[ This image shows the Coefficient fo Accuracy (the percentage of correct network-generated predictions), versus the number of training cases, in top left. Bottom right, is the sum-squared error loss history, as the network is trained for 3000 epochs. The network is implemented in Python/NumPy and GnuAPL, in a standard perceptron configuration, with a unique seeking behaviour during attempted loss-reduction back-propagation. Seems to work - and allows us to experiment in an unconstrained manner.] (Click to enlarge image, ESC to exit image enlargement.)

The training-action visualization graphics show noisey loss-reducing behaviour during traditional back_propagation training. We are still experimenting with this model, but it is interesting, because it is implemented directly, without recourse to TensorFlow or other high-level models or API's. TensorFlow is great, but having something we can tweak directly, is both looking promising and proving educational. Initially, it did not work well. Adjusting parameters and design topology have allowed it to reach a level that is potentially actionable.

[ Mar. 2, 2024 ] - Baby, Baby (Steps...) Python and NumPy is quite a brilliant combo. You can build a whole neural-network with just that, as NumPy has the matrix math to let the job get done. TensorFlow is clever - but may be too clever by half, as the Brits would say.

Say you want to do a quick calculation of your home-built neural-network, and determine the percentage of network-generated results that match the training-case data. I've called this the "Coefficient of Accuracy" and TensorFlow just calls it binary accuracy. It is simply the number of correct predictions that the network generates, divided by the total number of training cases. Simple.

Easy to do. Here is trivial example:

$ python
(blah blah, Python version..)
>>>
>>> import numpy as np
>>> vec = np.arange (1,13)              #--- create a 1 to 12 simple vector
>>> vec
array ([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12])

>>> vec[0] = 3                          #--- fiddle the first element to 3
>>>
>>> np.size(vec)                        #--- number elements in vector
12
>>> float(np.size(vec))                 #--- convert to float
12.0

>>> mat = vec.reshape(3, 4)             #--- flip vector in to 3 x 4 matrix 
                                        #--- not needed now, but it will be
                                        #--- create netvec, which could be our
                                        #--- results-from-network vector

>>> netvec = np.array([3, 8, 7, 1, 1, 0, 4, 10, 11, 12, 11, 12 ])
>>> 
>>> (np.sum(vec == netvec))/float(np.size(vec))
0.25
                                        #--- and that's it.  The first and the
                                        #--- last two elements match.  They get
                                        #--- evaluated as boolean "True", and since
                                        #--- they are really booleans, you can just
                                        #--- add them all together, with "np.sum"

In APL, this same sequence would be:

      vec ← ⍳ 12
      vec
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
      vec[1] ← 3
      vec
3 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
      
      netvec ← 3 8 7 1 1 0 4 10 11 12 11 12
      netvec                               
3 8 7 1 1 0 4 10 11 12 11 12
      
      (+/(vec = netvec))÷ ⍴ vec
0.25

What is so very cool about Python+NumPy, is that the same abstractional mental model can be applied as APL uses. There is no need to "for i = 1 to number-of-cases" yatta-yatta looping. You just lie the two vectors beside each other (even if they are a couple of million elements in length), apply a boolean transformational sweep across the whole data-space, and then press the button to add-reduce the vector to a single number, and divide that number by the known length of the vector. It's fast, simple and damn useful. Bravo to the designers of NumPy.

[ Mar. 1, 2024 ] - Bang a Gong - Work continues. We have a well-performing Tensorflow model, which trains well. It is configured on the Tensorflow 1.4 version (with session and di-graph design), and does not perform well under Tensorflow 2.x versions (tested on TF 2.12 on a Windows-11 platform, and TF 2.6 on CentOS-Linux box.) We may be coding and configuring in a non-optimal manner, and to be honest, the poor performance may be do to my coding. Tensorflow has curious and complex opertional features, that make it difficult know what it is actually doing.

But what is really exciting for us, is a custom-built neural-network we have created directly, in APL and Python code, which is now training quite well - on a 6000-record block of historical data, it is now training to an 82% accuracy, and with very low overall sum-squared error levels. This is up from low-60% accuracy, and much higher error-levels, so we are quite encouraged by this.

I *far* prefer working with code I have created myself, as it allows direct changes and unique insights to be both tested and created. The "black-box" approach of using higher-level API's like TensorFlow, tends to hide too much detail, and encourages a "mindless" approach to data analysis and economic research in general.

In this ugly and tragic world situation that we now are entering into - where some sort of major global conflict now seems to be clearly coming towards us all - we are all going to have to work harder, and most importantly, work smarter. War-time tends to clear away the foolishness and the cruft and clutter. If we are to be at war, then we had better be able to be damned effective at what we do, and do it well.

Note: I really *do* like Python. And I also quite like "NumPy", (a genius product, really) which makes Python actually usable for numerical work. "Lists" and "Tuples" and "Dictionaries" are just fucking stupid. All one needs is scalars, vectors and matricies. Go into higher-dimensions if you want to.. Blocks and bags of Blocks and bags of bags of blocky-tensors, and so on. The trick is to keep the syntax simple. If I get a chance, and have the time, I will write a front-end to Python+NumPy, which I will call "LumPy", standing for: " Langdon's Universal Matricies for Python". It might look a tiny bit like old APL.

[ Feb. 27, 2024 ] - A Eureka Moment (for us at least) - Finally got the Tensorflow network to work. I've built a real network, running on real data, from our Xerion (UTS - University of Toronto Neural-Network simulator) product. Xerion was a very sophisticated research tool, developed by Dr. Hinton's group at University of Toronto, back in the 1990's. We got a copy of it, after taking a short course Dr. Hinton offered as part of his funding deal, with the Province. We got a copy of Xerion, but it ran on Sun Workstations. I had to create a Linux version - and that meant first getting an early Slackware Linux running on an IBM P/C. It was a key project - led to many other things.

I've managed to replicate the Xerion-based analytic MPL (Multi-layer perceptron) neural-network device I built, but now using Tensorflow/Keras and Python. For the longest while, this did not look like a do-able project. The tools were just not there, or were insufficiently documented, and so on. But finally, I've got the thing working - even with just a single-layer network, and with only a 700 epoch training run. Of course, it can be scaled up from here. Previous versions would plateau at low-levels of binary accuracy, and high-levels of loss-history. But this version now trains successfully, as can be seen from our custom-built (APL-based) analytic graphics. It's a small result - but an exciting one for our small efforts!

