *certain* to fail, because they are greedy, stupid, cruel and venal. It is only those types, who achieve power and influence, so we are absolutely certain to fly the plane into the goddamn ground - over and over and over again.

Only the most selfish, and cynical and deeply-distrusting people, have any chance to prosper. The algorithm is clear: You must do what you have to do, and do it with effectiveness, and to hell with anyone or anything that gets in your way, including (most of all), your own foolish human emotions. You must become hard.

The alternative is to be unsuccessful, and to be condemned to negative, destructive outcomes. This is the honest truth of the human condition, and one must grit one's teeth, and accept the reality of this obvious observation. And then take the painful and cruel action one needs to take, in order to survive.

Otherwise, you will - over and over again - find yourself a passenger on that nightmare airplane, piloted by an idiot who seeks self-destruction, or an arrogant ass who does not know his job, as he flies the ship into the ground at velocity. Being that passenger, is a scenario that must be avoided, at all costs.

[ Mar. 19, 2023 ] - Nobody Knows Anything - Pretty much. Especially the folks in charge. The modern "Organization" - (both government-agencies and private-sector corporations) is a toxic mixture of kids, crazies, street-fighters and fraudsters. It's as if Drexell-Burnham-Lambert from the 1980's, became the prototype for this current future we are embedded within. Everything is twisted, stupid, dishonest and insane. The US Federal Reserve must have some intelligent economists or thinkers **somewhere** in it's organizational structure, right? You would think so, would you not? But even if they do, the way in which everything works now, seems to systematically preclude anyone who knows anything, from being able to *DO ANYTHING* about the tracking course of events.

Banks are *required by law* to reserve and create invested assets to backstop their deposits liabilities. This is the very essence of banking. And so, they hold bonds. Right? But whack-shifting the rates from zero to five percent, in just a few weeks, is *certain* to blow-up the value of their fixed-income bond portfolios. This is how bonds work. Rates go up, the existing bond's yields have to adjust to the new rate, so the *value* of the bonds falls, and falls sharply, if the bonds are long-dated, and don't payoff for many, many years.

This is pretty basic finance stuff, right? So, the smart-boys are supposed to *know* that dialing rates from zero to a big number, is gonna blow a huge fucking hole in the asset-base of the banks - which held the long duration bonds, because those were the only ones that even paid any interest. What is astonishing to me, (who dumped all bonds years ago, because they were *certain* to became "certificates of capital confiscation", once interest rates returned to sanity levels), is that Government and Federal Reserve people - must *know* this, because they actually **EXAMINE IN DETAIL THE FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF EACH BANK** as their f**king jobs, right?

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have to *know* this, because the information set is right there, sitting in black ink, in plain sight, any time a Bank is *examined* by a Government Bank inspector. But this basic information on how things are, and what is *certain* to happen, once rates are dialed up, does not influence policy setting action. The modern "Organiation" does not seem to operate a working internal information transfer mechanism, so that the information gets from the "bank examiner" level up to the "people setting policy" level. And this is the same old problem, that EVERY SINGLE ORGANIZATION I HAVE EVER WORKED IN OR FOR seems to have. It's terrifying. It is a problem that seems unfixable.

Collective of people DO NOT WORK RIGHT. The entire model for the "Organization" - public or private sector - is deeply flawed, and is almost certain to be unworkable and prone to failure.

This now makes for a very toxic and dangerous world.

In a fit of curiosity, I did some searches on insanity and crazy behaviour, and oh my, there is a lot of data on this sad subject. This problem is not new. It is as old as ignorance, and as certain as sunrise. The American author, Kurt Vonnegut, explained it, in a single quote: "True terror, is when you wake up and realize that your high-school class is now running everything."

Nobody knows anything. But an "organization" is worse, since even if it *knows*, it is a very safe bet, that it will be unable or unwilling to act on the knowledge it has. And this means, we are *certain* to be doomed to repeat and fail and crash and burn - even if we have the knowledge-base to both prevent the disaster and repair the disaster. The information will exist, but the organ - the worthless, useless human *collective* - will be almost certain to prevent the knowledge from being acted upon.

This is why there are Kings (and sometimes even Queens), who drive the process of History. All History is made by *individual action*, and that foolish drivel that European philosophers and religious folks and Marxists spout, is proven wrong by events, over and over and over again. So curious. But it is clear, beyond doubt, that it is the actions of SINGLE PERSONS, acting above or outside of "organizational constraints", that make anything and everything actually happen.

For example - the USA would not even have a working Space program, if it were not for Elon Musk, and his private, personal actions. The *collective*, the *organization*, just cannot get it done, without it has a top man, who acts a the captain. NASA had Dr. Von Braun, and so many people forget this key fact. Without these key people, the "collective" will almost certainly fail to see and fail to act, and this will prevent successful outcomes.

We are going to have to change this. And this means big change is going to have to take place, regardless of personal political beliefs. Otherwise, our *organizations* will kill us all, we suspect, because they are, by their very nature and structure, fatally flawed entities.

Here are two links: First, is a film-clip of Albert Einstein, speaking at the Royal Albert Hall in the UK, back in 1933. Einstein was very grateful to England and English scientists for testing and validating his Special Theory of Relativity, even though Einstein was from an "enemy" nation of Germany, back during the First World War. He spoke here against what he saw happening in his native Germany - the rise of the National Socialists, which he rightly believed would threaten the freedom of the individual. He made it clear, that without freedom for the individual "life to a self-respecting man is not worth living" and this is a great truth that all must understand, grasp and accept.

He spoke - both as German Jew and as a refugee scientist - in strong defense of the need for personal human liberty. He said clearly: "Without such freedom, there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, and no Lister." Greatness would have been expunged from the record of humanity. Here is a link, where a clip of his 1933 speech can be seen:

The 1933 Albert Hall Speech by Albert Einstein to British Academic Assistance Council

We study the time period of the 1930's, and the events in Europe and Germany of those times, with great interest. The National Socialist movement in Germany was effective, and it's use of modern media was impressive. But it was curious that it turned on elements of it's own social matrix. Their rejection of "Jewish Science" was an absurd and tragic error, that doomed their economic and political model to failure. When Germany turned against it's own clever Jews, it lost a great resource. Germany without it's Jews, was like a dog without it's teeth, or an eagle without it's eyes. National Socialist Germany, with it's absurd model of "racial superiority" of runty little fellows like Hitler and Gobbels made this painfully clear to anyone who looked carefully at their bogus belief systems. Yet it is curious, just how many embraced and accepted what was so obviously false and dangerous and counter to the processes and procedures and structural systems that had made the Germans successful in their past. Little runts using the leverage of big ideas that are so obviously wrong, can be very dangerous fellows. They can destroy whole nations.

Racially homogenous social structure is a bad idea. Regardless of whether one is comfortable with the idea or not, diversity is a proven strength. It can be shown both mathematically and experimentally, that diversity of characteristics in a complex system, will let the system become stronger, and more resilient to damage or deformation or assault.

This is one reason why America should *NOT* lose it's small and medium-sized banks and financial alternative structures. And it is why the "economic schadenfreude" of the poltroons in the Democrat Party of the USA, should grow a pair of brain hemispheres, and grasp what has made America strong and successful. Like it or not, bad banking has been very good for the development and deployment of American success and American freedom. This is not a counter-intuitive result, if one thinks about it, or does some research on the topic. It's often through questionable finance, that greatness is made manifest in physical and social technology. Look at Tesla - both the original man and his partner, Westinghouse, and the modern electric car company, if one needs examples, in order to grasp this truth.

[ Mar. 17, 2023 ] - Don't Fear the Reaper - Fear the MIG. The MIG-29 is a good aircraft. Bravo to Poland for stepping up. Not sure what is wrong with the rest of NATO. As a wise man pointed out, a while back: "It's time for NATO to put on it's Big Boy pants, and get into the fight." What is happening in Ukraine violates all rules, procedures, agreements and sanity. It is a stupid, wrong and foolishly cruel excercise in mass-murder, launched by arrogant old men, trying to recapture their past glory-days. Just because the Iraq invasion by America was stupid and wrong also, does not make this war acceptable. We need to restore sanity, and that means Russian invading forces need to be expunged from territory they have stolen.

Our economics will get worse, regardless of whatever action is taken in Ukraine.

And at least sanity has come to Switzerland, with the Swiss National Bank offering assistance to Credit Suisse. It is stupid to let a major bank fail, so this is a wise decision. The key here, is that the shareholders need to remove the current management, and correct the problems. This will take new people probably. But first, the idiotic action whereby attempts are made to reduce inflation, by destroying big-banks and small-businesses, needs to stop.

[ Mar. 13, 2023 ] - Madness Takes Control - Can you remember, (by doing the Time Warp?) - back in the 1970's, when we were young? It's "Stagflation" and ugly action - like that Killers song - "He doesn't look a thing like Jesus". This is just silly.

We are programming exactly the outcome we are getting here. It's like watching a bad movie, Clockwork-Orange-style. Perhaps it is time to disconnect the algorithmic trading machines, from general market process. Just an idea...

Our leaders and economic managers, have taken prosperity out behind the barn, and shot it in the head, and dumped it in a shallow grave. This is not a good plan. You have to wonder, exactly what the Federal Reserve expected would happen, when they twisted the dial, from "Zero" to "Really Quite a lot Actually", at the fastest pace in human history. Did ya not think, ya might break something, lads? If you really wanted to do this, then maybe take a look at history, and see what happens. The info-set is sitting there, easy to see.

We live in a hyper-regulated, high-tax, low-opportunity world now, and the solution seems to be to our problems, higher taxes, more regulation, and a curious collapse in sanity and common sense, which does not expand the set of opportunities for rational action.

Just for the record - We are against over-regulation, and high-taxes. We advise policy choices which increase opportunity, even if that raises the risk-profile. If there is not some risk, there can be no profitable gain. Life is a high-risk enterprise, with a real "long-run" problem, than cannot be resolved (we die, folks, and there is no god.) So, RTFD (Roll The Furry Dice), because you won the lottery, just by being born. It can't all be perfect. We believe in the need for less regulation. But since the USA Central Bank and Government people *CREATED* this problem, they have a duty to step up and fix it. And they seem to have done so. Good. But we are concerned that great, unnecessary damage has been done (quite similar to 1929, truth be told), and there will be consequences, that stretch into the future. We are watching FRC and FHN, and CS. Our stuff we have, is now (as of 14:19 EDT) trading in the green. This whole horrorshow was unnecessary, and a direct result of the too late, too rapid shift in interest-rate policy by the USA Central Bank folks... just as so many wise folks have indicated.

We are seeing - in internet time - "The Madness of Crowds". As a social-scientist, this is interesting. But as an investor, it is not nice, and the violence of the volatility, requires a stainless-steel stomach. The term "stomach" can be a transitive verb: "To bear without overt reaction or resentment". As in, "Can you actually stomach this nonsense?"

Here is link to some info on FRC (First Republic Bank). It will likely survive. If you have a strong stomach...

First Republic Bank Pain May Get Worse

But be careful. We are standing pat. (St. James Infirmary? - I like the Cab Calloway version)...

St. James Infirmary Blues - Cab Calloway

That $20 gold piece is worth more than $20 now. And I think I see the "skull and crossbones" on that flag, my friends.

[ Mar. 12, 2023 ] - Run For the Shadows in These Golden Years - - Bank failures. Really. Videos of lineups outside of SVB, and other regional Banks in USA. Clowns and geriatric fools in charge of the USA. JHC, if you can cough up 100 billion for various goofball pet projects, maybe a backstop temp-fix of a few billion, to keep SVB up and running, and protect the depositors, might be indicated. If just one company that SVB is holding cash for, gets to be a *unicorn*, and go big, then the future tax-collections will justify keeping the Silicon Valley incubator bank, from going down in flames, and taking the startup companies funds with them. This whole thing is nuts. The SVB guys were either idiots or criminals, and once they started pulling the trigger on their HTM (Held To Maturity) portfolio, and had to mark those bonds to market, they were toast.

The regulators had no choice, but to take them over, if the bank collapses into a negative-equity situation. And it did, once the HTM (Held to Maturity) portfolio was accessed. And all this happened because the SVB folks reached for yield, extending duration to something like 15 years, and the Federal Reserve decided to destroy the value of all fixed-income portfolios, by jacking up rates, too late, too fast. This is all just crazy.

But these SVIB and SVB guys were idiots to push their duration out to 15 years, FFS. It's nuts. Small banks often hold 20% to 30% of their capital in short-term T-bills and such, just to deal with this kind of mass-withdrawal event nonsense. It should never happen - but history shows, that it happens over and over and over. Bernie Marcus - 93-year old founder of Home Depot - nailed it correctly. The SVB guys were focused on nonsense like DEI social crap, instead of proper risk-management. The bank was actually in pretty good shape - except for the insane, unwise rapid increase in interest rates, which has smashed the value of existing bond portfolios. Hell, we sold our *entire* bond portfolio years ago, when rates went to effectively zero.

We put all those funds into a real-estate deal, which is ticking along nicely. But we are tiny, and do not matter. Small startups all around the world, were using Silicon Valley Bank, which is impressive - except now, it is tragic. They actually do matter.

An entire ecosystem of small startups, will be gutted by this madness, if their funds are vapourized

It's really wild - we now are living now in a "Bizarro" world, where the Conservatives, will bail-out crap companies with junk management (like General Motors, for example), but small, not-badly capitalized things like SVB, which actually should be pretty cheap to bail-out, (since it's really a stupid problem created by a boneheaded lawyer, in charge of the Federal Reserve), will not be given economic assistance, by the Lefty goombahs in charge of Washington and California. This is just silly.

The goofs on the Left used to like to chatter about the need for co-ordinated economy-wide "Industrial Policy" and big government schemes like that. Well, here is one for you now: How about *NOT* blowing to hell, your economic process that is responsible for creating new companies, and ensuring future employment opportunities - and tax-collection actions? That sound's like a good "policy", eh? Maybe? Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell should just be fired, and some folks chosen at random could be given their jobs. I honestly believe we would be in better hands. At least, maybe.

As it goes now, we are pretty sure, that we are fucked now. There were lines forming at regional banks around USA on Saturday, of people trying to withdraw their money. These idiots in Washington have no idea how dangerous their stupid, narrow thinking, really can be. When the SHTF, you need to take some fucking corrective action, not just puff-out words.

[ Mar. 10, 2023 ] - Unbearably White - - As the avalanche falls down. Things are not looking good here in the Great White North. We have yet another hard-core snow-storm, full blizzard conditions, and a market that is tracking the awfulness of the weather. Our bank-stock portfolio has been shredded, and we made the (bad) decision not to unload yesterday. I just assumed the AI was being over-driven by extreme data, that looked worse that it really was.

Wrong.

The AI was pointing straight down - and that is how the market tracked - again today. At least the technology works, even if the trader is not doing his job well. I am tired. I find it difficult to pull the trigger into a down-burst of irrational fear. But the AI does not. It just pointed "down", as the most likely price track, and it was, sadly, quite accurate.

Harsh times. And a bad moon rising, perhaps?

[ Mar. 9, 2023 ] - Working in a Coal Mine - Goin' Down, Down! ... The AI model turned down, but I was doing some other work, and did not close out positions yesterday. This might have been a mistake. The Canadian dollar is being shredded, the BOC is dithering, and USA is acting strange in several areas. Our Banks are looking very bad. Their numbers ranged from so-so to really truly awful, and this is hitting us hard today. Their share-prices are heading south, like little snow-birds in winter. We are feeling sad to see them go (down so fast and hard!) We use no leverage, and have no debt, and we retain these for their dividend streams. But our capital is being killed. It's bad.

Also, our original website is broken badly, and we caution that the folks at "One.com" do not seem to be in the position to offer any real assistance. They bought the Danish provider we were using, converted our old site, and broke it. And billed us an *annual* fee. We cannot update the site, and cannot gain access to where-ever it is being hosted. We will probably just have to write-off the old site.

This new site here: "http://35.182.107.190" is running at Amazon AWS. AWS is "Amazon Web Services" EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) - which is how we are doing this live test, seems to work pretty good. It is a learning-curve. But it seems to work. We are in test-mode, of course.

Hello World! (Really!)

This has been an important test. We have confirmed yet another ugly path-trick. Internet companies will make a purchase of a firm, which has harvested a bunch of customers, mostly to gain access to their financial relationships with their customers. The acquiring firm gets the billing info, the VISA-card numbers, and then just hammers all the original monthly-fee customers, with *ANNUAL* billing, knowing full well that most of the customers will leave. The acquirer (in this case "One.com"), has niether the ability nor the interest in actually offering any support to ensure services actually work - once they get the VISA numbers, and run their *ANNUAL* billing thru their accounts. They just harvest the data for a revenue stream, and then scoop the cash. And then, they are done.

These "One.com" guys are based in Germany, it appears. Their purchase of our Danish provider - "Simplesite.com" has all the appearances of a scam. We were "converted" in early December of last year, and since then, have be unable to update our old website, at "https://www.gemesyscanada.com". "So it goes"... as Vonnegut used to say...

Sadly, I rather expected this sort of nonsense, given the negative reviews that "One.com" has received from various UK users. The company is truly hated by UK users, it appears. We understand why, now.

But AWS - Amazon Web Services - is a very good provider, and has been helpful.

We will now engage the project of trying to get our test-environment operational as a DNS-aware thing, with a real domain name. Since another German firm has actually expropriated our name "GEMESYS", we find that "GEMESYS.com" has been scooped by them. Hilarious. The world if full of some very not-nice, very nasty-bastard people, yes?

This is, of course, to be expected. In our "Consulting" work, we have run into some real "pieces of work", shall we say. It never gets better, unless one works very hard, at making it better. Entropy and human cruelty and greed, have such impressive power and reach. And let's not forget stupidity, which has to be recognized as one of the primary forces of nature. I seem to recall, it was Issac Asimov, who said that the most common element in the Universe, is not hydrogen, but in his view, it was in fact "Stupidity". :)

[ Mar. 7, 2023 ] - The Low Spark of High-Heeled Toys - JHC, just when you think it can't get much worse - it gets worse. We just have a little Blackberry (BB.TO) in one of our portfolios. A *very* little Blackberry, as it turns out today. We can add this stuff to the "pile of bad ideas that did not work out very well". How the fuck do you manage to lose money in software? Well, let me count the ways...

This test-thing on AWS is working not too bad. We are flat-out unable to update our "http://www.gemesyscanada.com" website, since "One.com" bought our Danish provider, and "converted" the website to their stuff - which we find simply does not work. We cannot update the site, so that is not good.

We are finding software everywhere seems to be turning to crap. It seems to be part of desperate "upsell" campaigns by everyone, desperate to increase revenue streams. Today, we notice "Gmail" has been butchered on one of our analyst's machines. She comes and says "I can't get into Gmail!"... and on it goes. Meanwhile, poor Blackberry continues to fall. A link to the numbers is below:

Blackberry Reports Ugly Numbers, Shares Fall 13% - 12:37 pm EDT, March 7, 2023

Curious and annoying. We only have tiny wee bit, just to keep us watching. Sad, all around.

What is even more hilarious, is the latest Dilbert. (You can see it at: "Dilbert.com") It seems Dogbert owns Tiktok. Makes sense to us. Also, "vi" editor in Linux, has this annoying stupid "feature" thing called "syntax highlighting". I hate it with a passion. You can turn that nonsense off, with sequence: : (the colon to enter command mode), then "syn off". Syntax highlighting is very bad and unwise idea, IMHO.

[ Mar. 6, 2023 ] - Peas Poridge Hot, Peas Poridge Cold - And Peas Poridge in the pot, nine days old. Our gruel is not so good. We are engaged in heresy. It seems so many things, do not really work very well - and this forces us to both think, and to explore areas that are outside the mainstream. We have no choice. As I noted earlier, we often look clever, but we suspect we are just lucky, truth be told.

Our research shows clearly, we need to generate better results, than we are getting. We are doing OK, but that is not enough now.

The material from Behavioural Economics - that whole "nudge" thing - is just not very useful.

Here is a link to a summary, which agrees with our research efforts.

Behavioural Science Does Not Really Work Very Well

We are also exploring some Federal Reserve research, which suggests that loose monetary policy, essentially ensures a serious financial crisis roughly 7 to 9 years later. This result also jives with our understanding of things.

It's a funny problem. It feels, often, like the old adage: "You can't win, You can't even break-even. And you can't quit the Game." J. M. Keynes would probably agree. One aspect of our "heresy", is that the current range of Federal Reserve set interest rates, do not really matter at this point, for a variety of reasons. Market participants focus intensely on this now. But it is possible, that there are wide-ranges of rates, which do not really affect market prices very much at all. This, of course, is heresy. More on this later.

[ Mar. 2, 2023 ] - Tumbling Dice - And tumbling bank-stock price. Oh my. Toronto-Dominion shoots itself in the foot, and does a little dance of sadness. We unloaded our TD a while back, but held on to the expensive RBC. We look clever, but were just lucky, truth be told. It's good to be lucky, and we sometimes get to be the smartest room in the guys. But lately, we are happy just to survive and hold on to the chance of being able to someday prosper.

The World is tracking towards crazy-town now, and we want to just stay in the game.

Here is a link to a summary of TD's results. They blowed up real good, too! ;)

Newswire: TD-bank Group reports first quarter 2023 results

[ Mar. 1, 2023 ] - Take The "A" Train - On second thought, maybe not. I have become a rusticated fellow, that will rarely get involved in any sort of transport scenario, unless I am the driver or the pilot. If you are not in control (and you rarely are), then your comfort and survival are completely at the whim of either some computer system or some bunch of folks who may or may not have any honest clue to what they are doing. I detest travel on trains and commercial passenger aircraft, because the whole experience is so bad. Travel is just bad now. But generally not as bad as trains in Greece, I guess ... the land where Tragedy was born.

Reading the details of the Greek train wreck is pretty sad, because it was old-fashioned human error, combined with bad-systems (it looks like), that caused the horrific high-speed crash. It is difficult to believe that something this awful could play out as it did - but honestly, truth be told, we are seeing this kind of foolishness and stupidity, just about everywhere now.

We think the current "stupidity epidemic" might be related to the idiotic and ill-advised Covid-19 "lockdowns", which were quite stupid policy, for so many reasons - mostly because they did not work. But also because of the damage that was done, and is still being done. Something is weirdly wrong, just about everywhere. Nothing can be trusted to work right, and the truth of this assertion can be verified by one's daily experience. It is pretty curious.

I was a small child in the 1960's, and I recall how sort of just about everything "just worked" - and kept getting better and better. The TV came on with a click, and if it had problems, a "TV Repair-man" would come to your house and fix it. If you got sick, a doctor could also be called, and would come and see the sick person at their home. He would offer advice, solutions and drugs to treat the illness. Aircraft travel was improving rapidly, with small, noisy propeller-aircraft being replaced by Boeing 707's (and then 747's!). Every trip got better and better. FM radio replaced AM radio, for those who wanted music with proper sonic fidelity, and color-TV replaced the grainy black-and-white models. And then, little calculators were offered, that offered the trig functions, square-root calculations, and exponents, available at a key-press, like magic. All this stuff "just worked."

But lately, almost nothing works right. We are deeply technologically dependent, but the technology is unreliable, flaky, poorly designed, badly implemented, and subject to almost constant, - and *critical* - bouts of failure.

I am not complaining - just making an observation. We are just not getting better - only just different, so that mass-replacement is routinely required, and the result is never much better - just a bit different. My sense is we have reached the top of the S-curve = diminishing marginal returns, is the technical term for this phenomenon. It seems to be evident everywhere now. Designers seem to be failing, as do operators.

We should try to fix this, and improve the reliability of our world. A technologically-dependent world, where the technology is flaky and unreliable, is just not very good. We can do better. I know this, because I have seen our systems manifest a reality that *was* much better and more reliable.

[ Feb. 28, 2023 ] - Arias and Symphonies - And cutting your poor bloody shareholders off at the knees. As students of history, we sometimes feel like bad dogs, getting our faces rubbed in messes - many of which we did not make - over and over. As Reverend Spooner said, in frustration at some students who he felt were not doing their studies with sufficient diligence: "Arrrgh! You have Hissed all of my Mystery Lectures! In fact, you have Tasted the whole Worm!!"

Well, we got to "Taste the Worm" this morning. We have to accept that our AI forecaster does not work well.

We use this Canadian bank stock (called "New Scotland" in Latin), and we got right royally whacked today, when these bank folks released their awful earnings numbers. The results were grotesque, complete with financial summaries that posted awful losses, close to a billion Canadian dollars, in a column titled "Other". FFS, is about all we can say.

We will be calling the new CEO of the place, and beg him to let us help him right this sad, sinking ship. I am sure like most Canadian CEO's, he will have some flak tell us to bugger-off and go to hell, as is usually the case. But BNS's results (oops, I typed the ticker symbol...) are really ugly and bad.

Does this mean that the clowns at the OSC, will now bust me for offering "security advice"? We will be amused if they try. They are worse than useless, and basically disrespect shareholders, so I think I could enjoy a good court-fight with them. They are unhelpful in so many ways, and should truly be abolished, in the interests of the Canadian economy and the poor beaten-down shareholders that try to survive in this silly country. We need to change the program here, in so many ways.

Anyway, I have another solid heuristic now. When the AI says one thing, and the market-action says something else, best to believe the market action.

This is painfully obvious, of course, but one has to try to follow the damn model, and run an honest experiment. BNS had a fine quarter **in Canada only**, with nice improvements in net interest income - but they managed to set fire to ALL the profit they made offering banking service in Canada to Canadians, with boneheaded, irresponsible sales of valuable product in Asia, at fire-sale prices, during the Covid-19 pandemic and related hellstorm of toxic ignorance. Plus, there seem to be other problems, that we cannot yet determine. (There seems to be an interest-rate "hedge" that went wildly the wrong way - but we are not sure about details yet...)

We hold BNS shares, for our AI experiments and for the dividends, and we are deeply concerned that Brian Porter basically whacked the BNS shareholders badly. That bald-headed fellow is now gone. He looked much like the "Dilbert" CEO, near as I could tell. How about that? Art and life run in parallel. Bloody hell. Perhaps he was fired by the BNS Board of Directors for being a money-losing failure of truly biblical-level proportions. We don't know. But that does us no good now.

What makes me so crazy-angry, is that I *saw* the market-action was just plain not right for BNS, and I failed to unload the stupid shares. It is such a beginners, naive, goof-stupid error, and I really have no-one to blame but my own foolish caution and lack-of-action. I had unwisely thought that the bad market-action was just algorithmic-tripwire trading - when in fact it looks like it could have been information-leakage of the puke-awful results that BNS would post. Last year, for this qtr, BNS made $2.14 fully diluted, and this year, they just reported $1.36 EPS for this qtr ending Jan. 31, 2023. This is just disgusting, given the *increase* in their very profitable Canadian banking business. And the Reserves for bad loans, has been gapped up from $222 million for Q1 2022, to $638 million, for this quarter Q1 2023! You have 2/3rd of a billion dollars in NEW dead-beat bad loans? Really? How did this happen??? BNS can't blame this on the abusive and outrageous Federal Government tax assault the Canadian Banks have had to absorb (which is also a bad number). (And let's be **very** clear here: That abusive bank-tax, the "Canadian Recovery Dividend Tax" is not being paid by the Banks. It is being paid by the Canadian Bank SHAREHOLDERS and the Liberal political people in Ottawa bloody well know this. When those Government merkin-biters hurt the banks, they hurt our pension funds and the mom-and-pop smallholders who rely on bank dividends to pay their bills. The GovFolk-of-Ottawa are the worst, most unthinking and dangerous creatures we have in this land. They are able to do such consistent, serious damage.)

But it's that gap up in PCL - from $222 million to $638 million. What's the deal, guys? Why the don't you loan money to people and companies that will pay it back? Or at least get enough collateral, so this kind of money-burning idiocy does not need to happen. It makes you look like idiots, like those Swiss fools from CS. Now, maybe there is more happening, that we do not see at this point, so I am gonna have to take apart the BNS financial statements in detail, and get a handle on just how these people bungled their basic business, so very badly. This can't have been all Brian Porter's fault. This begins to look like some kind of serious evidence of a systematic failure somewhere - perhaps a massive *cockroach* or something? At this point, we don't bloody know.

But these BNS results are just stupid.

The market stock price for BNS today is down from near 72 yesterday, to the mid-67's now, and this range is down from the low 90's, which is where we acquired one of our tranches. So yes, the is business. But it is now personal. There are some serious problems at old BNS, and it seems to me, that some serious management changes need to be made - all across the company - so this fine old bank, does not go the way of CS and Barings and other classical tragic nightmares of banking failure. The BNS capital ratios look fine and strong, but something seems to be broken, perhaps in the basic business process, we suspect. Today's BNS results just smell really bad, and the market has reacted accordingly. The AI was blind to this, as I was also. This must change.

Here is a link to BNS summary of the Q1-2023 Quarterly results, (ending Jan. 31, 2023), from their company website:

https://scotiabank.investorroom.com/2023-02-28-Scotiabank-reports-first-quarter-results

[ Feb. 27, 2023 ] - Hathoy Knows He's Doin' Alright - Ya'all shoulda seen him, just around midnite... Well, of course you should have. Just use the "Internet", eh? Ha ha ha. You can see anybody, do anything.

Heck, I didn't even know "Dilbert" was still being published... and in "Newspapers", it turns out. I found Scott Adam's website for "Dilbert". It's called "Dilbert.com". How about that. It's absolutely hilarious. I am so impressed. Scott (and "Dilbert") are still goddamn funny, after all these years. Good for him. He even had a series about "Chat-GPT" which is - how shall we say - right on the mark. Think: "Food".

I went to buy some "newspapers" a while back, and they cost something like $12 each or some insane price, and I thought simply "WTF? You have *got* to be kidding!", and I gave up on "newspapers". And now the SEC in the USA wants to engineer & ensure the end of the crypto-marketplace, so I guess this is more "Assault by the Alphabet Boys." (This is humour, if you can actually grok the concept...) There is a long subtext here, about the "3-letter Alphabet Folks" who are trying to destroy the Old America of freedom and liberty. In the so-called "extremist" sites, like 4-chan and Kiwi Farms (which are not really "extremist" - just open and uncensored, so they get pretty hilarious), there are lots of chit-chats about the Alphabet People - they are kinda like the new Agents of Spectre - dark forces, "Deep State", etc. Of course, these are the FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the DOJ, the NSA, the EPA, the CDC, FEMA, FOMA, BOMA and BUNA and so on, Gov-crap agency scumsters, overpaid timeservers collecting the purple-wage, slime and slop without end, growing like out-of-control feral cancer every year.

Right? Please tell me this assertion is incorrect. Someone make the case, that we are not actually *all* headed toward oblivion, on a government-funded rocket-sled down the toilet. The old "normies" want to believe that, right?

We must send a note to the Bidenista's in the big white house... "Lads and Ladies, and those of other colourful pronouns, yet unknown: Ya'all don't need to worry so much about "White Supremicists". We "white-folk" is no threat. Honest. We be too stupid! :D (-- dat little glyphy is a laughing face, ok?)

On a more serious note: The high-frequency tripwire marketplace is evolving rapidly. And it's (again) looking like maybe it is breaking the AI thing we try to use. The AI is again pointing "UP", and we are seeing serial weakness and curiously harsh doubleplusungood stuff everywhere. Perhaps we be falling into "Thoughtcrime". Read Warren Buffet's stuff on American positive-view tailwinds, etc. Someone needs to say that world is not falling apart. I suspect Buffet is right again, but we laugh daily at how Democrat nut-jobs keep trying to blame all their insane, outrageous failures, on old Donald Trump, who is down in Florida, enjoying sunshine. Mr. Trump has more sense than the rest of us.

I keep thinking of the ending of that film: "The Army of the Twelve Monkeys", where the two protagonists are trying to make it to the "Florida Keys" (but they get taken down in the airport, by Alphabet-People). Somehow, this sticks in the back of my thinking, when I read the daily economic news. There is terrible evil, again marching in the world now, just like 1939.

Chat-GPT cannot save us sorry humans, since we seem determined (or condemned?) to repeat the same tragic patterns, in our political efforts. Read the note by the Chief Economist from Morgan Stanley - "This time, maybe it IS Different", about bonds and interest-rates. But it's not different. We just be tracking a reversion-to-mean on a long-long trend. We maybe gonna ride with the Valkyries. Or the Four Horsemen... or the Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Our true concern, is not inflation. It is Putin. He is not Hitler. That sorry fuck is Kurtz, from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". He has successfully turned Russia - our beautiful Russia - into those heads on posts, that Kurtz would lecture to, after he drank. Putin is truly working to deliver a grotesque "World of Darkness", where death and pain and horror again become the Russian legacy.

This path is just completely insane and awful. And it will drive all planetary economics, until the Evil Dwarf expires or is ended, and sanity can be restored to the World Island. Curious how so few people grasp this simple reality.

[ Feb. 24, 2023 ] - Blues on Ice - Harsh times. Web-hacking, markets cracking, plans hatching, and weather whacking! Exhausted, but up and running. Our old dog is lying in the sunshine on the carpet. She is 14 now, quite an old dog, but very healthy. Here is her secret: I tell people she has no nose. They ask, of course: "No nose? Oh my, how does she smell?" And I reply: "Awful!".

We've got GNUAPL running on the AWS EC2 instance, and this web-site/weblog and note collection. Figured out how to render APL fonts (and Russian & Ukrainian cyrillic glyphs) and even German umlauts and such. All the i18n (internationalization and Unicode/UTF-8 character support) is built-in to Linux and Apache and modern web-browsers. My error was in the source-code copy-paste, which failed to render the Unicode/UTF-8 characters correctly - not in the .css stylesheets or the server or client font downloading, and so on.

(Note: Unicode is the term for the characters. UTF-8 is the transformational process standard for encoding/decoding the Unicode representation. Unicode ASCII chars transform into themselves - 8-bit ASCII, for compatibility.)

I determined this myself - despite a lot of excellent advice from ChatGPT that was essentially of little use. ChatGPT was very helpful and provided some very detailed information, but our rendering-of-font problems was do to bad file creation by me. Here is an example of a little GNU-APL program that draws a plot: (See: "GNU-APL Notes" page, a page-link visible by clicking the "More" button on top-line Menu-bar, to see the graphic this tiny program creates)

      ∇RAN_PLOT[⎕]∇
    ∇
[0]   RAN_PLOT
[1]  ⍝ --- Plot 2000 Random Numbers.  Note, this fn uses global var: Attr
[2]  ⍝ --- Attr is a nested array of "attrib: value" (eg: "line_width-1: 1 pixel") passed to ⎕PLOT as left argument
[3]  ⍝ --- This function simply displays a PLOT of 2000 random numbers, in the range of 1 to 1000.
[4]   Attr ⎕PLOT ,(1000?1000),,(1000?1000)
    ∇

I put this program into the .html source file, by loading a Unicode/UTF-8 file that had the program, into my Tcl/Tk visual editor, highlighting the program source text, which has rendered the APL font correctly, and then just returning to this file, which I am editing in "vi" editor, and pressing the centre mouse button to effect the copy. (The centre mouse button is the wheel, which can be clicked, on a Linux box.) Note that one can use the "small" html markup command, to shrink the font so code can fit the display better, and the html "pre" command to maintain the embedded blanks so the code renders correctly. All the default .css seems to handle this ok. The key-fact is that APL characters are defined in Unicode/UTF-8. Note: I did put the file "fontawesome-all.css" into the /html/css directory, and I note that this stylesheet is being loaded by all the site webpages. (I am converting the original GEMESYSCanada.com website to run on an AWS EC2 instance) But I suspect the fontawesome-all.css file was not necessary. The APL font renders ok, even on my ancient (and hacked) iPad 1.0, as does Russian and Ukrainian language text.

The key to getting it to work, is to ensure the source-text has the correct UTF-8 encoding of Unicode multi-language characters, which Linux and Apache and web-browsers now handle reasonably well, without active font-file management. When one is not using a Unicode/UTF-8 file, one has to define or load an APL font, to render APL characters on a display, such as in a Linux X-window display. GNU-APL supports a few different ways of doing this. (See the "GNU-APL Notes" page for details.)

The cool thing is that now, unlike the old days of APL terminals (the museum-piece IBM 2741 Selectric "Typewriter" terminal is the canonical example), it is easy to render any sort of character glyphs to support human or computer languages.

[ Feb. 23, 2023 ] - Still Alive and Well - Every now and then, I know it's kinda hard to tell... (Thx for the riff, Mr. Winter!) AI is getting press lately. How about that? We've tried ChatGPT and ran it with a test-suite of serious queries, and it performed nicely. You can ask it for very specific technical and business-critical advice, and it responds well. We pretended to be Investment Councilers, seeking what we should do about clients who want to take on too much risk, and then we asked for detailed technical information on a computer-related process, and it replied well, and even offered screen-shot examples of what the desired procedure should be. This is about time, folks. Bravo to OpenAI. It is possible to "trick" ChatGPT, and thus get curiously amusing nonsense answers, but that does not detract from it's effectiveness.

We all have much work to do.

[ Feb. 22, 2023 ] - Bad Moon Rising - The Evil Bald-Headed Dwarf Wants to Harm the World - Completely silly, this current insane environment now is. We find the risk-reward characteristics of everything, seem to be bent more than just a bit. One needs to take extreme-risk, just to get minimum gain now. We grow concerned that this model will come with costs that many still do not yet appreciate.

I read the official mainstream drivel in the US press, and it is bad, and then I check out the "extremist" blogger-sphere material, where truth is supposed to be allowed to speak, and it has become even worse. The Righters blovate about "Global Capitalism", like a bunch of drugged-up Marxists from the 1920's. It's just weird and silly and strange. Sanity has left the building, it seems.

(Hint: Righters: Honestly, in the real big world, no one really cares at all what the boneheads at World Economic Forum say. The old Nazi-boys and the Euro-women who chatter about owning nothing and eating bugs - are simply crazy dicks & chicks looking to do old-style puff-it-up politics, and get noticed. Really. Only the looney-leftists take them seriously, and they only pretend to, so they can also get noticed. Everyone just wants to sell their crappy books full of nonsense. Know the truth of this.)

See, the World-stage (and the internet, of course) is becoming a carnival-sideshow of barkers, each trying to get your attention, and grab some of your cash. Aside from the pure-stone-killers (eg. the Bald-Headed Dwarf), running their classical-evil war-models, that is all that is really happening. That, and the wild, internal power-struggle going on in China, after Xi's idiot-stupid "Zero Covid" policy was thrown in the garbage by the technocrats.

Most all of the nasty attention-seeking is fueling a race-to-the-bottom that is accelerating, as the money runs low. That's mostly all that's happening.

What is interesting, is that the Euro-fems who seem to run most of the silly Euroland zone, can actually get "religion" when they see tanks and rocket-carriers from Bald-Headed-Evil-Dwarf-guy start blowing up Ukrainian cities, stealing the children, killing the men and raping the women. Russians are the darnest troopers, eh? They will violent-rape anything from 8 to 80 - and then the drugged up monkey-men will burn down your house, and shoot the family dog. They are the kind of walking evil that good men are willing to die to destroy. History teaches us this, over and over, like a child's storybook.

It seems even the Euro-lady leaders, are now cognizant of the need to have a big-stick response to these literal Russian motherfuckers. Poo-Tin and his supporters need to be crushed and ended, regardless of the costs. Nuclear war might be necessary to end the evil. The Russian killers are what they are. They are just walking billboards of classical, pure evil. And Dwarf-Guy, acting as a perfect hitler-clone leader, and his geek-squads, will keep cheering, right until the end, if history is any guide to this coming tragedy. It always seems to play this way, in Russia. Curious how the Russians seem to be unable to learn from their painful and violent history. I thought they were repaired, and that the future was going to be bright and good for them.

Just goes to show, how wrong one can be, when "hope" is substituted for careful analysis.

[ Feb. 21, 2023 ] - Parallel Lines of Force - Will Anything Happen? - We think maybe... One area of study where I beat my brains with when younger, was related to trying to answer the question: "What drives/causes/allows scientific progress and industrial/economic innovation?" Lots of folks have examined this question, and tried to nail it down. But it comes down to creativity, and opportunity. These two fuzzy things must meet, and from their liason, sometimes a new (and significant) discovery and/or development emerges.

And so, here is a link to the scariest news story I have read in maybe 30 or 40 years:

BNNBloomberg: Russia's War on Ukraine and China's Rise Expose USA Military Failings.

So, USA - the greatest military and economic power in the world - is close to being neutered, if what is described in this article is true. No one had thought we might have to fight a *conventional* war, without using nuclear weapon technology. This tacit agreement not to use weapons of mass-murder, is not a nuclear-age thing. In WW2, neither side used poison gas, although each side had the technology. Hitler thought poison-gas was evil, and should not be used, and allied forces agreed, and wanted not to have to induce an enemy change-of-heart. So, neither side used poison gas - just as niether side in the coming conflict, will likely "go nuclear". This allows for some unexpected scenarios.

If China lands 12 million men on the west coast of the USA, while the Russians bomb New York and Washington with over-the-south-pole hypersonic missiles, USA might find itself out-matched, and facing a difficult defensive scenario. China could maybe do this. And then do it again. And then again. To us, this seems crazy-talk scenarios - but then, so did the absurd and foolish idea of Russia invading Ukraine, one year ago. China has a lot of people, and after it takes Taiwan and Japan, it might decide to go all-in. They could lose 30 or 40 million soldiers, and still keep rocking on. They have a lot of people. Or they might try to take India. Or perhaps we will find ourselves allied with the Chinese - fighting along side them, against Russia. Again, this seems most unlikely - but that might just be what ultimately happens. Russia would find itself in a two-front conflict, for the "World Island", and China might just end up taking it all - like the Mongols did before them. Seems crazy-far-fetched - but the idea of China as a *ally*, to assist in the resolution of the "Russia Problem", might actually make sense.

We we be better off making an alliance with China, rather than motivating them to ally themselves with their traditional enemy, Russia.

A lot of stupid-stuff has happened in a year. It's all completely silly and crazy - but it is what it is.

And it is 11:59.

[ Feb. 17, 2023 ] - Everybody Wants to Fool the World - We just want to be honest. Sometimes, I feel like the Martian in Heinlein's "Stranger In a Strange Land". It would be better, of course, if we could all be Jubal Harshaw. This AWS-EC2 build is quite the experiment. Re-engineering this site, in AWS, is a non-trivial project, which like all good projects, turns out to be more involved than initially estimated. Remember the old strategy? Take the estimate, build in some slack, and then double the estimate? How many times, that simple algorithm worked well!

We had an ice-storm last night, and this AM, we lost all power. The generator was started, and basic services maintained. Power was restored after roughly an hour, but only for 15 minutes, and we then went dead a second time. By afternoon, grid-power was back again, and seems to be stable.

Updated one Linux machine, running CentOS, with an improved kernel a while back, but the default boot-kernel kept falling back to the old version. The silly "grub" configuration file in the /etc/default directory has the "grub_default" parameter as "saved", which makes no sense at all. Google-searching the Linux voodoo for systemd machines, explained that this allows a command-line thing to be used to set the kernel to the desired boot-default. I wanted the default set to the kernel on the top of the list (I have about 5 kernels on this particular machine), and the top of the list is the most recent one, which seems to be the most stable. (Not surprisingly...)

So, to set the default to the first one (the list is zero-origin sequence numbered), one simply enters (as root) "grub2-set-default 0", and that sets the correct kernel as the one to default boot. But this only works, if one has used the "saved" parameter as the "GRUB_DEFAULT=" option value, in the "/etc/default/grub" file. (This is useful if you get bloody power failures on a semi-regular basis, and want your machine to recover itself.)

Re: Economics again: Been reading how Charlie Munger hates crypto-currency, and thinks it should be outlawed. His attitude is curious, as crypto-currency is really no different than old-fashioned paper-money, combined with *bad-banking*, which is what allowed the USA to bootstrap-finance it's westward expansion, it's railways, and much of it's economic development in the 19th century. USA industrialized, by using the most questionable fiat money. And it worked. We think crypto might be bullshit, but that just means that Gresham's Law will likely also encourage it's continued expansion and general acceptance. Sure, this is crazy, but it is no more crazy than what USA and many other nation-states are currently doing, by issuing debt that they now must know cannot be repaid anywhere close to what it's current value is.

The inflation we are seeing, is not some kind of "accidental tourist". It is a necessary methodology, that must be used to maintain the operation of the existing global monetary system. Those trillions of dollars of bonds will come due eventually, and their repayment will require deeply discounted dollars. Plus, if those arrogant old men at Berkshire had any knowledge of the histories of other nations, they would recognize that most paper-money issuances have eventually become worthless, or close-to-worthless due to corrupt government actions, fiscal expansion that is almost fraud, and then the resulting engineered inflation, or some basic combination of all three.

We have to assume that USA will seek to honour it's financial arrangements, but we suspect it will require some degree of dollar devaluation - not against other currencies - just against it's current value now. And of course, we are seeing this process begin. We can be certain it will take place (the inflation), since it has *always* taken place in the past, when unsustainable financial expansion, using fiat currency, has been used to fund government spending far in excess of tax collections. And one has to admit, it might be that crypto-currency holdings could offer a way to avoid the government-driven inflationary meltdown of the government currency, much as holdings of gold, silver, company stock and real-estate have done in the past. If one examines historical inflations, it's the government currency that became worth less, while the holdings of various assets offer investors and ordinary citizens degrees of wealth protection and preservation.

We think the Berkshire folks might want to think a bit more about why crypto-currency - and all other alternative asset classes - have sparked so much investor interest. It's not just greed. Ordinary folks know they are at real risk. It's nice to add to one's wealth. But it is much more important to hold on to one's lifetime earnings, especially when armies of government agents, money "managers", high-fee "brokers", financial "advisors", and outright criminal fraudsters and scammers are everyday seeking new victims. (CS provides a modern example of this very old class of problems.) Crypto-currency driven decentralized finance - if done right - might be able to offer protection against fiat-money depreciation, debasement and confiscation, rather like gold-holdings have done in the past. This is an obvious possibility, that merits consideration. But it looks like Charlie Munger might just be too rich to think clearly anymore. :)

[ Feb. 16, 2023 ] - Sun Machine is Coming Down - And we're gonna have a party? Sure looks like it. The Russian Navy and Chinese Navy "War Games" in South Africa, starting tomorrow, are a prelude to the new times. Existing political and econommic models are having all their parameters shifted. The curious development-path that is system-operational in the USA, is still playing out. Analysts and economists seem to really think that the Federal Reserve is actually in charge of the value-of-money parameters in USA-land, and yet this is so obviously not the case, that it is curious. Our AI forecast is pointing "market-up", and there seems to be bid happening at key price pivot-points. We keep thinking about Berlin...

[ Feb. 15, 2023 ] - The Highway is for Gamblers - So, if you are writing in plaintext/HTML, and just uploading a raw HTML file to the EC2 instance, if you edit your HTML-text as a program, using "vi", then the HTML syntax is rendered, if you leave vi syntax-check set to on, which is cute (but annoying). To turn syntax-highlighting off in vi, just press ESCAPE and then enter string: "syn off". Turning off syntax highlighting is a wise idea, since it makes your brain-process work better. Lazy folks do poor work, and syntax-highlighting makes a person mentally lazy.

Strange days. The market is curiously twitchy, but wants to rally. The AI thing we run, now says "UP UP and AWAY" in a very postive signal. Not sure if this is to be believed. We remain long, fully invested. The dividends have been paid, and the cards are playing well. And I am starting to feel like Willie E. Coyote, from the RoadRunner cartoons, as some more cool mail-order sourced technology waits for us at the delivery location. We are climbing several learning curves, at the same time.

[ Feb. 14 - 2023 ] - New Sensations - Have now got very preliminary version of the GEMESYS Canada Website & Research Log now running on Amazon AWS EC2. Must say, this environment is genius. Jeff Bezos will probably start getting money from me, just like Elon Musk does for the Starlink connection, which works so well. This is disruptive technology - still. I thought we were done, kind of... but this is not the case. There is much that remains possible! :)

[ Feb. 12-13 - 2023 ] We managed to see the Green Comet last night and the night before, as finally, the skies overhead here became clear, cold with winter-crisp viewing possible. The Green Comet was a smudge visible to the left of Mars, in Taurus, on the night of the 12th, and last night, it had moved southward, towards Aldebaron. If one learns to recognize the Great Winter Hexagon, all these locations are immediately findable in the northern North America night-sky.

Experimenting with ChatGPT, and finding it useful and impressive. I have an awesome idea for ChatGPT, which probably is being built into it, as I key this.

New Technology: I bought a "Churchill" 12-inch barrel, 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, which is made by Akkar in Turkey. It is light and easy to carry on perimeter excursions and forest-inspections. We suddenly have a squirrel problem at our property - with significant damage being done to the forest ever-green trees, and rodents now in the attic of the house. All technical choices are trade-offs, of course. A light shotgun is easy to carry, but it kicks hard when discharged, and it must be held correctly, or the shooter himself can be knocked over or injured, just firing it.

Learning this AWS environment is a significant curve. But it is very cleverly constructed, and wisely offered. The business-model is brilliant, and lots of information is available, but which of course requires effort to track thru and digest. Business conditions are strange, but we have solid reasons for remaining long, fully-invested in equity positions, in the portfolios. The mainstream professional investor class does not believe or respect the current constructive conditions - the market rally - that is underway, but we have solid reasons for believing that this is the only way things can track, if our reading of economic and political conditions is correct. More on this later...

I am keying this in raw html using an Editor that I wrote when I did a TCL-Tk project to repair and develop a Network management system at a Canadian disaster-company called Nortel, many years ago. The graphical Editor I wrote in Tcl/Tk survives to this day, and runs on Linux boxes, the MacBook-Pro, and the Windows machines, since Tcl/Tk 8.5 can be installed on each environment. Considering I wrote this thing on HP and Sun Unix workstations, it's pretty hilarious to see this "Nortel Legacy" still lives, and can be so useful, given that the Nortel company itself was such a flaming disaster. It was a many-years-ago project I did because I needed the money (typical consulting/programming gig-work back in the day). It was an education, in many, many ways. Nortel had *great* technology, but the management were idiots and/or criminals. So sad. Years later, when I became an "Investment Analyst", and Nortel stock was trading around $120/share, I had lunch at a fine Bay-Street restaurant, with another "Industrial-Products" Analyst. We both agreed that the right price for Nortel was probably around $20/share. Of course, it went completely to zero, and even though the patent-portfolio was sold for over $4 billion, the equity value for common and even preferred share-holders, became zero, since even the bond-holders were not paid-off in full.

But I kept the work I did to do the work at Nortel. ( I had to build some of my own software-tools, just to get productive in the complex Unix/networked environment I encountered at Nortel. As I said, the technology was excellent. The Sun and HP workstations ran lovely Unix X-Windows, and X-Windows could be used to do magical things.

But, I am writing this research-log (Blog!) using a Tcl/Tk text-editor, so I may have formatting errors. Please excuse, if text and page looks silly. I still have not figured out how to get the necessary .css (cascading style-sheets) files installed, so that the top-level GEMESYS menus display correctly. Pls stand-by, as they say... Technicians are working on the problem (ha ha)...

Speaking of X-windows tricks - I have got the GNU-APL environment running on my AWS EC2 instance, and can now use some of our APL-based AI software to generate graphical displays (charts and such) and have the APL procedures actually render the graphic images on our Linux and Mac OSX machines. This is pretty cool. You do not need to mess around setting the environment variable for $DISPLAY, you just need to use the "-X" option, when doing your "ssh" login to your AWS EC2 instance, and also setting the "sshd_config" parameters on the EC2 instance (your virtual or physical cloud computer at AWS). This is a very useful feature of X-windows, which is really a brilliantly thought-out software product. More on this later. ANd oh, we built the GNU-APL product from Github source, right on the AWS EC2 instance, which required that a bunch of development stuff be installed with "yum install ", where is typically .h header files, the various development libraries, and other related stuff for gcc (GNU c++) development. Got that all working, which is impressive. We are using AWS EC2 instance operating system: "AWS Linux", which looks to be a clone of the Red-Hat Fedora environment, which we are also using internally for our own AI-driven market-hacking and forecasting.

Stay tuned, as they say. Oh, and our AI forecasting thing is pointing up, for our test-bed security, which we hold thousands of shares of, in our real-world yes-actually-we-need-the-money portfolios.

Did I mention that my first "summer-job" as a real Economist, was at the "Anti-Inflation Board", set up by Trudeau (version 1.0), back in the mid-1970's? I learned things doing that job, that are *very* relevant today. Strange times, yes indeed...

[ Feb. 7, 2023 ] - Amazon Rocks the WORLD! - We are back. For the moment, I cannot edit the old website/GEMESYS Research Log. I have learned a little bit of Amazon AWS, and have this experimental site, now up and running in **remedial mode** (anyone remember DECSystem 20 series machines? That was the old DECSystem term for a limited-functionality machine, running, but missing some sub-systems..) Anyway, I'm still learning AWS (Amazon Web Services) and related platform development procedures. It's pretty impressive. Welcome to the bloody "Cloud", I guess. Better than being buried in the earth, yes?

Just hacking this with HTML markup...

Ukraine needs those Leopard and Abrams tanks. Also jets. They need aircraft, with spare-parts and missiles. But the tanks are critical. Nice to see Canada is sending some "Senator" APC's (They are good. Try not to get them killed, eh?) Best of luck, guys.

Here is a German-Japanese co-production music video, to keep everyone's spirits up!

A Traditional Soldier's Song for Germany About The Excellence of Their People and Their Weapons!

Feb. 7th - 2023 If someone wants to assert copyright on the German Soldiers-Song video, I will acknowledge them, or remove it. It shows good German technology - and the Leopard tank in action, and I want to commend Germany for making a just and courageous decision. We should get NATO into this project, since this is what NATO was created to actually do. We have a problem on our Eastern flank. Time to get busy, folks. There is Work to be done.

... Original GEMESYS Webpage log: www.gemesyscanada.com is still up, but we are having trouble editing/changing/adding anything. Text from original site is below. Site: www.gemesyscanada.com is still up, but is frozen as it was as of Dec. 7, 2022.

...

[ Dec. 6, 2022 ] - On the Beach With A Solid-State Wallet - A Future Scenario:  Lots of beauty everywhere, bags of bitcoin in the digital wallet, except all the computers and communications equipment have had their circuits fried, by the EMP - electromagnetic pulse - caused by a massive hydrogen bomb upper atmosphere air-burst.    And all that bitcoin is gone.  The guy next to you on the boat, with a pocket full of dubious silver coins, can still buy a plate of rice and a beer.  But you cannot.   Oh my.

[ Dec. 5, 2022 ] - Review & Renew - Reviewing some work from earlier.  Time is the most precious resource.   We remain surprised that we have not seen much in the way of positive developments in either politics or science, for quite a while.   Very curious.

[ Dec. 3, 2022 ] - Future Tense - I had to do some work with language semantics and linguistics, at one point.  LIke Randel, maybe.  Just read "The Burning Platform's" note on "The Truman Show" and it's conceptual link to our modern dystopian government social-control models.   Dovetails with my curious work on languages - which of course, Geroge Orwell explored in his famous "1984" novel. 

I had a 1984 Jaguar XJ6, which was a lovely thing, and when I hear the sequence "1984" it brings to memory the Jag, and the speed, and the time I blew out a Pirelli tire at high-speed, in the left-lane of King's Highway 400 northbound...  Language has subjective meaning, as well as objective.

Orwell understood language as a key tool to enable the "boot on the face" political model of the "Inner Party".  Newspeak turned all discussions about political freedom and self-actualizing human social  experience into a single word:  "ThoughtCrime".  Orwell's book is brilliant literature.  We studied it in high-school, many years ago - along with "Catcher in the Rye", which I thought was a silly book.  (I was reading: "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", IIRC... and Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" - which is what I feel like now.)

Key here is:  Language both models and virtually controls our thought process. 

And if you can control language - you can control large groups of weak-minded people.

And the Earth has 8-billion people, the majority of whom, are weak-minded.  But many don't want to be - and that is why censorship is always in an ebb-and-flow scenario, in the political space.

Some censorship is necessary.  Humans have a deep appetite for violence.  That needs to be discouraged, or we will all kill each other.  But it is curious that so much work on European history of the 1930's is so heavily censored in the USA.  I just cannot understand why Ye would be "deplatformed" for posting some silly symbols on that popular Twitter thing.  ( We detest social media - it is the most vivid example of the fast race to the bottom.  But it is where everyone is now...)

So, the future is now toxic.   We have Marshall McLuhan in hyperdirve.  Electronic re-tribalization is happening all around us, and at a fast and furious rate of acceleration.    Each tribe, typically has it's own language...  And language can twist like a worm on a hook...

https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/rammstein/du-hast

If you want to understand crypto-currency, and modern equity markets, you can read a novel called "The Man from Lisbon".    I am telling all my secrets now, since I see Mr "D" in the rear-view mirror.    The book was about a clever guy from Portugal, who scammed a money-printing firm in the UK, in the 1920's, to print up a large amount of real, legitimate Portugese bank notes.   He pretended to be a secret emissary from the Central Bank of Portugal, (doing an "Open Market" cash operation)  and requested a special run of bank notes - which he ordered, paid for, and took delivery of.  As he and his gang put the notes into circulation, national business-conditions improved noticably.   What makes the novelization so good, is that it really did happen.   [Update:  Part of the book is on Google Books!  The novel was written Thomas Gifford, published in 1977.   It is a book for curious, clever people who want to know how the world really operates.  At the start, it has two special pages of info:  First says simply:  "I am not I;  He is not he;  They are not they."   And the second page says:  "It really happened."    And yes, it really did. 

Nothing is ever really what it seems.   There is a hidden Imam - always.  Rather than being crushed by this reality - you can maybe become the Imam. 

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/The_Man_from_Lisbon/bG3QBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT7&printsec=frontcover

What is difficult to accept, is that sometimes, the hidden Imam is pure randomness.  This is what Nassim Taleb warns us about.  Use a chaos-generator, and draw the "Tent Map" or the "Mandelbrot Set" to see how Nature herself can actually fabricate randomness, if a sufficient amount of entropy does not exist in her current system.  The entire plot-success of the story of the "Man from Lisbon", hinges on the event where the secretary in the office of the President of the Central Bank, accidentally spills a bottle of ink on the letter from the UK printing firm.  She fears for her job, so she trashes the letter.   And thus everything plays, like a Beethoven Symphony.   Is this a plot-device - or was our man clever enough to turn the secretary?  Unclear.

Much of our detailed data on the 1900 to 1925 period is hard to obtain.  But it is very interesting and useful - and it offers insight into the current path we are all on.   The First World War was insane-crazy.  It was technology-enabled madness.  Armies used mid-19th century tactics - big, massed charges - and 20th century technology (ie. machine-guns.)  Young men literally were ordered to run forward into a hail of machine-gun fire.   It is fascinating that so many actually did so, and did not just shoot their officers.   (At the end, that is what was happening, truth be told...)  

And European history from 1920 to 1940 is even more interesting - especially in Germany, since Germany basically IS Europe, or at least it has been since the Fall of the Roman Empire.  The French make nice food, and wine, as do the Italians.  Spain has nice weather, and Greece and Eastern Europe give us repeated lessons in bad economics.  The UK is not Europe, anymore than Japan is China.  In Europe, Germany is all that really matters, except for the Madness of the Russians and their curious national love of cruelty, which both they and the French share.

The current military co-operation between China and Russia is interesting.  Each side wants to get a real good look at just what sort of shit the other guys have, and how they can expect it to work in the operational theatre.   America had better get some real leadership soon, or we here are all gonna be in a very big heap-o-trouble.

No amount of linguistic baffle-gabbing & disinformational chatter, can disguise this looming reality.

"Chicks and Cars and the Third World War - the only three things worth living for..."  I always thought "Two outta three is not bad...".   But we are gonna get the trifecta, our analysis suggests.

[ Dec. 2, 2022 ] - F*cking Hell - I always thought that would be a good name for a heavy-metal thrasher band.  "And now, Ladies and Genttemen - We are so pleased to bring you.... "FUCKING HELL!!"  --- (sound of screaming kids, loving it, in the background...)    But I supposed it's probably already been done.  

My AI-driven technical trading sh*t works - it flashed (before the open.. "***DUMP DUMP DUMP***" but I thought the opening price was goofy too low (WEE TU LO  - 2nd Korean Pilot).  But of course, the lovely f*cking market falls out of bed, and hits the floor - and then goes thru it. 

Fucking hell...    :)    (Noises off:   "Ya got a gig for us, dude?").

Me: "No, no... I was just getting a beer..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell

Lawyer: "Careful.  That is a licensed and registered trademark."

Me: "What?  What's a trademark?" 

Lawyer: "No. Fucking hell."

Me: "What?  What's wrong?"

Lawyer: "Nothing.  It's a trademark."

Me: " 'Nothing' is a trademark?"

Lawyer: "No.  'Fucking hell' "

Me: "What's the matter?"

Lawyer: "Nothing's the matter.  Just warning you about trademark law..."

Me: "The word 'nothing' is a trademark?"

Lawyer: "No, goddamn-it!  Fucking hell!"

Me; "What is wrong? You sound so upset!"

Lawyer: " 'Fucking hell!'  It's a trademark! "

Me: "What's a trademark?"

Lawyer: "FUCKING HELL!"

Me; "Man, you have anger issues, dude.  Why so upset?"

 Fucking_Hell_Trademark_USA.jpg

[ Dec. 1, 2022 ] - Hells Bells - And dreck in the wells...  Another month into the graveyard, and another load of shite and hype down the pipe.   The current AI model says market is turning up, and one should be long, but the (repaired) box that runs the technical indicator calculators (which is how the money is made), says "Oh, hell, no!  Ahieee!! Here come cowboys, pirates, and killer-black-swans!", and of course, that stupid technical crap was spot on correct again this AM.  

I have to learn to love the aliens (the models, which are vastly, wildly, insanely and comically better at calling the future = and thus crafting trading strategies - than I am .)    I am like a guy who was a mid-level chess player, and he gets a quantum-AI rigged "Deep Blue" chess-robot, and it kicks his ass, every single f*cking day, and he just wont stop playing against it.   It is crazy comical.   

My sense was the AI (the medium-to-long forecaster), was correct, and we were near a turn, due to oversold conditions, and too much silly fear - but no, the plain kinky technical thing - which I keep nameless - just nailed it again.  (I sat long, like a bump on a log...) 

The Secret: You want to make money in the market-world?  Throw away ALL fundamental horseshit analysis bookery blather - and just watch the goddamn prices, and make yer bets based on goof-stupid techincal factors - and NOTHING ELSE.

This honest awareness drives me to crazy distraction.  It just seems so god-damned wrong.  And yet - over and over and over again, I get the putrid, rotting truth of this observation served up to me, almost daily, like a mound of moose-shit served on a shingle. (An old Canadian receipe from the Far North - "Shit on a Shingle".)  It's also a perfect description of the current markets, with the global governments yield-curve now inverted, and Powell determined to give us the "Great Depression Version 2.0"   

JHC I watched Credit Suisse trade down to $2.99 US, and was supposed to take some at that point - but of course, I was out removing a goddamn big bulldozer from my field!  (Silly story:  Some clown working for a neighbour, had his equipment delivered to the wrong address, and I watched a flatbed unload a big yellow bastard bulldozer into my snow and mud-covered field!) 

Life-Lesson: If you don't watch every fucking thing, all the fucking time, you can be absolutely certain, that some goof will take maximum advantage of your temporary lack of attention - just like in the markets!   :)

And it is goddamn December, the month that I truly hate the most, of the whole year.  But at least it is not Christmas. (And I am still alive!  Fuck Yah!)   I *really* hate Christmas - but we try to cellibrate Saturnalia, which was what the Romans did - 4 or 5 days past the maximum southward tracking of the sun.  You know then that the shitstorm that is Winter, is now certain to be ended and corrected.   LIke all filthy-rotten shitty crap awful stuff, it just takes a bit of time.

On a lighter note - we saw the NASA image, of the Artemis ship, in deep-space, with both the Moon and Earth in the background, hanging in the dark void of black space.  The picture is both uplifting and quite terrifying - at the same time.   Well done, NASA.  Bravo for not having your big rocket explode.    Hope the missions with humans on board, go as well!

[ Nov. 29, 2022 ] - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble - I found a good chart of the South Seas Company stock price, in England, from 1719 to 1720.  It is educational to study the historical price action of financial "bubbles".   Here is URL about Thomas Levenson's book, from which the chart was taken:

https://www.aier.org/article/when-financial-markets-bubble-theres-something-for-everyone/

[ Nov. 27-28, 2022 ] - Dance The Newgate Hornpipe - This is an old Australian expression - which meant to be hung outside of Newgate Prison, in London.    In writing a note about bitcoin and the English South Seas Bubble - I had to look up the history of the infamous "Debtor's Prisons" in London:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshalsea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgate_Prison

I've not read "Little Dorrit" (by Charles Dickens), but it seems strange to have someone put in prison for failure to pay debt.   In USA now, the President wants to simply "cancel" Student Debt.  This also seems strange.  

I wonder how long it will be, before things become even more strange, and change further.  

One of my machines died yesterday, and it is curious - the keyboard simply stopped working on an old Pentium MMX I had, which I was using as an appliance.  The unit boots ok, the hard-disk is accessed fine, the video works fine, initialization happens, but when a program runs which requires keyboard input, there is nothing.  It is not the keyboard - I confirmed that - it is the main board - looks like a keyboard-driver chip has simply failed.  Capacitors all look ok, no strange voltages - just no action on the keyboard.

