Sinema Goes Independent

 Arizona Senator Sinema leaves Democratic Party, registers as independent. She is left, but has often served as a brake on the far-left elements of the Democratic party. Maybe if all members of the legislative branch were independents, they could represent their constituents and not a party HQ'd in DC and funded by global, not even American, money. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tired-partisanship-senator-kyrsten-sinema-abandons-dems-goes-independent

Better to Hurt Your Own Tribe than Help the Other

 If you have any doubt that Americans have been polarized and tribalized out of rational thinking see this study. Most participants would not give their tribe two dollars if it meant the other tribe got one dollar. 

Opening up ballot access so that more choices are available is the best way to lower the emotional costs of switching brands so that people can start evaluating choices based on reason rather than tribal identidy. 

Greater Idaho? Oregon Counties Want OUT

 Counties in Oregon who feel that Eugene isn't listening want a referendum to leave Oregon and join Idaho. And why shouldn't they be allowed to? I've been writing about this since 2012, particularly in the blue book below. Political decentralization will continue to gain importance as an issue. 

Get the books:

A Fraudulent System Requires An Occasional Patsy Like Sam Bankman-Fried

 Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried is not less moral than those who run our financial system, only less clever. I would even argue that the system requires the occasional "rogue actor" that causes large amounts of supposed assets to be exposed as worthless in order to conceal the larger reality of how over-leveraged the entire system is. 

"if one mouths the right empty shibboleths, one can do whatever one wants"- SBF

 We live in a fraudulent financial system built on fiat government money (chits with no intrinsic value backed only by government force) and leverage. Thus, those with access to cheap credit can buy up the real assets of the world on leverage. Success isn't won by merit so much as knowing how to play the game. The game of pleasing those who run the system enough to give you the easy credit (financial as well as PR) you need to start leveraging. Do you work hard providing good service to others but question the narratives that the ruling class wants you to parrot? No easy money for you!

The first step, after saying all the "right" things and getting access to larger amounts of easy credit, is to use it to create an "asset". You could work hard and provide real useful products and services to others so that what you have created has actual value. This however, is hard and is completely unnecessary to get rich quickly in today's fraudulent economy. The perceived value of the asset means more than the actual value, because you can entice people to buy a piece of what you are selling if the perceived value is high. Getting the mainstream media to talk about your product in a favorable manner is worth more than being good to your customers. 

You then use that perceived increase in value to obtain more credit and buy or "create" another "asset", whose value you also have every reason to inflate. At each step, you use the perceived increase in value to obtain another asset, which you use to make your portfolio worth even more. It isn't even about making a real, working, profitable business. If you can sell the possibility of future profits (and the establishment media can make you or break you on this, so repeat all the things they tell you to believe), you can borrow more money and buy even more stuff. 

The trouble is that at some point some of those assets lose value. Maybe a shell game is exposed, or maybe there is a general malaise in the sector with the asset in it. It becomes known that the true value of that asset is not as great as the money that it was used to gather up, be it in stock price, corporate debt, or both. If I can convince someone to loan me ten billion dollars at 2% then I only need the assets I acquire with that money to increase in perceived value at a rate of four percent to be "worth 200 million dollars" at the end of the first year. But if they don't get me any more value, or worse, lose value, then I am hundreds of millions in the hole. This is going on all over the economy and so many who got on top this way have to keep the plates spinning or the whole thing crashes. 

For the 2008 bank bailouts, the system literally just created all of the currency out of thin air that they needed to keep the plates spinning. If favored players had assets that were underwater, the Fed Discount window either bought them at above market prices or loaned money with them as collateral at better-than-market terms.

But this had a cost. The debt created to supposedly back this currency will have to be paid for by sacrificing future consumption. But in a system built on this kind of gas, there is no point at which you can say "ok we are going to tighten our belts now" without crashing the entire system. Also, the shear amount of debt needed to sustain it is going to raise red flags. Eventually the world will figure out that all of this "genius financial investing" is simply the result of the government writing trillions in hot checks to sustain the illusion of solvency a little bit longer. So they can't just borrow their way out. 

As a way to put off the inevitable, the system needs fall-guys. That is, it has to find a way to allow some of the underwater assets to get liquidated at a loss. They can't keep all the plates spinning at once, so they are trying to blame the individual plates that drop instead of the entire system. 

Bear Sterns was a "bad actor".  MF Global was a "bad actor" (yet the very connected John Corzine never went to jail). Most of the Big Banks were caught being "bad actors" in the sense that they recklessly overleveraged in 2008. Like I said, the government kept the plates spinning by moving their bad bets to the taxpayer's books. But that outlet has exhausted itself because they have stolen all they can steal via those means without collapsing the economy. They have to wait until it recovers from their past skimming before they skim again at that magnitude. The parasites risk killing the host. 

