I’m on a two week vacation starting now. I hope to stay completely offline for the duration.

Recently my son asked me whether we can get out of the mode where we’re prepared for an immediate disaster, basically whether he can take the laptop out of the evacuation backpack. I thought about it and said this: “The last few times I went out for a walk, 2 out of 3 times I ended up going to a big sports/outdoors store and I always came home with a few additional pieces of survival/emergency preparedness gear. I bought several thermally insulated stainless steel water bottles, a fixed blade hunting knife, cordage, inox cups, a spare backpack, gas-powered cooker, several LED battery lights and similar stuff. I didn’t really intend to, I did it on autopilot, without planning or thinking about it, the way a squirrel collects nuts on instinct. Also, you’ve seen me collect gold and silver. So, you tell me, if you see a squirrel collecting nuts in a hurry, on instinct, how likely do you think it is that spring is coming?”

No, I don’t know why I’m doing it, and I don’t know what’s coming, but I’m a squirrel collecting nuts and acorns to put in various holes in trees, and feeling good when I’m doing it, and it basically does itself on autopilot, I’m not having an intellectual plan of any kind, and if you asked me, I would tell you that for most probable crisis-types, this kind of emergency preparedness is futile and meaningless, but it’s something that a physical body does in response to a certain type of subconscious premonition. So, that’s what’s been going on lately, and I didn’t write anything here because I didn’t really know what to say. Everything I said before still stands, and I have no real updates, other than that my body is quite badly damaged by the coronavirus; I seem to have permanently lost a significant portion of my lung capacity so I get winded much sooner during any kind of exercise, which aggravates my excessive weight problem which always arises during the winter, when I can’t go out for long walks and just sit at home, eating the quantities of food I got accustomed to during the high-activity periods, and this time “winter” just got extended by a few months. A combination of excessive weight and low oxygenation equals strained heart, which is not good. All in all, I’m not in the best of conditions and I am trying to fix it with a fast/diet, with limited success due to the fact that everything that’s actually effective in reducing weight is also putting my brain first in low-sugar mode, and then in keto mode, both of which are impairing or outright disabling my spiritual abilities, which is something I am not willing to put up with.

Gold has been steadily rising, and silver was behaving excessively poorly, which is contrary to all expectations that are to be made based on the laws of supply and demand, so it’s obvious that the market is controlled, but that doesn’t tell us by whom, for what reasons and to what end. Before the weekend, silver started slightly outperforming gold, but the ratio between them is still over 100, which is historically unprecedented in how bad it is. One could say that it’s a good time to buy silver, but that is based on the assumption that silver is going to rise, and/or that gold is going to stagnate or drop, but this is all based on the rationale that silver is going to re-assume its historical role of a secondary monetary metal. Having in mind that historically silver was a secondary monetary metal only because it was impractical to mint gold coins of such low value for daily trade, and today we can use electronic purchasing systems to settle trade in very small fractions without any additional difficulty, this assumption is highly dubious. In fact, considering how gold was recently re-instated as a class 1 security, and nothing of the sort is even in the cards for silver, gold remains a sure thing, with an almost certain further growth until the amount of gold stored in the central banks reaches at least 40% of the value of the overall monetary emission. Silver, however, remains a highly speculative investment and I’m very glad I kept my investment in silver limited to a lower percentage. I am, however, happy to have it, just in case it starts behaving like a new Bitcoin, which it might, but I can’t give you the probability because I don’t know all the factors involved.

Also, Biljana got the new 16” Macbook pro, and I of course tried it and was mostly underwhelmed, because it felt almost completely identical to my mid-2015 15” model, which is the highest praise I can give a laptop, essentially saying it’s great and if my 15” died I would buy it without reservations, other than the price. The new GPU is excellent, leagues better than anything Apple put in their laptops before. I ran Valley benchmark on it in 1600p on ultra and it ran perfectly, in high frame rates, and the laptop managed to cool itself normally once it ramped up the fans, stabilizing around 75°C. This essentially makes it a capable gaming laptop, in a pinch. The problems are the USB-C charging without any external indication that the battery is full, no magsafe, no legacy ports, no upgradability, and the price is obscenely high here in Croatia, with 25% VAT on top of higher European prices and stuff. To calculate in hard currency, the price here was two ounces of gold, but since I bought gold instead of the laptop while gold was much cheaper, and the laptop remained at the same price as before, I can almost talk myself into believing that I saved money buying it now instead of earlier, although I know I’m deceiving myself. 😊 Anyway, that was the only thing I bought recently that doesn’t fall into the category of “gathering nuts and acorns”, and my squirrel-self is not happy about it and wants to return to gathering gold coins and survival thingies as soon as money allows. 😊

And of course, with the ominous feeling of impending disaster on the horizon, a vacation on Hvar is postponed indefinitely.