Rather like the markets - and many of the humans I knew.  One day, they are fine.  Then, a circuit or a device fails, and I hear that tune from The Doors;  "This is the end, my only friend, the End..."  With machines, we can sometimes repair them.  With humans - it is more difficult.

My old Pentium MMX box - decided to dance the Newgate Hornpipe.   And ancient motherboards are like ancient, high-quality people - despite being valuable, they are curiously difficult to replace, since they are no longer in active production.   :)

[ Nov. 25, 2022 ] - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Rust  - We are pretty sure we know why the Chinese are so curiously intense about Covid-19 lockdowns.  It's probably (we suspect) because they *know* the true origin of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  They know it was the result of a lab-leak, and that the "gain-of-function" research efforts were weapons-research, to make a  really lethal-bad human corona-virus which was based on a bat-virus, but with the spike-protein's tweaked to hack the bio-defenses of the human lung ACE receptors.  We think they *know* this to be true.  (Study the technical data in detail.  It is hard to come to any other conclusion, unless your income-stream will be threatened.)

So, here is an interesting fact:  The majority of  Covid-19 deaths in August 2022 in USA, were of *vaccinated* persons.,., NOT the unvaccinated.   Something very curious is happening.  Maybe this is just natural evolution of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  Quite possible.  Or maybe this is by design?

And lets be clear - We are *NOT* anti-vax.  We here at Gemesys Ltd. have all been at least three-times vaccinated.  I was three time vax-ed with mRNA vaccine - two Moderna, and one Pfizer.  But at the beginning of October 2022, I caught a nasty case of Covid-19 (and confirmed it with the Covid-19 antigen ELISA assay test).  It took several weeks to recover.   The vaccines are not very effective now.

But I am angry that the "lab-leak" theory - which is almost CERTAINLY how this nasty virus got into the World ecosystem, has not been investigated more carefully.   It is simply absurd to suggest that this remarkably nasty virus, just POPPED INTO EXISTENCE out of nothing - in a live animal market that was right next door to a virus research lab.  WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT GAIN-OF-FUNCTION virus-enhancement research was being carried out in the Wuhan Virus Lab - USING FUNDING THAT CAME ORIGINALY FROM THE USA!  These facts are NOT IN DISPUTE.   We know that a young, healthy doctor who tried to warn about the release of this virus, was shutdown abusively by the Communist Party of China officials, and that the doctor then died of Covid-19 corona-virus, a short while later.

Since this Covid-19 SARS-Cov-2 virus has killed as many people as Hitler did in World War Two, it is probably time that we got to the bottom of EXACTLY WHERE IT CAME FROM.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/vaccinated-now-account-majority-covid-deaths

There almost certainly will be more virus-agents like this created.    They are powerful weapons, and in a world, that suddenly looks like it needs some new, effective weapons to deal with the problem of State-sanctioned mass-murder - rather like Russia is doing in Ukraine - there is strong military motivation for this kind of research.

If your people and your army is properly vaccinated, then you can spray airborne virus from a fleet of drones, and wipe out your enemy - or at least make enough of them really sick, so that they lose their will to fight.    A SARS-like virus is a very effective weapon, let's be honest.

Pandora's Little Shop of Virus Agents has been opened and put into the world, and we will doubtless need to keep doing the research - and try to make the mRNA vaccines more effective against the evolving virus variants, as time goes by.   We have no choice, now.

Play it, Sam...

"You must remember this - a kiss is but a kiss - the fundamental things apply.   But a virus can kill, your whole army, in the blink of a young girl's eye..."

[ Nov. 24, 2022 ] - A Note on Neural-Ethics - or: "Holy shit, this stuff is amazingly awful & terrible - and the kids love it.   Wow!"- Research in Artificial Intelligence came out of two fields - brain-science work, which was physiological/medical and of course, the math/computer world, where the big win has been made by the training of neural-network matrix elements, particularly as applied to images.  Back-propegation works, and various kinds of NN (neural-network) methodologies have been developed, which work quite well in domains where there really is a there actually there.

But maybe the real payoff, is (and will be), in the medical/psycho-technical side of things.  It turns out that humans are really (really!) easy to program.  This came (partly) from the world of the NLP research (or technique?) - Neural Linguistic Programming.   Human behaviour can be virtually called up and fabricated on demand, if the appropriate visual, sonic, and language modalities are used to drop the information onto a human sensory experience in the right order.

What this means is that clever practitioners can manipulate human behaviour with astonishing efffectiveness - if the sensory experience is crafted correctly, with the right images, sounds, physical sensations, and language action (meaning elements) in the right order.

This seems absurd and unbelievable, and yet I get solid, repeatable, consistent evidence of this all the time now.  It is just scary, truth be told.

We are living in very (**very**) perilous times.   More dangerous and toxic, than perhaps at any time in human history.

I was looking for evidence on "runaway" phenomenon, and I literally (by accident) found the videos of a young female artist named "Aurora".  (The you-tube song is called "Runaway").  From the Aurora experience (tuneless self-similar high-production quality videos of young, doe-eyed child-woman), I found "Billie Ellish", who is very similar - both are "musicians" (just animated pop singers, really), and the video work is just amazingly high quality - as far as production values go.

But the "music" is just toxic, tuneless shit.  It is the worst, most awful second rate (no, make that THIRD rate) drivel that one could craft.  And it is *all* by very careful design.

It is a perfect example of simply *genius* NLP.    The video's are hypnotic.  They are like little movies - quite well crafted.

And every single human "neural programming" technique is used - and in the right sequence.

I could write for pages, detailing all the smart neural trickery used - it is very, very clever. 

But here is the key:

The music is self-similar, toxic crap - it is so bad, so sad-horrible-awful (but all in the correct sequence to trigger the necessary emotional reactions - in 12 to 17 year old girls and boys) - that the videos have all gotten *tens of millions* of views.  Some have hundreds of millions of views.

This seems "Un-Fucking-Believable" (a Terry Southern expression).   Really, very, very damned impressive.

But the *art* and *music* is just the worst, sad, drivel-shit I have ever seen.    And of course, the edited comments, have *nothing* negative to say.  The kids are not even getting a chance to hear anything but the same idiot-opinions.  They are being neurally-hacked (and mentally fucked over...)

The whole "Youtube" thing is now a very toxic experience, IMHO.

But it obvious makes a ship-load of money, for the promoters.   A real hyper-goof-load of quatloos...

Kinda like the idiotic and silly action around the  "crypto currency" stuff....   ...   (more dots...)

And another fat copper disk dropped onto me.  :)

I searched, as a joke-experiment  (using DDG, because Google will not show real results):

"Holy shit, this stuff is amazingly awful & terrible - and the kids love it.   Wow."

And you can get some interesting data - there is a "reddit" channel in "discord" all about this.  But of course, nothing on Youtube.  This is hilarious.

Everyone knows.  It is all a toxic shitshow, and it is making the kids crazy, (really, really crazy unwell).  It is not good.  The insecurity and uncertainty of youth is amplified, and reflected back at the kids.  This is why there is an ethical issue.  This process is making billions of dollars, for the neural-science hacker-skanks who know how to run the program to hack the human brains of the insecure data-addicted children.   But it is making the kids unwell, I suspect.   They will come to doubt their identity, their sense of themselves, and these clever fantasy-madness videos will twist their mental world-pictures, until they don't know which way is up.

And in one generation, this maybe will lead to social collapse and global warfare.   The NLP action looks this impressive.   Every clever Holly-weird trick is used - and a bunch of new ones, also.  It is neural-hacking, of the highest quality.

So, maybe it is just evolution-in-action (like mean people say when the read about a suicide-club).   It will get worse, because there is just too much money to be made, using these neural techniques.   

Even if (especially if!) it results in just amazingly awful, terrible, crap-music.   :)

[ Nov. 23, 2022 ] - My LIttle (Bank!) Runaway - Oh my.  Bank runs.  How about that?  Here in the 21st century, almost having burned up the 1st quarter of it - we are seeing absurd, classical "bank-runs" - FTX and CS being the current examples.  (I read some notes on SOFI and LC,  and it seems skanky-banking is alive and well in the the good old USA...).   Certainly, there is a space between VISA loan rates of 20%, and quality, fully-collateralized loans of 5%  (hey, they call those "mortgages", don't they?).  Someone should do some Amazon-style disruptive action, and compress this massive margin - and I guess that is happening.  (We don't borrow much money, so we don't know much about the DeFi loan space.)

But we know all about "Bank Runs..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOh8NS_2nu4

Banking is a comically good business.  It's easy-peasy, trivial almost - and anyone can really do it.  But it is fragile has hell, if it is not done right.   There is this Renaissance painting - showing a rich banker, but the artist was a clever fellow, and shows a delicate glass vase, near the edge of the table where the gold coins are sitting - showing how bloody breakable is the whole notion of wealth.  Even if one has lovely, solid "gold" - the gold can be stolen from you, by bandits or by the King's Men - whomever those vile scoundrels might be, at any given point in the temporal vector.  Or it might just be the Wheel of Misfortune that takes it all...

Here is my latest note on "Crazy Crypto Comedy Capers" - and a side item about this artist and his two business partners, who have made $163 million dollars selling digital art on the net.  (Say that number again,  like Austin Powers would say it.  Say that number twice, and scratch the itchy spot on your head...  Really.  From Selling NFT's of his artwork...  ).   If any humans are reading this log, just click the link below, or you can select the topline menu option on this page, of "Is Crypto Bullshit?"

http://www.gemesyscanada.com/453469367

After I wrote this, and watched the morning action, I thought maybe I should have investigated the question: "Is Credit Suisse Bullshit?".   The current parallels are curious.

I mean - what is going on here?...  I don't get it.  The "Chairman" of CS, is some guy named "Axel Lehmann".   Really.  No kidding.  I am serious.  The guy should change his name.  Really.  The current "reality matrix" we are embedded within, is like we have a guy who is Chairman of a Big Failing Bank, and his name is: "Mr. SpinningShaft  WeWillStealYourMoney".   Fucking hell, that is almost as good as "Samuel Bankman-Fried", isn't it?    Or like our brain-hostile PM in our Federal government dystopian hellscape ->  "Mr. Just-Put-It-In  WaterHole."

I keep feeling like I am embedded in a Terry Southern sequel to "Dr. Strangelove", where Colonel "Bat" Guanno has gone into politics, and has become the President of Earth.

JHC, if I put the current World Situation in a novel, I would be laughed out of the publisher's "slush-pile" for it all being too silly and absurdly far-fetched. 

But this is what we call "reality".   (I recall the 1970's expression:  "Reality is for those losers, who can't handle drugs & alcohol.").

And here we are.   Some analysts are suggesting that the near world-future is a choice between abusive, totalitarian "World Government", or a multi-polar Three-Power-Block World, that will lead to certain nuclear war.  The "Mega-Deaths Estimates" (maybe it really *is* being done by the "Bland Corporation"?) is for 380 million dead from the nuclear exchanges - but then 5 billion will starve to death, over the next 18 months, as 14 teragrams of dust and soot are blown into the upper atmosphere, and we experience the ugly phenomenon of "nuclear winter", due to reduced solar energy input to our world..  

Forecast: Fun times ahead.   Probably you want to hang on to that "Acoustic-Research" Model-15.  Make them come and take it - like the Spartan's used to say, when told to give up their swords.

[ Nov. 22, 2022 ] - Two's Company - We get to watch the Great Comedy-Show of Washington Kleptocrats - the poker-faced scammers of the Democrat Party calling their California She-Brew Mafia Boy - Bankman-Fried - up on the Federal carpet, and pretend to probe for details of his great digital Ponzi scheme.  Methinks they will not probe too far, lest they encounter the steaming black fllth that is the tens of millions of dollars of funding the Demo-hacks received from SBF's FTX loot-pile.

And what is the story behind the Hunter Biden laptop drive?  It was claimed by the Leftist Media organs (CNN, Washpots, Dorsey's Twitter, etc.) that it was all Russian disinformation.  That has been debunked, and all that happened is the FBI took the original hard-drive, and hid it away, so the Biden Democrats would not be embarrassed during the election.   Curious how that worked.

The rumor is, is that Hunter Biden's famous laptop, was chock-full of the most outrageous pornography - but no-one will talk about this publically.   As long as it was nothing illegal, we cannot really see what the big fuss is about - but perhaps there were some interesting examples.   Was Kamala Harris was one of the actors?  I just cannot see that  (no, I cannot - really - please, I must just censor my own imagination here...)  :)

What really is supposed to be on the drive, is material showing corruption.  The New York Post summarizes the affair:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-confirmed-in-new-york-times-report/

https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/npr-issues-correction-after-claiming-hunter-biden-laptop-story-was-discredited-by-intelligence/

For us, the really impressive information, is the $1,000,000 US tax "liability" that Hunter Biden had to pay off to the Internal Revenue Service - the USA Federal Taxation authorities. 

Where did he get the million dollars US to make that payment?  And what "business" did he do, to earn enough US dollars, that he had to pay off the IRS with a 1 million dollar income tax payment???   Sorta makes one a tad curious, no?

But was the famous Hunter Biden laptop full of extreme porn?   Did it end up like the print of "Blue Movie", inspected in underground vaults at the Vatican?  (Like in the fiction book, "Blue Movie", by Terry Southern).   We just don't know.  (But it was a good book...)   Or did the laptop have a bunch of what looked like "child-porn"?  That information appears to have been scrubbed from just about everywhere.  Sure - the whole "Hunter Biden Laptop" thing could have been a Russian - or some other group - disinformation campaign.  The computer-repair guy had to close his store, and leave town, (apparently he received death threats, etc.), and there is no direct evidence that the "water damaged laptop" even was Hunter Biden's machine.  It could have been a simple plant, by someone who extracted the contents of Hunter Biden's hard-drive, and then used that to fabricate what appeared to be a standard Mac hard-drive, but with added awful stuff.   The FBI siezed the original hard-drive.   And since there is *no* active investigation into this affair, nobody knows what the truth is.

The mainstream leftist media just retailed a series of lies that it was a confirmed Russian disinfo plant - but even those lies have now been proven to be false - so false that NPR even issued a retraction, to protect itself from lawsuits, no doubt.

What also funny, is the way Google responds to search-requests for "What happened to Hunter Biden's ... " --- as you key that, you suddenly get all these suggestion-prompts for items like "What happened to Biden's first wife" and so on.   Nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop.  Hilarious.  Then, input the same search-strings into DuckDuckGo, and you get a *lot* of optional completions directly about "Hunter Biden's Laptop".    So it goes, eh?

There are the *media* lies and there are the *government* lies - and they both dance along, thru the noxious digital vapour of cyberspace, like two drugged-up children, smiling and laughing, as the truth lies bleeding on the sidewalk, unable to even speak.     Strange times.

[ Nov. 20, 2022 ] - Future Boy Leaves His Hunch - Sanity has fled from this World.  Our politics is now completely insane.  The entire climate-change fraud is being shown to be exactly this - with COP-27 - a great mad scheme to hack even more wealth from over-burdened taxpayers in the Northern Hemisphere, and send the funds to the corrupt sh/t-hole nations of the South, via the scam-artist UN-fraudsters that administer this great, expanding theft.   My, but life in the *future* is is just hilarious.  

I watch the scale of the frauds and outright, evil gangster-stuff that is driving global politics now, and it makes me nauseous.   The extent and the breadth of the theft and the absurdity - when you drill down in to the details - is amazing.  One thinks: maybe "It's not really as bad as it looks", and when you see what the pig-pokers who run things actually are doing, you realize it is *so much worse* than even your worst-case scenario.   The FTX fraud is nothing, compared to what our *elected* governments are doing, after they *win* their no-choice "elections".   I look at the ballot, and all I can think is "None of the Above.... Where is that option?"  

I want the option, on the ballot, that says:  "Check this box, to dissolve the Federal Government and devolve all executive authority to the Provincial Governments, and the local Cantons." - like they do in Switzerland.   I don't want *any* elite "Federal Politician Class" that throws away the taxpayer funds on jet-trips and fancy hotels by going to bogus G-20 and COP-27 talk-fests, where scam-artists sit around brainstorming ways to further scam the "Normies" and mine their wallets for the private gain of the elite "political class".    

Here is what is beyond-belief today:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/explainer-pay-climate-loss-damage-190637835.html

This entire concept (as described in the above news item - where "Climate Justice" funding is being proposed and set up by these fraudsters), is as big a FRAUD - probably bigger - as what Bankman-Fried did with filth-stained FTX thing.   The concept of "climate justice" payments - from rich nations to poor nations - is just bullsh/t nonsense in the most extreme.

It is complete fake-economics - the entire global political process being rigged by the elite scammer political jackmiesters to extract more funds from those who create wealth, and allocate it to noxious, abusive parasite nations, which do nothing but fabricate stupidity, costs and numerous human babies with hungry mouths, low-IQ mothers, and absent fathers.  

This is madness.  The taxpayers of North America & Europe will be sent the invoice for the actions of jack-stupid motherkilling African overpopulated hell-hole nations run by racist, corrupt kleptocrats with fat Swiss bank accounts, full of funds already looted from their people.  We *KNOW* about this serious problem - and yet the Climate plan is to GIVE THESE A$$HOLES EVEN MORE MONEY??

Seriously.   The plan is to give these corrupt nations - more northern money to add to their pile of loot, because their climate is hot and nasty and dangerous - just like it has always since before ancient ROMAN TIMES!

Bloody screaming hell, but this sort of nonsense is just "Climate Fraud" and "Climate Engineered Theft".   That fact that dung-steaming crocks of nonsense like this are taken seriously for even two seconds, shows how bent, broken and corrupt our global political process drivers now are.

Our own national *Federal* government entities are completely and profoundly broken.   This is not what their jobs are supposed to be.  This is just insane.  It is over-the-top economic fraud, being planned in the name of the huge, bogus "Climate Change" scam.    People need to wake up to what is happening here.   We are being cheated - and at an ever-increasing scale.

[ Nov. 18, 2022 ] - No Problemo - Big snow, warm lakes, and the world is white.  Cut some trees & the carport is full of wood.  The stove is hot and the fan is running - but we are low on deuterium.   Reviewed the "Antifragile" tapes (files, actually - but I am spending too much time in 1966...).   Patterns in markets now are very interesting - like being shot at, and not hit, is interesting.   Creates a range of curious emotions, that are probably not terribly useful - unless one is a reptile.  We try to decouple the reptile brain-action, but each day, as we remain under assault, the lizard looks out at us, with it's cold eyes. 

But the lizard and I are ok, and the resilience machines are running, and the life-support systems are up and running.  Oil - WTI - is on it's way back to $40/bbl.  A friend of mine has a Prius, and it actually is not a bad vehicle.  Toyota has released details of it's new one, with a two-litre engine, bigger tires, and better design, and FIAT is bringing back the 500e, which looks like a golf-cart with a roof.   I wanted a Cyber-Truck, but it seems that is a bridge too far for everyone, even Mr. Musk.   We fear Elon might have damaged Twitter.  The idea of Twitter is that it needs to be robust - but it might be in real trouble now.   Curious how really smart people, can do really foolish, unwise things.    We are living in the strangest of strange times.  Recalling an old Mott The Hoople Song::  "Death may be your Santa Claus"...  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amhy7LcAdGQ 

One of their best.  And yes, "We get all the books from the Corn Exchange..."  indeed.

[ Update:  More Economic "After Action" Reports... ]

This one, (Pearl & Roy (England)) is the best Mott song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0OkfuyhyY

"... Amateurs, amateurs, bullshit calameters..."

"---Your on the lamb / Can't control it! / Your just a scam / You mink stole it! "

This just played in my head, as I read more of the FTX details.   So awful embarrassing.  Just got some local after-action details on the FTX hell-storm:  Ontario Teachers Pension Fund (one of the *big* funds, like the Ontario LCBO is the world's big booze-buyer), actually managed to blow-up all  $95 million on FTX (USA Dollars - "real" money, as we say in Canada), and I find this face-palmingly crazy.  

We have to change the program here.  When an old punk-rocker like me, becomes the f*cking voice of sanity, wise investment strategy, and common-sense, we have a curious situation.  I never ever thought of myself as becoming a "wise gray eminence", but that seems to have happened.   Holy sh/t.  The world is twisted very badly.  

There has to be some very serious money to be made, in unwinding and repairing some of the city-wrecking, crazy-to-the-bone madness that is playing out everywhere.   A fellow consultant friend - who also has a villa with acreage in our "God's Country" homeland, has just de-camped for another high-rate-of-billable-action project, to fix a broken Gov't situation.   I hope she charges big.  The world is getting just completely bonkers.    I am just gob-smacked, truth be told.

The $95 million USD's that "Teachers" just wrote off, is roughly $127 million Canadian.  For that amount, I could have put together a portfolio of 10 very good, quite possibly unicorn-level entities, and drove them forward.  Probably only a few would pay off - and you only need one to go into hyper-drive mode - but $127 million given to a 30-year-old doofus magoo who lies like a rug, and does not even have a f*cking honest CFO/Accountant or even a goddamn auditor - that is bone-whackingly f**k-stupid.    I am sorry for the profanity, but f*cking hell, FTX is just nuts.

I worked for Lehman Brothers (poster-child for bad behaviour) - in their bloody back office, fixing a big company-wide database, that did the accounting - unit-by-unit - each single profit-generator had it's own P/L, and each day, you could run a roll-up program, and see *EXACTLY WHAT THE HELL EVERYBODY WAS DOING" and exactly the position of the company - to the very US penny.   For a wild-west sh/t-show like Lehman, this was the minimum.  And it worked good.  As the trading-book moved around the world, each unit in each trading-zone, needed to know how much the firm's arse was hanging out over the line.  And they did.  But this was in the 1990's, when Lehman Bros were smart, focused, honest and successful.  See --- that is the key, eh?   That is the true key to making money in the markets - knowledge + integrity + action.  You need all three.

FTX was filthy -  self-dealing & hiding shit, lying like sock-tuckers, and hooving up client funds - stealing the cash - and f*cking around with it.   All the digital crypto-crap is just red-flag scam-foolery for the suckers.   FTX was Bernie (The Great NASDAQ Liar) Madoff meets Charles Ponzi, meets Godzilla.  And "Teachers" put f*cking $127 million dollars into this stinking outhouse of filth and fraud?   How could they be so over-the-top stupid?

This is just f*cking insane.   Like that guy in Sweden who withdrew all his money from the bank - almost 1 million in US dollars - took it home, and burned it all in his fireplace.  (His divorce settlement had indicated he had to give his ex-wife half of his wealth.  So he gave the bitch a bag of ashes.  Really.)

I need to role up my goddamn sleaves, and try to fix some of this insane, crazy stupid shit, before it wastes the planet.

"Don't bury me, 'cause I'm not dead yet! "

 [ Nov. 17, 2022 ] - Opportunity is Fleeting - When either randomness or human stupidity gives you a opportunity, it is wise to grab on to it.  The NATO forces had a really fine and effective opportunity to demostrate to the Russian terrorists, that military action against a NATO member nation would be met with an intense, firm response.

But the narrative is now being retailed by USA and NATO members, that the missile-strike in Poland was some kind of "accident", when in fact it was clearly a probing test by Putin (who thinks he is clever), to see if NATO and Poland would react.

Video below is from BBC, and shows a morning commuter drive in Ukraine, as a Russian missile hits a natural gas plant: 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63659370?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

Imagine this sort of pure terrorist action in USA or Canada or Europe.  The Russians are no different from ISIS terrorists, or fhe Bin Laden terrorists that flew hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre towers in New York.    The correct solution is to bomb Moscow, so that the Russian terrorists have a reason to negotiate.  World cannot have nuclear-armed terrorist governments, threatening cities and routinely killing civilians.

The Free World has missed an opportunity to send a necessary message to the Russian terrorist forces in Ukraine, and this is most unfortunate.  It is just wrong.   Action is now needed.

It's time to deal with the corrupt, cowardly Russians and end their crime spree.  But the Europeans and Americans - and our government as well - are off on vacation, drinking and fucking around...

We have the wrong "leaders", our "governments" are ineffective, and the evil forces of the World are using the tragic uselessness of the absurd "United Nations" entity, to commit the most astonishing aggression and mass-murder.

It is a curious and surprising outcome.   Something is deeply wrong with national governments - both in Canada and United States.   In USA, they cannot even seem to count ballots - the recent "midterm elections" appear to be some kind of slow-motion theatrical farce.   And in Canada, we have a national "leader" who can only be described by using the kind of obscene expletives I just don't want to type. 

Our failures to act now, will cost the World big.   We might have stopped this nonsense earlier, with firm action.  But since nothing serious has been done - NATO has taken NO DIRECT ACTION and Russia is encouraged to continue this insane murder-spree and military assault on Ukraine,  

This failure to act when we could have, will cost the World it's future.   One does not need an AI toolset to predict what the outcome of our weakness and failure will be.  In trying to avoid WW3, we are almost certain now to have to endure it.  Either we fight these Russian bastards now and stop them, when we might have a chance to end their insanity - or we are almost certain to get destroyed by it at some point in the future.

[ Nov. 16, 2022 ] - Artemis Launch Did Not Explode - We watched the Artemis launch from Florida last nite.  Congrats to NASA, as the launch went OK, and the rocket did not explode.  The rocket was supposed to be launched in 2017, and the mission was supposed to cost roughly 7 billion USA dollars.  Cost is now over $23 billion, just for this mission.  The rocket uses 4 old space-shuttle engines, and the same kind of boosters (built as tube-sections with O-rings between them), but is at least made out of steel.  Plans are for a new version of Artemis rocket to be made with composite material.   And the entire rocket is thrown away, as part of the launch.

I watched the original Apollo missions, in the 1960's.  They were amazing and impressive.  No one even remembers Apollo 10, but that is the one I documented most closely - the LEM got within a few hundred feet from the Lunar surface, but then fired it's rocket, and returned to the orbital ship.  (There are morons in the USA who argue the moon landings were faked.  No chance - we were there, and saw it, and it all worked pretty good.  USA and it's technology companies could do amaznig things then.  The whole place was a meritocracy, and a very effective working democracy.  Voting was done right, and good people were elected to be in Washington - so very, very different than today.).

The moon is not that far away (about 250,000 miles - I owned and drove cars with higher mileage on the odometer!),  The difficult part is the vacuum of space, and the need to bring everything you need, with you, for the trip.   We have had chemical rocket technology, since the Chinese invented gunpowder (but not guns!) thousands of years ago.

I strongly recommend Peter Thiel's book: "Zero to One", or the course notes, for the 2012 Stanford course, which I am working thru.  

We need to re-capture the future.  Really.  It is the most important task humanity faces.

We need to throw away political correctness, most censorship, all blather about "equality".   There is not any human equality, at all, and never will be. Just fucking stop it, people. It's a bullshit objective of perfect absurdity.  And it is an ugly and detestable, dishonest political goal.

A good friend of mine just died - he won't get to see "Man return to the Moon".   And all I can think, is "What the fuck happened to this world?"   Honestly, a massive nuclear war might actually be a necessary event now - it would be terrible, and we should work to avoid it, of course, but this strange Darwinian logic nags at me and keeps me awake a night.  Our current world is badly broken.

It's like:  Maybe the Depression of the 1930's was a good and necessary and correct thing, as it meant that USA - and the Free World - had the financial "headroom" to go very deeply into honest debt, and gear up and jack up industry to build B-17's and P-51's like Henry Ford built Model-T cars.   The USA had all this significant un-used, available industrial capacity, that could be deployed fast and effectively, just using paper dollars.   But they were gold-and-silver backed dollars, which folks trusted.  War-bonds were sold.  The money needed was honestly borrowed, not just printed.  And we know now, that this makes a big difference.   The entire war for the USA was only four years.   The massive debt-load was honestly repaid.  Unlike now, where debt is "written off" or weirdly (and dishonestly) "cancelled".    And as a by-product of Depression and War, we got atomic power - both as powerful weapons, and as nuclear-reactors, which are powering my computer, as I key this note.  

All the wildly beneficial technology, came from honest-debt funded, war-driven research and development effort.   The economic and technological extreme uplift of the 1960's was seeded by the 1930's economic collapse, and the debt-funded Second World War.  The 1941 military and technical scale-up in USA, was truly extreme and impressive.

Imagine trying to do this now?   I don't think it would even be possible.  War for UK and Canada started in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin invaded and occupied Poland - our war was 7 years long.  It was a longer, harder, and more difficult grind.  

Maybe we really need that ugly, horrible "reset" that a major terrible event - like a large, city-wrecking war, or a global economic crash - can bring.   This idea nags at me, since I want it to be wrong.

Some folks argue in the USA, that the "9/11" terrorist-attack event was that for the USA.  But that event was - let's be honest - pretty trivial.   A couple of buildings destroyed in New York, and the US military HQ, the Pentagon, hit, but with minimal loss of life or even much damage.   The Ukrainians endure this sort of thing *EACH DAY* now and have been doing so for months.  And in World War Two, entire cities were *LEVELED* - not just in Japan, but in Europe.  I stood in Warsaw, in 1990, and they have historical plaques like we have here, except some of their's show scenes of absolute, complete destruction.  The entire city of Warsaw was reduced to rubble - actually worse than Hiroshima.   Berlin was a smoking ruin of destroyed buildings and burned-out houses.    War truly is insane - yet if your nation is invaded by murdering, killer-terrorists, you have zero choice in the matter, you *must* fight, and fight to win.  You do that, until you either die or your side wins.

Really, the United Nations should authorize a complete blockade of all Russian ports.  And then, the bombing should begin - probably from space.    Russia's actions are weirdly illegal, and very hard for a sane person to accept.  But for some curious reason, this seems to be the Russian way.  When the Marquis de Sade wanted to have a really awful, terrible "sadist" in his fictional literature - he made the bad guy a Russian.   For Europeans, this made sense.  History whispers to us, in so many curious ways.

Perhaps folks in Russia might want to re-frame this narrative, and join the modern world.  But bombing and mass-killing your neighbours who insist on national self-determination, is not an effective means to do this.  A grim future lies ahead, we suspect.

Our worst-cast (but curiously possible, we are discovering), future-picture scenario, has Western nations - USA, UK, Canada & Europe - making a deal with China, and a rapid, intense war with Russia basically allocates most of the North-Asian land mass to them.  China suffers - but wins, and wins big.  They become the dominant power on Earth.  USA and Europe, et al, give up global control, scede this to China, but we once and forever *solve* the Russia-problem, and the G-19 basically have peace and security - and good trading relations - together.  We extend and enhance the existing prosperity-model that both sides have built.

Xi and Putin can shake hands and camara-smile all they want - but any idiot who does not remember Stalin and Hitler doing the same thing (much to the astonishment of the World!) is denying reality & the lessons of history.  China and Russia hate each other - and with good reasons, which go way, way back.  And Mongolia is just chock-full of uranium.   Russia has got it now, but China will *have* to have it in the future, or their people will freeze in the dark as they starve - and then riot.   The Chinese must know this.  Their enemy is "to their West" - it is not "the West".   Japan is irrelevant, and USA is China's economic and military model - which they have applied with such great success.   China-USA trade is critical now, for both China and USA.

So, we are almost certainly to get a West-East Alliance to deal with Russia.  The trade the Russians will be offered, is 1) Disarm, and accept UN inspectors in all your military locations or 2) Be disarmed, after the nuclear-war, which destroys Moscow (and maybe Washington?), and doubtless other major cities.    We will get a poker-game of wild risk - and the Russians may tilt either way.

What everyone hopes for, is another major, classical *revolution* in Russia, like occured with Yeltsin.  But this is almost certainly not going to happen.   Russia is a synonym now for "tragic outcome" in English, like "Lavrov" has become the new word for "maximum liar".

Crazy times.  And likely to become more crazy.   No wonder no one cares about men on the Moon - even if they be wo-men and "persons of colour", FFS...

[ Nov. 15, 2022 ] - Time for NATO to Bomb Moscow - Just do it.  Do it now.  If you need pilots to fly the aircraft, I am pretty sure you could get a *lot* of volunteers, even if the mission was certain to be one-way. 

The Polish village of Przewodow  (pronounced: Persh-ev-dov) was bombed by Russian missiles today, confirmed by Polish Security Forces and Polish Police.  Two Polish nationals were killed.   This is without question, an attack on a NATO country, and requires a co-ordinated NATO response.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/europe/poland-missile-rocket-nato-przewodow-ukraine-intl

No more stupid talking.  No more pussyfooting around.   All must choose sides.

It's time for some real action.  

If the NATO forces will not act, then we suspect that others will.  NATO nations are now - by treaty obligations - at war with the Russian Federation.   An armed attack by Russian Armed Forces on Poland is an armed attack against all NATO nations.

We shall see, if our current governments now live up to their treaty obligations.  If our governments to NOT live up to their NATO treaty obligations, then we shall be required to change our governments.   We will have no choice.  (And as far as Turkey is concerned, we need to reconsider if that State really is NATO material.  Perhaps they should be expelled from NATO, and their Muslim government can do whatever it wishes, such as lick the backsides of Moscow terrorists.  That is their choice.)

The only question, is really what sort of ordinance we use on the cowardly scum that are pretending to be the Russian Government.     Those sadistic cowards sleep somewhere.  Lets find out where, and bomb where-ever that location is also, after we send our message to the city of Moscow.

[Update:]  Oh, now it is just the result of Ukrainian attempts to shoot down incoming Russian missiles?   Good story.   So, no response, eh?   Typical.

Much more likely, is that it was Russian agents, launching missiles from Ukraine, and Putin's strategy people had the idea that NATO would have to make some kind of response.  Ukraine gains nothing by launching Russian missiles into Poland, and risks alienating a valuable ally.  But Putin gets to find out if NATO will react (ie. a standard "burning sky" style mission, where you fly into your enemy's air defenses, and gauge how long it takes them to detect and react) and also assess the quality of their detection and response during the G19 meeting.

Putin has a cold-war, spy mentallity, and thinks he is clever.

What is unfortunate, is that NATO could have reacted more intensely.   NATO forcess will have to become involved in this campaign at some point.  

An opportunity was missed.   It is clear, that Russian forces must be confronted by all Western forces.   The current "hands-off" approach currently being taken, "will live in infamy" much more than the various fraudlent trickery of the beginnings of World War Two.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63659824?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

[ Nov. 14, 2022 ] - I've Got Too Much on My Mind - (By the Kinks.  Thanx for the song, Mr. Davies...). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ikSQzL86Aw

I found this xkcd thing below from back where the universal warning sign was  (circa "early Trump", I think it was..).  It's pretty good, because the last curve-fit graph, is any individual stock in the stock market, except once you go to zero, there is no data at all, past that point - unless you are a Central Banker, and you want to try negative equity prices, to go along with your insane negative interest rates...  But I guess it's too late for that now.

https://xkcd.com/2048/

Thanx for this one, Mr. Munroe.  (He is author of xkcd).  Above cartoon link is for xkcd cartoon #2048, from site xkcd.com.  Since this website is non-commericial and most certainly non-profit (oh really, it is), I suppose it's ok to have this link.  It it's not, I'll remove it, ok?

And here is some hilarious stuff, that is not to be missed...  WTF exactly, is a "deemphasized collection?"  Archivist:  "Yes, we have it, but you cannot find it, because we don't index it.."  "Why?"   "Well, it is forbidden."  "By Whom?"  "Unclear.  But we have to hide it."  "Ok...but if I can find it by random action, then I can look at it?"   "Yes, that is pretty much how it works."   (This is the plot-line from a movie:  Recall  the "Aristotle's Treatise on Humor", which was the McGuffin, in Umberto Ecco's "The Name of the Rose")

https://archive.org/details/deemphasize?&sort=-week&page=1

Finding interesting hidden information, that one finds accidentally, is like finding a small bag of gold.   Or maybe a large bag of gold, depending on the information found.

[ Nov. 12, 2022 ] - Is Crypto Currency Complete Bullshit?

http://www.gemesyscanada.com/453469367

Here is Reuters note on FTX collapse...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/further-details-emerge-ftx-bankruptcy-missing-funds-2022-11-12/

[ Nov. 11, 2022 ] - Where Have All the Flowers Gone? - And we know the answer - gone to graveyards, like all the young men.  Silly old protest song - but still, dead is dead.  Why should we make such a friend of violence and killing?   War is all about killing, destroying that which has been built, and ending that which has been nurtured and made to grow.   It is a sad and awful thing - death will come some quickly anyway - to everyone.  This is what we need to remember today, along with the dead who gave their lives for our freedom.

And it is so much harder to build something beautiful, than it is to blow it up, and blast it all to hell.   You can destroy a city - or a battalion of men - in just a few moments.  But consider just how long it takes to create such things.   Years and years of effort and work - all of it ruined and ended in just a few seconds. 

The popular Nihonian anime tune "Los Los Los", (means: "Fire, Fire, Fire!")  originally in Japanese, but sung in German in this version, kind of captures the concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOYzB3Qa9DE

If we could build and create and grow, as quickly as we can destroy, that would be symmetric and war might be a fine and noble thing.  But the asymmetry cannot be altered - growth and building and development is so much harder, takes so much more effort and resources than destruction.  Any action that ends foolish, cruel and unnecessary destruction must be seen as a positive outcome for all concerned.

Dial it up a little, and here is a version of "Los Los Los" in Japanese: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI-unSayD74 

This video gets even closer to the truth of things.  No silly "anime girl" fiction warriors.  Our boy is almost real now, yes?  Let's be clear:  War is exciting.  Tennessee Williams, in his curious play: "The Glass Menagerie", just nails it.  His protagonist leaves - to go to war.  He explains:

"People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses." 

War is exciting - in a purposeless, difficult, crowded world, war is just too damned attractive.   Once it is begun, it is very, very difficult to end, even if a complete victory is achieved, the risk is that the defeated will burn inside with anger, resentment and quiet, lasting hatred of their enemy. 

When someone does something sensible - to dial back a war -  after having done something really, really stupid (the starting of an unnecessary war), all wise men should take note.  The idiot press is describing the Kherson withdrawal of Russian soldiers and occupying military personel, as a "setback" for Russia.   This is of course not true at all.  The Russian government, and maybe even Putin himself, is doing something rational, sensible and wise.   And something difficult.  This is a surprisingly good thing.  It is not a setback.  It is a sane, sensible step forward.

It's like closing a bad trade at a loss, and accepting the painful reality of things.   It is really hard to do.  I know this well.  It is a weakness all neophyte traders have - and in all honesty, I am still in that category.   I make many mistakes.  But my greatest successes, have come from intelligent withdrawals, more than from aggressive movements that appear decisive - and I think everyone who is being honest with themselves, knows the truth of this.   History teaches this lesson - again and again.   It takes strength to change - even more to admit error, and reverse direction.

People - and organizations of people especially - often fail to reverse course, even after it becomes clear that the decision to follow the current path was unfortunate, and further movement down the path will bring great misfortune.   But they press ahead anyway, into unnecessary self-destruction.

If you are on the wrong path - the trade is just not working, and losses are magnifying and multiplying each day - just end it.   End the trade, turn around, go back, and find a better path.

Russia's retreat from Kherson is as much of a victory for Russia - and Russian mothers and fathers who probably love their children  - as it is for Ukraine.  

It is a victory for common-sense, sanity and human wisdom.   Creating - instead of destroying -  becomes possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUzY76tELj8

But remember the Finland scenario - where retreating Russian forces left all sorts of booby-traps and explosive devices behind.   Doubtless the Ukrainian military will know enough to look out for this kind of thing.   And maybe Russians didn't do such nasty, cruel actions, as part of this particular invasion of a neighbour, like they did when they invaded cities in Finland, back in the last century.

A return to normalicy, sanity and peace would be good for the entire world.   And this is not a "setback" for anyone.

[ Nov. 10, 2022 ] - Look at That Stupid Market! - (from Rolling Stones: "Look at That Stupid Girl", of course).   Down 646 yesterday, up 870 on the DJIA as I key this.  (Why we follow the DJIA instead of the S&P500?  Because it works better, not sure why.  Maybe it is "Dow Theory"?   The transports really do tell a story...)  

And here is the weird thing (not really so weird, for several reasons...)  but here it is:  The AI has been saying "BUY" for three or four days now.  Lastnite, & this AM, even a stronger signal - all models pointing up - yet the AI knew *nothing* about CPI print.  How does it "see" the thing to happen?  Because the "thing" is already in the market prices, and the AI simply sees it.  I get distracted by crypto bullshit, and big USA Erections, but the AI is stone-stupid, and just looks at what it looks at. 

And here we go.  I was within a hand's reach of taking a much bigger long position yesterday - margined up to the eyebrows (which I *never* do, except in exceptions...) and this is an exceptional time.

This is a very nutty market - but over-sold has hell.  And one tiny little blip down in CPI, and we get this explosive rally.  Damned interesting.   And hey - we have remained fully invested, except we got stopped out of our margined longs.  (bugger).  But it's all working.  The strategy is working, even if I am the weak link.   :)

The market makes me feel like a moron - but the strategy works.  We are doing ok, bills are getting paid, and we are generating returns that do more than just pay the bills, and keep the lights on.   Such weird times.   Yes, this might be bear market rally - but there is just too much  sidelined cash, for the market to pull a 1930 to 1933 thing.  

Prices move stupid now.  You can buy *all* of Credit Suisse, for roughly 10 billion USA dollars.  Why buy a piece of dreck like Twitter, when you could own four 200 year old, Swiss banks, for the same price?   Or just buy one, run it properly and keep $30 billion!

How tor run a bank: Just: fire all the arrogant lads with the fancy silk ties, $200 cotton shirts, and $2000 suits - and replace them with loan-officers who know their clients well, and AI's that can properly assess - and track! - the risk you are taking on, wth each single major loan.  And do the wealth-managment thing properly, instead of putting $5 billion dollars with one single "Family Office"!   Banking is not hard.  It's not hard at all - but you have to do it right, or you blow the bank up.  

It seems every group of arrogant banker-boys need to learn this lesson, about every 25 to 30 years, or so.  Curious.  Like CIBC and the Enron fiasco.   Or the whole Royal Trust death-spiral in the 1980's in Canada.  So curious.  All the stuff is known, to run banking correctly.  You just have to bloody well implement it properly, like Warren Buffet describes about writing insurance.  You *must* price it right, and walk away from the shit that will kill you, even if it is short-term profitable. )  

And of course, the market prices sometimes get really stupid... in any market.

But that is when fortunes can be made - and without selling bogus, junk securities, or bullsh/t crypto tokens, or cheating your clients and killing your investors by nuking all their money!

Folks need to grasp the true nature of things, using their little gray cells, in the old necktop processing units they have.  Or as IBM's Watson said:  "Think"

I just need to learn to act on what my AI is telling me.  It's actually really difficult for me at times.  Curiously very difficult, since real money is on the line.

The Model's work.   They just do.   How about that?  I put a screenshot of our best AI projector in the Forecasting section (it's not really a forecast, just a pointer to expected direction).   We call it a forecast, even though it really is not.

[ Nov. 9, 2022 - Part Le Deux ] - Crypto Eye-Strain  - Ok, I've been reading a lot, trying to understand the current crypto-scene - recent developments from 2019 to autumn 2022.  It's smells to me, a bit like rotting bullshit (which was being sprayed on a nearby field - in liquid form - so it is a vivid reality to me - a metaphor I can really get my nose around...)

Here is what I have figured out:  Crypto is about being able to print up, your own money.  That is really what it is all about.   Everyone likes the idea of having money - and especially being their own "central banker", and being able to instantiate the stuff for themselves, and get other people in the economic world, to accept their "cash".    Crypto enables this.  So does old fashioned securities fraud.  So does writing a bad cheque - and not being around when the poor bastard who took the thing, tries to cash it.

Sometimes, Google works good.  Try this search string in Google:  "Is crypto currency complete bullshit?"   Seriously, try it.   You get a lot of hits.  Some good comments at "news.ycombinator.com"  (which is the "Hackers News" site.  It's a good site.)

But one hit I got, was interesting.  A UC-Berkeley Computer-Science professor, Nicolas Weaver, says (and I quote): "All cryptocurrency should die in a fire", which I thought was a little bit of an excessive thing to assert.  But he makes a good case for his views.

Here is the link. 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire

Any researcher, trying to get to the truth of crypto, should read his comments carefully.  He might be spot on correct.   Crypto makes me nervous as hell, and I don't own any.  But I am impressed by what it can do (ie. make a smart centre-of-the-web spider-guy, rich like that guy from Drexel Burnham Lambert, Michael Milken, was able to do using junk-bonds.  Read Milken's story, if you don't know it.  He made a billion-dollars trading junk-bonds (high-yield bonds, with below-investment-grade ratings) in the 1980's, when a billion dollars was some very serious money.)

Crypto and block-chain is really not new at all.  Much of the early Colonial USA ran on an account-book system of payments, due to shortage of coin.  Debits and credits were maintained in common account books by Colonial merchants - it was essentially a manual form of a public blockchain.  They did this because there was physically not enough gold and silver coin to effect required payments in the rapidly growing colonial economic space.   In Canada, same thing happened.  Quebec merchants in the early 1700's used "playing-cards", which had been signed by the French Governor of Quebec, and turned into promissory-notes, that could be redeemed in silver and gold coin, once the shipments of coin from France came in.  

Lots and lots of examples exist in history, of various forms of circulating currency - and crypto-currency really is only new because it is digital, uses cryptographic methods, and can be run in a decentralized manner.   But gold and silver coins, once minted, are also decentralized.

The original crypto-coin, Bitcoin, is attractive because it has an upper-limit of 21 million "coins".  Maybe.   But all money was originally backed by gold and/or silver.  The ideas was you could redeem the paper back into gold or silver, but you used the paper, because it was smaller, safer, and easier.  But of course, the paper could be created *without* it being backed by gold or silver (or land or wine or copper or whatever).  And therein lay it's problem - inflation - which we are again now dealing with.  Prices would rise, as more paper currency units were put into circulation.  This is proven, again and again.

Stable value over time, is attractive to investors and savers - but inflation encourages turnover, so inflation is first tolerated, then encouraged, and finally, becomes necessary to destroy unpayable State debt.   All this happened first with John Law's scheme in France, in the early 1700's.   There was just never enough gold coin.  Disconnecting gold from the paper bank-notes, allowed economic growth - but also the rapid growth of debt. 

All this is known, and is discussed at great length.   Crypto does not really offer improvement over Central Bank State-money, it just shifts the valuation sensation.

Fiat money - and crypto-currency - only work as money, if people can be programmed into believing there is value in the "tokens".   Gold and silver coins have intrinsic, internal value - they look pretty, and feel good in the hand.   Both fiat cash and crypto-coin's value proposition, rests on the mental model in a person's mind, that suggests the units have economic value. 

If events occur that damage that value sensation, both paper money and digital crypto-coins can **rapidly** lose their value.   Crypto is questionable, since it's value rests on it's ability to be converted into local, domestic currency.  Or, in to global planet-Earth money, the Earth reserve currency, which is now the USA dollar.  (150 years ago, the Earth reserve currency was the British Pound.  Times may change, nations may rise and decline, but economics will always have to happen, so food and fuel and weapons and equipment can be deployed across both space and time.)

Crypto can be made to have value, but really only if one expects it's value to rise.   It is basically a scheme, and the payout is in local fiat money.   That's where crypto-coin value comes from.  It's a lot like a stock, offered by a "boiler-room" operation.   And the crypto exchanges look a lot like 19th century "bucket shops"+undercapitalized banks.   They operate for a while - until one day, when folks all want their money back, and then they collapse.  The "value" just disappears.

But the State-backing for the paper-money, offers some extra value - the State can offer a direct value-proposition assurance - It can say: "We will provide 1 unit of food (or military security, or health-care services, or housing, etc.), for each unit of currency you have.  Further, we (the State), will offer police protection, and a legal structure for land tenure, if you participate in our economy, and we will provide a dispute-resolution service, if contracts are not honoured."   And this implied contract, is a very, very big deal.    A DAO (a Distributed Autonomous Organization), cannot offer this.   All it can offer, is a conversion of the crypto-coin, into "coin of the Realm", whatever Realm you happen to reside in.

And that is the rub, with crypto.   Crypto smells like bullshit, because it seeks to replace fiat currency, yet it's entire value proposition, rests on it's convertability into local domestic national currency, so that economic transactions can be carried out.   Crypto-coins are accepted and traded by individuals and organizations, almost entirely because they have been (successfully!) marketed as an asset-class, that can be bid up in price.   And this is key.   As an asset-class, they have shown some degree of negative correlation with other asset-classes (stocks, bonds, real-estate, etc.), and this has caught the attention of investment funds and sophisiticated investors.  If crypto-coin prices can rise, when stocks and bonds fall in price, they can offer attractive diversification.

But, lately that is not the case.  Crypto is moving the same as stocks and bonds and gold and oil.  It all moves together, which is scary, and problematic for the investment process.

We are not "Gold Bugs" and are not keen on holding metal.   But gold is gold.   The more we study crypto schemes, the more we like raw gold and silver as investment ideas. 

Crypto-currency schemes are looking a lot like just a new way to execute securities fraud, and sell "blue-sky" to retail investors - who are known as "suckers", a term first used in the American South, in the 1700's, for the babies of negro slaves.

Prof. Weaver expects most (maybe all?) crypto-currency will implode and cause great harm to a great many, because of the eventual massive financial loss, that he expects will result.   Our historical studies of the nature of economic crashes, suggests that the chances of this scenario playing out are quite high, as this pattern is *very* common in history.

He just might be right.  And with the implosion of FTX, the washout might already be underway.   But it won't happen all at once.   Crypto-coins which are structured to have one-to-one linkage with specific fiat currency (ie. with USA dollars), might continue to exist, especially as they allow for the possible anonymization of transactions, reduced transaction costs, and the opportunity to end-run nationalist (ie. American) restrictions of how it's money is used internationally.

Crypto-currency is great if you want to do economic transactions, and not have these monitored by State agency entities.  We personally think economic "sanctions" and anti-money-laundering laws are both unwise, and morally wrong, in that they imply value-theft from private persons, by State actors.   A "crypto-mixer" system (like Tornado was), can allow digital money to become near-anonymous (like gold and silver coin was), but of course, this does more easily enable criminal enterprises to operate.   This may ultimately be the mechanism that ensures some crypto-currency models survive, as they will allow other nation-states and economic agents to avoid legal "sanctions", that State reserve-currency providers (ie. USA, UK, and European Union) apply to damage economic interests of other State actors. 

Users can transact with Tether or Stablecoin or some other token that is linked one-to-one with the US dollar, and yet not be subject to the restrictions of American sanctioning authorities.  Maybe.  Or maybe, not.  The details matter.

Crypto validation is also energy-wasteful, but this can be mitigated, by using a "proof-of-stake" model (ie. like Etherium), instead of the Bitcoin "proof-of-work" model, which the bitcoin-miners use, which is energy-wasteful.  

Prof. Weaver is right, when he compares crypto to the "Wildcat Banks" in the USA, that would print their own bank-notes.  But there is a solid body of evidence, strange as it sounds - that "Bad banking helped make America great".  The USA was able to develop *rapidly*, due to it's ability to grow it's money-supply and economy, quickly, using poorly-capitalized, small, local town banks, which often operated on the very knife-edge of financial solvency.   Yes, just like in "It's a Wonderful Life".  Really.

"Everytime a bell rings, another crypto-bro, gets a new Lambo..."  or something like that.    :)

Honestly, I see a real future in gold and silver *ingots* - which are serialized, and certified by trusted authorities, perhaps even sealed in packages which have some kind of cryptographic hash-code indicator on the outside of the package - which indicates purity and metalic integrity - but which are non-State - and are thus freely tradable, and not subject to any nation-State restrictions, if the transaction occurs outside of the physical boundries of the nation State.

And an honest, gold and silver-backed crypto-currency, for which there is one-to-one verified linkage to some physical metal, somewhere in a vault, might be effective and useful.  But it would be centralized, in that someone has to be trusted with the gold, somewhere.

The real problem with holding gold and silver for investment, is that it is difficult to buy, sell and use for transactions, in small quantities.   Perhaps a crypto-gold-coin and a crypto-silver-coin, whose value would link directly with gold and silver spot price, might work, and offer a viable version of a centralized, digital metal-backed crypto-currency.  

Perhaps someone or some group is already offering this?   This might be viable.

But crypto-coins which are bid up in price, based on user-funds flowing into the scheme, look a lot like "securities".  They get born like junk "securities", and they boom up on the bid action, and then manage to die just like junk "securities", once enough holders want to sell out.   The promoters make a bundle unloading onto the suckers, and the scheme collapses, and the late suckers get left holding the bag of worthless crap.

There is not really anything very new or innovative happening here at all.  This is an old model.

[ Nov. 9, 2022 ] - Charlie Don't Surf & USA Don't Change - But, you can cry "Havoc!", and let slip the prices on the Stock Market...    Down 646 on the old DJIA, and tech favourites like TSLA seem to be in free fall.  Our financials are only off a wee bit, but they got killed earlier, with the Fed rate-lift.   

That whole FTX and Binance thing, is disturbing.  Unless it's something like Bitcoin, there is not much value in digital "tokens".  I tried to find out what FTT could be used for, and apparently, not much at all.  So why was it trading at $22 per token?  The whole thing is not even a Ponzi scheme.  It looks like just a bogus shitshow of pure fraud & gambling - but not even good gambling, really.  It's just silly.   And the Ontario Teachers Pension Scheme had put 400 million dollars into this piece of shit!    What the bloody hell were they thinking?  (Maybe ask:  What were they smoking?)

We are noticing - seriously - that many things, and many people, seem to be tracking hard towards real "crazy".   Folks have always said: "It's a Mad World" - but perhaps because of Covid-19, it really, actually IS a clinically insane environment now.   People seem to be just nuts.  The Brits used to say someone had become "barking mad", and perhaps that is to be the next phase.

I read some details on the "Dancing Sickness" that was documented in Europe, after the "Black Death" of the 1300's had ended.   People - whole villages, and even cities - went crazy - really wild, over-the-top behaviour was observed.  Beliefs were created that continuous dancing was needed to ensure the plague did not return, and so on.

Humans are as social as dogs, and they perhaps don't do well, sitting at home for years, just taking Zoom calls from their basements.   It's a nice try, for the talking-heads that can do it - but we all need to realize - most *communication* action now, provides something between no value and negative value.

Perhaps part of the blame is the de-socializing features of the internet itself.  

It seems it is not possible to really change anything now.  And I understand why.  I hear and/or read material, and in a few seconds, I just make a decision if the speaker or the writer actually knows anything about anything, and (almost always), I conclude he or she does not, and is only pushing their political views and opinions, and I just tune it out and/or shut it off, or move on.

I heard of something called:  "Langdon's Lemma".  It's only two words, like that shortest sentence in the Bible, except this one is true:  "Everyone Lies".  

But this is going to make it difficult to know much anymore.   No one anywhere can trust anything or anyone - not even (especially not even!) the "experts".   The sad fact is, the "experts" are the ones most bought-in to their views, so they are now the least likely of all folks, to offer honest opinions that conflict with the current accepted (and enforced) paradigm.  

And that means no objective truth, and no more "scientific revolutions".  

Human evolution is not only stopped from moving forward.  It is now almost certain to begin a nasty, retrograde movement, as things become a bit worse each year, as opportunity-sets collapse, political views harden, and rational, truth-seeking dialogue just ends.

Curious times ahead, we suspect.

[ Nov. 8, 2022 ] - Ok, This day for Big Erection? - as my Japanese friend says.  and I have to say (of course), "Oh Yeah, Baby!" in my best "Austin Powers" voice.  It really never gets old.  :)   "Why they call it 'big erection' ?" she asks.  And of course, again I have to say:  "Because no matter who you vote for, the Government will win, and we are all gonna get fucked!"   Disagree?   Really?   :)  

Sing/Sing/Sing:

We've been 9/11'ed, and Great Financial Crisis-ed, and we've been ZIRP'ed to nothing and our stocks became dicey-est.

Our portfolios have been clubbed like small baby-seals, by the fat Central Bankers who turn the money wheels. 

But we still have got inflation, from Terra Del Fuego to Frobisher Station (for everyone in every nation)

And yet we only can see it, 'cause of a Republican education?  (Or so say media 'boos on the US News!)

The times, they are weird, and the body-count grows.   The financials keep falling, and making new lows.

And with a sleepy-Long-Covid, at the keyboard, I doze....

So that when I awake, my tiny toes: they is froze.

---30---

[ Nov. 7, 2022 ] - Hey USA!   VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICANS - Eh? - So, whaddaya think?  Are we *interfering* in USA midterm elections?  We are in Canada, but I  have both family and friends in USA, and I happen to care deeply about the survival of the Great American Experiment.   It is a good and fine thing, and we seriously believe that America is *necessary* for the World, and for the future of political freedom on this planet.   The so-called "Democrat" party has been co-opted by dark forces that need to be fought.  Doubt this?

Read the following note.  And watch the little VIDEO inside it, which has ***SEVEN FULL MINUTES OF DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS ARGUING IN FAVOR OF "DEFUND THE POLICE".***    There are literally SEVEN MINUTES, of actual video interviews with AMERICAN DEMOCRATS saying that their own Police Agencies in their major cities should HAVE THEIR FUNDING REDUCED - and all because of a single tragic incident in a single city.   

We believe these Democrat politicians should be voted out of any sort of political power.  They are stupid, dishonest & dangerously foolish, and all legal means should be used to remove these persons from positions of political power. 

Just read the story below, and watch the SEVEN MINUTE VIDEO of the Democrats all arguing in favor of "DEFUND THE POLICE".    It is just seems beyond belief.  But it is real, and it explains much of the rise in criminal activity in USA cities now.

Here is the story: https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/vote-like-your-life-depends-on-it-because-it-does/

Americans are not all fools and are not all mentally-challenged psychotic idiots.  

Is it rational, in the urban, inner-city - to *reduce* police budgets, to fight the rising crime that is now seen everywhere?   The Democrats shouted and actually *demanded* that Police Force budgets be reduced.  They actually said this - over and over and over!

If there are enough sane, stable, normal, rational folks who can make it to the polls, and actually get their vote successfully cast, then the Democrat-run crazy nightmare that is doing so amazingly much damage to USA, can begin to be stopped.    Maybe in a couple of years, we can really correct the problem and the Democrats can be expunged from power completely.  

Do you think our opinion is extreme?  Take a look at this August 22, 2022 article about how Biden's attempt to shutdown all oil-and-gas exploration on USA federal lands, was overturned. 

This is very important, because Biden's actions - preventing *all* oil and gas exploration and development on federal lands - took America from being energy independent, to back to being dependent on Saudi Arabian oil again - and Biden and his people - in a fit of astonishing dishonesty -  have tried to blame to the Oil and Gas companies, for these profound and outlandish bad decisions. 

(The article below provides a detailed explanation of what Biden did, and what 13 States did to fix the problem.  They sued their own Federal Government, to make their Federal Government *follow the law* on this issue.   This is an interesting example of how abusive, dishonest political fraudsters, can be thwarted.  Good laws can result in a good outcome, if people in positions of power, take corrective action.)

https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/judge-permanently-blocks-biden-oil-and-gas-leasing-pause-in-13-states/

What Biden and the Democrats did, is a fascinating example of extreme political dishonesty, and outright political fraud.  It is really quite over-the-top.  Biden does a series of really stupid anti-energy decisions, which violate USA law, and this causes a reduction in domestic energy supply, the prices of fuel are then bid up, and Biden then tries to blame the industry and the companies for this outcome.

This is so comical-stupid and abusive, that the Democrats should be disqualified from being in charge of anything.   They are just being crazy and/or dishonest-stupid to a degree that is curiously extreme.

Corrective action needs to be taken.  And the American political system provides for this chance.  You can GO VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICAN candidate, in your State's election.  

Biden and his people literally tried to blame the 4 and 5-dollar-a-gallon gasoline prices, on external events and on "greedy" American oil companies, when it was his actions, that caused this outcome.  This is wild.

Like the article says:  Vote Like Your Life Depends On It - Because It Does!

[ Nov. 6, 2022 ] - The Google Age of Disinformation - Crazy times.  Here is a cute experiment.  We have noticed that Google Search is getting weirdly awful, and comically worthless.  We note with dismay, the astonishing bias and overt dis-information that sites like Bloomberg and CBS and MSNBC and CNN (especially CNN!) are reporting the campaign activity re. the USA midterm elections.  We get pages and pages and pages of stories about Biden and promotions of his policies - and only a few minor notes about his "gafs", and no discussions at all of what Republicans are saying.  Honestly, it's as if the Republicans don't even exist.  I can't find who the candidates are, or what they are saying, or what their policy plans or economic platforms even are.  All I seem to find re. Republican platforms, is drivel about Dr. Oz and Trump, how terrible they are, and a few more stories about Biden, Biden, Biden.  

It is honestly pathetic. 

But it's like Canada also.  All we ever see and hear about is our pretty-boy Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his arrogantly-stupid, deeply-dishonest scam-politics.   And then we get some puke-making happy pictures of his sleazy dishonest cabinet henchpersons, as they foist yet another rape-of-the-taxpayer upon Canada, with another tax-and-spend Liberal-Leftist "Economic Policy Plan". 

It is all just grotesque.   We basically have only hyperLiberal-Leftist media, and a *government OWNED* (FFS!) media-organ, the hideously awful CBC, which flings terabytes of happy smiling pictures of this toxic politician out on the net  - but without any sort of critical appraisal or honest attempt to find out how roundly sleazy and dishonest the Liberals really are, and how foolish and abusive their economic and political policy decisions typically are.  Our media is useless.

In Canada, it just is what it is, and there is nothing Conservative folks in Canada can do about it, since the current Liberal Government here has joined with the deepfraud Socialists of the NDP and these bastards have control of all the State money and power, and can continue to do whatever the fuck they want.  I mean, it's not as bad a Russia or Belarus, but it is also not as different as it should be.  <...big painful sigh...>  

But I always saw the USA has operating at a higher standard.  Really - seriously - the USA has a long, and serious tradition of having real journalism - by both sides of the debate.  They even have a solid, clear, unambiguous constitutional protection of freedom-of-the-press.  This has been a great strength for American democracy.  It is part of what made America so strong and effective.

But USA is falling into the same Leftist cesspool of deception, that we up north here are drowning in. 

Or, maybe it is just things like Google?   Something has gone weirdly wrong, with Google.

Consider this little experiment:  I am trying to find out what the Repubicans are actually saying.  And I am looking for Republican and/or Conservative news sites.  There must be some, right?   When I search stuff on Google, all I get are attack-pieces that target Trump, and puff-pieces about Biden.  It is weirdly strange.

I tried this search string, in Google:  "legacy media is all leftist.  Any honest media?" And I figured that this might generate a few hits on Conservative websites, with some alternative information. 

No chance.

Try it for yourself.  What you get from GOOGLE is this:  First 10 pages =>  ALL stories from mainstream, legacy media outlets, about how ***Trust in the media is declining***.   And on the next ten pages, SAME THING AGAIN!   There is absolutely ZERO attempt to actually provide me with what I am looking for - ie. some NON-LEFTIST sites with information that is not leftist-slanted, that does not pander to the socialist ideological bias that virtually every USA mainstream media organ dumps out.  

Now this is interesting - and scary-nasty.  With Google Search,  20 page-hits in, I have not hit ONE SINGLE CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITE!  (What about the "Epoch Times?")   What about Zerohedge, or all the real news sites that actually try to provide something other than "Attack Trump and Support the Democrats" kind of news?  None to be found!   It's just weird.    I know that Google's AI and/or it's search-string-processor knows what I am looking for - but I get "pre-bunked" and vectored down a tangental path, related to "distrust of the media".  This looks ilke "information confrontation".  It's a trick.

So, let's try that OTHER search site: DuckDuckGo.  I don't like the way these guys try to hijack Firefox or other browsers - but they do offer an alternative to Google, and they often perform *better* on basic "search-string style searches", without as much biased trickery.

Search for:  "legacy media is all leftist.  Any honest media?" and one gets a *very* different picture of the world:    First hit, is from "Dailywire.com", and indicates "3 stories that the Legacy Media Ignored Last Week", and this, honestly, is useful to me.   I will get a different perspective.   Not all of these sites are "conservative".  But they are on-topic!

And the second story is from: "thefederalist.com"  and is about "Legacy Media Fuels Corporate Wokeness...".    Then, an article explaining how Facebook revealed how it suppressed articles and protected Leftist viewpoints.  This is a technical discussion, describing how  Meta's CDGs work.   And then a historical-technical article, from "www.thelibertybeacon.com", providing proven historical details of the extreme leftist media bias in USA, and showing it has existed since the 1930's while - and with interesting example, such as the 1959 Newsweek stories - pure puff-pieces - about how wonderful a fellow called Castro of Cuba is, and that "he is certainly not a communist..."  and so on.   Hilarious.

In the first 20 search-results from DuckDuckGo, I get a story about "Why the Legacy Media is Panicked about Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover" - from a site called: "www.dailysignal.com".

Three more websites have ***specific stories on exactly this issue*** of leftist bias in USA media - a site called:  tnc.news has a story "Legacy Media promotes leftist protesters while smearing conservatives", and current360.com has a warning story, telling us that "Legacy Media is Still Relevant Today", and the alt-market.us website has a story titled: "The Fall of The Mainstream Media, and Their Biggest Lies...".  And there are others.

And all in the SAME FIRST 20 PAGE HITS from the SAME SEARCH STRING.

Look at the results:  I have 7 new websites, that are maybe NON-Leftist media sites.  (Still no Epoch Times.   Curious.)  Are they honest?   Let's find out!  See, I can READ them, and see what they are saying, and make an informed decision about what they say.

