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The Deck is Cold. It's now late-November, 2023. Does a cold deck make for a hot hand? The markets are recovering, inflation is being reduced, and new rate-shocks seem to be on hold. There is even a threat of peace. The markets are drifting higher, but remain curiously risky. We are used to cyclic behaviour. Summer is lovely, but Autumn always comes along... The summer things are packed away now. The leaves have been raked up. The cycles will track their course, like they always do. (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)
Here is my new Sorrento boat at my dock, at my Northern lake. "There's NOTHING - absolutely *nothing* - half so much worth doing as messing about in boats... or with boats!" - Water Rat, in "The Wind in the Willows", by Kenneth Grahame. The older I get, the more truth I recognize in this little assertion. (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)
This is a hack I am pleased with. I like the helm on the Sorrento, and I now have got the panel lights working. This images shows what the panel looks like at night, and what it looks like with external flash-camera illumination. (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)
We had some nice weather, so I got some range-time in. Here is the Norinco NP29, after cleaning, and with a bit of polish applied. It's a nickel-coated 9mm, but in the standard M1911 ("Colt .45") form factor. It's just a joy to shoot, although the trigger is a tad stiff. But I can drop the plates at 10 meters, which is remarkably soul-satisfying. Shooting is a very good sport. It teaches self-control, discipline, and focused technical awareness. The world would be a better and more peaceful place, if it were offered as a course in all public high-schools. (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)
New Research Log - Beginning in February, 2023
[ 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.
Netenyahu 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.
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:
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.
[ 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...)
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.
[ 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.
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
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!)
[ 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.
[ 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://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:
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 vapourizedIt'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
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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...]
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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
[ 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:
(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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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:
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.
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...
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":
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):
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:
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:
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."
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
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.
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.)
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...
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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 an