Jeremiah Babe,
“Americans Spending Like Crazy; Consumers In Fantasyland;
System Meltdown Inevitable; Fake Recovery”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, April 18, 2021
Musical Interlude: Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Like delicate cosmic petals, these clouds of interstellar dust and gas have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile star fields of the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes called the Iris Nebula and dutifully cataloged as NGC 7023 this is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this remarkable image shows off the Iris Nebula's range of colors and symmetries in impressive detail. Within the Iris, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star.
The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Central filaments of the dusty clouds glow with a faint reddish photoluminesence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Infrared observations indicate that this nebula may contain complex carbon molecules known as PAHs. The bright blue portion of the Iris Nebula is about six light-years across.”
"Each Of Us..."
“Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless -
each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.”
- Walt Whitman
Chet Raymo, “A Few Words Inspired By The Tomato Plant”
“A Few Words Inspired By The Tomato Plant”
by Chet Raymo
"Mostly we think of life in terms of individuals - this person, this tomato plant, this frog, this oak tree, this gnat. And we talk about birth and death as the beginning and ending of life. But there is another sense in which life is just one thing, whose beginning is lost in the depths of time and whose end is not in sight. Life in this sense embodies itself in matter, temporarily, as a tomato or a frog, puts on matter and puts off matter as we might don or doff clothes. By this account, I am an ephemeral conglomeration of atoms that life is using to perpetuate itself.
But what is this thing called life? It cannot exist except as embodied form, but it maintains a continuity independent of any particular embodiment. It is a strange enduring wave that stirs the material world into purposeful and directed avenues. With Johannes Kepler we might call it the facultas formatrix of nature, the formative faculty, but giving something a name doesn't explain it. Whatever life is - in the unitary, enduring sense - it would be surprising if it only existed here on Earth. If I were a betting man I would bet that life is as pervasive as matter itself, or energy. Matter, energy and complexification. We have lots left to learn.
But let's be cautious. There are lots of folks out there with half-baked biocentric theories of the universe. Someone once chided the philosopher W. V. O. Quine with a quote from Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” To which Quine is said to have responded: “Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”
“Touched With Fire”
“Touched With Fire”
by Paul Dalio
“My name is Paul Dalio. I’m a filmmaker, husband of my NYU film school classmate, father of two children and bipolar. Of these labels, the one I’m certain stands out in your mind is bipolar - and not in a good way. That’s no fault of your own, since you probably don’t know much about it other than what you’ve heard. I’m either right about this assumption or wrong about it. But either way, I’m certain of it because of my past experiences with the stigma that surrounds it.
So how do I deal with this label? I could remove the “I am” part to avoid it defining me and just say “I have” in which case I would have to add the word “disorder” to “bipolar,” which isn’t exactly the ideal fix. I could say I have a mental illness or am manic-depressive. But other than that, what label do I have to choose from that’s not a disorder, disease, illness or defect in my humanity?
The recent attempts to fight stigma have been to say “you are not your illness,” but I and others of my kind can’t swallow that because we can’t get around the fact that God weaved that illness into the fabric of our DNA, since bipolar is genetic and has been running through our family trees since the origin of our being.
I remember when I received the label at age 24. It was just after I could have sworn I saw God lift the veil and unfold the entire miracle of the universe before my eyes. I was thrown into a hospital, pumped full of drugs and came down only to be told that I wasn’t experiencing anything divine; I just triggered a lifelong illness that would swing me from psychotic manias to suicidal depressions with progressive intensity until I would most likely fall into the 1-in-4 suicide statistic - unless I took my meds, which made me feel no emotion.
If you can imagine missing feeling sad, it’s the only thing worse than pain. All every medical book had to offer was that if I stayed on these meds, I could live a “reasonably normal life.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty sure it sounded like “just get by.” So I stepped out of the hospital, knowing I wouldn’t be the sane person I used to be and not wanting to be this new human diseased me.
Six months later, I came across a book, "Touched with Fire", by Kay Jamison. It was the first medical text showing a tangible correlation between bipolar and artistic genius, profiling some of the greatest artists in history. Kay Jamison is a psychologist who in the middle of her time at UCLA went manic. She was going to hide it at first, afraid of how her psychiatric community would react, but she decided to be open about it and write books about it, one of which was "Touched with Fire."
For the first time, I heard words, shining right through every medical book’s thick printed clinical ink, describing something I could be proud to be. I was like, Yeah, that’s what I am. I’m “touched with fire.”
It would be destructive for me to deny all four seasons of the bipolar fire. When summer’s mania exceeds its stay and the fall shadows grab hold of your brain, you can feel your will within each withering leaf clinging to the trees of the entire forest surrounding you slipping as they fall down on you. When winter rolls around and your soul retreats deep beneath the frozen ground, and it’s calling your body down, it feels like your ashes are fighting gravity. And when spring comes again, it extends a warm invitation to rise too high and repeat the bipolar cycle that will lay waste to your lives.
