No idea is dangerous. Many ideas offend power. It always turns out that the ideas which are illegal, because they are dangerous, are the ideas which offend power. But since power is powerful, to offend it is not to endanger it. Nothing can endanger it.

Therefore, when in the spirit of glasnost we state these ideas, we have a special duty not to state them as if they threatened power—for truth is not treason. Glasnost is the right to express any idea—and the duty to express it in the coziest, most harmless way. Actually, when you suggest that your idea is dangerous—you are a collaborator, for this is exactly the official thinking of the regime.

There is no information war. If there was, it is over. The regime won. It always does. The end of war is peace; and in peacetime, no idea is a bullet. When I have ideas that remind me of the bullets of the late war, I go out of my way not to cast them in brass. In particular, I never advocate anything at all.

This is the spirit and strategy of glasnost: not one of tension, but of relaxation. We are entering the peacetime of ideas. But how can we have peace, when some d00d stole Nancy Pelosi’s podium? Surely Belzec is just around the next bend in the tracks… the peacetime of ideas is when nothing matters. We cannot avoid this fate; it is already here.

Do we dare even hope for peace at this point?

Many ideas do offend power. No ideas threaten the powerful—because the powerful, having power, have nothing to worry about. The closest ideas to being dangerous are ideas that the strong should abuse the weak. Power can do nothing about these ideas, because by definition the strong have power.

Globocop do-gooder-ism is essentially the rationalized form of that which is currently en vogue. It is for precisely this reason I am skeptical any party involved even wants peace, save for us cranks. Nevertheless, the path to peace (perestroika) is discussed:

Certainly the easiest way to turn a bottom-up, unaccountable organization into a top-down one is to fire the former and hire the latter. This is not always the best way, but it is often the best way. It is especially likely to be the best way after a prolonged period of unaccountability. If it’s not an option—perestroika isn’t real.

It's funny. For years my grandma has said "we need a dictator" and she's not wrong. At this point there's no alternative way to cut out the cancer.

Perestroika cannot work, and cannot even happen, as a way for one side in America’s class war to dominate the other. It can only happen as a peace measure. Its purpose is to end the cold war by installing an authority that is dedicated to serving all classes. This can only happen if both sides consent to giving up their real or apparent power.

One of the most deeply-held beliefs of Americans is that unless they hold power, they will be oppressed. This is like a cokehead believing that unless he has cocaine, he will be depressed. While it is not evidence of reasonable thinking, nor is it necessarily untrue. And our thinker can marshal plenty of empirical experience to make his case.

Yet another reason I am skeptical of the prospects for peace; we aren't even close to the level of "rock bottom" misery these power junkies would have to experience to even think about throwing the ring into Mount Doom.

If both sides of the public mind can realize that their quarrel is the consequence of a political structure that gives each of them a good reason to fear each other; that they have little or no substantive conflict; and that they have the same principal interest, an effective and accountable government that treats all groups and classes fairly—they have at least the abstract basis for a mutual and stable peace.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Yeah, sure. Keep dreamin'. Peace is not the goal, but failure in the public's mind. We're far from 100% war exhaustion yet.

It does matter which side the perestroika comes from. But it doesn’t matter a lot. While Trump’s CEO has a huge wave of anti-elite sentiment at his back, he has another huge wave of elite resistance in front of him. Our elites are not violent, of course—but they can still be a quite pain.

Biden’s CEO is more like Gorbachev—since he is a legitimate figure, the sea is calm before and behind him. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. You might object that he’s a lib. It doesn’t matter—the job creates the man. Lee Kuan Yew was a lib. While the lib inherently has more to learn, what he learns is inherently fresher and more thorough.

I can very much agree with this part. It's funny that the libs themselves jawboned about "transparency" back in the Obama era. Of course without accountability, it's just brazenness but it was at least an acknowledgement that something is very wrong with the administrative state coming from the elites themselves.

Which I think is the only way this can work. The elites themselves have to realize this is not working and decide to do something about it. Can the auto-glasnost strategy actually pull this off? Time will tell.

Their talking points are pretty much spot on (regarding the current crooks in Berlin):

These pigs are nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the Second World War, whose task it is to keep down the German people.

That said, it sounds like scamming (as with libertarianism here) is rife in nonmainstream politics over there too. That said, it's still less of a scam than voting and thinking taxes actually help any citizen, lol. This is what I always emphasize -- if normal politics weren't an obvious criminal conspiracy, hardly anyone would fall for the absolute nonsense out there in the alternative media. "Alternative Medicine" wouldn't exist if mainstream medicine worked.