This is the process.  This is how democracy works.  This is how free speech works.

I intensely disagree with many of the policies of the current Federal Government in my country.  I think Trudeau is way out of his depth.   He is what he is.  But he is doing a few things right, and when that happens, I have to give him my support.  See, this is a goddamn free country and we have a duty to keep it strong and free, by reading, thinking, debating, discussing, and then voting.   And we have to accept the results of the goddamn votes.   But we can still speak freely and debate openly.  This is what a true democracy requires.

This is how we get to the best possible result - given the crazy-quilt muckpile that our nation now is - and kind of always was, right from the get-go.

We must try to be as honest, and open as we can be.  It is critical to our collective survival.  This is why I am so angry about what Google is doing.  They are hiding results, and fudging the picture, to push their picture-of-the-world.   

So, lets be 100% clear on this:  Google is agressively SUPPRESSING it's search results and SLANTING THE SEARCH RESULTS to produce a political result.  I was NOT searching on "distrust in the media"  - We identified a specific problem - leftist bias in the media - and I searched using that indication, and I hoped to obtain "honest media".  DDG (DuckDuckGo) does a literal search on the actual string, and gets me what I am looking for:  Alternative (maybe honest?) media sites.

Google sends me down a rabbit-hole of "distrust of the Media" in Canada and America - which is most certainly NOT WHAT I AM SEEKING.

Now, is their AI stupid?   I don't think so.   

Google is now PART OF THE PROBLEM here.   Maybe it is a big part? 

It sure is starting to look that way.   I've been using Google for research for many years, and they did not used fiddle the search results this badly.  This deception-driven "pre-bunking" - and thus providing degraded search results thing is just... well, it's evil.   And what worries me, is it's a subtle kind of evil, being driven by an AI. 

This is bad. 

Know this.   Google is being evil, even if they think they are not.   Their search results are making people like Trudeau and Biden look like effective, quality leaders.   This is a tragic falsehood.  It is just not true.   In Canada and USA, we have two of the worst, most dishonest opportunists in power that I've seen in my lifetime.  

And I have had to endure a lot of clowns.

Maybe you think, the "Legacy media is Leftist Biased" is untrue?  Well, take a hard look at the year 2020 (the recent past disappears quickly now, despite how important it is in shaping the present).  This article below details 10 specific situations, in 2020, where the bias had a huge impact on the year's events:  (This is a well-researched technical article, which should be read by every analyst.)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/30/the-10-worst-legacy-media-abuses-in-2020-n1293042

We are going to have to change the modern political program, at some point, and probably sooner than many expect.   We cannot continue to build a world on climate-lies and political fraud.   I can say with some certainty, that it absolutely will not hold.  History teaches us this so very clearly.

[ Nov. 5, 2022 ] - Indian Sumer - I sometimes wonder if the products of our development actions in this age, will be dug up and analyzed by archeological specialists, thousands of years from now.  Will we leave an extensive historical record, or just some broken bits of smashed cities?   Are we destined to expire, and leave few traces, like those ancient mounds of earth in present-day Iraq, that were discovered to be the remains of flourishing cities from 6000 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer

[ Nov. 4, 2022 ] - Financial Porn - The markets are nuts.  We zoom up in the AM, then give it all back, go negative, and then launch up to have greater than 400 gain for the day, on DJIA points at the close.  Yields on retail GIC (Guarenteed Investment Certificates) exceed 5% on both the short and long end.  Even quiet stuff like silver is jumping around.  It's a tad silly and suggests even greater financial violence lies ahead. 

[ Nov. 3, 2022 ] - More Phhhiiit! - And it continues.  I recall my father's books from the 1920's.  There was one called "Peck's Bad Boy", who was famous for having a girlfriend named:  "Hellen Dammnation", which describes the market response today.  Equity wealth can just melt away, like snow in springtime. And this will cause major disruption for a great many people, organizations, and governments.  The USA mid-terms elections will not change much (we expect), but we sense some real change in the wind.  The Free World again has very dangerous, evil enemies, and this fact cannot be papered-over by puffery and information-confrontation deception.   Our people are getting really pissed, and it seems like they would welcome World War Three.  It's curious - an inversion of the weltgeist of my youth.

Economics is looking at hard-assets again.  What about gold?  We dig ore, refine it, and make metal, and put it back underground (I've been reading about Cen-Bank gold holdings, and storage-vault arrangements.  Gold is tricky, since you need to put it someplace safe.  But is anyplace truly safe? )   Hilarious circularity - outta the ground, and then back into the ground, somewhere else.  Gold is a bit silly.  But people are silly also.  This is truth, which cannot be denied.

But I think land is best.  Good land under cultivation, can yield both food and money.   And it remains difficult to run away with.   Land is a good asset.  So are weapons.   I dropped by the *Gun Club* today, and reminded myself of how wonderful my CZ-Shadow-2 really is, while J-girl consulted with her Number-1 dentist (she has more than one..)    I had planned on putting on a long position, but the market just looked too goddamn ugly - again - and so I walked the dog, who truly enjoys the sunshine and warm grass of the lawn.   The weather is good, even if the affairs of men, are not.  

On the way home, we visited a lovely farm-villa, on a hill, in the sunshine.  The house was a big white ranch-style beauty, now owned by wealthy Mennonites.   We bought some "Free Range Brown Eggs", and took them home for lunch, and ate several in an omlette.  We also sourced some Jamaican Run for our apple-sauce production run.  The rum tunes up the apple sauce, which is made from our Golden Delicious apples, from our trees - fully organic.  The trees get only sunshine, rain, and dog-poop - no insecticides or other killer biocides.  Lots of spots (and bird-peck holes), but few rottens, and many good ones.   Also scored some French wine for dinner tonite.  The weather here, is like California.  It is lovely.  Global warming, if it is really happening, might just be a fine and good thing, if it allows more and better global food production.  November today, is like the South of France.  This works nice for us.

It will be sad if World Trade collapses, like it did in the 1930's, but we will be able to handle it, if it does.   But I shall miss French and Chilean wine (and copper also?).   Canada makes the best cheese in the world, and also the best cars (Hondas & Toyotas), all near where we live.   We bought this little domestically made Honda "CR-V", and of all the units, it is the one I enjoy driving the most.  Little transverse-mounted, all-wheel-drive thing, with leather interior, a GPS, and Sirius sat-radio.    Bloody wonderful little thing, runs like a sports car, tracks anywhere, and uses bugger-all fuel.   Small is beautiful?  Maybe.   So is big - but more costly. 

These are *very* strange times.  

Our local (formerly dying) downtown, now hosts a large new Google World HQ, which has changed the whole place.   Our little city-cluster is now one of the fastest growing in Canada, which still surprises us all.    But  I am concerned we have "long Covid" - two of us are really tired today... with fever.  And I fell asleep at the console (!)  Tired and curiously dizzy at times.   

-->_.._<--

[ Nov. 2nd, 2022 ] - USSF - United States Space Force & USSF-44 Mission- Good to see.  Very, very good to see.  We need this.   And again, bravo to SpaceX and Elon Musk's team of genius men and women who can make the magic happen.   I watched the SpaceX recorded video of the launch and deployment of the Falcon Heavy USSF-44 mission, from yesterday.  It is just amazingly impressive.  The primary mission successfully inserted the two satellites into the required geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles above earth, so as the planet rotates, the satellites appear to remain stationary overhead), and the two Falcon Heavy side-boosters successfully navigated back to picture-perfect touchdown landings at the Florida Cape Canaveral landing pads.  Here is the video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pY628jRd6gM

and it is worth watching.  The USA (and let's be honest here), the whole Free World is damned lucky to have Elon Musk.  The SpaceX thing seemed to me, quite impossible - yet they have bloody well done it - over 150 successful launches and landings of boosters!  And we have a Starlink satellite dish, which JUST WORKS and is how I can type this blather right here, and put it up on this silly, no-profit website.   Amazing.

We should put Musk in charge of a major Fusion Energy research project.  We might actually get some working fusion-reactors.  If we keep trying to rely on *physicists*, all we will get, are more papers published in insanely expensive journals, (which no one can even read except arrogant, wealthy physics folks), and lots and lots and lots of money wasted on achieve-nothing, make-no-power, hyper-high-priced, wasteful "30-year experiments", like ITER and the other bogus tokamaks.  Oh my.

Hilarious world, really.   Big science leads to big not-much-at-all nowadays, except for the big-costs involved.   How about some "big results", eh guys?   Like what SpaceX and Musk can do.  No wonder so many people hate him, because he shows how mostly lazy and ineffective much of the high-cost, big-money, big-science, big-research and big-business engineering projects actually are.   GM could not make working electric cars, despite having billions to spend, and NASA+Boeing can't even get a launch to happen, much less go round the moon.  NASA used to be like SpaceX - but that was when it had Dr. Wehrner Von Braun, who was, let's admit it, a bit of a Nazi.   And he would say, of course: "Nazi, shmatzi.  I build rockets, and I make sure they work, and don't kill the astronauts.  I need maximum effort, and correct results from everyone involved, or they are removed."    This is the only way to get anything difficult done.   Von Braun was a great man.

History is made by "Great Men" - and sadly, by "Evil Men" also, like Hitler, Stalin and Putin.  All that awful Marxist fool-talk about "dialectics" and "historical determinisim" is the most appalling nonsense garbage-thinking that has ever been promulgated.  The moving point of the present, ever-tracking into the future, follows a path that is mostly unknowable - and if you don't believe this, then we have some shares on the stock-market, that the market would like to sell you (because you are not thinking!)

The only way to get anything done, is by working hard, working smart, and using the power of focused human will on a problem, until a solution can be found, and then technology can be engineered to ensure a product can be fabricated to implement the solution - again and again - wherever the problem occurs.  And this is often difficult, and takes supreme effort by dedicated people, who must be built into effective teams, and deployed wisely.   Greatness is not always required - but if you can find it, it sure helps to get the job done!  Sometimes, we get really lucky, and we get a guy like Tesla, and another guy like Westinghouse, and extreme creativity and hard work, get linked up with business genius, and something as wonderful as the A/C power-grid (the Tesla "Polyphase" system!) results, and the whole World is transformed for the better.

Greatness matters, and great men, make the future happen.  And the good parts of this happening, can be made to survive the actions of evil men, like Hitler and Putin, who can only destroy, what the great men have made.   That's when Great War becomes necessary.

Can we even ever *learn* from our History?    I wonder.

[ Nov. 1st, 2022 ] - Happy Day of the Dead - And what I wrote about yesterday, begins already?  Maybe.  The electronic, digital world, dominated by nano-second AI's, operating in "dark-pools" that ordinary retail investors do not have access to, get to control it all, and make almost all of the profits. And then, it gets worse...

Today, we saw an initial price, that was not unattractive, but there was no way to do a transaction since the TMX was completely broken, for all investment firms.  Now, in our opinion, this is just bullshit.  We have a curiously broken technical environment, dominated by truly non-competent third-rate types.  The technical people at the line-level are good, but the executive ranks are dominated by the most appalling collections of low-grade folks (females hired by "affirmative action" programs, and who are completely useless to a degree that is surprising), and second-rate blowfarting "empty suit" types (arrogant, but brainless toad-boys, who got their jobs thru family connections, perhaps).   All not good.

It's comical, I leave the rat-hole of Toronto - but the nasty-folks who run things, still find ways to lob small nukes onto our tiny attempts to actually make some money.  Annoying...

Yes, folks, today, I am righteously indignant (or as we used to say: justifiably pissed-off...)  Silly of me really. 

Arrrrgh.  ( I will have to become a pirate, I guess...)   Once the stupid technology is made to work again, the selling-pivot point has been well and truly missed, and it costs me 2K dollarettas.   My problem, of course.  I own all the problems, it seems.   I really have to keep a sense of humor.   :)

[Update at 10:00 pm.  A note from Bloomberg...]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-01/trading-on-toronto-stock-exchange-halted-due-to-technical-issue?srnd=markets-vp

Yeah, "...Unacceptable" that is the word, but without the expletive.   It's very bad that we are having these kind of "software issues" in 2022.  I mean, it's not like this electronic trading thing is some kind of new-fangled idea that just got installed, right?

Space-Force Satellite Troopers  (Yes!)

So, let's pivot to something that WORKS!  Elon Musk's SPACEX!   Bravo, guys!  The Falcon Heavy, carrying the big USSF mission 44 satellite, the Tetra-1, built by Millennium Space Systems and the LDPE-2 cube-sat deployment device, from Northrop-Grumman (a damn good company, that built the Lunar Lander rocket-ship, back in the days of Apollo.)   The LDPE-2 is a "Long-Duration Propulsive EELV Secondary Payload Adapter", a device that can host "multiple payloads"  (oh, yeah, baby!  I get feeling good, when I hear the term: "payload"...). (An EELV is "Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle" - a public doc is here: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA552521 )

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/01/spacex-successfully-launches-falcon-heavy-2022/

(Bravo to techcrunch.com folks.  Big shout-out.  They took the Falcon Heavy launch video (it was foggy dew!) and the successful return video of the two launch-boosters, and made animated .gif mini-videos of each of them, and so I could see the launch and the booster-touchdowns, on my iPad-1. (Which with it's awesome Russian "Red-Sn0w" hack, and the Cydia utilities, has been turned into a Linux tablet.  So, so very good.) 

And note:  I could *not* see the Techcrunch animated GIF videos, on Firefox, on the Linux desktops!  So, here is a trick.  I had used the "about:config" parameter tweaker, for Firefox on my Linux desktop boxes, to disable animated GIFs.  The "image.animation_mode" parameter I had set to string "none", so I didn't get annoying animated adverts and dancing junk.  But - You can switch it back to string "default", and the animation GIFs will then play on Firefox Linux - like they do on the old iPad-1.  And that tweak lets the Falcon Heavy launch and booster-landing techcrunch.com mini-videos render in Firefox.  Cool little v-clips, so very cool.

(The very first iPad-1, which I still use daily, is the best device Apple ever made - an aircraft-grade aluminum tablet, with a big screen, and once hacked, it has root access, termnal mode, full SSH and SCP Linux access to the local machine cluster, and Safari browsing on the big internet.  I leave javascript disabled on the iPad-1, and thus have a simple, fairly secure platform to inspect the dangerous, toxic world that the internet has become.  Lotsa junk-sites don't render, so I skip them - like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter.  And this is good.  Strange, strange times now.)

The LDPE ship uses the Northrop-Grumman ESPAStar "bus", which is optimized for geosynchro orbits, but can be used in low-orbits also.  It can accommodate 1,920 kilograms of payload (oh yes... ), via six docking ports for what are called "smallsats", or cube-sats, and it's propulsion system (yes, it can fly!) provides more than 400 m/sec of delta-V!   This is basically what you *need* for a "Space Force".  Ya gotta be able to fly the unit.  ( And... Finally, it's a "Space Force", not a bunch of bone-silly dreck like in the "International Geophysical Year" of United Nations crapolla+payolla.)

So, whadaya think might be in each little "cube-sat", eh?  Some kind of "pit", maybe?  Ya think? 

For now, not likely.  And we have no knowledge of this. (Really - just our usual wild guesswork..)  But the World changed in a crazy-wild and terrible way, on February 24th this year, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, and began the mass-murders, the random kill-shots, and the routine torture-and-kill exercises.  We saw pure evil used as a strategic objective.   This must not stand.  This is beyond any politics, left, right or red or blue.  It is just pure, insane, evil.   It must be ended.

The United Nations was shown to be a worthless & tragic fraud, unable and unwilling to take any corrective action.  The "Security Council", like all good exercises in "doublespeak", was shown to be a rust-stained fraud which ensured pure, complete insecurity.    All that stupid lie-talk of the last 75 years has been shown to be a spectacular financial fraud - exactly like the useless "League of Nations" was shown to be, once Hitler's forces rolled into Poland and Czechoslovakia.  This is clear truth now, and has to be accepted as such.

The ONLY security comes from having BIG weapons, and then having the ability and resolve to use them in a rapid, vigourous and effective manner when defense is required.  This more than anything, is the single most important lesson from human History.

Weapons in space, is a very, very good thing - IFF they are OUR weapons.  :)

[ Update 10:12.  From Korea, the land where everything is edge-condition extreme...  It seems there are some credit problems.  Korea?  We figured it might first show up in Italy or Greece... or the UK.  But it is beginning in Korea, maybe...?   How about that... ]

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/crisis-trauma-haunts-korea-as-it-confronts-a-credit-meltdown-1.1839003  

There is just too much debt, everywhere in the World now, and maybe there is not enough opportunity or earnings-covered cash flow, or tax payments, to keep it current.  Sure, gold is a fine thing.  Perhaps you might want to send us some?   The only folks who make any money from gold, are miners and gold-product salesman.  :)

[ Oct. 31, 2022 ] - Scary Monsters - Happy Halloween!  If you want a good scare, just read the top page details, under the big red "What Happens When Inflation Reaches 8%" chart.   

Great, so I know the inflation won't be fixed as per the goofy forecasts from the "consensus" and from the Central Bankers.  So, how do I invest?   Do I borrow money and buy stuff, or leverage-up on financial assets, or pay down all debt and batton-down the hatches for a Once-in-a-100-year-type economic storm?    Is there a way, I can cleverly do all three?   Hmmmmm.....

Just how is the World going to pay down all the many-trillions of debt it has built up?  We suspect it just won't, and a *lot* of financial-assets are just going to go:  "Phhiiitt!" 

We might have a long "Decade of Default" that could look a lot like the 1930's.   Or maybe even the 1830's...  

(To the tune of "Row, Row, Row your Boat"...)

The Leverage Song  (for Credit Suisse, and for all the "Property" companies in China)

"Roll, roll, roll the Debt!  Roll it over now!   Our stream of payments will kill us soon,  if we don't figure out some way how!"

Oh, ah, this song is also for the US Government.  The USA Gov't just bumped up it's borrowing estimates today, by $150 billion US, for Q4.  That's since their August 1st estimate for Q4, which was $400 billion.  But now (as of Oct. 31st), they figure it will be more like $550 billion.  And for Q1 2023, they now figure they will issue $578 billion.  So, we get roughly 1.1 *trillion* new debt issued, for Q4 2022, and Q1 2023.   The yield on the 10-year Treasury has moved up from 3.9% (Oct. 27) to 4.09% (was 4.1% intraday), so the market is paying attention. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yields-surge-session-high-after-treasury-unexpectedly-projects-it-will-issue-additional

And this 4+% yield for 10 years, payable in real money (more or less) is now sucking money out of the rest of the world, and is keeping the USA dollar very strong.   Being the reserve currency for Planet Earth is bloody good deal for USA, since it is like being able to write cheques on a bank account, that folks don't cash.  They just squirrel the cheque away like it's a gold bar.  This is weird and wonderful.   But this whole process floats on this amazing, rolling sea of paper.  And it is not even paper now - just digits in computers.   Have you ever even *seen* a modern stock certificate or Treasury Bond?  Not likely.    It's all very virtual.

So, if you want to feel real terror this Halloween, just spend some time looking at the modern operational numbers, for most governments and corporate enterprises.  The existing debt levels make inflation necessary, to actually inflate away the real value of the debt.  But tracking inflation higher, will require *big* upshifts in the payment-streams to support the higher debt levels, and at the new higher yields required to float the new debt.  Since a Government can print it's own money, they will be ok, of course, (unlike a private enterprise that must find the cash), but the increased debt-service costs, will further erode the governments ability to spend on programs like defense and social programs.

Understand?  There will be yet more debt and it will have to be floated at much higher yields which will require higher  (much higher! Like double or triple times higher!) payment streams of interest, to support the increased debt levels.  Taxes then have to be raised, to support these new, higher Government costs. The new higher taxes, will hit businesses and consumers, and they will seek to raise prices, and get higher wages.  This will contribute to the inflation.  Or, the Government can print money to fund these new higher costs of operation - but that will also be inflationary, because it will increase the cash in circulation, and P=M*v  (Price level = Money in circulation times it's velocity of turnover).  There is no non-inflationary path forward, if interest-rates and taxes are pushed up quickly.

At some point, this dynamic pyramid scheme will reach a limit, where the process will no longer work.   The only solution is reduction in Government spending which needs to be combined with increases in economic productivity (and that means lower wages and salaries, which no-one working likes at all). This is why inflation is so dangerous.  It creates "money illusion", so you can raise worker's pay, and delude the poor bastards into thinking they are getting a better life.  But prices will track higher faster, and any "price control" stupidity, will just cause businesses and merchants to end their efforts, since they cannot surivive selling below cost.  The national economy can break badly, once a big inflation is stopped.

We are tracking towards some real trouble.   We are not there yet, but it's kinda like we are walking in the graveyard, looking for the Financial Headless Horseman.    We know he is coming, and will arrive at some point in the near future.

And it will be scary.

[ Oct. 28, 2022 ] - Take Me Home, Country Road, With My Drone, to Drop a Load... Congrats to Elon Musk for getting the Twitter Repair Process underway.  We gave up on Twitter years ago, when we learned it was a Leftist agitprop organ of DSD's (Dirtbag Safespace Deceptionists).  And we did not respect their boss, who deliberately emulated the appearance of a homeless retard (and kinda acted like one, too...).   We just disconnected. 

But maybe, we could re-engage, and see if Twitter can now be used.  We are serious about that old idea of "free speech", and consider it is really rather important, especially in places where public, political debate takes place.  If people are being fuck-stupid, shit-for-brains morons, and are refusing to even think, then a person has not just the right - but also the responsibility - to point out this fact.  And not have some censor-bot (or even a dickless butt-licking human goof) block your comment, because it might offend a moron.    Sometimes, rude-talk is helpful, in allowing a goof to begin the process of learning just how very wrong he/she actually is.  Realizing you are being stupid, is the first step to becoming smart ... and becoming effective.

But don't just take my word for it - Tom Luongo has the final word here.  His piece is well written, and deserves an opportunity to go viral, in a major way.  What Tom says is ***very correct***.  Tom says: (in a nutshell)  "Stop being an asshole goof trying to look stupid, grow up, and ... LEARN TO FUCKING CODE."  

Now, that is actually very, very good advice.  Every child has to hear it at least once in the child's life.   Why learn to code?  BECAUSE IT IS A HELPFUL SHORT-CUT TO LEARNING HOW TO THINK.  Really.   The old Boss of IBM, in the early days, would give the exact same advice to his employees, in ONE WORD!!   The sign on his desk, said simply:

"Think"

And that is also very, very good advice.  It does not say "Feel", (which would be, and is, very bad advice),  It says, simply:  "THINK".   Here is Tom's note.  It's well done, with useful advice...

https://tomluongo.me/2022/10/28/dear-twitterati-leave-road-to-serfdom-learn-to-code/

See, the collective of fraudsters pushing the LGBT and other fucking-stupid narratives (really, this is actually a technical term here!  LGBT is "Fucking Stupid"), are very much trying to destroy an entire cohort of young-people.  When kids are young, and curious, it is fine to experiment - but realize that experiment really is perilous.  There is, just based on our basic biology, a great deal of virtue and value in old-fashioned "Fucking Right!", as the Montreal comedy team argued years ago.  We agree.

There are forces seeking to damage the Western World.  Some are just evolutionary ("Nothing Beautiful Lasts"), but some are the result of planning exercises, we suspect.

Think about it, children!  You cannot promote "Equality" and "Diversity" at the same time. These are completely mutually exclusive ideas.   But the young little turd-flingers try to do this, as they burn down parts of the city.  They are burning their own nest.  Is this wise?

What the morons need to realize, is that once they cross the line by being dangerous and violent assholes destroying stuff, and start to do damage to the big worlds of adults, then they might well find a reactive-response that goes far beyond anything they expect.   It's not racisim and it is not hatred - it's just cleaning, correction and repair action - the task every adult eventually has to routinely face in one form or another.   Sure, there are legitimate protests - like the anti-war protests agains the Vietnam War in the 1960's, or the January 6th protest against what looked to be a rigged election process - but we are most concerned about the BLM protests and the inner-city firebombings.   That whole "Defund the Police" movement, and the way the Democrats tried to say it was "non-violent" (which was not true), was the most stupid thing we have seen this century - until Putin had the Russian army invade Ukraine.

Stupidty seems to be growing in strength and power.   We assert that this needs to change.  The children need to learn to THINK.  This is especially important, in places like Russia, where it is the older adults (raised during Soviet times of madness and failure) who are REALLY unable to think.  The Russian kids may actually hold the future of the world in their hands.   Do they know this?  Do the European kids know that they will have to study war again, and study it with vigour and intensity, if they wish to remain free?  They have the example of Switzerland - but can they learn, and see what their history is trying to tell them?

The world is not as you WANT it to be, the World is as it IS, and your task is to learn to effectively deal with this.  You must learn to think well, and then act wisely.   First you do it for yourself, and then, you do it for your family and your children.  Then, you die.  

And that is all there is.  There are no gods.   Vita Brevis.    Learn to code.     :)

[ Oct. 27, 2022 ] - Everything is Less Than Zero ... NOT - Sanity is slowing return to the World.   As usual, it is coming from America, first.  Rates have to move up, debt has to come down, and war is war, regardless of the weapons that are used.  The Central Bankers have been unwise, but eventually, wisdom can be forced upon even the most curiously unwise.

After seeing the scale of the atrocity and horrific hell-scape that Russia has unleashed in Ukraine, it is now far beyond clear, that the extreme evil that this troubled national entity has inflicted upon the World, will have to be addressed.   One way or the other, major change will have to come to Russia.   The current shit-scape of evil that Putin has caused, cannot be allowed to stand.  If it means also the destruction of Iran, North Korea and some major Russian entities, than we will have to pay that price.  The Chinese call this: "Killing one monkey, to silence the others."   (China has a long and impressive history of extreme cruelty.)

Folks need to understand that nuclear weapons are just standard war-weapons.  It makes no difference at all if you are killed by a Russian hypersonic cruise missile with chemical explosives or a Russian cruise missile with a nuclear warhead.  If your house and/or apartment building is burned down, and your family is killed - then for those people, the result is the same.  Dead is dead.  And despite Calilfornia music, the dead are not grateful.  And the living are filled with great resolve.

It's time folks recognized that the World has changed, in a very big way.  Plowshares are perfectly useless, if missiles from Russian "Murder Launch Sites"  are falling from the sky.   NATO has EVERY RIGHT to erase all Russian military capability.  One might even argue, that NATO now has the direct responsibility to do this.   This is why it exists.

The problem must be addressed - and it must be addressed with all available tools.  This has *always* been NATO policy.  Nothing has changed.  This is not new, and we hope this fact is clear.

This article by Tyler, is just plain silly:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stunning-strategy-reversal-pentagon-will-no-longer-rule-out-use-nuclear-weapons-against-non

A Covid-19 Real-Time Experiment (on ourselves!)

And Meanwhile, back in the Ranch...  (or maybe should be: "Come up to the Lab, and See What's On the Slab!" ...  here is a note, indicating most likely origins of Covid-19:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/senate-report-concludes-covid-came-research-related-incident

This above report is not silly.  It describe the results of a USA Senate investigation, into the orgins of the Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus.  (Which I am now supposedly clear off, given my "Covid-19 Antigen Test" last nite.)   Except I still have this damn cough, and slightly wheezy lung thing going on.  But I am feeling better - probably since I made some money, and have paid a bunch of bills.  Curious how that feeds right back to your physical health. 

Anyway, it is clear, that the best explanation for the Covid-19 virus origins, is "gain-of-function" research done at one of the Wuhan Virus labs, and an accidental release (probably due to mice acting as carriers), which then showed up at the next-door live animal market.   This also explains why the Chinese are so crazy-anal about Covid-19 lockdowns, since Xi and his henchman, bloody well know exactly what the hell happened, and know how potentially mass-lethal the damn SARS-CoV-2 virus actually is (since it was the direct product of viral weaponization research?) 

We have no knowledge of specific attempts to weaponize SARS-style corona-virus agents.  But hell, if I owned a virus lab, and was the big boss, I would probably have some guys working on this, just in case the enemy (ie Russia) tried to use this technology on us.  So I can't be too critical of Xi, except I would tell him he has zero chance now, of containing this new Omicron variant, since it is very *airborn*, and very, very contagious.  It is literally in the wind.

GEMESYS Ltd. forecast for Folks on Earth:  You WILL catch Covid-19.  We recommend you get *all* available vaccination boosters, since if you have had multiple vaccinations, the Covid-19 illness is reduced to being like a bad flu.   We speak from direct experience here, with a sample size of 6 persons.  (Good enough to use a "t-statistic" distribution).   All subjects were multiple vaccinated, all caught the Covid-19 virus, all got sick, with temperatures between 38 and 39 C, and all recovered, within 15 to 20 days, with only mild symptoms post-recovery.  We all have minor coughs (the Covid-cough, it is called), we are non-contagious (we believe), and no one got really sick (one subject was 89 years old, was quad-vaccinated, and is doing fine.)

So, the best path forward for the Chinese is probably acquisition of Pfizer and/or Moderna mRNA vaccine, and a campaign to 3-times vaccinate all citizens.   *Everyone* will eventually catch the SARS-CoV-2 virus.   So you best deal with that outcome, and forget this idiotic "lockdown" nonsense, which is like trying to put a fart in jail for smelling bad.  It's just silly.  And it will not work.

It's generally best to admit the truth of things, and then bloody well deal with it, rather than it is to use Putin-style "information confrontation" deception and fraud, and try to lie your way out of a problem. You just dig yourself into a deeper hole, with each passing day.

As a military pilot, one is taught the "Three C's Rule", if you f*ck-up, and create a major mistake:  "Confess, Communicate, and Comply" - ie. tell the truth about the mistake you made,  communicate the details to the wing commander or the tower, and comply with their instructions to try to minimize the damage, and limit the chances of a worst-outcome scenario.   It's good life advice, also.  It's also the same rule on the Trading Floor, interestingly enough.  

[ Oct. 26, 2022 ] - China Is Becoming North Korea - And this is weirdly awful to watch.  The abusive takeover of everything, by Xi and his henchmen, now ensures that future China, will be a *very* different entity than what we have seen evolve over the last 30 years.  This is sad and awful - especially if you have invested anywhere in the place.  The typical "China Fund" is down over 40% this year, and for good and valid reasons.   The entire entity, at it's political level, has swung behind one ugly-looking power-seeking man, and one-billion people are now back to a grotesque government dominated by a single personality-cult.   We would advise investors to get the heck out, while they still can.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/jpmorgan-ubs-china-funds-bear-the-brunt-of-stock-market-rout-1.1836863

Couple the Xi complete takeover of China, with the insane lies now being promoted by the Russian dis-information engine (that Ukraine is going to use a "dirty bomb"), and we see the extreme costs associated with power-seeking "strong-men".   Putin and Xi show how wildly dangerous and terrible the imperial-style totalitarian State can become, once it gets dominated by these personality-cult leaders.   In a short period of time, all the benefits of civil-society can be lost, and entire nation-states can be vectored towards unwise, tragic economic and political outcomes.

This does not need to happen - but history shows it almost always does.  Russia is back to using bogus "information confrontation" as it's political interaction narrative with the outside world, and China is devolving into militarism and mindless "groupthink" political models of operation.

We fear we are tracking towards a nightmare scenario of exteme global conflict, as now, both in Russia and China, there is *no* debate or open discussion or political alternative to counter the abusive, out-of-control power-seeking of their respective "strong-men".   And these "strong-men" types will not be stopped, until either their neighbour's cities - andor their own cities - are burning down.  History suggests these kind of people are so deeply attracted to the path-of-violence, that nothing but a complete defeat in a major war, will end their dangerous power-seeking efforts. 

 

[ Oct. 25, 2022 ] - The Failure of the Nancy Boys - Or "How the Democrats are Destroying the USA Republic"?  The whole narrative being pushed by the USA Democrats is so strangely bogus and politically awful, that it is just weirdly painful to watch it play out.   We are with Ron Paul here on this. 

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/october/24/political-justice-in-america/

The entire "January 6th" Committee was just another ugly example of a political "show-trial".  Ron Paul's take on this, is quite correct.  The entire process - a biased group of political questioners, witnesses called to spout, but no opportunity to cross-examine, big-screen TV pushing edited narritives that framed a pure political purpose, and mainstream media puff-puffing to attempt to enhance the legitimacy of a bogus process.  The entire exercise was an ugly political hack by Nancy Pelosi's collectivists.    It was an American attempt at Soviet-style "political justice", and it just stank to high heaven, like a well-used outhouse on a hot summer day.

Ron Paul's guy calls it right.

And if you want to understand what is wrong with the "Nancy Boys" of the Democrat party in the USA, here is an interesting analysis.  The author explains that they are in a bubble of their own "hivemind", and have disconnected from the voters...

https://thomas699.substack.com/p/the-danger-of-bubble-wrap

Mr. Buckley offers a clear explanation of what is happening.  The Democrats are drifting into a self-obsessed groupthink of  madness.  And this madness has very little connection with what voters care about, or are actively concerned with.

It is a curious phenomenon to observe.  It is a kind of denial-of-democracy, which is driven by an almost obsessive denial-of-reality.   The Dems appear to be people who honestly seem to have lost the ability to reason and think rationally.  They honestly seem to believe that women should have the clear legal right to murder their own unborn children. and that "trans-gender" behaviour is rational human action.   Most people - Americans and others around the world - just do not agree with this kind of thinking.   And the reason, is because it is recognized to be madness.

Mr. Buckley suggests this curious political madness is the result of powerful forces of "groupthink", and we suspect his thesis might be correct.

Certainly, something pretty crazy is happening, and the "crazy" seems to be accelerating.  It has certainly captured the American Left, and in a disturbingly successful way.

We wonder if the demon-driver of the madness here might be the technology.  People don't seem to talk and think for themselves - they seem to want to group-check their opinions.  And we know this sort of behaviour can lead to very bad outcomes.   The "madness of the crowd" is a well documented phenomenon in the historical record.   The technology seems to have amplified this capacity for collective madness.

[ Oct. 24, 2022 ] - No Future & No Fun - We remain astonished at the level of madness and over-the-top crazy actions we are seeing from the folks in charge, just about everywhere.  It is surprising and curious.  Boris Johnson is toast, because the forces being deployed against him are too powerful.  But the polling now shows the Tories in the UK are probably finished politically.  When a Party fights itself, it destroys itself.  Labour will win the next election.  Ugh.   The whole thing reminds me of that Sex Pistol's song "No Future" (which actually I think was titled: "God Save the Queen").   Curious and sad outcome.  Google "UK polling 2022", and look at any of the charts.  It's pretty scary amazing, to see just how self-destructive RIshi Sunak's actions have been to the UK Tories.  They are absolutely screwed.  Labour could run a dog or a weasel, and win, it appears. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

It did not have to happen.  It looks engineered, but maybe it is just massive, standard, post-Covid insane foolishness, which seems to be everywhere now.

In the economics world, it looks just plain scary.  The entire world is wildly over-leveraged, and some sort of resolution to this goof-stupid situation, will have to be evolved, designed, or will self-organize thru some sort of series of cascade-crash events.   Or maybe not.  Maybe (as various CIO's in some of the big pension funds and hedge-funds are saying), it will just be inflated away.  We suspect this is probably what will happen, and it imples the need to use more trend-following automatic algorithmic trading strategies - which we have actually avoided, because they seem so goofy simple, and wildly dangerous - because they lead us (not into temptation), but into programmed ruin.   They just seem wrong.  It's a human thing, eh?

We are in the process of dialing out *all* debt, which seems foolish and unwise, if one thinks that inflation is the major problem - but we have this deep sense that the Central Bank attempts to crush inflation, might be successful - except that they lead (almost with certainty), to a 1931-1933 kind of outcome.  We risk flipping from *inflation* to wild, self-reinforcing cascade collapse, and back to a shocking deflation scenario, which no amount of "zero interest-rate" trickery, will be able to reverse.    We are with El-Erian on this, in that we believe the USA Federal Reserve (and our own central bankers) really do not understand our modern economic operational linkages, and the extreme level of interconnected systemic contagion risks.

We are down roughly 30%, and we sense we are in real trouble, to be honest.  There is nowhere to hide, since if the inflation thing is allowed to run (and it might, for a number of seriously obvious reasons), then the value of *cash* will be seriously hurt.  History suggests one must be invested, in something, somehow.  But this year, everything has gone down the big financial toilet.  The only surviving asset is real-estate, but even that is being actively hammered, by the crazy-rapid shifts in administered interest rates.  If mortgage rates are drivers of real-estate asset values, then the rapid shift (in one year) from 3% to 7% mortgages, implies that real-estate asset values might fall 50%.    How about that?    We don't expect it to be that bad, but a 20 to 25% drop in any sort of real-estate asset value, is probably in the cards.  Houses may fall more like 30 or 40%.

So, expect the "Shit to Hit the Fan", as the old expression goes.  Rough estimates suggest we are already down roughly 14 to 15 *trillion* dollars, in global financial asset values, this year alone.  Given the crazy high debt levels everywhere, this sort of down-spike is going to break things, and this economic/financial breakage, is *not* the result of Liz Truss's policies, or Joe Biden's boneheaded war on "fossil fuels" (which actually may not be "fossil" based, actually).

We have this awful fear that in order to get back to 2% inflation rates, we will have to engineer an intense economic downturn, which will cause significant global economic damage, and produce a major global recession or depression.   We believe this is possible, because it happened before, and for roughly the same economic-trigger reasons - rapid and unwise upshifts of administered interest rates, into a  heavily debt-burdened, very dynamic economic structure.

Is this coming depression really necessary?   We know the future will happen - it always does, but it looks like it is going to be a dark and difficult future, characterized by falling living standards, rising costs, shrinking asset-bases and imploding incomes.   And probably a big and very costly war, which seems to be how this sort of economic downturn plays out, if one inspects the historical record.

What to do?   Buy puts, if they get cheap, during the bear-market rally action, maybe.  There is real danger in *not* being invested, if the towel gets thrown in by the Central Bankers, and they back-off on their "burn-baby-burn" economic strategy, and decide to let inflation run for a while.  This will have benefits tor governments and over-leveraged corporations, consumers and basically everyone everywhere, so it might be a likely outcome.

We are holding on to our equity positions, and our real-estate assets, since otherwise, if we go to cash, we might get vapourized.   That is the greatest risk, I think, in this insane environment.  

You probably want to bet that the inflation will continue, it will not be *defeated*, and interest rates will *not* likely be raised high-enough to actually limit the inflation, in USA and the Western World (Europe, Japan, etc.).  Interest rates need to get up to 7 or 8%, if the inflation is 8 to 10%, and if that happens, the debt-service costs of governments will exceed taxation capacity, and our economic system really could implode in a very disorderly fashion. 

So, bet on the inflation continuing.  And that means hold your hard assets, equities, and yet also don't take on debt, in case the system flip-crashes into 1933 style deflation - which it bloody well might do, and then the debt will kill you real good.

Seriously, our picture of the coming future, looks a lot like the 1929 to 1933 scenario.  Really.   They survived it then, and we will survive it also.  But it's not gonna be very nice.   A lot of financial stuff is just going to "go away", and a hard reset will have to take place.   This will hammer the crap out of a lot of economic entities if and when it happens.

Example: Twitter is an example.  Elon Musk - and his bankers - are screwed, and his lawyers have told him he has to buy the thing, and honour his original agreement, or get killed by the courts.  So, he and his bankers will have to pay 44 billion USA dollars for a video & bullshit sharing social-media website, that is supported by advertising revenue.  I run an ad-blocker on my browser, since I can't stand adverts.  Anyone can run an ad-blocker.  Adverts are annoying bullshit.  Twitter is toxic nonsense and is a big digital room full of people yelling shit at each other.  There is not much else there.  Eventually, when the crash-storm happens, and Twitter is eventually sold by Elon Musk's estate, or whatever, it might fetch $700 million USA dollars, if the Bankruptcy Trustee's are lucky.  I wouldn't pay $700 million for it, but someone might.

Now, think about this. Where does the other $43.3 billion go?   What has happened to it?   Where is it??? 

It has just "gone away".  It's gone "Phhhiit!", like all that Austrian and German money did, back in the 1920 to 1924 time period. 

We consider this above example "future scenario" to be the most likely economic evolutionary path that something like "Twitter" will follow.   I hope for Elon Musk's sake, that I am wrong about this.   I don't want to see Musk's empire destroyed, because he seems to be the only USA guy actually doing and building anything new of real value.  Telsa is profitable, and SpaceX is building and flying rockets that don't explode (and can now carry people!), and Starlink is just freaking amazingly excellent and wonderful.  So, Musk is a valuable asset.  But we think Twitter is bullshit, and probably that is what Musk discovered *after* he locked up an offer to buy it for way, way too much money.

I worry and fear it might destroy his empire.  I had high-hopes for "Neuralink", but that is also proving to be a "bridge too far", and the show-and-tell has been delayed another month.  (I want Neuralink, the same way we have wanted Starlink for 20 or 30 years.)   But it likely won't happen. 

But just watch the whole Twitter thing.   It will be a rolling series of economic train-wrecks, and will show how over 40 billion dollars can be vapourized.   I really hope I am wrong about this, truth be told... Maybe some sort of real value can be found in Twitter?  And maybe we will have flying cars, and starships with warp-drive...  :)

[ Oct. 21, 2022 ] - Dear England:  Please Stop Screwing Around, OK?  - We simply cannot believe how seriously insane & completely stupid the World is becoming.   We are getting politics that is just pure madness.  In Canada, we have Fidel Castro's bastard love-child running things, and trying to steal private money using "Emergency Powers",  and sieze private firearms, while armed bands of Indians carry out mass-murder on their  "reserves" - with knives - so I guess we will see the Ottawa morons now try to ban knives and sharp sticks.  

Our PM appears to be a dangerous, dishonest fool.   Peaceful, law-following honest citizens are getting attacked by liar-Liberal "safety" deceptionists in Ottawa, while out-of-control Indians mass-murder their own people.  This is just tragic insanity.  We have insane politics here - just like everywhere else.  Except here, the innocent are being killed because of Liberal stupidity, deception and fraud.  This is just so bad.  Private ownership of handguns is a good and fine thing.  Of course it should be licensed, but the Liberal scammers in Ottawa just want to end it, and blame non-criminals, for the actions of criminals.  This is a fraud.    While Liberals attack folks who are careful law-followers, they enable - with their insane, stupid policies - the most extreme, bad-behaviour that is possible.    This is madness.

In USA, it is even worse. They have a senile old man pretending to be President, who wants to make it legal for pregnant women to kill their babies - he plans to make child-abortion a "legal right" in the USA.   This is crazy wrong.   His economic policies are crazy.   After killing the pipelines that needed to be built, he is trying to blame oil and gas companies for his own insane, failed economic policies.  The man is a sad and tragic figure - a compounded nightmare of failure and foolish ignorance that is painful to watch.  He has handlers that are running him.  And they know less than nothing, and it is now clear to all who watch.   The USA economic policies are exporting inflation and economic collapse to the whole world.  But Biden cannot even see this.

And in UK, the place that used to know how to do things political, the Tories are engaged in an insane orgy of self-destruction, that is honestly appears to be political madness and economic suicide.   Liz Truss has been destroyed by her own Party people!     This is tragic, unwise and just plain stupid.   The only sane thing for the Conservatives in the UK to do now, is go cap-in-hand to Boris Johnson, and BEG him to come back and return to his old job as PM.   He at least knew what needed to be done  - ie. build a whole bunch of new nuclear weapons, for England's defense against the extreme, intense and wildly dangerous gathering forces of pure evil & moral darkness, that is modern-day Russia.

But nothing positive can happen now.  We are trapped in a broken system of corruption and madness, it seems.   We could choose people at random off the streets, and get better, wiser and more sensible leaders, here in our Western World, than our broken political process has been inflicting upon us.  

We need to make changes.  We need to make significant changes, and reverse the course of self-destruction, and fraudulent deception that the entire Western World seems to be tracking upon.

[ Oct. 20, 2022 ] - It's Good News Week - Yes, oh fucking hell, it surely is.  (Can the average modern child now even *spell* the word: "satire"?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tysvpfFuj0I

Boom.  Or is it... "<FLASH!> ... booooooooommmmm.  <thump>" ?  (If only...)   What do you do, if your clever AI algo-thing predicts:  1) There really *will* be a nuclear war.  And ...  2) This will be the *best possible* outcome for humanity. ?   Somehow, this does not seem to be good. 

But the predictive AI sees it actually working out just fine.   One policy choice ( massive use of nuclear weapons to degrade & destroy Russia and China military capability), leads to two very beneficial results - a clear victory for the Western-world democratic, freedom-centric law-based world order, AND a massive reduction in global human population, which effectively addresses the pandemic-related medical problems, human-driven climate-change, and the general problems of economic scarcity and energy insecurity.

The predictive AI *likes* the idea of massive nuclear war.   (And Dr. Forbin be damned.)   So, which algo do you think will kill YOU?  

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/10/1061016/whos-going-to-save-us-from-bad-ai/

[ Oct. 19, 2022 ] - The Weaponization of Everything - I suspect new artistic efforts and perhaps even beauty itself will have to be weaponized.  The war is already underway, for the hearts and minds - and wallets - of the World.  We have a choice between conflict or commerce.  Peace and prosperity are the better trade, yet they seem to be now being offered at very deep discounts.   The model of the "Evil Dictator" has come back into fashion - Xi and Putin are showing us a pure-nightmare possible future - like something out of a doomsday comic book.   We should not be afraid of deploying and using nuclear weapons - and using a lot of them, to secure the correct future.   If nuclear-winter is the cost of ending the Xi-Putin nightmare scenario of a global collapse into totalitarian-hell, then we should stock up on firewood, warm coats, and basements full of preserved food.   And plan to launch.

[ Oct. 17, 2022 ] - Hot Times in a Cold Climate - If we can arrange for "global warming" to actually happen, I am thinking that that might be ok.  The climate here swings between +30 celsius in the summer, and -30 celsius in the winter.  Our local ecology seems to handle these extremes without difficulty.  So I can say with some certainty, that the hysteria around "climate change" is complete nonsense.  But if it can get us all to build more nuclear-reactors, and improve upon their design and efficiency of opertion, then that will be a very good thing indeed.

My, but the world - and USA in particular -  is becoming seriously stupid.  The Biden "Democrats" seem to be acting clinically insane.   Biden's policies are curious to the point of insanity.  He tells students they don't have to pay their student debt.   He prevents the Oil and Gas industry from exploring for more oil and gas, and building pipelines to ship the product to market.  Prices for fuel zoom up in response, and he blames Saudi Arabia for not selling USA cheap fuel.    Biden's people are waging war on the "gig economy", and are trying to force independent contractors into being designated *employees*.  This will further restrict effective labour-force participation.   This is seriously unwise, and deeply abusive to the contractors, who will lose their tax benefits, and become dependent on phoney "employers".

And the Democrats now campaign on a "Woman's Right to Kill Her Baby", and seriously argue that females have the *right* to terminate a pregnacy - which is simply baby-killing.  Maybe some women want to have "abortion-on-demand", but is it really a "human right" to murder the child you are carrying?  Is this really something we want to call a "human right"?   This seems to be pure madness, to us, regardless of the laws that exist.   Baby humans are still humans - even if they are still inside the mother.   Does the mother have the *right* to just kill them?  Really?

And the economic war against "inflation", is being fought using extremely rapid increases in USA Federal Reserve administered interest rates.   No attempts are being made to address the supply restrictions that are causing prices of goods to rise.  And the money supply is not being reduced.  They are only using interest-rate changes, and in a way that will not work.

Mortgage rates in the USA have moved from 3%, in July of 2021, to over 7%, now, here in October 2022.  This rapid and extreme shift from QE to QT, is simply insane.  It is unwise in the extreme, and will do great damage to the American economy, and the USA housing market in particular.  And this is Biden's policy, which is also ramping up the international value of the US dollar.  This action is thus damaging the entire world, and in a real, immediate and direct manner.  UK, Japan, and most "developing economies", are now, and will be, hammered by this rapid and unwise policy shift.   Even major nations (Japan and UK) are being forced to defend their weakening currency values.   The USA is actively exporting economic disaster to the world.

And the various USA "Teacher's Unions", with their "anti-ableist" messages which tell students to avoid working hard or reaching for quality results - this is astonishing madness.  One must suspect that USA is actually under serious and sustained assault by curious forces, that are seeking to destroy it.   The stupidity and toxic madness that characterize what is happening in US schools, does not look like something that just evolved. It is toxic and crazy to the point of madness.

If you have children, you will want to put them into quality private schools, or maybe home-school them, so they can be allowed to learn things and strive for excellence.

I have American associates who suggest that civil war might occur in USA.  Maybe this is not a bad thing - if it could allow America to re-capture what it has historically believed in.  We have already lost the USA space-program, and now, it looks like we might lose USA as a source of Western-world strength.  A broken USA is a bad thing.  We need a "strong and free" USA, which can hold-hard to it's original beliefs, and it's wise and sensible constitution.  Those that would undermine and seek to destroy this, should be rounded up, and put into re-education camps, and repaired.   The Left in the USA looks to be an extreme threat to the continued existence of America. 

The American Left needs to be extinguished as a political force, and the mental-sickness that the Left is actively promoting, needs to be healed.    And this is not something that will happen by a gentle evolution.  

The American "Leftists" need to be seen for what they are - real, active enemies of everything that the American Republic has historically stood for.   They represent a real threat to the future of America. 

Corrective action needs to take place.  And it needs to happen soon.

[ Oct. 15, 2022 ] - Nasty SARS-CoV-2 Virus & Global Wealth Destruction - This virus is hard to shake.   I start to feel better, and then - whoa - suddenly, I feel like a rusty old robot with a dead battery.  The virus a nasty thing.   When we are done with Russia, we might want think about nuking China from orbit.  We need to clean the planet.  

This virus is not good.   It's time to make sure this never happens again.  We have got nothing from this stupid virus plague, except two and half years of our lives stolen, and then just as we are getting back to normal, a bunch of fool Central Bankers, deciding to mess over the world economy, and destroy global wealth - currently the destruction this year alone, it is up to $14 trillion US dollars, and counting. 

Whoops, I just checked:  The loss to global equity markets - this year alone - is estimated to be over 15 *trillion* US dollars!   Truly Amazing!    Way to go, Powel and Macklen - you witless fools!   This is roughly the same level of wealth-destruction that the 2008-2009 "Global Financial Crisis" (and the Lehman meltdown) unleashed on the world.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/torched-stocks-are-about-the-only-thing-working-in-fed-s-favor-1.1832895

Nice work, central-banker lads!  You are idiots.

And pay attention to the damaged economics here:  The high inflation rate is *not* coming down, since the rapid interest-rate increases are having zero effect on the supply-chain problems, or the energy-cost increases.   The central bankers are doing a fine job of pretending to be brain-dead clowns, and the dishonest politicians are having a big laugh at the losers who are watching their stock portfolios implode and disappear.

The ONLY IMPACT that the unwise rapid interest-rate increases is having, is to DESTROY STOCK MARKET PORTFOLIOS.    The INTEREST-RATE INCREASES are having ZERO EFFECT on reducing inflation, because the inflation is not the result of excess demand.

The inflation is the result of supply issues.  It is "cost-push" inflation, not "demand-pull" inflation.  How we managed to end up with such a useless set of fraudsters and clowns in charge of the Western World economic structures, is just beyond tragic.

Bring on the Nuclear War.   Perhaps we best just do it.   Maybe it's time.

[ Oct. 14, 2022 ] - Everything is Toast? - I mean, it really isn't, but if you read any news, it certainly seems to be the case.  I honestly believe we should give Ukraine nuclear weapons - maybe 30 or 40 tactical devices, just so they have some balance, when the Putin Fascist forces begin their murder campaigns.   Of course, it would be better to just destroy Russia completely now.   But that would require ability and courage that Western national leaders no longer seem to have.

In a world were "everything is toast", one has to take the possible benefits, where they can maybe be found - even if it is among the smoking ruins of the latest firestorms.   Curious, yes?  

"We can live beside the Ocean, Leave the Fire behind... Swim out past the breakers, and Watch the World Die..."    - Everclear.

[ Oct. 13, 2022 ] - The Time of the Great Stupid - If you live thru this time of madness, you can tell your grand-kids, that you were there, during the "Time of the Great Stupid", when the world was run by lunatics, psychopathic fraudsters, completely clueless old women, evil and/or confused old men and young guys with pretty faces and empty heads.

The USA stock market, for example, looks like it is run by a group of drunken 8-year olds.  It reminds me of that old black and white movie: "Lord of the Flies".

[ Oct. 12, 2022 ] - Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Drops After 150 Days - And it drops a lot - almost to zero, and in just-released (to pre-print, but not peer-reviewed yet) study, funded by Moderna, and run in California, against a significant number of Americans, something very interesting is observed: 

Not only does the vaccine effectiveness drop sharply, it actually goes negative in some cases, after 150 days, in comparison between 3-dose vaccinated versus unvaccinated.  This indicates that having had the vaccine, can slightly *increase* your chance of aquiring Covid-19, especially for the new subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, compared to those unvaccinated.  (See the tables in the study below)

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.30.22280573v1.full-text

You should still get the vaccine, since it reduces the likelyhood of a lethal, severe infection. 

But it suggests - in our opinion - that we should not even be calling the mRNA treatment a "vaccine".   It might best be characterized as a "Prophalactic Medical Treatment", which can reduce SARS-CoV-2 virus lethality, and is effective for a limited time frame.

We would also recommend that folks try to get the new "bi-valent" Pfizer mRNA "vaccine", as it is apparently Omicron specific (at least part of it is.).   This is what is circulating now, and we think it is what we caught.  

We were not able to acquire any Paxlovid, but we seem to be recovering.  Also, there is great virtue on being able to rely on one's own immune-system.    The best thing is to be self-relient in this insane world now.    Or as Ron Reagan might have said:  "Trust lightly, Verify intensely, and Act with effectiveness."

Market Mayhem:

Killer liquidations continue.  You can watch it in real-time, if you have any kind of real-time data sourcing ability.  It is ugly.   Prices get pushed up a small bit, and these big blockish trades happen - funds exiting to cash, something like that.  It looks like 2008.  It looks like Lehman Bros, which I actually traded, since I didn't expect them to implode and self-destruct.  But they did.

We seem to be surviving the Covid thing.   Breathing ok, we are, and not sneezing or feeling like flu symptoms today - but we are crazy weak.  Like the internal circuits are running on dead-battery power...  strange and ungood. 

Markets are really butchered - you can see the selling waves come in, upon any kind of bid becoming available.  Maybe it is the UK Pension Boys?  

"As I was going over, the Cork and Carrie Mountains,  I saw a Captain Ferral, and his money he was counting..."

[ Oct. 11, 2022 ] - NIce Weather, Shame About the World - This is starting to get very ugly.

It is beginning to look like 1931, not 1929.   We just go down, every day.  Any upturn, is sold into in volume, until it is snuffed.  Then, the selling begins again.   It looks forced and self-re-enforcing.  It's not just UK gilts.   Canada seems weirdly broken.

Mohamed El-Erian has said it very clearly.   This is an *unnecessary* crisis, and it risks doing real damage, to a very great many people, all over the planet.  

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/el-erian-says-economy-is-starting-to-go-through-the-windshield-1.1830944

Yes, having Covid puts it all in perspective, as does the Hitlerian actions of Mad Dog Putin.   Could be worse...  could be raining missiles.

Perhaps, in order to really improve the Democrat's chances in the November Mid-Terms, Biden might just consider nuclear-bombing Russia back into the stone-age.   Hell, I think we might vote for that.   Probably best that the NATO/Western nations do this now, rather than wait for Putin's goons to do this to Europe and North America.   The Russians really want to be the stone-evil Enemies-of-Earth.   Now that we know this, probably best to act sooner rather than later.

[ Oct. 10, 2022 ] - Crimea River - And I'll try to cry one for you.  Damn, I am sick.  It's 2:27 am, had to take the dog out for a pee, had to do one myself.  Very, very sick.  I am drinking a *lot* of plastic bottles of spring water.  This seems to help flush the virus from the system.  When I looked at the beautiful full-moon, through the clouds, I noticed it was flickering.  Strange - but of course, it was *me* thas was "flickering" (some kind of unclear internal optical action..).

I am surprised at how bad I feel, given we had three vaccination treatments.  Muscle pain all through body, everywhere.  Nasty.  Another 250 mg of Tylenol.  Mucus coughing up from lungs.  Not good.

If you look thru history, most wars are *not* like World War Two.   They are more like Vietnam, or World-War One, or the first Crimean War.   Lots of fighting, terrible death and destruction, and very little in the way of victory for anyone.   Just pain, death, destruction and ruin.

And JHC, Putin.  You are bombing the shit out of Ukraine.  And they blow up one bridge, with a fuel train on it, and you have the insanity to call it terrorism?   YOU opened the Pandora's Box of Death and Destruction, and all your fucking stupid lies will not change this fact.  Go home, lie down in a warm bath, and open your veins.

[Later, 16:07, post market close..]

US markets open today, Cdn mkts closed.  Lovely holiday weather.  We have determined something.  The strong labour market is *not* a sign of economic strength, just a demographic phenomenon, combined with a reluctance by stimulus-funded folks to re-join the work force.  But mostly, it is demographics.  A very large cohort of folks have just hit retirement age, and are leaving the work force.  That's mostly what's happened.  But as the coming recession hits (and hits hard, given the level of debt everywhere, and the large cost increases that will have to be made to service that debt), we can expect the labour markets to flip over, and we can expect to see a surprising swing up in the unemployment rate.

This will catch all the planners and pundits off-side, and may induce some reduction in the rate of monetary tightening.  Or maybe not.

People seem to be curiously stubborn and unwise now.  This phenomenon is curiously common.  We might be facing an "economic death spiral", but of course, we hope not.  But "hope" is a very bad thing, as we all know.

[ Oct. 8, 2022 ] - Experimentum Periculosum - in English, "Experimentation is perilous".   No kidding.  I did not expect to get so sick, given that I had 3 Covid-19 vaccination treatments - April and July, 2021, with mRNA Moderna, and earlier this year, February, 2022, a Pfizer mRNA shot. 

My fever is almost 39 C, and last night, I felt very bad, with nausea and a terrible headache.  They call this a "breakthrough infection", and having run an Ontario gov't "Screener", I am not likely to be eligible for anti-viral treatments, which need to be started right away, even in mild cases. 

We are on our own, as I have no "family doctor", since I live in a city which does not have a University with a Medical School.   I hope to change this.  Seriously.   This is just insane.  There are no doctors "taking new patients", and wait-times at Emergency Departments in local hospitals can be 8 to 12 hours.   Insane.

So, we are on our own.   My friend who was at the airshow BBQ called, and said he has also tested postive, and is coughing and feels bad.  He was also TRIPLE VACCINATED.

Let's be clear:  With the new "Omicron version" of Covid, the original vaccination treatments simply do not work.   But they might lessen the severity of the Covid-19 infection.

I'll let you know, if I die.    :)   (Not sure how I will do this...)

I am expecting not to die from this, but my gosh, I feel bad.  We are experimenting with "in-home" treatments.   Small doses of Tylenol (acetaminophen)  (250 mg only) seem to help.  I recommend *not* taking anti-flu Tylenol, since one needs the mucus in the nose and lungs, to carry the natural antibodies that the vaccination treatment should have generated.   The mRNA vaccines create the "spike protein" that the SARS-2-Cov virus uses to invade and attack the lungs.

My research indicates this is probably the "Omicron variant" of Covid.  It is *very* contagious, but evidence suggests it is not a lethal as the original Covid-19.  We are experimenting.

We have also noticed that hot showers, which raise the body temperature temporarily, seem to help.    Not a lot, but a bit.  Also, dexadrine spray, up the nose, to keep the nasal passages working, and reduce the awful sense of suffocation that Covid-19 can create, is helpful.

Got to sign off. Too much headache, dizziness, and nausea.  I have not been able to eat much of anything, for 25 hours now.  Feeling rather bad, with chills then fever, then repeat.   :(

[ Oct. 7th, 2022 ] - Breakfast of (Vaccinated!) Champions - I went to a static air-show, and BBQ yesterday at a nearby Air Park, saw a bunch of great vintage biplanes and home-built aircraft, and managed to catch Covid-19.

"Oh hell", I thought, as Mandrake had said in "Dr. Strangelove", when told by General Ripper that the nuclear war with Russia had begun.

Fortunately, our little collective has been triple-vax'ed, two Moderna and one Pfizer mRNA shots.  As a result, so far, Covid-19 feels like a bad cold, but with curious dizzy feelings and a mildly elevated temperature.

Wish me luck.

[ Oct. 6th, 2022 ] - Arrrgh. - A death rattle in the stock market?   WTF guys?   The Central Bankers want to hammer us into poverty and economic depression?  R U all insane?  Raising everyone's costs, and reducing the values of their investment assets 35%, will not lower prices.  Exactly the opposite will occur.

We will be jacking up our rental costs for our farmland, next year, directly because of this stupid shit-show the government fool-toads are hammering us with.  Our farmer guys who rent our land, will pay the higher rental costs, because their costs can be passed forward.  Food prices will rise, and consumers will pay, because they like the idea of eating.   Food prices will rise sharply, next year.  (Most farms are leveraged, with mortgages and revolving credit lines.)

These stupid rate-rises and the resulting collapse in various investment asset values, will - with absolute certainty, we can predict - raise prices, and hence contribute to the inflationary spiral.

Folks working on the inflation problem, discovered this phenomenon, back in the 1970's.  It was named:  "stagflation", as growth collapsed, and employment markets swung from "not enough workers", rapidly to "not enough jobs".   I know, I was there, and lived thru it.

In 1969, when I was young, and my older brother was graduating, companies and government agencies had recruiting booths and tables at graduation events, looking for hires.  In 1978, when I graduated, there were - honestly - virtually NO jobs on offer, anywhere, because inflation and intense economic downturn, had hammered everyone.  Then Volker raised rates way up in 1980, and destroyed whole sections of the North American economy.   His actions did not help, except for savers, who could earn crazy excess returns - for a while.

The turn came, with the election of Ron Reagan, as USA President, and the ending of the pussyfooting idiocy and moronic price-controls of the awful, terrible, profoundly unwise Carter Administration in the USA. 

Reagan's election in November of 1980, changed everything.  

He CUT TAXES and REDUCED STUPID GOVERNMENT SPENDING and literally ignited a "New Dawn" of confidence - in USA.   He used a lot of borrowed money to do this.  But he did not seek to hammer and hurt ordinary business operators, or consumers.   The change was an immediate return of confidence, in USA.   There were also serious technological changes, which were making MANY things MUCH better.

We also began the process of getting rid of Pierre Trudeau, who, up until that time, had been the Prime Minister of Canada.

Finally - the central planner folks and government minions, recognized what was called: "Supply Side Economics", and realized that the inflation was being caused by supply issues, not by too much demand.   If the inflation is because of too much demand, the rate-rises can maybe work.

But the jacked-up rates had zero effect on the price of crude oil, that the new Arab Oil Cartel - called OPEC - had caused.  It was only when policies that restricted supply creation were removed, that the inflation - and the interest rates - came down.

Price and Wage/Salary controls were also ended, and recognized to be extreme failures of both economic thinking and of government policy.   Nothing positive was accomplished by these foolish experiments, in either Canada or USA.  (I wrote a paper on this topic, where I examined the results of these ideas.  They were complete, and profound failures of policy.)  

The conventional wisdom was confirmed - prices controls increase prices, and wage-and-salary controls serve to *increase* wages and salaries, thru various methods and schemes.  The breakdown and damage done to the price-signalling mechanism, which drives the entire savings-into-investments process that the financial markets enable, greatly exceeds any small benefit from simulated stability provided by price controls.   All scarce products and services become allocated by "standing-in-line", and economic growth runs retrograde.    Really.

The extreme economic failure of the planned "socialist/communist" economies of Eastern Europe and Russia, proved this beyond any doubt, but it seems Jimmy Carter and his teams of economic dimwits, (and our own idiot-savants, Pierre Trudeau's teams of French leftists from Quebec), all had to learn these lessons about price-controls, for themselves.

 And now, here we are in 2022, and nobody has really learned much of anything from this strange, 20% annual inflation time, in North American economic history.  This is curious.

The over-paid, government run who run things, do not have correct models of economic system function and market operation.   I personally *know* this for certain.  Except I thought things had improved.

Things have not improved.   Government employees who advocate this sort of solution to the inflation problem, have not improved their thinking or their models.  Evidence suggests they have all gotten actually much less wise, here in the 2022.

Oh my.

[ Oct. 5th, 2022 ] - Useful Information About Surviving a Nuclear Attack - Seriously, this is actually a very well written and well researched 317-page book on exactly this topic:

http://oism.org/nwss/nwss.pdf

After 7 days, 90% of the radiation from nuclear-blast fallout is gone.  If you don't get burnt or blasted in the initial attack, and can stay in your basement or shelter for a couple of weeks, you can survive a nuclear bomb attack.   The "Nuclear War Survival Skills" book is useful information, which might be needed, if a nuclear-war with Russia takes place. 

We consider this very unlikely, but even so, the information in "Nuclear War Survival Skills" is most interesting.

Meanwhile, in the Markets...

Things are more curious each day.  In our post-pandemic world do the Central Bankers and their Government masters really want to self-destruct the Western-World global economy?  We just cannot believe that is prudent or wise.   

You might bring down inflation, by freeing up supply-chain restrictions, reducing financing costs for businesses and consumers, and taking action to allow oil prices (and hence gasoline and diesel prices) to fall.  This is just not being done.   Massively higher administered interest-rates, will encourage prices to *rise*, not fall.  We learned this in the 1974-77 period. 