Now FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried was a "bad actor". He was playing the game, with these connected people selling paper assets to one another at more and more hyped up prices. But he got took. Instead of dumping their bad assets on the government's books, they played him for a chump and got him to take it. That wasn't all that happened of course. He got desperate when the true value of this stuff asserted itself and used money he wasn't supposed to in order to try and keep those plates spinning. But ultimately, he leveraged to the moon on hyped-up assets just like the rest of them- his assets were just worse. 

Look for there to be more such cases in the future, not fewer. The system won't correct this because it can't. It has to have a way to bleed off some of the toxic assets without taking down the whole system. If they can't have no damage (because 2008 style taxpayer bailouts are off the table for a while) then they will try to find some patsy to take the fall. They will find some guy who isn't really that sharp, build up his reputation, then sell their trash to him on borrowed money. When it goes bad, he is exposed as a fraud, and the system goes on- not exposed as a fraud. 

End fiat currency and limit leverage. There is no way to save this system anyway, and even if there was, it does not deserve saving. 

Get the books:

Lockdown and Vaxx Authoritarians Now Selectively Appeal to Single Christian Virtue- Forgiveness (for Them)

  "The Atlantic" has come under harsh criticism for suggesting that people should let bygones be bygones concerning the vast harm caused by authoritarian lock-down and vaccination policies. Zerohhedge has an article citing numerous responses from angry people who lost loves ones, who have been disabled, or whose mothers had to die alone, due to useless authoritarian measures and under-tested vaccines that have been increasingly shown to be unsafe. Those who implemented these measures are now suggesting that "forgiveness" and an "amnesty" is in order. 

These are in large part the same people who reject God and take pains to expunge Christian values from all of society in exchange for the shifting sands of their own opinions. Yet when caught in monstrous crimes against their neighbors, they selectively appeal to the primary Christian virtue of forgiveness. Not for your sins against them, mind you. You are still to be held to full account for each and every perceived micro-aggression. They mean that you are to forgive them. Not due to their heart-felt repentance, they still want to be authoritarians,  but rather their desire to evade justice and accountability.

Well, scripture is something that I know a little bit about. I've a Youtube channel that is primarily devoted to the study of Genesis for example. And I've noticed that the same bible that says "love your enemies" and forgive them also says that government is supposed to be a minister of God to honor those who do good AND bring wrath on evil doers.

So yes, the Christian ideal is that we should forgive those who sin against us, and that civil government should punish them. It is a tension. There are two things that are true at once that seem in conflict in this world but the conflict is resolved in Christ.

So in practical terms, if you were to write an encouraging letter to a penitent Anthony Fauci as he serves his life sentence, you would be doing well. If you were to feed a hungry former doctor or bureaucrat who has been stripped of all of their possessions as partial compensation to their victims, then you would be doing a good thing. Unlike the woke mob, Christians do have mercy and do forgive. But this does not mean that we do not also pursue justice.

Get the books:

Confidence in Institutions Declining

 Recent polls show that confidence in Media and Government (two heads of the same beast these days) is at an all time low and is going down fast. "Collapsing" is the way the Epoch Times put it. I guess when the media goes into overdrive to push clearly false narratives and squash relevant stories that's going to happen. It is an inevitable consequence of over-centralization of media. They all repeat the same narrative, there is no healthy debate within them. Naturally those who distrust the monolithic narrative they put forth are going to distrust them.

The same thing with political parties. When the two dominant parties put barriers to entry to other choices, with the collusion of said media, naturally those who don't buy into the six-inch wide band of policy they represent, with no mention of other important issues like ending the "Federal Reserve", are going to distrust those two brands. Our choice should have never been shunted into those two brands anyway. We have all kinds of choices on almost any other product or service. Why should we have to choose between two terminally corrupt political parties that are clearly enriching their own elites at the expense of the rest of us?

 We have a very obvious two-tiered justice system where the insiders and their kin openly commit multiple felonies and are not even prosecuted, while the rest of us have our stuff seized and then have to "prove our innocence" to get it back or face long prison sentences for breaking arcane laws that are so numerous and ever-changing that we can't even keep up with them. That of course is the consequence of the two problems described above. The majority of Americans have no confidence in our institutions, except for "small business" and "the military". Nor should they. Our institutions face a crisis of legitimacy which they are choosing to ignore or worse, re-direct blame unto those noticing they are corrupt and unjust rather than reforming themselves from within. 

If there is a systemic solution, its localism. It is a political philosophy of radical decentralization in order to counter the radical centralization we see all around us. 

Get the books:

The Chinese Have a Detailed Plan to Control the United State's Congress

 I don't think it is a workable plan right now as it will only work in swing districts, but they have a plan. And they will get better at figuring out how to do it as they go. The size of our economy has helped protect us for a while, but as China rises and super corporations collude, that protection is eroding. Erecting barriers, multiple barriers in a layered defense, to such capture like the ones discussed in "Localism a philosophy of government" is the only way to stop it. 

Get the books: