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Category: Conspiracy

  • My Memories on Collapsing Dollar

    When I moved to California, you could by a cheap carton of greasy fried rice from a Chinese greasy spoon for about $1.00 – $1.50. Now the Chinese greasy spoons are extinct or gentrified, and a bowlful of fried rice cost $10 to $20 per.

    Meanwhile, reading and listening, occasionally even watching people (or AIs) pontificate about the current situation as if this is something that suddenly appeared through this latest Middle-Eastern war seems a bit surreal. The problem with US dollar started long time ago, probably longer than I have been alive, but I will here just ramble a bit based on my own fallible memories. Any factual errors are mine and I blame them on my small and feeble brains.

    I’ll start with Bush Jr. Having arrived after the voting ended and then following the discussions about hanging and pregnant chads, anthrax letters and finally 9/11 which set the tenor until the banking crisis. For USD, 9/11 is significant because using that as a pretext for Iraq war allowed United States to mess up global oil markets, causing price per barrel, and thus the demand for dollars to buy the more expensive oil, to shoot up. This allowed the Greenspan Moderation, which inflated the credit bubble – everyone got a housing loan and the subprime loans were then baked into collateralized debt obligations or CDOs. Michael Lewis wrote a book about The Big Short which was later adapted into a hilarious movie. Although the movie may have been less funny for the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes when the adjustable credit rates started moving up.

    The implosion of the credit bubble during 2007 and 2008 was something awesome/awful to behold. I remember picture of Ben Bernanke, the Treasury Secretary on his knees in front of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, begging for congress to pass a bailout package. One of the many that bailed out banks, the newly homeless regular folks, notso mucho. Occupy Wall Street was born and Obama got elected.

    After which the Quantitative Easings continued to stabilize the banking system, people were left to survive. I don’t remember exactly what happened to dollar during Euro Crisis 2011, which I think was triggered when Soros publicly doubted Greece’s ability to pay back all the loans they had taken. The doubts spread like a wildfire in arsonist prone chaparral, infecting other shaky economies, especially Portugal, Spain, Italy and eventually Ireland, which were lumped together as PIIGS. The northern EU that had pumped their own economic numbers up by lending to southern EU so that they can buy northern products like tanks and submarines, then sanctimoniuosly castigated the peripheral member states for their economic profligacy despite having their own economic mirages depending on the same.

    The Euro Crisis coincided with Arab Spring which had been triggered by exploding food prices, brought to you by bad weather (droughts, floods and sundry), US agricultural and green energy policies (‘green’ corn-based bioethanol had consumed the US feed corn, so the US ranchers bought cheap corn from abroad, which then raised the food corn prices in Third World), deregulation of wheat futures market (previously open only for farmers and grain processors, anyone could speculate on bad weather, and speculate they did), and Gaddafi’s decision to start selling oil in currencies other than USD. The last one was fatal for Gaddafi and Libya – for me this was the most obvious demonstration how social media could be used for destabilizing fragile countries. Though the Abar Spring itself is credited for having started in Tunisia when some fish cart got confiscated by officials (the famous last straw), Tunisia avoided the worst consequences. Morocco and Algeria had troubles, too but those were ‘handled’, whereas Libya got bombed. The campaign was seemingly started at EU/French initiative and US participating simply because we had to (though in retrospective, I wonder…). It degenerated into multiparty civil war, shenanigans in Benghazi being a side note – I think that was about US running guns to ISIS, but I might be wrong, and it took a major oil producer out of market. Egypt which fell and then stabilized under Muslim Brotherhood and then under military dictatorship (I don’t think Arab Spring brought much democracy anywhere) does not produce oil, but Suez Canal is kind of important, Lebanon, Iraq and especially Syria fared poorly (I wonder if US troops are still in Syria to protect their oil now that ISIS toppled Assad?).

    We also had instituted sanctions against Venezuela during Chavez presidency (also tried to get rid of him by other means), affecting global oil markets, there has been happenings in Nigeria (partly due to destruction of Libya which unleashed islamists all over Northern Africa), all of which have pumped oil price up, helping the demand for US treasuries. That is, trillions of dollars more government debt for bailing out the billionaire class (not just too big to fail banks but many other megacorporations), waging wars and insane government social engineering programs meant to extract control and wealth from the working and middle classes to various bureaucracies and governmental NGOs. A classic example, Obamacare. Marketed as a government healthcare system, it actually manifested as a government mandate to buy a private sector health insurance. Problem: people who could not afford health insurance before Obamacare were still too poor, even though some pressure had been taken off by complex and arcane health insurance subsidy system based on the buyer’s reported annual income.

    In any case, Obama continued the debt bazooka, fueled by oil wars, but since it only benefited the 1%ers, voters went berserk and elected Trump. I had expected 2016 election to be between the anointed Clinton and the anointed Bush, but then the Republican primaries went sideways, with Jeb proving himself unelectable without properly organized party machinery, Trump winning the primaries. If it had been on voters, the Democratic primary winner would have been Bernie, but superdelegates rescued Hillary, who then expected a smooth coronation. Except that the US voters did not co-operate.

    Trump’s first term increased the spending but did not add any oil wars. By 2019 the economy was about to have a coronary arrest – I was expecting banking collapse some time during autumn or early 2020 at the latest, but then came COVID-19 and two weeks to flatten the curve. Giving a great excuse for the economic collapse that IMHO would probably have happened even without the virus, though maybe not as comprehensively.

    Biden was ushered into presidency and once the lockdown mess began to clear, it was obvious that the US treasury was being looted by every (administration aligned interest group) as if the country was under a fire sale. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was the US equivalent of Byzantine’s Battle of Manzikert. Not the withdrawal itself which should have been done years ago, but the manner it was executed, complete with reenactement of Last Helicopter Out of Saigon. Emboldened by this clear sign of an empire in decline, Russia moved to Ukraine 2022, after waiting for Beijing Olympics so as not to insult their new best friend and fellow BRICS member.

    Technically USA could have ignored Ukraine, but too many corrupt interests converged there, and then there was the fight over superpower prestige. Plus it was a too good opportunity to destroy the EU economically by isolating it from cheap Russian energy resources and markets. Nordstream II exploded. There was self-imposed ban on buying Russian oil (though buying the more expensive Indian distillates made from Russian oil was OK). All this meant more pressure on energy supplies, meaning higher US dollar demand. Meaning the debt could balloon from well over 20 trillion dollars at the end of Trump’s first term to well over 30 trillion dollars after Biden’s only term.

    When Trump took over, he promised a Department of Government Efficiency to weed out fraudulent spending. I wonder what happened to that. He had also promised no new wars, then took out Venezuelan president Maduro (and US oil companies are back in Venezuela, trying to extract the oil there, but years of sanctions have left the infrastructure shaky), threatened to take over Greenland (mineral resources and Northwest Passage), and finally went to Iran.

    Problem with Iran war (among the too many to list): too much oil production has been taken off the market and global economy is failing. The price per barrel has been suppressed by multinational SPR releases, but the tanks are nearing empty. Also the agriculture has been devastated by rising fuel and fertilizer prices, and the summer has been brutal in North America, Europe and Asia.

    The Ukraine and Iran wars had also been a double whammy on the treasury demand. People have spoken of glut in dollars, worried about inflation, but it was the increasing use of economic sanctions as a weapon to all directions have shaken the buyers’ faith on their safety as investment. Also, USA has bled Japan dry with yen carry trade (cheap yen loans to buy a bit higher interest US treasuries and bonds and pay the Japan loans with US paper and pocket the difference has supported the US debt machine), and the recent bail outs IMHO are just a drop in a leaking bucket, an omen of end to arrive.

    Now, on that background we have reached 40 trillion dollars, and borrowing costs have risen to levels that Treasury apparently is uncomfortable with. IMHO, Bessent’s buyback promise is a sign of weakness, and may be remembered by future economic historians as a gross blunder, but blaming the current administration for failing to kick the can one more election cycle further is a bit intellectually dishonest. Bessent’s hands are tied by the realities, namely USA has over the decades squandered its superpower status by living well beyond its means (partially to maintain superpower status, partially to appease voters), and there is very little that can be done to soften or even postpone the dollar collapse, especially with the current incoherent administration. For example, I don’t like how Treasury and Fed are uncoordinated. Nor do I like the AI mania or how our trade policies sabotage our agriculture.

    I expect the official Federal debt to continue at least a couple of trillion dollars higher, possibly up to 50 trillion dollars, but backed by full faith of US government is no longer what it was. Meanwhile, while money gets printed, nobody is printing bread (even vat grown meat is a specialty item and requires way more resources for much unhealthier product to be currently more than a curiosity for healthy technocrat class, though meat glued scraps are the new sausages for plebeians), so I expect food inflation with sporadic shortages and rampant skimpflation in wealthy countries and outright famines in poor countries.

    (A side note back to the Arab Spring; there was a model that predicted the level of food prices when a country undergoes an upheaval and on 2011 all the Arab Spring countries had crossed that level. In Europe, the only country to have food price distress was Latvia, but instead of revolution, the Latvians simply migrated, thanks to EU free mobility. Later, UK, dismayed at all the Eastern Europeans flooding the island, voted for Brexit, but that was then another story.)

  • Water for Suspicion

    Water, somewhere in Finland, 2025, May 31st

    My crawl though murkier parts of internet brought me to the subject of Water Wars, that is: who gets to decide who gets water?

    While the subject has been surfacing my feeds in waves as new item or old opinion makes splashes, I thought the post behind the link above to be a nice summary of many of he main points.

    One of the voices for monitoring and monetizing the access to water is WEF. On private sector, the role of Nestle in various water related controversies in Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe have been reported. But surely privatization will work this time, right? People joke about communism, as in “but this time it will be different”, but I have noticed exactly the same issues with capitalism. In the end, it does not matter whether the central command is the Chairman of the Politburo or the Chairman of the Board, access to resources will become a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed. By inference, the only way to prevent the water distribution from becoming a tool of dictatorship is to maintain local control over access.

    AI, of course, is now part of the mix, and it does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings that they are often prioritized over people. I suspect many of the local water crises only happened once a data center was added to the drinkers. But every crisis will be exploited to justify control, not only locally but globally. Just last month we were told that world is entering water bankruptcy. We know water is scarce in Sahara, Arizona and Mongolia. However, Canada and Sweden have plenty of water, and most countries should have reasonable rainfall levels, though politicians may do their best to worsen the situation. For example, despite nearly double snowpack on Sierras 2019, political decisions were made and California told residents not to water lawns. So even though UN acknowledges water scarcity is unevenly distributed, and even locally, like in UK, I think the shortfall is due to bad politics and mismanagement, possibly even profiteering, rather than actual environment, I suspect the control grid will be global.

    At which point, I would extrapolate from central command to the dangers of central command at hands of anti-humanist ideologies of WEF, technocratic dreams of Club of Rome and John Maynard-Keynes (and his followers), not to mention the trans-humanist tendencies of technocracy (some of who are prioritizing AI not as a tool for wealth but as a stepping stone for a manmade god to rule the stupid biological masses in their controlled hives). The publicly allowed zeitgeist seems to clearly wish there were fewer of us and people are without censorship and overtly talking what should be done about it, calling for ‘sustainable development’.