We have to believe that programming in a major economic downturn is not likely going to be allowed to proceed to catastrophic completion.

Here is a great analysis on "real yields" - quite well done, most interesting, yet curiously wrong, right at the end.

This is what is making me uncomfortable.   Everyone seems to reach wrong conclusions.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/turn-cnbc-and-watch-real-yields

The above analysis is well done, nicely documented, etc.  But he uses the "inflation expectation" numbers for his calculation of what "real" is.  We view that  "real" valuations need to use the **OBSERVED** actual indicated inflation, not some fictional construct extracted from the unknowable future.

Real yields on 10-year US Treasury notes are nominal-yield minus the inflation rate => so you get roughly 4% yield  - 8% inflation-rate (roughly) which is -4% real yield (roughly, of course).

So, "real yields" are still very seriously negative.  You buy a 10-year bond, which yields 4%, and with a long-term annual inflation rate that is around 7% to 8%, you are getting hosed.   You are still losing roughly 4% of your capital each year to inflation.

The investment process is thus not working.   Our concern is that we need to look to stocks - ownership in viable business entities - that can adjust and alter their actions, to compensate for inflation, and so on.   We think banks should be able to do this.

Trouble is - they are not doing it very well.   Bank stocks are trading more like 100-year bonds, with extreme sensitivity to current, prevailing rates.  Bank stocks everywhere are WAY down.

So, we have been badly whacked.    We thought the banker folks and investment houses attached to the banks, would know about how to make money on the spread between assets and liabilities (Raise money at 4%, loan it out at 7% to 8%.  Make 4%, with small risk.  Happy life.  Make both sides into floating rate securities, scale it all up, and you have a fine inflation-proof machine.)  

But they feel they need to make 10% to 12% on their capital, so they do other things.  (Fees, investment-banking IPO's, big vigourish on currency trades for clients, etc.)

What concerns us really, is that a Bank stock paying 6%, might face an economic adjustment to allow the paying of dividends of 8% (to at least match the rate of inflation).   How do they do this?  Simple.  They let their share-price crash and burn, so that their existing dividend yields 8%, once the share price is allowed to zoom down the toilet.

It does not have to be this way, and it *should* not be this way.

We did (and still do) not expect this to happen.   But so far, it *is* (and has been) happening, and this causes us all some concern.  We are getting kicked to the curb, as the market price adjusts in a pathological manner, suggesting that the banks cannot and will not learn anything, and will not change how they do business.

If the Gov-guys and the macro-prudential regulators and the Central Bankers continue down this extreme current path of maximal rate-shocks, we fear we are setting up a process where stock AND bond prices fall hard, interest rates spike dramatically, money-flows lock up, government finance action becomes twice to three times more expensive, taxes go up, business conditions degrade, consumers shut down all non-essential spending, and a truly intense economic downturn develops with storm-like speed.

Where M. Lebowitz fails badly, is in his last paragraph, suggesting that USA 7% mortgage rates (and other rate-shock spikes in borrowing costs) will be deflationary.   Why do people make this weird mistake?

If your house mortgage costs MORE THAN DOUBLE, you are absolutely going to DEMAND HIGHER WAGE & SALARY COMPENSATION - just to stay in your house!   A business will see IT'S REVOLVING LINES OF CREDIT become MUCH MORE COSTLY.   Will they give up, and shut down?  Maybe, as this is what many businesses did in 1980, when borrowing costs went over 20% annual.  

But if you have any pricing power, of any kind - you will PASS THESE BIG BORROWING COST INCREASES THROUGH your production and consumption functions.  Or, you will shut down and/or collapse your borrowings - via de-leveraging, which will reduce and/or shut down your economic processes.

This is not just *pain*, this is a receipe for higher prices, since the removal of marginal producers, will allow non-leveraged stronger producers a less-competitive landscape, which means the last producers standing, can now successfully raise their prices to compensate for their higher costs of capital.

See, if inflation is NOT happening because of excess demand, but in fact is the result of programmed supply restrictions (like it was in 1974, when the gasoline prices doubled, due to the "Arab Oil Shock" where OPEC nations reduced oil supplied to the world market and jacked up the price), then the borrowing cost increases are JUST ANOTHER COST THAT IS PASSED INTO THE VALUE-CHAIN PRICING PROCESS.

The Central Banks have a bad economic model.   Like many folks do.

We expect them to update their models.   And we also expect Governments to wise up, and focus on efforts to increase (not reduce) production levels of "Energy Resources" (ie. oil and gas, electricity generation via nuclear power, and battery production for EV's)

We also expect the Banks to do OK in this new, somewhat higher-inflation environment, which will not be going away anytime soon.   Maybe never, since governments have these massive debt-loads which will have to be addressed somehow.  (We think the gov-guys will try to deflate them away, by having moderate inflation.  Or not so moderate inflation. )

We are pretty sure, that the inflation will not be going away, anytime soon.  But if we try 20% interest rates, like Paul Volker did, back in 1980, we *will* certainly crash the world economy, due to the high-debt levels that already exist.  

Inflation driven by supply-side restrictions, is not a new idea.  In fact, it seems to occur everywhere and always throughout history.  All it requires, is unsound, low quality money.  And that certainly sounds like what we are seeing in our modern world.

[ Oct. 4th, 2022 ] - "And Then She..." - Here is some truth:

Central Banks will have to moderate rate-raises, as too rapid rise will seriously damage both gov. and private-sector, since debt levels are so high.  Like it or not, we need moderate (5% to 7% annual inflation), so massive levels of govt debt can be paid down with depreciated currency, and companies and consumers can refinance without bankruptcy.

Liz Truss and the Black Man were and are correct in their strategy.  Too rapid a pivot into hard-core tight-money, and we seriously risk a hard crash to the whole system.  High taxes kill growth and destroy opportunity.  The UK is an interesting little laboratory right now.  Just remember that when running perilous experiments, it is important not to blow up the lab.

The Central Bankers have brought a machine-gun to a knife-fight.  We caution they might want to ease-up on the trigger for a while.   There will be enough "blood on the streets" for everyone with rates where they are, right now.  Labour markets and real-estate sectors have turned (and are turning) hard.  We live in a very high-frequency world now.  Gigahertz, guys.  Please try to learn this, Ok?

No One Knows Anything  (And, Full Disclosure, even folks like us, with AI's that tell pretty much what will happen, are too arrogant and stupid to just do what the damn computer says to do.  Really.  We are still long, against our AI's advice.  Because we are human.  )

Here is a link to a very good article, from Bobby Molavi, (via Zerohedge site), a managing director & macro-trader at Goldman Sachs:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/goldman-trader-if-nothing-else-2022-has-taught-me-i-know-nothing

He makes some good points.   Especially his last paragraph, about destruction and creation.  We have been getting some not bad creation, despite the impressive destruction we are seeing.  It is always more easy to see buildings falling down, and stuff blowing up, rather than the slower pace of buildings going up, and ignorance and human stupidity being pushed down, which both happen rather slowly.

[ Oct. 3rd, 2022 ] - Blue Skies - Looking forward to those lovely, warm October days, with blue skies and sunshine...

[ Oct. 1st, 2022 ] - We Are 99.9% Certain It Was Putin's Guys that Blew Up Nord Stream - But it is absolutely fascinating to read the strange material that is being written about this curious event.

Have a look at this strange, good analysis, which manages to be so very wrong.  This guy is smart, and writes well.  He is probably a not-bad Analyst and basically very clever guy...

https://tomluongo.me/2022/09/29/the-curious-whodunit-of-nordstreams-1-and-2/

Seriously, anyone who creates a blog called "Gold, Goats and Guns" is quite alright in our books.  Never heard of Tom Luongo, but I give him credit for brains and creative-thinking ability.

So, we are at a loss to see why he so misses the obvious.

Of course it was Putin's guys (not Russia) - just Putin's guys - that did the deed.  These are two VERY different things, right?  Even Mr. Luongo is careful to point out this key fact - that you must not think in terms of "nation states" now, but really view the world in terms of *factions*.  This is a clever and key insight.

So why does Mr. Luongo get it so wrong?    I just don't know.

When Hernando Cortez came to Mexico - he burned his ships, so his 600 men had no choice but to defeat the Aztec Empire - which was large, and which understood warfare quite well.

https://blog.thecenterforsalesstrategy.com/burn-your-ships-how-to-be-a-great-leader

This "burn your ships => no way back, we are fully committed lads!" is a recognized leadership strategy.  I am not convinced it makes you a "great leader', but it certainly is a very well understood, and quite well recognized strategy. 

Lots of historical examples exist of this strategy:  Viz. "crossing the Rubicon", "You cannot unring a bell", "In for a Penny, In for a Pound", and so on.  Here is wiki, on "Point of No Return"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_no_return

https://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/open-innovation-commitment.html

There are *major* groups and powerful factions in Russia that oppose what Putin's various brigades have been doing.  One group we know of - Lukoil Corporation - one of the World's largest oil and gas companies - was publically critical of the Ukraine Terror War, and publically spoke out against it.   It's CEO - Ravil Maganov - went into a Moscow hospital, because he had become unwell, and he was thrown out of a window and killed.  Of course they say this was yet another "suicide".   This only happened at the beginning of September, 2022.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62750584

We do not accept the "suicide" explanation at all.   We believe that Maganov was murdered.

Maganov is the 8th senior oil and gas executive to die in ugly circumstances in very recent times - google the BBC report on the men and woman (and their families, in some cases) that have been killed or died mysteriously in only the last several months.   There is real factional war underway in Russia.  Navalny's poisoning, arrest and imprisonment shows how serious this is.

Putin is taking down any and all local competition.   This is also a well-understood "leadership" strategy.

The entire Ukraine Terror War, as prosecuted by Putin's brigades, is a terrorism and theft exercise.  Putin therefore has to neutralize any commercial "business executives" that stand in the way of this objective.   As I key this, the 500 hostile Russian soldiers are holding the Director of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear plant hostage, and are trying to force him to sign over ownership of the nuclear power plant to Rosatom, the Russian State Nuclear Agency.  

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63102220

Putin is a gangster-leader.  His faction is in control now, and he is commited to keeping it that way. 

This has nothing to do with US neo-conservatives, or DAVOS or any bullshit "globalization" nonsense or US or European conspiracy theories.   Tom Luongo is inventing fictional speculations, not addressing facts and obvious strategical techniques, historical analogs and clear and obvious motivations for Putin's actions.

This is just standard-average hard-core nasty traditional Euro-Russian-UK-American style political street-fighting.  It is just in Russia - the tradition of factional political fighting is *very* common and historically, it is *very* intense.  And it often turns into *real* street-fighting, just as it did in Germany in the 1930's.   Study how Catherine the Great became "Great" (she had her husband, the Czar, arrested, and he died on his way to exile in Sweden).  Examine the actions of Peter the Great, and Ivan the Terrible - strong and nasty and very, very focused on power-at-all-costs.  Look at how the Russian Revolution was prosecuted.  The Bolsheviks were just more violent, intense, focused and gangster-like, (and they voted by using machine-guns), to bring down the Mensheviks, which only ran the place for 6-months after the Czar was overthrown.

Russia is a violent and dangerous place - probably the most serious and intense and viciously willing-to-kill state entity as any nation ever in history.   But the people are mostly wonderful, warm, smart, generous and truly some of the best people in the world - at the family level.  It is a very strange and beautiful - but terrifying and dangerous - group of fierce tribes that have became a large nation.   They are also the place where "caucasians" evolved into existence.  Know this.

I once attended a lecture where Gordon Liddy spoke, and Mr. Liddy was very eloquent and clear about what the future world would look like.  We are now smack-dab in the middle of that World, and it is a nasty, dangerous, and faction-dominated place.

Putin blew up the pipeline (his people did - probably some special-forces group, with access to an old Soviet submarine).  It was not likely Russian military regulars, who would maybe question such an unusual order.  ("You want us to burn and destroy our own <insert-asset-name-here>?  Are you mad?")

The action was exacty the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships.  Putin has made it clear - there will be no *going back* to peaceful, trading relations with Europe or the World.   Comrade Putin will retain control and effective *ownership* of the Russian Federation until he dies, much like Stalin did.   Apparently Putin's grandfather was Stalin's cook, or some such curious historical connection.  Putin is a hard-core ex-Soviet spy-guy, who probably honestly believes the breakup of the Soviet Union was a very bad outcome.   

If you talk to the young, clever Russians who are getting the hell out of Russia - RIGHT NOW - because of the murderous conscription that has been announced, they can explain it clearly to you.  Putin is from an older, Soviet-educated generation, and he is recognized to be from a world that no intelligent young Russian now wants to be part of.

This is so obvious.   Putin destroyed the line (not completely - just rendered it inoperative), to ensure that no faction could remove his team, and "turn it back on" now.   Like it or not, Russia is now committed to Putin's unwise global war.  

Curious how a bright guy, who can write well, cannot see this.  And Mr. Luongo is not alone.

There seems to be a curious planet-wide mental failure thing happening.  People are getting curiously stupid, and are championing astonishingly incorrect and absurd views - like that "Firehouse Effect" on steroids.   I recently had a conversation with a guy, who is really clever, but who argued that the phrase in the USA 2nd Amendment where it indicates "the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" - that this particular use of the term "People" only referred to the "Well-regulated Militia" that was in the justifaction pre-amble, not the USA population at large.   

Now, regardless of one's views on the "right to keep and bear arms", the meaning in the US Constitutional amendment number two, is painfully clear and obvious and direct.  It is the same "People" as in "We, the People".  The meaning is clear, and not open to debate.  Yet intelligent people will put their brains into the toilet, and argue nonsense, just because it suits their obviously twisted, incorrect, Euro-centric views of things.

People are becoming mentally degraded, it seems.

I am not sure why so many smart folks seem to be becoming strangely mentally degraded and almost brain-dead like this - but I think it might have something to do with the Covid-19 lockdowns.   Humans are social animals, and the lockdowns maybe changed people en mass.   People were maybe watching too much television and social-media nonsense, and it has rotted their minds, perhaps?  

(Seriously - I have this huge plasma-TV, and we don't watch broadcast TV, despite having a digital over-the-air antenna.   Everything on broadcast TV is commericals and silly drivel aimed at 11-year olds, or housewives.  I honestly cannot even watch the News anymore.  We leave it turned off - and only activate it to watch movies downloaded via Starlink from archival websites, using a linked Linux box, which can render on the big screen.  Built that tech ourselves.   It's a custom hack, but it works nice.   Strange world now.  Everything in the public space, has turned into the most surprising, worthless crap.  To get any live digital feeds of any quality, once must pay serious fees.   But living without TV drivel, (and all social media) seriously improves one's life.  We read a lot now - lots and lots of text on the 'net. )

I am starting to believe that TV and modern video social-media really, honestly promotes cognative impairment.   In simple language:  TV rots your brain.

Something is certainly wrong.    Smart people - especially smart people - don't seem to be able to think clearly anymore, and are so determined to push their curiously toxic thoughts out into the public space and have *conversations* about insane, absurd, mindlessly wrong nonsense.

Another example was some interview scenario - where the Democrats brought in a bunch of people who actually had professional credentials - and argued that biological *men* could get pregnant and have babies.  To do this, they referred to trans-females, declared them to be *men*, and then said that since they had a uterus, even though they were now self-declared *men*, they could still have babies - so ergo: "Men could have babies".

Of course, this is beyond sophistry - it is madness.   But it is a strange madness that is gaining real political currency.

What is clear, is that there seems to be a problem with political people - and their analysts and advisors - being able to think and reason clearly, and reach effective, useful, successful - and effective & actionable - conclusions.

We agree with Mr. Luongo on one point:  We are now in perilous times.   These strange mental failures, especially on the part of the *people in charge", is creating great risk, and is likely to create signifcant costs and damaging outcomes for all of us.

The wicked-fools & fraudsters-in-power might just kill us all. 

(or maybe only 20 or 30 percent of us...  still, that is a billion or two, right?  One might want to get some Iodine pills, and screen "On the Beach", this great submarine+post-nuclear-war movie made in Australia, back in the 1960's.  Also, you probably want to have some property that is *not* near a big city, and maybe 12 to 18 months of food and ammo stashed either onsite or somewhere nearby.   And beware those fancy, battery-powered red-dot sights for your AR-15's.  You're gonna want to keep those old flip-up metal peep-sights handy, for when the battery fails.  And maybe that lever-action Winchster, and a few boxes of .30-30 cartridges - along with the .223 NATO also, of course.  If you read the news, you probably know the contents of the list...  If you can get hold of an AK-47 legally, then you are a lucky American.   You'll need 7.62x39, of course,  but you can pickup a big wooden box full of that old communist-block corrosive ammo.  Just make sure to wash down the whole unit, with soapy-water if you use any of that filthy, barrel rotting ammo.   :D  )

And don't expect your cell-phone to work for more than an hour or two, once the fun starts.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/gone-30-minutes-next-europes-doomsday-list-collapse-cell-phone-networks

But who are ya gonna call, anyway?  Self-reliance, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested and wrote about long ago, is the main key to a happy and effective life!

[ Sept. 30, 2022 ] - If You Buy an iPhone, Does It Turn You Gay?- Or, are you just supporting a humourless collective of wicked, nasty skanks, who make way too much money using illegal, competition-destroying market practices?   We don't know.  But we sure know about this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-executive-sacked-joke-fondling-140344275.html

A guy makes an obvious joke while reviewing a fast-car - with a funny movie-reference line about "fondling large-breasted women" - and it costs him his JOB at Apple Computer?

Apple is a company run by a homosexual.  Normally, as a *normie*, we don't care about that.  You want to be gayboy, and suck (whatever), that is your private business.  And the whole concept of business, is that there is this separation between work and play.  This is the correct way to do things.

But here is this hypocritical company, with a queer running the place, and his queer action is supposed to be OK, but an employee making an obviously absurd, humourous comment - lampooning the whole concept of modern work - and Apple won't even let him apologize.  No, he has to leave, while the sock-tucker gets to stay in charge of the place.   Really?

We need to do something about Apple.   The company is a snot-sucking ruck-sack of pathetic poison toads.  It's just a bad, bad thing, for so many reasons.

If you buy an Apple iPhone, we believe you have made an unwise choice, not just because it is a wicked, nasty, privacy-destroying tracking device with flawed "security" software - but also because it supports the kind of people behind the slimy modern hypocrisy that is destroying the World's culture of freedom.

There was a time, not long ago (in my lifetime!), when being caught out as a gayboy, could get you fired from your job - and also even subject to a criminal charge from the Police authorities!  This actually happened to the man who invented computer science,  Alan Turing, as we all know.  That was a wrong and bad thing.

And now, here is Apple Computer, doing the same thing, because of some guy's attempt at humour, which was obviously a jest.  He did not actually DO any breast fondling, as far as we can tell - he got fired for making a *joke* about it - obviously not something that would be allowed or encouraged in this modern world.  THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT SO TERRIBLY FUNNY!

The only response, is to push harder, right?   I am looking forward to the Post headline:

QUEER APPLE CORP SACKS HETRO EXEC FOR BIG-TIT-TOUCH TIKTOK JEST

or something like that.  

The Apple company should be broken up like the Standard Oil Trust was, back at the beginning of the 20th century. The world would be a vastly better place, if the Apple monopoly was sectioned into 4 separate companies: a software group, a computer hardware group, a telecom devices company, and a media distribution company.

[ Sept. 29, 2022 ] - The Curious Plan to Blow Up the World - The Central Banks of the various nation states seem truly intent on blowing up the financial and economic world.   What they fail to realize, is that the inflation is *necessary* if there is ever going to be any chance that the massive global debt-levels can ever be brought under some sort of control.   As it is now, debt is growing - essentially - out of control, in an unlimited manner.  

Somehow, this process will eventually reach some kind of limiting case event space.   What concerns us now, is that it may be thru a global "currency crisis" kind of event, rather than what we expected earlier, a protracted period of high (5 to 10 percent annual) inflation scenario.

First we see contagion, then we will experience the cascade collapse.   This is our worst-case scenario, which we had expected there would be a reactive-response to actively avoid this kind of economic collapse scenario.  But that does not seem to be on the table.

Instead, there seems to be a deliberate, co-ordinated effort to drive the global economy into a profound and protracted economic depression.

We think this is unwise.

Hell, let's be clear.  We think this current approach is fucking madness.

The nation-states and their minion-boys and minion-girls, seem determined to fly the "air-craft of state" (it is not a ship, anymore...  things move too fast now...) into the ground, like that gayboy co-pilot "Tomato Andy" on that GermanWings aircraft did, several years ago.

This is just completely bloody insane.   We are at risk fo seeing a *manufactured* economic depression, which will be worse than the inflation (which would at least allow the high debt levels to be brought down to something sane..)

I fear we are all going to be seriously damaged by the resulting economic storm.

And it is a storm that our *institutions* are working to actively create.

This is some kind of real madness.

Meanwhile - Something that actually worked right!  [ From Germany - Land of Music, Fast Cars, Leicas, Schmeissers, Panzers, SL-8 HKs, Walthers, Social Nationalists, and Lovely Blonde-haired, strong, healthy women  (I love Germany, it's no secret...) ]

Unlike many companies and virtually all governments and their entities - which are failing, perhaps a result of Covid-19 and/or vaccine side-effects - we don't know - here is a note about something that actually worked right:

The Porsche IPO !

The Porsche IPO (a spin-out from Volkswagen) has been a rip-roaring success.  Kinda like the cars themselves.  Big Mercedes and fast Porsches are just plain damn good cars - in a world of not very good, rather crappy cars.   (Note:  Hondas are damn good cars, also.  We have 5 cars, all licensed and roadworthy, and our used Honda CRV (bought with 170,000 km on the odometer, from a local Honda dealer for $10,700 plus tax) is one of the best damn vehicles I have ever owned and/or driven.  It's a 2011, with almost 200k km's on it now, and it looks and drives like a new, all-wheel-drive sports-car.   It was Built in Canada, by hard-working, smart, focused Canadian lads.   The 4-cyl, 2.4 litre CRV, drives like a race car, truth be told.  It's an amazing piece of surprisingly good engineering. )

We wish Porsche good luck, and all the best.   If I ever get rich, I will buy a 911 or a 928 or a 944 or something like that.  Maybe I can convince my nephew to sell me his 911 someday, so his son does not kill himself with it.   They are good cars, but they can go *very* fast.   And when a man comes into some excess money, he buys one.  It's really that simple.  

Story from the WSJ:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/porsche-ipo-blazes-trail-for-other-auto-makers-11664462832?mod=rss_markets_main

Yes, we admit it.   We like fast cars.  It's kind of a weakness, truth be told.

[ Sept. 28, 2022 ] - Putin is at War with the World Now - This is getting crazy silly and we are seriously now tracking towards World War Three.  The deliberate destruction of the Nord Stream #1 and #2 Gazprom pipelines, which ship Russian natural gas from Russia to Germany, is almost certainly an action ordered by Putin of Russia.  He is sending Europe and the World a message, that he welcomes confrontation.    He is a bad person, doing very bad things.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/business/lukoil-chairman-dies

This Putin fellow must be removed.  And it is the Russian people that will have to do it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Our bank - BNS - appears to be in some kind of fairly serious trouble.  We are not sure what exactly it is, but something is very wrong.  The trading is wrong.   While *every* other bank stock is advancing, some quite smartly, this bank is trading up just a very tiny bit, only to get hit with massive selling waves (20,000 then 40,000 and then 65,000 shares, etc.), which hammers the share price back down hard.  We are only two days from ex-dividend date, where a generous dividend can be locked in.  This is not a typical trading pattern.

To see this kind of trading pattern, at this time, when the greater market is being bid upwards everywhere, is a bad sign.

Perhaps South America is expected to remain viewed as something between an economic wasteland, and a foul cesspool of corrupt government-manipulated bad finance?   We dispute this view, yet there have been so many bad political developments - year after year after year - without lasting change ever really becoming possible - that it seems North American sentiment has crashed, and investors have just thrown in the towel.  This is not surprising, but we made an error, thinking that the AI was missing something (the AI is *really* negative, in it's forecast..  And it appears the bloody thing has been spot-on correct. ) 

I felt I had to bet against the thing, since it is just a mindless computer program.

So, I have learned another hard and painful (and expensive!) lesson.  If it looks bad and trades bad, and the AI says it is bad, then it probably *is* bad, and trying to call a turning point, is just difficult and also unwise.  (I recall trying to short Nortel, because I knew it was run by idiots and fraudsters and it was a money-loser - but the share price would keep getting pushed up...  I put on a short at some insane level, 1000 shares or more, with a tiny retail account - and I could not sleep the whole bloody night.  Closed the trade with a tiny profit next morning, and watched the stupid, worthless shares get bid up from 120, to higher levels.  Insane - but such is market dynamics.  Our view - honestly - is that the market price is usually wrong, and typically getting more wrong.  But it can stay wrong, longer than you can stay in the trade, unless you are George Soros or a pro trader at a big bank.)

But damnation, one has to try.   The problem in the world of trading, is that as an investor, there is no action one can take, except to sell.   An engineering-minded person, wants to roll up his/her sleeves, and try to fix the ugly problems.   In this modern fools-world - that is just not possible, which is the source of our frustration.

We see the honest financial world being abused and kicked to the curb - everywhere - by lightweights, idiots, dishonest and/or incompetent political persons and herd-followers - and there is nothing we can do about it.

As the Templar knights would say: "God's bodkin!"

[ Sept. 27, 2022 ] - Get Tomorrows News Today! - Why the heck not, eh?  The stock-market is acting a bit insane.   Our very profitable Bank is trading like it is a failing company.  We believe this to be wrong.  Equity is not the same a long-duration bonds.  Market is running on fear now.  Rates are not at 20%, and this is not 1981, nor is it 1931.  Yet.

Look, Brian Porter is a good man, and has done a good job.  He's a lifer at the Bank, been there since 1981, climbed thru the ranks.  He's gotta be tired.  Good time to leave, except he is leaving with the share price rocketing down into the goddamn toilet. 

The new choice - Scott Thomson of Finning Intl, is a bloody good choice - he is just what the doctor ordered, as we used to say in the old days.   We had no info on this at all - we are on Mars, pretty much, down in that crater, looking for lichen and red mud.   What surprises the hell out of us, is the goofball reaction of the market.   The stock is being auto-dumped.  Brian Porter is well respected - but *everywhere* we need change.  We truly need change more than at any time, in my entire life, I am feeling.

The stock of our pet-project Bank appears to be in deep trouble - down from near $100 to the high-sixites, and we have added (foolishly, it is looking like) to our long position.    We had thought it was a no-brainer buy at 70 and change - but no.  The bloodbath continues, and the dumping is switching to glide now - running on automatic, driven by the goddamn AI algos.

This can be the kiss-of-death for any publically traded company.   The automatic trading algorithms can crush the life out of any security, if the programs are setup right.  Personally, as AI users, we are concerned that connecting AI's directly to market trading feeds, is just not a good idea, as this does two things:  One:  it creates - regularly - the conditions for a "flash-crash", where value can evaporate completely, and quickly.  This is not good for markets or society in general.  Two: Co-ordination among algorithmic trading platforms, can create *exactly* the same kind of trading patterns and negative-feedback-loop phenomenon, that is created when a group of dishonest market-scammers target a particular stock, and *wash-trade* the thing back and forth, to create either a postive or negative action.  This illusion of market action is wrong and illegal because it actively damages the honest process of price-discovery, that is the necessary job that the market does.

We cannot prove this - but this is the whole problem.   It's like "price-leadership" in economics. You can get exactly all the negative characteristics of a combine or a cartel, but without even having the cartel, if the various participants agree (or just try-to) to behave in a co-ordinated manner.  If they make an explicit agreement to set price, that is an illegal cartel.  But if they just run the same algorithm in the open marketplace, then the same cartel-like results can be made to occur.   You can basically have the price set at whatever level or point that you want it to be set at. - IFF (means If-and-only-if) the algorithmics are sufficiently self-similar, and run the same way.

We must be honest.  This kind of cartel-action = the same thing as everyone running the same algos.  And the danger/problem is that, over time, natural selection will *encourage* everyone to develop and run the same algorithms.

This is the "lemmings running over the cliff" problem.   Really.

It's only the "mavericks" and outlier-traders - the hard-core brass-balled speculators - that can stand against the lemming-herd, and turn a hacked, hi-jacked market.

History has actually quite a lot of examples of this kind of phenomenon.   Market history especially, has examples that we know about, because the speculator who stands against the market (and acts to help turn it), can make (or lose) a *lot* of money.

But if the algos are good, they can *see* the speculator activity, and ensure it is not effective.  The positive-focused speculators, can be extinguished in an algo-driven co-ordinated downturn.  Credibility of the entire marketplace, is put in jeopardy.  Prices can spiral down, in a self-destructive feed-forward driven looping process. 

An economic world can be destroyed by this sort of action.

We cannot prove it - but we suspect that between the algorithmic trading, and the unwise actions of the political people and the central bankers, we are maybe *programming* another 1931-style disaster, where the current downturn could become highly self re-enforcing.  The technology enhances the chances of this.

A few days ago, I didn't think this.  But we are into a global co-ordinated withdrawl-of-liquidity-driven hell-storm, which is showing signs of acceleration.

So yes, bringing in Scott Thomson as CEO of the Bank is good and wise.   He is on record as saying something about Finning, when he started there.  He said we will restore and enhance the share price and the company credibility.   A clear focus on company share-price (instead of the standard Investment Bank employee approach where all focus is on the expected annual bonus), would be a very good thing for a Bank with a collapsing equity value.

This clear focus is exactly what the Bank needs.  And they need it right about now.

[ Sept. 26, 2022 ] - Burn, Baby, Burn? - We have to wonder if this is the response the USA authorities really want to see.  One looks at this manufactured meltdown, and cannot help going back to the data where this strategy was applied before.  In all cases, it created massive dislocation and downturn, that seems unwise.

It's showing up first (as per the old Dow Theory), in the transportation stocks.  In our post-modern world, that means Fed Ex, for example.   

We cannot help stand in awe and disbelief.   We are pretty sure this action will not have the intended consequence, unless a recession was planned, and the manufacture of another "crisis" was the plan of the idiots that have provoked this madness.

I also read a report that Joe Biden has actually said some astonishing untrue nonsense, and that the American Leftist media have picked this up, and retailed the lies as if they were truth.  It is technical falsehoods, regarding AR-15 rifles, which Biden has said shoot bullets "five times the speed of ordinary guns" and this is simple false.   The AR-15 is no more or less lethal that the .308 deer-rifle (a Winchester Model 100) that my father bought in 1965, and took on a hunting trip with a bunch of doctors and other dentists.

Biden is a-lying.    And in a nation of technical people who know about these things, this is astonishing.   He and the Democrat half-wits, honestly think they can lie their way forward, in the same manner as they accused Trump of doing.

https://patriotdetroit.com/columnists/charlie-kirk/blog/biden-repeats-previous-false-claim-about-muzzle-velocity-of-an-ar-15-bullet

What is curious, is that various news-generator sites (eg. the Washington Post), catch this absurd lie, but characterize it as a "mistake" or a "botch".   This cannot be an error on Biden's part, because it is so factually incorrect, that it is comical.  What it is, is just standard Washington disinformation, which is tossed out in order to support an agenda-of-political-assault against traditional conservative Americans.   

The Democrats are creating a lie-culture, to drive a sense of crisis and fear, which their social analysts have probably suggested can help them in the November elections.

But this kind of clearly-wrong, factual-fantasy strategy is particularly curious in a nation of folks who have long known about rifles.

George Washington had a rifle - not a musket.   The entire American revolution began because British soldiers began raiding farms in Concord, to confiscate the farmer's muskets and other firearms.   If there is one nation that knows the technical details of guns, it is USA.

So, what is likely to be the fate of the American political party, that has a liar and a fool as it's leader?   Unless much of the USA has suddenly become brain-dead, I just cannot see any Democrats getting many votes.    They are a force of that which is just bogus.

They have become an anti-technology, anti-truth group of fraudsters and cheaters, supported by a deeply dishonest and manipulative mainstream media.   Many see this now.   The American conservatives who argue this, seem to be - daily - proven correct.

Change is needed.  The Leftists are doing real, and un-needed damage to America.

As the recent, horrific indian mass-murder in Canada has shown - carried out by two knife-armed indian brothers - a focus on the *weapon* as opposed to a focus on the human-problem, cannot hope to end the epidemic of ugly violence, that modern Leftist social policies have unleashed.  Our corrupt and fraudster Prime Minister has even asserted that Canadian citizens, in their homes, have no right of self-defense, and must welcome killers, home-invaders, and drug-crazed murderers, without any recourse to defensive methods.   Justin Trudeau is also a liar and a fraudster, and he must be removed from his position of political power, if Canada is to hope to remain a free country.

We are living in very strange times.

Change is needed.   The Leftists need to be removed from power - everywhere - in every nation.   This is the key requirement we face in the 21st century.

[ Sept. 23, 2022 ] - Puke Point Reached Yet? - R U vomiting yet?  Has the Market hit your "puke point" yet, where you barf, and sell your longs at market, and go to the bar for a double whiskey and water?    Must be getting pretty close, I suspect.  The trading today is very ugly, and looks not so much like a blowoff, as a melt-down.  

The American Leftists (who are running the show now, make no mistake about it - they cannot blame this on Trump!)  have decided they want a gut-wrenching economic downturn - another *crisis* - which can then open up a whole dog's breakfast of modern neo-fascist political opportunity for themselves.   (This is our nightmare scenario.)  Either they know what they are doing, or they are just insanely stupid and collectively brain-dead.  Choose between really-bad or really scary-awful.

This is the first, most directly fabricated economic downturn we have ever seen.  It is simply not necessary, but it seems to be desired by a curious collective of folks, who are generally not always on the same side.  But this is a different world now.   The Democrats seem to be deeply committed to a series of projects which will *ensure* an ugly, economic downturn for the USA.  

We think this is completely bonkers.

The correct course of action for the Federal Reserve would have been to move interest rates up gradually, and begin a clearly communicated runoff of their absurdly huge balance sheet, which is stuffed full of what are essentially junk bonds - except they are not technically "junk", because they are being underwritten by the Federal USA authorities.   But just beginning the process of not buying more of this puff-money paper, and letting the USA money supply begin a controlled contraction, would have been a powerful and visible anti-inflation action.  AND it would not have hammered the equity markets quite so hard.  Why did they not take this course of action??

What the Fed and other Washington social-justice warriors do not really understand, is that many Americans stash their wealth in the USA stock market - and actions to *deliberately* trigger a stock-market crash event, is going to have substantial economic effects in the real USA production economy.   The Fed is doing a "rug-pull' on Americans.

We are in agreement with a wise fellow who suggested a couple of days ago, that the probabilty now of a serious USA recession in 2023, is now 99.9%.   

And we think this is just bonkers.  We agree with the forecast, but disagree with the wisdom and necessity of taking this action. 

The Americans (and our own Government, to a lesser degree), are acting rather insane.

We've just cancelled (again) projects that were to be set up for next year.  Pandemic or post-pandemic - if the central authorities want to smash economic growth that we expected would be on the table for next year, we cannot, as small-holders and bit-players, act against trend. 

What is curious, is just how profoundly un-necessary this current madness, on the part of the central authorities, really is.

We are in agreement with the Goldman-Slacks (sic) boys in NYC, that the end point for the SP500 for 2022 should be revised into the goddamn basement.  They took their forecast from 4300 to 3600, but probably, 3200 (or lower) is closer to where we will be.

But this is nuts.   It's madness, that was not required, and it will not *reduce* inflation, it will, almost certainly *add* to inflation.   Any economic entity that has any sort of pricing power (think any sort of trade union or any group of producers, any professional association, shippers, suppliers of any necessary product, and any and all provincial and municipal tax agencies - literally anyone or anygroup that can raise it's prices), will now do so, as each entity is looking into the business end of a double-barrelled economic downturn, and an ugly loss of real wealth, combined with a violent upswing in operational costs - energy, rent, taxes, etc.

The solution to the current inflation problem, is lower energy, food, housing and tax costs - not idiotic rises in borrowing costs.    In the 1970's this problem was discovered and discussed - and yet nothing was done then, except foolish wage-and-price control attempts (crazy unsuccessful, both in Canada and USA) and then the Volker rate-rises to 20%+, which destroyed economic growth, and smashed many into poverty and bankruptcy.    The 1980's recovery was funded by borrowing.  And the borrowing has been increasing since then.

Now, we are about to raise the costs of the borrowed *trillions*, and at the same time, hammer down the machine that re-cycles savings into productive investment - the markets.

This is goof-stupid.  It's nuts.

We are deeply concerned that trashing the equity markets - which is explicitly what the birdbrains in Washington want to happen - will have the effect of *increasing* economic demand for non-productive services, which will probably have to be supplied by government agencies and entities from the non-self-financing sectors.   This will be met by more borrowing.   And this will *add* to inflation pressure, and in a manner that will be quite pathological.   (ie. Economics that is Bad, Bad, Not Good.  Clear?)

We've seen this stupid movie before, and I am surprised that I have to sit thru this same idiotic foolishness again.  Arrogant-idiot Leftist politicians seem unable to learn from their historical errors. 

Maybe you think Trump was not a good fellow.  But assess the economic performance under Trump, and compare it to the current bit-storm of idiotic economic insanity the USA is now dealing with.  By the end of next decade, one of the *biggest* economic costs the USA Federal Government will have, is their annual interest payments on their debt - it will be over 1.2 *trillion* US dollars EACH YEAR.  This will be just the INTERST PORTION of the debt!   We suspect there is zero chance that the USA Government debt will ever by paid off in real money. (Total interest costs on USA Federal debt are expected to be roughly $399 billion for 2022.  Even with the CBO''s attractive assuptions about GDP growth, by 2032, total debt-service costs are projected to be $1.2 trillion.  This number is not visible in the CBO paper, of course.  Total actual USA Federal debt is also nowhere to be found. All tables are reported as "percent of GDP", which masks, of course, what is really happening.) 

The inflation is NECESSARY now, just to re-balance the USA economy.  The USA has to inflate, in order to have tax-extracted puff-dollars to pay down the debt that was taken out in real-dollars.  Like it or not, this is how government borrowing works.

( If curious, here is a link to the .PDF from the Congressional Budget Office's, July 2022 paper, which has the forward projections for USA debt.  This paper looks serious, but it is drivel, because all the charts and projections are based on "percentage of expected GDP", which means all projections are meaningless speculations, and assume that GDP growth humps along nicely, interest rates stay moderate (in the 4% nominal range), and bracket-creep keeps tax collections increasing.  Even with all these heroic assumptions debt-to-GDP is projected to rise.  To find out what the actual real debt numbers are, you have to go to other sites.  But here is the CBO's paper:

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-07/57971-LTBO.pdf   )

A better picture of what is really happening is provided by the note written on this site:

https://www.patriotledger.com/story/opinion/columns/2022/08/27/interest-national-debt-enhances-risk-fiscal-crisis-congressional-budget-office-medicaid-medicare/7891645001/

So, we need to understand just how completely weird and unsustainable, the political-economic process is actually becoming.  

If the USA whacks and hammers it's GDP growth, the entire economics of the place are at risk, to a much greater degree than most folks probably realize.    If you get fired from your job, and your income falls to zero, your mortgage payments remain.   If you decide not to make those payments, then there will be consequences from that decision - for someone, somewhere, right?

The USA Leftist government folks are already walking down this curious path of: "let's not pay our bills, eh!?"   These actions will have consequences.

Jacking up interest rates rapidly now, in a mis-guided attempt to "bring down inflation", actually risks provoking an extraordinary economic collapse in USA land.

This is unwise.  But perhaps it will provoke **regime change** in USA, in November, and the crazy Washington halfwits who are bent on destroying growth in the USA economy, can be removed from their catbird-seats of political power. 

Change is needed.  And one way or another - it not only *must* happen - it *will* happen, whatever your political beliefs are.

[ Sept. 22, 2022 ] - Inflation Will Inflate All Prices - Rarely make mkt calls - but this is just too blatantly obvious.  This is not 1974.  If the "inflation" phenomenon is as profound as it looks to be, then asset prices will not fall, they will rise, along with *all* other prices.   Jerome Powell is not a bad fellow - but he is a lawyer.  Vladimir Putin trained as a lawyer. (And then he became a Stasi spy.. which is where the bad began.)   I know a lot of people who are lawyers - they are not bad people.  But they are not creative thinkers, able to make critical intuititve mental leaps.  They are not "leapers", they are plodders.  They just aren't trained or even mentally disposed to jumping their "picture of the world" from where it is now, to where we will be.  It's curious.

Rates will have to move up to the 7 to 8 percent level - maybe 10 or 12 percent, to dial down the inflation we are going to have.  It will be *months* (maybe years?) before that happens here.   We will see prices of everything - including assets - continue to march higher.  Maybe a lot higher.

I can't see this not happening.  Too much fiscal push, and too much serial destruction, if we stop the gravy train of government money.   No one wants "National Socialism", but we are tracking fast towards "Social Nationalism", and the result may not too much different.

If the inflation is not "demand driven", then raising up interest rates will just *add* to the costs that everyone is facing, and so it will be **inflationary**.   Your mortgage costs go up 50%, and housing is 50% of your household budget, then you are going to insist on a pay-raise of 25%, or you will have to eat less and be hungry.

The rate-rises will program in more inflation, more quickly.   Combined with the "fiscal push" from the Democrats and Liberals (in USA & Canada respectively), where the political people are pushing out money-wealth to ensure smoothly running social policy, there is zero chance that inflation will moderate.

Will Governments reduce their spending, and bring their budgets back into some kind of possible (eventual) balance?  Will taxes be raised?  Unlikely.   And if taxes are raised, then that will be *inflationary* also, since tax-costs are just another *cost* that has to be absorbed by someone - and the someone facing the cost, will act to raise his/her wage or salary demands, so as to survive.  Or move towards crashing hard down into poverty.

The hardcore *inflation* will be seen as the least evil alternative.

Everything will go up in price - even stocks, if they pay reasonable dividends, and offer the prospect of the dividends also riding the rising inflationary train.

Toot, toot.  "All aboard!"  (Is this not the most likely scenario?  It is not 1931, and it is not 1974.)

Just to be clear:  We are not making a "Bull" case  - but at the risk of sounding like an old stock-broker - we suspect that financial and investment **survival** will be most effectively engineered by being invested in dividend-generating equity positions, which can be expected to ride-out the coming economic storms.   And maybe even a hot little (or not so little) war.

Remember that scene in "Battleship Potemkin", where the Cossacks ride down the citizens of Odessa, and kill the mother with the baby carriage on the Odessa waterfront steps?   How about a different ending, where the mom reaches in to the baby's carriage, pulls out a Schmeisser, and carefully sweeps fire at the murdering Russian soldiers and they and all the Cossacks are cut down, and tumble to the ground.  Call it the "American" ending.

A wise person writes his own script.  He does not rely on the plans and designs of others.

If you know about life and history, you know that "Life is Nicer with a Schmeisser", just like life is better with a "Kitty Full of Quality Equity."   

https://www.mp40.nl/index.php?page=hugo-schmeisser   

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-wells-fargo-heres-the-best-asset-to-own-during-inflation/

[ Sept. 21, 2022 ] - Smash Palace? - maybe not.  The news is so negative and so many worst-case scenarios are playing out, that it seems like a turn might be in order.  Old James R. Keene, one of the greatest speculators ever, is reported to have said that he "traded on intuition, like a woman", which is a curiously honest thing to say.   Sometimes, you just have to play an idea, insane as it seems.  We are long.

[ Sept. 20, 2022 ] - In for a Penny, In for a Pound - I think this is becoming quite silly.  Honestly, this is just nuts.  Stimulate the crap out of the global economy by pumping up reserve currency money supply, and then when the inflation appears (as any Economist kid from the Chicago School could have told you it would) deliberately crash the USA economy, with the fastest upward Federal bank-rate change since the New York Fed fiddled the discount rate back in 1929 - and caused the 1929 Great Market Crash).

Why exactly do we need to do this?? 

Perhaps the policy people will be siezed by a sudden burst of sanity, and may just do nothing.  Seriously, we are into real "Experimentum Periculosum" territory here. 

The Federal Reserve of the USA, might want to think about just doing nothing for a month or two, and avoid the prospect of "doing harm".   Harm is bad.   Aggregate demand is not out of control - just go look.  Folks are having trouble paying their bills, and evidence shows they are cutting back, and using their credit cards for living expenses.  Grasp this, lads.  If the inflation is *not* demand-driven, then dialing up interest-rates will *not* create a better situation.  It will just create a *worse* situation, as interest-linked costs are dialed up - causing folks to demand higher wages and salaries and fees, to make ends meet.   

Damaging the USA economy will not reduce inflation driven by supply-chain shortages, and Putin's idiotic insane terror-war in Ukraine.  Higher interest rates, will not lower food costs, caused by product shortages. 

At some point, sanity will take hold, and the virtue of a stability-seeking regime configuration, will become apparent.  Just dialing down M2 via the run-off of the Fed's balance sheet, should have a pretty solid effect on inflation.   Large rate-rises are probably not needed, and risk doing more harm than good.

If this view gains traction, this might be an inflection point in asset prices.  If you liked it at $92, you're gonna really like it at $72.   At least, that is the logic.

As if this market has any logic...

[ Sept. 17, 2022 ] - Federal Failures to Learn From History - The current crop of buffoons that dominate the global political stage, are perhaps unique in the historical context, as being the most serially unwise and profoundly stupid that folks alive today have had to endure.   As Earth citizens, we have to go back to the early 20th century post-World-War-One world, to see leaders as unwise and just plain bad as the crop we have now.  It's curious and rather sad, that we are back to having "Idiots in Power", like we did in the "bad old days."

It's different in the business & financial world.  The business and finance people of the early 20th century were almost all focused, honest, and very clever, despite what the Leftist media and profoundly Leftist academics in the University economics and political-science (fiction) departments like to assert.  They had to be, or they got crushed.  It was evolution in action, like it always is in business.  It is only in politics, where lies and deception can sustain a man (or woman!) for an entire lifetime career, while they do such great damage (like in Argentina, for example.)

Things are often not as they seem.  The best "Red Pill" of all time, is honest, focused historical research, which makes use of original documents (and ***not*** the secondary opinions written by most academics in Economics and History departments and "reporters" who work at news-generator organs, such as what used to be called "newspapers". )    It is hard work to find the truth.   It is often buried deep, and obscured by fabricated opinion, and mountains of worthless drivel.

The "Great Depression" that the USA endured, during the 1930's, was *directly* caused by the harsh and extreme interest-rate increases that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (the USA central bank), began in April of 1928, when they raised interest rates (the Reserve "discount" rate) to 4%.  (In the fall and winter of 1924-1925, the rate had been 3%)   The New York Fed then continued in an aggressive campaign of rate rises, which reached their peak in September and October of 1929, with the rate at 6%.    This was an aggressive attempt to bring down the *inflation* in asset-prices that was of concern to USA Government economic managers.   They felt the New York Stock Market was "too highly priced", and wanted to bring down asset prices.

They succeeded.  Oh my, did they succeed.

Problem was, they (the USA Federal Reserve - the Central Bank of the USA), crashed the US Stock Market.  The high-rates, the loans being called and the resulting implosion of financial *wealth* caused an economic implosion which smashed the USA economy, and caused extreme economic dislocation, mass-poverty, more than 25% unemployment, and a "banking crisis", in which over 3000 USA small banks became insolvent, and went out of business, causing hundreds of thousands of USA citizen investors to lose most of their life savings.

This is not just our opinion.   This is what happened.

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a clever Economist with a PhD who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014,  has said the same thing, in a speech he gave, back in 2002, to the Hoover Institute, on the ocassion of Milton Freidman's 90th birthday.

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depression

Our research indicates that the USA Federal Reserve did not just "make mistakes", we are also of the opinion that the actions of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York actually *caused* the stock-market crash of 1929, which triggered a recession, and then went further (in 1931) to exacerbate the downturn, and cause the Great Depression.

The clowns at the USA Federal Reserve did the same damn thing, again, in 1931, as things were become slightly more stable.  In August 1931, the New York Fed "discount rate"  was 1.50%, which was reasonable, given the economic storm which had been unleashed.  But the Fed jacked up rates to 3.50%, by November of 1931.  Clear?  From September 1931 to November of 1931, the "discount rate" was jacked up from 1.50% to 3.50%.  This was a MASSIVE increase in the cost of money, at a time when *EVERYONE* was hurting, loans either had been or were being called in, and financial wealth was being vapourized by falling asset prices on the Stock Market.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York basically blew up the USA economy.

Their action was a prime cause of the Stock Market asset-value collapse, in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from over 335 in 1929, to just over 42, in early 1932. That is more than an 85% fall in the price of USA high-quality industrial stocks.  Many smaller companies simply went out of business, and failed.

People have long forgotten just how awful this collapse was.   This economic collapse, which was DRIVEN DELIBERATELY BY THE ACTIONS OF THE USA FEDERAL RESERVE economically destroyed an entire generation of people, created global mass-poverty, and set the stage for the Second World War, which was only ended by the use of nuclear weapons that were used to destroy two Japanese cities.

So, when retired Larry Summers asserted in his Bloomberg interview, that he knows of no example in History, where a rapid rate-rise by the USA central bank, had any "large costs", I have to admit that my head exploded, and the top of it blew a hole in the roof of my "Atomic Ranch"-style farmhouse.  (At least, that is what it felt like...)

A paper written about Federal Reserve history, documents Bernanke's comments:

Larry Summers either has brain problems, or is profoundly ignorant of history.  Maybe both.

Go look at the data-series.  Here it is:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M13009USM156NNBR

The above series, is probably the most imporant historical time-series the St. Louis Fed has. 

(Let me say a special "thank-you" to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, for maintaining and publishing it's most excellent time-series data.   The St. Louis Fed Data-Series have been very helpful.   This data has educated us, and this education has enriched us with valuable knowledge.   We have translated this knowledge in to action plans, and it has help make our lives better.   Thank-you for providing it. )

The Great Depression was an awful time, in both Canada and the USA.  It was not so bad in Canada, but it was harsh.  My grandfather had just purchased the family farm, from his siblings, and had taken out a large mortgage, in 1929, to make the purchase (the family farm had been left to him, and a bunch of his brothers and sisters.)   When the Depression happened, and the economy blew up, and prices started falling (and falling, and falling...), he was unable to meet the mortgage payments from the (much smaller) revenues the farm produce could be sold for. 

It was only because of sensible "forbearance rules" that were enacted, that he was able to keep the farm.  (The "Forbearance Rules" required that if a mortgage-holder could make *any* monthly payment at all, then that would be sufficient to allow the mortgage (and mortgagee!) to remain in place, and the unpaid amortization amount would be added to the principal.)    The 1929 mortgage did not get paid off, until the 1960's, when my father had become a practicing Dentist, and had sufficient funds to pay down the mortgage.   

And what is most amusing, is that the farm and farmhouse still exist, but my father sold them for $10,000 back in the 1960's, to a neighbour.   The farm (50 acres) and the farmhouse is probably worth $500,000 or more today.   Cheap real-estate, that can yield a revenue-stream, is a reasonable and effective hedge against the inflation that always seems to happen.

We bloody well need to learn from history.  

The current inflation is mostly structural, and due to stupid actions by very bad political leaders.  Interest rate increase will not fix this problem, and will *not* lower costs.  The solution that should be applied, along with *moderate* interest rate increases, is probably targeted removal of the psychotic mass-murdering crazy "Strong Leader" idiots like Vladimir Putin.  

That man should be target for removal, by any means possible.  And he should be removed.

Seriously, the UN should pass a resolution requiring Moscow forces to exit ALL Ukraine territory within 12 days.  If they fail to do so, then the UK, USA and NATO should begin a bombing campaign in Russia, starting with military instalations, and progressing rapidly to the power generation and water supplies of major Russian cities.  

But maybe, if we just act now, really quickly, and with real vigour, we might stand a damn good chance of catching the bastards with their pants down.

Maybe we should just pepper these bad guys with all the good technology we have.  Absolutely use every single item we have - even the secret stuff we cannot talk about.  It's gonna have to happen at some point.  So maybe now, is the right time to get this dirty job done.

:)

[ Sept. 16, 2022 ] - More Stupid Comments from People Who Should Bloody Well Know Better - It just keeps getting more silly and absurd in USA land...  Old former Treasury Secretary of the USA - Larry Summers - has just gone on record as saying: "I am aware of no major example in which the central bank reacted with excessive speed to inflation and a large cost was paid."  

Here is the Bloomberg article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-16/summers-says-history-shows-no-example-of-hiking-rates-too-fast?srnd=markets-vp

(you may have to select "Reader view" or disable Javascript to see the article)

This Summers fellow actual said this.  Is he really this ignorant and clueless?

What about the "Great Depression of the 1930's"?  It was caused by a stock-market crash, that was triggered by a 50% hike in interest rates, from 4% to 6%, made by the USA Federal Reserve, in 1929.

In 1929, the Federal Reserve raised a key benchmark rate from 4% to 6%, because it was concerned that about asset-price inflation, in particular in the USA New York Stock Market.

Most of the investing public of USA was margined up to their eyebrows (and more, in some cases.)  In the 1920's, you could borrow up to 90% of the value of your stock portfolio, and invest that borrowed money into new stocks.  

When interest rates were JACKED UP 50% by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in the late summer of 1929, from 4% to 6%, this 50 percent increase in the cost of money, provoked MANY investment and brokerage firms which had loaned out money, to call in their loans, as stock prices started falling.  Since the loans were backed by stock, which started falling in price, the whole process became quite automatic, (and very fast) as margin calls were made.   Investors had to put up more money, as their stock portfolio collateral fell in value, or their stocks were sold - into a falling market.  The process snowballed.

[ I decided to find the actual data numbers, and after a lot of searching the St. Louis Federal Reserve data-series, I found it.  It's clear.  The US Federal Reserve Bank of New York raised the discount rate from 4% in April of 1928, to 6%, in October of 1929. Here is the data series:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M13009USM156NNBR

This was a MASSIVE increase in the cost of borrowed money, and like today, this Federal Reserve rate was a benchmark that many financial firms used to set their loan rates.  This jump in rates, to stop asset-inflation, was the trigger for the 1929 Stock Market crash. In a 2002 speech to the Hoover Institute, Ben Bernanke even admitted this.]

The Federal Reserve raising interest rates from 4% to 6% in 1929 was the direct triggering cause of the 1929 New York Stock Market crash.  And the Stock Market Crash in 1929, essentially caused the "Great Depression" of the 1930's, as stocks fell and fell in value, until many had lost 80 to 90% of their peak 1929 prices.

So Larry, what da ya think?  Was the complete implosion of the US economy in the 1930's a "large cost?"

Summers is speaking like some kind of brain-dead idiot who does not even know his own country's (and the World''s!) financial history! 

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats in the USA?   Are they all insane or something?

They seem to regularly be saying the most absurd nonsense that is just plain not true.  This comment by Larry Summers certainly qualifies.   Can Summers really be this ignorant of his own nation's market history?

[ Sept. 15, 2022 ] - A Beautiful Analysis (That is Wrong...) - I am just seeing so much that is curious and strange - and wrong.  This is unique and perhaps is an occupational hazard of both reading and aging.   One has to ask, quietly.. "WTF?"

I do this about ten times a day now.  Often, the internal dialogue is more like: "WTF is this sh*t??".  But not always.  Here is a lovely example of some really fine analysis:

https://realinvestmentadvice.com/yields-are-defying-yesterdays-logic

The above attempts to explain the rising yield (falling price) of US Treasury bonds.  Author Michael Lebowitz has really done a nice paper, and offers an interesting explanation for why bond yields are not acting the way they have in the last 40 years (ie. trending down, down and down more... and then more still, until in some cases, they went negative, right?  Remember?)

Mr. Lebowitz is a smart guy, offering some fine, smart-guy advice.  His paper is a lovely example of fine analysis (he suggests falling US Treasury bond prices (rising yields) are driven by foreign selling, by nation-states seeking to stabilize their weakening currencies, and that this is temporary, and soon, yields will come back down. The nation-state central banks are using the dollars they get from bond sales to buy their own currencies, to prevent them from weakening further.  Clear?)

I think his analysis and paper are very well done.  The only problem, is that he is wrong.

I am really pretty sure he is wrong.   It is simply that the 8% (and more) inflation rate, regardless of what sort of voodoo is being used to suggest we actually know what "inflation expectations" in the future really are, is not likely a temporary phenomenon, and market participants know this.

People are not always stupid, all the time (to paraphrase old USA President Lincoln).

It is not necessary to search for complex, multi-factor, hidden-Imam or Central Banker currency crisis fear-driven strategies to explain rising yields on US Treasury bonds (falling bond prices). 

Bond yields simply **SUCK** at these current levels.  In a world of 8% inflation, getting a small 4% return on a Government Bond IS A REALLY AWFUL INVESTMENT.     It is just a bad, bad investment - and you have to PAY UP HARD to get the OVERVALUED US dollars to buy the nasty thing, and then you get paper denominated in an overvalued currency, which yields only half the inflation rate!   In a world where liquidity is drying up, this is just a bad trade. 

A rapidly rising US dollar is an ugly problem, yes, we grant that.  It is bad for many investors in many nations - even for the USA, as it makes their export products too expensive to acquire, for many.

But the 3 and 4 percent yields now on offer, are LESS THAN HALF what is needed, to make the investment even have a BREAK-EVEN real value.   You buy a T-bond, and you are certain to suffer the negative real return of an awful investment.

It really is that simple.

The world is making a transition, from easy-money, free-cash-for-everyone crazy+crazy multiplied by more crazy =>  really, really crazy economics, to a world of more rational economics, which are going to be characterized by one key word:  "SCARCITY".

Economics was often called the "Science of Scarcity".

And scarcity - old-fashioned "dearth" - is returning to our World.

This is happening for a variety of reasons - most of which are sad and bad.  And very typical and common in the sad sweep of human history.  The 4 Horsemen.  They are riding again.

If you now - as a trader - recognize that bonds ***still do not work right*** at these yield levels, given the obvious and accelerating inflation that is ***EVERYWHERE*** in ***EVERYTHING*** now, then a better trade, is maybe to sell your existing "financial asset" paper, and sit in CASH for a while, until the World re-normalizes to the one you expect to see.

And what will that world look like?   Take a hard look at 1974, and you can get a real good picture of what I fear we can expect.  I am almost certain of this.    We will see a "stagflation" world, of rising prices, falling consumption, rising unemployment and scarcity.  This process is just starting.

We are already seeing the runaway inflation.   Houses cost $1 million for something nice.  A can of ordinary paint at the hardware store is $85.  For a can of paint!   A small red-dot Bushnell optic for a rifle, that I could buy a few years ago for $150 Canadian, is now closer to $300.   Every thing seems to be up 10 to 20 percent or more, in the last couple of years.  Many products are not even available, unless acquired online and shipped in by Amazon.  But even that disruptive process, has reached it's economic limits, it is starting to look like.   Couriers are facing 50% increases in fuel prices.  Limits are appearing everywhere.  Cost are rising first, then product prices.

Years ago, we dumped the bond portfolio (that 60% equities and 40% bonds is toxic nonsense, used by salesmen to sell financial paper -  please learn this people!), and we bought northern real-estate, and have been beavering away on developing it.  It promises to be a 10-bagger, if we can move it along a bit further, and get a structure built.   A good investment *should* be a 10-bagger, (a gain of ten times initial costs), since it has to be that good, to make up for the ones that go to hell and die, right?  Every VC (venture capitalist) know this truth.  You can learn it too, if you read a bit.   You don't have to be Mr. Son of Softbank, and being Elon Musk is also difficult.

But even if you cannot be Elon Musk (and spend more time being "Elon Muck"...), you still are not required to be explicitly stupid, right?

Bonds are just a bad investment.  You get all the interest rate and return-OF-your-capital risk, plus the currency risk, and precious little benefit - a small, stinky, polluted little "Butler Creek" dribble of interest payments (from Bill Gross's book), and maybe, maybe if you are very lucky, you might even get your money back. 

"Fuck that Shit.", as we say so often, here in Canada.

Bond yields are RISING, because BONDS HAVE TO YIELD AT LEAST THE INFLATION RATE, TO BE VIABLE, RATIONAL INVESTMENTS, unless you are in Superman's crazy BIZZARO WORLD, where you can make money because yields are being driven down by financial engineering, liquidity floods, central-bank panic buying, private bank's capital reserve requirements, government-funding-frauds and a whole bunch of other curious schemes.

Please know this:  Bond yields at 4% are NOT ENOUGH if you are getting OFFICIAL inflation prints of more than 8%!   (We believe true inflation is much higher than the official numbers report, since government statisticians design-in "hedonic" adjustments to products, such as cars and other big-ticket items, so as to deliberately understate inflation.)

In the 1960's bonds were called:  "Financial Certificates of Confiscation".

Does no one anywhere read their economic history anymore?

Government bonds have to yield at LEAST 6% to make any sense in this current environment, unless we are certain to make a rapid jump back to a deflationary environment.   But deflation is not going to happen, in a world of rising scarcity.  That is why bond prices are STILL FALLING.  We are only roughly HALF-WAY THROUGH this painful reset event that is now playing out.

This is why we retain our long postions in our bank stocks.

We think the banks will do just fine, in a world of 6% to 8% yields.  Banks make their profit on fees and the spread between their assets (their loans) and their liabilities (their deposits).  Your loans will cost you 11% to 15% (like your VISA card today costs you 22% on a CASH ADVANCE).    And your deposits will still earn close to nothing.  Expect that.  The real-world economy does just fine with 20% or more interest rates.   Money is scarce for poor-people with bad credit scores, and it is priced accordingly.  It is also priced expensive for stupid people who don't pay back their loans on time, and on schedule.

So, given both history and modern current economic reality, we are pretty sure the world will be able to accommodate 10%+ interest rates.

The only place this new reality is not fully recognized, is in the distorted "Bond Market", which has become to be dominated by a bogus trans-national government scheme, designed to enrich the already rich, and allow corrupt and dishonest government scammers to run their out of control tax-and-spend games.  (Check out the Trudeau Liberal's latest unwise economic plans, if you doubt our assertion.)

TL;DR  -  Bond yields are going up, because they are still TOO LOW.

Sure, I sound like a hair-brained conspiracy theorist, I know.  What is amusing as hell, is that this really is the reality we are facing.  In a world of new scarcity, which also means a scarcity of real wealth, we will have to see either a runaway inflation (if the pandemic money-printing is continued), or a harsh, painful dial-back in consumption, production and economic activity, if rates-of-return on capital are allowed to rise to sane levels that rationally reward investors for investing and savers for saving.

Clear?

Bond yields are RISING (which means bond prices are FALLING) because bond prices are still too high, and need to be re-priced down to be economically ratonal investments, in this "new era" of collapsing levels of liquidity.  The money-supply of the global reserve currency (the US dollar) is being made to shrink.  This action will act to reduce prices of all financial assets.

The economy can use financial assets to create synthetic "wealth", like a Central Bank can create M1 and M2 money supply.  But the markets can also use financial assets to remove this same synthetic "wealth".   The effect typically is to reduce economic activity.   The key problem here, is that this financial wealth-creation, and it's economic effects is not linear, and neither is the inverse, the financial wealth-destruction. 

The simulation-response to money-supply increase, and financial-wealth-creation, is generally gradual.  Business people and consumers dial up their production and consumption slowly, whereas when money-supply is reduced, and/or financial wealth is erased, production & consumption can experience rapid response-actions, as existing projects, production-systems and consumption plans are "cut-back" or "axed".  Nothing is linear here.  Small changes can have big effects, and tripwires and threshold triggering pivotal-points are everywhere.

Investment action still does not work right yet, and lifting administered interest rates will not bring forth new energy supplies, which like 1973, is the trigger mechanism for the current inflation.   Energy prices are spiking, pretty much everywhere.   We all maybe have the Dancing Sickness, except now, we are dancing in a minefield. 

And interest-rate increases will not resolve supply-chain disruptions, or reduce the level of global conflicts, and restore lost production.  All that will happen, is that asset-prices will fall, and that will induce wealth-destruction, and an economic downturn.   Long term mortgage rates have doubled in the USA (3 percent to 6% in the last year), and tripled in Canada, in some cases.  This will hammer real-estate values and house prices.  We know this will happen, because it is already happening.  Easy prediction, yes?

So, we expect we are only maybe halfway thru this post-pandemic reset that is occuring.  Some pundits and billionaire investors are calling for an S&P-500 of around 3000, and yields to be much higher.  But this can be avoided.

The various Central Bankers should let the markets do some of the work of managing this reset.

What really matters, is the long-term interest rates, and those are set by the market-place, not by a bunch of guys in Washington or Ottawa.  Yields will rise, as bond prices need to come down, in order to make economic sense.    The Central Bankers should recall what the doctors are taught:  "First, do no harm."   That means pause a bit, and monitor just how fast the economy is adjusting to the withdrawal of the extreme money-supply expansion.   Just reducing the bond-purchases might dial things back enough, to reduce inflation pressures.

EIther way, we are in for some rising yields, no way around it, we suspect.  And we do not expect bond prices to rise, for quite a while.   Maybe not in our lifetimes.   The current inversion in the yield curve (with short rates 20 or 30 basis points above long rates in the USA) is also indicating that money is now tight, and can be expected to get tighter, over the next 6 to 12 months.   If this does NOT happen, the alternative may well be 20% (or more) yearly inflation rates. 

[ Sept. 14, 2022 ] - The Necessity of Victory - As I have admitted earlier, I am no longer objective about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  I want Russia to get defeated, absolutely and completely.   This must happen, even if extreme measures are required.   We - the World - must do what it takes.   