Likewise, it would be unwise for a doctor to deny that on those manic summer nights, when we look out our hospital windows, we can see the stars pulsing spirals of fire across the sky, as God lifts the veil and unfolds the entire universe before our eyes. We know that humanity’s most beloved image of the sky was seen through a sanitarium window with Van Gogh’s manic eyes, and that scientists have recently discovered a phenomenon in nature that occurs in the sky called turbulence which, while painted perfectly in Van Gogh’s manic sky, is invisible to the human eye.
The reasons why it would be unwise for a doctor to deny this is because if the doctor acknowledged that maybe there was something to it, that maybe it wasn’t just some misfiring synapsis flashing through a crack in our minds, maybe we saw something that was just too beautiful to prove, he would also be able to remind the patient that while Van Gogh may have seen that sky through manic eyes, he didn’t paint it when he was manic, because he didn’t need the mania to have the fire.
And that doctor would then be able to assure the patient that he doesn’t want to stomp out that fire, that over time with gradual adjustments in medications they would work together to make sure the patient keeps that fire, and sustains it without letting it get out of control and burn down his mind, leaving his life in ashes.
How much more receptive would a patient be to treatment if the patient was told that the treatment was to nurture a gift they had, instead of terminate a disease they had? When out of all the poets who received the Pulitzer - the prize awarded to those who made the biggest contributions to the human spirit - 38 percent of them were bipolar, how can we simply label it a human disorder? Think how much more they could contribute to the human spirit if they knew it could be used as a gift to humanity, instead of something to hide from humanity?
However, in order for this to work, the doctor has to be able to trust the patient just as much as the patient has to be able to trust the doctor. My doctor trusted me, since he saw I was impeccable with my health habits, I was patient, willing to wait years before finally feeling full rich emotion, and that I would be satisfied without mania. So in return, he was never satisfied until I felt I had full rich emotion. I now feel deeper, richer emotion and more creativity than I ever did before bipolar, to the point where I can call it a gift, so much that given the opportunity I wouldn’t want a “cure.”
Still, I know I’ll always be walking a tightrope, but you get better at it over time, and like the guy who crossed the twin towers, you learn not to fall. And the higher the stakes and tighter the wire, the stronger and more disciplined you’re forced to become in order to survive. It’s only when things are so dark you can’t see hope one inch in front of your eyelids and it’s so cold, your soul is so numb, you don’t even know if it still exists, when just as your dim glow is this close to being blown out by your own lips a sudden spark of grit and will to live breaks into a flame of desperation, raging to blaze its way into the light of day again. So by the time you finally rise, the light in all those sunbathing souls combined couldn’t hold a candle to the fire in just one of your eyes. And when you combine that with the bipolar fire, no matter what anyone labels you, that’s something they can’t deny.
Van Gogh said, “What am I in the eyes of most people? - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”
I’m sure what he meant is, if you step out of the MoMA after seeing “Starry Night” and you walk by a crazy man gazing up at the sky with wide crazy eyes, before you cross the street to avoid walking past him, maybe you’ll see him differently now that you saw through his eyes. And instead of saying “he’s bipolar,” maybe you’ll say, or at least think, “Oh, he’s touched with fire.”
"New Rule: Give It to Me Straight, Doc; Real Time with Bill Maher"
"New Rule: Give It to Me Straight, Doc;
Real Time with Bill Maher"
"Comedian Bill Maher used his HBO show once again to highlight some awkward 'facts' and ask some uncomfortable questions about media and politicians approach to COVID. He rightly decries the politicization of medicine and the manner in which the media has been a handmaiden of panic throughout. Let us hope that his monologue, transcript below, is a foreshadowing of what will soon emerge as the conventional wisdom. Full transcript below:
"And finally new rule, don’t spin me when it comes to my health. Over the past year, the COVID pandemic has prompted the medical establishment, the media, and the government to take a scared straight approach to getting the public to comply with their recommendations. Well, I’m from a different school. Give it to me straight doc, because in the long run that always works better than you can’t handle the truth.
Now I get it, doctors tell people lies because they don’t trust you to finish the antibiotics…. And media, well, I think we all know if it bleeds, it leads. The more they can get you to stay inside and watch their panic porn the higher the ratings. Researchers at Dartmouth built a database recently monitoring the COVID coverage of the major news outlets across the world and found that while other countries mix the good news in with the bad, the U.S. national media reported almost 90% bad news. Even as things were getting better, the reporting remained negative. And politicians, they lie because it’s their nature to cover their ass. They don’t get blamed if things goes badly and also to keep in practice.
