Wednesday, December 1, 2021

"Trust Me, I Know What I’m Doing"

"Trust Me, I Know What I’m Doing"
by Bill Bonner

"Trust me, I know what I’m doing."
– ­Inspector Sledge Hammer, 1980’s TV show

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "Oh My Cron? OH-mee-cron? Or something like that. President Biden sees it as such a big thing, he scheduled an address to the nation. Of course, POTUS knows nothing more about the omicron COVID variant than the rest of us. Still, he urged all Americans to get a booster shot. Is he practicing medicine without a license? Who knows? Here at the Diary, the hardest decision we make each morning is choosing what to laugh at first.

Quick Movers: Meanwhile, some slick hustlers moved fast to capitalize on the omicron craze. Yes, you guessed it… they rushed out an Omicron crypto coin. No kidding. What market did it serve? What product or service did it offer? Why the hell would anyone want to buy it?

We have no idea, other than that the word “omicron” came to be very much used over the weekend. Here’s Mark Gongloff at Bloomberg: "A crypto thing called Omicron has soared more than 900% since Saturday because there is now also a Covid variant called omicron. That’s it. That’s the reason. Omicron the Crypto Thing is, in the words of CoinTelegraph, “a recently introduced decentralized reserve currency protocol that runs on the Ethereum layer-two network Arbitrum. Its native OMIC token is backed by several other crypto assets including the USD Coin stablecoin and liquidity provider tokens. It can only be traded on the SushiSwap decentralized exchange.”

Clear as mud…

Here’s Gongloff’s colleague, Matt Levine, with more gibberish: "Omicron is a clone of OlympusDAO, a fascinating decentralized-finance Ponzi scheme that we’ll probably have to talk about around here one day, but that’s not why it’s up. It’s up because it is a tradable claim with the word “omicron” in its name, and the word “omicron” is up. You just have to unfocus your eyes and not think too hard about it. Omicron, omicron, get it?"

Distract and Conquer: In South Africa, where the variant first made landfall, health officials say omicron, the virus, is no big deal. It produces “mild” symptoms, they say. But hey… there’s one born every minute. Some become crypto gamblers. Others become presidents of the USA.

Besides… this is a good time for distractions. Inflation is getting worse… Stocks are falling… Congress is again bumping into a debt ceiling… Gasoline is 60% higher than a year ago… Supplies of oil, gas, and electricity are becoming more fragile…and winter is coming. USA Today adds:

"Who imagined that COVID-19 would continue to ravage us and that we would also have record-high inflation, sky-high gas and food prices, and our fellow Americans left behind in Afghanistan? Who could have seen that the No. 1 enemy of the Justice Department in 2021 would be parents worried about what their children were taught in school? Who thought that our southern border would be effectively open and that the supply chain crisis would be so dire, children’s Christmas gifts are at risk?"

When you are out of office, tell the voters that things are getting worse. But when you are in office, let them think that Heaven on Earth is just around the corner. If we were president, we know what we’d say: Inflation? No problem; it’s transitory. Debt ceiling? Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan. New variant? Under control. And winter? Who could have seen that coming?!

Special Precautions: Viruses, like cryptos, replicate. And then, they tend to lose their puissance. They are living things. They “want” to spread out… to reproduce. And they do it best by infecting people, but not killing them… at least, not until they’ve had a chance to spread to others. But you never know. Most of the deaths – whether from COVID-19 or the flu – are probably “accidental,” or collateral damage, from the virus’s point of view. Their hosts just couldn’t handle the load. And you might be one of them.

So, if you don’t want to risk getting a virus, the way to do it is easy – never leave your home… and never permit any visitors, not even from pets. Few humans want to live that way. Instead, they take their chances. They drive fast, eat mushrooms, and enjoy one-night-stands without asking vaccination status… and go see doctors and priests to help them through their moments of doubt and pain.

And as they get older, they become more vulnerable, so they take special precautions. They move more slowly, for fear of falling. They drive more carefully, aware that their reactions are not as swift as they once were. They get their shots. And they die.

Tried and True: Here at the Diary, we have no problem with any of that. Amor fati. Do fools get separated from their money? Do old people die? Do the leaves turn color in the autumn and politicians lie all year round? We are serene about the way the world works. But we prefer truth to lies, beauty to ugliness, and courage to cowardice. And when the leaves turn and the chilly winds blow, we prefer looking out on a few cords of dry firewood, rather than trusting the Department of Energy to make sure we stay warm.

For our money, we’ll stick to the old tried-and-true. And as to medical advice, we’ll talk to our doctor."

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