    Helped by the swarms of opportunists rushing to exploit the chaos caused by the disruption, the technocrats hope to push their anti-human control and wealth extraction agendas through (regardless of the consequences to environment, environmentalism being just pretext.)

    Lil’ PlanktonPunkt needs water to survive. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt does not like that another vital resource is taken over by the wealthy and the powerful behind paywall. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt remembers years ago in a faraway land everybody had access to water and swimming and fishing (angling was mostly free, nets required fishing license.) If you wanted water piped into your home and then out of it, you had to pay for municipal water authorities. Water bills were not really an issue, or maybe Lil’ PlanktonPunkt just does not remember. Some supermarkets had free well water for customers to refill their containers if they did not like the chemical taste of municipal pipe water. City slickers, of course, were obligate users of municipal water and sewer services. Today, on another continent, authorities decide if you are allowed to drill a well on land you own and if you are allowed to water your fields from that well, and there are places where storing rain water that fell on your roof for watering your garden into too many barrels requires a permit. But then there are fights over whether you are allowed to grow a garden, on land you own. And that is not even including laws requiring registered seeds. PlanktonPunkt worries about food. And access to water.

    Running water and bird song, 2025 May 30th, Muhos, Finland

    (Note: the links in my postings sometimes contain ads but I’m not sponsored by any of them)

  • Finland in Financial Finale?

    I wandered into a video about why Finland sucks. Some I agree, some I don’t, but I put a longish comment there and decided to republish it with some modifications and additions.

    The downward turn of Finland became a point of no return at EU membership.

    The money circulating in economy now goes to Brussels and multinational corporations operating under international rules, while Finnish economy is being strangled by EU directives designed to favor the looting of peripheral provinces like Finland. Everything else is downstream symptoms of this colonialism.

    Including chopping state services like electric grid, elder care, and soon common water resources, for sale to international bidders (which I suspect to happen because the administrative and tax structures are heavily stacked against those domestic enterprises that do not use tax sandwiches and cheap foreign labor.)

    Using regulatory capture via EU is a modified version of standard globalist modus operandi, sending economic hitmen to subvert national governments to facilitate their countries looting. Here it is a supranational structure operating under severe democracy deficit that functions as a middleman and a fig leaf of legitimacy to borderless looting. After quick googling, I got the impression EU itself seems to consider the political legitimacy a perception issue, i.e., the system may get (cosmetic?) changes and the EU subjects might be probagandized more, if the issue becomes more relevant to the powers that be.

    Among other economic issues, the video mentioned refugees, which in case of Finland was a GDP Ponzi scheme coordinated at EU level. In general, the whole multiculturalism is just a marketing term used by elites pushing for their ‘remedies’ to economies that are already underperforming because of the epic looting that has been going for a long time.

    The real original reason for the refugee business was at first ‘tax payers are not breeding, let’s import more labor’ (and charge the public purse cost plus for integration services by well-connected providers, which, surprisingly, have zero incentives to run out of people to provide integration services for). If nobody paid for the great social benefits to them (AKA the immigration industrial complex) the immigrants would go somewhere else. As would the integration service providers siphoning this money.

    In California, we have a massive homeless industrial complex, with more and more tax money collected to subsidize more and more homeless services serving more and more homeless. Now people have began asking evaluation of results, even audits to find where 20 billion dollars (20 * 10^9 $$$) paid over 5 years went.

    Then, when the newcomers did not get employed (the economy was still sick due to looting, and using the ‘integration services’ rather than job opportunities as a bait attracts different cohorts of immigrants), the rationale began to shift towards consumer headcount method of economy – more consumers mean more economic activity.

    Except to pay for the new army of unemployed, the successive Finnish governments needed to borrow more money, cut other services and pay taxes. Which did not increase economic productivity but increased money in circulation while shifting it from pocket to pocket. Which means inflation and rising unemployment. But at least the economic numbers were manipulated to the EU standards using approved methodologies.

    I don’t know what the next phase of immigration will be, but I would be surprised if it worked better than the previous two phases. Finland, I think, is still in the first phase but beginning to have doubts about it (I might be wrong because I don’t follow Finnish media that much any more.)

    Slightly expanding on the subject, I think NATO’s current whining for war is just the grand finale in the leveraged buyout of nation states like Finland. The EU cash cows have been milked out of all the profits a peacetime economy can provide, let’s sell them to meatpackers. The military industrial complex, the war bond markets (large parts of Ukraine have been put as collateral for the loans required to continue the war against Russia), the reconstruction contracts, the overall firesale of the desperate (or dead) people’s resources for cheap to multinational investors. Finland is, of course, eager to go against traditional enemy, thinking that NATO will help them or that they will help NATO, or something.

    TLDR: Finland is just a case example what happens to once stable and prosperous countries once EU gets to rule them. I suspect that once looting Finland with just current methodology is no longer cost effective, it will be one of the assets to be liquidated in the war against Russia.

    Economic low pressure over remaining small businesses, a metaphor.

    Checking photos of Finland to best illustrate the situation, I think this is better than one of the runners up, a dead tree full of concs.

    Here is a sky darkened by rain clouds and a thin line of trees, cosmetically around a road rest spot, but no trees behind them. To the right was a rain drenched bog with sparse, stunted pines.

    It could be that the line of trees surrounds a farm (those are also usually under heavy regulatory and financial burdens), but thin lines of trees can be seen standing between roads and clear cut openings all over Finland. Such a line could be easily considered a metaphor for cosmetic ‘Happiest Country Statistics’ masking over the remnants of Finland’s economy, while behind spread ploughed through clear cut openings, that would be the real state of Finlands economy. And the dark clouds of global economic collapse and war are looming.

  • Sometimes I Get Paranoid…

    Looks like Peter Thiel, the Palantir billionaire, has moved his wife and children to a safer country, namely Argentina. Paranoids like me would be curious, why?

    Mr. Thiel bankrolled J D Vance’s career, and with his Palantir surveillance and Anduril military intelligence company, is one of the powers behind the throne for Trump administration. If someone knows what is happening and when, it would be him. And considering that he is probably one of the most powerful men in USA, if not in the world, idea of him moving his family to safety from what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful superpower, despite owning a substantial fraction of its oligopoly of violence and being a billionaire.

    I first read about it yesterday morning and got curious.

    Some of these articles speculate that he might be fleeing billionaire taxes. Ultra-wealthy in general have been buying additional residency permits and passports in various countries for “just in case”, often to park their assets to lower tax region. Maybe Mr Thiel was tax planning, but I think he has a small army of accountants and lawyers, not to mention a layered multinational corporate structure to minimize tax consequences, even if Palantir and Anduril would need to be nominally American to officially maintain security clearances. Some mention that he is worried about nuclear war and the Southern Hemisphere would be less affected by the exchange.

    I thought that maybe the fire he was fleeing was not nuclear but from torches of pitchfork crowd. The sentiment online has during past few years considerably hardened on both left and right sides of the isle against billionaires and AI and surveillance state, and Mr. Thiel represents all three, and probably knows about the rising sentiment, having the first hand access to online moods.

    Then, later yesterday, I saw a link to this posting…

    I instinctively mistrust when an anonymous leak is fed through influencer (which used to be a mainstream paper like New York Times and it famous Deep Throat), but if true, could explain why Mr. Thiel felt a need to relocate, at least his family, despite being very influential individual in US politics, due to providing the tools for the surveillance state (and modern military).

    Also, while I understand the need to protect his family, his quest for additional passports (New Zealand and Malta were mentioned) feels in this light a bit like a rat fleeing a sinking ship after gnawing a hole in the hull. In any case, he does not seem to have much loyalty to United States. The same could be said about the other 0.001%ers, who have helped to grow this Doomsday Machine of an economic system and are scouring the globe for bugout residencies – loot a country and flee with profits to the next jurisdiction.

    What I would like to know, what are the 0.001% going to do when they run out of countries to loot? What is the end game? A luxury bunker? Face the torches and pitchforks? (And in reverse, what is there for us peasants after everything is gone)? Is there a backup plan? (Other than build an AI master and hope that it will solve the mess – BTW did they hear that it only takes 250 data points to poison even a large LLM? Do they trust the input data? Or do they just “Trust The Plan” – assuming there is one?)

    By the way: New Zealand, which was fashionable some years ago, is now suffering from energy crisis brought by long-term malinvestment, meaning any bunkers there better be stocked with fuel. And anything else imported with planes or ships that require fuel to function.

  • Polyticks and Tickboxer

    I like to follow various conspiracies, adding new and updating old. This spring has seen the surge and updates of the tick conspiracy. I have an impression that already in 1990s there were rumors that new tick borne diseases that caused nasty neurological symptoms and could trigger meat allergies were promoted or even developed by shadowy forces, using polyticks, i.e., multiple bloodsucking parasites as their vector.

    Fast forward this spring and we are seeing the anti-meat globalists trying to reduce greenhouse gases by forcing tick-borne alpha-gal sensitivity on masses to stop them from eating meat, leading to natural demand destruction for beef and thus reduction of herd size. Tick-borne diseases are presumed to have been developed in US bioweapons laboratories and then used against US population. An alternative or additional conspiracy rumor is that a biotech company just developed a vaccine against a tick-borne disease and is now looking for a market (probably with government help – who else is going to allow and even support such a marketing campaign, at least if past vaccination manias are considered as a model for government response?)

    In this spring, a twist that is novel to me, is the tickboxes; someone(s) are spreading secretly on farms boxes filled with ticks to sicken cattle and/or people. A recent X posting showed a purported tickbox, from which fled a swarm of dark dots said to be ticks, when the presenter nudged the box with his boot. The video was too unclear for me to say whether the dots were polyticks, some other arthropods like ants, or AI-generated fake. The text in the X posting reads like AI generated, the exhortation to share this information sounds like someone is running a psy-op campaign, and there is very little information of the original author (aside from their X profile), so I would take this posting with a couple of lb sized grain of salt.

    But if we toy with the idea that there was a bunch of ticks in a box (as in not an invented psy-op lie), even if the horde was of little eight-legged bloodsuckers, they might not originate from government (or globalist) bioweapons laboratory (just spitballing from position of near total ignorance), it could also be that boxes like that are cozy safe havens for ticks against natural predators like opossums and Guinea hens, and scattered to promote the spread and welfare of polyticks, as only safe boxes for the native ticks to nest would need to be provided.

    And to continue with the speculation, if there is a government conspiracy to spread boxes of diseased ticks in the rural parts of USA, this means that in addition to myriads of boxtickers, there must be at least one tickboxer employed by the USGOV to package the polyticks for the people.

    On a more serious note, how low has trust in government sunk that there is a growing community that believes that government spends money and effort to grow ticks to bring disease and death to its citizens and cattle?

    And even if there is a budget for tickboxer + ticks and boxes (and diseases for the ticks), how likely the money would be to reach its intended purpose rather than being whittled away by layers of bureaucracy, AKA the myriads of boxtickers, with the remnants wasted or defrauded by all the well-connected subcontractors, middle-men, and other looters of government coffers? Think of the California High-Speed Rail, or military’s F-35 program.