But when all of our sources for medical information have an agenda to spin us, yeah, you wind up with a badly misinformed population including on the left. Liberals often mock the Republican misinformation bubble, which of course is very real. Ask anyone who works at Hillary’s pizza parlor. And we do know conservatives have some loopy ideas about COVID like the third of Republicans who believe it couldn’t be spread by someone showing no symptoms. But what about liberals? You know the high information by the science people. In a recent Gallup survey,
Democrats did much worse than Republicans in getting the right answer to the fundamental question: what are the chances that someone who gets COVID will need to be hospitalized? The answer is between one and 5%. 41% of Democrats thought it was over 50%, another 28% put the chances at 20 to 49.
So almost 70% of Democrats are wildly off on this key question and also have a greatly exaggerated view of the danger of COVID too and the mortality rate among children. All of which explains why today, the states with the highest share of schools that are still closed are all blue states. So if the right wing media bubble has to own things like climate change denial, shouldn’t liberal media have to answer for how did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID.
A new report in the Atlantic says the media won’t stop putting pictures of the beach on stories about COVID even though it’s looking increasingly like the beach is the best place to avoid it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and vitamin D is the key to a robust immune system. Texas lifted its COVID restrictions recently and their infection rates went down in part because of people getting outside to let the sun and wind do their thing.But to many liberals that can’t be right because Texas and beach loving Florida have Republican governors, but life is complicated.
I’ve read that the governor of Florida reads. I know we like to think of Florida as only middle school teachers on bath salts having sex with their students in front of an alligator but apparently the governor is also a voracious consumer of the scientific literature. And maybe that’s why he protected his most vulnerable population, the elderly, way better than did the governor of New York.
Those are just facts. I know it’s irresponsible of me to say them. Look, here’s what I’m saying, I don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions. And now that everything is politics… That’s all we do. If their side says COVID is nothing, our side has to say it’s everything. Trump said it would go away like a miracle. And we said it was World War Z. Trump said we should ingest household disinfectants and we laughed as we should of course. And then it turned out 19% of America was literally drenching the fruit in Clorox. And now of course, we find out that all that paranoia about surfaces was bullshit anyway even though we spent hours and hours wiping our knobs with Lysol. And if you’ve ever wiped your knob with Lysol, I think you know.
Now go home and wash the mail. If you lie to people, even for a very good cause you lose their trust. I think a lot of people… Thank you. I think a lot of people died because of Trump’s incompetence. And I think a lot of people died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America. I know you’ve heard me pound this fried drumstick before, but since I last mentioned it, a stunning statistic was reported. 78% of those hospitalized, ventilated, or dead from COVID have been overweight. It is the key piece of the puzzle by far the most pertinent factor, but you dare not speak its name. Imagine how many lives could have been saved. If there had been some national campaign [inaudible 00:06:49] Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Program with the urgency of the pandemic behind it.
If the media and the doctors had made a point to keep saying, but there’s something you can do. But we’ll never know because they never did because the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie."
"After All..."
“The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.”
And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…
“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
- Sydney J. Harris
Everyone says “Only human…” compared to what?
Billy Joel, "You're Only Human"
“You Are Free, Like it or Not”
“You Are Free, Like it or Not”
by David Cain
“One evening I went with my family to a Thai restaurant for dinner. They seated us near the back, not far from the kitchen doors. A very bubbly waitress brought us our menus, filled our waters and told us to let her know if we needed anything, or had any questions about anything at all. When she came back, we ordered. “Perfect!” she said with a huge smile, taking our menus. She went off to the kitchen. As soon as she was through the doors, her voice changed. She was chatting with the staff and we could hear every word.
“Oh my God, I was so sick this morning! I couldn’t stop puking. My boyfriend had to hold my hair back for me.” She went on about the trip to bar, the shooters, the cab ride, the stupid friends who didn’t show up. Lots of details and swear words. Then she came through the doors again, her waitress face back on, and took orders from a few more tables. She went back into the kitchen again. More profane banter. When she brought out our food, she had a wide, wholesome smile, and it was really hard not to laugh.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Jean-Paul Sartre had written about a similar scenario to illustrate a human tendency he called bad faith. His waiter at a cafe seemed to be completely under the spell of his role as a server. He moved too quickly, too snappily. He spoke about the daily specials with an enthusiasm that no food could warrant in real life. His gestures were so ridiculously waiterly that he seemed to have lost track of the fact that he was a free-choosing person, as if there was nothing to him besides his current role.
Sartre believed that we have much more freedom than we tend to acknowledge. We habitually deny it to protect ourselves from the horror of accepting full responsibility for our lives. In every instant, we are free to behave however we like, but we often act as though circumstances have reduced our options down to one or two ways to move forward.
This is bad faith: when we convince ourselves that we’re less free than we really are, so that we don’t have to feel responsible for what we ultimately make of ourselves. It really seems like you must get up at 7:00 every Monday, because constraints such as your job, your family’s schedule, and your body’s needs leave no other possibility. But it’s not true – you can set your alarm for any time, and are free to explore what’s different about life when you do. You don’t have to do things the way you’ve always done them, and that is true in every moment you’re alive. Yet we feel like we’re on a pretty rigid track most of the time.