And in the link below, one can see how the military equipment donated by Western Allies, has been and is being used by the Ukrainian military, to achieve the necessary objective, and defend their own homeland:

https://mil.in.ua/en/articles/western-armored-vehicles-in-offensive-operation-in-the-kharkiv-region/

Like it or not, the World is at war with the Putinistas of the Russian Federation. We are not at war with the Russian people.  Just the idiots who support Putin, and this insane campaign to destroy the freedom of the European citizens of Ukraine.

The Markets:

The inflation print in the USA, at over 8%, with no sign of letting up, will force the USA Federal Reserve down a path that leads to the inversion of all they have done for the last several years.   Rates are being re-normalized too quickly, and may produce an ugly, non-linear reactive response.  Our AI models are negative, but we have elected to remain in the market, and continue to hold our long positions, as the dividend streams do not appear to be at risk.

This might even be a time for leverage, curiously.   If you view the market reaction as overdone, there is a case to be made, for adding to positions once prices reach dividend-yield levels that represent investments that are attractive in a moderate to high inllation environment.

But this is a dangerous strategy - rather like that game of Russian Roulette, as played in that film "The Deer Hunter".    I screened the 1962 MGM version of "Damion & Pythias" last nite.   It was a remarkably good film.   The Second World War made America strong - but it was strength gained with wisdom learned, which is rare in this World.  But you can see it in the wild range of the films that they produced, especially as the war memory receded into history, and became part of the culture.

We must try to continue to look *outward*, and not turn inward, and fight with our own people.   The later course ensures tragic error and self-destruction.    This is happening now, in Russia.  

The whole problem with games like "Russian Roulette", is that the outcome-cost exceeds all possible benefits, if the game is played long enough.

Nature Herself offers so many much-better-games that can be played, and for much greater gain.   Stupid, lethal games that end in certain disaster, should be avoided.

Is this not obvious?   Of course, the case for peace is best made after victory has been achieved, and this is undeniable.    But it is the son of the tyrant of Syracuse, who convinces his father to spare both Damion *and* Pythias, after Pythias has fought his way into the city, to offer himself for execution, in place of Damion.   Perhaps I am slightly unique, in knowing the background about the Cult of Pythagoras, which forms the key to the film's subtext plotline...  Our Western cultural world, came directly from this 4th century BC Greek world that is quite accurately depicted in the MGM film.  

In the film, and in the ancient story, the tyrant leader Dionysus of Syracuse relents, and frees both Damion and Pythias not only because his son requests this - but also because he wisely recognizes that he has an insufficient number of armed soldiers to put down a revolt against himself by his citizens.   Wisdom is forced - not just by honour, friendship and the heroic willingness to accept self-sacrifice that Pythias demonstrates, but also by the power that these heroic ideals have on the imagination and minds of the citizens of Syracuse.   The whole film is a clever explanation of how the power of an Idea, can change and reshape the World.

This is why these ancient stories were told, and continue to be told, despite routine attempts to corrupt and degrade the ideals that the stories represent.   

The ideas are real, and they have Power.   The ideas have greater power, than the tyrants have, and eventually, even the cruel tyrants must learn this trurth.   This is the source - the fountainhead - of wisdom.

[ Sept. 13, 2022 ] - The Cult of Strength is the Cause of Failure - When a people become hooked on the bogus "Cult of Strength", the probability of system failure rises rapidly.   Every take-off carries some risk.   Sharp turns near the ground are to be avoided, for many various reasons.   The Russian pilot's name was "Daniil".   He died in this crash, which is thought to have occured in occupied Crimea, on Sept. 11th, two days ago.  The A/C is an Su-25, the Russian version of the "Warhog", a type used for close-air-support and killing tanks and armored-vehicles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcFh4NlEa_U

In ancient times, War was described as the time when fathers bury their sons.  But nowadays, one may not even get a chance to do that - not even little bits or pieces are likely to be left after this kind of crash.

Putin's war against Ukraine is the stupidest, most needlessly foolish & destructive action that a political leader has ever taken in modern times.  At least it looks this way to me.  It is killing entire cities of peaceful Ukrainians, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian young men, doing terrible damage to Russia and it's economy, harming all of Europe, and damaging the stability and freedom of the World.   

The man is a psychopath - or he is emulating one for his own political and personal gain.    He survives only because of Russia's love of the tragic "Cult of Strength", that has done such great damage to Russia and it's people, throughout it's history.

It is a madness.  There is no benefit here for any civilized person, anywhere.   Only a violence-addicted thief or criminal bandit could derive any gain from this insane action.    What is particularly awful, is the carefully co-ordinated killing of Russian energy company executives (and their families, in some cases) that Putin's FSB has inititated.  So far, his people appear to have murdered 8 different executives.  (Our source for this is the BBC, and other International press reports.)

Regardless of your own political beliefs - all can agree that this madness that is dominating the Russian Federation, must be ended, by any means possible.

What is curious, is to see just how worthless and ineffective are our trans-national organizations (like the United Nations, for example), that were supposed to be able to prevent this kind of Nation-State to Nation-State exercise in mass-murder and destructive conflict.

It shows just how little humans have progressed since ancient times. 

[ Sept. 12, 2022 ] - Jurassic Park - We have two large groups of turkeys that hang around the farm.  Each is dominated by a large male.   They keep seperate, and apparently have "eagle eyes", dashing for the forest or hedgerows, if they see anything that disturbs them (like our dog).  But since we don't shoot them, they have decided this is safe territory, and forage for food here regularly.    In the morning, when the weather is nice, and the sun comes up and illuminates these very large birds, as they graze for worms, seed and bugs in the alfalfa crop, the farmstead looks like Jurassic Park.  It is a strange sight.   It's not quite as dramatic as when I see the large black bears up at the "Northern Office", but it is still pretty impressive. 

Nature is rather amazing.

Charest got 16% of the Conservative Party vote, and Polievre got 68%.   I tried to explain the obvious necessity of this to an associate.   This was the right decision.  Charest may be a "nice fellow", but I suspect we are entering a time of danger, conflict and outright warfare.   There is just so much astonishingly stupid actions being carried out by so many Leftist nutjobs in positions of power and authority, that we are ripe for a real "revolution", in the very classical meaning of that word.    We need a man like Polievre.

We need a wholesale purge in Ottawa, where we sweep the "catbird seats" clean, and begin the process of healing a really angry nation.  

As I drive around Ontario, I see *many* cars and pickup trucks sporting small (or not so small) Canadian flags - the symbol now, of the "Truckers Protest" that was ended by Justin Trudeau's invoking of "Martial Law" and his governments arrest of the organizers, and the government sanctioned theft of their funds.   That action was unnecessary and grotesque.

And now the awful mass-murder at a Saskachewan Indian Reserve, shows clearly and tragically the utter idiotic insanity of the Trudeau approach to creating "Indigenous Homelands" in Canada - an ugly, foolish and profoundly stupid approach that is directly responsible for Indian crime being so common and so serious.    When the Indian brothers began their stabbing spree, the "first responder" was not an RCMP policeman, but was some dispute-resolution woman - and of course, she was killed by the out-of-control Indian criminals.

Out-of-control, indigenous-person murderers are part of Canada's history - just as is the RCMP who would track these bad persons down and dispatch them.    The history of Canada is violent, and has been sanitized by every generation, so that little truth remains visible today.   You can find the truth of the fight for Canada, in old books,  Our history was really violent.   And the most intense and over-the-top violence came from the indigenous peoples - the Indians.    They were *extremely* violent, and routinely carried out warfare on deliberately genocidal basis.   When I purchased my farm, I checked which Indian tribe had lived on the land - and it was land that was held by the "Neutrals" - who were a distinct national entity, who chose to remain independent from the Iroquois and Huron wars that characterized Ontario from the 1500s to the 1700s.   And what happened to the "Neutrals"?  They were systematically exterminated by both the Hurons and the Iroquois, who were angry that they refused to pick a side.

Indian Reserves are very bad idea, as the land is held in common.  This is a perfect algorithm for tribal conflict, and internal dispute, and outright warfare.  It also ensures poverty.

If you don't own your own property, then you do not do any maintenance on it.   I spent the last few days, repairing a dock.   It is insanely difficult work, literally back-breaking effort required to lift and position beams and rocks, while standing in water.   There is no way any sane human would work to improve and develop property he does not own,  if hecannot enjoy the the legal title to it, and extract benefits therefrom.

The Indian Reserve land should be deeded-out on a fee-simple basis to all "tribe members", and all "Indian Treaties" should be ended.   Brazil did this - there are whole cities in Brazil where all birth-records were destroyed, so that it is not provable whose families were from a slave, and who were from a European "nobleman".  This is the correct model.   Racist views can not be actionable, if all people are designated equal in the eyes of the law.

Canada needs to begin moving in this direction.   We cannot support a race-based system of land tenure, and it is time it was ended.

There should be no "special-status" Canadians.   

All our citizens, should have exactly the same equal rights and privilages under Canadian Law.   The "Indian Reserve" system, and the newer insanity of "Indigenous People's Homelands" which have semi-sovreign status, must be ended.    This current insanity that Justin Trudeau supports (and has championed, with tragic  intensity), is profoundly racist, unwise, economically foolish, and just plain a really very bad idea.    It will have to be ended, and we should begin this process now.

As things stand now, Canada is a crazy, absurdist "Jurassic Park", with an entire sub-class of "special-status" tribal folks who are not allowed to own their own property.  

This is madness, and it must end.

[ Sept. 8, 2022 ] - Locked to a Dwarf - We follow certain astronomical developements for reasons which are too involved to describe here.  This is an interesting paper, which describes two possible, rockly Earth-like planets, which orbit a nearby (32 parsecs, or roughly 104.3 light-years away) red-dwarf star.

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/forth/aa44041-22.pdf

The two planets are thought  to be tidally locked, so that their rotation is gravitationally synchronized with their orbital periods, so that the same hemisphere of the planet faces the cool star.  (Cool for a star, which is still damn hot).  The idea is that each planet is *maybe* in the HZ (Habitial Zone), close enough so that water is liquid, but not too close so that all the water is boiled away, along with maybe most of the atmosphere - the Goldilocks region - not too cold, not too hot.  Of course, complex climate-models have to be assumed, even to make these estimates - all of which are conjecture.   Probabilty estimates have to be used to link the photometric data to the planetary characteristics, etc.    But the photo-data numbers and the analysis looks not too bad.   What they found looks real.

I dislike papers with hundreds of authors, and are funded by a bunch of "Big Science" government moneybaggers, since they are usually impossible to read.  But this one (funded by NASA and European Agency folks), and with a list of authors that looks like a University telephone book, is not too bad.  They used the right software, and the analytic leaps and wild assumptions are reasonable.    Exoplanet research is hilarious - a perfect example of how big datasets with very tiny numeric variations can be mined to discover quite surprising results.   But it proves there are *many* star+planets orbital systems out in space, which resemble the one around our Sun.  And this fact alone is very useful information.  

Market Madness:

As for our market efforts - we are getting hammered badly, and remain long and fully invested. The AI models have all swung down, and if we were in a less extreme set of scenarios, we would exit and go to the sidelines.  But the current scenario is madness.    We are seeing a surprising and curious set of serial phenomenon that we have to call simply "madness".

We suspect the models are wrong, and we simply doubt that the North American and European nation-states will seek to engineer a catastrophic economic collapse.   The risks we see related to inflation remain.   Stocks are not always a hedge against inflation, but they can and should be, so we suspect they will be over the next 12 to 18 months.

What we are seeing, is market-driven reactive responses, based on sophisticated algorithmic models (which are not that different from the market dynamics of the late 1800's & early 1900's, when you had big technical/economic change + lots of very smart, risk-taking speculators in New York, all playing dangerous games.)   You end up with lots of wild volitile action, and crazy swings - a lot like the recent Bed, Bath and Beyond "Fractured Fairy Tale".  (The dead CFO on a New York sidewalk is a painful and dramatic touch, certainly. But it is also very much in keeping with history.)

I think we can survive this current storm.   Our holdings offer a generous dividend-stream, and this seems to be secure.  But like others, we are down nearly 20% this year, which is ugly and bad.  But if we bail now, we not only lock in the loss, but also lose all protection against runaway inflation.  And this has happened to us, several times before.  Holding on to the dividend-stream generator-process, has proved to be a successful market-survival strategy.  It pays the bills.

What we have learned also, is that our earlier "high-frequency" approach, was probably better.  But it can also cause one to miss a major move, and that can be a big problem - one needs the gains, to balance the costs of the down-swings.

Yes, we are all bound for the graveyard (and that is best-case scenario, remember!), but we are not going there just yet, so we hope our political gamesters in their power-positions do not seek to destroy the Western World prosperity just yet, also.

We should not have Governments that do unwise and unfair, foolish actions.

"Windfall taxes" on special situation companies that have been recently successful - eg. banks during the real-estate boom, and oil-and-gas companies during the insane Russian "war" - are completely wrong and illegitimate economic exercises.  Such silly action, to punish the successful, during their rare times of success, really should be avoided.  The gains made during the good times, are needed to allow passage through the storms of the bad times.

It is desperately important - critical really - that we (the Western World) get a new crop of political "leaders", in most nations, very soon.   We wish Liz Truss good luck in the UK.  I remember a story about a cake, baked for the English military garrison in Cairo, as the German Army was advancing across the North African desert, in WW-II.  The cake had a mis-translation of "God Bless the English Army" written on it, by the Egyptian cook.  The cake was presented to the Officer's Mess with the phrase:  "God Help the English Army" which history suggests He actually did.   Perhaps we can all pray in a similar manner, for newly minted UK Prime Minister Truss.

[ Sept. 7, 2022 ] - The World Must Stop Being Completely Silly - The world is being completely silly.  There are so many interesting opportunities.   Prices for good things, are becoming lower, and with the number of really stupid people in charge, in just about every location and every nation, the opportunities for folks who are not completely silly and behaving in an unwise manner, has grown significantly.

Putin - whom we used to like and respect - has shown himself to be an unwise monster.  Regardless of one's political views here, we all agree that Russia must lose it's "war", and lose it bady.   The invasion of Ukraine was illegal, sadistically evil, stupid, and will do more damage to Russia, than most folks realize.   The Russians around Putin now know this.  Putin is not a Statesman - he is just another in a long line of brutal and cruel gangsters, on par with Pablo Escobar, Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel.   The man will end his days in prison, if sanity and justice can prevail, or in a bunker, or in a hospital.  Maybe he will be like Stalin, and get a stroke, and be left alone for 24 hours to ensure he is offline forever.  On the day of his death, millions of people around the world will rejoice.  

What a sad legacy, for what could have been a fine and good person.   Russia must figure out how to escape from the tyranny he has created, and dismantle the new "Gulag State" he is constructing.   They must recognize the profound fraud of the "strongman".  Human strength and success comes from the brain, not from the fist.   The nation of  folks who put the first man in space, and built the first orbiting satellite, should understand this, better than any group of people.

What is good, is that Europe is coming to it's senses.  This crisis has shown Europeans that they need to stop wasting resources on foolish, Leftist-fraud economics, and build more nuclear power plants, and develop and deploy critical technology.  They need to manage their security better, and focus their efforts towards weapons production.   Europe should become more like America - rather than America becoming more like Europe.

As a retired NATO General said, so wisely:  "Time to put on your big-boy pants..."  and ensure that you are all ready to fight to protect and maintain the Western Cultural values that define what we all accept and require as civilized behaviour.  

We can all have fine and effective economic growth, in a safe, sane, low-inflation environment, and have energy and national security also - but we have to avoid being so fucking stupid.   The "Lie of the Left" needs to be understood for what it is - and rejected.

Wind-turbines are useless on calm-wind days, and solar-energy is maybe OK to charge a small car-battery, or keep a radio working - but it cannot run industry.   Europeans need to stop being fucking stupid - they should be *building* new nuclear power plants, not shutting them down. 

This is a sImple, obvious, and necessary requirement.

And money must be diverted from  idiotic "sit on your fat ass and get free money" social programs, and used to fund weapons manufacturing.   Life is what it is.  People are born, they live, and then they just die.   It might be time to bring old-fashioned *eugenics* back into vogue.   There is nothing wrong with using science to help raise the quality and sanity level of a national population.  This does not automatically lead to "death camps" and evil atrocity, like the Leftist fraudsters assert.  

And it's necessary to recognize the outright fraud of "Climate Change".   Even if global temperatures are rising (which we see no provable evidence of at all), these are most likely due to increases in solar output, and represent an opportunity for northern locations.  The various attempts to degrade economic growth,  and restrict economic opportunity and national economic development, in the name of bogus "Climate Change" goals, must be completely ended.   The climate here will change, and change radically, but over a *very long time scale*.  Our history shows half of North America was covered by glaciers, only 25,000 years ago.  We have our farm, on a series of eskers, drumlins and terminal moraines, which were the direct result of glacial activity.  To suggest that we can 'gain-ride" (dynamically alter) the large-scale climate patterns of our planet, is absurd and arrogant foolishness - and it wastes and diverts resources.  We need to put this "Climate Change" nonsense to bed, and focus on environmental transformation, not environmental "head-in-the-sand" economic restrictions driven by fictional pseudo-science political goals.

We need aggressive pro-development, transformative economic goals and objectives, which operate on enhancing the supply-side, not foolish and unwise restrictive policies that attempt to smother and degrade economic demand.

This must be done.  And we must create a new political environment, where these kinds of transformative policies become possible. 

We *must* make these changes happen, and eject the Leftist fraudsters from political power.

[ Sept. 6, 2022 ] - Bad People Doing Bad Things - This seems to characterize so many groups now - the criminal sector, the international situation, the various "indigenous communities" out West, the financial agents in many public corporations, the regulators and social-planners just about everywhere, the Chinese, the Russians, and the politicians in our Federal Government.  It is unclear just how to address the astonishing breakdown in sanity that seems to be underway just about everywhere.   Is this the result of the Covid-19 Lockdowns?    Or is there more going on?  We think there has to be more behind all this.  We are seeing an astonishing serial lack-of-wisdom in so many diverse areas, that it is a tad unbelievable.

But history has always suggested that "truth is stranger than fiction" - and more annoying also, it seems. 

[ Sept. 2, 2022 ] - It's Astounding, Time is Fleeting, Madness Takes Control - All true.   We are to do the "Time Warp" again?   Serial madness, and cereal shortage?   We study the events, and we are surprised at the lack of wisdom everywhere. 

But it does not have to be this way.

Poor China is blowing up it's "property" sector, except it really does not actually even have a "property" sector.  All "property" in China is owned by the Communist State.  A supposed "property owner" in China only has a 99-year lease-hold on his land or home or apartment.    This simple little legal fact, makes all the difference in the world.  "Owning property" is a bogus concept in China mainland.  

The current China "property" market  is bullshit.  

And this little fact, is key to the current shitstorm that the Chinese "property" market is now facing.

Until a new Government is able to take charge in China, and correctly deed out all the "leased land and leased houses" to their actual tenants, there will be further problems.  And things will get worse.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/chinas-top-developer-slides-rapidly-severe-depression-property-crisis-worsens

The solution to the current property mess in China is simple:  Create proper "fee-simple" correct Roman-style true land-holding.  These characteristics must be real, and be complete with full legal protection and proper, clear means of hypothecation (ie. you can pledge land as collateral for a loan of money).  The Chinese understand this concept well, and it was the foundation of their economy for thousands of years, just as it has been the foundation of the Western World's economy, for a similar period of time. 

This allows the State to tax property properly, and also encourages citizens to keep and maintain their property holdings - through thick and thin times, as a key source of familial, trans-generational wealth.   In this environment, all good people will pay their mortgages, protect their homes, and fight to save their cities, at all costs.    Legally sanctioned, direct, ownership-based  land-tenure is the starting point for all social cooperation and economic interaction in a civilized country.  This is the key basis for human social organization.   "Fences make good neighbours", as even our Poets have wisely said.

If you stop paying your mortgage, then you lose your property, and the bank auctions it off to someone who can and will pay the taxes and the mortgages on the holdings.  So the family, wisely, does all it can, to protect it's property holdings.   Property holdings are tangible and actionable base-line stores of familial wealth and opportunity.    A State entity that messes with this economic and social model, will fail.   This is proven by History.

This model works well.  It is the very foundational basis for civilization.

If the Chinese Governments could simply wake up to sanity and reality, and completely throw out the unwise, foolish, and socially awful lies of "Communism", they could engineer an immediate corrective solution to their current "property depression" crisis that is taking place.

You cannot "bullshit" your way to prosperity and wealth.  It has to be real - and this applies not just to private individuals, but also to State agents and Governments.   Every person and every company and every nation, eventually learns this simple truth.

[ Sept. 1, 2022 ] - Putin Suspected of Ordering Murder of Lukoil Chairman - The 67-year old executive, Ravil Maganov, Chairman of Lukoil, one of the world's largest Oil and Energy firms, has died after another Putin "defenestration".   This ugly trick of throwing political opponents out of high building windows, has a long tradition in the FSB (KGB).    It happens with such tragic regularity, that one wonders how and why the Russian people tolerate gangsters running the governments of their homeland.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62750584?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

Our source here is the BBC.   And European history...

https://allthatsinteresting.com/defenestration-of-prague

The death of Ravil Maganov is just one more good man gone, erased by Putin's sadists and killers who have taken control of Moscow and Russia.  Putin's body-count is growing daily.

This is insane.  Russia was doing well, Ukraine was doing well, and Europe was flowing wealth into Russia, as Russian companies exported Russian oil and gas to the world, at a good profit, which generated generous tax revenue for the Russian State, and the Russian people.   Both Ukraine and Russia were developing, and becoming prosperous.

But psychopathic murderer, Vladimir Putin, put an end to the fine peaceful life of both nations, and has turned Russia into a bleeding Hell-State, run by stone-evil killers, and murderous gangsters.

The recent string of murders of Russian business executives is significant.  There are *many* other very suspicious deaths, of key people - and their families.

https://www.world-today-news.com/the-son-of-the-russian-oligarch-protoseni-said-that-his-family-was-killed/

This is insanity on par with Hitler, in his last days in the Berlin Bunker.  Putin is a dangerous and unwell creature.   He is actively destroying Russia, and the peace of the World.

This is a very big problem. 

It needs to be fixed.   And it should be fixed by the Russians themselves.

And, sadly, Ex-president Gorbachev has died.  He was 91.  Putin will not attend his funeral.   Boris Yeltsin and Mikail Gorbachev transformed the ugly and brutal Soviet Union, into a modern Russian State.   They were great men, and did great deeds.  Even the UK press agrees with this.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62756196

[Aug. 31, 2022 ] - MAATADoSA - Ok, so if MAGA hats are "semi-fascist" (according to Biden!) and we are not supposed to try to "Make America Great Again", then perhaps the Democrats might sport "MAATADoSA" hats?  What is "MAATADoSA" you ask?...  "Make America Able To Actually Do Something Again".  Poor America seems unable to actually do anything much at all, anymore. 

It's Students are not able (or willing) to pay the debts they incurr for their education and the NASA folks cannot seem to launch a rocket, even if the whole project is FIVE YEARS behind schedule!

Now, since NASA is using Boeing Space Launch Systems, which if they use the same software that the Boeing aircraft use, this might actually be a good thing, since no one wants rockets that automatically fly into the ground with the astronauts on board, like the 737-Max-8 Boeing aircraft have shown the habit of doing.   So maybe the Artemis launch failure had to happen.

But so many things are really falling apart.  America not only failed horribly in Afghanistan, it has also successfully turned itself from a petroleum-products exporting nation, of big cars and prosperous people, into a petrol-poor nation of high fuel and electricity prices, and dependency on foreign oil supplies.  Again.   Just like under Jimmy Carter.  Wow.

This is an astonishing transition.   The Democrats are actually arguing that Making America Great, is "semi-fascist".   And they seem to be programming failure into all their actions.

And the mainstream media just lies.  It is obvious and evident.  Here is comment by someone who has documented this:  (from our "Economics 2021-2022" section:

http://www.gemesyscanada.com/448329755

These Democrats added *over TEN trillions* of printed (digital, really) dollars to the USA money supply, and then argued it would cause only "transitory" inflation.   We all said (as both Economists, and Historians) "Oh, for Fuck Sakes!!", but like our explanations on Covid-19 lab-leak "gain-of-function" Chinese virus-engineering research origins (funded by the USA!), we (and by that I mean all of the sane and rational people in the world, basically), were shut down by the vicious-idiot criminal a$$holes in the Left-supporting mainstream media, that make it their business to grease the lie-machinery that supports the Great Fraud of the Left that we are all now being hammered with.

And we think this argument disqualifies "Progressive" (which means Liar-Leftist) Democrats from being in any sort of government position, anywhere.   

The modern "Left" is a political entity that encourages and encompasses failure, fraud, and low-quality bad fucking.   Really.

The Democrats, and their ugly little evil-hobbit cousins, the "Liberals" in Canada, have become a extremely sick and sad joke.

"Greatness", prosperity, independence, and freedom, (as well as good-old-fashioned family-style fucking by mom and dad) - these used to be effective and actionable American values.  And the whole social model worked fine and good.   America literally saved the World.

The modern model of America is A COMPLETE STRANGE FAILURE on every single level, and it is just face-palming crazy.    America's borders have been thrown open to Latin American criminal gangs and hordes of desperate refugees, and the Democrat solution to this - seriously - was to "DEFUND THE POLICE".  

How can anyone, with an IQ over 80, even consider the sick, sad, psychosis of actually voting for a Leftist Democrat?

Trump is not a great choice.  We like Ron DeSantis of Florida.  But hells-bells, and Christ-with-smells (the old moniker of the Cato-church here), we beg America to try to fix itself, and course-correct.   And fuck, yeah, we beg the same thing from our population of stoned, drunk, dope-crazed nutjobs who reflex-vote "Lying Liberal", because they gave up on thinking and reading and learning and believing that they could make any real difference by voting.

Yeah, bit of a rant today.   We are watching everything fall apart, not just asset-values.    Since China has threatened to destroy the Starlink satellite array, then it looks like some action will have to be taken.   We will have to neutralize China.   Might have to be the private sector that does the job...  Since we have Fidel Castro's bastard "love-child" in control, who loves the Communists, we have - as Houston would say - a problem.

What we need in the good old USA, is a hard-arsed angry leader, who will act with clarity, focus, and strength-of-purpose.  When the Chinese attack Taiwan, we need Mr. President of USA, to just automatically rain an entire cloudburst of fusion devices down on all Chinese military targets.  

The monkey-f*ckers at the UN can then have a talkfest about that.

The Ukraine horror-show created by Russian sadists and psychopaths working for Putin, have shown the United Nations is a massive failure - a worthless, tragic fool's joke.     It will be up to the USA (and maybe the UK, us here, East Europe and Germany?) to save the world.   We cannot even count on the French, since Macron is an idiot who still sees Putin as a human being.  Big mistake.   Our leader guy here is a Communist sympathizer, sadly.  Until we can deal with that, we have been temporarily neutered.   It's ugly.  Really ugly all around.  We here have some very serious problems to solve.

Our reading of history, suggests that there is almost zero chance of avoiding a major conflict now.   Our AI models are still showing a slight bias for a rebound, but the trend is almost flat.  And this is not a good sign.  We think it implies a major (and dangerous) transition is coming. 

And given the wild, off-the-rails idiotic weird crash-and-burn failures we are seeing in USA-land and elsewhere around the World, we don't see sanity returning for a while.   Why the USA Federal Reserve thinks that engineering a massive economic crash is a good idea now here at this point, is beyond us.   They are doing more than enough just by running their "run-off" process, and shrinking their insanely bloated balance sheet.  To also hammer Americans with *double* the mortgage rates that they all had just last year, seems silly, over-the-top, and proves that Powell is just a common lawyer, way out of his depth.   Oh my.

[Aug. 29, 2022 ] - Shredded Tweet - The lovely and the awful, mixed together like debris from a storm.  We might be in for it.  The lack of wisdom at the level of the elite executive class, is as great as we have ever seen it.  One needs a long historical perspective to see wild foolishness as extreme as what we are seeing now.   And it seems to be happening everywhere.  Curious and lethal to all asset values, is our greatest concern. 

Raising costs of capital rapidly, now, at a time of maximum transition, will *add to* inflation, not reduce it.  The unwise and business-hostile economic policy choices being taken now, will also add to inflation, and also reduce risk-linked asset values.  Putin's stupid war will reduce global food-stocks at a time of reduced crop yields globally.   The elite are actually engineering mass-poverty.   This is the classical prescription for war.

And rather like the post-1929 period of the 1930's, or the 1914 time-frame after the Serbian "Black Hand" assassination of an "Arch-Duke', there is no requirement that we track down this stupid path.  We simply have a collection of not-wise decision makers who seemed determined to drive the various Ships of State onto various rocks, shoals, and reefs.    Wreckage seems to be in our collective future, and there does not seem to be much the average fellow can do about this.  

We seem to be looking at the: "Great Mean-Reversion to Scarcity, Foolishness, and Conflict", and have no operational choice in either the trend or the outcome.   Annoying.

[Aug. 26, 2022 ] - Time - It marches on.  And some time away has been good.  Maybe, time is almost up?   The August sun at the Lake was lovely.   Doing repairs on the dock, which was destroyed by the ice, last winter.  Took along some Writers Tears.    Read some old books.   Carried some wood,  Built some structure, and saw some fish.   It's still Summer.   But it is slipping away, fast.

Like we all are.

I read an interesting book about Gerard Mercator, the "cosmographer" and map-maker, of the 1500's, who created the distorted-but-very-useful "Mercator" projection, and used it in the first, proper and reasonably accurate map-of-the-world.    And I flipped back to this article on Peter Thiel, which I think makes tremendous key points, even though it is written by a woman who is not in any way, someone who supports Thiel's important and accurate world-view.

https://unherd.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-on-the-dangers-of-progress/

The article is *not* a screed on "the-dangers-of-progress", because it offers enough of Thiel's obvious and accurate picture-of-the-world, to indicate that the real concern is the "extreme-danger-of-not-having-progress", which is where we all are now.

We live in a world which is running retrograde.    I know this to be a fact, based on a lot of information that is too involved to offer here.

We have this accounting-illusion of progress.  We have extreme and consistant government financial "trickery" being used, to offer lots of free services to folks who are economic parasites. The problem with this approach to "social justice" is that it is very effectively "hollowing out" and quietly killing the "middle-class" in most Western societies.  The process is slow, and is not easily observable, especially since the numbers are being actively "rigged" to disguise and obfuscate what is happening.

But Thiel knows it, and so do others - you don't have to be a "Prince or a Lord" to see and feel what is taking place.

We have trashed the future.  There is no real progress - only the accounting-illusion of progress.  And this is why, in this future-world now mostly dominated by scarcity and intense competition for resources and opportunity, there will be rising levels of conflict.

The coming "Alphabet War" has already begun.   Here, it is political.  But in Russia and Ukraine, it is a bloody and violent shooting war.   In Europe, it is becoming first, a "Taxation War", and the first casualties, are likely to be European businesses based in Germany.

What can the average person do?   Invest wisely, and recognize the toxic nature of the information sources that one can obtain.   Not much else.   As a nation?  Build resilient response capability, and do it quickly, and cost-effectively.

[Aug. 20, 2022 ] - Hot, Steaming CNN Logs - Check this steaming material:  CNN reports that White House skanks "privately" express concern about supposedly classified material Trump had at his home.  Oh, so these are "privately expressed thoughts' - that just happen to end up on CNN?  How about that!   Do the persons in the White House, honestly think that the people of the USA are all super-stupid, and cannot see thru these obvious attempts at pumping out political attack dis-information?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/19/politics/white-house-concern-classified-information-mar-a-lago/gemesys-defense-tech.html

Just read this piece of absurd and ugly nonsense.  It basically makes no sense.  It is just a bogus and abusive hit-piece against Trump.  It's the equivalent of putting cocaine in some guy's glove compartment of his car, and then calling the cops, giving them the license number, and saying the guy is a drug dealer.   FFS, Joe Biden.  Stop letting your idiot staff be so astonishingly stupid.  Your people are defecating on the American public.  You should stop them from doing this.  It degrades you, and damages your office.  

Maybe your people really did steal the election?  We never really believed that.  But this FBI raid and the resulting fallout, is just becoming simply insane. It makes Watergate look like nothing.

You and your hit-squads are maybe going to face prosecution, once the USA government changes.  You should consider the real risk of this, and act now to stop this insane political assault by mental lightweights who are seeking to damage American democracy and the operational continuity of American government.

The Biden White House assault against Trump - who received his classified security briefings as all ex-Presidents have -  is mindless, illegal and just plain stupid.   Now, Trump has no choice, he has to run.  The Republicans are now required to choose him, and he will have to win.  This is not a great outcome.  People will have to vote for Trump, just to restore order and operational sanity, and to correct the problems that exist at the FBI and the IRS.   This path did not need to be taken.   But the recent actions of the FBI and Garland have changed everything.

The first battles of the Alphabet War, will likely be entirely political, within Washington itself.  They will begin in November, assuming the election takes place.   Once these political problems are addressed, the bigger ones in the the wider world can be dealt with.

[Aug. 19, 2022 ] - Crimea River - With some "Writer's Tears", I suppose.  Bought a gift for a dear friend, maybe I get to have a drink or two with him this weekend.  Checked out the local Bed Bath and Beyond here, and it was nice, full of fine stuff for the home, and looked fine.  Price-ponits are high, and traffic was light.  The Marshall's next door was busier, and my significant other bought herself a pretty coat.  The products in BBBY are expensive, and this morning, pre-opening, the stock price is low, and has just  crashed from $18.55/shr close-price yesterday, to $10.51, down over 8 dollars per share, as I key this.   Pre-open action is big, and share price looks to crater.    If I were the management of BBBY, I would call up Jake Freeman, and hire him, and say "Get Busy.  Do it.   What should we do?" 

Retail is a really tough business, dictated by fashion and funding and the monetary conditions of consumer's wallets.   Really.   I saw a couple of things I would have bought at BBBY, except I have a stack of 4-figure property tax bills on my desk, and these induce the sprit of frugality to hover above me, like a large, black bird.    Plus, we have so much stuff, that any expenditure on anything, typically requires we trash something we currently have, if we buy anything new.   My old Protestant work ethic and my modern Japanese sense of "Mo-tai-nai" (which translates roughly as "Don't waste!"), induces me to limit consumption item aquisition..

These are very strange times.  We have never been in better shape financially, yet we feel poor.  We see a very different world around us, everywhere.  The Muslims which have settled here make fine citizens, but some days, it looks like Kabul - with all these women wearing burkas that hide their hair and/or faces, some even cover their entire bodies in shapeless bags.  Makes me want to wear body armour  (just kidding - I think...).  Our governments are acting to destroy what we were. and what we are.  Will they also attack our future?  We are actually very pro-immigration.  The immigrants benefit our nation, and expand it's strength and range of opportunities.   But they also mark clearly, our failure to correct the obvious problems in other lands.

The betrayal of Afghanistan by the Democrats in the USA, and by the Liberals here,  was the worst most absurd military defeat I ever saw in all of history - a surrender and *runaway-runaway* act of strange political cowardice that has damaged the Western World and the proactive world-culture of freedom.  We suspect history will document Biden in the USA, and Trudeau in Canada, as two of the very worst political leaders in all of human history - since they surrendered the centre of the "world-island" to the forces of darkness and pure evil that are the Taliban.   No "Peacekeeping" force, no attempt to maintain the place - just pure *runaway* cut-and-run cowardice and fraud, from dishonest, stupid political paltroons, who should be dragged from their offices and made to answer for their criminal stupidity.   One literally has to go back to the Fall of the Roman Empire to see such awful and tragic examples of failure and abandonment, as what Western forces did to the Afghan people.

So our failures, first as colonial overlords and then second, as technical consultants on nation-building, will cost us - and by us, we mean those of us who hold fast to the values of freedom that are the key beliefs of Western World culture.    We see the rise of the extemely dishonest and abusive political entity that is now Putin's Russia, and the beligerent new China of Xi, and we see the worst-case scenario of The Great Future of Failure that may lie before us.

It is a grim picture.

We see the "world-island" captured and subjegated by evil men who control murderous armies of barely literate thugs, who are given licence to bomb, kill, rape, steal and destroy everything around them.  The New Silk Road will be a highway of blood and horror and violence, as thug armies march, and kill and destroy the modern Western World and it's modern ideal of freedom.

This process is already happening, and is already rolling in Russian occupied Ukraine, in the direct military threats against Taiwan, and in Myanmar.    Japan has been rendered weak and defeated by the murder of Abe, and the UK has been badly damaged by the betrayal and defeat of Boris Johnson.  Europe is run by complete idiots who are shutting down their nuclear reactors, so their people can instead burn wood to heat their homes this winter, as the Russian gangsters shut down their gas supply. 

We see all the hard-won gains of the last 120 years, starting to run in reverse.

And we cannot escape the feeling that critical action is required to remove the complete fools and abusive idiots that currently dominate our political and government organs.  

The feeling just nags at many of us, quietly in the background, across many of our modern cultures, not just here in Canada or USA.  It is curious that *many* Japanese feel the same way, as do others in many other nations.   The French "Yellow Vest" protesters, the Dutch farmers,  the pro-Brexit folks in the UK, who saw the damage that was being done to England - all are fighting a common problem.  And also are the Americans, as the January 6th protesters in the USA, who saw an unwell, unwise old-man puppet, defeat a strong, and vigourous champion of American rights and American ideals, and concluded that the election was massively rigged to ensure this absurd outcome.  

Everywhere, the feeling builds that we are being betrayed and cheated.  The feeling warns us that we are being misled by fools and fraudsters and criminals, who seek to end all that our Western World View and Cultural models have created, over the last 200 years.  

Are we really under attack?

How can one conlude that we are not?  The very idea of male and female is under attack, and the multicoloured flag of sexual identity transposition, is waved in our face, and we are told that this is something we are supposed to be proud of.  Really?  How can anyone accept that sort of insane, mentally sick foolishness, and support it with political action?   One simply cannot. 

But it is not just the girlboys and the queers and the dykes and the trans-sanity folks.   There are explicit and direct operations being carried out everywhere, by dishonest political operatives, the purpose of which is to explictly damage and destroy our historical Western World political, economic and cultural traditions - most explicitly, the common culture of freedom.   Freedom itself is being attacked, and this is where it gets very dangerous.

The massive home-invasion raid on Donald Trump's Florida residence was ugly, wrong, dishonest and abusive, and it signals a new and vicious trend in the corrupt politics of the US Democratic Party.   The FBI stole the man's diplomatic passport.   This is beyond the pale. 

The Democrats are no longer political people who are to be trusted, as also nor are the "Liberal Party" folks in Canada.   Both entities are taking explicit actions to assault and degrade traditional freedoms that have historically characterized both nations, since their beginnings.

So, these curious times are upon us, and the fear and anger that these unwise actions by dishonest political operatives acting as government agents undertake, can only undermine our sense of national identiy and our collective sense of national freedom.  If we are not free, we are not anything, since we have since our history began, collectively defined ourselves this way - as free people, strong and free, living in a free country.   We can welcome any immigrants who want to live free lives, and breathe the sweet air of freedom.  And we are *all* immigrants here, in this New World.   No humans evolved here.  Every human here came from someone who made the long march to Freedom and Opportunity.  

But we must ensure that our own governments do not assault the very essense of what makes us what we are.  They must not degrade our freedom, that which defines what we are.

We are lately being attacked from the inside, curiously, by our own governments.   And this is not good.  We must correct this.

What is even more curious, is that this sense of betrayal is not unique to us here.  So many people feel this, and in so many different nations.   The common threat is the assault on our traditional freedoms.  Those who govern the State apparatus are turning into strange enemies right inside our own homelands, and they are attacking anyone and anything that threatens their abusive and dishonest actions.   Has the "Long Covid" damaged the little brains of our "leaders", perhaps?

Does this curious feeling of anger, betrayal and frustration affect the markets?   Of course it does, and it probably alters and drives changes in consumption patterns.   People worry less about the pillows and blankets on their beds, than they worry about their personal security, their finances, their sense of freedom and their children's chances for a good education and a viable economic future.

We *must* execute a "course-correction" in the modern, Western-culture World.  We have no choice but to do this.

It is important that the Republicans win in the USA.  They have not just to win, they have to win BIG, and completely crush and defeat the forces of darkness that threaten America from within, and seek to destroy it's greatness, and degrade and damage it's future.  There are unwise people in charge now.  Are these the kind of people that LIz Cheney represents?   A political party has to ensure operational loyalty, otherwise it cannot function at all.   So her political defeat was needed.

A nation has to have some critical, commonly agreed upon, ideals that it represents and stands for.  Otherwise it cannot stand successfully against the threats that the World will throw against it.  The gangster-leaders in China and Russia are being effective, and hone their people's sense of national identity, knowing it is a force.

We should be doing the same thing here.   The difference, of course, is that we can be honest, and can speak truthfully.

We must support and cherish and promote the ideals of Freedom.  It is the only thing that can hold us together here in the West, and allow us to defeat the dark forces we are always dealing with, and that we shall soon have to be fighting directly, and with all our efforts.

I honestly believe we can win the coming war.  Especially if we can be guided by the beauty and effectiveness of our fine weapons.   And our very greatest weapon, our most perfect & powerful weapon, is our shared belief and insistance upon, the common culture of Freedom, that runs like a clear and pure and beautiful river, through all of the developmental history of the Western World.

The future may well see  "The Alphabet War".   The Russians started it, with their use of the Roman "Z", as their signature glyph to describe their assault on Ukraine and it's Western ideals.  The Chinese use Pinyin glyphs on their hardware in their campaign against Taiwan.   And our big coalition, will not use symbols of stars or leaves or crosses, it might just use the old Roman Eagle, with "SPQR" below it.  The SPQR is the ancient, trans-national, Western World Roman symbol, which stands for honest, elected government (the Senate) allied with all the People, engaged in the ancient and necessary Roman tradition of preserving, protecting and extending the Western World culture of Freedom.  

We suspect that this global "Alphabet War" has already begun.  But of course, what really matters, is how it ends.   It must end in victory, for the Forces of Freedom.  Not just for us, but for everyone in this World, who insists upon living in Truth and in Freedom.

[Aug. 18, 2022 ] - How to Make $110 million in US Dollars, While You Are Working on Your  Degree (Not Your Tan), In the Peoples Republic of Californistan.  In Three Weeks.  Really. - The story is in the Financial Times, which is behind the big paywall, but here is the ZeroHedge summary, courtesy of Tyler Durden:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/sureal-story-20-year-old-student-acquires-6-bed-bath-beyond-makes-110-million-3-weeks

I love this story.  Now be clear, the kid got $25 million from his Dad.  For all lads and ladies starting out, the "Bank of Dad" (or Mom), is the best place to borrow the funds needed to do your first big swinging trade.   My two best trades were: #1: self-funded by my first big consulting gig, and by a take-back mortgage from the vendor and #2: the returns from the first trade, plus a quite fair-sized chuck from the Bank of Dad, advanced against inheritance (another damn good idea, all families should consider).

The first trade paid off over 10 times (but it took 11 years, to be honest), and the second trade has been even better (and is where we live now - the Farm - which probably has a similar payoff level, but at double the time horizon - so far...)  

So don't envy or be critical of this kid.  He has done the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time of his life.  When you are young, is the time to swing really hard for the damn fence.   If you whiff, and strike out, you can recover without too much harm.   Bravo to him.   We salute Jake Freeman, and wish him well, and hope his future efforts (and the results of his Fund!) meet with the same level of success.  We like to see young guys win, and win big.

This is why the Free World exists - to allow this sort of thing to be possible.   Jake Freeman used leverage and options, to aquire roughly 6% of BBBY stock, and his little "Hedged Fund", even sent a detailed letter to the BBBY management, suggesting how they might dig themselves out of the hole they are now in.

This kid's prescription is not bullshit.  It looks sound.  It reminds me of what a fellow named: Horace Greely Hjalmar Schacht did to save his country from the outright economic insanity into which it had sunk.  Too complicated to explain here, but absolutely doable (since it really was done), and is not that different from the debt-paydown, restructuring of the debt at a lower rate, and the issuance of convertable shares (which become attractive to investors, since they offer a real chance to participate in, and profit by, an honest, real turnaround.  And a turnaround of Bed Bath and Beyond is possible, given today's inflationary environment, labour market, and household formation rate.   USA is not Japan.   It just is not.   BBBY turnaround is not assured, but it still appears possible.

Tyler Durden writes a fair bit of snotty tripe around what Jake Freeman did,  (is Dyler jealous?)  but it looks perfectly sensible and valid, since letting a big-name retail operation crash and burn needlessly, especially given the historical characteristics of what a post-pandemic world can look like, is silly, and stopping-the-silly can often be nicely profitable.

And kids do well in crazy times.  Larry Livingston did pretty well, as I recall.  And so did Mr. W. Buffet.  (I once thought to participate in the turnaround of a not-too-shabby local transport company, and I bought thousands of their shares at around $2.00.  But I was stupid, and young and wrong.  The management and their bankers, just flushed the stockholders down the toilet, and after losing half my money, I bailed, and watched the stock go to "zero", in the typical bullshit-style restructurings that are all in vogue now.

We should respect and make use of old-fashioned bankruptcy, where new, young managements can acquire good assets on the cheap.   We do exactly the wrong thing with these modern restructurings, where nothing changes, and managment and unions get bailed out and stockholders get erased - like was executed for GM, where the stockholders ended up with garbage called "Motors Corp..." crap something, and the Management, the unions and the government weasels all did fine, and new GM shares were sold to fat-money boys, and the honest, true company owners got ruined.   That whole operation was an ugly, government-sanctioned, corrupt fraud.   (Yes, I owned some original GM shares.  Still pisses me off.  )

I was surprised when Tory guy Jim Flaharty died shortly after resigning from being Canada Finance Minister.   ("Maybe there really is a God?")   His wife was a Liberal member for Oshawa, which had the big GM plant,  which dialed back production, and closed completely in 2019.  It re-opened two years later, in 2021, to make very high-priced pickup trucks for wealthy people.  But the original owners of GM got nothing but income-tax bills.  All benefits went to GM management and the Unifor union.

That ugly and awful GM nonsense may have cost the Tories the subsequent election, because the Stephen Harper Government sure lost me and many others when the dirty scam was run to bail GM with billions of dollars taxpayer money - and erase completely the share values of the shareholders who actually owned the company.   Filthy GM should have been bankrupted honestly, and it's assets and lands auctioned off to honest businessmen.   And the workers might still kept their jobs, in a proper, new, self-financing company, instead of a everyone losing in a government scam scheme that raped the Treasury.  

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadian-taxpayers-lose-35-billion-on-2009-bailout-of-auto-firms/article23828543/

The taxpayers of Canada got fucked over to the tune of over 3.5 billion Canadian dollars in that scam.  It was a shameful thing for a Conservative Government to do, and it should not have been done.  It was theft from the public Treasury, plain and simple, and it was done to secure political advantage for the Finance Minister, and his family.  And all political parties were part of this awful scheme.  It was wrong and shameful.   The modern GM truck plant that operates now in Oshawa was built on the backs of ruined shareholders and cheated Canadian taxpayers.  

If the Stock Exchange and the regulators do not get in bed with corrupt government toads, and set out to ensure that the stock-holders get cheated and kicked to the curb and left with nothing, then legitimate restructurings are possible, and can work - usually IFF ("if and only if" - a term from mathematics), the management is replaced with intellegent, honest-and-honorable men and women.  Sometimes this can happen.  But often does not happen.  (Eg. Nortel.  One group of thieves and fraudsters were replaced by yet another group of thieves and fraudsters.  Tragic and ugly.  The company failed, in an awful and spectacular manner.  Their hardware was good, their software was excellent.  I know this for certain.  Their management were unconvicted criminals.  They were put on trial.  But it was so sad the court case to prosecute the Nortel managment was not successful.   It's very hard to prove corporate security fraud. )   We still have Nortel preferred shares (worth nothing, of course), in one of our portfolios.  The company was a national jewel, and it's patent portfolio was sold for over $4 billion dollars.   The company had real value.  But the managment who ruined Nortel, were either worthless idiots and/or pocket-filling criminal fraudsters.   Probably both.  Sad.

Know this:  Over time, the quality of company management has a terrible tendency to degrade and disapate and lose focus and ability.  This is so common, and is such a profound and oft-repeated trend, you can seriously make book on it.  And that is what the short-sellers do.  And usually, they win.

But not always.

Right now, I am off to buy some towels, and take a little look-see, at just how bad the local BBBY really is.   BBBY is not Target.  Target failed when it came here.    BBBY has done not too badly in Canada.  They are not IKEA, but they are OK.  We spent over $200 at the nearest IKEA last week.   Home improvement and home products are selling well.  Really well.     BBBY does not have to die.

We cannot quite figure out how and why things have gotten so very strange in the dear old USA, where family and good friends live.  The pandemic lockdowns perhaps made many people crazy, and recovery is still taking place. 

On balance, we now suspect the lockdowns were unwise.   And we fear they were a "gateway drug" for corrupt and abusive government officials (of which there seem to be an awful lot, surprisingly.)  Free societies work better, when there is freedom.  And Ukraine shows us that folks prefer freedom, even if enemy missiles are raining from the sky, rather than life inside non-free "Gulag Nations" where FSB Secret Police can drag you to prison and then torture and murder you.   Not surpising, is this phenomenon.  (London, in the UK, showed us this also, back in the early 1940's)

Freedom is a good and wonderful thing.  History suggests it's price is blood and conflict - on a curiously regular basis.  The USA Democrats (and the Canada Liberals) are playing very dangerous games, these days.  Both political parties seem to have gone off the rails, rather quite badly, and become serious abusers of freedom.

We want USA to stay strong, and vote Republican, and then work bi-partisan with the remaining sane Democrats, to solve the problems.   The Looney Left "Safety Nazi" types, the SJW's and the Lockdownistas, should be hived-off into their own little group of "progressive" nutjobs, who can then fight with themselves over non-issues and silly fake stuff.  Like our NDP often does.  I hope someday, we can put them all on the "B-Ark" and be done with them.

Dear America...  We cheer for you, and wish you well.  Just make sure you keep your 2nd (and 1st!) Amendments to your Constitution.  Both are really, really goddamn good ideas! 

[Aug. 17, 2022 ] - AI is Giving Another Insane Projection - Check out the "Trading Notes" section, for the current (insane?) AI projection plot of our testbed security - which we hold in a big way.  Real money, two seperate portfolios.  We avoid diversification, since we have found best results seem to be from concentration, and modern volatility obviates most of the benefits of risk-spreading.  Nowadays, you maybe want to put most of your assets into your best idea.

Insane strategy, and insane forecast, for insane times.  Also, the public letter from the CEO of Smith and Wesson, is in the "Glorious Good Guns" section.  Read it.  It's one page, and helps understand the absurd madness underway in the USA.

[ Aug. 16, 2022 ] - The Red Pill - Really.  - I had long two-hour conversation about politics with a good friend/close associate.  Both he and his wife have joined the Conservative Party, to help get a former Quebec Liberal Premier to become head of the Party.  This Tory leadership race is a big, big deal for Canada.  Our current national PM is not good, and he and his Party need tot be defeated. 

The "Red Pill" is the pill you take, to see the World accurately, as it really is.  The "Blue Pill" is the pill which confers happy delusion, and ignorance to what is really happening.  The Leftist Media and TV and Radio, have been feeding us "Blue Pills" of sweet, seductive delusion, since the beginning of the 20th century.  The Red Pill is bad tasting, and the truth of things, is often ugly, nasty and painful.

My dear friend, and his wife (both very successful, very wealthy lawyers) have been "Red Pilled."  They see now the danger idiot-wokeness politics represents.  They have children.   This is bloody wonderful - except they still hate Trump and MAGA and think Trump and MAGA are evil.   (They only got the local Canadian Red Pill, for now.)   This is so, so curious.  They also don't like the Tory guy that I like - Pierre Poilievre (pronounced: Pea - Air - Polly - ev - rah) - who is a good man, and who must win the leadership, or we are all screwed, IMHO. 

The argument is that Charest should win, because he is a middle-of-the-road, make-no-waves, former Liberal, and former Tory who was a Minister in Brian Mulroney's cabinet, long ago.   Jean Charest (pronounced: Zshawn - Shar - rest) has support from "Red Tories"  (basically, neo-leftists who believe in fiscal responsibility, but also funding lots and lots of "social programs" ).  He is viewed by "pundits" (yes, I know...), as being the best chance for the Conservatives to retake the Commons, and form the next Government, and rid us of Fidel Castro's son (Ha ha, just joking.  Maybe.)  who is current  PM, and who is widely hated by many for a long list of reasons.

We believe that Poilievre is a better choice, since he represents real actual new ideas and honest change.  He is a "Reform" style Conservative, a very unique thing in Canadian politics.  He is a good and honest person, and he does not respect Trudeau.   (He is a good and honourable fellow.)   The "pundits" say he cannot defeat Trudeau, because Canadians are risk-averse pussies, and will not vote for change.  I disagree.  But we argue about future events.  Silly.  Here is media note on Poilievre, and they make him look like a Westerner, even though he is from Ontario.  Typical media bullshit trick (they use a picture of him from an Alberta BBQ).

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/08/10/pierre-poilievre-conservative-leader/

Suddenly, it is very serious here.  Trudeau has begun a process to ban handguns in Canada, which are *really* very tightly controlled already.  It is pure politics, and will make Canada a *much* more dangerous place, and a *much* more violent society.  It is a very, very bad idea.  And Trudeau and his government have been chock-full of very bad ideas, which have become very bad laws.

Politics and Economics are like two evil twins who are co-joined.  Economics explains why sellers cluster together, and politics is just a form of trade.  But if all the politicals are selling the same steaming bag-of-dung, people disengage, knowing they cannot change anything by their actions.  Political parties must champion different ideas.  That's how we get progress.  People have to live and act in real Truth, not wallow in political delusion and be victims all the time of class-system fraud and economic fairy-tales.

So, I am happy to see my two dear friends get "Red Pilled".  But they have only *partly* chosen to live in truth.  It's still basic politics - if we put Charest in as Tory Leader, we offer the voters "same shit, different day" - no real change in thinking or direction.  More Liberal tax-and-spend and social ballshots that we less-and-less can afford, without further raising taxes.  Income tax is already insane here - and we also pay 13% vigourish on every single farking economic transaction - the HST (used to be the GST, until it was "harmonized" with the RST, the Provincial Retail Sales Tax.)  Foreign visitors call it the "Holy Shit Tax", because they say "Holy Shit!" when they see the 13% added to their bill for anything they buy in Ontario Canada

Below is the best, most important article written by a USA reporter/analyst in the last 30 years.  Read it.  (Sasha used to be Democrat.)

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/the-raid-that-red-pilled-america#details

See, I am not a Trump fan.  And I support (a lot) Biden's policy on Ukraine.  Putin is a very real threat to global peace, security and the future of humans on planet Earth.  But maybe Trump - even if he is crazy, angry, and plain-speaking - might be a better war-leader than Biden.  Biden and Harris and the Democrats are saying and doing insane, stupid, illegal and unwise things.  Having the FBI do a home-invasion raid on Trump's private home in Florida, is wrong, wrong, wrong.  The whole "January 6th" witch-hunt is ugly, stupid, abusive and wrong.  The "Woke Left" are as dangerous a threat to America, as the Russian Communists were, when they had nuclear missiles computer-aimed at USA and Canada, and my Dad (former bomber pilot and then a medical guy) went up to do a short auxillary tour of duty on the DEW Line, back in 1965.  The DEW-line was a good idea, as it meant nuclear missile surprise attack would be impossible.  I was a nuclear kid from a nuclear family.   My Mom's cousin was also a Nuclear Engineer, who invented a machine to do first-stage uranium enrichment, during WWII.  (So when I build working fusion reactors, N2 TEA lasers, and blather on about fissile devices, I am kinda just following the family traditions of being a nuclear techster & a shit-disturber.  Really.)

I am not a fan of Trump, but if I were a USA citizen, (like some of my family folk are), I would be a card-carrying registered Republican, and would own a MAGA hat.  Get used to it.  No choice, really.  And I might have even voted for Obama, since Obama was young, and smart, and his "surge" in Afghanistan actually worked really goddamn well.  What the fuck is wrong with today's Democrats?  Are they *all* "Blue Pill" eaters??   Socialism is fucking stupid, men cannot become women, and kids should be wisely guided, but also left alone to grow up choose their own paths.  FFS.

When Trump was USA President, we had lots of oil and gas, prices were stable, there was peace and security in the World, there was no War, China was listing it's joint-stock companies on the New York stock exchange, the taxes were low, and the economy - everywhere - was growing.  There were problems, but things were OK.   Now, we have clowns and tax-and-spend fools running Washington and the USA, we have almost 10% inflation (which is likely to grow, unless we smash growth with high-rates), we are on (really) the brink of nuclear war (really), and both Russia and China recognize the extreme weakness and **WOKEness** of a mis-managed USA, and their meglomaniac leaders know this is the best chance they will ever get, to run "smash-and-grab" operations against their neighbours, without anyone offering any kind of challenge.  So, they are doing just that. 

The Left is so full of Lies.   The Washington Post and the Twitter bot-and-censorship thing are media machines that exist to pump sweet lies  (my partner calls these people: "Flower-field thinkers in La-La happy land".  Pretty good translation, eh?)  The Leftist media pump out delusions every day, day in and day out - onto the screens of the Blue-Pilled Democrat supporters.  

This is just nuts.   It is crazy-time madness, and it actually has lots of historical examples. 

Caesar was feared and hated, and was threatened, and then, was eventually murdered.   Trump is not Caesar - but neither is old Joe Biden.  Trump at least tried to be a leader, and not a puppet.   And that fool running the USA Justice Department is a buffoon and a supporter of - if not technically illegal actions - certainly deeply unwise, very bad actions.  He should be removed, and soon.  Biden should replace this poor choice, to try to ensure DOJ retains some respect and the confidence of the American people.

Today, at the farm, our neighbours are spreading manure.  It is hot.  It smells bad.  I told my partner: "Honey, the smell is so bad, it is like chewing on shit!"   She made a face and laughed.

Taking the Red Pill makes reading the Leftist news and watching the Leftist Media feel (and taste?) similar.  It's like consuming dung.

I tell my American friends, they might want to vote Republican, just to protect and sustain the USA Republic.  Because the Democrats are acting insane, and are doing bad things.

The FBI is now widely seen (rather like the IRS) as a potential direct threat to every living American in his or her own home.  If they can be wired-up to attack a former President whose Party is leading in the polls, they can certainly come and simply kill you.  Like they did at Waco, Texas to the Davidians, and to that fellow at Ruby Ridge.   Remember that?  The FBI were a problem.  And now, they are a bigger problem.  The DOJ is sending them on political hits.    There needs to be wholesale cleaning at both the USA Department of Justice, and at the FBI.  It won't likely happen under the Bidenistas.

Wake up, America.  Yes, the Washington politics is not nice, and it smells even worse, with Leftist folks in charge at every level, filling their pockets with your tax money.  It's like a field of steaming manure now.  But if you can vote for real change in November, you can maybe get a new crop of better people to begin to grow in the place where the stinking field of hot shit is now.

Such is the Benefit and Cost of Red Pill Enlightenment.   Nothing is free.  But living in truth is the only rational choice.  Political lies are like worms in your food.  People and nations don't operate correctly, on a diet of worms.

[ Aug. 15, 2022 ] - US Democrat Party Appears to Be Insane - So, be careful with American investments.  The Democrats have just handed Intel $50 billion in tax incentives to build a new chip plant (Intel really needs money?  Really?)  and has passed an insane piece of Theatre of the Absurd legislation called "The Inflation Reduction Act", which will give poor people free money to pay their utility bills, will spend $80 billion on hiring an entire *army* of armed IRS tax inspectors, will spend a whole bunch of money on "climate change initiatives" (free money for more folks who know how to suck at the trough for it), free money for more poor people to let them get presciptions drugs below costs of development and production, and special *funding* to cut health-care premiums.   And these clowns - these strange curious political people who operate in Washington - these people called this $437 billion bucket of economic slush and political kickback - the "Inflation Reduction Act", which is simply insane.

It is seriously, honestly insane.  Even the Wharton School at Univ. of Pennsylvania says this massive expenditure of foolishness will likely *raise* inflation, not lower it.  But hey, the difference is statistically close enough to zero, that we could call it zero... maybe.  (Hilarious, really.)

Oh, and of course, there will be expanded and increased taxes on corporations, to pay for this.  And that $80 billion for the IRS, too.  (Please Note, America:  Expect the Tax Men to come calling.  Again.  And again.  And again, taxation without end.) 

How did the Demorats come up with this Bucket of Money-Slush?  They polled folks.  Mr. Ron Klain, the White House Chief of Staff, said: (and we quote, from Bloomberg): "Our internal polling shows that messages touting the cost-lowering features of the *Inflation Reduction Act* - lowering health care costs, prescription drug costs, and utility bills -- are among the highest testing messages ever."  Well for fuck sakes, what did they expect?  How was the survey run?  Did they ask: "Would you like to Vote Republican, and pay market-prices for drugs and doctor visits, or would you like to Vote Democrat and have us give you free money to pay your bills?"    Something like that, maybe? 

Talk about bad data.  Really.  Bad.  Data.

Now, Joe Biden and these Democrat Clowns are going on a multi-state campaign tour - more than 35 events in the next few weeks to promote this absurd, insane nonsense.

This is pure, classical insanity.  I am dead serious here.  This is madness.

Are the American people completely fucking stupid?   I don't think so.   Old Granny Yellen has said the $80 billion for the IRS and it's new armed agents, will not be used to terrorize ordinary middle-class Americans.   But that is just air moving over her old-lady lips.  It has no force of law, and since it is a comment about future intention, it has no operational value.  It is probably just political cover-talk.  We will have to wait, to prove it to be a lie.

But the Democrats are actually running their campaign on this ugly tax-and-kickback-spend big-money taxation and spending law.

We look at this and think:  Wow.  The Democrats might have cut taxes, or at least done nothing, and promised to "hold the line on out-of-control government spending" or something like that.  That way, they could have looked like moderate, prudent fiscal managers, even if they were not really.  But with this slime-laden pot-of-slush and kickbacks, funded by $80 billion in new money for the IRS and for armed IRS agents, combined with increased taxes on corporations, the Democrat Clowns have proven to anyone with an IQ over 80, that they are unfit to manage money and govern - much less manage and govern the biggest, and best nation in the World.

The Democrats appear to be insane.  They honestly believe that touting this bogus-named law, (It really should have been called: "The Inflation and Taxation Act") which is just a grab-bucket of tax and kickback-spending, that they are going to buy votes from the American people.

We think that Americans are not as stupid as the Democrats are counting on.  Not now, after all this pandemic nonsense.

We are pretty sure that the Republicans will find that this idiotic legislation helps them in November.   Having the Democrats in control of everything, is just not good for American economics, and certainly not for the American people. 

Even if you normally vote Democrat, you might want to support your local Republican guy or gal, in November.     Sanity needs to be let back into the building.  The Demorats have sent her packing, and this is just not good.  Not good at all.

[ Aug. 14, 2022 ] - Threat Assessment & the AI-is-Lucifer Meme - Really?  AI as the new "Digital Anti-Christ?"  See, this is what worries me.  People are just getting cross-the-line crazy, even the sane folk out in the lovely country, away from the cities, who should really know better.  Or, maybe they are just becoming more extreme, in order to harvest clicks, and keep some google-ad-revenue dribbling in?  Unclear.  But check this most interesting note: 

https://alt-market.us/artificial-intelligence-a-secular-look-at-the-digital-antichrist/

and this one:

https://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-and-algorithmic-irresponsibility-the-devil-in-the-machine-157128

List goes on.  Now, the authors make a lot of good points.  The risk - the main threat - from AI, is it's ability to allow effective mass-monitoring of all human action, to be made a reality.  That's the old "1984" view-screen in every house nightmare.  Winston & Julia try to find a place to have some old-style normie love-making, contrary to "Party Doctrine", and the view-screen gets uncovered in their trysting-spot, and they are imprisioned, tortured, they betray each other, and are destroyed by the State.  This is the Orwellian (and Soviet-Russian, remember) nightmare.

AI technology and the mass "internet of things" can make this nightmare a reality - as it already is beginning to, in China and Russia, where masses of people are being programmed to believe weird, awful, stupid shit that is not true, so meglomaniac leaders can pursue their wet-dreams of global conquest.  Really - this is happening right now, playing out in real time, on an internet-connected computer-screen a few key-clicks away from you, right fucking now.

This is nuts.

This entire social-program model is bad and crazy, and will end badly - except it won't really ever end, it will just keep on, until we are all at each other's throats.    Putin has convinced Russians that Nazi's are controlling Ukraine, and war is needed.  No other view can be put forward.  It is mass-monitoring, AI and big-data management technology that makes this sort of horrific stupid lie possible.   Same thing in China, with Xi.  He has and is working right now, to convince the Chinese people that they need to "re-take" Taiwan.   This is crazy-stupid, cruel, pointless and evil.  But it is the internet and the extreme Chinese internet-monitoring that makes Xi's wet-dream of conquest possible.  No other sanity-enhancing view can be put forward.  This is only possible because it is being technologically enabled - and augmented with AI.  The best example being the face-recognition video monitoring technology  (Heck, I think they kinda look all the same - but the AI can do better at Chinese face-recognition than I can, no doubt about it.)

