Financial events

You must be wondering about the fact that the price of gold is falling and the American stock market is behaving strangely. Apparently, bitcoin and stock market are in a boom, and the metals are “worthless”, contrary to my predictions.

To that, all I’m going to say is that we have descended below the event horizon of the collapse of the world’s financial system. At this point and until the end, we are in the domain of chaos, panic, greed, ignorance and madness. Buy precious metals if you can. Earn as much money as you can while it’s still possible. Buy essential things. Avoid buying non-essential things. Avoid whatever the masses are doing. We are in the domain of evil and madness, enveloped by the fogs of war. Trust only in the plans that you made before, and don’t change course now, as Von Clausewitz would advise.

Totalitarianism

Watch this first:

There is a serious problem with identifying the leftists as “liberals”. A liberal is someone who minds his own business and does his own thing, and expects others to do so as well, the only limitation to freedom being the point where you infringe upon the freedoms of others. In that sense, I am a liberal. They are not. They are outright fascists. There’s no place for verbal ambiguities there. They have massive overlap with movements like the Khmer Rouge, the Bolseviks, Maoists, Sendero Luminoso, and the NSDAP. The only reason why they don’t actually commit genocide is that they are still in the process of maneuvering into the position of power where they will be able to do so with impunity. I am absolutely convinced of that, because I have historically seen such movements and all of them were outright murderous and genocidal. Calling them “liberal” is such an incredible misnomer, one can only facepalm. They are the exact diametrical opposition to liberalism.

However, to be honest, when I called myself a liberal that was true only to a point, because my personal worldview is nowhere near as relativistic. If I would have to qualify it more precisely, I would say my worldview can be summed up by “do what you think is right, and pay the price”, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a right to free speech, or that there is free anything, for that matter. If you speak lies, there will be consequences – your consciousness will drift away from reality, and your outward situation will reflect that. Also, if your lies offend people, they might do something about it, which also limits the concept of “freedom” of whatever is it that you want to do. If you speak the truth, there will also be consequences – basically, your consciousness will be more aligned with reality, but you might also offend liars and those who believe in falsehoods; and they, too, might choose to do something about it. The only way to avoid consequences is to live an utterly inconsequential life, but if you think that isn’t a consequence, you are sorely mistaken. In my worldview, you are judged by the harsh light of reality, and that which is of God will share destiny with God, while that which is false and evil will share destiny with nothingness. I always had contempt for the religious zealots who believe they have to kill people because they are the “enemies of God” as they see those things, as if God is powerless to kill his own enemies so they have to help him. That’s incredibly ridiculous. God has ways of dealing with scum. Trying to help God with justice is like trying to push Earth in order to help it spin. God doesn’t need you to help him with implementing justice. You need God in order to be aligned with justice. It’s impossible to be righteous if your consciousness isn’t in God. That’s the fundamental flaw of all those false moralists who are all basically atheists, and who in their conceit think they can be moral without God, and even want to kill everyone who disagrees with their pathetic “moral” views, usually based on “equality”, as the most pathetic of all concepts, because that’s what you come up with when you lack any moral compass whatsoever. So, my “liberal” approach is to tell you that you are free to explore reality and choose whatever path, but God is reality and illusion is deadly, and whatever you do, there will be a price. Offend evil by choosing God, there will be a price. Offend God by choosing evil, there will be a price. Try not to offend anyone and you will be inconsequential trash that will be taken out and recycled in the end.

How we lost freedom

It was a slippery slope.

Initially we had freedom of speech that was the core value of our civilization.

Then they came and said that isn’t right; if there aren’t limits on the freedom of speech, should the Nazis also be allowed to speak? Should holocaust deniers be allowed to speak? There should be limits to freedom.

Then laws were introduced that limited free speech for Nazis, holocaust deniers and “hate speech”, which was initially defined as calls for violence against groups of people based on their collective identity.

Then the “Nazis” were defined as “anyone who doesn’t agree with me”, the concept of “holocaust deniers” was expanded to encompass “deniers” of any kind of “accepted truth”, however flimsy, in order to protect weak ideas and beliefs from need to be defended by reason and evidence. “Hate speech” was extended to mean “any kind of speech that makes anyone feel uncomfortable”.

So now we no longer have freedom of speech, and soon we won’t have freedom of any kind, at all, because we are already locked down, and anyone speaking out is a “denier”, and apparently to deny the official narrative of corrupt politicians, journalists and “scientists” who are a propaganda arm of big industry, that’s a thoughtcrime comparable to eating small children.