We often think of freedom as something that can only make life easier, but it can actually be overwhelming and even terrifying. Think about it: we can take, at any moment, any one of infinite roads into the future, and nothing less than the rest of our lives hinges on each choice. So it can be a huge relief to tell ourselves that we actually have fewer options available to us, or even no choice at all. In other words, even though we want the best life possible, if life is going to be disappointing, we’d at least like that to be someone else’s fault.
When freedom is scary, we pretend it isn’t there: As soon as I learned about the concept of bad faith, I started noticing that I am guilty of it all the time. I might delay on a worthwhile-but-nerve-wracking phone call until it’s no longer an option to make, and tell myself the opportunity slipped through my fingers accidentally. I might pretend I didn’t hear a critical comment so that I didn’t have to decide how to respond to it. I often tell myself I can’t do any worthwhile work unless I have two uninterrupted hours to do it in.
I have a long history of bad faith. Maybe you do too. In high school, I remember deliberately learning as little as possible about scholarship opportunities, because I’d rather not apply for one than apply and see it go to someone else. Afterwards I might even complain that a guy like me could never compete with all the goodie-goodie students who schmoozed with the teachers.
I also used bad faith to rationalize my extreme levels of shyness, making life much harder in the process. Some part of me knew that being a functioning adult meant learning how to engage in small talk. But it was scary, so I told myself that small talk is all vapid and worthless, and I was abstaining from it out of principle, rather than fear. Like a lot of very shy people, I didn’t date in high school because I was afraid of rejection, but told myself it was because I had high standards.
We’ve probably all done this one: you’re dreading a to-do item because it requires a difficult decision. So you put it off, ignoring reminders you’ve set for yourself, putting less-important things ahead of it. You do this even though some part of you knows it has to be done anyway, and delays only make things worse for you. You make excuses why you can’t do it today – “I should get a better sleep before dealing with this” – even though nobody is fooled but yourself, and not even you benefits from your pretending you can’t do it yet. But you do get that hit of relief when you make a new excuse.
All of these kinds of behaviors are ways of denying our own freedom. If we acknowledged all of our options, the obvious thing to do might be something intimidating. Once you’ve acknowledged that it isn’t actually impossible for you to quit smoking, then you have to quit smoking. When freedom is scary, we pretend it isn’t there.
Bad faith is easier to notice in others than ourselves. You’ve almost certainly known people who complain about their situations, and insist that it is beyond their control when it obviously isn’t. When it’s really obvious, we call it a victim mentality. We tell ourselves stories that make us out to be hapless objects in the world – billiard balls on the table, rather than the players.
A former friend of mine perpetually expressed dissatisfaction with his overweight body, and had a shoot-down reason for every possible way to lose the weight. Running is bad for the knees. Restricting your diet leads to eating disorders. Lifting weights is for meatheads. Gyms are trying to rip you off. It was obvious these were not real barriers he ran into when he tried, but ways of arguing that his circumstances alone are responsible for his troubles, and that he was out of moves.
Essentially, all instances of bad faith are performances of some kind, in which we’re acting as though our hands are tied. We’re trying to convince ourselves (often by way of convincing others) that we actually can’t do the right thing, when in fact we simply won’t.
Life is a field, not a corridor: Bad faith leads to living inauthentically – living others’ values because you’re afraid of living your own. It is inherently self-defeating.
Sartre wanted us to really feel our freedom, as an almost physical sensation – the sensation of walking down a corridor, then noticing you were in a field the whole time. It is an exhilarating feeling to consciously go the other way at a juncture where you normally act in bad faith. It feels like you’ve unlocked a hidden area with new skills and possibilities, and that such secret rooms are everywhere.
Whenever you feel a sense of “this is just the way it is”, there is probably some bad faith there. For years I assumed I can’t expect to get any writing done after 5pm – the energy or focus just isn’t there, so I’m practically sentenced to spend the evening reading, watching something on a screen, going out or otherwise not working.
This is an old, self-defeating lie, and there’s no telling what it’s cost me. There’s no barrier at 5pm. The line is completely imaginary. There’s just a strong aversion to my work when I get close to that time of day, and I pretend it’s some kind of natural law.
Our lives are riddled with imaginary lines. Bedtime isn’t a real thing. It’s a choice, every time. Going to work is a choice. Eating lunch is a choice. Letting ourselves down is a choice. Meeting a deadline is a choice, and missing it is a choice, as much as we’d like to believe each of those outcomes was inevitable all along.
Noticing bad faith doesn’t cure it, but it makes it harder to ignore. We can let ourselves suffer certain problems for years, if we think they’re happening to us, the way weather does. But once you recognize a particular condition in your life as ultimately voluntary, its days are probably numbered.
I can’t describe to you how strong a feeling it is, but once it’s past 5 pm, I truly feel like I can’t write. It seems like the part of my brain that does that is shuttered like a storefront on a Sunday evening. But when I actually do sit down at six or seven or eight and start typing, the words come out like any other time. The door was always open, I just walked by it again and again and again.”
"Putin's Ukrainian Judo" (Excerpt)
Full screen recommended.
April 18, 2021:
"All-out War: Ukraine and Russia Surge as Troops ‘Ready for Assault’"
"Fears of all-out war between Ukraine and Russia are intensifying as front line troops described being "ready for the assault". Tensions between the two nations have risen after Ukrainian diplomats called Russia’s growing army “the largest troop movement since the Second World War”. US President Joe Biden issued a warning on Thursday, urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to de-escalate tensions and “refrain from military action.” In a statement, Mr Biden said: “If Russia continues to interfere with our democracy, I’m prepared to take further actions to respond. “Now is the time to de-escalate.” The US cancelled deployment of two warships to the Black Sea on April 14 in order to avoid an unnecessary escalation of the situation."
•
"Putin's Ukrainian Judo" (Excerpt)
by Dmitry Orlov
"A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia’s border with the Ukraine - or not - but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years - the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long! - this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.
But what’s about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?
The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia’s troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia’s paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others’ tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then has been met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.
Is it different this time and is World War III is about to erupt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?"
Please view this complete, lengthy, and critically important article here:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/18/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead: Important Updates"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/18/21:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Important Updates"
"The $2.3 Quadrillion Global Timebomb"
"The $2.3 Quadrillion Global Timebomb"
By Egon von Greyerz
"Credit Suisse is hours from collapse and the consequences could be a systemic failure of the financial system. Disappointingly, my dream last night stopped there. So unfortunately I didn’t experience what actually happened.
As I warned in last week’s article on Archegos and Credit Suisse, investment banks have created a timebomb with the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives monster. A few years ago, the BIS (Bank of International Settlement) in Basel reduced the $1.5 quadrillion to $600 trillion with a pen stroke. But the real gross figure was still $1.5q at the time. According to my sources, the real figure today is probably over $2 quadrillion. A major part of the outstanding derivatives are OTC (over the counter) and hidden in off balance sheet special purpose vehicles.
Leveraged Assets Just Go Up In Smoke: The $30 billion in Archegos derivatives that went up in smoke over a weekend is just the tip of the iceberg. The hedge fund Archegos lost everything and the normal uber-leveraged players Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Nomura etc lost at least $30 billion. These investment banks are making casino bets that they can’t afford to lose. What their boards and top management don’t realize or understand is that the traders, supported by easily manipulated risk managers, are betting the bank on a daily basis.
Most of these ludicrously high bets are in the derivatives market. The management doesn’t understand how they work or what the risks are and the account managers and traders can bet billions on a daily basis with no skin in the game but massive potential upside if nothing goes wrong.
Deutsche Bank – Derivatives 600X Equity: But we are now entering an era when things will go wrong. The leverage is just too high and the bets totally out of proportion to the equity. Just take the notorious Deutsche Bank (DB) that has outstanding derivatives of €37 trillion against total equity of €62 billion. Thus the derivatives position is 600X the equity. Or to put it in a different way, the equity is 0.17% of the outstanding derivatives. So a loss of 0.2% on the derivatives will wipe the share capital and the bank out!
Now the DB risk managers will argue that the net derivatives position is just a fraction of the €37 trillion at €20 billion. That is of course nonsense as we saw with Archegos when a few banks let $30 billion over a weekend. Derivatives can only be netted down on the basis that counterparties pay up. But in a real systemic crisis, counterparties will disappear and gross exposure will remain gross. So all that netting doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny. But it is typical for today’s casino banking world when depositors, shareholders and governments take all the downside risk and the management all the upside.
So let us look at the global risk picture in the financial system:
The $2.3 quadrillion above is what the world is exposed to when this timebomb explodes. That is the total sum of global debt, derivatives and unfunded liabilities. When all the dominos start falling, and no one can meet their obligations, this is what governments are left to finance. Yes, they will print this money and much more as deficits mount exponentially due to collapsing currencies. But the MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) clowns will then find out that printed money rightfully has ZERO value.
If these clowns studied history they would learn that MMT has never worked. Just check the Roman Empire 180-280 AD, France in the early 18th century, or the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela in the 19th and 20th centuries.
So when Fiat money dies, how much gold is required to repair the damage? If we look at the cube below with all the gold ever produced in history, we see that it is 198,000 tonnes valued at $11 trillion.
Below the cube the total central bank and investment gold is shown. This amounts to 77,000 tonnes or $4.3 trillion. That sum represents 0.2% of the total debt and liabilities of $2.3 quadrillion as shown in the Timebomb.