    And considering the sheer incompetence and mendacity of the government organizations, such as FEMA (e.g., 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2024 North Carolina winter flood), what would be the odds of success of a tickboxing campaign?

    I was thinking about adding a video or a GIF of a cute little velvet mite I saw last summer (not involved in the tick plot), but my internet is acting up again, and I am writing this from a coffee shop. Plus there is no need to besmirch the innocent and harmless little critter with this sordid mess, I think velvet mites are simpatico.

  • Are You Being Surveilled Enough Yet?

    Sunday March 15th morning, in my feed was an infomercial-like Zerohedge post. A company in California is making impressive humanoid robots that can learn tasks using neural nets. The learned tasks can be extrapolated to unfamiliar objects or environments. The more varied the environment is, the more adaptable the learning becomes. The company has now a working on a prototype that should be alpha tested in homes this year, beta testing in next year or two and functioning product before 2030.

    The kicker #1? All robots are connected to each other (the lag time was not specified), so what one learns all other robots learn.

    The kicker #2? Company owns the robots, the customer will rent them from the company which can then upgrade your rental unit based on training from other units.

    The kicker #3? They are envisioning billions of robots, half for domestic half for production and service industries, eliminating the need for most of the human work force.

    So, they are expecting you to rent an astonishing data collection machine to map your house and activities (down to your personal health data so that the robot can cook you a perfect meal) while you have become surplus to the elites that only have shown interest in you mainly in the amount profit they can extract from you and your existence (taxes, votes, kickbacks on public programs meant to “serve’ you, GDP growth from unfortunately necessary infrastructure investments to increase the pie they slice for their profit.)

    And this is not calculating the amount of energy and minerals to build, train and run 10 billion humanoid robots. We are already competing with data centers for energy and mineral resources. I expect the elites to prioritize robots over people because robots are more profitable (until we run out of energy and resources, at which point feral biology, bacteria, plants and heterotrophes surviving on minimal material in circulation will have an advantage.)

    On a positive note, to me it looks like the amount of climate doomerism has dropped to a fraction of its former deluge in the past few months – apparently it was only us peasants who were supposed to tighten our belts for the better weather, robots and AI will be excused. Or maybe the AI that selects my feed has noticed my skepticism over the current official paradigm (the paradigms will shift – when I was a little one, we were expecting the next glaciation any year soon, and more recently, the word ‘warming’ has already been exchanged to ‘change’.)

    Another corollary of universal unemployment is the dangers to human psyche. Nobody needs drudgery, but everyone needs a reason to get out of the bed and continue with life. NEETs and hikikomori can only exist in affluent societies that can and will support such life styles. Analogous to NEETs, there now exists a new branch of economy, attention economy (used to be entertainment, I suppose) with professional online influencers, content promoters and whatnots. I consider these to be manifestations of the same societal pathology as NEETs: lack of meaningful opportunity and resources in a society where everyone is being crushed by the system and even a pair of eye balls, an extra click, is meaningful, not just for economical survival but in many cases for validation. Look at me! I exist! This is not to bash the content creators, they are still trying and creating despite often limited resources, but I fear that for those people whose self-worth is tied to material possessions or external validation, and are born into the regulatory poverty in a hyperconnected world, this post-resource world is brutal.

    What is regulatory poverty?

    The real issues arise when people become too institutionalized in the invisible cage constructed by the rent-a-surveillance grid, enforced by social credit scores and crushing bureaucracy (that together will severely punish the least deviation from the matrix), that they stop trying to even survive. Case example: learning is a tool for prepping for future adversities. Learning leads to critical thinking and questioning the system that places the needs of the people over the needs of the system. The system, the surveillance matrix, being constructed evidently hates people learning, because some of the Gen Alpha it is raising no longer want to even learn to read because AI does it for them. Exactly what AI reads to them is presumably decided by the algorithm. There are young people (probably there were older people, too) who do not follow plot-based media. They do not understand complex questions nor do they do critical thinking. These youngsters will probably own nothing and be happy renting their non-plot-based media, listening instead of reading what is selected by AI, in their pods located in some anonymously identical 15-minute city owned by a selection of corporations and mismanaged by a local government that the corporations paid for.

    How do you prep for this kind of scenario? There are thousands of prepper channels discussing the pros and cons of bug-out places, urban survival and gear, growing your own garden (I’d love to) and canning your veggies. I think we should also plan for when the society does not collapse but excludes humans, even becoming hostile to human life as we know it. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World springs to mind, but when I was young, I read a science fiction story about human species had had regressed to infantile cognition while being tended by robots, who knew that when the species forgets how to reproduce, it is finally game over for human line. I wish I remembered what the title was. The description of those future humans was shocking, but now it seems we are rapidly approaching that singularity byy cultural, rather than by biological evolution.

    Learn, keep libraries, think, produce content, and most importantly, develop a spiritual core that will survive potential affluenza (I don’t think the new post-scarcity wealth will be much distributed among the masses, maybe just the equivalent of Roman corn dole or current EBT cards and housing vouchers) and despair caused by systemic dehumanization through decreasing relevance to the system.

    Meanwhile, maintain good cheer despite knowing the state of the world, that is one of the biggest acts of resistance you can do. Giving in to despair and ‘let it rot’ is what the post-industrial system wants from dissidents and other people the elites do not want.

    Take care of your soul, that is the most important thing to do.

  • Digital ID, War and Troubles Ahead

    Long time no write. I got employed (at will, contract until the end of November) and have been working since last week’s Monday. Still learning the ropes, enough of that.

    Federal government

    Secretary of War, Hegseth, had called all generals, 1-star and up for an all hands meeting. This includes those who have ‘active situations’ going. Very unusual. The rumors online ranged from imminent intensification of WWIII, invasion of Venezuela, an alien arrival, a complete reorganization of US military, or mass lay offs to clean out our top heavy military organization chart. The official explanation was pep talks telling the armed forces to merit base up, go on diet, and concentrate on learning how to efficiently win wars rather than having rainbow events and PC talk. It is generally thought that the pep talks were a cover for something else, though what that might be is unknown to public.

    The mass lay offs in military would have dovetail nicely with the threatened imminent mass lay offs of Federal bureaucracy in general, due to government shutdown, because congress cannot (again) pass a budget, or as the case has been for quite a few years, a continuing resolution. Trump has been itching to take a machete or a flamethrower at our bureaucratic jungle and to cut our budget deficit (our current Federal debt has ballooned since the summer 36 trillion to today’s over 37.5 trillion and keeps rising)or at least the funding to his political opponents. Instead of putting the Federal workers on furlough with back pay when the continuing resolution has been passed, the president proposes to simply fire the non-essentials (or a fraction of them) to reduce Federal complexity and expenses. Considering the recent increase in debt levels, methinks, this is an opportunity for a political purge, any savings would be incidental.

    The immigration enforcement (Feds) vs antifa + their affiliates (supported by democrat jurisdictions) situation seems to be verging towards civil strife of the Irish Troubles type. Basically the central government (the new establishment) is bringing rebellious city states and provinces back under control, task complicated by the democrat (the former establishment) outrage over having lost their control over the central government. Meanwhile, I suspect the people would be more interested in what either of the parties would be doing on the rapidly rising cost of living and the employment and housing crises.

    Digital ID

    Vietnam froze about 86 million bank accounts, they can only be unfrozen if the account owner gets a government digital ID and provides a proof to the bank.

    In UK, Prime Minister Starmer told the folks that everyone must get a digital ID, soon it will be illegal to work without one. ‘Ministers have ruled out’ that welfare payments or healthcare would need digital ID. I suspect them of being economical with truth, what with Tony Blair Institute for Global Change clearly stating its usefulness for accessing benefits.

    This is, of course, ‘to combat the illegal immigration’ (much encouraged by successive Labour and Tory governments alike.) Exactly how the UK government believes forcing digital ID on people who do not use even paper IDs is going to help, but I think the digital ID for legitimate, as in taxable, work and other economic activity will collapse what is left of UK finances. Or the people will revolt (though at this point I think that less likely than finding metabolically active extraterrestrial life.) In any case, immigrants without ID could presumably still access welfare and healthcare, even if they cannot work legally.

    While I unfortunately did not find a reference, I recall that during COVID, Sweden discussed banning cash, but the government retreated when they realized that large enough fraction of of their economy functioned on informal basis to sink the rest of the economy(sarskillt utsetta omraden would have exploded or become even less governable than currently. While the White Hall may know their people better than I and are banking on them being hopelessly obedient (rebels having left during 17th and 18th century), lots of White Hall mandarins are clueless elites that live separate from normal life and consequences of their actions.

    I also read about digital ID already existing or being rolled into various EU countries. The same source also mentions online access. Omitted was the potential barring of online access.

    In South Korea, there was a big fire in a government data center, which crippled many of the government services, including things requiring digital ID. The fire started from a lithium battery (the batteries were being replaced because they were getting old) and it is unknown how much actual data the South Korean government lost.

    While I was anticipating hackers having a fiesta with people’s IDs online, and rolling blackouts and other such infrastructure misery making them unpracticable (the Indian Aadhar system has reportedly led to deaths by starvation due to lack of access to government social security), I had forgotten about the vulnerability of the data centers. TietoEVRY, which is a major PPP contractor for various data base services to Finnish government (including the election vote results, at least once in collaboration with Scytl when still known as TietoEnator) managed to years ago (when it was known just as Tieto) totally mess up multiple Swedish databases. Considering this and the South Korean example, I expect any digital ID to result in Kafkaesque nightmare for the subjects and massive confusion and potentially paralyzing dysfunction to the governments. But perhaps that is not a bug but a feature – maybe it will allow greater variety for financial oppression while reducing the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against the governmental predators, the profits of which are then calculated to outweigh the cost of national collapses.

    Local news

    California has on November 4th special elections about redistricting. The cost estimates range from 250+ to 280+ million dollars, that is over quarter of billion dollars to invest on Democrats (maybe) taking Congress (and US budget.) Nevertheless, as a California tax payer, I am annoyed. I have gotten two mailings of official election information. I suppose that is my tax dollars at work.

    War and Troubles

    Drone attacks and air space violations of NATO countries are intensifying. Involved parties: at least Poland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and, of course, Russia and Ukraine. I probably have missed countries – these days the news come too fast for me to follow. Also who did what to whom is unclear, including to many of the targets. Meanwhile, I am more worried about cyber attacks and domestic terrorists.

    Of domestic terrorists: someone set (or attempted to set) the concert bus of Ice-T in fire while he was touring in Portland, Oregon. Many thought that happened because someone mistook it for ICE vehicle, though now the official explanation is a random act of vandalism. I don’t know if this was a contributing factor for Trump’s orders to sent National Guard to Portland to protect ICE there. Maybe the generals were called in to take marching orders for intensifying civil troubles. Meanwhile, some dude got 19 years for terrorism for setting a police vehicle on fire in UC Berkeley campus. UC maintains a police force separate from City of Berkeley. I wonder what Janet Napolitano, a former president of the UC system and a former Secretary of Homeland security would think about the current happenings.