I had written a detailed bunch of humourous drivel and posted it here, but it was a bit over the top, so I removed it. I had crafted a simulated rant about Python+NumPy and it's awful syntax, but it was a bit silly, so it's gone. I think Python+NumPy is actually quite brilliant, and it (or something like it) is long overdue. We need computers to help us think and work, not just to be used to turn us into serfs, screen-slaves, and have annoying adverts and other toxic nonsense fired into our faces so as to mine our wallets. :)

Python + NumPy is almost as useful as APL - at least it will be, once I manage to learn the curious syntax, and figure out how to wrap my brain around this "object/module" calling sequences. (And what is it with "lambda" functions? FFS, just call them in-line code, or maybe "functions"? There is too much "greek letter" noise already in the Options markets and the worlds of physics and math...). Have a happy+happy joy+joy day.

[ Feb. 22, 2024 ] - Building Stuff - Ayn Rand would be proud. We're building stuff. It's software, but it is still hard to do. Late nites - seeing the sun come up - crazy. I should be a happy old retired guy - but I am working like a student again, because we are missing the big run. There is money being created and injected - not sure where or how - but the US Central Bank folks are up to something. There appears to be a tsunami of cash washing into asset prices - this is not just NVDA and META and GOOG and MSFT. The USA election for this November will be shit-show. Trump is under sustained legal bombardment by curious forces of darkness. The unpopular Nancy Pelosi clone, Nikki Haley, is getting all the airplay and press - as if the media has been instructed to promote her, with games afoot to either neuter or execute Trump politically. It's nuts. And a market-run is being engineered, and honestly, it scares the heck out of us.

Today did not look right. Nvidia is a great company, with good products, that are much in demand. But AI is being done in a way that will help a few, and only a few. RIght now, a curious gold-rush mentality has taken hold - but we just don't buy it. AI is good - but any direct experience I have had with commercial "chatbots" is time-waste and toxic. When they answer the phone, I just give up. Had to do some awful government-driven work today - the usual unfunded mandate stuff at the micro level... long work, spin wheels, waste time, get cold, feel bad, etc. Curious how truly stupid, corrupt, dangerous and heartbreakingly awful much of the world has become ... and I didn't buy any NVDA, of course, so that hurts most of all ... :)

Got some code around a TF thing hammered together. Not sure if anything valuable and viable will result. Difficult times, and costly too. Everyone I know or research, seems to be a billionaire. All in all, the run today makes me feel nervous and silly - weird combo.

I have a feeling this is all not going to end well. No path forward from here, looks good. This is how wars really start. A bunch of "whoopi! - ya ya!" economics, followed by an ugly, soul-wrecking reversal, and everyone angry and spoiling for a fight. Not sure how I see this - but it haunts me. And the events in Russia, mean I will never get to see the Hermitage, which I had kind of hoped to one-day visit. Russia is tracking into sad/bad/angry/war mode, and USA is dialing-up the bat-shit crazy level. The Ukraine invasion is the most stupid, mindless, cruel insanity, since Hilter and Stalin carved up Poland, and ate it for dinner. If you are not Switzerland, then your country risks being toast. The Swiss have the right model - everyone in the Reserves, and each with a SiG auto-rifle under their bed at home. We are either architects or killers. Everything else is just support-services.

[ Feb. 16, 2024 ] - Another Good Man Dies - Sad news. Alexi Navalny was reported dead, by the Russian Prison Authorities. They said he died while taking a walk. This is sad. Many say he was simply killed. This might be true. Folks seem to die, when they are Russian prisoners. This is just sad and bad, the World is now a poorer and less good place, when a courageous man like Navalny is destroyed by the heavy-hand of cruelty. We all must work to change the program. If major war is necessary, then so be it. But it might be better to use wisdom, rather than brute force, to solve the problem of evil in the World.

[ Feb. 14, 2024 ] - Interview With A Vampire? - I used to really like and respect Vladimir Putin. But then he ordered his minions to invade Ukraine and torture and kill it's people at scale. This was crazy-unwise, and I don't like him now, as this action has destroyed part of Ukraine, done terrible damage to the growth and development of my dear Russia, hurt all the Russian and Ukrainian people, and caused unneeded pain and misery to a large number of folks all over the planet. But it was right and good for Tucker Carlson to go interview him. Why the hell not? Get all the information you can, and do all you can to restore sanity and peace to a world wracked by murder-monkeys, sadists, military-mindless-men who like to see "red-flow", and the typical wild horror-show that is modern tribal hate. Old-fashioned tribal hate is really putting on a big display in the entity that is called "Israel" - the truly worst thing that humanity has created since the days of "Vlad The Impaler" of medieval Romania.

Anything that moves the needle away from "War-and-Hate Mode: Let's Just Kill Them All!", and back towards the previous (circa 2019) "Economics Mode: Reasonably Peaceful Co-existence Driven by Business, Trading and Pleasure-Seeking" should be enthusiastically embraced and acted upon.

Like the "Eagles" said: "Do Something!" Putin is not the worst thing that could happen to Russia. An internal civil-war, fought with nuclear and chemical/biological weapons would be worse. And that might happen.

Look at Japan. They went down the path of stupid "militarism" and abusive "nationalism", and it ended badly. Same thing will happen to Russia, if it stays on the current stupid-bad path of pain, hatred and killing as a political strategy.

You can eat sushi and make money, get a new car, a warm house and have a nice life, or you can have war and madness and red-mist-before-your-eyes hate and anger and move the needle to the war-mode. Humans are so fucking easy to program, it makes me sick sometimes, truth be told.

We need to stop this shit. The whole Covid-19 thing was a tiny non-event. Wait until the full-scale thing is deployed. I am sure every private lab is working on this. I know the Israeli's were (and probably still are.) The nuclear is a minor threat, compared to the "Satan Bug", which is real, operational, and quite technically doable.

No on likes weapons more than me. Japanese katana and Czech CZ handguns are things of grace and beauty. They are the highest expression of the technical arts.

But we need to use this technology wisely and with care. We need to grasp our own human weakness, and see the virtue of being careful and peaceful. We need to turn our efforts outward - with vigour, and stand-down from this crazy war-shit. Yes, it is needed in Ukraine - and Hamas has to fight now in Gaza, given the wild evil that is in the true Israeli-heart-of-hate. Let's be honest. There are terrible reasons why Europeans hated Jews for 2000 years. The German Death-camps were not secret. The Commander-of-Paris, during WW2 occupation, would get roughly 2000 calls per day, from French citizens reporting "juifs" or "jews". The Jews were and are hated because they are very similar in strength, power and cruelty as were the German National Socialists. That is the source of the conflict - two strong, arrogant and cruel tribes fell into hate-conflict. What is going on in Gaza is a war-crime of the first level, and it must stop. Hamas was stupid to do it's hostage-raid. But it is wild-insane what Israel is doing, and that USA supports Israel in it's mass-murder exercise. This is just madness.