Imposing any kind of limitations on the freedom of speech was a terrible mistake. Nazis are fully within their right to say what they think. You are fully within your right to disagree with them. Also, if someone verbally commits something that is an actual crime, prosecutable by actual laws, for instance crying “fire” in a theatre, or inciting a crowd to murder someone or damage his property, those are not things that need to be solved by restricting freedom of speech. They can be easily dealt with using normal laws. If normal laws cannot be applied, it means it was impossible to demonstrate a causal relationship between verbal incitement and actual physical harm. Also, it is very difficult to categorically state that it is universally wrong to preach against entire groups bound by similar characteristics. If we can see logic in preaching against drug cartels or totalitarian states, we can also see why this should be extended by allowing one to preach against any kind of life-choice, behavioral pattern or in fact religion or race. As far as I’m concerned, KKK is fully within their right to preach against Africans, and Africans are fully within their right to prove them wrong. Nazis are fully within their right to preach against the Jews calling them an inferior race, and the Jews are fully within their right to show them the stats about Nobel prize winners per race, which demonstrates that, if anything, they are the superior race. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works – you say something, and then someone else counters your arguments with something that’s either correct or foolish, making you look either like an ass, or like someone who actually has a point. If someone thinks his arguments are too weak to win against the Nazis and the holocaust deniers in the open marketplace of ideas, then he’s the one with a problem, because if they are so wrong that they should not be allowed to speak at all, then it should be very easy to let them speak, and then expose the facts and make them look like complete fools.

After all, it’s not like “hate speech” is something that is universally abhorred. It’s perfectly allowed, as long as it’s against the “right” target. The movie “Lethal weapon II” is pure hate speech and slander against the Republic of South Africa, probably devised because America was having a financial problem with RSA selling the enormous amount of gold from the Witwatersrand Basin, which amounted to 22% of all the gold ever mined, in the history of mankind, on the world’s market, in form of Krugerrands. From what it looks like to me now, the entire “apartheid” issue was a CIA active measure against RSA, to limit their access to the world’s market and the resulting change of balance in the financial sector, since America moved away from gold in the 1970s and had a problem with its resurgence, especially if someone else controlled it. This is a very cynical interpretation of American “fight for human rights” across the globe, and postulates that whenever America wants to suppress an economic or political adversary, this or that human rights violation will be invented as a justification, in order to rally the well-meaning idiots behind its imperialistic cause. It’s always some children that will cry unless America bombs some state or prevents it from selling cheaper gas, oil or gold to the market where America wants to sell their overpriced goods. Basically, Krugerrands are racist and Russian gas is not democratic.

So hate speech is obviously fine – you are allowed to hate the “Nazis”, the “racists”, the “deniers” of official ideology, the Chinese, the Russians and the white people. You’re just not allowed to hate the people in power and their ideology, because that will get you “deplatformed” and “un-personed”.

So, tell me, how many of you have heard of the Witwatersrand Basin and how much gold was actually found in there? I knew there was lots gold in the RSA, of course, but I had no idea how much until very recently, and then it clicked – the time that gold was massively exported abroad coincides exactly with the time when the entire media industry and all sorts of celebrities started making propaganda about poor black people being oppressed in the RSA and calling for international sanctions against the “corrupt” and “racist” regime there, presenting it as if the blacks were the indigenous people of the RSA, and the whites came and robbed/enslaved them and it’s a huge injustice. In fact, nobody lived there before the white people came. It was a wasteland. Then the Europeans came, made it into a paradise, found ways to mine useful minerals, grow food and basically make it look like Europe, and it created so many jobs that the blacks from all parts of Africa migrated there because the living conditions were so much better. The Europeans didn’t like the concepts of all those black overrunning the little paradise they made for themselves there, and made rules that allowed the Africans to work there and be paid fairly, but were not allowed to participate in politics of what was basically a white European country, which was all very much in line with the politics that were in place in the American South in the 60s, implemented by the Democratic party (which BTW is to the KKK what Sinn Féin is to the IRA). Then they made a mistake of exporting too much gold in form of Krugerrands into the world market, the CIA didn’t like it, did their psyop, RSA government tried to appease them by removing the apartheid measures, and now RSA is in the process of devolving into a typical African shithole run by corrupt tribal fuckwits who think AIDS can be treated with garlic and raping virgin girls, and all their problems can be solved by robbing white people.