    There are many other items I could write about, but there is no time.

    Butterfly on a flower, flew away. Life does not need to be so grim all the time.

  • Resolution Weekend

    I just saw a video on YouTube by a gentleman who seems to be into Bitcoin. Aside from the Bitcoin part, there were interesting little news.

    Bank of England has published a bail-in guide. The term of note is ‘resolution weekend’. That’s when the peoples’ bank accounts will be converted into bank stocks at some fraction of value.

    I had already become aware that millionaires and billionaires are fleeing the UK by their thousands, an exodus greater than that afflicting PCR, despite PRC having vastly larger population. I was surprised at the claim that the departing assets are equal to 4% of UK GDP. Dividing the 91.8B$ cumulative wealth of the departees by 3640B$ estimated GB GDP gives only about 2.5% in mu calculator. It will be interesting to see if the UK government will go full DDR and slam the exit doors shut at this hemorrhage. They already have the hate crime reporting lines and speech crimes police (in case someone could post something UK government does not approve) so why not go for the full experience, complete with empty shops?

    Meanwhile, EU has made a deal of the decade (this century is too young to claim that something even weirder would not be coming through the pipes) agreeing to: 15% export and 0% import tariffs with US, 750 billion euros worth of US fossil fuels while banning all the Russian fossil fuel imports (which had continued despite the war, including quite a lot of natural gas transiting in pipelines through Ukraine), and 600 billion euros of private direct investment to US.

    Exactly what this private investment is and how EU Commission can agree to seems unclear. According to the document description page on EU side, the agreement is not legally binding. I suspect that the tariff and energy deals were a bribe to US to let EU still continue their war – I further suspect large amounts of US military gear to be included in that 0% import tariff. Also, I suspect that EU will rather soon have a resolution weekend for bank accounts as they are already talking about mobilizing funds laying in peoples’ bank accounts to fund plans that are excessive for the public purse. Pension funds are joining the arms bonanza. Bonus points if these ‘privately funded’ imports/investments will count towards the 5% of GDP funding target for non-US NATO members.

    Joker in the game: EU CBDCs, denied by European Central Bank to be programmable with expiration dates (not to mention blocking or sin fees for non-approved uses, which would similarly depend on programmability.) (There are also privacy questions.) I wonder what the actual utility of EU CBDCs for the small people would be, and how CBDCs (programmable or non) would affect application of a Resolution Weekend?

  • Department of Narrative Mismanagement

    I have followed the recent discussions about Jeffrey E., a dead criminal whose suspicious passing away in custody has caused years of speculation (including that he was taken secretly away and is now living somewhere nice.) Namely, he is known to have committed his crimes with lots of people and suspected of blackmailing the said people, which tend to be the very wealthy and powerful type. Which is why he was rumored to have been self-deleted.

    The current administration has loudly and repeatedly promised to publish the list of Jeffrey’s associates, until about a week ago an FBI memo was leaked(?) to Axios claiming: he offed himself, there is no list of people, and he did not blackmail anybody. The administration is trying to sweep the issue under the metaphorical carpet. Then the officials published a video of his cell from the night of his death. Except the video contained about 1 minute gap (or maybe more than 1 minute). It had been stitched together so badly that aside from the gap in the timestamp, the aspect ratios were subtly off. As Asmongold pointed out, there could be legitimate reasons for this blooper, but with all the other circumstatial evidence, to me this points towards a conspiracy concerning Jeffrey E.’s demise, the reasons for it, and the existence of more rot in the circles of power.

    As I keep on watching the government stumble from narrative fail to a narrative fail, with people becoming increasingly convinced that something is off with the official story (which has presented already by the previous administration), I have began to suspect that all this furor is deliberately fanned to distract the hoi polloi from something really important, possibly even more insidious than the idea that we are being governed by a huge criminal blackmail network, until it is too late to do something about it. This is quite a common tactic by the powers that be. For example, in Finland, I have imprecise memories on how government starts making noises about changing regulations or taxes on selling beer, and people get upset. Huge discussions rage over newspaper opinion columns and on-line boards, pro and con, while the government passes something else, much more important for people’s lives. The beer issue can be resolved, or if necessary, retreated from, people will calm down, and meanwhile something actually nasty was done to them.

    While the incompetence of governments can be stupendous, it stretches my credulity to have so many bloopers in the narrative management coming one after each other, and I am beginning to suspect we are being purposefully distracted. Whether it is from the coming (proxy) war against China (maybe started between Thailand and Cambodia, maybe still waiting for the Iran situation to worsen), the ongoing (officially proxy) war against Russia, the economic collapse (US consumers sentiment has been reportedly low earlier this year, though Goldman Sacks just reassured that everything is merely returning to normal), the incoming digital surveillance grid (brought to you in collaboration with Musk and Thiel under the guise of tracking immigrants – spoiler alert: to track immigrants they will “need to” also map the non-immigrants), or something possibly worse, it must be humongous to merit this level of egging of the masses. I don’t think Obama’s referral to Department of Justice for suspicion of having ordered narrative to be manufactured for the Russia Collusion quite qualifies, more likely it is just more noise to distract the masses. By the way, US just moved nukes to UK, but that’s probably a nothing-burger (I am still sitting on the fence about whether to link and comment to the article on the subject in aviationnews.eu.)

    I am also currently sitting on the fence on whether our government truly is this incompetent at narrative management or whether there is some obscure Department of Narrative Management, who are gloating about their latest glorious success in psyop against the people. Or maybe the Department of Narrative Management has gone rogue and is actively fighting against the current administration.