Both Russia and USA are being wild-insane now. The politics in both countries is awful and stupid, and needs to be recognized as such. Very bad, and very big war will happen - for certain - if this nonsense is not ended soon. I have to expend real effort not to hate (and hate with *strength*!) the evil that is Israel. Mass-murder of women and children - at scale, using warplanes and AI technology - is *not* acceptable. It will have consequences, for scores of years into the future. Little jewish kids a hundred years from now, will be made to die screaming because of this current madness. This is all wrong.

Happy Valentine's Day. (cf. that David Bowie Song - about the mean little gangster called "Valentine".)

We need to fix our borked World. Otherwise we become robot-prisoners to hate and history, without any chance for improvement and development. A day to celebrate love-stuff is fine - but we first need to end the wild-hate that is growing like weeds in a bankrupt shopping-centre parking lot, first and foremost. Otherwise, the tribal hate will destroy us all.

Defensive funds for Ukraine is a wise idea and are needed. But Israel should not get a fucking dime from anyone, anywhere, until it stops it's Gaza exercise in mass-murder.

[ Feb. 13, 2024 ] - TensorFlowed into Bank Failure? - Fighting with the version-Hydra of Tensorflow (what a comical nightmare of hyper-bloat...), and dealing with "Bank Failure" - in this case, failure to launch. Our holdings of bank-stocks has proved to be a painful decision. An associate bought some crazy high priced NVDA, back when it was around $250 per share, and I thought him heroic. Ha ha, and another ha. NVDA is over $700 per share, and even he is surprised at the moon-launch that has taken place in his portfolio value.

We tried to be the fucking "ant" and go for the "slow and safe and steady" and got fucking well handed our arses. Goddamn, but the world is run by fucking bone-heads - there is just no polite, socially acceptable way to fucking say it. The rude language of the trading-floor, is simply a pre-condition for accurate description of the fuck-stupid madness that seems to be driving human action, these days. I am reading old "H. G. Wells" books for escapist amusement.

That, when I am not beating my brains in, trying to grasp the complete insanity of the software evolution of Python, Tensorflow and Keras, build my own APL interpreter, make my own hardware, and keep Starlink, this AWS website operational and my farm and consulting business operational. I fixed one of my Linux boxes today, so the comically incomprehensible "grub2" bullshit, finally boots (by default) the correct kernel. The entire "grub" and "grub2" boot-loader nonsense is symptomatic of just how butt-kicked and shit-stained the modern technical world now is. It is a massive pile of bloat-gunk - needed just to get your fucking computer to start up by reading the disk's boot-sector - except it is not reading the disk book sector - there is UEFI and a shit-storm of complex nonsense that Intel and HP have built-in to their machines and processors - which makes just starting the goddamn machine a fucking nightmare of hocus-pocus fuck-foolishness that must be FULLY UNDERSTOOD to be CAREFULLY TWEAKED - less your machine be fucked and bricked. It is just comical.

I finally found a site (on the fucking "Malabar Coast" for fuck sakes!! Right out of fucking George Orwell's novel, "1984"!) A google-found site called: "hostmalabar.in" actually explained the clusterfuck that is "grub" and "grub2" and the complex bucket-of-foolishness, that is required to configure kernel boot-features for grub/grub2 (you need both, on a CentOS-x machine, thanx to the fucktoad complexity of Intel, HP and Red-fucking-Hat), and I finally got my one machine set right so it boots the least-bugfucked Linux kernel. ("Grub" - the "Generic Regressive Universal Bootloader" is a slushpile. One goes to edit a "/boot/grub.cfg" (configuation) file, and the first line of the file says: "Do not do it! Do NOT edit this file! It is created by some bizzaro process we are not gonna tell you about!" or some such thing. Eventually, you find: "/etc/default/grub", and you *CAN* edit that file - but nothing will happen (ie. when your re-boot your computer, nothing will change, you will boot the wrong old kernel), so you have to (as root, of course), run "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg", which will rebuild your "grub.cfg" file (you "hope" it is the right one - since you have (of course) "grub" and "grub2", and in your secret heart, where truth lives, you honestly do not know which one is really active for your current flavour of Linux...)

The IBM purchase of RedHat means that RedHat is now being destroyed (sadly) and CentOS-7 and CentOS-8 are being destroyed, if the curious folks at IBM have their way. (You can go to the CERN site, the folks who run the big supercollider, and read how it is all being killed or has died already. Who needs Physics anymore, eh? Just sad. CentOS-7 is/was the last good open-source Linux.) This is all sad and stupid, of course - but par for this fucking course, of course.

IBM/RedHat has announced they will try to *kill* the CentOS-7 version of Linux this June (and probably smash-palace all the yum/dnf stuff that one needs regularly to keep one's Linux updated and safe from evil agents of Doom and Death). We think this is really goddamn unwise, and that CentOS (the Community Operating System - the open-source version of RedHat Linux) should be kept alive, as this would keep the pay-money-for-it RedHat Enterprise Service stuff current, valuable, well tested and basically bug-free. This is critical in the current high-risk, evil-nasty-awful world we now live in. But IBM are curously short-term money-greedy (not the wise, long-term greedy of the rule-the-fucking-world folks of Google and Microsoft and Apple), so it looks like RedHat will be "Red-Booked" and basically killed and rendered into "deadbeef" and shit (where I guess we must all end up, yes? Dust to dust? Ashes to ashes? Shitcrap to shitcrap?...)