So, how did we lose our freedom? Was it when we decided that “Nazis” should not be allowed to speak, or was it something deeper, more insidious, like accepting the concept of universal human rights as a supreme civilizational value, when it was in fact pushed – if not outright invented – by the CIA, as a method of pressure on the rival powers? Or did we lose our freedom by blindly following the propagandists who took over the emptied platform once occupied by the Church? In any case, as in any totalitarian system, we are free to criticize the enemies of the regime in power all we want, and we are free to praise the ruling ideology all we want. For anything else, we will be swiftly and cruelly punished. And oh-by-the-way, we now also aren’t allowed to work, move freely and are basically under house arrest, because someone’s granny will die and children will look at us with tearful accusatory eyes if we drive cars, have money, or in fact exist.

Misc updates

I seem to have covid-19, judging by the symptoms; again, after almost exactly a year. I guess the level of antibodies went down during the winter and here I go again. So far, it’s nothing serious, I just get a slight fever (37°C or so) after physical exertion, so I had to cut down on physical activity, especially during the cold. The worrying part is that it doesn’t seem to go away; the situation is unchanged for the last month or so. Another worrying part is that it’s affecting my brain function, most likely due to low-level inflammation level that’s more-less constant, and it appears to affect my brain functions. So far it’s not very serious, but it’s similar to the last time when it was serious; I have trouble focusing and remembering things, my mind is not clear and I tire easily. Another thing is that my immune system is in turmoil and I am more prone to allergic reactions that just flare up all of the sudden. I increased the vitamin intake just to be sure, because this is very tightly correlated with the time I spent in cold and dark; sunlight helped a lot last year, and it gets much worse as the winter progresses, and the obvious culprits might be low vitamin D and melatonin levels, which degrade the immune system, which then becomes both ineffective and prone to overreaction.

Since I’m half-sick and my brain isn’t working properly I haven’t been doing much thinking lately, so I don’t have much to contribute; mostly resting and watching things on YouTube, but I do wish to comment on a few things.

The first is that I observed that people seem to think that investing in Bitcoin or some weird stock is a much better idea than actually working for money, and the worst part is, the economy is in such a state that they might actually be right – if you are locked down, businesses are closing all over the place, and everything is so regulated it’s almost impossible to find something that pays well and isn’t regulated into extinction already, and things like Bitcoin and Tesla seem to go vertical, it’s obvious what will make sense to most people. Of course, in my experience this is always a precursor to collapse.

The second thing I want to comment on is saving money. I saw several situations where it looked like a very bad idea; for instance, kids trying to save money by buying silver and gold, and people trying to save money when it’s obviously that their problem is insufficient income. This made me wonder where the actual limit is, in a sense of who should save money and reduce spending, and who should simply work on increasing their income. It’s hard to tell, but as a general rule, if you find yourself buying unnecessary stuff after you got everything you actually needed, you should probably think about saving. Also, if you have a stable career which brings significant monthly income, and there is no obvious path forward in a sense of an income multiplier, saving money is the obvious choice. Conversely, if you’re a kid who is just starting his career, saving money in gold and silver coins strikes me as a bad move; rather, you should invest in your skills, buy a better computer, buy tools that will increase your effectiveness on whatever career path it is that you chose. Basically, there is a time to invest, and there is a time when investments pay off, and then you save.