    Although considering the everyday dysfunction I live in due to the ongoing complexity crisis infecting all aspects of modern society and worsened by the ongoing incompetence crisis fanned by the decades of education crisis, I still think that, yes, they really could be that incompetent. Maybe.

  • Civil War by Proxy?

    California and Federal government are increasingly hostile in open. California has years of experience in ignoring Federal laws, some notable example issues being cannabis, immigration, and gender identity.

    On the other hand, California has used its soft power as a major economy to enforce environmental and consumer standards on the rest of the states and even abroad.

    During Biden(?) administration, Californian values seemed to become the US standard regardless of other states’ opinions, and California became more assertive also in foreign and trade policy, most notable event being the summit with president Xi and Biden in San Francisco (preceded by a climate lobbying visit of governor Newsom to Beijing.) Various California politicians were also courting China, although also opposite happened. Does anyone still remember 2022 when the then Speaker of the House, California representative Pelosi flew to Taiwan and caused jitters over potential armed conflict between USA and PRC? (Whether this was part of a policy by a bigger faction within the administration and if so, which one of them is murky to me.)

    Now, the issues between quite untethered California and the Federal government have finally come to boil. The trigger to me seems to be the transgender athletes competing against girls, where the Federal government sees California Title IX application to this issue as violation and the regular people just unfair. California continued this practice, despite warnings from Washington DC, and the current administration threatened to withhold Federal funds for California sports. Thereafter, Newsom threatened to withhold the Federal share of California state taxes, a move somewhat reminiscent to the Nullification Crisis prior to the Civil War in 1800s.

    Meanwhile, a group of Antifa or similar group(s) coordinated an attack on ICE that had done a raid in Los Angeles.

    This attack is curious because of its organization and its timing coinciding with the spat over ideologies and money. Reminiscent of the coordinated wave of violent riots in summer 2020, there were clashes between pro-immigration protesters in New York on the opposite side of the continent.

    More importantly, both the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and governor Newsom publicly refused to help to quell the rioters, even opposing the Federal efforts. The rioters were attacking Federal law enforcement with stones and were painting graffiti putting things in fire. In fact, a roster of California political people have come in defense of David Huerta who got arrested for participating in the riot, but their support to anti-Federal action.

    President Trump has authorized the use of 2000 National Guard (update: now 4000 plus 700 marines), and the Department of Homeland Security is bringing in reinforcements.

    I am writing this in Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, waiting for a flight that would take me back to California Bay Area via Frankfurt am Main and Los Angeles Airports. By the time I have landed, well before the time I can post this (I need to add links to sources), we will see if the California or Federal authorities have caved in. If the California stops protecting the violent mobs, removes transgender athletes from girls competitions and possibly even ponies up some tax tithes to Federal government, the incipient civil war will be averted. If the Federal government fails to enforce its rules also in California, I fear that this was the opening shot of the active phase of the disintegration of the United States. Worst case scenario, neither gives in, we may have active civil insurgency in multiple blue states by the end of the summer. The most likely outcome will be a frozen conflict, that is: both sides will pretend nothing significant happened but neither will acknowledge that the other side might have won.

    I also predict there will be lots of pundits dissecting irrelevant minutiae from the utterances of either side, and thanks to the strong left bias of the main stream media, the reporting will mostly support California and its allies, meaning tailwinds for civil war or mostly peaceful disintegration of USA and headwinds for peace and prosperity. The biggest losers will be the regular people trapped in the middle, looting and violence disrupting supply chains, especially for groceries and fuel, and then collapsing the teetering economy in general.

    Update: Much has happened since Sunday. California did not capitulate and the National Guard activated in Los Angeles is up to 4000 and 700 marines are in readiness. When I arrived on Sunday evening to Bay Area, I took the BART from airport to hometown. The train did not take or drop passengers at Embarcadero station due to political activism nearby, but let out a handful of burly police officers and while the train waited a couple of minutes next to the platform, I could observe the officers running and so did a couple of the people already there. There was still a crowd waiting for the next train or something, though the trains had started skipping that station for the duration. Sorry, no video footage of that.

    More ominously, a Walmart heiress is funding (in a small part) a nationwide call for unrest June 14th, another weak indicator supporting my hypothesis that the riots that started last weekend are part of elites’ civil war, raging over  who gets to loot the treasury.

    In social media there are reports of incidents in Denver, Charlotte (NC), Boston (MA), Chicago, New York City and Atlanta, things are escalating fast. This indicates that this is not a question of secession (California from USA) but of civil war by proxy between the progressive left and the conservatives over the control of Federal government. The presidency and the Congress are currently held by Republicans, but vast swathes of the administrative state are governed by the Deep State currently (mostly) promoting leftist ideologies (reasons for that are too long to expostulate in a single post and in any case speculative to the tinfoil hattery territory.) Individual states and their administrative apparati are a hodgepodge of ideologies, but the Left Coast in general and California in particular is the current vanguard and bastion of progressive establishment, so troubles beginning here makes sense.

    Meanwhile, governor Newsom and Federal officials are still discussing about who pays what.

    On a side note, a major food distributor supplying thousands of supermarkets got hacked last week and food distribution is off kilter. When I yesterday visited a grocery, they had a sign on meat counter apologizing for ‘warehouse issues’. I did not ask the cause then because I had not then seen this piece of samizdata news yet. I wonder if the food shortages and riots at the same time are a coincidence?

    Finally, whether true or not, the possibility of a fleet of robotaxis fleeing LA riots in order not to get burned by Mexican flag waiving ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters shows what kind of timeline we are living in. In any case, Waymo services have been suspended in downtown LA are for the time being.

    Looks like I need to pick some canned meat while it is still available.