So, we are tracking toward these sad/bad nightmare outcomes.    This has little to do with Davos or Lucifer or some silly "Globalist agenda".   It's just the same set of expanding threats that we have all faced since science joined hands with the military, and began the process of making better and more effective weapons.   AI can be a very effective weapon.   It allows mass-surviellance to be made effective and actionable.   The Chinese and Russians and the Americans are doing it now.  Our "5-Eyes" are useless, if not connected to machines that can interpret what is being seen.  

"Rome is Your Fweind!"   (cf. "The Life of Brian")

Let's be clear:  AI is just another enabling technology, like a good handgun.  A handgun is a lovely thing, as it really does confer god-like power.  You close your fist, and you can hurl a thunderbolt, just like old Zeus.   Fine and lovely - if it is wielded by a good guy, against a bad guy or a murderous crazy "mucker"  (cf. "To Stand on Zanzibar".  "Mucker" was not from "mugger", but actually was taken from "amok-er", a term to describe a person who has "run amok", or is "running amok".)   "Amok" is a Malay term for "a murderous frenzy".  In European Old-Norse language, a similar term describing the same human phenomenon - a murderous frenzy - is: "berserk", or "berserkr", taken from "bjorn" = bear + "serkr" = shirt. )  

Language is how we understand.  Our very language, and our mathematics, are forms of artificial intelligence.  Napolean used AI.  His artillery officers put two logarithmic scales together on a little stick, so that they could slide against each other, and this let his guys use some basic trigonometry and quick, rough multiplication, to more accurately aim their cannons in the rapid heat of battle.   The guy who aims fastest and fires with the most accuracy, wins.

In aircraft, a simple gyroscope mechanism allowed an "artifical horizon" instrument to be created, which ran from air blown into it while the aircraft moved.  This little instrument let pilots "fly blind", without seeing the real horizon.  If you can't see the real horizon, you run real risk of spiral-diving into the earth, since the acceleration vector points down from your arse, tells you if you are flying straight and level (hence: "flying by the seat of your pants").  But in a spiral-death curve, you can *feel* you are flying straight-and-level, yet you are tracking a perfect spiral toward the earth, as the acceleration vector is still pointing outwards, orthagonal to your own backside.  Without the little "artificial horizon" instrument, you are a dead-man.  But with it, you can fly through cloud, use some math to determine your course and location, and bomb the crap out of the enemies cities, even if you cannot see them.   We won World War II this way.

AI is not new.   It's not new at all.    We have been using it for centuries.    And it reached it's best and most effective expression, in war and conflict.  World War Two was a science-war.  We won, because our science was better.  It was a *lot* better.

So, yeah.  We need to be careful.  But we also need to avoid being stupid.  There is an intense AI arms-race going on, right now.   AI is not a "digital daemon".  It's just another device for human augmentation, much like a good bow-and-arrow, a good, strong Damascus-steel sword-blade (both strong *and* flexible), or a good rifle is ( a rifled bore being a huge technical improvement over a smooth-bore ball firing flint-lock gun).    Know this.

So stop this stupid "crazy meme talk" about globalization being bad, and religious and/or witchcraft nonsense and god-fiction hooey, and just learn how to use the tech.   The AI technology is a weapon now.   And the guys with the best and most effective weapons, generally win the big war.

The big war is already happening.   It is a crazy cultural war, as much as it is becoming a real war, like it is right now, in Ukraine.   And like all big wars, it is one that the good guys must win, or we will see freedom die like those folks in Kyiv suburb Bucha saw it die.  Really.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-civilian-deaths.html

Can AI help us prevent this kind of ugly shit like Russia did in Bucha?   Maybe.  Just maybe.

[ Aug. 13, 2022 ] - Big USA Election Coming - And it's already being rigged, in plain sight.   Don't take our word for this.  We are just gentle statisticians and analysts in the black-art of political economy.   But there is solid evidence that the Trump documents were available anytime that the USA government wanted to come and look at them.  The FBI raid on Trump's private residence is an astonishing travesty, on many different levels - from the basic issue of being an obviously abusive "home invasion", to the legal support given to it by a toad-faced moron in the US "Justice" Department, to the political foolishness of the curiously corrupted Democratic Party of the USA.   It's just crazy-nutbar bad, all around.

Don't take our word for it.  We think it looks like second- or third-rate ratfucking.  So do many others.  The Democrats should be ashamed of doing this, and it may well cost them, despite their obvious efforts to pre-rig the November elections, using all means possible:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/12/the-2024-election-is-being-rigged-right-now-in-plain-sight/

[ Aug. 12, 2022 ] - Dead Fish Don't Swim Home - The Democrats are behaving with astonishing foolishness.  The political weaponization of the US Justice Department is very unwise, the FBI is honestly becoming something that is a serious risk to ordinary Americans, the entire "Russia-meddled-in-US-election" narrative has been shown to be a false & illegal political construct, as it also now appears is the home-invasion raid by "FBI Agents" acting as Democratic political operatives - acting to obtain information on nuclear weapons.  

This has been reported by the Washington-RatFucking-Post, the most one-sided, politically slanted media-organ in the entire USA.  ("Rat-Fucking" is the technical term for what are sometimes called "Dirty Tricks" during election campaigns.  I've worked on election campaigns, and I've also worked as a scrutineer at a polling station.  Elections are serious.  Rat-fucking was not uncommon - many amusing and not so amusing examples exist.)

The Democrat-supporting Washington Post - the infamous "Watergate Newspaper" - is a political entity now, owned by Jeff Bezos.  The entity would have - mercifully - disappeared, if Bezos had not bailed it out with a bag of mega-bucks.  

So, we are concerned.  But not surprised.   The Democrats are being crazy - an assault on a former US President, who still commands the support of the Republican Party and roughly half of the American people, is profoundly unwise.

Seriously - if Trump had retained information on nuclear-weapons deployment, I am not uncomfortable with that.  Did he retain launch-code information?  Is that bad?   It means that if Washington were destroyed by a nuclear surprise attack, and the entire US Government was obliterated, perhaps some ability to respond, and a political control and co-ordination mechanism that folks would respect, might be retained, and be allowed to get up and running quickly.  

The entire raid looks like a political stunt to "rat-fuck" the Republicans and harm their election chances, by making their candidate look like a dangerous and irresponsible person.  This strategy might work - fear is a good political lever.  But it might, like most stupid, ill-planned stunts by not-so-cunning operatives  (the "cunning-stunts brigade") backfire in a spectacular manner.

We need stability, not political histronics by a bunch of Washington pencil-necked geeks, FFS.

And as to the Market:

Grasp this:  Rates are rising.  Capital is *working right* again.  Oh yeah!  Not too shabby, right?  Get it?  I remember this great comedy group from Montreal.  They performed in Toronto, and were called "Hetro Canada"  (there symbol was a copy of the "Petro Canada" logo, a giant maple leaf in background).  The handbill image showed a stylized 1950's boy with a short haircut and a girl in a dress of the same era, with text below saying: "Fucking Right!" - a clever phrase with an obvious double meaning.

This is the world we are transititioning back to.  Capital works right again.  Investment works right again.  Zero interest rates are like gay fucking - a rather silly idea that is profoundly unproductive, right?  Undeniable.  Just a dopey, goof thing, all around.  Laughable, really.  And that was the genius of the "Hetro Canada" campaign, which was shut down, of course, and was accused of being "homophobic", which of course, it was not.  But remember the "Name of the Rose".  Satire and humor are weapons against the overlords of evil.  ALways have been, always will be.

Simple thesis:  Rising interest rates => implies rising return on capital.  Business models work right again. This allows investment to work correctly again, and returns sanity to business process and financial/investment process.  Rising rate of return on capital is co-associated with this - even for real capital (the physical instantiation of financial capital), and as long as demand can be sustained (very, very critical - the buyers need to have money), then this is very, very market positive.  Good for investment process, good for business, stocks get bid up.

We found this phenomenon in history.  RIsing rates seem to track rising business conditions and rising markets.   Just go look, if you doubt this.

Love Trump or Hate Trump - he remains a force.  And this is starting to look like the England history War of the Roses, or the Japanese Heike versus the Gengi, or the Red Reactionairies vs the National Socialists in Germany, or the White Russians versus the Red Russians, and so on.   Only Trump is *not* Florian Geyer.   He is a former sitting President who won roughly half the votes of all the People.    He won't need a "Black Horde".   He is a former king, and he only needs to wait until the current bunch in charge of things, deliver another major failure.  He or someone like him, will be the next President, at some near point in the future.  Best strategy for Dems would be to leave him alone.

The only thing that is maintaining the Democrats, is the excellent, resiliant success of the US economy, and the better-late-than-never actions of the US Federal Reserve, and the fact that USA can use it's reserve-currency status to buy the world's stuff without effort.

Rising interest rates are also rising rates of return on captial (typically), and tend to be associated with rising stock markets.   So Don't Fear the Reaper, or the Return-to-Sanity Rally.  It's not a bad thing, and might move along just fine.  Rates return to the 5% to 7% level on the long-bond (which is the minimum if inflation is 5 to 8%), and DJIA tracks back to 35,000 to 36,000, which is not an unreasonable level.   This is not rocket-science, and those who would make it such, are just fucking wrong  (in more ways than one, eh?)   :)

Let me be even more clear:  We either track back to an environment of high-productivity and real technological improvement (not just more stupidphones) like we had in the 1960's (when everything we are using now was invented, from lasers, small computers and integrated circuits to B61-12's), or we are dead, and will crash back down into a scenario of mass-scarcity, and mass-warfare/poverty.   

Only Two paths are possible:  - one leads up, and the other leads down.  We either choose the Up-Path, support a global population of 30-to-40 billion and colonize Mars and then Venus, or we all die of starvation and disease, and the cockroaches inherit the future and our dead world.

[ Aug. 11, 2022 ] - Lou Ga Booh? - Or not.   As Mr. Every indicates - the economic numbers don't make sense, until you consider this new model where we see northern DM's moving to becoming southern-style EM's (and rich folks do ok, living in EM's - and the stonks get bid up, as long as the particular enterprise is not captured by crooks, or nuked by the corrupt government-of-the-week.   (I read a *lot* of crap, but like a dirt-digger in the People's Republic of Africastan, every so often, I find a diamond - maybe..)  Here is link to Zerohedge's reprint of Micheal Every of Rabobank's little note.  I read thru  it, and it's bloody good (I think.)  Big World is making a big transition.  We still be long-long, gentlemen, despite the motion-sickness that must be endured.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/one-bank-warns-us-econ-data-make-little-sense-until-you-recall-midterm-elections-are-coming

So, Western World, maybe all is not lost, eh?  SPQR.  (I bot another CZ - the magnificant Shadow 2 Tactical.)  I had always wanted to visit St. Petersburg, and tour the Hermitage.  <big sigh...> Won't happen, unless Gov't changes in Russland.   But maybe I can at least go visit the Czech Republic, Prague, and the place where the CZ's come from.  And Charles Bridge.   Prague has been a centre of culture & learning almost as long as Rome and Athens. 

https://archive.org/details/HorstWesselLiedToErika

Thx "Camshaft Daisy".  I really liked your video (above).  There is a scene from Charles Bridge in the video. I am just a history-student,  but we have to learn from our history.  And sometimes, one encounters something that just resonates.  I've had so many interesting conversations lately.  Truth is like ground-water under pressure.  The public "authorities" and the "old rabbits" (think "Watership Downs") try to control the narrative, but truth bubbles up like springwater, in the most curious places.

[ Aug. 9, 2022 ] - Are We Not Men? - Devolutionary trends abound everywhere, it seems.  Perhaps all the news-generators are dialing up the puff to provoke clicks, and things are not really as bad as they seem.  Or, perhaps they are much worse?  

We are deep in the DEVO now.  And curiously, the artists told us these strange truths, thru their wilding runs down the weirds of creativity, years and years ago.  We read of the FBI raid on Trump's home in Florida, the toxic spew old Medvedev is dumping out on Telegram, and the simple fact that Russia has just withdrawn from allowing START-V2 inspections of it's nuclear weapons arsenals.  

So, we not only see the USA falling into Venezuela-style politics, but the march-to-war continues, pretty much everywhere.   Dear old Boris Johnson was scheduled to meet the Polish PM, who basically told Johnson to "p*ss-off", and that he has no time for him.  This is unfortunate, and is an unwise snub.  We cannot shake the feeling that Johnson was the victim of a carefully aimed torpedeo, and that, as the UK crashes into ugly hard-times, Johnson may get pulled back from oblivion, to repair things.   

UK politics is harsh and vicious and profoundly toxic.  It would be good if the Brits could see just how great and serious a threat they are currently under, and try to come together and not fight among themselves (like everyone, everywhere seems so intent on doing.)

We see a very serious scenario unfolding, unlike any we have seen before.   The current Russian government is dangerously insane, and dominated by violent, gangster-style "tough guys", who represent a profound threat to the world.  USA Democrats are lined up behind old women, ill old men dealing with mental decline, and looney-leftists who only represent the American MSM (mainstream media) and the woke-fringe types who believe men can become women, by changing their clothes and their pronouns.   It's madness like we would not have thought possible.

And the US Navy - one of the most successful military organizations ever created - is now having to deal with F/A-18 "Eagle" aircraft, being wafted by wind off the airside deck of a carrier, and dropped into the wine-dark sea.  Bravo that the Navy salvage teams were able to recover the sunken fighter platform, but perhaps the boat-bosses might want to consider having the crew put tie-downs on parked aircraft?   Given that you are parking $100 million aircraft on the flat-surface of a big boat, this would seem the prudent thing to do, yes?

But this curious pattern of "devolution" seems to be everywhere.  We need to consider the risks and costs of electing unwise political people to positions of great authority.  And of course, we need to question the dicktats of authority-agents now, with even greater emphasis than at any time, ever before.   We are left with no choice, really, lest we become part of this curious race-to-the-bottom that seems to be underway, everywhere.

[ Aug. 8, 2022 ] - Lethe and Alethia (Oblivion and Truth) - Do we trade one for the other?  Do we deny Truth, and accept delusion and fraud, to gain benefit and favour from the dishonest?   Hell, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe

The truth is - is that chance and randomness are the Gods of this Universe we live in.   Accept this, and profit by it.   But it is in the power of each man, to define himself, set his principles and control his fate.

"It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God?  In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations.  A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you.  Do not believe it.  Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. "   - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[ Aug. 7, 2022 ] - Stainless-Steel Underground - as opposed to the Velvet Underground, right?  Not Nico - maybe Ocin?  Or the Great Hole of War?   IDK.  Sunak must regret back-stabbing his boss, since his actions will put yet another woman in charge of a key Western nation.  Maybe Ms. Truss will be a fine and good Leader.   But will she have the stone-of-scone to pull the big trigger, when it becomes necessary?   Read a summary of the "Holy Illusions" note, by an economist from Rabobank.  UK is in real trouble, and so is Europe.   We did it exactly wrong with Russia.  We should have blocked all their exports, and blocked their harbours.  They might feel that negotiation would have been a good idea.  As it is now, we have no choice, but to continue to dial-up the war.  For now, it is by proxy, but this cannot last.  NATO and the United Nations are really of no value, if their institutions and technologies are not deployed now.  

And with Xi of China threatening to attack Taiwan, and Kishida of Japan being a soft and silly neko-chan, all the cost of protecting the free, democratic world, falls almost entirely on the divided and angry USA.  

Putin and Xi will ensure there is no Pearl Harbour - only a peril harbour.   Poor Japan - when they should have been peaceful, they were war-crazy.   When they need to accept and deal with the real threat of invasion-war from China, they are peace-talkers choosing the path of non-nuclear weakness.   They are a curious people, out of phase with evident reality, and at the worst possible time in history, when being an island is of no strategic or military benefit. 

Rather like the UK - facing a failing Europe and a fascist Russia - yet again - as if history has become a kind of "Ground-Hog Day".  

If we are to ensure peace and resiliant operational continuity, each of us is going to have to engineer this for ourselves, privately, and on our own quiet terms of careful action.  And that is possible, with the new technology.   We can let the queers, the girlboys and gaygirls have the velvet underground.  Lou and Andy are long dead, but their zietgeist marches big, in the twisted mindspace of our misguided national statesmen.  So curious - as if there was a careful plan to weaken and degrade Western culture, from the inside.  Many argue that this is exactly what is now happening.   We are not sure, and suspect it is just the coin-toss of historical "devolution".  Not every evolutionary change is positive.   Many have to be negative, and self-limiting, for the evolutionary process to actually work.   The weak and the stupid and the wrong have to die off and not breed, if evolution is to track any kind of postive course of continous improvement.  This is the harsh reality of the world of life.

But you don't have to climb aboard the "B-Ark", or "Drink the Kool-aid" laced with cyanide (the popular expression for falling into a destructive pit of suicidal delusion.)   If you ship is toxic and your captain is crazy, you leave and swim for land.  If your own leaders are seeking to destroy you,  then you de-couple from their control process.

You can go underground - a stainless-steel kind of underground of the mind - where you harden all your emotional, political, financial, physical and psychological defenses, and focus on the mechanics of resiliency. 

Don't ride in the "B-Ark", and don't drink that deadly sweet nectar of lies and delusion.  

Think for yourself, and do that which you know must be done.  Keep your own council, but offer enlightenment to others, also, if you can.  (Mostly, you will be scorned. Try anyway.)  We are on our own, now, in so many ways.   But we always have been, truth be told. 

What is so interesting, is that writers and thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson - in 1841 - was able to articulate almost *exactly* this same philosophy, in his "Essays on Self-Reliance".  (It is so curious, when one grasps and realizes a hard-won truth - which often places him outside of the ken of many others of his kin and friends - and he finds that others have discovered the same truth, and written down this clear truth, in different times, in different worlds.

https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html

[ Aug. 5th, 2022 ] - War Bonds - Trying to get a sense of the future, here.   It looks like one of rising prices, and conflict, regardless of what the Central Bankers do.   Curious.   

Unless the abusive militarists in Russia and China (Putin and Xi) can be removed, and replaced with non-warmongers, then we see global conflict as being unavoidable.  The only upside, is that the lead-up to the bombing may well be associated with rising markets, and improving economic circumstnaces for many folks.

[ Aug. 4th, 2022 ] - Party Like It's 2099 (or 1939...)- Well, this is interesting.  The AI models have turned up, and the best one, quite sharply.   And this is the funny thing about the world.  It all looks pretty damn bleak.  But this is when improvements and corrections become possible.  If the house five doors down, burns down after a horrible family fight, folks respond by being more kind to their partners, and buying fire extinguishers.    We remain long, not just all-in, but with a tiny bit of margined holdings, in addition to being all-in.   Curious times.  The new B61-12's are coming along nicely.  And the F-35 problems with the ejection-seats have been resolved.   We are ready to rock-and-roll, if the need arises.

Here's that link from last year, again...

https://discover.lanl.gov/news/1220-b61-12-reaches-milestone

[ Aug. 3rd, 2022 ] - Pendejo Economics -
There is no way to say this with any sort of polite language.  Lets start down south:

Argentina is a nation of fine and noble people - but their governments are made up of what appear to be the most deeply unwise.  It is a curious and interesting phenomenon, worthy of serious study.   Inflation is running at roughly 60% per year, and the people - the citizens of Argentina, a lovely nation endowed with spectacularly attractive land and fertile regions which can produce fine crops and excellent wine - are burdened with idiot-silly, foolish political leftist clowns.   Never mind my opinion, take a look at this:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/argentina-pledges-to-end-budget-financing-via-money-printing-1.1801210

This - in the 21st century, in a time of crisis where we are all recovering from a nasty viral medical emergency - is insane.   The Argentina government has being paying its bills - or trying to  - by printing money.  This is madness, and is known to cause .... What, you ask?  ... EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING - INSANE,  (REALLY STUPID) .. RUNAWAY INFLATION.

Dear Argentina:  What the part of basic, intro "Econ 101" did your unwise clown government people not understand?  JHC, this is beyond belief.   For economists like ourselves, this is like a bunch of medical doctors finding a modern nation using witchdoctors and magic spells to treat sickness - and insisting it is OK.   The entire Argentina scenario is beyond belief stupid - hard to reconcile with a modern, 21st century world.  They cannot seem to learn anything at all. 

The new Economics Minister guy has promised to stop doing this - and will be asking for yet another loan.   Really?

It looks like the Government people are brain-dead zombie loons, who cannot think or reason with even the ability of a dog or a three-year old child.  They just keep making these same mistakes, over and over and over and over, like a collective of insane, socialist lunatics.  (Or like the evil clowns from Venezuela...).   We may have to just give the up, on South America.  The Leftist spanish socialist government clowns need to grow the hell up and become rational adults  - because we are becoming just as badly stupid in North America as they are now, and soon, we suspect, our governments will not have sufficient resources to bail out their sorry leftist backsides from economic grief, since we seem to be electing insane people as our leaders also.   

So, you are soon going to be on your own.  The IMF may soon self-destruct, as perhaps nature and the gods-of-economics will require it to do, since no one in the global room, anywhere, seems to have any economic sanity or common sense anymore.

This seems beyond belief, truth be told.   I am just losing objectivity.   Maybe military fascist dictatorship is the only way forward for the South.  What an awful, awful thought.

I went out to the Gun Club today, and played with a big .45 calibre rifle for a while.  It was very soul-comforting.  Big BANG, and the splatter-targets show the big hole for each round.  I had made a bunch of engineering changes to the particular rifle in question, and it worked well.  So nice, when the technology works.  No wonder war is so attractive to the common people - AND especially to the Officers and Generals.  The political buffoons can be pushed to one side, and positive outcomes can be created.  

We predict a big conflict soon, since the world is being run by the most astonishing group of clowns and fools and criminals, that have ever walked the corridors of power, in probably all of modern human history.  (Is this really the case, or we just getting old and smart and seeing things we used to miss?)   More likely, it has always been like this.  People - especially Leaders, Kings, Princes, etc., are just cruel, stupid and dangerous most of the time.  It's only a good Constitution, and good luck, that saves us and/or keeps the evil criminals at bay.  Sometimes.

It may be next decade, or five years from now, or next year, or next week.   Wowie, zowie.... as the "Mothers of Invention" said.   But we are not done.  Let's look, closer to home:

North America:

Ok, so lets look at what the clowns here are doing:  Last year, on August 3rd 2021, the 2-year T-Bill in the good old USA, yielded 0.17 percent.   Today  - August 3rd, 2022, the yield on the 2-year is 3.10%.  Get this?  Dig it?  Now, lets be really clear here:  Last year, 2 year risk free interest rate was 0.17%, and this year, is is 3.10%.  Ok?  Clear? 

Now, according to my simple calculations, this is a: 1723.53 % increase in the price of money.   Let's be more clear.  This is a One Thousand, Seven Hundred and Twenty Three point Five Three PERCENT increase in the short-term, risk-free interest rate.  Let's check the calculation:  0.17 x (1+17.2353) = 0.17 x 18.2353 =  3.10 PERCENT.    Right.

Ok, so the price of  MONEY - the thing that EVERYONE USES TO GET STUFF DONE, and to GET THINGS BUILT, and so on - this has INCREASED by over one thousand, seven hundred PERCENT in one year.   And this cost-of-capital price increase, is hitting a debt-heavy economy.

AND it gets better.   The 10-year Treasury note rate is - today, August 3rd, 2022,  - recorded a closing yield of 2.70%.  Hey!   That is an INVERTED YIELD CURVE which is typically associated with tight money and a RECESSION.

So, we have two quarters of negative GDP in the good old USA, and also, a seriously inverted yield curve - and yet the  SILLY CRAP-FOR-BRAINS FUMBDUCKS (oh, like White House skanks, and some guy named Krugman - a lefty runt who should bloody well know better) are insisting that the good old USA is not in a recession.  WTF?   Of course it is.   But it might be short and not too serious.  Unless your are all stupid.

We don't care about semantics.  But deceptive, arrogant, smart-arsed leftist liars just drive us crazy.

Dear USA Democrats - COULD YOU PLEASE STOP LYING ABOUT ECONOMICS?

And could you folks at the Federal Reserve, please try not to be stupid?

I don't want to see my world wrecked by these fraudster Leftist buffoons, idiots and fools.

Recognize, that the good old USA, has just been hit with the MOTHER OF ALL PRICE INCREASES -  VASTLY GREATER THAN WHAT THE USA CENTRAL BANKERS DID BACK IN 1929, to provoke the October 1929 Stock Market Crash.  (Rates were popped from 4% to 6%.  Given the insane leverage in the market, that was enough.)  Take a little note of this, and recognize that you need to pause, and see just what this 17 hundred percent price increase in the price of money, is going to do to your domestic economy.

Please grasp the idea that big changes in critical factor prices in a complex economy, can have EXTREMELY non-linear results.  This might be one of these times.

And take note of that INVERTED YIELD CURVE.  It is honestly telling you something.  Something real.

Your economic models are wrong.   All models are basically wrong, because THEY ARE MODELS, they are not reality.   The kids sometimes forget this.  Right?

I don't want to see my world blown to hell because everyone seems to be acting brain-dead.  Of course inflation needs to be hammered down.  But is the inflation all coming from too much demand?  Are you sure?  Please, be careful.

I am not the only one feeling this curious frustration...

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2022/08/01/the_mind-blowing_stupidity_behind_the_280_billion_chips_for_america_act_845357.html

The policy-people and the politicians have to stop doing so much profound damage.  Just stop.  It is getting seriously out of hand.  These political clowns are at risk of blowing up not just the US Treasury, but the entire USA economy - and maybe the world economy also.   We can look thru history and see what generally happens, when the Kings, Princes and Leaders do this sort of mindless reactive madness.   We typically crash into unnecessary - and now maybe world-wrecking - war.

The leaders of the world have got to back off, and start focusing on STABILITY SEEKING STRATEGIES because otherwise, we are at real risk of a phase-jump to several possible kinds of self-destruction.   I am not the only one saying this.   It's in the math, sitting there for all to see.

[ Aug. 1st, 2022 ] - Junxit deceptio mors non separabit. - "Death will not separate, that which is by delusion joined."   This is my update on the inscription in the famous Masonic golden ring.  

It describes the true nature of much of human political action.

We have watched in astonishment, as the Democrats in USA, and the Leftist "Liberals" in Canada, have made such curious and extreme efforts to lie to their public, and use outright deception as a political toolset.   Trump - even with his lies - was "truthier" than this new crop of angry clowns.

It's weird, dangerous and problematic.   The "main-stream media (MSM)" is partly to blame, but the blame also resides within each human soul.  People hear and see what they want to hear and see - their biased judgements are suspect, even at the best of times.   Objectivity is something that is difficult to maintain, yet still remains of greatest importance. 

Without at least a desire and a commitment to attempt to "live in truth", there is no life at all - only a temporary bio-process that is limited and will - with certainty - end and fail, and be of no value to anyone or anything.

It is the truth of our ideas and of our ideals that matter most.    This really is the whole message of life itself.  We can understand this as the key.  In a Latin inscription:  "Junxit veritas mors non separabit" - "What is joined with truth, cannot be separated by death."  Even Death cannot kill the Truth.  But we can, if we fail to honour truth.  If we break this link, the World can break. 

This is what is playing out in Ukraine right now - an astonishing and loathsome attempt by Putin's gangster militarists, to destroy the very idea of Ukrainian national identity, and reduce the country of Ukraine to a vassal-state of Russian subjects, in a no-longer-free Russia which is now dominated by a man who uses targeted assassination and mass-murder as a political strategy.

This is murder-crime of the very worst kind.    It is the most ugly and offensive political action, since the actions of German National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, and of course, bears great resemblance to what that monster-criminal, Joseph Stalin also tried to do.

These people - Hitler and Stalin - perhaps honestly believed that mass-murder and what we now call war-crimes, could be justified.  But the World must retain it's hard-won knowledge.  It must be joined in virtue to the memory and the truth of what criminal sadists and evil persons, these two leaders were.

Putin - like an evil little toy soldier -  follows in their footsteps, and beats on their same drums of deep dishonesty.    Either we are joined by virtue to what is true, and we oppose this, or we are absolute and perfect failures as living creatures, having separated ourselves from the truth and from the very idea of virtue.

Choose.

[ July 31, 2022 ] - Pierre Poilievre - the Next Canadian Prime Minister

Just learned this.  Really - we do so much international work, I have shamefully neglected my own balliwick.  Time to fix this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bGVNPw9R8o

This guy, Poilievre, will be our next Leader.  Count on it. 

[ July 31, 2022 ] - Is Justin Trudeau Clinically Insane? - We are starting to feel like we are crew on that ship run by Captain Queeg, played by the great Humphry Bogart in the film "The Caine Mutiny". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caine_Mutiny_(film)

Except our captain is Justin Trudeau, who more and more is looking like he seriously might be clinically insane.   We honestly question whether he is competent to be acting in the role of Canada's Prime Minister.  

We just learned that the strange "Liberal" Government in Ottawa, is proposing to initiate a *mandatory* buy-back of all existing, and now *prohibitied* AR-15 rifles AND we also understand that all purchases and sales of handguns will be banned in Canada, by these same  Ottawa clowns.   This is an absurd and profoundly unwise action, being taken by someone we think might actually be mentally unfit to govern.   This is serious.  The information that is flowing out from the Ottawa dis-information machinery is quite frightening, and - most disturbing - is profoundly inaccurate.  It's really nasty.  And it is just so misleading.

The Liberals have to be removed from power in Canada.  This is now a priority.    I am surprised that Justin Trudeau is being so unwise and foolish, as to attack such a large, honest and law-following group of citizens.  It is ugly, dishonest and abusive politics, being done by dangerous lightweights, who hope to score points with the ignorant and uninformed.

The Liberals are using the actions of an insane, violent mass-killer in Nova Scotia, that "Wortman" person, who used an *illegal*, unlicensed firearm to kill people, as he drove around the province in a fake RCMP police car.    It was the tragic, horrific actions of a madman.  And a madman who DID NOT HAVE a firearms licence, and obtained his weapon illegally.

Trudeau and his cronies are implying that the actions of this criminal, using an illegally acquired firearm, and pretending to be a police office, somehow reflects on lawful, patriotic Canadians, who are interested in carefully and legally engaging in the shooting sports.   His fundamental argument that firearms ownership is a "public safety issue" is manifestly false, and he cannot be so stupid, as not to know the truth of this.

That makes him a dishonest and abusive fraudster, and such a person is a serious threat to the Canadian Federation.   Many people in Canada have lost confidence in this man, and feel he is unfit to govern, even those who at one time supported him.  His idiotic assault on firearms owners - probably the most law-abiding and careful folks in the country - every one of whom is documented, photo-IDed, and licensed by the RCMP - is either fraud, or madness.  Or perhaps it is a bit of both.

We live in sad and serious times.   What worries us most, is that this little man, is also quite possibly actually insane, in a real and clinically confirmable manner.    There is evidence he is profoundly unfit to be in any position of authority - much less acting as the prime Government authority figure.

We are not alone in our assessment of this.   Justin Trudeau is an angry man, with serious emotional problems, and there is mounting evidence that he is emotionally unfit for his current role.  

 

Trudeau's Emotional Complexity (historical):

Trudeau, early on (6 years ago), actually confessed to mental instability and serious "anger" issues, in a meeting of senior advisors.  This was reported by sympathetic news-reporters as simply his "emtional complexity".  This was six years ago.   We see evidence of this becoming more serious now, and more than just "emotional complexity":

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-emotional-complexities-of-justin-trudeau/article29409595/

 

The Covid-19 Policies of Trudeau's Regime:

The National Post and it's reporters, (and many others) characterized the Trudeau Covid-19 policies as "madness"  (Trudeau was one of the first people to actually bring Covid to Canada, if people can recall):

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-the-madness-of-trudeaus-vaccine-policies-foretell-the-end-of-his-reign

 

Trump's Take on Trudeau...:

Regardless of what one thinks about former US President Trump, he was known for plain speech.  And he often called it clearly, as he saw it.  He called Trudeau with some accuracy:

https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/trump-calls-justin-trudeau-a-far-left-lunatic-as-trucker-led-covid-19-vaccine-protests-continue-in-canada/articleshow/89370317.cms

https://worldnewsera.com/news/canada/trump-calls-trudeau-far-left-lunatic-expresses-support-for-convoy/

 

What do Members of the European Parliament Think of Trudeau?:

Members of the European Parliament have a similar view to Mr. Trudeau, as did former President Trump.  Trudeau spoke to the European Parliament bragging about the "tools we have at our disposal" (much like Vladimir Putin has engineered his "tools" for the disposal of Ukraine), and a few European Parliamentarians recognized the kind of speech they had heard before, and spoke in clear language of their revulsion and disgust with Justin Trudeau:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL1kMKgq1b0

 

What People of Courage and Action, Think of Trudeau:

People who have historical perspective, deeply detest Trudeau for his pro-terrorist policies:

https://www.facebook.com/JustinTrudeauisanIdiot/photos/the-words-of-an-insane-person/1299472060190066

https://www.facebook.com/JustinTrudeauisanIdiot/photos/the-words-of-an-insane-person/1295373650599907

 

The Feeling In the House of Commons - Canada's Parliament:

Trudeau was loudly "booed" in Canada's House of Commons, for saying to a Jewish Member of Parliament, that she was a person who "supported swastika's".  This was not only rude and ugly, but it was just plain crazy-stupid wrong.  It was something a truly crazy person would say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-0MXlq4QUc

 

Australian Views on Trudeau:

A reporter from Australian Sky News, described Justin Trudeau's actions as "insane" back in February of this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inPEY_PS4kU

 

A Toronto Take on Trudeau (A Town of Liberals):

Another reporter for a Toronto newspaper, suggested, back in 2021, that "Justin Trudeau is playing with a whole heap of crazy."

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/bonokoski-justin-trudeaus-playing-with-a-whole-heap-of-crazy

The people of Canada - more than 50% - want this fellow to be GONE.  There is a LOT of evidence of this fact, but of course, given the current support the NDP offers the MINORITY Liberal "Government", there is nothing we the people of Canada, can do about this problem, until election time.

 

The People of Canada's View of Trudeau:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgmE7q6LPyp/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/trudeaumustgo/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/p/CglSVFstbLc/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgA31efJcet/?hl=en

http://friendlymisanthropist.blogspot.com/2021/09/does-justin-trudeau-suffer-from-mental.html

https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/trudeau-spent-nearly-100m-fighting-first-nations-in-court-during-first-years-in-power/

Now, lets be very, very clear here.  I am not attacking Justin Trudeau's mother.  I am just a simple analyst, gathering facts.   We honestly have some real concern, that Justin Trudeau is becoming unhinged, and unwell, and needs to be removed from his position of power.  He is just riding the lie-machine too often, and it is now reaching out and hitting us here, where we live.

So, lets be clear.  His mom was *very* unstable, with *serious* mental health problems.  She has been honest about this, and written it down in books.  We feel Canada is too important a social experiment, and the Canadian Federation - which has a long and valuable tradition of freedom - real freedom, not phony fake paper-freedom of the Leftists fraudsters -  is at risk.   

His mom was mentally unstable, and we suspect that he is also.  The man needs to step down.  Any good clinical doctor or psychological specialist, will admit that madness and mental illness which provokes bad behaviour, runs in families.  There is real, solid, hard evidence of this:

https://margarets.ca/margaret-trudeau-advocacy-award/

The more we dig into this, the more serious it looks.   

Listen to the sort of absurd, dishonest nonsense this fellow tried to retail, when legitimate protestors came to Ottawa to air their concerns.   Listen to what Justin Trudeau said, in his OWN VIDEO PRESENTATION:

https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/02/01/justin-trudeau-might-be-clinically-insane/

I started this analysis as someone who was not really a believer in the "Justin Trudeau is clinically insane" viewpoint.  I thought Trudeau was just going into a kind of full-Putin mode, and had simply decided to try to take down some marginal citizen-voter folks who his own unwise political people probably said didn't vote for him anyway.   Except, like Putin, we used to have some real sympathy for Trudeau.  If he did not attack us too directly, we were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But then, he decided that us quiet, private-sector farmer-folks - we were some kind of *enemy to Canada*, and our first, honest, intial reaction, was simply:  "This is just f*cking insane!   This sounds like what Hitler did in Germany, in the 1930's!"    And see, because of our economic research, we actually know a fair bit about this interesting time period.  For Liberals, this timeperiod and place, was a real object of study.  Stephan Dion's father actually did his thesis on the interesting political phenomenon of Germany in the 1930's.  (Dion was a Liberal leader, and failed Prime Minister candidate.)   Our interest has been on the economics of the whole process, and we have studied how Schact worked his magic to end the hyperinflation.  But the politics is really where the meat is.  It was such a terrifying and effective social and economic experiment, like the world has rarely seen.

So, the thought has occured, perhaps ... OMG, what if Justin Trudeau really is actually, truly insane?  Maybe full-on paranoid/delusional...   Is this possible?  

And as we set out to investigate this - we learned there honestly is a pattern.   The man is over-the-top unwise, and it now looks like he is being controlled by some curiously dark forces.  But these dark forces might be inside his own mind.   You don't even need to propose a "conspiracy theory", if you realize your subject is clinically mentally ill.

There is nothing we, as powerless average citizens, can do about this, until the next election, sadly.  And the election has been prevented, by the "national" socialists of the NDP, signing an agreement with the Ottawa Liberals.   Birds of a common feather, of course.  (yikes...)

But there WILL be an election at some point.   And there WILL be a reckoning.   The man is both not wanted, and we fear, he is bordering on crazy-dangerous, rather like Mr. Putin of the Russian Federation.

Until the next election, we will have to try to stay strong.    This crazy guy looks like he may be quite dangerous, and we had all better "stand on guard", as the words to our national anthem suggest is indicated during times of crisis.

We suspect efforts at mass confiscation of firearms will create a result similar to alcohol prohibition efforts - a significant increase in crime and criminal activity.  Trudeau and his gang are being completely insane, to a degree we thought would not occur. 

 

It's Worse Down South!

And finally, from the "It could be Worse.." file:  It is getting *really* weird in the USA.  The Biden folks are proposing an "Inflation Reduction Act" which will include a whole bunch of new taxes, and over $300 billion of new "credits" for wind-turbines and solar panels.  WTF?  Can you drive to work, using a "Wind Turbine"?   Biden and his handlers are *insane*.  And the Wharton school at Univ. of Pennsylvania, have run the new spending from the proposed "Inflation Reduction Act" thru their USA economic model, and said that this legislation will *increase* inflation.  Really.  And Biden has said: "The USA in not in recession", except we have just had two negative quarters of GDP growth, which is the technical definition of a recession.

So, without question.. the USA is even MORE INSANE that Trudeau and his gang, appear to be.  And understand - I am not making anything up here.  Our world leaders are inside some kind of deeply self-delusional information filter-bubble.   Take a look, don't just trust us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TdRdn6BqrA

[ July 30, 2022 ] - Patterns of the Wild  - Yes, indeed.  And, when one can learn to read them, all becomes possible. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GTmN7Fhv6o

The theme-song for chaos researchers, market-hackers, designers of advanced targeting software, and those who ran "hydrosims" at LANL, back in the old days...  Very good song.  Short, sharp and most creative, insightful lyrics, with evident hard-core acoustical poetry, on fine display.

We must do much more, than just to estimate Lyapunov Exponents, and determine embedding dimension.  We must pilot our lifecraft thru the roaring, bucking chaos, like a weapon's flying arrowhead.

[ July 29, 2022 ] - The Silence of the Neutrons - Some guy even has a Hedge Fund, named "Deuterium ...", which I thought was pretty funny.  We messed around with IEC Fusors, ran some fusion experiments that were successful, but found more profit in building Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines, to predict market action.   Curious, how technical developments tend to track similar, among different groups.  Good name for a Hedge Fund.   We hope the electricity-producing fusion reactors will eventually be developed.

The AI market forecast has turned up, and we are getting hard confirmation of our theory related to improvements in rate-of-return on capital driving market pricing improvements.  We expect the markets to continue to track upwards, as interest-rates are normalized.   The recent economic stimulation experiments due to Covid-19 pandemic, have had these extreme asymetries, which are now - essentially - being addressed.   Sanity is returning.  

We just need to begin the bombing campaign in - and against - Russia.   We hope it can start soon.  The Ukrainians are prevented from launching attacks into Russia, while Russian cruise missiles are raining down on their hospitals, schools, shopping centres, and grain warehouses. 

This is completely and absurdly insane.  All Russian military bases should be destroyed - and it should happen over a weekend - with whatever weapons are available.   The explicit statement must also be made, that Moscow and St. Petersburg will be destroyed, if Russia uses any nuclear weapons of any kind, anywhere.  

One has to speak to the Russians in their own language, and this is, of course, the language of violence, terror and conquest.  They are what they are.   And right now, they are the greatest problem the World is now facing.   One way or another, we will have to face this problem, and deal with it.

It's sad, that the World must likely now track forward into mass-violence again.  War is bad.  But the abusive and insane actions of Putin and his henchmen, offer us no real choice.  Sanctions are quite silly, wasteful, and most of all, profoundly ineffective.  They in fact aid dictators and criminals in their missions of social control, and as such, should be avoided.  The "Ron Reagan Methodology" - a directed missile attack explicitly against the murderous dictator's houses and homes (cf. Gadaffi of Libya, after the Pan-Am bombing over Scotland), is a vastly better strategy, and much more likely to yield behaviour-change.   These days, the World - and it's leaders -  is becoming stupid.   We need to correct this.

We did not *negotiate* with Al Quida, and/or Osama Bin Laden.  We hunted him down, and ensured he was ended.    This is the strategy that needs to be taken, when a mass-murderer begins his projects to destroy cities.  

We ended Bin Laden.  We didn't just cancel his VISA cards.  Similar action is required now, with the current crop of city-killers, and murderers-of-the-innocent.

[ July 28, 2022 ] - Private-Sector Nuclear Weapons? - I remember this tune - Tom Lehrer's clever song about  "World War III"...  Pretty funny, actually.  And of course, it is on Youtube.  How about that!   And it could have been written last week...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrbv40ENU_o

And if that does not sum it up, have a look at what Mr. Market is doing..  And guess what?  The AI turned up last nite, after yesterday's data update.  I thought to myself:  "Really?... Really??".  We  have had this theory about investment-action "normalization", and the curious lovely action that occurs when the old-fashioned rate-of-return on capital, starts to move in a healthy, positive direction.  And there it goes.  The doom-pedlars are ripping their hair out, and gnashing their tiny little pointed teeth.  It's kind of strange and curious to watch it play out.  

See, there is all this most astonishing drivel on the "big internet".   So much that is written is just wild-arsed wrong.  It is wrong and wrong -- and then wrong again.  But it seems to be a product that can be sold, like fertilizer for the rosebuds of the world.   (Remember "Citizen Kane"?  "Rosebud...  Rosebud..." his last words at death?   Was supposed to be a snow-sleigh...  But "rosebud" is American slang, for arse-hole.  No one talked about that, in my film course...)

There is so much poop and stinking-slime-stuff that sloshes around on the 'net, now, it is almost a textbook picture of how awful human-awfulness can be.  I read today about some poor young bastard who was on a little vacay in Greece, and he took a helicopter ride, and managed to walk into the rear propeller blades.  SO damn sad and awful - he was on his stupid-phone chatting, apparently, and it was dark..

And his sister has had to post stuff to ask people to stop hate-posting on him for being a rich, helicopter-riding rich-boy - since he was not, and this was actually even his first helicopter ride.

I remember my first heli-ride.  It was a small two-seater, one of those bubble-front choppers they used in Korean War, like in MASH TV series.   I was a tiny kid, and sat on my dad's knee, without a seatbelt, (and no doors on the thing!)  and the pilot, my father, and me, lept into the air and flew around a fair-ground in our small city.   I thought it was the coolest thing we had ever done.  Helicopters are just great.  But don't walk into the damn blades, eh?   Poor guy...

But the world is silly, and is run by deeply unwise folks, who are selfish, nasty and really, really dangerous mother-killers and child-shredders.  That's just the truth of things.  Even the "good" Christians would happily abuse and murder kids - like the lonely little Indian kids in Residential Schools, who probably had to provide cocksucking-service to the Catholic Priests and "lay-fathers" who ran the Indian schools.  The Pope apologized for this, and Cdn taxpayers have paid off some of the remaining adults who suffered the abuse as children.  But they are finding all these unmarked graves of the Indian kids who died at these schools.   Sad all around.   Putting the Catholic Church in charge of teaching children is maybe not the best plan, given the sex-crazed weirdness and appetite for cruelty and abuse, that has characterized so much of Catholic history.   It's just a fact of history, and you simply cannot deny it.  Catholics like to hurt people.  They seem to like it a lot.   Hell, most folks do.  It's a sad, bad world.

No one expected the "Spanish Inquisition" in Canada.  Just  as Monty Python so eloquently informed us as kids back in the 1970's... no one actually expects the Spanish Inquisition.  But it seems to crop up like clockwork - most recently in Kyiv suburbs, for Christ's sakes.  Truly insane.

And no one expects World War III, just yet.   But we are thinking actually, that Ackman is probably right, and it has probably already started.    Each side will refrain from using it's nuclear weapons, just like each side, in World War II, did not use it's stockpiles of poison gas.

No on talks about this.  England and USA did not use poison gas.   And even Hitler did not use poison gas - except on Jews, who had been disarmed, and put into gas-chambers.  And it was other Jews that actually ran that operation, which was genius - like Putin is now using Russian kids to kill Ukrainian kids.  How fucking awful is this?  If you put all this insane cruelty into a fiction book, people would dismiss it as too far-fetched and silly-awful.  But this is what humans like to do.  History teaches us this - over and over, it seems.

People can be astonishingly awful creatures, brain-dead and cruel in the most astonishing ways.  

So, don't feel too surprised or sad, as the private-sector boys begin to become the war-fighters.  With the nasty and sadistic "Wagner Group" from Russia, Putin has already begun this new trend.  And like any good trend, it will likely continue.   Right to it's logical conclusion.

[ July 27, 2022 ] - Give War a Chance - Really.   We are moving towards the time when this will have to happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQgbMOezqA

The Ukrainians are fighting the most astonishingly pure evil.   The asinine stupid cruelty of Putin's murder campaign is beyond anything rational or acceptable.   It is tragic, vicious gangster-style theft - of land, of grain, and of human life.   Putin is a criminal, who must be brought to justice.

For now, the Ukrainians fight.  And bury their dead.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-buries-young-soldier-who-planned-marry-2022-07-26/

Vladimir Putin is a murderer.    Sanctions are not enough.

We've been beating on our brains, to answer: "How we can defeat a giant mass-murder nation like Russia?"  This is hard question, and implies a very difficult project, to say the least.

But we have come up with an idea.   :)

[ July 26, 2022 ] - Warren Piece - I read yesterday the absurd and unmitigated horseshit that US Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in the Wall Street Journal.  (Yes, you can *mitigate* horseshit.  We do in on the roads around here in Mennonite Country all the time, since we have a lot of horse-drawn wagon traffic..)

Warren herself shit all over Jerome Powell for actually nothing more than that the man is trying to do his job.  Warren should be ashamed of being such a stupid runt, but of course, we know that she is actually very proud of this fact, and lets the world know about this, regularly.   I don't understand how American voters can be so barking crazy as to put a goofus like that in a position of political power.  It boggles the mind.

Anyway - crazy Ms. Warren has even managed to provoke the disgust and ire of old Larry Summers, the Clinton Treasury guy, who is a smart, honest and sensible person.  He knows just how terrible, bad and awful inflation can be.  It is economic cancer of the worst kind - and it was made possible by the irresponsible stupid actions of clowns like Elizabeth Warren and the other brain-dead politicals who seem to be driving US fiscal policy.  They blow up the "fisc", and when the rational economic agents of the good old USA respond accordingly, the Washington twits lash out at the civil authorities who are trying to clean up the hot mess the political fools have caused.

Even the "Editorial Board" at the WSJ has felt it has to comment on how completely idiotic this all is.   Powell is between a big, hard nasty rock, and a very, very hard place.  He and the US Federal Reserve have very little wiggle room now, and they will have to trigger a *growth pause* (or an ugly downturn), in order to try to contain the damage the Democrat irresponsible fiscal policy has caused. 

The Fed has basically no choice - unless it wants to simply not do it's job, which would be really very insane.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-economic-mess-were-in-jerome-powell-federal-reserve-elizabeth-warren-larry-summers-inflation-11658783704?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

We concur with the "E-Board" of the WSJ.  We are in an economic mess.  I am pretty sure we will rocket out of it, much faster than folks think, once we begin bombing Russia.  And we honestly believe, that there will be little choice, but to do this.   If the stupid nation-states don't do it, then the private sector of the world will sadly have to begin to take action.  The gangsters running Russia are insane and have become murder-crazy, out-of-control criminals.  It is worse than Afghanistan.

This world cannot tolerate an entire nuclear-armed nation of criminal thieves and rapists, running rampant across the world.   We will *all* be at war with the Russian Federation, sooner or later.  And although we may lose a few cities, and have to endure a man-made fix to the problem of "global warming", we are pretty sure that this is in our future.   We expect the war to be short, sharp and successful.   And we are now certain it is necessary.

Once the "Russia Problem" is cleaned up, there will be an economic take-off, the likes of which the world has never seen.  By then, it will be too late to obtain attractive equity positions.  You want to buy now, when the blood is still running in Ukrainian streets.

(Orban of Hungary is wrong, also, we believe.   We all have much work to do.  With or without NATO.)

[ July 25, 2022 ] - Hanoi Shan, Vladimir Putin, & The World Crime Syndicate - Maybe it's not a Phillip K. Dick novel - maybe it's another episode in the "Buckaroo Banzai" saga... that one we never got to see?   We are living in it, instead of watching it.   What's going on now, is madness.  It's classical, over-the-top crazy madness, and we suspect the time is coming, where we will *all* have to start hammering those plowshares into B61's.  (The B61 is not an aircraft.  But it uses aircraft...) 

Building B61-series-12's, is not madness.  It is a very good thing, and offers a local antidote to the actions of the madmen and their new World Crime collective.  The FPU (First Production Unit) has already been delivered, and the LEP (Lifetime Extension Program) which will add another 20 years of service life to this most fine device, is now underway and in production.  This is a big milestone, as LANL reports.  Good for LANL.  And good for USA and for NATO.

https://discover.lanl.gov/news/1220-b61-12-reaches-milestone

Pantex folks and the clever boffins at LANL have given us the 12th generation of the B61, a truly fine and wonderful device for the continued maintenace of World Peace.  We have been doing research on a theory - and found more confirming evidence for it again, in research on the excellent work of the Los Alamos lab, and the Sandia folks.   The B61 nuclear device was first developed in 1968 - in the same decade as the extreme technological phase-leap of the fine USA space program.  Interesting times.   Wonderful leaps were made.  There are films-as-videos of the 1965 XB-70 project, which was essentially the test-bed for the Space Shuttle (now a museum-relic..).  Such a curious time of technological lift-off.

The latest upgrade (version 12) of the genius-designed, beautiful-contructed B61, reduces the megaton yield, but improves it's accuracy.   It's so nice how the F-35 can carry and deliver this special package of our-fine-freedom to the very bad people of the world - of which there suddenly seems to be a distrubing new cohort.  

Fortunately, we are already ramping up to produce F-35's "like sausages".  The aircraft is expensive - but it can do amazing things, and can virtually turn invisible to old-style radar.   And it can put a B61 nuke right down onto Putin's house, if it has to.   Right off your toilet, eh, Valdimir?  And you and your henchmen, into a bunch of small particles and hot plasma.  I am sure you understand.)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/lockheed-s-next-f-35-jet-contract-is-expected-to-be-worth-30-billion-1.1796743

It is very important that Russia stand-down from it's idiotic and absurd murder-mission in Ukraine, and that all the Russian military gangsters be removed completely from Ukrainian lands.  No one wants to see these fine B61-12's get delivered to military sites in Russia.  Peace is so much a better idea than war.

But no one anywhere, anyway, wants to live as a Russian slave.  And this "live as one of Putin's slaves" is the only choice Russian forces are offering.   The entire insane war violates explicit agreements that were made in 1994.  This makes Russia's action illegal.   And it also makes Russia  - in a very real and formal sense - a "state sponsor of terrorism."

Regardless of what Europe does - they are good at talking  - at some point, we are going to have to role up our sleaves, and fix this insane madness that Russia has unleashed on the World.   Everything the Russians say now, appears to be fabricated falsehoods - lies so big and over-the-top, that one has to honestly have doubts about the sanity of most of it's current leaders.

Putin thinks the West is weak and stupid.  It kind of was, yes.  The whole idea of the "Western World" had almost gone away.   NATO seemed a relic of the past, with no real future, and no enemy.   Russia was our ally and our trading partner.  Putin, in his degraded mental state  (we truly believe he is mentally unbalanced), has chosen to throw all this away, and initiate an insane blitzkreig war against a peaceful, trading-nation neighbour, in hopes - again, like Stalin did - of stealing it's food-producing ability.   His actions have caused mass-murder, mass-destruction, and will (this winter), likely cause famine & starvation - especially in Africa.  

None of us thought he would do something so perfectly cruel and absurdly evil as this idiotic war.  We all had a good and working peace - beneficial for everyone.  

But the atrocity of Russian actions, has completely changed the thinking of a *lot* of people.   The actions of this profoundly evil man, have changed the dynamics of the World, and has made it clear, that we must now begin to seriously prepare for war.   Astonishing.

History has shown us repeatedly, with horrific clarity, the foolishness of trusting megalomaniacs who violate international agreements and choose instead to murder whole cities of the innocent.   What Putin is doing now, is not new.   It is nothing new.   Except for one thing...

We all now know it.   And we know what must be done.

[ July 23, 2022 ] - Fun with Dick and Gain - We found an article from February, 1972, about Phillip K. Dick deciding to move to Vancouver, from California.  His comments on human-nature, and our android-future, were interesting.  We've been researching the 1970's, and made this comment:

An article from February, 1972!  Very nice.  Thanx for posting this on
your site.  P. K. Dick wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", the
novel which became "BladeRunner".  Interesting how the science-fiction
writers saw our future.  Here we are in 2022, and the wars are beginning,
- both cultural and real.  

Our little analysis enterprise is concerned that we might be on the cusp
of a really nasty economic downturn, rather like the 1930 to 1932 time
period.  We are researching the economics of the 1970's.  Mr. Dick could
see the future - as well as write good stories about it.  The 1970's were a
time of very great change - most of it bad.

Nixon took USA off the gold standard in 1971, because he could not pay
for the Vietnam War, while maintaining any sort of currency link to gold.

This, combined with the 1973 "Arab Oil Shock" (where gasoline prices
doubled, and then doubled again), resulted in a massive inflation, high
unemployment, and reduced economic growth.  Paul Volker eventually
ended the inflation-run, by raising interest rates over 20%, and this
destroyed over-leveraged businesses and indebted households, but
economic sanity was restored.  In  the 1980's - with Ron Reagan's
"Star Wars" projects (to make nuclear-weapon missiles obsolete) and
a 40-year reduction in interest-rates down to below zero, gave us all
the greatest economic boom the world has ever seen in all of human
history.

Then we got the coronavirus plague, the mRNA vaccines, and here we
are now, up to our global eyebrows in debt, and now ramping rates up
to "fight inflation" - by raising everyone's debt-service costs, while also
taking Russia out of the global transactional economy.   This could harm
us all, we worry, in a number of curious ways.

We are thinking that Phillip K. Dick might have written this story we are
now thrashing around within.   It feels a bit like it.   

We don't have moon-rockets or even Space Shuttles - and if not for
Elon Musk, we would not have any spaceships at all.  
NASA dropped the ball, and USA is turning inward to fight with
itself, like an octopus eating it's own arms.  They fight about the "right"
for women to kill their own unborn children.  Is this not madness?

And the Federal Reserve will now *raise* everyone's debt-service costs,
so as to fight rising prices.   Can this possibly work?  It reminds us of
that comment from the 1970's about the Vietnam War: "Fighting for
peace, is like fucking for virginity."

We look at our world now, and think:  "Our leaders don't know Dick."

[ July 22, 2022 ] - A Surfeit of Twos - We seem to be drifting off course, it feels like.  It is possible that Samuel Johnson was right.  It is probably foolish and absurd in the extreme, to write without being paid for it.   I recall reading "Rassalas"  - as a storybook essay in a book I found on the road, on Jarvis Street, outside a collegiate.  Amazing good story - Johnson wrote it in less than a month, in 1759, because he needed the money.  It's a somewhat picaresque adventure, except the hero and his Princess are mostly just curious.  They leave "Happy Valley" because they wish to know the wider world - much as the Buddha did.   They encounter the "Astronomer."  And they talk about how the Astronomer became afflicted with a debilitating ailment, where he came to believe his monitoring of the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars in the heavens, were necessary, and if he failed to rise and document their actions, they would not move.  His madness was curious, and almost fatal, yet - like Nash, he fought his way back to sanity, and thru his interactions with people, cured himself of his absurd fears, and his burdensome sense of responsibility.

That Johnson could even articulate something so curious, is impressive.  He is remembered for his "Dictionary", and for Boswell's biography of him.  But his greatest triumph was "Rassalas", in my opinion.   He even describes, in the storyline, the mechanism by which heavier-than-air vehicles will one day be created.   (See: " Chapter VI - A Dissertation on the Art of Flying")

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/652/652-h/652-h.htm

In some ways, "Rassalas" is perhaps the first science-fiction story.  It reminds me a bit of "Ringworld", and those great 5-syllable names.   The Prince does not actually build an air-craft to escape his "Happy Valley", but he might of.

But far more interesting, is Johnson's portrait of the formerly-mad Astronomer.   Science is to some degree, like wizardry.   To be a scientist, is to be a bit like Faust.  You want to take command of the Forces of Nature, and make them do your bidding.

And, to some degree, you can.  That's what lets the madness begin to come in.  The "Mad Scientist" of fiction, is not completely a false-stereotype.   Such folks do exist - researchers who have lost objectivity, and have become obsessed, and now behave badly.  

When one gains and possesses power, it must be used wisely, or great tragedy can result.  We all know this - but the knowing about it, and the acting upon that knowledge, can be two different things. 

This binary conflict - knowing what must be done - and then taking action to DO IT - this binary nature, this "tyranny of the two", can affect any one of us.   We can see the first, yet fail to act on the second.   This is a most serious and dangerous kind of:  "non-binary".   If we know - we must act.  The binary action is required.  Knowledge must be translated into action, lest we be like Hamlet, and allow the opportunity to correct a crime, to slip away.

[ July 21, 2022 ] - Strength Thru Joy (in Georgia) - Maybe in Asia "Georgia" also?   St. George fought - and killed - the evil dragon.  "Georgia" is in every culture.   One would think maybe the metaphor implies a conflict with China (dragons and all).  But now we find, that our evil "dragon" that must be slain, resides in Moscow.   World is always offering suprises, isn't it...

[ July 20, 2022 ] - Bootleg Turn - We did stupid stuff as teenagers... mostly with cars.  I recall practicing "Bootleg Turns", where you take your Mom's high-performance car, zoom down a darkened, empty highway, cut the wheel over while simultaneously hitting the emergency brake to lock up the rear wheels.  We saw this on TV or on a movie or something... The idea was that you could execute a fast 180-dgree turn, if being chased, and spin your vehicle around to point in the opposite direction, within just the two-lane blacktop road width.  

Apparently the "Bootleggers" in the US South did this, when being chased by "Revenue Police", according to urban-legend.  (Canadian kids had a curious respect and admiration for the culture of the Southern USA - minus the racism, of course... since we all seemed to like the Blues also...)  We were pretty crazy, truth be told. 

An old friend who has converted all his music collection to MP3's, gave me a Neil Young CD.  It's called "Harvest Moon".   It's pretty good.  My favourite song on it, is about an guy and his old hound-dog named King, who had no fear.  Very much a Canadian kind of song - but it also sounds right out of Deep South, USA.  (We love USA, lets be clear on this, eh?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d4cDMiUarA

The title track, "Harvest Moon", has a nice video on *tube.  At time-index 3:55, you can see King jump out of a parked pickup truck.   :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2MtEsrcTTs

Nice music from less crazy times.  But now, these wild, rapid 180-degree full turns, seem to be pretty common in our modern markets.  We have theories (related to the tripwire nature of the machine-algorithms that are used now to harvest funds from the market-players), but no one really knows exactly why markets are so wild twitchy now.

What we know, is that the V-bottom - at least on a short term basis - still remains in fashion.  And the algos have to obviously "gun for stops", if they are going to work, short term.  And they do work, which is fine, since it makes some market action predictable, much more than it really should be.

I honestly think one has to be a bit crazy, to try to trade this current environment.  It's like warfare - lots of fun and excitement, until you get shot in the leg, or your hand, or your head.  Then, you are ruined, and learn fast that warfare is pretty much a rather stupid & terrible thing, full of pain and worthless death.   You watch good friends and trusted comrades get splattered or torn to bits by a shell, and there is just nothing good at all about the experience.   And the folks on Train "Cargo 200", don't even get to learn anything at all - they take home nothing but their own dead flesh, which is little use to anyone, except to offer closure to grieving families.

We are *very* cautious traders/investors.   We have to be, so we don't get whacked and ruined, which is what this kind of market can do.   The great monetary stimulus is going to run in reverse now, for a while.   And rates will drift up to normal levels.    This must happen, and most certainly will create a whole raft of opportunities - but it may ruin a few folks also.    Lots and lots of trades are very crowded now, and wild swings are needed to clean out the bad and the foolish.

I dropped into a Ford dealer yesterday.  They had a single new "Black Diamond" Bronco on the lot.  It was a "Demo", and could not be bought.   It's $60K Cdn, once another one comes in which can be bought, which is a bit silly.  It was a black-top convertible.  There are shortages of units with hardtops.  This is not the crappy little "Bronco Sport", this is the full-frame, full-sized unit, with big-tires and fender skirts to catch the gravel and mud.    It sports a 2.3 litre engine, which makes it smaller displacement than our 2.5 litre 4x4 Honda CRV  (which is made in Canada).   My F-150, with the 5-litre V8 is a bigger unit, but it costs me $200 in petrol, to run up north and back, now.  It's over $250 to fill the tank.  This is insane.

The Ford Bronco (the big one, with the proper frame), is a win, in our opinion.  Ford is making an F-150 "Raptor", which retails for $109,000 US dollars, apparently, although this number might be wrong.   I read it on some internet site, so it might be bogus.  This price also seems insane.

But these are insane times.  I remember, maybe 14 or 15 years ago, trading BAC, and in one trade, made half the price of my old, previous F-150.   If you want to run a farm in Canada, you must have some non-farm sources of income, since farming is not a huge cash generating business-model, typically.  I think I paid $12K for a used 2005 F-150.   And of course it was trading bank-stocks that provided roughly half the needed cash.

So, by this metric, I should be able to make $30K in a single trade to fund half a Bronco?  Somehow, I seriously doubt that this is possible, without taking on the old Gambler's Risk-of-Ruin.   And there is no Lehman Bros., anymore.    I actually did some work for those boys and girls, early on.  Such a curious world.  The dreams (and nightmares) of an older fellow, are the memories of his younger days...   :)

UPdate:  Here is a paper we just read.  Stock returns data from 1963 to 2020, is compared to T-Bill returns.  Controlling for all the usual factors, 500 biggest stocks beat T-bill returns by about 4% per year.  Make it 1000 biggest stocks, and it still works.  But pull out the best 3 years, and the execess returns over T-bills drops to less than 2%.   This paper is by a clever fellow in Edmonton, working for a "Frontier" operation.  The .PDF can be downloaded and read, only 13 pages.  Nice piece of research, which contradicts more of the usual academic blather.  :)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4143649

Stock investing works, and it works - consistantly - better than buying Government bonds.

But watch out for those "Bootleg-Turns"!

[ July 19, 2022 ] - Sunset Curve - Take some time to consider the "Phillips Curve".  Original work by New Zealand Economist Dr. William Phillips, which was detailed in a 1958 article, using mostly 19th century English data.   He later updated the research using 20th century data up to 1948, which purported to show the relationship between changes (increases) in money wages, and the change (decreases) in unemployment rate.   The idea is that rising money wages (not real wages), leads to, or at least co-relates with reduction in national unemployment rate.  This was shown to be the case, in 1920-24 Germany's experiment with deliberate hyperinflation.  It *sort-of* seemed to be the case with Canada's inflation experience in the 1960's, but did not seem to hold during the 1973-1980 "Oil Shock" driven inflation.  

That nasty "Arab Oil Shock"-provoked inflation, which was also characterized by runaway, out-of-control ramp-up in Federal spending, was characterized by increasing rates of both inflation and unemployment.  The data suggested, in that environment, that the Phillips Curve was an artifact which had little useful predictive or even explanitory value. 

It was bogus.

But in more recent (post-modern?) times, the relationship does still seem to be apparent.   In the USA, we have now very low and falling unemployment, combined with rising inflation and evidence of rising money-wage (ie. not inflation-adjusted "real" wage) rates.    And it still represents a modelized picture-of-the-world which influences Central Bank thinking, many believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

You can read about and listen to the music of "Sunset Curve", an indy band from Calif., circa 1995.  They were scheduled to play the Orpheum, July 22, 1995.  They sang this song "Now or Never", and you can use the little "mPlayer" box at browser screen bottom-right, to play the first 27 seconds of this quite good tune (if you a running a Linux box, and Firefox Quantum Extended Support Release.  Not sure if this works on Macbook Moneymountain or Windows xx.yy.  We gave up on that shit.  :)  )

https://julie-and-the-phantoms.fandom.com/wiki/Now_or_Never

(Ok, yeah, "Sunset Curve" are actually a fictional band.  Right?  Get it?  "Fictional" - kinda like the Phillips Curve, that the Central Bankers are using.  Here is the *tube clip below - with shameless Netflix adcrap ...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6bFYaVXMiY

We can work cutting down the trees-of-ignorance all day, but we never manage to actually get out of the great Forest of Foolishness, do we.