The third thing that provokes my reaction is a case of a person who applied for a job and then figured out “oops, I only have a smartphone and I would need a laptop in order to do this”. We don’t live in a parallel universe where laptops are expensive. Sure they are, if you buy a really fancy one, but really, you should only think about a fancy one after you did lots of work on your cheap one. Not to have one at all, today, is actually dangerous, because everything is done over the Internet, and if you actually want to get anything done, you need a proper computer, not just a smartphone. The level of equipment at which you are a “player”, meaning that you can technically do serious work for money online, is so low, you need to be a dumbass not to have a laptop and a smartphone. For fuck’s sake, a cheap Xiaomi phone and an Acer Aspire 5 will get you in the game, for everything up to really, really high levels of professional work, at which point you will already have made so much money with a Xiaomi and an Acer, buying the newest and best equipment will be something you just do in your stride without even feeling the financial sting. Not having a smartphone with a good mobile network contract, and a decent laptop you can use to do work and stay informed, it’s not even borderline careless, it’s actually self-endangerment by outright foolishness. In my case, having less than two fully functional computers at any one time, having only one way of connecting to the Internet at any one time, would be something I would consider risky. Don’t think it’s just because I have money. I had redundancies of that kind even when I was really out of money, because the first thing you need to look after when you’re out of money is maintaining access to means of making money. If you lose that kind of access, your life is basically in danger. Losing access to means of making money, and here I mean access to making money by doing skilled work online, and not chopping wood for pocket change IRL, is something that starts a very steep downward spiral that ends with you starving and freezing on a street somewhere. Never allow yourself to lose full access to the Internet, and full capability to function in an online environment. This means a computer capable of running the right kind of software for the work that you do (whether that’s Office, AutoCAD, Visual Studio, UNIX terminal or Xcode depends on what you do), it means a webcam with a good microphone so you can do telepresence, which is absolutely essential during the lockdown and probably in the future work of any kind, and it means comfortable interface, which means “not phone”; a good laptop is usually fine, and a big monitor, proper keyboard and mouse are usually a welcome improvement. As for the operating system, don’t get a Chromebook if you need MS Office or Xcode for work. Don’t get a Mac if you have to write .NET code. Basically, being able to do work completely online today is absolutely essential, and good smartphones and laptops can be had for so cheap, compared to what used to be the case until very recently, that failure to equip yourself at least in some minimal sense necessary to get started, is sheer fucking idiocy. If you lose your home, you can bounce back easily if you have a smartphone, a laptop and some money saved. If you lose access to the Internet, and/or means of making money online, you are in a much worse peril than if you only lost your home. You basically lost access to civilization.

Free market and value

I’ve been thinking more about the weird aspects of the free market economy and the concept of valuation in general.

There are two basic ideas about value; first is that everything has some sort of “intrinsic value” and the point of free market is to discover it. The second idea is that there is no intrinsic value, that things are dynamically valued according to utility and scarcity and the market value is the only value there is.

I had a problem with this, you see. The concept that there is no objective value is contrary to my belief system, where certain things are valuable as such, not just because someone put a market price on them. I’m not talking about gold or bitcoin, I’m talking about more fundamental principles, such as virtue or spirituality. Some things can be infinitely valuable even if there isn’t a market value. So, basically, I am opposed to the free market fundamentalist idea that there is no value outside the market. However, I don’t think there is an inherent value to anything material, outside human needs, utility, desire and fear, which create a balance of desirability and scarcity, eventually resulting in market valuation. For instance, water and air are extremely desirable, but if they are not scarce, their market valuation is low. However, if they for some reason become scarce, their market valuation could climb to extremes. Also, some things can be extremely rare, but if they have no utility and nobody needs them for anything, their market valuation can be extremely low, so scarcity is no guarantee of value either. An example are exotic elements found in piles of radioactive waste – all quite rare, but nobody so far found any use for them, and as a rule you have to pay people to take them, not the other way around.

And then it dawned to me: market doesn’t discover the value of things. It reveals a quantified representation of human needs, desires, greed and fear. Market is a mirror in which humanity sees itself through value it puts on things. If probabilistic statistics quantifies human ignorance, marketplace quantifies human values: shelter, food, energy, hygiene and cosmetics, greed, status symbols, sex, guilt, fear. Basically, if Ponzi schemes are popular, what does that reveal? It reveals that people are greedy and stupid, not that the schemes themselves are actually useful, valuable or scarce. They stop being popular only when enough people lose enough money that it becomes common knowledge that they are the opposite of useful.

This is also my answer to the question of inherently worthless assets that trade on the market for often insane amounts of money – why are they popular, why are they valuable, and what does it mean. It’s not the worthless asset that is made valuable, it’s the human greed and madness that became revealed and quantified. You can actually convert greed, madness, stupidity and sin into money, and it’s not only easy, it’s the foundation of the most profitable business models; for instance cosmetics and luxury items are ways of monetizing human vanity.

The more “normal” assets are very easy to evaluate in this manner – for instance, the fact that you buy food gives you the obvious answer that you need to eat in order to survive. The fact that you buy fuel for your car says you need mobility in order to function. However, luxury clothes, watches and cosmetics, they are more difficult, because their function is to create an outward appearance of yourself, and the underlying motive can be dignity, vanity, or in fact anything. It can be samyama on some aspect of God, or it can be deception, of both self and others. In any case, it’s a wonderful opportunity for introspection.