The $4.3 trillion gold value is at a gold price of $1,750 per ounce. This minuscule 0.2% of liabilities obviously is far too small to support global debt. A 20% gold backing of total liabilities would be a minimum. That would be 100X the current 0.2% or a gold price of $175,000.
I am not forecasting this level or saying that it is likely to happen. All I am doing is looking at the total risk that the world is facing and relating it to the only money that will survive. Also, measuring the gold price in dollars serves no purpose because when/if this scenario happens, the dollar will be worthless and the gold price measured in worthless dollars at infinity."
"Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails"
"Globalists Will Need Another Crisis
In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails"
by Brandon Smith
"It might sound like “US exceptionalism” to point this out (…and how very dare I), but even if the globalist Reset is successful in every other nation on Earth, the globalists are still failures if they can’t secure and subjugate the American people. As I’ve noted many times in the past, most of the world has been sufficiently disarmed, and even though we are seeing resistance in multiple European nations against forced vaccination legislation and medical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will have the ability to actually repel a full on march into totalitarianism. Most of Asia, India and Australia are already well under control. Africa is almost an afterthought , considering Africa is where many suspect vaccines are tested.
America represents the only significant obstacle to the agenda. Conservative Americans in particular have been a thorn in the side of the globalists for generations, and it really comes down to a simple matter of mutual exclusion: You cannot have an openly globalist society and conservative ideals at the same time in the same place. It is impossible.
Conservatives believe in limited government, true free markets, individual liberty, the value of life, freedom of speech, private property rights, the right to self defense, the right to self determination, freedom of religion, and the non-aggression principle (we won’t harm you unless you try to harm us). None of these ideals can exist in a globalist world because globalism is at its core the pursuit of a fully centralized tyranny.
There are people on this planet that are not satisfied to merely live their lives, take care of their families and make their mark peacefully. They crave power over all else. They desperately want control over you, over me, over everything, and they will use any means at their disposal to get it. I would compare it to a kind of drug addiction; globalists are like crack addicts, they can never get enough power, there is always something more to take.
They tell themselves and others that they are “philanthropists”, that “they know what is best” for the rest of us. They believe themselves superior and therefore it is their “destiny” to dictate and micro-manage society for the “greater good” of us all. But really, when we witness their methods it becomes clear that they have no noble aspirations. They have no empathy or honor. They don’t care about the average human being, or the environment, or the economy or society in general. They only care about themselves and their delusions of grandeur. These people are a cancer on the rest of civilization.
They seem to be particularly obsessed with deconstructing and sabotaging America in the pursuit of their global Reset. Real philanthropists would not have a problem if someone didn’t want to accept their “charity”, but psychopaths cannot abide a group of people rejecting them and their ideology. You are not allowed to walk away from them. You are not allowed to do things your own way. You must be forced to comply. The agenda only works if EVERYONE submits.
Unfortunately for the globalists, the Reset is not working out for them everywhere. In the US, the agenda is failing miserably compared to Asia and parts of Europe.
As the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is so fond of reminding us, the Covid pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to push forward the globalist plans for a total Reset of human economy and society. To the globalists, the crisis is a panacea, a doorway to their version of a better world. They love the pandemic, they are not distressed by it. The problem is, it’s not doing enough damage or terrifying enough people.
Consider the Event 201 coronavirus pandemic simulation – It was held by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation only two months before the real thing “coincidentally” happened in early 2020. The pandemic war game was less about saving lives and more about how the elites planned to keep the public under control. The suppression of alternative media and censorship in social media was discussed at great length. Dissenting voices need to be silenced if the Reset is going to prevail.
One factor within the Event 201 simulation that never played out, though, was the WEF projections on deaths. The war game suggested at least 65 million initial deaths due to the pandemic. Early projections on the death rate suggested 2% to 3% of the population or more. The same projections were repeated by the UN’s World Health Organization when the real pandemic was first revealed to the public.
Instead, Covid-19 has been a letdown for the globalists, with a tiny death rate of around 0.26% outside of nursing homes. Meaning, 99.7% of the population has nothing to worry about from covid. Millions of Americans are becoming savvy to the situation and are refusing to comply with mandates over a virus that is a non-threat.
Instead of backing off of the Reset scheme, the globalists are continuing to double down. Why? Because they have no other choice. They let the cat out of the bag and bloviating big-mouths like Klaus Schwab told the world exactly what the plan is. If they retreat now, they might NEVER get another chance to implement a world centralization plan; a massive grift which requires medical tyranny in order to prevent rebellion.
You see, if the death rate had been dramatically higher than 0.26% and covid represented a legitimate threat, then maybe a larger portion of the US population would have been on board with longer term restrictions and medical passports. Maybe not. The fact remains that 40% of deaths have been in nursing homes among patients with preexisting illnesses, the death rate outside of these facilities is minimal, the mask mandates have been proven completely ineffective and the states that have remained open and removed mask mandates have FALLING death and infection rates when compared to states that are enforcing lockdowns.