Linked in Yarvin's piece below, and good on it's own merits. I'm so happy pieces like this are coming out of the right finally.

Yarvin with an important essay:

You can be a Republican. The Republican Party, including its deranged fringes all the way to the “alt-right,” contains a complete spectrum from pure fraud to pure fascism. Corruption, betrayal and perversion are observed across this spectrum. Ultimately, the Republican Party is a party of losers; and to support it is to be a loser. When you give it ideas, they are either fake ideas for helping its officials defraud its voters, or real ideas for building fascism in America.

You can be a Democrat. The Democratic Party, including its deranged fringes all the way to “antifa,” contains a complete spectrum from pure bureaucracy to pure sadism. Corruption, sycophancy and perversion are observed across this spectrum. Ultimately, the Democratic Party is a criminal organization; and to support it is to be a criminal. And since it is the ruling party, unless you oppose it, you support it.

And “third parties” are even worse. And people ask me why I don’t like democracy!

Spot on with all points there.

Of Texas’ power generators that were not operational during the storm, Magness said the freeze was responsible 42% of the failures. A lack of fuel and equipment damage unrelated to the weather also contributed, but Magness said that for 38% of the plant outages, the problem remains unclear.

Just in time inventory + price control shortages = plants off for no reason.

Why did they adopt this clearly lunatic strategy of JIT inventory? Because they know contract law is toothless against them, and they'll never pay the price for violating their SLAs.

On bitcoin and our current financial situation.

The bull case for bitcoin (and other crypto variants) goes essentially like so: Monetization is going to happen, and the Gresham's Law saver pile-in will make it go "to da moon".

For those of you like myself who have paid attention since the 07-08 GFC, this is all sounding real familiar. Despite a spectacular run up, the best hype in the world, lunatic money printing and thousands of years of precedent gold still couldn't kill the dollar.

Much of this is because there is a category error in this thinking. Both crypto and USD are currencies and not money. They are mere vouchers for...something else (money). The precise nature of that something else is actually what matters.

As such, Gold being a money can't beat something it's not even in a race against. The bullion banks on the other hands were trounced handily because of both network effects and the intrinsic value disparities involved with the backing money.

Now you might be asking "hold on, the USD isn't backed by a dang thing!" That is unfortunately quite mistaken. In fact, in the case of everything but stablecoins (which are themselves bizarre backing themselves against other currencies and not monies), it is actually crypto which is backed by little more than hot air.

This is not to say there aren't strengths inherent to crypto, just that they are far from unique or non-transferable to other currencies. In fact, many of the fiat currencies out there are already experimenting with their own take on distributed ledgers.

The point here is simple; the future is crypto, yes. But not in the way those of us who wish for freedom want it. It's gonna be either a USD backed stablecoin or a directly FED issued shitcoin. The precedent already exists considering USD (which are *also* just ledger entries in a payment network you pay fees to use) to property, so this will be extended to crypto despite it being clear nonsense as pointed out by Vin Armani and others, regardless of the outcome of Bozo Craig Wright's lolsuit.

The reason for this is incredibly simple. It's the riddle of steel. Gold is strong, but H-Bombs are stronger.

Not only are ICBMs the most rare and expensive things humanity have ever produced; they also give one the power to never take no for an answer. It should come as no shock that they have all been driven out of circulation. They are more jealously hoarded than dragons do gold.

To be quite clear, the US Dollar is the empire. This is why despite an incredible speculative mania and it's many technical strengths against fiat currency, Crypto will still be a god that failed. Eventually the US Empire will too; but this vortex of corruption powered by satanic weaponry (despite it's feet of clay) have much longer legs than our current bull market.

This also sort of alludes to the core weakness in the dream of crypto. Sure, they can't seize your account without your consent. They can on the other hand hold you in contempt of court indefinitely and ensure you never enjoy the fruits of your labor, which is actually a worse outcome than if they had in fact seized it. Turns out Osama had the right idea to kill the dollar after all.

There will never be an escape from the power dimension of money. This is because freedom of action is the most valuable thing a person can have. And why governments invent nightmare weapons like MIRVed H-Bombs on ICBMs; so they can accumulate even more freedom of action.

There's a reason the ring of power was a gold ring. Like the Ring of Gyges, it's a platonic ideal of authority unburdened by responsibility. And what organization (and it's money!) on earth more fully embodies that ethos? You can take it to the bank!

