Liberty and safety

Whenever a government introduces some totalitarian measure that infringes upon liberties and freedoms of all, they justify it with “safety for you and your children”. Every single restriction introduced, from speed bumps and surveillance cameras to financial restrictions, is justified with either “need for law and order”, implying that only a criminal would oppose it, or “safety of your children”, implying that you must be incredibly irresponsible and callous to oppose it.

My comment on that is very simple. Regarding “safety” I will quote Benjamin Franklin:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Regarding criminality, people implicitly act as if the laws introduced by the state are the laws of God, not something voted on by a bunch of incredibly corrupt people in the parliament. Every evil thing imaginable can become a law, and actually was law at some point in time. In America, the blacks were counted as three fifths of a person and were legally considered property. In the Third Reich, the Jews, Slavs and other “undesirables” were legally stripped of all rights and property and “disposed of” in death camps. It was all perfectly legal, so you might understand my cynicism regarding human laws. I might obey them for fear of reprisals, but I have little inherent respect for them.

Regarding surveillance, I urge you to study the history of the Hollerith (IBM) punch card computers in the Third Reich. Please do, don’t take my word on it. People didn’t object to the census performed by the Nazis because they implicitly assumed that it would be impossible to analyze all those mountains of data and figure out whose third cousin is a Jew. Unfortunately, they didn’t understand that the Nazis had the technology to do just that, and with very little work. They categorized the data in computationally-friendly forms and used the mechanical punch-card computers to do the work. After that, they very accurately knocked on people’s doors and brought their precisely targeted victims to the death camps. But don’t believe me, because apparently nobody does, I’m supposed to be the one everybody doubts. Just do your own fucking homework and understand what those cameras on the streets, “for the safety of your children”, are actually for. And understand that “money laundering” is a code for “saving your money from forced confiscation by the state”. Every single measure against “money laundering” and “financing terrorism” will be used against you, when you try not to pay the 75% tax, or when you are designated a “right-wing domestic terrorist” because you don’t want your children to be indoctrinated with pro-Muslim or gender-fluid brainwashing at school.

But first, you need to be ready to sacrifice your lives, and the lives of your children, for liberty. Remember that there are no human rights. It’s a “social construct”, as the leftists like to say. There are now “human rights” because the law says so. The laws are changed in “emergencies”.

So, if someone wants to introduce some restrictive measure for the “safety of your children”, and you say “no thanks, I’ll take my chances”, do you understand what kind of hell will break loose?

JP Morgan warns about Dollar decline

Read this.

…we believe the dollar could lose its status as the world’s dominant currency (which could see it depreciate over the medium term) due to structural reasons as well as cyclical impediments  

As such, diversifying dollar exposure by placing a higher weighting on other currencies in developed markets and in Asia, as well as precious metals makes sense today.

… Being the world’s unit of account has given the United States what former French Finance Minister Valery d’Estaing called an “exorbitant privilege” by being able to purchase imports and issue debt in its own currency and run persistent deficits seemingly without consequence…

There is nothing to suggest that the dollar dominance should remain in perpetuity. In fact, the dominant international currency has changed many times throughout history going back thousands of years as the world’s economic center has shifted.

… In other words, in the coming decades we think the world economy will transition from U.S. and USD dominance toward a system where Asia wields greater power. In currency space, this means the USD will likely lose value compared to a basket of other currencies, including precious commodities like gold.

… Central banks across the globe are also adding to gold reserves at their strongest pace on record. 2018 saw the strongest demand for gold from central banks since 1971 and a rolling four-quarter sum of gold purchases is the strongest on record.2 To us, this makes sense: gold is a stable source of value with thousands of years of trust among humans supporting it.

Given the persistent—and rising—deficits in the United States (in both fiscal and trade), we believe the U.S. dollar could become vulnerable to a loss of value relative to a more diversified basket of currencies, including gold. As we scan client portfolios, we see that many of them have far more U.S. dollar exposure than we feel is prudent.

My interpretation: Jim Sinclair was right that the central banks intend to do a “soft landing” inflatory move, devaluing the Dollar (and Euro will, in my opinion, devalue even more since the EU has an even worse internal crisis on top of Euro being essentially a Dollar-derivative). According to Sinclair, this first controlled inflatory attempt will fail, and as a result there will be a second, “natural” inflatory event that will balance the world economy on actual values.

So, nobody can say they haven’t been warned. According to some rumors, JP Morgan has been accumulating immensely large amounts of silver recently, so you can’t say they aren’t backing up their talk with money.

As for crypto, I agree with Peter Schiff that crypto will be the first thing to collapse, and that will actually make fiat currencies look good. Everybody invested in crypto will be wiped out. The exception are the blockchain-based technologies backed by actual assets, like the Russian crypto-Ruble. After that, everybody holding significant portion of their assets in fiat currencies or their derivatives such as dollar and euro denominated bonds will be wiped out. The current rise of gold and silver is just a precursory warning shot, and I still recommend buying.

The disclaimer is that this only applies to people who actually have significant savings. If you reduce your cash supply below one month’s needs, you are actually putting yourself in harm’s way. Instead, stock up on canned and other long-lasting food (pasta, flour, sugar, beans), because in a hyperinflatory environment food supply might get disrupted. I don’t know how long this might last, so there’s no harm in assuming it might last long enough for everybody who didn’t prepare to regret it. Have in mind that I’m following my own advice, which means I’m taking this shit very seriously.