The great benefactor of the IBM purchase of RedHat, is of course, Micro-fucking-soft, since every sad group of swinging-dicks (like ourselves, for example), are now having to either switch over to Ubuntu (which used to be affectionately called "Crash-buntu" in the old days), or ArchLinux or Manjingo or Hackware or some bonefucked pile of hackery built maybe by troll-faced grinning children with malevolence in their hearts. Whatever. But mostly, it will be Microsoft that will benefit, as folks acquire Windows-10 and Windows-11 machines, run the awful Edge browser (which does have some nice attributes, once all the Microsoft spyware and bloat-butt user-monitoring-trickery is disabled), and try to keep their shit working. Or we just keep using our CentOS-7 stuff, and like our old Fedora-9 stuff, maintain it ourselves. We have no secrets of value to hack. :)

(Secret, very high-value investment advice: Buy stock in companies that are abusive monopolies that in your little economist's heart, you hate and despise. You will make more money, than if you buy stock in companies that you like. "ESG" is complete bullshit, and so is "Global Warming". The Worlds of Big Science, Big Religion, and Big Government are built on massive, solid foundations of fraud and deception. It is only the World of Big Money, where Truth openly gets to operate. When I worked as an Analyst, I put a "Sell" on the first company I wrote up. A manager told me: "You won't get far as an Analyst, writing 'Sell' recommendations." That dude was spot-on correct. Within a short time, the firm I worked for self-destructed. So I had to sell my "consulting" services - basically as a hired-gun computer-programmer. Went to NYC, the town where your nightmares can be made manifest. Really an awful place, sadly. I can name the client, because it was Lehman Bros. They self-destructed eventually also (long after my short gig was over.) The key fact about the World of Money, is that Truth is a business-critical factor-of-production, unlike it is in most other organizational operations.)

We bought a Window-10 and a Windows-11 machine, and have finally managed to get Python-3.11 and Tensorflow 2.12 installed on the goddamn Windows-11 thing, and actually ran a test which trained-down a tiny test-neural-network. It can be made to work, if you bang your fucking head on the problem for a couple of days (or weeks, truth be told...)

Our bank-stocks are getting fucked again today, as the USA inflation report (at 3.9% annual rate) caused a burp-fart mini-crash on the USA market for stonks. This is silly. We raised our prices 4% for our farm-land. How the fuck could we not, with our fucking property taxes going up like rocket-ships? Inflation is now hard-wired into the system. Live with it. But folks react weirdly. The USA gags and coughs and spits a bit, and Canada has a puking shit-fit, and gets Covid-with-pneumonia and falls over. Fuck, I hate this shit. Nothing gets better. We just keep seeing the same shit.

The Japanese say the same goddamn thing, which is hilarious: "USA sneezes. Japan gets the cold." And I suppose China gets cancer and dies? Except not. Not at all. China does just fine, thank-you very much. The Chinese Experiment in Capitalist-Communism has been damned interesting. Communist-nonsense is complete bullshit - but the Chinese know how to work hard, and get shit done. Their market economy is a proven success at the macro and the micro levels. If they could just dump the fucking Communist shit, they could rule the world. Key requirement is basic "fee-simple" honest land-tenure. You have to own your own familial land or at least a house, or you are certain to be fucked by inflation. This is baseline.

Chinese can build good stuff. We bought two deep-well pumps (gorgeous stainless-steel things, that look like uranium enrichment ultra-centrifuges) from Shy-Lui or Shou-Lin Pumps or some such name, and a "Power-Fist" gasoline generator, for the farm, and this stuff works fine. And it costs a fraction of the bullshit price that domestic manufacturers wanted to charge us. And did I mention that the Chinese stuff JUST WORKS? Plus, we had circuit boards made by JLCPCB - and they work great. The quality is high, the price was low, and the delivery was fast. Really. And the crazy stuff we built (Z-80 SBC's - single board computers, to a friend's brilliant design) work amazingly well.

Our stuff works good, and our plannifcation-driven strategies typically work very well.

But we cannot say the same for the World. The outside World is a fucking horror-show now. It is bad beyond laughable. The "Bank Regulators" in the USA are fucking insane - and seem more interested in fucking over US banks, and destroying them, rather than trying to make their financial system actually work as it was designed. The implosion and failure of Silicon Valley Bank was completely absurd, and shows yet another example of how completely borked - at both the Federal and the State level - the USA Democratic administrations are - California and Washington-Federal. They are just stupid and arrogant - a terribly dangerous combination, which is now so crazy common (we have our own version of this, operating in Ottawa, at the Federal level here.) It is just head-shakingly awful.

And even the guys who should fucking well know better - the old crafty bankers - let stupid shit happen, that makes it look like their Bank's are in value-failure-mode. The **bank-failure** we have had to deal with - is the ongoing failure in the share-price valuations of our major big banks, which used to be reasonably well-run institutions. But maybe not so much, anymore...? We don't know.

The chart below is the share-price value of our one of our biggest "hodlings"... Yes, we are fucking stupid to still be holding this. We really shoulda dumped this downer and just bought Microsoft (holding nose, of course). "Value" investing is a hard and grim business, these days. It's called a "value trap" - you put in some serious money, and you get trapped in a downslope of decay and failure that kills slowly. One needs to avoid this, since life is short.

We've held this position from the low $80's - it looked OK for a while - but now it hurts. We really expect this thing to trade back into the mid-$70 range (Cdn$'s), but it may be awhile. Good dividends are being paid, and workforce reductions are planned (finally!). This company *should* be nicely profitable and growing - it is the most international of Canada's big banks. But we wait. And wait. And wait. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

So, we wait. And yes, the dividends are being paid. But the problem with dividends, is that one wakes up in the night and thinks: "Are my dividends just being paid out of the money I invested in this venture? Is that why the capital is melting away like spring snow?" And a picture of a fat, smiling fellow with a big grin appears in one's 4:00am imagination. He's carrying a briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, and is getting on board an airplane, which has it's engine's running...

[ Feb. 8-9, 2024 ] - Wild Sheep Chase? - We are feeling less musical these days. And we agree with David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. Our bank stocks and telecoms and mining shares are withering like dying Ash trees. These trees slowly die as they are attacked by the small green beetles that bore under their bark. The markets actually do appear to be broken. Price discovery does not seem to be operating. Value investing is a death trap now, and we truly believe traditional process has been disrupted - perhaps even corrupted.

The USA Government is now basically acting like a Mafia-style "hit-squad", and regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are elected to run things, the Deep-State murder-squads continue to operate. Can reflex-response assassination-attempts be far behind? We profoundly disagree with using "hit-squads" to kill one's political adversaries, and remain concerned that this low-level "World-War-East" is unwise. We are reminded of the sarin-gas attack in Tokyo subway system, back in 1995, and fear that this sort of nonsense could be our future.

There was this old expression my Irish grandmother used: "What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander." Or in more modern Karmic terms: "What goes around, comes around." The organizations of folks, whose leaders are being killed by murder-drones in the Middle East, would now seem to have not just moral justification, but perhaps even "rules-of-war" legitimacy, to carry out targeted killings of political leaders in the USA. We believe this is *not* an acceptable military model, despite what policy choices the Israeli entity makes. It seems unwise, to try to murder your way to peace. That is the gangster model, that creates the bloody cycle of violence that can go on for generations.