"Sunset Curve" indeed.

[ July 18, 2022 ] - Scary Monsters - Our AI models keep pointing straight down.  It's is disturbing, since we are believing them to be someone wrong, since they are - well, they are computer models.  I feel like Number 6, in that old British TV show, "The Prisoner". .. somewhat discombobulated.

We watched the big runup in Bank shares on Friday, and this morning - only to see the DJIA fade away all it's gains, and the TSX start to follow.  Banks are fading.  TSX (Toronto Index) was up over 300 points, but is also fading now.   Bank shares were all up almost a couple of dollars, but are fading now.  "Arrgh.." said the pirate.

These up-runs in price, followed by retraces, are looking like 19th century "bear-market rallies", which can be quite vicious, and yet are counter-trend events.   I have fear, no question.  The AI stuff is better than we are - and it is a tad disturbing.    We have a real fear that guys like Peter Schiff might be right.   We own some gold-mine stock (not physical gold), but both have been poor investments.  Gold is down, and gold-miners are falling like autumn leaves - or leaves eaten by worms.  Not pretty.

https://schiffgold.com/peters-podcast/fed-chair-powell-perpetuates-keynesian-myths/

https://schiffgold.com/peters-podcast/peter-schiff-a-tale-of-two-dollars/

Schiff is famous for calling - most accurately - the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis (Bad Models, Bad Bonds & USA Housing Market Fraud crash).  I have a video of him making the call, and being harshly ridiculed by a witless TV commentator, and some Real-Estate "Analyst" with a name that ended in a vowel.   (Beware the guys whose family-names end in vowels.  I am not sure why this absurd indicator works - but it just does.  Hilarious.   Viz: "My Name is Sam Scamo, and have I got a Scheme for you!"  Our advice:  Run away.)

Schiff is running a "physical gold" promotion website.   He might be right.   Holding GLD ETF's or GOLD shares or whatever kind of metal-backed financial paper is on offer, might turn out to be sub-optimal (which is investment-market-newspeak for: "shite").

We are a bit "at sea" now, as our models are really giving a clear signal ("Market is headed down, things are REALLY BAD, and you should SELL").   We honestly feel this is overdone. 

We actually think it is a LOT overdone, and that all will be well - sort of.   But we are *VERY* aware that our "Buffetian Optimism" could be plain wrong.   So far recently, it truly has been.   For what it's worth, we can say, we should have just followed the damn models, and pulled the big trigger into full "risk-off" mode.  

But we have these "long-wave" models which are still quite positive, and suggest that this downturn is a typical "shit-house cleansing event", and that our historical analysis indicates that these sort of events must occur - regularly - in order to keep the markets functioning fairly, and with operation effectiveness.   Everything is too expensive.

Cars are too expensive.  Taxes are too high.  Houses in Canada are too expensive for working kids out of school, in their first jobs, to even begin to afford, without help from the "Bank of Mom & Dad".  In a country the size of Canada, (10 million sq. km) with a population (38 million), which basically same as  New York State, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania  (roughly 39 million people), this is simply insane.  We live on top of mountains of wealth.  We have it all - land, minerals, fertile farmland, and clean water from the ground.  We have forests and technology and everything we need to exploit it all.

But, We have a Federal Government which collects extreme levels of taxes, creates very rich politicians and "civil servants" in Ottawa, and who spend most of their time trying to think up new ways to increase (even more) the tax-burden on Canadians.  Result:  A high-tax, low productivity economic structure, characterized by restrictions, regulations, costs and controls that limit many of the benefits of any sort of risk-taking, entreprenural activity.   

We have always felt, that if we could just get the goddamn Federal politicos out of our collective hair (and wallets and bank accounts), we could and would look more like Switzerland, and less like Argentina,

So, we have reason to be very long-term positive on the Canadian economic performance.  Yet we never seem to see that possibility of enhanced performance, translated into a share-price take-off in this country - except for Banks and Telephone companies.     We should have the greatest pharmaceutical and aviation industries in the world.  Instead, we have scammy little failures, and Bombardier ( a moneypit of Federal funds which have been consumed, and will never be returned - rather like our experiments with our auto-industry.)   To be fair, the auto-industry has done quite well - once we started building Japanese cars here.  (We have Toyota and Honda factories in Ontario.   And the Toyota's and Honda's they build, are very good.)

We have (and really need!) a free-trade arrangement with the USA (which is a very good thing indeed), but the Americans can not be trusted to keep to a deal once they make it (as the Iranians and the Afghans have discovered, of course), and so life here remains curiously sub-optimal.

Anyone who builds or invents anything of significance or major economic substance, needs to head down south, to get the funds to make it fly (or work, or get made, and/or get sold).

We had this one big success story - Nortel - which got captured by criminals and pocket-filling fraudsters, liars, morons and cheaters.  The OSC was never actually able to put the bastards who destroyed Nortel in jail (the OSC folks honestly tried to, but were not able to prove criminial intent, only that the Nortel management were just fucking stupid beyond human belief - which is not a crime, sadly.  Maybe it should be?  <big sigh>)

So, we remain positive and hopeful for Canada (and Canadian share prices), yet it is a hard road to travel, at times.   The soil of this economic landscape is stony and far too often, is rather like cement.    Perhaps we should use dynamite?   Or maybe small fission-devices?   

Our great fear now, is that the world is about to enter a significant "de-globalization" phase, if not an outright open global war.    The crash of that Ukraine Antonov carrying Serbian mortar ammo for Bangladesh (does *anyone* believe that absurd storyline?) in Greece airspace, suggests that the Russian-Ukraine War has already shifted into Europe.   

We remain Warren-Buffet-style optimists, and yet our AI, with it's pessimistic forecasts, has done a better job at calling the path of recent future events, that we have.   And this is a tad scary.

[ July 15, 2022 ] - Dr. Havenstein Would Be Proud - Really.  Dr. Rudolf Havenstein was the Chairman of the German "Reichsbank", during the 1920-1923 German hyperinflation.   The German hyperinflation was probably the most interesting and significant economic experiment ever conducted.  It was not completely without success.  It created a continous economic boomtime, with curious prosperity for a bankrupt nation, with zero dot zero, zero percent unemployment.  Dr Havenstein steadfastly denied that his massive money-printing operation was the reason for the German hyperinflation.  Seriously.  He clung to his curiously wrong model, until he was replaced by Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who was brought in to repair the extreme damage Havenstein had wrought.

Wrong models are common in economics.  The most recent was the idiotic madness of the "risk models" of the 2007-2008 "Great Financial Crisis", where the curious belief was created, that risk could be sliced and diced, and managed, so that low-risk securities could be manufactured from a high-risk, hyper-correlated situation (a massive real-estate fraud, where $200,000 houses were up-valued to $800,000 houses, mortgages were granted, and folks with little or no income could obtain mortgages on the upshifted valuations [since they had excess equity].)   The idea was that a global downturn could not happen, since it would be a 5 or 6 standard-deviation event, which was believed unlikely.  The logic was absurd, as if all the people on a sinking ship, would not and/or could not, all run to the same side of the ship.   The models were wildly wrong, but very profitable for the folks who promoted them, until they were not.  It was another fascinating, "wrong model" situation, much like Havenstein's world-view of how inflation happened.

We have another curious situation.  Central Bankers believe that rate-rises are "deflationary", because of various reasons that do make sense.  Except they miss some of the very key phenomenon, that are painfully obvious to practical folks who are empircal analysts.  Rate rises are just cost increases, to an economy running on floating-rate debt.

Viz:  Recent info on BNN/Bloomberg.  We quote from the article:

"Based on the Canadian Real Estate Association's average home price of $711,000 in May, a  variable rate of 2.7 percent will result in monthly mortgage payments of roughly $2,845.  At 3.7 percent, which (Leah Zlatkin, a licensed mortgage broker) considers the best mortgage rate now, these payments will now total $3,168, an increase of $323 per month."

Now, there it is in black and white.  You cannot argue with this.  It is a simple financial fact.  Our banks we deal with, have all raised their "prime rates" (on which all revolving credit-lines and demand-loans are based) by 1%.  Their "Prime Rate" is now 4.70%.  Most credit lines for businesses and households are "Prime plus 2 %" or more.   This will be a serious cost-of-living increase for many economic entities.

So, what we have, is a "PRICE INCREASE" of a key, critical price, that EVERYONE WHO HAS ANY FLOATING RATE DEBT MUST PAY. 

One has to ask:  How exactly, does RAISING PRICES TO EVERYONE WITH DEBT cause the inflation in our economy to be REDUCED?

Answer: It does not.   Raising interest-rates does NOT reduce inflation pressure.  It actually ADDS to inflation pressure.  (Some called this the:  "backward bending IS-LM Supply-curve model".)  Everyone with floating-rate debt, has INCREASED COSTS which will most likely be passed forward as INCREASED WAGE DEMANDS, and INCREASED PRODUCT PRICES.

We saw this happen in the 1970's.   A lot.  Raising Bank of Canada bank-rates did *not* damp down inflation.   The opposite appeared to happen.  The banker-economists had the wrong model.

We learned, that if you want to stop inflation with interest-rate increases, you have to raise rates high enough to destroy households and destroy businesses.  Volker did this, with his 20% rates.  Laws against "usury" had to be re-written, as demand loan-rates often went above 25%, a statutory limit that was on the books of many States and Provinces.

And this is more than just "painful".  It is explicitly destructive.   This is the only way it works.  You have to raise rates high enough to destroy demand.  You *must* create a recession, or the rate-rise efforts are *not* deflationary, they are - maybe -  *inflationary*.   Understand?  It depends on the economic structure, currently in place.

And this is the rub.   By just raising rates a bit, you only add fuel to the fire of inflation, since you are just raising the price of input-money.   And if the inflation is "cost-push", and not "demand-pull", then increased rates may REALLY ADD to inflation pressure, and *seriously over-stimulate* an inflationary psychological reactive response, on the part of both businesses and household-consumers.   We believe this is what is happening in Argentina, right now.  As usual, they are in real trouble, due to their curiously bad government policy choices.   (Yet another textbook case, of how not to run an economy...)  

FFS.  Does no one ever learn anything from history?   :(

[ July 14, 2022 ] - My "Inner Trader" says: "Nuke'em Till They Glow" - and the arrogant bastard also suggested - pretty clearly - that I dump *all* the bank stocks, once the AI model started pointing downwards.   Well, we did not, since the bank valuations and their Basel capital ratios all look damn fine.  They should be able to skate thru the mini-depression that is coming.  It will be a not-so-mild recession, and it probably will vapourize a lot of businesses.  But "Inner Trader" was correct (as usually he is.  Such a curiously productive inner dialogue...)

This planet has too much debt, that will *never* be repaid.  We can say there will be defaults, with the same certainty that we can say the sun will rise tomorrow. 

The Cdn banks seem to be pretty well provisioned for the harsh downturn that is being programmed into our world.  So do the US ones.  But their share prices are being reset, and this sucks (really, like a low-pressure weather system sucks.  Remember, the wind does not "blow", it actually "sucks".  Such is reality.)   Europe, of course, will be fucked, like it usually is.  This is sad. 

("Inner Trader" says;  "Poor Europeans.  They did that big Euro currency union, and everyone thought they were all gonna get DMs in their wallets...  Instead, they got Lira!"  [The Euro slipped *below* parity with the US dollar today.  Oh my.  I remember when 1 Euro was $1.50 US.  Not any more...]  And it will get worse, we are told.  This winter, many Germans are expected to be heating their houses with wood...  [ Like they did in the 1500's.]   Note: Nothing wrong with heating with wood - except you need to own several acres of forest, in order to make it a sustainable process.  And you need more than just a chainsaw - you need to have a diesel tractor - and it is difficult to make your own diesel fuel.  But in Canada, there is more oil in the Alberta oil-sands, than in Saudi Arabia.  It's just a tad expensive to extract it.   But it's there, so we will be ok.   But it will be a hard row to hoe, for the Euro-folk. )

I remember Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.  Lightweights.  And the Iran "Hostage Crisis", and the election of Ron Reagan.   That got things fixed.   Reagan was a damn fine fellow, and a wise and effective statesman.   He pissed-off the Democrats so much, because he spoke truth. 

The Democrats seem to always want to deal in lies and fraud.  As if a woman, has the "right" to murder her unborn baby.  What a fucking load of nonsense.  Where the fuck does it say that, in the US Constitution?  We don't care either way about abortion.  Do it or not.  Your choice.  But don't bullshit the world, and say that child-killing is a fucking "human right".  The fucking Democrats look like brain-dead, immoral fools for behaving the way they are now and saying stupid shit like this.  

They should just drop this "females-have-the-right-to-kill-their-baby" issue, and let each State decide what it wants to do about abortions and child-murder.  The ancients used to dump deformed children out on hillsides, out in the country.  Hence the famous story of "Oeidipus the King", who murdered his father, fucked his mother, and then put out his own eyes, when he learned of his awful, sinful crimes.  

The ancient-world stories will be alive, long after all the names of all the shit-for-brains politicians of this current time, are lost to the memory of history.  

Because those ancient stories, they deal with the harsh-truths.

The Ron Reagan years were a good time.  The stupid Berlin Wall was smashed to bits, and the evil, rotting filth of Communism was shown to be the economic garbage that every sane person knew it was.  Karl Marx could not shit thru his asshole, without terrible pain.  He had bad hemorrhoids.  So he sat on his sore backside down in British Museum, and he shit thru the nib of his pen.  Read "Das Kapital" and learn the truth of this assertion.  It is fiction - the made-up work of an angry, bitter shit-artist.

We got lucky in the 1980's, and ditched the toxic-garbage political stupidity of the 1970's, and got things working right.  And we did it WITHOUT warfare.   And the result was a runaway economic boomtime, unlike any that had ever been seen in all of human history.   Ron called the cruel communist fraudsters running Russia for what they truly were: "an evil empire".  And he was spot-on correct. 

And now, the Putinists - corrupt gangster scum of the first order - like the dirt-bags that licked Stalin's shit, are now back to pure-evil empire building, by murdering the innocents of Ukraine.  It is evil, like Hitler's death camps were evil.   It must be fixed.  And it will be, one way or another. 

And we will know no economic peace and security, until we deal harshly with the warmongering mother-killers currently running this assault project.  They must be erased and ended, at all costs. 

It's so weird - like we have crawled up the greasy pole of progress - and are now tired, and are slipping back down, all the way back down to the foolish hellstorm politics of militarism that drove World War Two.    Putin's "Big Lie", that there are "Nazis" in Ukraine, taps into this sad reality.  There are no Nazis in Ukraine, but there are Nationalists - just like there are in every Nation.  If we let them all be killed, then the Nations of Europe will be next, as it will embolden the evil forces that now control Russia.

It's madness.  And tragedy.  But common as hellfire, like the great sweeping broom of history.

[ July 13, 2022 ] - Better Late Than Never - (Tiff launches a big "one"... )   Bank of Canada boosts short-term bank rate up 100 basis points - ie. a full one percent.  Big move, mkt expected 75 bp (3/4 of a percent).  This was probably his only sane option, given the sense that has developed that inflation is in runaway mode.  We don't believe it is, but we have to admit, we have been wrong to hold our bank stocks.  Market (and our models) said to: "dump and run", but we elected to hold, since we like the big dividends (and we have this curious desire to eat, and actually pay our bills...).

Mr. Macklem basically had no choice, given that the Central Bank here has a clear mandate to protect the currency, and not let stupid fiscal-action put us into a downward spiral of currency valuation collapse matched with an upward spiral of material, commodity and house-cost price inflation.  Such double-helix linked "death spirals" are similar to the flat-spin that a high-performance aircraft can enter, if the flight envelope is punctured by extreme control inputs from an unwise pilot.    You poke thru the curve, and you spin down to crash & burn, which is a worst-case outcome to be avoided, of course.  

It's a more lagged process in the world of economics, and the burning of the economy can take place in the silent nightmare-space of each household's economic picture.  It's like Tolstoy said about how each happy family is similar, but each unhappy family is different in the myriad ways in which it's unhappiness can be made manifest.   

Bad economics is painful and destructive to each household and each person, but often in unique and curiously different ways.   Good economics requires stability, which then allows businesses and households to have the ability to create and execute upon medium and long-range plans, which are generally the difference between having a happy, prosperous outcome, and a f*cking sh/tshow of misery, pain, poverty and self-destruction.  (Very Russian, yes?) 

Similar to another aphorism we like:   "Once you've tasted Black (ink), it's hard to go back!"

There is great joy in being cash-flow positive, and being resilient enough to withstand idiotic market action (which happens with remarkable regularity lately).

We expect the bank-stock valuations to recover, because the banks are going to just coin the cash, within this new, rising-rate environment.  We expect a flat yield curve (with periods of inversion, no doubt), since the long-term forecast is for mild rates, and mild recession.  The bond market probably has this figured correctly, and with short-rates up to sane levels, each bank which is able to maintain the quality of it's credit profile, should do just fine.   And this is likely. 

Folks in Canada don't default on their mortgages typically.   It is mostly governments here that go "under water" and "into the hole".  

We have decided to name our big government deficit the "trudeau" - which means "water hole" in French.  If you are 'under water' and 'in-the-hole', then you have a "trudeau".  Canada has always had problems with having "trudeau's".   They seem to be part of the general problem of Canada.   Our State spends more than in takes in, despite the high-level of taxes here (ie. 13% sales tax on basically *all* economic transactions) - the HST (which foreign folks tend to call the "Holy Shit Tax"), since when they buy something, and find that 13 percent vigorish attached to the final cost, that is generally the reaction: "WTF?  13 percent tax!  Holy Shit!".

And now, into this high-tax environment, we will now fight inflation, by raising the price of money.  And this is hilarious, since we did this, back in the 1970's, and it basically only worked, once we raised rates enough (the market actually did this), up to around 20% level, and provoked a business-destroying mini-depression.  I recall this well, as I was starting out on my own, and I recall sitting in a big restaurant at the top of a Toronto skyscraper in the very early 1980's, eating an expensive lunch by myself, and noticing that there was only one other table in the room that had guests.  The whole place was empty, except for all these waiters in suits, a table of 3 worried looking business men, and me, on the other side of the room, eating my lobster-bisque soup, and a warm bread-bun with butter, sipping a coffee and reading my newspaper. 

I looked about 14, and decided I enjoyed being an independent consultant, since I seemed to be able to operate in a counter-cyclic manner.  I was busy and generating serious billable hours, while others were being let go, and businesses were failing left and right.  I was working for an oil company, on a computerization project.  It was a strange time of very big change. I had quit a regular job, and started my own small consulting practice.  The economy was in free-fall.

A year later, I was building a computer database for an investment firm, automating and data-capturing these big legal-sized "greensheets" that detailed syndication characteristics of stock flotations.  It was a ton-o-fun, actually.  I learned new stuff, every day.   A bit later I remember I bought my first shares - a board lot of a new issue, that was "British Telecom".  I remember reading the BT prospectus, and I realized: "What? These crazy Brit guys are actually *selling* their national phone company!  If it gets run like a sane, normal company, instead of a bloated government-owned cost-plus regulated monopoly, then this thing will just piss money!"   They let you buy board lots (100 shares) on an installment-plan.  I took all the cash I had, and bought 100 shares for 700 dollars.  On the first day of trading, it doubled in price to $14 a share.   Like and idiot, I sold it (it went to $40 later on), but I was hooked.  "Good game." I recall thinking...

It's really been a funny ride.   I was always busy when the world was falling to bits, since no one calls in a consultant or a fixer, unless they have sailed their ship onto the rocks, or a storm is hammering them to pieces, and the board-boys realize they need to make some serious changes, before they are all destroyed by events beyond their control.   Good technology allowed a lot of bad business decisions to be fixable.  I would execute by deploying good technology, quickly and at managable costs.   Fun times, but busy.

So, I am looking forward to the coming deluge, since all my life, I seem to have done best, during  the worst of times (and not so great, during the best of times).   I've never been comfortable during boom-times, and tend to miss the blowout runups.   But when it is crashing down, then that seems to be par for the course I have always played on.   Curious. 

We are looking at another meltdown in bank-shares today.   And given the financial strength of the banks, this seems overdone.  But bank stocks trade like infinite-duration bonds - very, very sensitive to interest rate regime-change.   But the bond-market is notorious for really, really stupid pricing - pricing so wrong, that it can be silly.  Long before there was crypto-coin and NFT's and other stupid sh/t like that, there were deep-deep discount bonds of companies and countries that were expected to die.  

Often, they did not die.  I knew a guy who scooped up deep discount stuff, and made crazy potfulls of money.  You would buy the crap for 10 or 20 cents on the dollar, and if your analysis is right, and the entity does not die, you end up with bonds which get redeemed at par, and you make 5 or 10 times your money.  Or, you loose your whole investment. 

Talk about Monte-Carlo methods, eh?  :)

We think we are entering a similar regime now.   There will be failures and breakdowns, and ugly times.   And we are a tad offside, like most.  Bank shares in USA are down typically 25%.  That is a hard downshift.  It might break the gearbox, but we don't think so.  Not this time.

But there will be changes.  There will be BIG changes everywhere, and rather soon, we suspect.  The changes will build and feed upon themselves.   Good property will become even more valuable, as the not-so-good stuff is discounted down.   Governments will change.  Old faces will be gone, and new, younger ones will appear, and they will act with both strength and wisdom.   Or they will disappear also.   We are moving from fat and stupid, to lean and firm.  We have to.

The USA is in a time of crisis now, but it does not have to be that way.  We suspect there will be a mass-movement away from woke-folk idiocy, and psycho-sexual insanity that seems to be infecting the USA's children.  The old players will be pushed from the stage, and newer, younger ones will take their place.  The puke-points will all be hit, and regime-change will happen - everywhere - even in (especially in) China and Russia.  

Time is on our side.  But we all need to stay healthy.

And the world will eat more sushi.   Really.  If you are TOO FAT, you should EAT LESS.  Some things really are that simple.  If your STOCKS HAVE GONE DOWN, you must alter your investment strategy, and ensure you BUY STOCKS THAT ARE GOING UP.   (And note the long-term picture of the Cdn Bank stocks.  They are volatile has the dickens, but they trend up.  No single entity can own more than 10% of a Cdn Bank.  They are - by law - widely held, and this and the OSFI, keeps them solid and honest.  They paid their dividends, even during the 1930's.

Hope this helps.  :)

[ July 12, 2022 ] - Yield Curve Inverts Hard - Ok, so the 2-year US Treasury Note is yielding 3.04% this morning, and the 10-year US Treasury Note is yielding 2.91%, and this despite an auction for a bunch of 10-year US Government paper taking place today (the increased supply, usually pushes down the price a bit, and with bonds, as price moves down, yield moves up.  Verstehe?)  So, to see short-duration yields above the yields on longer-term paper, tends to be a no-bullsh/t indicator for *Recession* or basic, old-fashioned economic slowdown.  Now, driving around Ontario, one can see that the place is booming - but I was hitting tourist towns on warm, sunny July days.   And Canada is an edge-condition environment.  The market-moving action is always south of the border - except for oil and other energy commodities - which themselves are looking weak.  August-contract WTI oil is down $7.77/bbl, at last check, putting it in the $96 and change range.  Given that it was 102 and a bit, yesterday, and earlier this AM, that is a pretty hefty downtick.

So, a fairly serious economic storm is incoming, we fear.   With European energy supply looking at risk, and Putin's Terrorist Campaign in Ukraine running hard, with the blood of the innocent literally running in city streets, the investment climate is fraught with new, open-ended risks.   Russia will have to be declared a "State Sponsor of Terrorism", and probably we are already at war with them - except our various political poltroons just don't realize it yet.  

Our bank stocks have been slammed, and we believe are crazy good value right now, since we expect that the ferocious downturn that is being programmed-in, will require a hard pause on the rate-rise plans - which will probably come around Sept/Oct timeframe.   These Central-Bank boys have slammed their foot on the brake - but the hellstorm that is now appearing in the rear-view mirror - and is approaching at ramming speed - will almost certainly require a re-think in strategy, once it starts hitting the labour markets.

So many folks forget that Central Bankers cannot *set* medium and longer-term interest rates.   Those rates (yields) are set by market action, and the market is predicting that interest rates will be staying low, for a long time.

We actually see something that looks more like the 1930's developing, rather than the 1920's or the 1960's.   Most of what's on offer now, is expensive and dishonest - from crypto-currency, to "Climate-Change" motivated ESG-style investing, SPAC's and the Grand Internet of Awful Advertising.  The new computer technology used to be disruptive and beneficial, driving down costs and increasing opportunity for many.   Now, it is more likely to be used to monitor citizen actions, track individual and group behaviour, manipulate public opinion, sway elections, cheat people out of their money, and execute classical "blackmail" actions which require ransoms to be paid.  

The internet has turned to shit.  

The time you spend in front of a screen, is pure, old-fashioned, nose-to-the-grindstone annoying *work*.   People are beginning to recognize this, more and more.  It is also risk-laden.

We have noticed that we are *not* getting significant real, physical improvements anywhere now.  We are not even close to any kind of operational fusion power, and solar and wind-power energy is laughable, as it is a tiny and expensive fraction of the energy needs a modern nation has.

At the very least, we should be building *fleets* of new nuclear fission reactors, if we are hoping to actually convert away from the petroleum-driven global economy.   But the only place this is happening, is in China.   So, much of the economic-future planning efforts, appear to be bogus and off-track.  We don't have hoverboards or any kind of anti-gravity devices, and we don't even have flying taxi's (despite some noble attempts).    All we have built are cheap computers, and VR nonsense that is only economically successful if it offers pornography.  Pretty sad, really.

This atrophication of effective scientific research, and the related engineering-science, means we cannot move forward globally, without we revert to the old models - instead of everybody gets better off (ie. the "Green Revolution" in crop-yields being a good example), we can expect to see harsh competition for resources - some will be better off, and others will become poorer - and/or just be killed off.  This is grim.   There is a grim and violent future ahead of us now, and we are concerned we will not get bailed out by technological fixes this time.    We have exploited all the existing and possible improvements.  

Quantum computing might give us better encryption security - but that's about it.   Our space-travel technology is back to where it was in the 1960's, and we only seem to be able to explore, by using one-way travelling robots, which can send us pictures.   There is little gain from that sort of exploration.

We suspect Nature herself, is programming us for a major conflict.  It may have already started, and will eventually involve all of us.   It's probably likely to be a "Malthus Event", which will re-balance the population-growth and technologically-sustainable-population curves.  This may be a very grim time, for a very great many.  Big diebacks will have to take place, at some point.

Rather than limit, restrict and dial-back human effort and creative activity to support "Climate Initiatives", we should perhaps seek to develop process and procedures to encourage and facilitate significant technological progress.   We now actually *need* technological jumps, which can allow us to survive comfortably (and with prosperity), in lethal, hostile environments.  Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars should probably become a global priority - because it would drive real technological progress.  

We seriously are going to really *need* to have some major leaps in technological capability, and rather soon, regardless of what the Earth's climate does.  "Climate Change" is noise.

Our best scientists and thinkers and builders need to move away from the virtual wasteland of the internet., and the silly, limit-action efforts to restrict human activity that is the ESG model.

Want to save the World?  And how to do it?

The answer is probably:  More lab-time, and less screen-time.

[ July 10, 2022 ] - Russian Spy-Guys Try to Kill the World? - I go away for a few days, up north, and a tsunami of sh/t washes over us all.  It's quite awful in a curious way - the murder of Shinzo Abe, by a "lone gunman" who actually had to make his own gun (in silly, unarmed Japan, where security is offline, it appears) was truly awful.   We liked Abe, and were very impressed he suggested Japan allow US nuclear weapons to be located on Japan territory.  That was a very good idea - and PM Kishada of course said no.  So, Japan will be (eventually) overrun by China - or be reduced to economic poverty.   You are either strong, or you are weak, and get crushed and/or killed.   Abe's murder was a tragedy on par with what happened to Jack Kennedy.  (Were both orchestrated by Russian agents?   Hard to believe otherwise...  Abe's killer appears to be a manipulated stooge, similar to Lee Oswald. )

And the one good European leader, Boris Johnson, gets back-stabbed by his own Finance Minister, Rishi Sunak.  Pathetic.   Brit Tories couldn't run a f&cking lemonade stand, without trying to fight over who was the boss.   It's a sad sight to see.   Mr. Sunak appears to have turned hard against his boss, and it all shows why loyalty is not just important - it is everything.

The Tories have probably shot themselves - not in the foot - but in the gut.  As a political party, they will now endure an ugly, tragic and slow political death, that will hand the UK to Stammer-guy of the Left.  What a foul, nasty and tragically unhelpful sh/tshow of foolishness.,.  Just so unnecessary.

And while I was away, the old Rogers/Fido cell-phone/internet service crashed and burned - supposedly due to a mass software update on their routers.  So we have to believe the Rogers company is staffed by a bunch of foolish fumbling folks, who cannot actually execute a software upgrade successfully?  Probably not.  Was it was an attack?   The *entire national net* was taken offline & was shut down.  My phone would show either "No Service", or would show 4 bars of signal, but when I tried to make a call, the phone would try for a minute, and then report "Call Ended" without even making a ring at the other end. 

Eventually, in the evening, I was able to call my nephew (who had the same area code as me), but I still could not call the farm - land-line or cell-phone.   I had him contact the farm, which he did.  He had no internet, but his Bell service worked.   But he could not call me - but I could call him, and he reported all was well at the ranch.   Serious sh/t, since none of the debit-card terminals or ATMs were working in the nearby town.   We suspect the Rogers-Shaw merger is dead like Mr. Abe, and the UK Tories.

Is Putin and his evil-nasty FSB (the KGB's new name) behind all this awful action?  Unclear.  But something is funny, since the Japan cellphone service company, KDDI, was also hit by a similar outage, only a little more than a week ago.   This seems most curious.    If Rogers was hacked, they have decided to lie, and tell the world, they were not.  Everyone lies now.   It's sad.

After only taking 4 days off, to work on a building project at the "Northern Office", I have returned to a much changed world.  (Abe was probably on track, to resume his role as the LDP leader and Japan Prime Minister, as Kishida is doing such a vacant and confused job.)  Johnson of the UK was the strongest and most sensible of those supporting Ukraine, and he was also the smart fellow who said UK needed to increase the size of it's nuclear weapons arsenal.  That was a wise and good decision. But it made him a real threat, so he had to go.   This is how 21st century warfare was predicted to be, by the way.

Non-nuclear nations are weak and irrelevant players on the world stage.  Note that both Canada and Japan - two weak nations with very limited military abilities - were the two nations hit with the cell-phone/internet-provider outages - less than two weeks apart.  Both nations hide under the skirts of the Big Mama USA, for our nuclear-attack response - though of course, both nations have the ability to put devices together, if they chose to do so.

Perhaps Russian agents are not behind this current series of tragic, destructive events.  But it just smells funny. 

The UK Tories might have simply self-destructed, as Tories are often seen to do (they seem to really have trouble with the concept of party loyalty.)  One learns in any organization, that loyalty to the organization is the highest, most critical requirement, to ensure continued operational success of the entity.   Without loyalty, a group of people cannot work together at all. and begin to fight among themselves.   People are mostly insane, selfish and rather stupid.   They prefer fantasy to reality, and are always willing to be cruel and unwise.  History teaches us this over and over again.

But my "Inner Trader" laughs, and says simply:  "Remember how the First World War, was begun by some Russian-backed Serbian terrorist from the Black Hand, murdering the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife?   This killing of Mr. Abe, the best leader the Japanese have had in 40 years, combined with the crafted-removal of UK's Boris Johnson based on media-puffed fake "scandals" ( and his dis-loyal brown-shirt brown-boys), combined with two successful take-downs of weak-nation internet/cellphone networks, sure makes for an interesting cocktail.  We are supposed to drink this all down, and believe it was just coincidence?  When you look at this hot-mess drink, and add in the latest China Covid lockdowns, it just does not smell very nice, or appear to be something that a sane person could swallow..."

Doing searches on "Sunak", I found this interesting summary on Buzzfeed, from 2020, where Mr. Sunak is described as being "fiercely loyal" to Boris Johnson.  Oh really?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/boris-johnson-cabinet-reshuffle?bfsource=relatedmanual

Absolutely hilarious.  Why do I hear that old "Sex Pistols" song in my head... "God Save the Queen" playing quietly ?    "No future for you.  England's dreaming."  

Humor Under Attack?: Apparently, humor has been outlawed by the "Woke Folk" of the USA, because people truly are becoming insane.  Really nasty folks are "armouring themselves with false virtue", and going on the most curious assault-hunts, against - get this - those who write satire.  This is, in itself, pretty goddamned funny.   That black woman who Biden put on the Supreme Court of the USA, could not even define what a "woman" was, when asked.  She said:  "I am not a biologist..."   WTF?   So the "Babylon Bee" made fun of this whole "Woke Folk cannot decide what a woman is."  This got them "fact checked" by some Woke Folk weirdo site.  And it also got a retired General suspended from his job, when he made a Twitter comment (as a private citizen) to some kill-your-baby feminist diatribe that Jill Biden published on Twitter.   The Conservatives are reporting that rationality itself is under assault.

Here is how weird it is getting...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/rationality-itself-is-under-attack-ceo-of-the-babylon-bee_4579189.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

More Ugly Nasty Sh/te: - For years, we have quietly warned clients the internet is slowly turning toxic, risk-laden, noxious and nasty, and localization is critical.  Using any sort of "cloud" resource will put you at real risk.  And everyone with any sanity, will use filters, cookie-blockers, script-blockers, ad-blockers and limited-functionality software, more and more as time drives on. 

Lately, we discovered another piece of crap - we keep seeing hits to "canadian.permutive.com", when we access various websites.  This is another (newer) tracking tool, designed to follow your browsing activity.  The idea is that even if you block cookies and other user-action tracking tools, there are still ways that your actions can be closely monitored and tracked in realtime.  

Here is an information-lite story about these folks:

https://www.yahoo.com/now/consumers-opt-marketing-permutive-brings-132600008.html

We do a lot of our research "browsing" with javascript disabled (it simply cannot be trusted - the entire concept is just an unwise, high-risk idea), and we regularly clear cache, cookies, history, etc.  But that means little, because everything you do, can still be tracked by agencies like Permutive.

The advert-supported internet is turning everything online to slime and wicked high-risk sludge.  Too bad.   It was fun while it lasted, but we think Musk is very wise to end his plans to buy Twitter.  Twitter is a censored echo-chamber of hard-core Leftists and neo-National-Socialist "Woke Folk", most of whom cannot think for themselves (maybe because they are "bots"?).   Or even if they are not, they act like Lefty-bots.  Musk is wise to walk away (fast) from everything that is Twitter.  It cannot be fixed or reformed.  It just is what it is - a mostly a toxic trash talk site for self-promoters.  Ugh.  :(

[ July 6, 2022 ] - Memo to the Pilot:  Beware the Cumulo-Granite - When flying thru a storm, caution is advised.  Boris Johnson is being torpedoed by his own people, and Europe runs the risk of losing another good leader.   It almost appears that a co-ordinated teacup-storm is being system-generated and carefully deployed.  The Brits are too willing to top their best people.   It's sad.  Resigning is a bit silly.   Reminds me of dogs fighting - all this noisy, nasty politics over not very much at all.   Same nonsense they do in Japan.  

Scandals are mostly bullshit, and no one really cares at all - it's mostly theatre.    We need to recognize where the threat is coming from - and it is coming from the Left, and the wagon-load of lies and nonsense it uses for it's political trade-goods. 

Here is an interesting and well-written piece on the idea of the "Great Reset" (not the "Great Replacement"...  )   Note that anything labelled "Great" usually is not so great.  Like the "Smart Car" was really kind of a stupid product, and a "Smart Phone" has become a device that is being used to make everyone become rather stupid.  And how a diet of "Happy Meals" makes you feel sad, when you look in the mirror, and see the huge bloated blob of lard that your body has become.  Language can be manipulation and obfuscation - instead of education and elucidation.   :D

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-great-regression/

We don't mind a bit of a global approach to things.   We just want a world where the bad folks don't always win the day, steal the wealth, and control the State.   And it honestly appears to us, that the Americans crafted the best political model and constitutional government structure, to get close to something that works right.

Try to fly right, America.  And Good luck, England.    Best Wishes to all.   And watch out for those economic storm clouds of cumulo-granite.  The ride is getting bumpy.

[ July 5, 2022 ] - Let's Awake The Truth - This feels a lot like 1931.  We are making a "transition" for sure.  We are making a transition from a Good World to a Bad World.   It's really that simple.  Bear Markets are not big *crash* events like October 1929 or March of 2020.  They are slow killers, like bleeding to death.  You fall on average an eighth or a quarter or a half, each day, day in, day out, week in, and week out.  The selling is forced selling, as de-leveraging happens.   This feels like what is happening.    It's nasty.

Fortunately, we have non-leveraged real-estate holdings.  We had planned to develop one of them, but have (again) pulled the plug on the project work we had tee-ed up for this summer.   Such is life.   (Could be worse.  Could be raining.   Could be raining Russian missiles... )

Let's cut to the harsh truth, shall we?

A Completely nutjob-goofball set of scenarios are playing out - and we watch as all our "leaders" continue being stupid and making bad decisions.  It's tragic-comic.   Except for our local Provincial Premier, who has done a very good thing, by cutting the gasoline tax, and by refunding the license-fees for car license-plates.  This has made a positive difference for us.   But the arrogant buffoons in Ottawa are consistantly hostile to our interests, and we find that a curious thing.

The Cdn-dollar is down over a full cent, and there is real risk that a co-ordinated and brutal economic downturn is now being programmed in, by the idiocy of the "Leaders of the World". They have no clue what they are doing.  And this truth is becoming evident.

One solution, of course, is to convert to a War Economy, and pepper Russian forces in Ukraine with all the bombs and weapons we have, blast the bejeezus out of all the Russian ports, and have a meeting at the UN, where the Russian folks are told to remove their forces from Ukraine, or we start bombing all Russian cities.   This dribble-war, where we sit with our arses on our hands, and let Murder-Terrorists destroy whole cities, and maim and kill tens of thousand of innocent people,  is just fucking insane.   It is wrong.   It's like dead-jews-in-gas-ovens kind of wrong.  Bill Ackman is right.  World War Three has started, but the bozo-brigade poltroons, do not yet realize it. 

Russia wants a war with NATO, and we should bloody well give them one.  Issue war bonds, and raise up a few $trillion New Dollars, and convert our Western World economies to War Production, and roll across the Russian landscape like we should have done, long years ago, when Gangster-boy Stalin blockaded Berlin.   (General Patton was wise and correct about the need to fix the Russian problem, right at the end of WWII.)

Instead, we will have this idiotic war of attrition, where everyone gets poor and angry and we fight with each other instead, which is just so stupid.   We can take all the kids who like to play with AR-15's and shoot from rooftops, and put them in goddamn uniform, and point them toward fucking Moscow, and say: "Get to work."

What the fuck good is NATO if it is just a bunch of fuckwits arguing with goddamn Turks!  Fucking Turkeys!  We are arguing with Turkeys, while cities are burning and Russian missiles are being launched against Europeans - it is simply madness.   

If you have a goddamn problem, you fund-up, buy what you need, get your logistics and supply lines gen'ed up, and then you get the fuck busy.  We used to *really* know how to do this.

We simply cannot understand the idiotic and pointless and profoundly stupid behaviour of the global fuckwit brigade of second-rate, ass-covering dumbshit political poltroons that we seem to be burdened with in our current Western World.   They are "Safety Nazis" in a very dangerous and ugly world, and they are not wanted on this voyage.   They must be made to leave the building, before their talk-shop chatter costs us our freedom and our lives.

We need to create and implement an entire Allied Western World "Force de Frappe" (to use the wise French term), and then get the fuck to work on this goddamn problem, and stop fucking around with shit-stained, arse-licking politics.   (Pardon my fucking French...)

Fucking hell, if we are all destined to die poor and starving, then we should at least find that this new reality enables us to mobilize effectively, and get our people together, and take some solid, direct *action* against the forces of cruelty, madness, and stupidity, that seem determined to degrade and impoverish our Free World.

For fuck sakes, if Germany needs to have gas from Russia, then they can just use the "Putin Doctrine", and GO FUCKING TAKE IT!   Fund-up your military, and tell NATO "Hold my beer...", and go fucking TAKE Belarus and any part of Russia proper that you feel you need to ensure energy security.   This is what Putin is doing in Ukraine, so he cannot complain.  Ask Poland to help you.  Hell, ask everyone to help you.   They probably will.   This time, we do it fucking right, and solve the goddamn problem.

War was supposed to have been made *illegal* back in 1928, and disputes were supposed to be dealt with at the famous Swiss-based "League of Nations".  Most nations of the world, signed on to the "Kellogg-Briand Pact".   It was a noble idea, and it was agreed-to by all major nations, and signed on August 27, 1928, in Paris France.  It was supposed to make war between nations, illegal.  But it had no effective enforcement ability.    And we can see that that it did not work too well at all, did it?   It was just another in a long line of talk-shop frauds.  The "United Nations" in New York continues this tradition, with that big talk-shop now used as a cover for Russian "Special Military Actions"  (SMAs) that destroy cities full of folks who thought they were new European citizens.   This is political fraud, an obscene abuse of the highest order.

Well, we better get the fuck used to this new current reality, and begin to GET BUSY.   Plowshares into swords, and yellowcake into Davy-Crocket rockets.   We should begin to work on this now, and not wait until Russian missiles are incoming on our homelands.

[ July 4, 2022 ] - Help Me Find My Car Keys, and We Can Drive Out - Do most folks realize just how silly it is getting?  We are seeing a cascade of curious choices, by folks who run things.  The results are becoming not too difficult to predict.  The inflation is already here, and hammering along at warp speed, and a cascade collapse is becoming possible.   The French are dealing with this by proposing a new *law*, that will increase the salaries of civil servants, raise welfare payments, and boost pension payouts.  Passing **new spending** laws, that further damage Government finances - Wow! - That really ought to help limit inflation, eh?  (If one put all the current foolishness into a novel, people would dismiss it as being just too absurd and far-fetched, to read.)

https://www.reuters.com/business/how-macrons-inflation-relief-law-tests-frances-new-political-order-2022-07-04/

We actually don't think North American real-estate prices will collapse this time.  We just expect interest rates to rise to the 7% to 10% level, and prices to continue to climb.  We expect the banks to do well, as they will be able to harvest serious inflationary gains, as long as credit-conditions are not blown up - and we suspect they won't be, since it will be less bad for the "Governments" of the World to keep the free-money flowing, rather than have a collapse in employment, rising social conflict, mass bankruptcies, and large tax increases to support wildly expanded government debt service costs.  

We are all hooked now on the heroin of fiat money.   And it is just too difficult to convert your gold holdings into cash.  (Unless someone makes a smooth-working gold-coin crypto currency maybe...) 

Others seem to agree.   The future looks crazy.   And the "crazy" seems to be accelerating.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/germany-risks-a-cascade-of-utility-failures-economy-chief-says-1.1786885

And it is not just Europe who will find it gets weird.  USA is running debt-to-GDP ratios, at the same level it did (125%), back in the midst of World War Two.  

https://goldswitzerland.com/this-implosion-will-be-fast-hold-onto-your-seats/

We are a tad skeptical about gold.  But the above note is interesting, since we also see the possiblility of a very fast change taking place, as all the parameters seems to be lining up for a "phase-jump" to a new, chaotic orbital location of economic variables, which better reflect the significant new levels of scarcity of goods that folks want and need (like food, fuel and ammo).  These transitions are typically not smooth.  They are non-linear.  

Like a sign I saw on the back of big Jeep 4x4 the other day:  "Get In.  Sit Down.  Shut Up.  Hold On."   For fun, I checked on the price of *used* Tesla cars.  There were a few listed on a popular buy-sell site.  The least expensive was $98,000 for a 2018 model.  Really.   If you are rich, you will be ok.  If you are not, you might not be.  But that's not a new phenomenon.   What is going to be surprising here, is the speed of the transition, we suspect.

Enjoy the ride.

[ July 2, 2022 ] - President Joe & The Saviour Machine -
Funny, but in truth, I got all the data on the future, long long ago.   The AI technology will kill us all, Mr. Bowie indicated, just as Mr. Musk has warned, and President Joe is busy engineering...?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-AMec7yr7c

Ok, maybe not.  Maybe the "Saviour Machine" is supposed to be NATO?  Or that big AI that IBM has?  ("Deep Blue Goo?)  Maybe not that either. 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2327107-deepminds-ai-develops-popular-policy-for-distributing-public-money/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=news

Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" keeps bubbling in my subthoughts.  We are in a very strange global horror-show now, where Putin is playing the part of Hitler, and Scholz of Germany, the part of Chamberlain.   The USA is trying to run a limited war, by "phoning it in", and sending some weapons, but not offering any direct help.  Canada has sent some bullets and shells and (I understand), 3 (yes, *three* - not three divisions, not 3 hundred, just 3) M777 cannons.   (Maybe would could do a bit more?  Eh?)  

"Fucking hell!" says my deeply cynical "Inner Trader".  "America spent *billions* blasting the shit out of Vietnamese jungles and North Vietnamese cities, billions on the unnecessary war in Iraq, and tens of billions in Afghanistan, but they cannot even spare one fucking aircraft carrier to park in the fucking Black Sea, to deter the mass murder of cities full of European White People?"  

And, oh - there he goes again, what a bad fellow!  But my cynical "Inner Trader" has let slip a truth, yet again.  The Russian Terror War by Russia, offends us on a deep and basic level,  because it is a bunch of people like us - standard average White folks - caucasians - who are being slaughtered by low-IQ Slavic monsters whose decendents hail from the East - Asiatics with their epicanthic folds, breathing through their Gengis-Khan mouths, looking like V. I. Lenin's half-wit children, and who himself was half-Mongol.   Lenin returned that "Mongol Yoke" to Russia, in the guise of "Marxist Communism", and it enslaved them for almost 70 years.   Poor Russia.   And now, it sends it's goons to kill the peaceful folks of Ukraine, who want to be part of Europe, and not be enslaved by Slavic Asia.  Could this become any more awful?   Perhaps.

Russian history is a perfect horror-show of tragic irony.  We screened some "Why We Fight" USA propaganda films from 1942 and 1943 last nite, along with a bunch of Dziga Vertov's "Kino Pravda" flicks.  Vertov was an absolute cinematic genius, and his "Kino Pravda" films are easy to watch and remain fascinating.  Revolutionary Russia was an interesting thing - a real entity, until it was destroyed by Stalin (an abusive, failed priest, for god's sakes...).   The history of this planet is such an astonishing foul-up, that it defies belief sometimes.  Stalin was a bank-robber and a true terrorist, much like Putin has morphed into.  Astonishing and so curiously tragic.

The most important task for every living person, is to support freedom and justice, by making the terrorists feel the same terror that they have inflicted on the innocent - just before the terrorist's lives are extinguished by the forces of justice and freedom.  Putin's Terror War in Ukraine is the most perfect evil that I have ever seen play out in my lifetime.  It will seriously poison Russia for many years into the future.  The scale of the tragedy, is matched only by its unnecessary cruelty.  It is political insanity of the highest level possible.   And it changes everything.

Somehow, we need to get new leaders into positions of power in the "Free World", and we need to get this done quickly.   We need young, strong and very, very angry leaders, who can take action, mobilize the people, and end this murderous evil, before it expands and grows greater still.  Because it most certainly will, if we do not act.   The costs will be high, but history has shown us - again and again - that this is a cost that must be paid.  Freedom must be earned, by each generation.  And the cost of keeping that freedom must sometimes be renewed, even if that cost is blood, pain and death.

[ July 1, 2022 ] - Welcome to the Shitshow - The large and tragic costs of having complete idiots in charge of things, is now becoming apparent.  Our multilateral, open world of honesty and freedom, is giving way to an ugly, polarized, angry world dominated by the extraordinarily stupid, the dishonest, the cruel and the profoundly incompetent.   It's quite a surprising transition.  We have this tragic-comic sight of Russian thugs, actively using their Soviet-era weapons to bomb Ukrainian apartment buildings and shopping centres full of non-combatant civilians - and then reporting on Russian TV saying that the targets were military instalations.   The scale and extent of official Russian Government dishonesty is making the entire Russian people look like absurd lunatics.  This in and of itself is an astonishing crime against human reality, sanity and basic dignity.  Putin is actively destroying Russia and degrading the Russian people, their culture and their history.  It is a sad and curiously awful criminal act.

We are watching the unfolding of a "New Age of Unreason."    It's extreme and bizzare.   In the USA, and here, we are seeing a curious political focus on twisted weirdness, and a strange and insane attempt to create a mentally unbalanced world where people are encouraged to re-define there sexual indentity as other than male or female.   This makes no sense.  But it serves a political objective, which encourages and mandates a new form of social control.  People are required to *embrace* mental sickness under the rubric of "diversity".   But it is the diversity of insanity - the classical denial of evident reality that characterizes the behaviour of the psychotic.

Why the insanity?  Because it empowers the corrupt and manipulative social fraudsters that have gained control of the public debate and political process.  If you can force people to believe lies and nonsense by peer-group pressure, you can more easily control and dominate them.  Serious experiments in the field of psychology have demonstrated this process and technique.

Sadly, much of the improvement and gain that the last 40 years has generated, is being swept away by curiously awful events, driven by absurd, extreme and ridiculous levels of greed and indifference - and by the abusive and clever strategies of the deeply dishonest and profoundly dangerous political operatives that now control and dominate this world.

The Shitshow is on.

What to do?  Get angry.  Keep a smile on your face.  Follow the idiotic rules, and maintain a low profile.  But get angry inside, and know that the Good World is under direct attack.   It is being actively targeted by the very dark forces of fraud & deception.   Plan quietly, and realize that you are being actively lied to, manipulated, and defrauded.  Work quietly for the change that must come.   Preserve your capital, and make sure when you vote - you vote for correction and for repair and for course-change.   But just voting, will not be enough.

You must realize, as one can now see - voting itself is under assault.  The ability for people to affect any sort of change is being degraded and prevented now by the corruption in the political process itself.    So each of us, must begin to create and develop alternate methods - not just to try to repair the awful damage being done - but to ensure our very survival.

Strange times.  Never expected to see things become so weirdly grusome.  

It's even worse in the the world of economics.  We are seeing a deliberate attempt to degrade and destroy our market processes, so as to protect the foolish and dishonest behaviour of our corrupt political people.  "Climate Change" surcharges on our fuel prices - which are already high and growing fast.  First, we had the initial denial the inflation was even happening, then absurd and completely senseless assertions that inflation was transitory and temporary (?!?), and now, rapid and knee-jerk **PRICE INCREASES** to supposedly **FIGHT** (???) inflation.

Of course, this has smashed the markets down 20% in three months, and provoked the greatest and fastest co-ordinated economic downturn, since the engineered inflation of the 1960's.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62005360

This is just abusive and insane.   We have 40 years of out of control government overspending on idiotic and unsustainable social programs, free-money-for-non-working-deadbeats, tax policies that punish effort and entrepreneurship, policies the encourage and promote unsound money, and a high-cost, low-opportunity economic model, that encourages our best and brightest to leave the country, and relocate to the USA.   And the solution to the resulting inflation that this exercise in very bad Government created?  Higher taxes and higher interest rates, of course - but not until this action can hammer the markets, and enhance small-holder impoverishment.  

It's pretty comical, since the co-ordinated degree of foolishness, seems to be planned and designed to do maximum damage, as quickly as possible.  Probably this is not really the case - but it seems to play this way.

We are probably looking at an economic downturn, on par with the 1930's.   This seems to be what is in the forecast, and this is astonishing.   Our models are pointing straight down.  Down and down more, in ways we have never seen before...  It is scary, but our cynical "Inner Trader" suggests quietly: "This is not an accident.  This is not a "Black Swan" of randomness.  This is by design.   A broken, bankrupt people are in crisis, and Governments like we have now, they *want* to have a crisis, since it gives them political cover, and gives them real power to take further, greater control.  Our gangsters in Ottawa are not really that different from the gangsters that control every nation now - even the Russian gangsters."

It's a terrible thought.   And we fear it might be true.

Think our comments are too extreme?   You are probably wrong.  There are easy solutions to the current problems, but political actors are *actively* preventing solutions from being implemented.  This very much appears to be by plan.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/whos-in-charge/

The Really Big Shitshow looks like it has begun.

[ June 30, 2022 ] - LinkedIn Does Not Work For Us - We Get The Moving Blue-bar of Death - Thank-you Microsoft.  Everything Microsoft touches, turns into black, stinking sticky nastystuff.  Just hilarious.

We use Linux and Firefox browser, a not-too-bad "ESR" version (extended support release), as we place stability-of-operation highest of all virtues.   Some years back, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, and turned it into a crappy, bag of "Does not work on Linux+Firefox", so as to drive folks to have to use their ugly and abusive Windows ecosystem.   

Just confirmed this again to day - when I try to login and display any information - I get successfully logged-in, but then get shown a white blank screen, with only a LinkedIn logo, and a blue bar moving back and forth.  Nothing else happens.  I disabled the AdBlocker, and tried a bunch of other stuff - but LinkedIn is butchered, so that it will not run with our quality, secure, generic Linux software.  I figured; "Oh well, Microsoft bought it, and they fucking ruined it, like they did with Skype, as a simple matter of business policy.  Typical abusive monopolistic behaviour.  Fucking jerks." 

And I thought that was the end of it.  I'll just delete my account, and throw in the towel with those fuckwits.   But then, a little reseach, and it got even more interesting.  Turns out, the Microsoft boys were doing some oh-so-clever tricky-dicky stuff - like copying the contents of your personal system clipboard, to the LinkedIn app, ON EVERY SINGLE KEYSTROKE that a user made while using LinkedIn!  Oh my.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716451

We've said it once, and we will say it again.  Most internet shared-usage "Applications", like most software offered on the internet (and probably *all* applications from the major tech-providers), are often toxic shit-shows of data-rape.   They exist to harvest your information, and use it to take advantage of you.   Microsoft owning LinkedIn, and doing this, is not quite the same thing as putting camera's in the Woman's Shower-Rooms and inside the toilets - but it certainly is in the same spirit.

Beware the "Cloud".  Beware the Internet.   It is - honestly, we say this in truth - it is just not your friend.  Hold that thought.  

(Recall that scene in "The Life of Brian":  "Rwome is yur Fwiend!"   )   So is Microsoft, apparently.

[ June 29, 2022 ] - Hoisted By His Own Petard? - Or maybe not.   We don't wish ill-health on Dr. F., but it still is amusing to see the high government officials become Covid-19 lab-rats.  Maybe he will get Monkeypox also?

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/fauci-suffers-covid-symptom-rebound-after-course-of-pfizer-s-paxlovid-1.1785523

We are not doctors, but if we were, we would suggest Dr. F. try a course of hydroxychloroquine.  And we are completely serious here.  That drug has unique abilities to reduce inflamation and pain associated with arthritis, as well as offering value in the treatment of various malaria symptoms. 

It has also been shown - in numerous empirical studies on real patients suffering from Covid-19 symptoms - to substantially relieve the symptoms, and reduce the mortality rate from Covid-19.  For various curious reasons, it's use became politicized by various reactionary leftists and other American disinformationalists.   It is a safe and useful drug, which addresses out-of-control inflamation, which can occur in a number of disease scenarios.  

https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/patient-corner/drug-information/hydroxychloroquine-plaquenil/

Seriously, Anthony Fauci should try this drug, and report the degree to which it relieves his rebound Covid-19 symptoms.   We - and many others - are honestly curious.   A sample-size of one is not statistically useful, but if he took this drug, and obtained immediate and tangible benefit, then some of the stupid politics that surrounds it's usage, could be ended, and thus Dr. Fauci might actually be able to do something helpful and useful.   And that would be good for himself, for the USA, and for the rest of the world. 

[ June 28, 2022 ] - From Russia with Love - Not.   Putin must be located and ended.  Russia must be declared a "State Sponsor of Terrorism", and all trade must be suspended until Putin and his Terrorists are neutralized.  No other rational choice really exists. 

Ukraine should be offered NATO membership, due to the extreme emergency it's people are facing, and all global resources should be used to remove the terrorist threat that is engulfing that nation.   No other option really exists, short of removing Russia from the planet using extreme methods.   Russia bombs hospitals and shopping malls.  The world cannot live with a murderous, nuclear-armed Terrorist nation of brutal mass-murderers of European civilians.

Russia has become the Great Evil.   The free world must act.  If it does not, then we must replace our leaders, with men and women of courage, wisdom and strength, who can begin the process of doing what we all now know, must be done.

[ June 27, 2022 ] - We Are On to Something - More research.  I am growing quite tired - but we are on to something.  I managed to find Hjalmar Schacht's "The Magic of Money" book, which was published in 1967, three years before this wise gentleman died.  Schacht was the Reichbank's President, who took over after Haverstein had the good sense retire, and then decency to die.  Schacht took over in 1924, and ended the insane money-printing that characterized - and drove - the German hyperinflation.  It is difficult to get accurate financial information on the 1918 to 1923 period in German economic history - the economic numbers simply became silly and absurd, and seem not to reflect reality, so they tell us little, most think.  Of course, this is not the case.  The German economic numbers from 1918 to 1923, scream at us like people trapped in a burning building.  It is just painful and difficult to listen to them, and understand and accept what they are telling us.

People are most often lazy, stubborn and stupid.  It takes serious effort to become enlightened, and then it takes courage and stamina to act on the knowledge gained.  It also takes private freedom and a large bucket of luck.   And there will be "crabs in the bucket" which will further complicate and impair necessary action.

The more I study the German hyperinflation experience, the more ominous it appears.   We think we are so much smarter now.   But to that sense of smug satisfaction, I say: "Bullshit".   Our Central Bankers are - right now - quite possibly also being driven-along like horses on a highway, by the "Wrong Model" problem, towards a place where the economic bridge is out - rather like happened to Haverstein's Reichsbank.  We won't be printing banknotes - we already did that electronically - but events might be engineering a wild and extreme transition, which we will not be in control of.

We begin to suspect that we are at risk of an accelerating change in economic conditions, the likes of which most of us have never seen or experienced in our lifetimes.

I feel like we on one of those old world maps, with edge-regions labeled "Here, There Be Dragons", and we are there - just about to sail off the edge.   We are actually - and deliberately - engineering a financial scenario where a major world-trading partner, Russia, is being forced into a technical bond-default, by our own leader's design to "punish" them.    This is insane.  Those hurt, will be our own investors - not the Russians.   We should be encouraging them to pay up, not telling them they cannot.

We use economics, when we should be using direct force, and we use direct force, when we should be using economics.  Why does the USA try to prevent the Chinese "Belt and Road" idea and plans?  Trade is good.   War is bad.   Let's do Trade instead of War.   But if war is needed, then let's do it right, fast, and with intensity and focus.

The interest-rate rises planned by Central Banks, may have very unusual, extreme and quite unplanned consequences.    People - even senior, high-ranking folks (especially), can become quite delusional - and this propensity for self-delusion seems to be growing at an exponential rate.  It is defining the times.

[ June 26, 2022 ] - In A Godda Da Vida - People like to live in "La La Land."   You see it in our mythology and our history.  Humans seek and embrace delusion and outright madness.   It happens again and again and again.  Governments are the worst offenders, since the gangsters that often get control of states can profit enormously, if they can get the people to believe crazy, stupid, insane frauds.   This happens quite often, throughout history.  It is awful, tragic, scary, and interesting.  

We are now seeing a curious world, were idiots, fools and outright delusional madmen (V. Putin?) seem to be in charge, almost everywhere.   History teaches us that this is not an uncommon problem.   If someone wants to understand "inflation", one does well to study the German inflation from 1914 to 1923.  In 1924, a clever fellow named Hjalmar Schacht took over at the German Central Bank.  He invented the "RentenMark", stopped the insane and out-of-control issuance of higher and higher value German bank notes, and stabilized the German currency.   He had to make his office in a cloak-room, as the Riechsbank people would not even allocate him an office.  ( A similar thing happened to a fine and clever Government boss at a Treasury department that ran a money-management group I did some work for many years ago.  Organizations do not like to change, and they have many effective ways to resist attempts to induce required changes.)

But one must study the 1914 to 1923 period of the out-of-control German inflation.  That "hyperinflation" resulted from the Reichsbank have some real idiots in charge, and stubbornly clinging to a wildly wrong economic model.

Here is a short summary, well written, by a German Phd professor, who taught in America, and died in 2007.   It is short and clear.   When Central Bankers have wrong models, things can get very bad, very quickly.  Germany in 1920 to 1923 provides a very good example of this.  The German hyperinflation was *not* a result of Germany having to pay absurdly-high First World War reparations.  It was a wild creature, directly of their own making - but Haverstein absolutely denied the truth of this.  It is a fascinating disaster, that provides a textbook example of how really bad big Government, and big Government organizations can be:

https://mises.org/library/hyperinflation-germany-1914-1923

We believe - and in fact, in honesty - we are *certain* - that a similar problem exists today.  We are certain that small increases in central-bank administered interest rates, in the contexts of our highly leveraged modern economies, where almost everyone - businesses and consumers - carry debt, and have debt-service costs - we are certain that these inceases will be inflationary. 

They will **CONTRIBUTE** to rising levels of price inflation, because in the short and medium term, everyone's costs will be increased.  Businesses will raise prices in response, and consumers and households will demand higher wages and salaries, to deal with their rising mortgage and demand-loan and VISA-card debt-service costs.

It is only when interest rates reach levels which induce substantial and significant change in business and consumer behaviour - you close the business, and/or you sell the house or investment at a big loss - that is it possible for higher interest rates to reduce price levels.  But this process requires a deeply damaging recession - or even it's more evil twin, the "Depression".

There had developed some solid understanding of this problem, back in the 1974 to 1980 time frame.   But that understanding and awareness seems to have been lost.  It is certainly lost on the current crop of Central Bankers in the USA.

We think the USA Federal Reserve should pause - and seek to dial down monetary stimulus by reducing it's massive portfolio of bonds it bought.  Just let them redeem (pay off), and that will quite effectively reduce the amount of money in circulation.  If P really does equal M times V (which we believe it rather actually does), then one probably does not even need to raise the administered rates much at all.  And if overall indebtedness is so high that everyone's costs are sure to rise a lot if rates are raised, then rate-rises might produce dangerously disruptive responses where price increases feed on price increases, which would requre higher interest rate increases, and thus could lead to a very deep economic downturn in USA.  And that will be very bad, for a number of rather obvious reasons.  (This is what has already happened in Turkey, in Argentina and in Zimbabwe, all textbook examples of:  "What Not To Do When Manageing a State Economy."   Must we emulate these folks?

When setting policy, it is wise to ensure that your actions do not make a bad problem become worse.  Sadly, this is often what we see now.   Our political people and our regulators seem to have made Wisdom leave the building.   Along with Elvis, I guess...

But don't worry.  We will all die soon, and in the graveyard, economics does not matter very much.  :D

[ June 24, 2022 ] - Dollars from Hell - Instead of "Pennies from Heaven"...?   We are possibly looking at a global reset-process taking place.  If this is really the case, then we are only at the beginning stages.   This is another worst-case scenario.  If it plays out, a lot of that central-bank created money supply, which has fueled the world economy for the last two years, might simply be made to go "Pffhht!".  Markets are up and hopping today.  But financials are lagging badly.   This is a dangerous signal, we fear.

Been on this all morning.  Thought it might be international stuff (perhaps a major purchase of a Bank down south?  (The whole deal is going south even further?  But no,  that does not look like it.).

It's reported to be the Canadian housing market.  Prices for houses in Canada, are up roughly 3 times, from average prices in 2000.  Contrast that with USA, where prices are up roughly 60%, over the same 22 year time frame.   Canada is expensive.  And suddenly, within the last two weeks, the air is said to be "leaking" out of our house-price balloon.  Rough numbers, from several articles across a bunch of sources - Vancouver and Toronto looking at 10 to 15% reductions in house prices - right about now - according to news media articles.  (I could not confirm this.) 

Lawyers supposedly  have small stacks of "Cannot Close this Deal" problems on their desks.  (Example: You do a deal at $900,000 for a house, appraisal comes in lower than expected, and even with your $50,000 or $100,000 down payment, you cannot get bank financing, because suddenly, the bank appraisal comes in at $740,000. Yikes.  But is this really happening in a big way?  Unclear.)

So, the story is that Ontario communities are seeing house prices off 8% to 11% in just the last two to three weeks, entirely due to Bank of Canada administered bank-rate interest-rate rises.  Perhaps more in Vancouver, where "students" were often buying mansions, according to mainstream-media, advert-supported "journalism" data items.  News media is not trustworthy, but prices are prices.  No price reductions are evident in and near small city where we live, since supply is seriously unable to meet demand.   Average price for house in Vancouver is $1.2 million, roughly.  And that is high.  But Vancouver is special case, based on the goofy geography of the place, with steep mountains limiting places where houses can be constructed.  It's nickname is "Hongcouver".

Two or three years ago, one could get a 5 year fixed term on a 25-year mortgage, for 2 percent or less.  Some were available for 1.75%.  Now, a five-year fixed rate term on same 25-year mortgage might sport a 5% rate, given the new interest rate environment.   One of our Banks raised it's internal "prime rate" from 3.20% to 3.70% a couple of days ago. (Business and demand-loans for consumers are typically priced as "prime plus", typically something like 2 or 3 or 4% added to that "bank prime" number.  So, shifting bank-prime, jacks up the interest costs of everyone's loans.