Inflation

How much is a German Mark (DEM) worth in Euros?

This is something intended for the Europeans in general and citizens of the former Yugoslavia in particular, since we used to do our inflation-hedging by doing everything in DEM. So, we must still remember how much is a DEM worth.

1 EUR is 2 DEM, right? That’s the conversion rate that was used when the Euro was introduced. And I caught myself thinking about that, implicitly assuming this conversion rate when I was thinking about the housing prices in the past, when a square meter in Zagreb used to cost somewhere around 1000 DEM, with the highest prices reaching 2500 DEM and the lowest being around 500 DEM. I was thinking how the prices went to Jupiter since then, as they are now between 1000 and 3000 EUR per square meter. That would be 2000-6000 DEM. Or would it?

And then I thought of a good way of verifying my calculations: the historic gold price chart in EUR:

The red X marks the spot where EUR replaced the former currencies in circulation; its value is 10000 EUR per kilo of gold. This means the value of DEM is 20000 per kilo of gold.

Today the price of EUR is above 40000 per kilo of gold. This means its actual value dropped by the factor of four since introduction, and the value of DEM, in today’s Euros, would be 2 EUR. So the exchange rate would still be 1:2, only the other way around.

So, the cost of housing in Zagreb today, recalculated using gold as the standard, would be 500 DEM for the cheapest, 700 for the normal, and 1500+ for the high-end of the range. Basically, that means that the prices got more affordable, in terms of gold per m2.

As a conclusion, no, the real estate is not going through the roof, and no, gold is not going through the roof. It’s the paper currency that’s gone down, by a factor of 4 in the time span of 17 years. You will ask why nobody told us? I will ask, why do you think they would want you to know? Your faith in their bullshit currency is what gives it value. Your faith is a commodity. You and I are just cattle that’s bred for slaughter. You don’t tell the cows the prices of meat and milk on the market. So, if you were a good boy and saved your euros somewhere in a bank, you are now rewarded by being poorer by a factor of 4. If you had your savings in real-estate or gold, you’re fine.

 

The white male Moon

I read an article yesterday that comments something in the leftist media (called “main stream” despite the fact that nobody actually reads it), and apparently they figured out something that was quite obvious to the rest of us for quite some time now: American Moon landing and space programme were achieved by competent white men. Not by the diversity hires. Everybody in the mission control and in the capsule was a white man. The leftists are right in stating that this is not their achievement and that they have nothing to celebrate. If a man on the Moon is a purely white male achievement, what is theirs? What do the diversity people have to show as their achievement? A 12 year old who doesn’t know whether he’s he or she? A middle-aged man who identifies as a little girl?

The thing is, the NASA Moon landing project wasn’t all white and male because of racism, but because the most competent people happened to be male and white, which is a hard pill for the leftards to swallow. Actually, when the most competent people happened to be the former Nazis from Peenemünde, they were put in charge of the project. I even know of a Yugoslav engineer, Milojko Mike Vucelić, who was in the mission control. I saw a video with a black woman weaving the core rope memory for the AGC at Raytheon. A woman even wrote software for the AGC, so it’s not like the doors were closed for women and minorities; they just had to prove they can do the job better than everybody else. The management wanted to go to the Moon, not fill quotas; they wanted the best people, and if the best programmer happened to be a woman, great, she’s in. If you just defended the doctoral thesis on rendezvous in orbit, you got picked to actually pilot a spacecraft. True story.

The “diversity first” era started at NASA with the introduction of the Space Shuttle programme, which was supposed to “save money” and not “waste it on space when it’s needed here on Earth”. As a result, it achieved nothing, cost so much it drained money from all other projects, and was so dangerous it killed two full crews of seven. But it sure was diverse. It didn’t achieve anything, but all colors and genders were represented. With the introduction of diversity, America gave up on its dreams, it gave up on virtue and merit, and instead embarked on a long voyage to become an African banana republic. Right now, it appears that they are closer to that goal than ever.

So yeah, that’s one thing they would have been better off not reminding us of, because people might figure out who was it that actually cost us not only our Moon, but our civilization as well. This here and now is their civilization, the civilization of diverse races and genders. But our civilization created the atomic age and went to the Moon.

Told you so

https://www.rt.com/news/464051-finnish-study-no-evidence-warming/

A new study conducted by a Finnish research team has found little evidence to support the idea of man-made climate change. The results of the study were soon corroborated by researchers in Japan.

In a paper published late last month, entitled ‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’, a team of scientists at Turku University in Finland determined that current climate models fail to take into account the effects of cloud coverage on global temperatures, causing them to overestimate the impact of human-generated greenhouse gasses.

Given the evidence presented in the study, the Finnish team rounded out the paper by concluding “we have practically no anthropogenic climate change,” adding that “the low clouds control mainly the global temperature.”

The results sharply cut against claims put forward by many environmentalists, including US lawmakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who argue not only that climate change is an immediate threat to the planet, but that it is largely a man-made phenomenon. Ocasio-Cortez, better known as ‘AOC’, has proposed a ‘Green New Deal’ to address the supposedly dire threat.

I had a simple anecdotal method of figuring out there’s no climate change. Like, watching things for 40 years and noticing that nothing changed. Sea level rise estimated from tidal markings on known places: zero. Average weather patterns: the same. If not for the hysterical communists, one would see no problem whatsoever.