I like Haruki Murakami's gentle "magic realism" novels, as this slipping-into-the-surreal seems to be what will have to take place, for folks to engineer operational approaches to the madness of the current modern world. Things are becoming dangerously stupid. America used to be a nation that at least paid some attention to right-thinking and morally sensible (if not "correct") action-strategies. But this is now ancient history. Terror and violence are now being actively exercised as Nation-State policy, and we believe this will create a rising cycle of reflexive violence. World War Three has probably already begun. We hope we are wrong about this.

The technology-economy is booming. I visited a big shared-office environment (a very large converted factory complex, which is now a collection of technology-company offices), and whereas the empty parking-lot during Covid-19 years was an indicator of the "work-from-home" dial-it-down business-model that we had to live thru - the new reality is a quite *full* parking lot, with the in-house coffeeshop full of folks discussing deals, and doing interviews. It is a real transition. The local tech-sector appears to be firing on all cylinders, and accelerating nicely.

We are not sure about the rest of the nation's economy. Most of North America seems to be running on borrowed money. We worry about this. The level of hard-asset inflation is impressive. Anything good is expensive. Nice houses that cost around $300,000 15 years ago, now sell for near $1 million. A good pickup truck can cost $70,000 to beyond $100,000.

The six-figure annual salaries - after income and other taxes are subtracted - require folks be frugal if they are to pay mortgages at the new rate levels.

There is lots of cheap-crap in the stores. But food is expensive - and good food is getting quite expensive. Good wine used to be available for $10 to $12/bottle. Now, one must pay close to $20.00 (or more). Good domestic whiskey can be had for $30/bottle (where each bottle is 750 ml), but the fine imported brands can exceed $100 or more. These are strange times, where all price-points exist at the same time. Real value is unclear. The low-cost whiskey is Canadian Club, which in Asia, is a high-cost premium brand, because it truly *is* a very high quality product. It is not simply transportation costs that account for the price-differences. Value can sometimes just not be recognized, and this situation can remain as a curiously stable artifact, despite what economics suggests.

Lately, many of our attempts at "value capture" in the stock market have been disasterous. It's quite comical - we look carefully, wait for attractive entry points, acquire what appears to be some quality stock, and watch it just collapse in price after we make a buy. It is painfully comical.

The latest nasty for us, is "Bell Canada Enterprises" - a good company which reported reasonable results, and even increased it's dividend - only to see the share price implode by another $2.00/share, the day after we added to a position. We waited patiently, and acquired a bit at $53.07, a couple of days ago, only to see it break south of $51. The CRTC has told Bell it must share access to it's new premium fibre-optic network with other low-quality internet providers. BCE has spent billions of dollars to build out its fast fibre-optic network in Toronto and other major cities. This requirement to share it's bandwidth on a privately funded new optical network is an insanely stupid decision on the part of Canadian regulators, but is par for the course, for the abusive, ignorant buffoons who currently run things in Ottawa. We had thought all this nonsense was priced in - and with the earnings to projections, and with EBITDA (essentially operating earnings) doing fine, we thought the discount was overdone. BCE stock was trading in the $62 to $63 dollar a while back, and over $65/share at the beginning of May, last year (in 2023), and so to see it hit the $50 and change level, after increasing it's dividend to $3.99/year, is just tragic. Net earnings for 2023 were down to $2.3 billion, versus $2.9 billion for 2022, but adjusted EBITDA was up from $10.2 billion to $10.4 billion, and free cash flow was up from $3.07 billion for 2022 to $3.14 billion for year 2023. The earnings are down over 20%, which has really spooked investors, but as a regulated entity, subject to CRTC diktats, the company has to be careful not to make too much money (which yes, we think is silly, but so it goes...) We like the dividend stream, and consider it to be reasonably predictable and reasonably stable. But the stock has fallen from 65 to 50 and change, and this is tragic, since BCE is held by most pension funds and local investment schemes. Things get weird when a nation has bad government.

So, we cannot risk buying more, as the domestic regulators are perhaps French socialists who are maybe actively interested in destroying the Canadian commercial telecommunications industry. We honestly cannot tell. The recent decisions from Ottawa are so comically stupid, that we are unable to know anything now about how future events are likely to unfold. Really. The Ottawa CRTC loons look like they want to crash the company. It's just nuts. But we will have to have an election soon, so we might get a chance to throw the current regime and it's cronies out into a snowbank - or maybe the Rideau River. (We can dream...)

All in all, we are seeing "value-investing" to be a classical "value trap". You buy some stock at what looks like a reasonable price - and the shares fall out of bed because bad decisions are made by unwise people. The fiasco in global interest-rate policy is a pretty good example of this problem. So, of course, our holdings of Financial stocks (banks) has seen an even worse collapse. We cannot grasp why public authorities are bent on destroying large parts of the machinery of commerical finance. It just seems insane - yet so does having Pierre Trudeau's child, and old geriatric Joe Biden, as the political leaders of Canada and USA. It just seems completely insane. We keep thinking (wrongly) that normalcy and sanity will prevail eventually. But so far, this has not been the case.

What is interesting, is how crazy-accurate our AI stuff is. I don't like following the AI, because it just seems too mechanical. But it works better that an old value-hound like me. It works a *LOT* better. It said - back in January - that the Banks were going to turn lower and sell off, and they did. You can see the charts on the first (index) page of this web site. (Click the top banner.) I report the results here, because this is an honest science experiment, even if we are losing money. "Mechanical Turks" can call the market accurately, because they ONLY look at price action, typically. That is both their strength and their weakness. But in today's world - price action seems to be everything. (And this is also what the old guys from long ago, also would say, truth be told.)

I know that as soon as I dump the portfolio, it will gap upwards, of course. :D

At least we had no bonds to speak of. :)

[ Feb. 7, 2024 ] - Are We Toast? ... Which Might Explode? - There is this wonderful painting by Paul Gauguin, which poses three questions in the top-left corner of the canvas: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" - if I recall correctly. It is one of his lovely, colourful paintings from Tahiti. (Edit: Here is link to the image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Gauguin_-_D%27ou_venons-nous.jpg )

Our markets now are these huge, bi-directional highly active networks, with many players both sending and receiving information. Impossible really to model - but perhaps we can say something about their fragility and/or their lack-of-fragility (robustness?). We of course, seek to have them "anti-fragile", but in our attempts to make things more "robust" with regulator oversight and control - are we in fact making the entire structure more likely to self-destruct? This question gnaws at me, like a hungry dog can gnaw at a meaty bone.

Watching the NYCB meltdown today, I would say that there are either great risks ahead, or some wild opportunities lying in front of us. Of course, it can be both at the same time. Or neither. How can we know which it is?