And so raising rates should make the bank more money - but it also has the ability to whack down the bank capital, as the bank's assets are the loans it has outstanding.  Our bank in question, had increased it's business-lending, by 19%, from last year, according to a May 2022 report.  That meant more money coming in - but with collateral being re-priced downwards, it means risk for the (very well capitalized bank) is still rising, not falling.    If a significant downturn takes place in house prices, this is expected to have a non-trivial impact on bank stock valuations, as existing mortgages become more risk-laden.   But will this happen?  Unclear.

We *really* think the market is over-reacting, and that even if house-prices come off 20%, it will not impair the banks any more than they have already have been hit (Share prices are typically down roughly 20% from highs two or three months ago).  

But the market *always* over-reacts.  And sometimes, it knows why, and has valid reasons.  But house prices were getting silly - and interest rate rises will help bank profits on new loans, as the spreads will improve in bank's favour.

And again, we have been handed the time-honoured lesson:  Do not try to "average down" on an investment or speculation, unless you know that you know something that the other market players are unlikely to know.  And that, in itself, is rather unlikely to be the case.

It remains to be seen how serious the market downturn will be in house prices.  Since the Federal Canadian government is importing between 400,000 and 500,000 immigrants per year (almost double the long term average of around 250,000 per year), then we don't expect prices to fall very much.  There is just too damn much real, honest demand for a nice place to live.

We suspect that rising rates will accompany rising inflation.  Why?  Because that is *EXACTLY* what happened in the 1975 to 1980 inflation, and it took 20% to 25% (and more) interest-rates to break the late-Seventies inflation we had here in Canada.  Raising rates breaks inflation, by breaking businesses and people. 

In Chile, the Central Bank rate is 9% (it was just raised).  In Argentina, the Central Bank rate is 52% (it was also just raised).  Inflation in Argentina is running over 5% per month and is showing no signs of slowing down.  Argentina bonds - the new US-dollar ones - are trading at around 25 cents on the dollar.  It's a replay of the 2000 collapse, it looks like.  They cannot learn, it seems.

The floors of the World, are getting very slippery.  In some places it is blood, and in others, it is radioactive waste, mixed with spilled oil and the sweat of over-leveraged investors who are losing money.

Our AI model is pointing down, sharply.  Against our (and it's) better judgement, we remain long. This might turn out to be an unwise approach.  But we fear holding cash in this idiotic time, and believe that our equity positions in solid, well regulated financials which are characterized by very large capital buffers, offer better protection than cash-holdings. 

Time will tell.  And maybe quite soon,   Here in Canada, we have learning problems also.

[ June 23, 2022 ] - Here Comes Barfy - Forced selling seems to be taking place.  Stops have been hit, and hit again, and then one more time.   Buyers are looking scarce.   Investors are looking scared.   Not good.   What is just hilarious, is that Tuesday, driving from Parry Sound back to the cottage property, we saw a real, live Black Bear cross the highway in front of the pickup truck.   I have not seen an actual live bear in the wild, for many, many years.  And this big boy walked quickly across the road, on all fours, looking like a really huge black dog, except his legs were as big and round as sewer-pipes, and were covered with thick black hair.  He was a good speciman, and looked healthy and well fed.

Perhaps, he had grown fat and fine from eating investor's portfolios...?

I am not supersititious, but perhaps I should have been.   We are getting shredded today.  And the thought occurs - what if the big Banks in Canada, get repriced so they yield dividend rates that match the inflation rate?  Easy-peasy, right?  Just take 20 or 30 dollars or more off of each bank-stock share price, and then the financial process will start to work again - sort of.  As it is now, if inflation is 8%, and dividend yields are 5%, and there is no significant growth on the horizon, then something has to bloody well adjust - and maybe it will be the share price.  Without a financial process that at least matches inflation rate, you are stupid to hold the paper.  Much better to hold physical assets, right?  Duh.

And this worst-case scenario is playing out now, before our tired eyes.   Fack.

[ June 22, 2022 ] - "Houston, we have a problem..." - Our positions are not looking healthy.  The markets are deciding that Canada is perhaps a bad trade.  This is unfortunate.   The Asians say: "When you reach the top of the mountain, all paths lead down."   The problems are becoming more serious, the market is saying.  It may be right, and we may be wrong.  One must always keep this simple truth in mind.  "Memento mori.." whispered the slave, into Caesar's ear, as he rode in triumph through the streets of Rome.

[ June 18, 2022 ] - The Year of Living Dangerously With Inflation - Curious asset re-pricing action underway.   We are seeing a rush for the exits - and into what?  We are concerned that markets are jumping to a different regime where asset valuations are unclear, and margin calls are being made across a large range of  investment structures.

We seem to be tracking another of our worst-case scenarios, where a global, co-ordinated reduction in debt-levels is being triggered by a fairly minor revision in US short-term administered rates.   Except data suggests that the change in US interest rate levels is not really that minor.   The move from 1 percent to 1.75% is actually almost a doubling in the cost of money.  If inflation really were a risk, then being a debtor is a good strategy, as you can repay with devalued currency in the future.

But what is happening here is an attempt to blow-up inflation, by raising the "cost of money" by 75%.  The bank's equity valuations are getting hit, because the fear is that the underlying collateral value that backstops the bank's loan portfolio, is thus going to be re-priced downward.   Banks make money by giving people mortgage loans  to acquire assets.  The mortgage-holder's asset is the bank's collateral.  If we see asset values de-flated, the reduction in collateral values puts the loans at risk.  So the bank equity is re-priced downwards to reflect this risk

The problem is that the air does not tend to get removed from this kind of balloon in a smooth and gentle manner.   If asset-revaluation occurs too quickly, then the risk is that all sorts of investment structures that were fine and nice and working well, suddenly jump - when the cost of the borrowed money jumps significantly - from being nicely profitable, to becoming ugly, money-burning disasters.

This is an old problem in the world of economics - rather like the "Farm Problem" (when harvests are really good, lots and lots of food is available, and the prices paid to farmers falls, often a lot.  Farmers tend to do best, when crops are poor, harvests are small, and prices are high to reflect the scarcity of the lean harvest.   A good harvest tends to punish farmers for their success, by offering them lower prices for their successful efforts.)

In the business of loaning money, low rates of interest tend to reflect difficult economic environments, and the low cost of borrowed funds encourages investments which have small rates of return.  But if lots of easy, low-cost money is made available, asset prices and investment valuations can get puffed-up ("inflated!") to levels which are not sustainable if the costs of the borrowed money suddenly rise.   This is why companies and governments issue bonds, so that costs of borrowed funds can be locked into predictable schedules for extended durations.

The problem here, is that a rapid shift in the "cost of money", can radically disrupt a range of investments which can suddenly become unprofitable, if funding costs are up-shifted.

And this is the crux of the "inflation" problem.  Raising interest rates raises **costs** to many business owners and mortgage holders.  In an ugly environment, where costs are rising, and both producers and consumers are getting squeezed, the blunt instrument of a significant rise in funding cost, is VERY MUCH AN INFLATIONARY ACTION.   

The only way that interest-rate rises can work, is to explicitly destroy the economic effectiveness of marginal, high-risk investment structures.   The near 20% interest rates of 1979-1981, worked to bring down inflation, by causing a brutal, business-destroying, unemployment-increasing recession that was ugly and awful.  I know, because I was there, and saw it first-hand.  Wage and Price control programs do not work at all, and simply cause pain and disruption to everyone in a working economy.   Plus, they do real damage.  Price controls just stop economic activity.  They are stupid beyond belief, and only low-IQ political people suggest such foolishness as a solution to the inflation problem.

But interest-rate increases - in short-term administered rates - must bring down inflation by causing economic investment valuation destruction.  This is why the changes to administered interest rates (Central Bank rates, which underpin most bank loans and mortgage pricings), need to be made gradually, and EARLY.  What the Federal Reserve in the USA has done, is almost a perfect textbook case of how to not to deal with inflation.

Inflation is almost never "transitory".   Why any economist would suggest that, is simply beyond me.   It indicates a deep lack of understanding of the inflationary economic process.  This is curious.   Why is everyone getting so weirdly stupid?   Rates needed to begin being raised - gently - last year, when the inflation hit the 4 to 5% level.    Rising rates are not a problem, in an environment of rising rates of return on capital - typically resulting from improved trade, enhanced supply-chain operation, increased ranges of economic opportunities, and improving technology. 

Where we are now, is silly and stupid and awful, and I am just gob-smacked by the madness of things.  We are at risk now, if the interest-rate changes are too rapid, of blowing up a well working Western + Eastern World economic model - across just about everywhere and everything.

The small cities near where I live, are just *booming*.  New houses are being built, people can afford them (mostly), the banks are making money, and the factories are cranking out everything we need.  The harvests are good, the farmers are well-off, and the money is cheap (the CDN dollar is in the 77-cent US range - so we are a cheap, low-cost, almost Third-World attractive production environment.  Our competitor is Mexico, and our customer - only a hundred miles away, is all of USA.)

If the government regulatory loons, and the silly Central Bankers could get some wisdom, and stop fucking around with the parameters in an unwise and uninformed manner, then we will all be just fine.   Rates needed to be raised last year, and we all told you this.   Now that we have this inflation, we need to be careful to assess what the causes are.  

Right now, most of the idiot inflation is because of Putin's stupid, unwise and cruel war in Ukraine.   And also because of the strange rules that prevent America from finding and refining and shipping and selling more oil.   Europe is trying to convert to an "electrical energy" economy, away from a "burning fuel" economy, but they are also shutting down their nuclear power plants, which is fucking stupid beyond belief.   Europe should be building a bunch of new nuclear power plants, and developing a range of safe, spent fuel underground storage sites. (China is building something like 20 or 30 new nuclear power plants.

What folks have forgotten is that inflation is not entirely a monetary phenomenon.  A doubling in the price of a basic, primary economic input, is going to cascade a series of price increases thru a working economy.  This is obvious. 

And raising borrowing costs - just as that is happening - will simply ADD TO THE INFLATIONARY PRESSURE.   This curious phenomenon was seen, and documented in the mid 1970's in North America.  Economic papers were written on this.  Some economists called it a "backward bending supply curve", and so on.   Raising interest rates, after the first "Arab Oil Shock", as it was called, simply ADDED to inflationary pressures, and wage demands.

Rates had to be raised to insane levels (roughly 20%) to break the inflation psychology that took hold, and this caused massive economic damage.  But it worked.

Must we track this path again?   Interest rate rises will do NOTHING to reduce gasoline prices.

A better approach might be to directly address the energy supply restrictions - find and produce and refine and ship more oil, at a lower price, develop liquified natural gas facilities, research and develop hydrogen fuel systems and make fuel stations available, build better, more efficient nuclear power plants, with off-site spent fuel storage (for enhanced safety of operation), and develop methods to get electric trucks and more electric cars on the road - and this means making it possible to find and mine and refine the materials needed for the batteries.   All this action will benefit from LOWER interest rates.

What we suspect, is that we cannot be the only ones who realize this.  We suspect interest rates will be moved back to a normal, sane level, and then left there.  We will not likely see Volker-style crazy rates, as that would kill us all, now.   We need to invest to make big transitions, and some inflation will be necessary.

But the inflation won't destroy the banks, and interest rates must not be upshifted too fast, so that real-estate crashes and/or  mortgages go underwater, or the housing market is blown up by the process.  That would be insane and unwise in the extreme.

If our current inflation spike is NOT due primarily to monetary policy, then it would be unwise for significant monetary policy change to be used to address the inflation.  We suspect the Central Bankers and their staff, know this.

So, we expect a few upmoves to make the interest-rate environment sane and stable, but not enough to seriously damage the economy.

And, long-story-short, we remain long our bank stocks.   We just don't see the need for an economy-smashing rate runup.   The inflation we are seeing, is almost entirely due to the extreme up-shift in gasoline prices.  It is dramatic, and costly, and ugly.  And it is due almost entirely to Putin's stupid and unwise war against Ukraine, and the sad necessity of sanctions to communicate to Russia, just how extremely awful and stupid this illegal State-terrorism actually is.  Putin is living in an isolated dream-world of delusion, and has no idea of the hell-storm he is unleashing on the World.    He is actively destroying Russia's future prosperity, while his troops bomb and kill and burn down Ukrainian cities.

This is madness of the very first order, and no monetary policy can address this problem.  We understand that Putin has cancer, so perhaps Nature will offer an endpoint solution that allows eventual resolution of this insane tragedy.  She mostly always does this, as we all truly know.

[ June 15, 2022 ] - We Might Have to Vote for Biden - despite the insanity of the American Leftists.  Biden and the USA is doing the right thing, as is Trudeau and Freeland in Canada.  Ukraine needs weapons.  They need a *lot* of weapons.  They have shown the world, their soldiers are not afraid to die to defend their Homeland.  That is the measure of true courage, and it deeply impresses the World.  Russia is acting the role of the perfect, evil monster - all because of Putin, and his personal madness.   This is a bad situation.

So, we have to give the Ukrainians weapons.   All that we have.  And then more.   This is the only choice, a sane and just person can make.  Biden is putting US dollars, and hardware, where his mouth is, and we are very impressed by that.  So did Trudeau.  I disgree with much of what Trudeau has done - but he has done right by the cause of global freedom.   Freedom, in the end, is all that really matters.  This is the truth - as Vaclav Havel said - and it is the place where every good person likes to live, and raise his or her family.   Russia is murdering not just Ukrainian citizens and soldiers - it is murdering it's own freedom and it's own success.  This is sad.  But the actions of Biden are good.   It's that simple.

 

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/us-to-announce-additional-650-million-in-weapons-for-ukraine-1.1779225

I think we should arm Ukraine with **everything** we have, and call the bluff of the Great Force of Evil, that Putin is trying to create.    Putin is attacking Europe - lets be clear about this.  He is attacking us.  Many folks just don't see it yet.

[ June 14, 2022 ] - Burning Down the House - The American Left seems to want to destroy the USA.  Curious.  The Democrats and the "woke" folks more and more appear as a strange and quite unusual threat to our future.  We cannot help wondering if a subtle campaign is being run, by some bad folks, offshore, to encourage the evident 'devolution' of the USA.

Edward Thorpe (who wrote "Beat the Dealer"), a book about how to win at gambling games of chance (Blackjack), is now 89.  Wow.  The smart folks are getting old and are fading out.  This will cost us all, I suspect.  It is the Bernie Madoff types who are running things now.   This is a problem.   We all want to be the "House", and earn excess profits at the expense of the stupid people.  But this is perhaps not a great strategy, if it makes the *Big-Stupid* become the dominant world-force.  This will bring ruin down upon all of us. 

Thorpe identified the Madoff Fraud early on, as did Markopolos.  Thorpe simply checked on the S&P Index trades, that supposedly were making Madoff's portfolio always make money, month in and month out, and he found there was no record of them at the dealer's office.  But few even believed him.  So curious.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-investor-who-spotted-madoffs-fraud-early-has-a-whole-new-worry-11655196333?siteid=yhoof2

It's interesting that Thorpe is worried about (or at least comments carefully on) the same issues we are looking at.   We see the USA heading for some very real conflict, as the "Normies" are being put in jail now, for any action that protests agains the "Woke Socialists" - (the "Wokzi's?" - kinda like an anagram of "Nazi's").    Elon Musk is quite correct, in calling out ugly platforms like "Twitter" (and the other social media monopoly processes), which are shutting out at least 50% of American public opinion from their sites.   And the "Let's Get Trump Show" on TV, is just an appalling debasement of any kind of honest justice - it is politics of the lowest, and most abusive - a "Trial by Television" - designed to harvest action from radical Leftists, and support the Democrat Party.  It is just shameful.

I think back to the very violent Anti-War-in-Vietnam protests - which were intense, and make the Jan. 6th "Election Fraud" protest in Washington look quite tame.   We always thought that protests were part of a democratic society - a way for governments to learn, and see up close and clearly, when their actions have become abusive, dangerous and contrary to the "Will of the People".  The Congress was meeting to "Certify the Election", and a LOT of people felt that the election was bogus, and should not be certified.   

You can't just write them off, an say their views do not matter.  They are HALF of America.  I watched the USA election results, and regardless of what the "Wokzi's" say, it sure looked bogus to me.  It honestly looked like the "Big Media" and "Big Tech" and Democrat Party were not getting the results they wanted (and engineered, so carefully), so they shut-down the vote-counting process, and arranged for a bunch of "Biden Ballots" to be found, and counted.  Perhaps these really all were quite legitimate - but the optics of the process was profoundly disturbing.

And even more worrisome, is that the statistical distribution of votes, from the "Bags of Biden Ballots", did not match what the election-night vote looked like - at least this is what some analysts have reported.  But that story has disappeared.   Curious.

Perhaps Biden won fair and square.  Perhaps.   But trust was lost, and this is a very serious problem.   And this "Let's Get Trump Show" on television, is only fanning the flame of anger.  It is not just abusive - it is probably unwise.   Show-trials are never a good idea.   Any good film-maker knows that the camera lies, because it crops reality into a false, bounded image. 

But anyone now, who opposes the idiocy and abusive stupidity of the racist "woke" Democrats, is accused of being a "White Nationalist" or some other such silly, emotionally-charged propaganda-style political label.   This is all looking seriously unwise.

Thorpe suggests a set of not-very-attractive-outcomes are possible, and likely await us in the near future, and we are concerned he may be correct - again.

[ June 12, 2022 ] - Modern Times - Or is it "Post-Modern Times?"  And what comes after "Post-Modern" -  "Post-Post-Modern?"   Or perhaps it should be "The Time of the Big Stupid?"   Unclear.  We can say, that risk is rising.  The floors of the world are getting slippery...

https://xkcd.com/2038/

and a fall looks possible.  We seem to be having a self-created energy-crisis.  We need to looks for solutions to this.   How about steam-powered cars?  We could fuel them with plutonium, and they would even run on Mars.

[ June 11, 2022] - Silly Science - A lot of the research we do, cannot be published here, because of course it is for clients, and is their "edge" (we both hope), and so I write about other things.  But the madness of the world at present, is provoking some pro-bono research - basically along the lines of "What the fuck is wrong with people now?  Why is everyone (including our Leaders), acting insane or stupid-beyond-belief, and "Are things really as bad as they seem?".   This is a trenchant line of critical inquiry, I am starting to suspect.  Too much crazy-bad-really-unwise things are happening one after the other.  Everything is getting very, very silly.

And look, it is not just me.  Former US Treasury Secretary (basically the USA's Minister of Finance), Larry Summers, has said the initial inflation forecasts from the US Federal Reseve (the USA's Central Bank) were "delusional" and their more recent forecasts have been  "ridiculous."  This is strong language, from a smart guy.  And it is 100% spot-on correct.   But why is only this retired guy is saying this?  WTF is wrong with the current crop of "experts"?   Why are they almost *all* being so fucking stupid?  The Washington "Democrats" are succeeding in making Trump and his gang, actually look good.  This is surprising, is it not?

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/larry-summers-says-fed-forecasts-look-ridiculous-warns-on-rate-delay-1.1777285

This is an actual honest question, not an angry rant.   Of course, as a scientist, I have to look at the "Dunning-Kruger Effect", (the 1999 study which offered evidence that not-smart people tend to significantly over-rate their abilities).   Now, this famous "Effect" may well be why low-wattage (dim-bulb) people, who are "street-smart" (ie. good at vicious political in-fighting), tend to end up in top-jobs.  They get there because of political skills and knowledge of organizational & administrative "trade-craft", not because they understand the business.   They are good at being back-stabbing bastards and have learned to employ political henchment effectively.  (cf. Putin of Russia, a skilled spy-master and a serial poisoner - and a very bad - and very unwise  - "Leader" guy.)

The Federal Reserve is a special case, because they used to be quite good.  But their top guy is now a **lawyer**, not an economist.   Is this a case of "bringing a knife to a gunfight?"  Maybe.

Also interesting, is some real science that suggests the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is an artifact of how the analysis was done.  This is actually a big deal.   We find a *lot* of examples of artifacts in data, and you can test this, by system-generating some pseudo-random data, and running it thru your analytic-predictive system.  The results are often surprising - the random data turns out to: 1) look a lot like your "real-world" data, which says something important, and 2), often, will give results that support your thesis or validate your predictive efforts - which is even more problematic.

Check this little note, from McGill University in Montreal  ( a not-bad school..  They have done some very good work, in a number of interesting fields.  Plus, Montreal is a great city to meet attractive girls, and have a fine night-life, which makes study at McGill a very fine thing indeed.)

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real

[ June 10, 2022 - Mad World Markets -The Market has figured out that raising interest rates, will not do anything to reduce $120 per barrel oil, or end the insane war being inflicting on Ukraine and Europe by Putin's military Gangsters..  But it will raise business costs, and put pressure on asset values.

Real food and energy shortages already exist, and the high-prices we are seeing reflect this.  Raising rates too far, too fast, will just hammer households and businesses that are being stretched by big cost jumps in primary inputs.  As we have often noticed with "Government Policy" exercises, it is often massively better for Governments to simply "DO NOTHING".  But "Do-something-ism" is now deeply hardwired into political behaviour.  This is unfortunate.

Almost always, any "Government Policy" moves, tend to make bad situations become worse.  The markets seem to have figured out that this rapid pivot from easy money policy, to tight money policy by the government Central Banks, is looking like it might induce and amplify a market-negative scenario.  The violence of the down-move today (June 9th), and it's breadth (every single stock on my quote page went red, except for Ontario Hydro), was intense..  This kind of risk-off move on every single asset is pretty rare, considering the large dog's breakfast of diverse stuff that we watch.   We seem to get farther away from sanity and stability every day, lately.  Curious.

Apparently, dogs have two genetic sequences, different from wolves, which make dogs friendly.  If the leaders of the world had at least as much sense as my dog has, we would have more wisdom and less madness and violence in this world.  But no chance of that, I fear. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZvPSpLxCg

[ June 9, 2022 ] - "Data!  We Need More Data!" - We shout this like the Engineer on an old steam-train, shouting for coal.  We must fire the "boilers" with more data.  So much we understand now - it is comical. 

"Randomness only becomes dangerous, when it starts to look orderly." - an old stock-market expression.  Except it actually IS orderly - more orderly than most folks realize.    But it is not concious.  Is there a God of the Markets?  Is there a "They" in the markets?  No and probably no - except for sometimes, when the "They is Us".  "We have met the Enemy, and they is Us!" (This was from a 1971 "Pogo" comic...)

https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/

My best education came from reading the newspapers in the morning, with my father and brother, before going to school in the morning. I was really young, but I would read everything - and then have to leave and waste time at school doing stupid tasks with low-quality folks.  It was comical - truly the school nonsense really interfered with my education.  I remember asking why there was a big LIST in the paper, that had the label of "Unlisted Securities".  In the USA, they were smarter, and called the crappy, secondary junk stocks the "Pink Sheet" stocks, since their prices were printed on pink sheets of paper, or maybe the trading tickets were pink? 

European Parliament has voted to end production of cars with petrol and diesel engines by 2035.   In Germany, they have decided to shutdown their nuclear reactors.  And they have also voted to stop buying Russian oil and gas.  WTF?.  Does anyone see a problem here?   This "Green Nazi" nonsense has got to be tempered with sanity.  We have seen the "worst case" scenarios with exploding nuclear plants in Japan and Russia - and Canada - but most folks forget the Chalk River thing - thank-you SRI Reading Labs.  I was such a meganerd in public school - in Grade Three, at "Recess", I would sneak back into the classroom, and read the SRI reading-lab articles from the back (you were supposed to read the simple stupid-kid articles from the front, but they were boring.)  But the "Purple-Coded" articles from the end, were really interesting, and one of them had all the details of the famous Chalk River research nuclear reactor meltdown - and subsequent clean-up.  It was absolutely fascinating.   And it kinda stuck with me.  And Jimmy Carter too, as it turned out.  :)

Anyway, we see the World tracking towards a madness. And what is fascinating now, is that this is pretty much exactly what happened once the "Black Death" of the late 1300's in Europe, finally receded.  People went nuts.   There were outbreaks of "Dancing Sickness" - which were well documented, and became known as a medical affliction that doctor's studied, because it became so common.   This is why the "Black Death" wood-cut pictures often show skeletons playing music, and dancing.

Sadly, the Putinistas of Russia like to dance in the blood and ruins of their neighbours.   The United Nations should be abandoned, and a Euro-NorthAmerican military exercise should be started in Ukraine, to address the illegal Russian assault in Donbas and South Ukraine, even if it means risking a little nuclear war.   Putin needs to be lamposted - like Il Duce of Italy was.   A nation needs to learn to resist the allure of Medieval Fascism, which is what Putin is bringing to poor Russia.    He is *not* Alexander Nevsky.   Ukraine was feeding and enriching Russia, not harming it.  Putin's fucking idiot thug army has attacked their best and most honourable friends.  A dumbshit Leader that does something so stupid and cruel needs to be removed - like Kurtz - with extreme prejudice.  It may take a journey into the Heart of Russian Darkness - but the World should offer a reward for his arrest and trial.

What is going on now, is a kind of insanity that pins the meters off the scale.  It is pure, extreme madness of the most vile and tragic kind.  It is sad that we are supposed to just sit back and watch this insane abuse, and not assist the Ukrainians.  Canada is at least trying, but we cannot give them our secret nuclear weapons, since officially, we do not have any.  Crazy.

And we suspect that the European car-drivers, and auto-makers, might just vote to disband the European Parliament, since it is becoming stupid, annoying, and abusive.

What other choice do they have?  Be like those Monty Python folks in "Holy Grail", digging in the mud, and forming "collectives" of the poor and dirty, who have no energy supplies, cold dark cities, and dig in mud to survive? - kinda like my Irish relatives probably did long ago, back in Ireland.  The wise ones used the peat-bogs to grow barley, and then make and flavour Irish whiskey.  The poor ones just dried it (the peat, not the whiskey!) and burned it to keep warm.  Energy supplies matter.  (They *drank* the whiskey, to keep warm, of course.)

A Europe with no petrol cars and trucks, and no nuclear reactors to make electricity at scale, is going to be a poor and nasty place.   So we predict the end of the "European Union", since that would allow the "European Parliament" to be ended, which is probably a much better idea, than commiting economic suicide - and going back to digging in muddy peat bogs to keep warm.

What is interesting, is how the markets are discounting two very different "future pictures" - one very positive, where we get our sh/t together, fix the insanity, and decide to run things right - and the other, where everything goes off the rails, and civilization itself gets kicked to the curb by bad decisions and the resulting conflict those trigger.  (Soros is not a stupid man.  He offered an honest warning about this at Davos.)

I lean toward the postive outcome happening.  But we have to always keep in mind that the human capacity for cruelty, stupidity, and idiotic madness, seems to know no limit.  Putin's Russia is showing the absolute truth of this right now.  It is madness almost beyond belief.

[ June 8, 2022 ] - Gosh Darn Python 2.7 on Jupyter Notebooks - been trying to get a Jupyter Notebooks project (which works fine on a couple of 32-bit machines - just fine), working with Python 2.7, on another machine. No way, it appears.

The fine folks who took over this Jupyter project have turned it into a bit of a bloat-bag.  They have  arrange things so one cannot use Python 2.7 (and all it's most fine utilities and modules), on the "Jupyter Notebooks" environment.    The world of "free software" is turning into something that looks like cluster-bombing crap-attacks of cross-dependent mung, most of which is toxic, and is about as stable as a viral cluster of warm liquid on a toilet-seat in a whorehouse.

I wrote a really angry rant - but I have removed most of it, since I figured out (and have already built part of..) a fine workaround.

(I really now understand why old guys were always cranky.  It's because they saw new stuff that was really good - constantly morph into bloated junk with tailfins and flashing idiot-lights.  After 40 or 50 years of seeing this phenomenon over and over and over, it just makes one bad tempered. )

I really disagree with this concept of taking good, solid, working software, and declaring it to be "End of Life".  That is just wrong.  It's actually pretty abusive.

Here is what might be the solution?

https://me.me/i/back-the-fuck-up-its-a-goddamn-python-virtual-environment-73dfbda9ff57424995de53325d87c7ae

Except, I tried that.  All that approach did - was give me yet another NON-WORKING PYTHON KERNEL SPEC in the Jupyter environment THAT DOES NOT WORK.  I now have three kernel specs - but no working kernel of Python 2.7, so I am done with Jupyter and Notebooks.  To hell with that nonsense server-client foolishness.  

It should be easy to define whatever interpreter environment you want to run, in a server-client thing like Jupyter, and have it JUST WORK.  We have had multi-process/multi-user systems with UNIX pipelines since I was a tiny child - and they work fine.    I am so truly disgusted by what has happened to Jupyter Notebooks, that I want now to build something myself that works. 

And, I just did.  Bloody thing works nice.  I have a working prototype already, with the editor in Tcl/Tk, and a run-window, which can run interactive Python 2.7 (but not as "Notebooks"...), and fling up a graphic display on the desktop, using 'TkArg'  parm of _Tkinter.   Just tested it - and the concept work NICE.  (I am feeling "chuffed", as I think is the old English expression, I learned once on a trip to the UK.)

No one really knows how to think well, until they are in their 40's  (or 50's... and beyond...).  This is the truth of things.  Really.

What would be good, would be to teach the young lads who want to break the world, some Greek and Roman classics, and then send them off to war, so the slow and stupid ones can get killed, and the smart ones can get wised up real quick, and be more productive in a sane and sensible way, much sooner in their lives.   The rapid progress of the 20th century, was built on the profound wisdom of the Victorians, who both knew about this problem, and then applied the harsh - but effective - algorithm to fix it.

[ June 7, 2022 ] - Despite All, We Continue to Continue - Strange times.  It's like a replay of the 1970's, except everything is happening on "internet time".  The Oil-Shock is harsh.  But it opens some wild and crazy opportunities.  (Eg;  Small, personal, portable nuclear reactors, for home and office.  (Really!) )

[ June 6, 2022 ] - The War in My Leg - I think I have either a wild viral infection, and/or a runaway immune-response thing happening in my left leg.  Large painful, rope-like lumps - terribly painful - form under the skin, and then seem to heal up.  Maybe DVT, or maybe a whole bunch of possible things I've discovered on Google...   Comical, really, since I have to heal on my own, I guess.   Cannot seem to access a doctor, and do not want to go to hospital "Emergency", since it is always a crowded sh/tshow of sick people, and also now, a Covid-19 ground-zero. One must manage risk dynamically. 

Strange times.    I suspect this weird thing in my leg is a reaction to the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine, I got back in February.   It started about two weeks after I got the vaccine.   What is interesting, is that the healing process seems to be working.  There is an actual viral war going on in my leg.  And I think I and my immune system are winning it.  Did a long walk around the fields today, with my dog, and felt almost no pain.  Curious.  I honestly believe there is great benefit to be gained, by staying the hell away from most doctors.  Not all, of course, and not the surgeons - when you need some repair, you likely really need the repair.  And vaccines work.  They just bloody well work, and are worth the pain and risk they involve. 

A good vaccine, is like a missile-defence system for your body.   As you lie in bed at night, you can actually feel the healing happen, as the invading virus-agents - and their associated toxins - are neutralized.  

There is very little in one's life, that feels more rewarding than to be attacked by a cruel enemy, and then crushing the force of the filthy bastard, slowly, methodically and with clear, singular focus.

Tech:

Back to doing some more tech hacking on the platform that seems to be calling the future most successfully.  Several years back, I built a bunch of stuff using Python.  Have returned to it, as it looks to be the fastest/bestest way, to get some working data frames.    We are seeing such silly up-and-down action in the markets - I should be trading *a lot* more than I am.  But when feeling like sh/t, the energy-levels degrade.   The machines are saying things are good and getting better, but the gut is sending out a different message.  Elon Musk is maybe right.  When I get these weird bad feelings - I have learned not to ignore them.    There are some serious risks on the horizon now, which make the hair stand up on the back of my neck - just like my dog, when she barks at the turkeys (we have these *huge* wild turkeys in the fields and forest this year.  They are grey, with large bodies and small heads, and make the place look like "Jurassic Park").

Python is a weirdly strange language.  I need to re-compile my source version (2.7.14), with a proper TLS-1.2 SSL, so the goddamn thing can import modules, using "pip" on my custom Linux hack-boxes.   The kinky thing about Python, is the genius interpreter idea.  Most computing is moving stuff around, and running existing programs.  Python is a reasonable "glue-language" environment, and it has a philosophy of not being a wankers bit-fiddle butcher-bucket of glop, like so many C/c++ environments (or Perl, for f*** sakes).   Here is a page: "The Zen of  Python"

https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/

The ideas generalize.  I would also add, that Python meets the "George Patton" dictum: "A merely *good* plan, executed today, with vigour and speed, is often much better than a really *excellent* plan, executed a few weeks from now, when the time for action has passed."  I am not sure if he really said that, but it sure as hell is true in the World of Finance, Markets and Money.  (And maybe in Love, also?)   :)

 

[ June 1, 2022 ] - World Going Completely Bonkers - Absolutely nutbar, silly bonkers - crazy politicians doing amazingly stupid things, bad policy, unwise choices, foolish short-term "do-somethingism" which will almost certainly take us all into crazy, un-needed conflict and wild extreme scenarios.   No one, in positions of power and privilege, seems to have any sense anymore.   Truly, we are not sure why.  

A little "retail relaxation" was in order.  I bought a new thing - and of course, being here in the Great White North, it will be many weeks before I am allowed to take it home from the store.  Here is a video of what I bought (hint: It is a fine, precision instrument, manufactured in the Czech Republic.  I have a very, very soft spot in my heart, for Prague, and really all things Czech - from beer, to camera equipment, to semi-auto's.  The Czech folks are us, like the Ukrainians and the Polish people are - and the Scots and the Germans and the Brits and the Swedes.  Here, we are Europe, Version 2.0, truth be told.  Oh, and the French also, of course.  Lots and lots of French, which make Montreal the coolest city on this planet - also another quiet local truth.)   But today, we are thinking of fine things Czech...

https://youtu.be/3qt1qm-rMHk

I literally have to wait for paperwork from several government agencies - Provincial and Federal, before I can take my new purchase home from the store - and then out to the Range.   :)

[ May 26, 2022 ] - Nothing Success Like Success - This seems so obvious - but it is difficult to actualize, quite often.  You know what you must do - but the doing of it is difficult, so you shy away and fail.  Don't be a pussy.  If it needs to be done, and your analysis says it must be done, then the only option is to do it, painful and difficult as it might well be.  Pain can be helpful - it is Nature's Way of letting us know we are not yet rotting dead meat, and that life is able to be a wonderful goddamn thing.  :)

If any humans are reading this - the stock we held, is up another $1.25 as I key this, and the DJIA is up over 500 points (again).  Mr. Market is in one of his manic phases today.   Everyone in the world knows we have to bomb our dear Russia, and burn their cities, like they are burning down Ukrainian cities - but we still have not managed to cross this Rubicon just yet.  But I think Soros is correct - this is a river that will have to be crossed.  It may result in a nasty little (or not so little) nuclear war, but it is gonna have to happen.  Russia has become an advance Terror State, on par with Osama Bin Laden, and the rest of the World cannot put it's head up it's ass, and pretend that this reality has not transpired.   Difficult action will be required...   Unless the Russians can arrest and imprison Putin for mass-murder and his other War Crimes.

Meanwhile the markets are flying.  We are doing so well in Canada, that is is almost embarrassing.   "Money for nothing, and your chicks for free"  ( I think it was a poultry farmer who said that...)

The Canadian Banks are doing fine.  If you are curious, you might want to see what AIRB risk analysis methodologies are mandated by the OSFI, for the Canadian Banks (an old High-School buddy of mine, used to be the OSFI boss.  He was a very clever and focused dude, with a high degree of personal integrity, and high-grade executive abilitity.   I think all this stuff the OSFI put together, was created on his watch.  There are some smart folks at the OSFI, and I think this approach has kept our Banks honest, careful, and nicely profitable.  Details in the URL below:

https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/fi-if/rg-ro/gdn-ort/gl-ld/Pages/Self_Inst_Ja06.aspx

See, the OSFI created this reasonably standardized approach, and the Banks report according to this model approach - which still gives them latitude to have their own risk-models.   Risk is a funny thing - it is never absent.   Every trade, every business action involves real, true risk.  But you never can really get a complete handle on it.  This is the "unknown unknowns problem", and is always evident.    Taleb labelled it the "Black Swan" (which was found in Australia, after being a legend and a fictious thing, in European culture).   This insane terror-war in Ukraine is almost a Black Swan, except US Intelligence folks learned about the preparations, and the USA told the world.   Good for them.   It is the dumbest, most ass-fuckingly evil-stupid insane thing I have ever seen in my lifetime, and I would honestly have said that it would not happen.  But I would have been wrong, since human cruelty and stupidity knows no real limit.

If it takes a world-smashing nuclear war to explain to the Russians that this sort of shit-licking evil is not to be allowed, then it will just have to be a cost we will have to bear.  

But it would be better, if a bunch of honorable and good Russian citizens could engineer a change in regime, regardless of how it could be done.  That would be a better outcome for the World.

Personally, I would nuke Putin from orbit, since this insane Hitler-style exercise in mass-murder will not end, until Russian cities are burning the same way that Ukrainian cities are.  Until Moscow looks like Mariupol, the lick-shit toads in Putin's Gangster-group, will not be weakened sufficiently to allow the good people to act, I suspect.   Russians must feel motivated to make a change - like they did in 1917.    I used to really like and respect the Russians.   So for me, this whole thing has an ugly, pesonal element, that makes me non-objective now.  I feel personally betrayed by Putin and his henchmen.    That fucker cheated us, lied to us all, and is now threatening the World with nuclear assault.   That fucker has to face the consequence of his very, very bad actions.

Curiously, there are a few others who have figured this out.   Putin must *lose* this ugly war.   Most Americans, strange as it may seem, show evidence of having no clue about the need for this, or really about much of anything else, now.  Not sure why...  But this women understands, and has the courage to write the truth:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/2022/05/23/defeating-putin-is-the-only-route-to-peace-in-ukraine/

Market Hackery - "No Man is so Innocently Employed, as One Who Is Making Money".   And maybe, this is true?  I was deeply happy to see Russia get rich.  A rich Russia is good for Russians, and good for the World.  What Putin has done, is a Crime against Russians, as much as it a crime against the Ukrainians.   The Russians have given the world so much.  We use their math to make money.   And making money means we can ALL live well.   War is a crazy, an evil sickness which is sometimes forced upon honourable people who must defend themselves, against invading monsters - a true creation of *hell* in this World.   And Putin - personally - is the author of this current horrific conflict.  This is just so damn sad.   We will have to study war - again.  And we will have to win.

The skills between market hackery, and the aiming of anti-aircraft weapons, are not very different.   WW2 taught us this.   What is interesting, are the auto-correlation characteristics of some time-series.  Prices, and the first-difference, or rate-of-return values of a price series - those are very interesting.  I just discovered some stuff from these Wolfram guys.  Probably just a guy named Wolfram.  Cool stuff.  Here is a cool interactive graphic of a stationary series...

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/AutocorrelationAndPartialAutocorrelationFunctionsOfAR1Proces/

There are these silly trades one can make - day in and day out - that make a little bit of money (until one day, when they lose it all, and then some!).   Market processes are interesting - and they are the only thing I have found on the entire internet, that I can make money with, on a reasonably consistant basis.   But you had better do your risk-control stuff, or you will get done like a Russian kid driving a shit-stained Soviet-era tank, as the Javelin missile blasts him into little pieces of red bits.  "Statistical Arbitrage" is a stupid name.   They should call it "Market-based DiddleHacking - MBDH" and report it as a line-item of profit, in the "Capital Markets" section of the Quarterly Report.

[ May 25, 2022 ] - Dumb Guy - Sold the leveraged part of my position, which I put on, driven by the AI uptick, because I just felt too much risk.   Dumb and dumber, since the company we testbed with, reported a solid earnings beat, and the stock is zooming up.  Bugger.  At least we still have a truckload of the original postion, in a couple of different portfolios.  Pretty funny - I can predict the future reasonably well, but I still am not yet very good at trading it profitably.  :/

Canada is sending 20,000 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine, for the big M777's.   Rock on, guys.  Defend the Homeland from the "Zombie" forces.  No-one lives forever.  If you die fighting the forces of pure evil, your life (and your death) have real meaning.  But of course, do your best to "Come Back Alive!".   Ukrainians are showing the world what true human purpose and honest courage looks like.  We should send them a bunch of our F-18's (and some ASLM's) to sink the Russian murder-ships infesting the Black Sea, and trying to starve the World of Ukrainian food exports.   Putin's Russia has become a Terror State.   Russia should be declared a "State Sponsor of Terrorism", and it's ports should be blockaded by a UN-authorized military action.

 

[ May 24, 2022 ] - World Going Dark, New Leaders Needed - We have to get out our horses, and ride out to where Cincinnatus is running his farm - and beg him to come and lead our armies.   The times demand change.

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cincinnatus/

[ May 23, 2022 ] - Shaken - and Stirred-Up - Boris Bondarev:  Heroic Teller of Truth. Russian diplomat resigns in disgust because of Putin's Terror War & Lavrov's Lies.  Good for Mr. Bondarev.   The Invasion and murderous, illegal Terror-War against Ukraine by Russian military forces, is pure madness, and has set Russia back into a dark-age of cruel violence and economic isolation.  It is deeply wrong, it will gain nothing for Russia, and it was completely un-necessary.  Mr. Bondarev has done the right thing by speaking out against it, and will now walk a dangerous path.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/23/1100731559/russian-diplomat-un-quits-ashamed

Strange and sad times for many.

Meanwhile, back at the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Ranch... The forecast from the AI seems to be working.  All Cdn markets closed today for Victoria Day (We love our old, dead Queen Victoria.  She helped create our Homeland.)     The US Bank Stocks caught fire today.  Up and away, it seems.   The AI called a bottom on Friday.  Curious.  It is mindless, but it is also better (mostly) than the community of pundits and analysts.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/jpmorgan-fuels-rally-in-banks-and-the-us-stock-market-1.1769625  

[ May 22, 2022 ] - The Great Retracement - Markets appear to be in synchronized downshift mode.  "Retracement" is the term.  We are of course concerned that this may be the "Great Retracement", in which the stimulus-fueled gains of the last 10 years, are unwound - perhaps in a much shorter time frame than they were built up.

Synchronized events of negative market motivators are:  Idiotic and insane Russian war-action in Urkraine.  This is abuse and evil and madness which is true "Black Swan" stuff.  It destroys Russia as a political and economic entity, and it costs the world food, customers, and productive producers.  It is madness.    But it gets worse, when Covid-Zero in China, and the supply and production problems that this causes, combined with the global high-inflation that the money-supply expansion has caused, and that thus provokes the USA (and others, of course), to raise administered interest rates.  Probably a lot more than they are already now.  Oh, and we are seeing an "oil shock" to the global economy, that is almost the same intensity that we saw in 1973, when the Saudi's hired a US consulting firm to tell them where to price their oil  (Recall those third-year ECON courses:  viz: "Products Which Have Demand Characteristics Which Exhibit High Degree of Price Inelasticity "  - like both insulin and gasoline do?   You can set the price at just about any level, and roughly the same amount of product will be consumed.  Except that if the market-clearing price is too high, you start to see your customers begin to die off.)

Combine this nasty economic storm, with the political turmoil that is evident in every nation now, and you get a clear algorithm for synchronized ** market retracement ** - which of course, we have to call "The Great Retracement", because that just seems to be what it needs to be called - for obvious political and social-scientific reasons.

The one interesting thing, is that our mindless AI has tilted up.  Just ran it with Friday's close numbers, and we still get the curve showing a bottom, and a tiny tilt upwards.  

So we may be at - or near - a local bottom.  We have already lost between 20% to 30% from the high-water price-levels of 4 to 6 months back (depending on whether you consider the DJIA and S&P or the Nasdaq Index as your benchmark, against which you measure your tracking error).

Let's be clear.  We are worried - and reduced a large part of the leveraged position we took on. (We are *always* too early, in both entering and exiting positions.   Just seems to be that way...  I just seem to see stuff before others, and have not yet learned sufficient patience...)

But the AI is clear.  It says we are primed for an up-move.    I can post this on a Sunday, and now we will take the old vintage Lincoln out for a drive.    Best 73's.

[ May 20, 2022 ] - Are We Not Men? - We are down low.   And we worry we might have brought a knife to a gunfight. 

"Rome is your fwiend!"

[ May 19, 2022 ] - When the World is Running Down... - Go long.    Make your bet on the Power Rangers of Freedom.  :)

We killed Hitler in his bunker once. (Our Dad's and Mom's did it, actually.)   We just have to do it again.  Hitler Version 2.0 is named Vladimir Putin.   You know where he lives, right?

See, now, it's our turn.   Plowshares into yellowcake, yellowcake in to UF6, boil the UF6 in a steam-kettle, and whisk the puff into the centrifuges.   Spin-baby-spin, and out comes the "Dust of Freedom Dash 235".  A kilo or two at each end of a binary doublewhumper cannon, some TNT, a charged battery, and some fast electronics to make sure each *whump* happens at the same time, and quote me that Hindi scripture, eh?  "I have become Freedom, the Creator of New Worlds!"   Duck, yeah!  (or something like that...)

See, it is gonna get interesting, when any kid with a 240-volt 3-phase connection to the grid, a pile of hot rocks, and some welding kit, a machine-shop, and some chem-lab stuff, is able to fab his own "Davy Crocket" rockets.   Unless we let the Russians kill the whole world, and burn down all the libraries, the Blue-Genie of Science is now out in the world.   And with Science there is real Power, and with some funding, the Power can be converted into Freedom.  Real, serious tangible Freedom.   Because the prime-driver of science advancement, has always been weapons research.  Yes, this is true.  Really.    Almost all major science and industrial development action, has been driven by weapons research. 

And remember, Libraries will get you thru times of no money, better than Money will get you thru times of no Libraries.  Ask the kids at the schools in Mariupol, if you doubt this truth.  Oh, wait.. they are all dead, aren't they?  Well, go make some more.   Get busy. 

And about NATO: Most folks don't even know that NATO was a Canadian idea.   And that Lester Pearson, defeated the Conservative Government of John Diefenbaker, because Pearson INSISTED UPON having Bomarc nuclear missiles ON CANDIAN TERRITORY - here, able to launch against any invading Russian bombers.    The Tories wimped-out, and Pearson's Liberals engineered a "No Confidence" defeat of the Conservatives in Parliament.  This saved us from nuclear attack, we suspect (but cannot prove, of course.)   The Tory PM, Diefenbaker, was an unwise tragic fool, despite being able to play the part of what appeared to be, a good and honourable statesman.  So sad. Really sad, actually.)  

Pearson probably saved Canada, but history gives him little credit.  He might have actually saved the world, also.  Trudeau (the father of the current PM), was another arrogant ass, much like "Dief the Chief" (god help us),  It is the man, not the Party, who matters, our history has taught us...

NATO was crafted to prevent insane, (and planned - we know this for a fact, based on our intelligence info) Russian nuclear attack on North America.   The Russians can simply get batshit crazy, because of their awful, twisted, and horribly nasty government and spy-system apparatus (goes back to Czarist times, truth be told.)  Hell, probably goes back to St. ("Kill them All!") Olga of Kiev.   The Russians can be crazy evil - much like the Germans can.  It's a family fight, after all.  Know this.

NATO saved us - and probably the USA and England (the UK) also.  Post-War Europe also got saved.  Trudeau version 1.0 wanted to exit NATO, and focus on spending slush-money in Canada to support folks in Quebec.   Then, someone explained the World to him, and he got wisdom (probably Pearson did this, we don't know who actually.)

Lester Pearson, the Liberal Prime Minister, was a careful genius.  He was a quiet, funny guy, spoke with a lisp, and had an IQ like Issac Newton, it looks like, in retrospect.  He was a truly brilliant political operative, and a man of astonishing vision, integrity, and an actual true genius - much like John A. MacDonald, our first Prime Minister, and the man responsible for creating the Dominion of Canada.  MacDonald was a Scotish Tory who drank too much, had a pretty but invalid wife whom he loved deeply.  He had a hot temper, and killed a kid in a duel when he was 18.  (He deeply regretted this, and was cleared of the crime, by a sympathetic Judge.) 

Pearson was a strong, peace-seeking Liberal, who wore a really goofy looking bow-tie, and came across as a Walter Mitty character, but who had a mind like a Caesar, and who armed Canada with nuclear weapons when it became necessary to do so.  Canada was by necessity, technologically advanced.  Canada was the third nation to launch a satellite, (After Russian and USA did) and it was a *working* television communications satellite.  We were also the first nation to clean up a complete nuclear-reactor meltdown, at Chalk River in 1952.   The Chalk River thing was very educational.  We really know nuclear here. The nasty Chalk River reactor meltdown & cleanup, is a fascinating story:

https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/history/nrx.html

I had thought NATO was a dumb idea, and was just a silly historical artifact.  I was *really* very wrong about that.  REALLY.  WRONG.   I just did not understand how truly insane and awful, Russian political people could really be.  They are *NOTHING* like us at all.  The correct model for Russian political people, is hyper-violent world of the USA gangsters of the 1930's.  (The Watergate Guy, who wrote "Will", Gordon Liddy, came to speak at our University, and explained this to me.  It turns out he was spot-on correct, and all the other jabbering head-mouths were wrong.   Curious how that occurs, is it not?)

Anyway, NATO has turned out to be exactly what we need, in the here and now.  And the Prime Minister of Finland, should study why Pearson (who was a real peace-nik, let's be clear), had Canada station a bunch of nuclear missiles on our territory, to deter Russian war-planning efforts.   You don't fuck with Canada.  We can be as blue-crazy (in the William Wallace kind of crazed Celtic-way) as any Slavic folks.  Maybe it's the Winter or something.  If you can survive a Canadian Winter, then a nice warm "Nuclear Winter" seems no problem at all.  We really, really understand and support the Ukrainians. There are a *lot* of Ukrainian flags around here.  Our landscape is a Ukrainian Flag.   Ukraine made a major error, giving up all it's nuclear weapons.  Nuclear weapons are necessary to ensure peace.  It is that simple.  Know this fact.

Here is the Canada role, in the founding history of NATO, from their website:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_161511.htm

And here is a link to history of St. Olga of Kiev (when Kiev was where the "King of all the Rus" monarchy was based, 1000 years ago.)  St. Olga is the Patron Saint of Revenge.   And I am not making a jest here:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/01/saint-buried-people-alive-burned-city-revenge/

We must study history.  It is the detailed road-map, which shows us exactly how the hell we got to the curious place where we are right now.

And we need to embrace our nuclear history.  In my personal case, it is close.  My Mom's cousin was directly involved in uranium-enrichment from the Elliot-Lake motherlode.  The uranium from the Elliot Lake mine, was partially enriched, and then sent to that hillbilly site in USA, that was built to run the big gaseous diffusion factory.  That was where the 235 for the Trinity test, (and the Hiroshima device) came from - a machine my mom's cousin built.  Runs in the family, I guess.  In our case, hot rock enrichment is sort of family-business history.   We don't run any centrifuges, and we don't use any radio-hot material.  But in Canada, science is Science - it's a bit of a religion here.   My neighbour next road over, funded the Perimeter Institute  (a theoretical physics chalk-hall kind of shop), where Steven Hawking ended his days (before he went over the existential event-horizon.)   

We all need to recognize that nuclear weapons & atomic bombs are "really, really good things to have".  And unlike Madonna's boyfriends - they are good both to have AND to hold.  They are perfect machine devices for ensuring that greedy, gangster nutjob sadistic Russian fockwits, do not invade and destroy your Free Nation. 

Lester Pearson - a soft-spoken, bowtie-wearing Liberal peace-freak - had the genius to realize that there are times, when a sovereign nation needs the thing the French call the "Force de Frappe" - the "Strike Force", aka the Triad of Dissuasion, which De Gaulle insisted that France develop and maintain.    That Finnish Prime Minister, should study history, and not just knee-jerk respond to our World's tragic and silly current events.

Some history on the French efforts to build their "Force de Frappe":  They asked the USA for help, but the Americans told them to f*ck off because De Gaulle was such an astonishingly annoying pr/ck.  But the French got it done, and it worked.  Folks need to realize, everything we have that works, came from research in the 1940's to the 1970's.   It was a time of amazing technical, engineering and scientific progress.   The entire Moon Landing effort, was designed and implemented in less than 10 years.  We cannot seem to do big projects like this now.   Most stuff after the 1970's, is just deriviative work, various improvements, etc.   Here is a link to a declassified US military document on French "Force De Frappe" (nuclear disuassion) technology, from 1966:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA488151

The appropriate course of action for Finland is to place 50 tactical, nuclear-armed 1-megaton yield nuclear missiles all along it's border with Russia.  But not put any fuel in the missiles.  Make that fact clear to the Russians.  But have the missiles configured to detonate without being fired, should the need arise.   A Russian invasion, thus becomes very unlikely.  And the rockets could be fueled at anytime, if requirements might change, based on events.

Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.  (Have we heard this idea before, maybe?)

[ May 18, 2022 ] - Fool's Paradise - Enjoy the scenic beauty of things, while it remains possible to do so.   We seem to be on the cusp of the Great Apocalypse of Maximum Stupidity, and there is little the average person can do to alter the forward flow of this strange, destructive Plan.  Curious, indeed.

Could we just please at least terminate Vladimir Putin?   We could drop the thermo-nuke from space, and end that psychotic sadist, and his cabal of murderous hell-mongers?  That would at least restore some balance, justice and goodness to our sad planet.  No more talk or sanctions or chatterbot blah-blah-blah from head-mouths.  Just a few keystrokes, a launch-code, and some solid, effective results that would demonstrate that the World still had some sanity and capacity for justice and correct action.

It's time.  Really.  We could do this.   "Gentleman, we have the technology.  We can end this murderous, parasitic monster, and make the future of the World into something positive, good, honourable and fine.  Let's just do it.   Let's to it now."   I think I heard some guy say this at a meeting in the Pentagon.   Or maybe it was at that Air Force Base.    Really.  It's time for action.  Talk-time is ending.   Action-time is beginning.   Cry Havoc.   Go-code Green.

---

Ok, so yes, this idea above, remains in the realm of fiction.  And this is the other problem.  Sanctions will not stop Russia, or alter it's behaviour, given the obvious pre-conditions that exist.  We just have this existing insane scenario that makes the world poorer, and causes whole cities of people to be killed, and it seems there is nothing we can actually do about it.  This is very bad.

We were supposed to have this "United Nations" thing available to address exactly this type of problem, but it turns out, that the "United Nations" is just another political fraud.   And so we cannot make any real progress - at least until we can execute upon the kind of scenario described above. 

In the meantime, we really need to give Ukraine a much bigger Air Force, and some really serious fire-power and military hardware.    If, of course, we want to have things like food, peace, prosperity and freedom remain available to people on this planet.

[ May 13, 2022 ] - A Trip Around The Place - Busy times, checking & repairing properties.  Spectacular weather, good times.  We drove around various place in our local Homeland - and saw many Ukrainian flags.  Yellow and Blue.  The Yellow is for the fields of sunflowers, and the blue is for the lovely blue sky.  We have exactly the same colours here in the Great Wild North, as they do in Ukraine.  And suddenly, the schools have all these Ukrainian kids in them.   We are welcoming them.  They are really focused.  They will be *really* great folks to have in our wild Canadian matrix.

And speaking of yellow - we need to bake all that yellowcake, and get those spinners a-spinning.  Plowshares into swords, yellowcake into hexafluoride, and swing, swing, swing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A

Here that?  That's the sound of our centrifuges spinning.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjgZGhHrYY

The winds of change, are about to become a hurricane.  I've been to Helsinki.  It is a very beautiful city.

[ May 6, 2022 ] - Most Internet Traffic is Now Robots and Scams - And most trading activity on modern exchanges, is generated by AI's and algorithmic trading methods.   And public opinion is being actively managed by what can only be described as "agency operatives".

This presents a range of serious problems and risks.  The AI-driven stuff can be hacked in real-time, to do very bad things.  And public-opinion can be hacked to create mass-fraud, and enable terror-wars that sane folks would think are impossible.

Our IP# (supplied by our Internet provider), has had it's "reputation" damaged, by some sort of automated device, we suspect, so that "Cloudflare" (a site-security access-blocker firewall type tool) is now automatically blocking our access to a Ukrainian site we were monitoring.  

The world is getting both more nasty and much more stupid at the same time.

"Cloudflare" can be hacked this way, and turned into "CloudFAIL".

This is creating strange and extreme risks, combined with curious opportunities.

Our access to a Ukrainian site has now been *blocked*, because this "Cloudflare" company (which offers firewall service to websites), has decided, using it's Artificial Intelligence tools, that our IP#, (supplied by our internet service provider), is "has a bad reputation".  What these means, of course, is that some clever boys - somewhere else - can spoof your IP#, and just put it onto a blizzard of junkmail or some NMAP scan-attempts to break-in to a bunch of websites, and thus degrade the "reputation" of your IP#  (IP# is basically your internet address - unique as a phone number.)   This is a nasty, clever trick, we suspect.

We don't have bad software running at our end (we monitor packets in and out), but by trashing the "reputation" of our IP#, this completely blocks us from accessing the Ukrainian information site.

Pretty clever, eh?   The world is getting really nasty.   Our primary interest here, is to simply get the word out, that a co-ordinated attempt was made by  Russian operatives in Ukraine, to steal a MANPAD (Man-Portable Air Defense) missile launcher, and use it to shoot down a Russian airlliner - and blame the attack on Ukrainians.   This would inflame Russian public opinion, and justify a large scale-up in the Russian Terror-War underway in Ukraine.

This is VERY BAD STUFF.   We want to try to prevent this kind of ugly "FALSE FLAG" terrorist attack from occuring.  We want to prevent a Russian airliner full of innocent people from being killed by Putin's FSB goons.

Best way to prevent this - is to neutralize the value of the exercise.  Make everyone aware that AN ATTEMPT WAS ALREADY MADE TO TRY TO DO THIS.  We know the name of the goon that was running the operation, and the Ukrainian-Russian "dual citizens" behind the attempted theft, have been already arrested by Ukrainian Law Enforcement.

But if and when a Russian airliner is brought down by a Stinger missile or a Javalin anti-tank rocket, we want everyone to know that Ukraine is ACTIVELY TRYING TO PREVENT THIS terrorist-style attack, and that THIS WAS A PLANNED ACTION BY RUSSIAN AGENTS operating in Ukraine.  (See May 1st note below for details.)

And an attack has been made against our IP#, apparently - sufficient to make it impossible for us to access the Ukrainian information site where this latest "False Flag" terror attack attempt was reported.

Serious stuff.

[ May 5, 2022 ] - When in Danger or in Doubt, Shout & Sell & Try to Cash Out? - Markets are getting quite twitchy - running up 900 points in USA-land on Fed. Reserve interest rate increases on first day, and then crashing down more than 1000 points next day.   I've read 15 to 20 articles by pundits and portfolio-jockeys, none of whom mention what is driving this mad behaviour.  It is the Russian Terror War in Ukraine, of course. 

The US Federal Reserve is a sideshow.   A 50 basis point rate increase from a low starting point, is not too much to worry about.   But loss of a very large section of planet-Earth's economy, and it's buying power and farm-production (ie *food* production), is a huge issue.  Russia is offline due to sanctions, and Ukraine's output is not available in any sort of predictable way.  This is tragic and quite bad.

It's astonishing - I read pages of comments and public responses by folks who run money and manage financial enterprises in USA and globally, and almost no one really grasps what a very big deal, the loss of Russian and Ukraine as peaceful partners, really is. 

The disruptions that are to be caused by sanctions on Russian economic actions, and against actual economic goods themselves - combined with the loss of Ukraine food and industrial output and trade - are going to be large and significant.  We are all going to be hurt.

We believe that the USA and Canada stock markets are more accurately pricing in this ugly reality today, May 5th, 2022, than they were just a few days ago.  With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1063 points today, we look to have a real bear market underway, despite the buy-the-dip historical mentality.

A stock market and the much bigger bond market, both domestic and all-the-World, are beginning to realize that a  significant, non-trivial collapse of world trade and commercial activity cannot be consistant with rising commercial enterprise valuations.

The Russian Terror War in Ukraine is now doing great damage to Ukraine, and *will* begin to do great damage to Russia itself - and will also damage global prosperity and impair future global economic growth. 

Every day this war goes on, makes the World a poorer, and less stable place in which to live - and also to invest.    Putin has unleashed a tragic and absurd madness.    Russia will see it's economic level collapse along with Ukraine's, and the Western world will see degraded asset valuations, lower growth and/or outright GDP shrinkage, along with prices rising because of real product scarity, and significant supply-chain disruption.

We had hoped sanity would prevail, and peace could be engineered in Ukraine - but given the scale, extent and nature of the abuses that Russian forces have inflicted, this seems to be becoming less and less likely each day.

And when this real damage to global economics is combined with the beginning of a Federal Reserve (and UK and Europe) "tightening cycle" now provably underway, and the "Covid-19" lockdowns in China (and China's refusal to buy and deploy Pfizer and/or Moderna vaccines), a truly toxic cocktail is thus going to be served to investors everywhere.  

Madness.

[ May 3, 2022 ] - Frederich Merz Has Ba//s of Steel - And he travelled without security protection, to Kyiv, to meet with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, the other World Leader who also has Ba//s of Steel.   We understand the talks went well.  

(Bloomberg) -- German opposition leader Friedrich Merz had an hour-long meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv on Tuesday, amid a background of growing tension between the governments in Berlin and Kyiv. 

The talk went “exceptionally well”, Merz’s spokesman later wrote on Twitter.

--- 30 ---

Please - Germany and Ukraine - no disputes or bad feelings, OK?  Everyone in the World has to be on the same side in this fight.   Verstehst du mich?  Putin's insane "Zombie" forces must be crushed and destroyed.  The Future of Freedom for planet Earth, depends on this simple requirement.  Putins wahnsinnige „Zombie“-Kräfte müssen zermalmt und vernichtet werden. Die Zukunft der Freiheit für den Planeten Erde hängt von dieser einfachen Anforderung ab.

Безумные путинские «зомби» силы должны быть сокрушены и уничтожены. 
Будущее свободы для планеты Земля зависит от этого простого
 требования.

Germany; Let's get those Leopard tanks on the go, ok?  Please?  A few MiGs would also really make a difference.  (The "Ghost of Kyiv" will live forever in our hearts and minds and history books.)

[ May 1, 2022 ] - False-Flag Faked Blame - but the Plan was for Real Murder & Terror.

The Russian Gangsters working for Putin had rigged this plan to steal a "MANPAD" (a Javelin or a Stinger portable missile), and use it to shoot down a civilian airliner in Belarus or Russia itself.  The idea would be to blame Ukraine "terrorists", and then launch a bigger, (maybe nuclear) attack on Ukraine.

This is really pure-fake nasty "Hitler-style" evil.  This is a "False-Flag" attack, and is sometimes known as "pretexting" - ie. you create a fake "pretext" for doing some sort of ugly, awful criminal action, using your national military.   Hitler did this to start his invasion of Poland.   Stalin of Russia was his ally.    But the world knows about this trick now.   Everyone knows.

This is more dim-bulb evil being hatched by Putin's goon-squadrons of very-bad-people.

These Russian agents were going to kill an airliner full of their own Russian citizens.

Except Ukrainian Intelligence agents have been waiting for this sort of bullsh/t, and caught the little traitors, who were planning to pull off this vicious, cruel and **stupid-evil** action.

Link to the details, in Ukrainian:  (They even have the code-name of the Russian goon that was the controller of this mission..)

(We had the link to the Ukraine site URL in here, and we had to remove it, as putting in here, seems to have triggered a device to trash our IP# 's "reputation", so that the our machines can no longer access the Ukrainian site.  (see May 6th note above for more info.) )

English Translation:

Russian intelligence agents tried to steal a Stinger MANPADS to shoot down a plane 
carrying passengers in Russia or Belarus. This was 
reported by the SBU. Ukrainian law enforcement
 conducted a multi-stage special 
operation to identify and neutralize enemy agents. Their group consisted of two 
dual citizens and a recruited accomplice. 
Their work was coordinated by Russian Alexander Tyuterev, who is a staff member 
of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and has the call sign "Marine".

[End translation]

[Ukrainian text: ]

Агенти російських спецслужб намагалися викрасти ПЗРК “Stinger”, щоб збити літак з пасажирами на території Росії чи Білорусі.
Про це повідомляє повідомляє" СБУ.
Українські правоохоронці провели багатоетапну спецоперацію, в ході якої виявили та нейтралізували ворожих агентів. Їхня група складалася з двох осіб з подвійним громадянством та завербованого спільника. Координував їхню роботу росіянин Олександр Тютерев, який є кадровим співробітником головного управління генштабу збройних сил РФ та має позивний «Морпех».

[ end Ukrainian text ]

----

We at GEMESYS Ltd. offer this information, as public service.  This is some *really-bad-shit*.  This Russian spy-goon was basically planning to carry out a terrorist action that was the equiavalent of what Bin Laden did in the USA so as to give "pretext" for Putin to scale-up his Terror War in Ukraine.

This is very, very serious.  Putin is willing to *** Kill large numbers of his own Russian people *** just to continue to expand the insane warfare atrocity that is taking place in Ukraine.

This is just about as bad as it gets.   The entire World community needs to understand that this Putin character has to be removed, at whatever cost.

We are dealing with an absolutely evil person here, who is more dangerous than was Hitler.

It is better to stop this Putin person now, rather than wait until he tries to kill the whole world.