POSTSCRIPT

On a serious note, we're about to get some truly incredible inflation thanks to record levels of capital destruction, margin debt and low interest rates. This is gonna send bond yields to "da moon"...unless the FED decides to sop up all this dough in an accumulator (which is what IOER did with the GFC) and spread it out over a number of years to conceal massive deflation due to malinvestments liquidating.

In short, they're gonna try and kick the can down the road yet again. The difference this time is the massive iceberg of capital destruction nobody yet fully grips the extent of thanks to lockdown. As such, they're guaranteed to fumble this one, and badly. It's unclear whether it will be in the direction of inflation or deflation. The only thing which is clear is that either the savers & producers or the wall street casino will get run over. My money's on the former.

If we think our market is a bizarro world with 0 connection to reality, I think we ain't seen nothin' yet. This might finally be Mises' crack-up boom. The incredible social upheval over the last year and the Cathedral's total incorrigible dementia pushing us towards civil unrest won't make this any better.

Essentially what's going on with all political activism at a high level. It's 1000% corrupt grifting from bottom to top.

Gib new plane plox. Self licking ice cream cone

I had a feeling the vTuber future being brought to everyone was closer than anyone imagined.

All talking heads and pols will now be Eliza Kassan and John Henry Eden henceforth.

Given the inventor has been sidelined, one suspects they were extraordinary flops.

Good enough for government work

Hype is the fundamentals (for all currencies!). I figured out things were a game of musical chairs pump and dump when I realized this grew out of the 07-08 gold speculations. It's the same pyramid scheme as back then (which is why gold has never retraced it's old gains).

Every rationalist is a disappointed lover. The rationalist becomes a rationalist because he has one simple dream: he wants the world to be ruled by reason. This dream always lets him down and always will.

It’s easy to fault the rationalists for the semiotic arrogance of their self-selected label. As if no one in history had ever thought of being rational! This is uber cringe.

These clowns always have no conception of the sins/virtues and how they just so happen to line up on emotion/reason. It's always the same old fight by the clueless.

The disappointed lover keeps being disappointed. And he keeps coming back: like the dolphin, he enjoys his rest in motion. The dissident is trying to get out of Plato’s cave. The rationalist is trying to furnish it. Tough when the trees are so drippy, and the sun is so weak—the upholstery gets moldy so fast…

Late in any empire, there is an air of dismal futility to all these efforts at reform. Since talking about what should be done is a pastime, a profession, a pretense that will never cease before they stop having Super Bowls, the discourse continues. Everyone really knows the real answer: nothing can be done. Nothing will be done.

Doubly so because the woke BS is just a right wing conspiracy conning them into not paying attention to the wars and the vortex of corruption.

Remember: every phone has a black box.

Klein's core thesis is that it's all because the Dixiecrats flipped R in the 70s, and the answer is to disenfranchise the republicans forever.

Of course, being in the Yank matrix, SSC can't see what's staring himself in the face, even though he has a hint by alluding to WTF happened in 1971?

The reality is that the dixiecrats wouldn't have made their devils' bargain with the party of lincoln had the Yanks not decided to just print money to the moon so that they could do literally everything they wanted and ignore all others. Yanno, kinda like the yanks did back during reconstruction.

It really is that simple to fix the country. Just stop believing Yank lies. Or, wait until they blow up in their faces again.

SSC thinks prediction markets are the answer we need for Full Communism Now(TM). He fails to realize it will fail for the same reason; participants optimize for success. You get more of what you reward, less of what you punish.

NO SNITCHIN'

When you realize the implications for crypto you'll be more bullish than you ever thought possible

MICHAEL VICK DID NOTHING WRONG

Author suspects an anschluss will be the end scenario, just because the locals aren't enthusiastic enough about their local tyrants. Probably correct; modern militaries are in a box as nobody intelligent enough to be an effective fighter is patriotic anymore. That leaves fighting for ones' family or plunder (the former is being actively undermined by the government, and the latter expressly prohibited).

In short, the mechanics that made mass mobilization work have collapsed for the westernized (read: feminized) countries. This will make them international "sick men" who can do practically nothing about encroachment once their peer competitors such as China reach similar levels of capitalization.

This month's "must read". This will breathe new life into the conservatives.

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

I suspect things will get far, far bloodier.

Part and parcel of our "let's never take responsibility for anything" emotional ninny culture

Glad to see what guys like the daily reckoning figured out 15 years ago finally getting some more mainstream traction. Despite all our efforts, productivity has flatlined; we are strangled by red tape, or crowded out by .gov domination of the sciences. The guy's "Qualitative" focus is essentially just looking at productivity from the side. We are no better in any major field essentially because we are no more productive (in fact measurably less so).