[ Feb. 6, 2024 ] - Visualizing The Simple to Grasp the Complex - The entire world is a matrix of linkages and complex interactions, which is something that can be examined, modeled and then manipulated. This is of course, what is happening to all of us. All persons can be manipulated and "managed" by their needs to breathe, eat, seek shelter, obtain economic advantage, and the necessary human interactions of intimacy, and so on. Shrewd manipulators craft social and psychological machinery to make engineering strategies effective. This wild process is what drives most market activity. Attempts to model market activity, and get a sense of what is going to happen, is difficult - almost impossible.

But not completely impossible, as it turns out.

I'm playing with trivial examples in TensorFlow again - returning to some work from 7 years ago, with some new ideas. With generative AI, we are seeing some truly impressive results. They are of course also dangerous, since the manipulation machinery can now all be taken up a level - quite a few levels, perhaps, with the success of "deepfakes". I spoke of this with a clever fellow last summer, and it is interesting to see how quickly events have moved. We have concluded that "Little Brother" needs effective AI technology right at the edge-level - just to keep his freedom and capacity for effective independent action. We are moving into curious and dangerous times, where validation and verification will be critical daily tasks that will be operational pre-conditions just to stay alive. The new AI technology will make things crazy - even crazier than they already are.

And this is already showing up in the markets. The price of NVIDIA reflects this. To train big networks, everyone will need a little supercomputer - or at least benefit from one. We remain impressed at how market action can be determined and modeled by statistical methods - like what the Turtles discovered in the commodity markets years back. Yes, Virginia, the Central Limit Theorem really does exist.

So, we are trying to stretch some ideas again - and looking at the Tensorflow tools to model some of this. Back to basics. Here is an image of the simple example XNOR network, the code for which is a few pages below. A very simple neural-network can actual be quite effective as a tool - like the old idea of the "back-of-envelope" analysis. A simple and clear thing that captures something very basic and is deep-driving a process, can be very effective in predicting forward path movements.

We caught this with a simple economic idea, which is now playing out. So, we figure we better run with it.

Here is simple graphic image of the XNOR network.

Simple visualization schematic of the TensorFlowXNOR example network. This looks like a very trivial structure, but what is interesting, is how well a small, simple network can perform classification analysis. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

And of course, a collection of trivial classifiers wrapped together, is not a bad model for how our brains actually work.

[ Feb. 5, 2024 ] - The Stench of Sulfur from Hell? - So Joe Biden, the least-wise world-leader in recent memory, has decided to "escalate to de-escalate" - against a bunch of desert-nomads with radar-stations! Oh, and he will bomb Iraq (an ally?), and Syria (the nation that the dear USA is trying to HELP??) To us, this all just seems unwise. It is so unwise and really quite stupid, it makes one want to weep. The Americans used over 85 sorties of big-engined billion-dollar B1 bombers, against a bunch of sand-dudes with pickup-trucks, in the hot desert of Yemen, Iraq and Syria. This is just nuts. And of course, dear Mr. Biden waited until Groundhog-Day market-close, before beginning his little World War Three. What a very curious old fellow.

And today, I am fighting with the hot-mess that is now Python-3. My but the lads did destroy this thing! Python2 was a tad quirky, but it was brilliant, and it just worked, like the old APL did. Like C and C++ still sort of do, a little bit. But everything is fouled up on Python3, because the critical examples and the entire code-base of the world, has been kicked to the curb, and made wrong and obsolete. Not helpful.

I have spent all day, trying to do some simple things that should have taken 5 minutes, and it was past dinner-time, before I finally got the thing I needed, to work.. I had to do this crazy and quite idiotic "software archeology" exercise - but in reverse - to see how exactly the things that did work, were hammer-whacked by bit-fiddlers and pedants, so they do NOT work now. It's just hilariously silly. There is absolutely NO SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENT OF ANY KIND HERE. All that is happening, is **DISRUPTION** so that those who benefit from the disruption, can gain their objectives. Folks just break technology that actually works. And we are certain this process will cause an ugly fail in a spectatular manner, at some future time point. Perhaps this will happen once NVIDIA, GOOGLE, APPLE and MICROSOFT reach some kind of critical economic mass. There is just too much, that is too awful, affecting too many, for this process not to cause a reactive response in a different direction. But it may be *years* before that happens. We will have to use this half-broken technology environment for a while longer, until enough people get angry enough to drive change. It's a grim prospect, I fear.

I think Miss Sanity and Mr Common-Sense, decided to get onto the B-Ark, and fly into the Sun, holding hands. I am constantly amazed by just how truly awful modern software has become - just about everywhere one looks. Using the internet is an ugly and frustrating and annoying experience, which just makes ones teeth hurt. This is comical, considering the dollar-deltas of the revenue-streams of the major technology zaibatsu. And programming with modern frameworks and bloat-code-libraries of crud that do not work because APIs and operational features have been "deprecated" (what a nasty, poop-stained weasel-word!), and fragile, hyper-complex development tools that create failure after failure, is even worse. It's all just so curiously nasty and bad - bad tech for an angry world? Can this really be a good plan?

We see a world that is perhaps getting ready for the big revolution of the great Karmic wheel.

[ Feb. 2, 2024 ] - GroundHog Day in the Future - Here we are. Same future, different day. Big Jobs numbers in the USA. Wage gains up slightly, and financials hit by market-snipers. Nasty. We are seeing what appears to be a strong economy in the Great South. But it seems to be driven more by fear and loathing. Commodity prices falling (oil and gold/silver), and stability looks like it might loom on the horizon. But why does it *feel* so fake? This we cannot explain.

Seems like "Groundhog Day"...? Could that be it? (PS: The Living Magoroku is a good film...) https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-living-magoroku, if one wants to study history, art, and propaganda.

We got Tensorflow downloaded (458 mb!! - just for the binaries!) and have run some tests to train a tiny, test netork for the "Exclusive-Or" example from old Xerion days. Runs and works. Snappy quick, using "Stochasitc Gradient Descent", which seems to be same algo that Xerion used when it was working fastest.