The fear narrative is falling apart. States across the US are opening and are refusing to implement useless mandates. In my home state of Montana, legislators and the governor are passing laws that forbid the enforcement of medical passports. Even major corporations are not allowed to demand vaccine passports from customers or employees.
On top of that, 40% to 50% of the US population in polls are refusing to comply with the vaccine rollout or medical passports. Why take a vaccine for a virus that 99.7% of the population is unaffected by anyway?
The jig is up. The globalists are going to need another crisis if they hope to enforce further lockdowns in the US, along with medical passports and disarmament. Do not be surprised if there is more engineered chaos going into the summer months. But what will the next crisis look like? I think we are already seeing the signs…
Covid Mutations: The mainstream media is pushing a non-stop narrative of covid mutation hype. We hear about UK and Brazilian variants on a weekly basis, and the assertion has been that surely, these variants will be more infectious and more deadly that the original virus. There is still no proof whatsoever to confirm this, but the globalists only care about planting the idea in people’s heads. They only care about reigniting the fear.
My feeling is that this strategy is going to fail, at least in the US. Too many Americans are aware of the con game, and a new virus threat is not going to have the same effect as Covid-19 did in the early months of the pandemic. None of us really knew what we were facing back then, and caution was a practical response. Today, we know for a fact that covid is not a concern for the vast majority of the public. Media attempts to amp up the threat will be ineffective, but they will of course still try.
BLM Riots: This is the next obvious tactic on the part of the establishment. Numerous state officials are openly supporting renewed riots across the country due to a recent police shooting in Minnesota. The shooting itself was accidental, with the suspect violently resisting arrest and leaping into his car. A female officer grabbed her pistol in a panic instead of her taser and fired.
This event had nothing to do with racism, and nothing to do with police brutality. But, that’s not stopping Marxist groups like BLM from taking advantage and making it all about “white supremacy”. The real danger of unrest, however, will arrive at the closing of the Derek Chauvin trial.
With the trial coming to an end, evidence has been revealed that George Floyd was involved in heavy drug use and the medical examiner indicated that this along with heart disease were contributing factors to Floyd’s death. A “speed ball” containing Fentanyl was also discovered in the back of the police cruiser in which Floyd was originally restrained. So, even if Derek Chauvin’s knee to the neck tactic helped kill Floyd, it is unlikely that a jury will convict him of 1st or 2nd degree murder based on the evidence. Any lesser charges will undoubtedly trigger more BLM riots.
Conveniently, these powderkeg events are taking place at the onset of the warm spring and summer months, which is prime time for riots. My concern is that civil unrest will be allowed to spread and fester in the US until regular citizens start taking matters into their own hands. And, of course, any community that tries to defend itself against looting and destruction will be accused of “racist aggression” – at which time the Biden Administration will then try to assert the authority to institute martial law measures in various regions. This combined with renewed attempts at covid lockdowns is a highly likely scenario.
Cyber Polygon: Just as the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic preceded the real thing by only two months, there are concerns that the next World Economic Forum simulation event will also be a precursor to another crisis.
Cyber Polygon is a war game being held by the WEF this July which is meant to simulate a major cyber attack on the global supply chain and the economic system. There has been endless discussion in the media the past year building up fears of cyber attacks by Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea.
In terms of supply chain threats, I’m not sure exactly how a cyber attack could do much to disrupt global shipping, unless we are talking about another blockage in a major shipping route like the Suez Canal. But, a successful attack on stock exchanges in places like Wall Street could be devastating. I suggest watching this event carefully as it may be designed to precede a real cyber attack sometime this year.
Global War Tensions: The media and the Biden Administration are very busy trying to create tensions with Russia over Ukraine. There are renewed tensions between Iran and Israel and continued destabilization by the West in Syria. And, a rising danger of confrontation with China over Taiwan.
War could be the goal, or, the goal could merely be economic conflict. After all, China has already been dumping dollars and US treasuries the past year, and it would not take much to cause damage to the dollar’s world reserve status if China and Russia both diversified into a basket of currencies for global trade.
Beyond that, there are many advantages for globalists in creating regional wars and drawing Americans into pointless conflicts. For example, the threat of war could be used to institute a new draft. What better way to keep American men in particular busy and stop them from rebellion against the Reset than to draft them so they can die in a meaningless war overseas?
There is also a narrative advantage to global tensions; when presented with a foreign threat, are Americans more likely to reject notions of rebellion against government trespasses? I have no doubt that the establishment will try to claim the liberty movement is not a movement for freedom, but an “astro-turf” movement created by the Russians to destabilize America. This has been the leftist media propaganda strategy for years now; so why would they stop?