Here is our test program: tensorflowXNOR.py

#--- Initial Tensorflow example - XNOR network
#
import tensorflow as tf 
# (ignore cuda... error message if not running an Nvidia GPU
#
from tensorflow.keras import layers
#
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Activation, Dense
#
import numpy as np

# X = Input 3 boolean input XOR gate
# create the inputs of the neural network (direct from the table)
X = np.array(([0,0,0], [0,0,1], [0,1,0],  [0,1,1], [1,0,0],
              [1,0,1], [1,1,0], [1,1,1]), dtype=float)

# y = the output of the neural network
y = np.array(([1], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0], [0],
              [1]), dtype=float)


Xtest = np.array(([0,1,1], [0,0,0], [1,1,1],  [1,1,0], [1,0,0],
              [0,1,0], [1,1,0], [1,0,1]), dtype=float)

# define the model
model = tf.keras.Sequential()

# configure layers of nodes and set activation function
model.add(Dense(4, input_dim=3, activation='relu', use_bias=True))

model.add(Dense(4, activation='relu', use_bias=True))  #--- Comment out for first run.

model.add(Dense(1, activation='sigmoid', use_bias=True))

model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error',
        optimizer='adam',
        metrics=['binary_accuracy'])

print (model.get_weights())

history = model.fit(X, y, epochs=2000, validation_data = (X, y))

# show what we have built
model.summary()


# printing out to file
loss_history = history.history["loss"]
numpy_loss_history = np.array(loss_history)
np.savetxt("loss_history.txt", numpy_loss_history,delimiter="\n")
binary_accuracy_history = history.history["binary_accuracy"]
numpy_binary_accuracy = np.array(binary_accuracy_history)
np.savetxt("binary_accuracy.txt", numpy_binary_accuracy, delimiter="\n")


print("\nThe binary accuracy is: ")
print(np.mean(history.history["binary_accuracy"]))
print ("\n")


print (" ")
print ("Test against original training data...")
print ("Original Input Training data: ")
print ("X:")
print (X)
print ("Network result... ")
result = model.predict(X ).round()
print (result) 
print (" "+"\n")


# --- try a different input to predict 
print (" ")
print ("Test against this different input data...")
print ("Xtest:")
print (Xtest)
print ("Network result... ")
result = model.predict(Xtest ).round()
print (result)
print (" "+"\n")
print ("Done.")
# --- Done.

The above code is a tad more polished than the experimental video display generator. The code above creates a simply binary-exclusive-OR table, and sets up a simply two-layer network of 4 nodes each, to create a predictive device to be trained and meet the rules defined by the input.

It confirms Tensorflow works, and shows how basic neural-network training can be done.

The image below, shows the run results on the left side, and on the right side, the results of the process used to download and install Tensorflow on the CentOS-7 box, which was: pip3 install tensorflow

Results of running the "tensorflowXNOR.py" program shown above. Run results on left side of image and the right-side screen shows the results of the installation process run for Tensorflow on a CentOS-7 Linux box. (Click image to expand, ESC to exit (or click a hidden X at top right corner of image to close it)).

Tensorflow now uses "Keras" which makes network configuration and setup easier and more intuitive.

[ Jan. 30, 2024 ] - Tensorflow, PyTorch & The Living Magoroku - Japanese AI. Interesting. You can get a Google prototype LLM-driven, text-input AI that allows videos to be created and/or edited, just by entering text. This is wild. Tried to source some hardware - an associate has latest Tensorflow running, and went to acquire an Nvidia RTX-4090 based machine, and ... ha,ha ... not available. Hilarious.

The LLM's (Large-Language Model) AI's allow you to just enter text, they figure out what you want to do, and then they do it - write code, edit videos, create videos, create "deepfake" material that looks like existing media goofpeople (the political-toads, filmstars, musicboys and musicgirls, and so on.) I had a discussion with a clever guy back in the summer, suggesting we now enter a world where nothing is real anymore - but of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Lies and fraud and cheating and disinformation - this has been the human condition since before ancient-Roman times.

Our models suggest now that we are cusp-transitioning to what is basically World War III. It won't be fought with nuclear weapons - it will be fought with "death-squads" using assault-rifles, inside hospitals, offices, medical centres, government buildings, and so on.

It won't be a pretty picture. The Israeli death-squad assault on a Jennin Hospital, to kill patients who were alleged to be "Hamas operatives", shows the "New World Order" that American militarism and it's support of the Israeli entity, have given us now. It is a picture of the future of nation-state conflict-resolution, and it looks a bit like the "St. Valentines Day Massacre" from historical Chicago. The unqualified and unlimited support that United States is offering to Israel is an impressive war-crime of very highest and most significant kind. The Americans and the Jews of Israel want their enemies to believe that they are all-powerful, and respect no laws or limits on their actions. This ideology exceeds levels that go beyond even what the German National Socialists of the 1930's managed to reach. This changes things.

One is going to want to have access to current AI technology, as that will make defensive operations more effective and more viable. Deception and nation-state initiated violence are two nightmare scenarios of which we now have continuing and ongoing confirmation. In US-slang: "The shit has now hit the fan", but we suspect that few are really aware of how serious and significant a transition this is.

When the Governments of the world are direct participants in extreme criminal behaviour of the most limitless kind, we can expect to see a rising level of technology-driven feudalism that will collapse existing social characteristics. The USA-Israeli death-squad approach to political conflict has always been with us, at some dark, low and ugly level. But technology now enables us to see it clearly in action, and experience exactly what is happening.

We analyze this material with an objective focus. It is possible to see the fractal-like connections, that drive human process - and the AI technology lets this become *much* clearer than before. One can actually *encourage* the AI to "dream" (halucinate), and then speculate, and once the ideas are marshalled - conclusions can be drawn.

It took not one, but *TWO* nuclear bombs on Japan, to end the Japanese deep-desire for a hard-core militarism and the "cult-of-the-very-strong". What will it take to address the American+Israeli militarism and their common "cult-of-murder-as-the-solution"? Will it take *THREE* nuclear bombs? Maybe FOUR? Will it take more? How much damage will have to be done to Israel and America, before a hard-reset in political thinking becomes possible?

War may be a necessary action, driven by clear, direct and evident reality that negotiation with a cruel and fanatical enemy is not possible. Hamas seems just to have accepted this same strategy that has dominated American and Israeli political thought. Why should they be any different than any other group of people? The tribalism and the resource-constraints that drive conflict have to be removed. But any human or AI studying human-history, can see that this is not possible. So we are condemned to remain in constant conflict. There is no "off-ramp" on this highway to hell. It is the human condition. Both Malthus and Darwin saw this basic truth, we suspect.

So, going forward, what can be done? Sadly, not much. We run the same movies, with the same comforting lies, on a tragic cycle of repeat. AI technology will be certain to amplify the human lies that undo us. Modern neural-science allows more effective human programming through sensory-successful methods and modalities. We will have our daily "Two-minute Hate" sessions, and the violence will become increasingly mundane and banal.