The bottom line is this: America is the primary target of the globalists because we are one of the only countries with the means and the numbers to stop them and the Reset. Until they are removed from the equation they will continue to throw crisis after crisis at us in order to wear us down and force us to accept totalitarianism. Do not get too comfortable in the fact that the pandemic agenda is failing here; stay alert and continue to organize your communities."
Saturday, April 17, 2021
"Is China Preparing A Gold-Backed Digital Yuan? Beijing Greenlights Purchases Of Billions In Bullion"
Full screen recommended.
"Is China Preparing A Gold-Backed Digital Yuan?
Beijing Greenlights Purchases Of Billions In Bullion"
by Epic Economist
"Recent evidence shows the Chinese government is getting ready to launch the first Central Bank Digital Currency backed on gold, threatening to put an end to the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency and triggering a global banking crisis during that process. Since 2018, global market specialists have been arguing that China had started to secretly turn to hard money in order to strengthen the status of its currency, and the latest data release is exposing that they were right. The debates begun after the Chinese introduced a gold-backed, yuan-denominated oil futures contract in that year. Although such contracts were priced in yuan, they were convertible to gold, which sparked discussions about the prospect that “the rise of the petroyuan could be the death blow for the dollar.”
The U.S. dollar is facing a number of challenges, particularly due to the fast expansion of the money supply over the past year and the growing national debt. A couple of weeks ago, the IMF reported that the global share of US-dollar-denominated exchange reserves had fallen to 59.0% in the fourth quarter, matching the 25-year low of 1995. Meanwhile, China has rapidly advanced in financial matters over the past 12 months, and just last week, it has finally implemented a Digital Yuan, becoming the major economy to unleash a Central Bank Digital Currency.
Moreover, just yesterday, a Reuters report confirmed that the Chinese government has given permission to domestic and international banks to import large amounts of gold into the country. Traditionally, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the nation's central bank, is the agency that regulates how much gold enters the country through a system of quotas given to commercial banks. The bank typically allows enough metal in to satisfy local demand but, oftentimes, it restricts the flow. However, the report revealed that during the past few weeks, it has given permission for large amounts of bullion to enter.
All that seems to be setting the stage for the Chinese to launch a gold-backed digital yuan, putting all major fiat currencies at risk, but especially threatening the U.S. dollar leading position as the world's reserve currency. That's according to the forecast of the founder of Heisenberg Capital and pioneer investor in cryptocurrencies, Max Keiser, who said the recent evidence signals the new Chinese digital currency is going to be backed by gold. Keiser also predicts that the PBoC will soon declare that it has 20,000 tons of gold, and this enormous amount will serve as a reserve backing for the new digital currency. The plan isn't to convert digital yuans into gold. China will use gold reserves in the vaults of its central bank to bolster confidence in the digital currency in circulation. Last year, GoldMoney's Alasdair Macleod wrote an article pointing out that the best way for the eastern superpower to escape the fate of a dollar collapse is by tying the yuan to gold.
Even though the country has enough resources to push the dollar to a devastating collapse, the financial analyst argues that it is not in China's best interest to be the driver of such a catastrophe, particularly because it owns roughly $3.4 trillion dollars. The Chinese government will call out for the Federal Reserve to control the dollar collapse in the foreign exchanges. However, that's exactly where the real problem lies. The Federal Reserve will be tempted to solve the situation with more inflationary policies. That's why the expert anticipates that a global banking crisis is embedded in this script, having critical effects on all fiat currencies, "since international banking is overwhelmingly a dollar affair," he says, and as a result, that would compromise its position as the reserve currency.
Macleod argues that "it is clearly not in China’s current geopolitical interest to introduce a gold standard that undermines the dollar. For this reason, China will only do so once it is clear that the dollar is in the early stages of an unavoidable inflationary collapse, and the risk of the yuan going down with it must be urgently addressed". The Chinese government must be seen by the rest of the world trying to protect its own interests by returning to sound money and not deliberately crushing the dollar.
In short, it seems that the dollar reign has its days counted. A gold-backed digital yuan is the beginning of the end. At this point, it all depends on how the federal government's and policymakers' agenda will handle the debt trap of rising interest rates and the explosive hyperinflationary spike that looms. Nothing lasts forever, and right now we're entering a stage that might set the end game for the United States as the global leading economic power."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Large, dusty, spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen edge-on near the center of this rich telescopic image. The field of view spans nearly 2 degrees, or about 4 times the width of the Full Moon, toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus.
About 13 million light-years distant, NGC 4945 is almost the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy. But X-ray and infrared observations reveal even more high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. The other prominent galaxy in the field, NGC 4976, is an elliptical galaxy. Left of center, NGC 4976 is much farther away, at a distance of about 35 million light-years, and not physically associated with NGC 4945.”
"The Questions..."
“I don't pretend we have all the answers.
But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
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