All this is known, and documented. And it now can *all* be analyzed and data-reduction methods applied, and clear results can be generated. And the conclusions are scary and disturbing: There is basically zero-chance of avoiding the "Thucydides Trap" as it is called. We are already now inside the new war. We are just not seeing the rivers of blood, unless we look for them. But they are there, and will grow

The question we deal with now - when will America experience this? Who or what will cross the Rubicon into USA, and bring directly into USA, what USA has been bringing into lives of the other people's of the World?

When will American cities burn? By what machinery or mechanism, will the American hegemon, with it's lust for violence, and it's burning hatreds, be taken down?

Be clear: We do *NOT* seek this outcome. We actually seek to avoid this. But the AI technology is unique and it allows massive amounts of historical data to examined and summarized. And it is painfully obvious that the current "death-squad" approach to politics that America and it's Israeli entity are both championing and actively operating, is revolting, unlawful and hideous. And this fact will drive change. It will encourage and embolden those who seek to D3 (degrade, destabilize and destroy), American and Israeli hegemonic control.

No one wants to live in a world where armed thugs and murder-squads can blast their way into a hospital and murder injured people lying in their beds. And when this kind of hideous criminality is sanctioned and supported by State entities, then such State entities must therefore be removed from operational existence. This was what USA did to Japan. One has to see the picture of the very large flat-bed wagons covered with the burned and rotting corpses from Hiroshima, before the true extent of American crimes can really be experienced.

The American invasion of Iraq, and now the American supported Israeli mass-murder campaign in Gaza, shows that America cannot change - and it will not change - until it suffers a military defeat that at least is at the level that Japan suffered in the World War II conflict of the 20th century. This simple conclusion just falls right out of the data, like a blood-clot dropping from a woman who has just given birth.

So, we can say with some certainty: World War III has begun, and we suspect that it will not be a war that America can "win". It will be a war that will damage and degrade America. And what the Americans need to do, is to focus their plans on limiting and dealing with the damage and destruction that is certain to come to their lands. The reason for this is simple: The more America tries to bomb and kill it's way to a conflict-resolution, the greater and more intense will be the collective desire on the part of the groups of "bomb-ee's" (those who were bombed...), to degrade and damage the American hegemon.

This is not a political position. This is a scientific observation, that is generated by the data.

[ Jan. 27, 2024 ] - Natsu no Tobira - Japanese tune - the "Door to Summer", which someday will open - just like the Cdn bank stocks are likely to fly again, once we can get a new Gov't in Ottawa that is not hostile to Canadian prosperity. It's a damn hard project, and it requires we all work a little harder, and get the damn job done. Things do not have to stay terrible, and they do not have to be run stupid. It often heppens in the World, but it is neither a necessary nor even sufficient scenario for the human condition

That being said, here is a tiny experiment. Let's see if anyone is reading these notes. I need to get some stuff done using PyTorch, and I have insufficient knowledge about how it works. If you are an expert, or even a basic student who has used this neural-net toolset, get in touch with me, quote me what sort of rate you would charge for some consultative assistance, or what sort of deal you might want to enter into. I am finding I can do anything - but I simply CANNOT do EVERYTHING, so I need to dial up the resource deployment just a tad.

First dibs on anyone who is reading this. We are changing the program now. :)

[ Jan. 25, 2024 ] - Py-Stuff - Here is a simple test thing. I want to use the HTML tags to put raw code inline here. The code is a simple test-program to exercise a video display, with a bunch of random boxes, which contain squares of colours, made programatically.

Python3 Test Program - Draw Random Colour-Gradient Boxes on Screen

Note; The program runs continously, and updates at the interval you set at startup. Using 100 is nice. This means the program will draw coloured boxes on the screen, randomly, for 100 times, and then will re-paint the screen, using "tkinter". It's a simple test program to exercise video-functionality between different machines, running different flavours and versions of Python.

# --- squaresmovecont3.py --- test program for tkinter display of image data
#                        --- display continuously. this one for Python3
#                        - MCL, Jan. 24, 2024
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# --- Make and Show immediately a simple pattern as a .jpg file
#
# --- For now, you start Python and import this file with: import MakeShowMoire
# --- or use: execfile ("buildbmp.py")
#
# --- import modules we need 
# --- from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageTk
# --- import _tkinter
from tkinter import *
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageTk
import numpy as np
import scipy.misc
import os
import random
#
# --- try to turn off warnings...
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
#
# --- turn on the Tk system...
# root = Tk()
#
# --- Ok, lets go..   was: 1720 by 670
width = 700
height = 400
channels = 3 
# --- ask the operator for number of images before reset
numtoshow = int(input("Enter Number of images to show before reset?: "))
#
img = np.zeros((height, width, channels), dtype=np.uint8)
xx, yy = np.mgrid[:height, :width]
# --- circle = .212 * ( (xx - 1000000) ** 2 + (yy + 1000.7) ** float(1.9795) )
print ("Generating Image with shape y: ", img.shape[0], "  x: ", img.shape[1], " ... ")
print ("xx is: ", xx)
print ("yy is: ", yy)
#
# --- Lets walk before we drive fast...
for y in range(img.shape[0]):
    for x in range(img.shape[1]):
# ---   r, g, b = circle[y][x], circle[y][x], circle[y][x]
# ---   img[y] [x] [0] = r 
# ---   img[y] [x] [1] = g
        img[y] [x] [0] = int(y) 
        img[y] [x] [1] = int(x)
        img[y] [x] [2] = int(y / 2.7)

original_image = img


#--- turn on the tkinter system
#--- root = Tk()

# --- now, we have made the image, lets save it, and read it back
# scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
# imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
# --- I had to write array img to image, in order to convert img array to img-as-a-PIL-image. 
# --- but, one can just do this, without the file-write:
imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)


#  w = Canvas(root, width=1000, height=700)
#  label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
#  w.pack()


# --- loop 6 times
j = 0
ypos = 1
xpos = 1
ymax = 800
xmax = 1400
#--- canvas start pos for Linux screens
#cxpos=150
#cypos=70
#--- canvas start pos for Windows laptop
cxpos=0
cypos=0

bigdoit = True

while bigdoit :


 root = Tk()
 w = Canvas(root, width=xmax, height=ymax, bg="black")
#---    Canvas.place(relx=0.5, rely=0.5 anchor=CENTER)     #--- does not work!
 root.attributes('-topmost',False)
 root.geometry("+{xpos}+{ypos}".format(xpos=cxpos,ypos=cypos)) 
 label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
 w.pack(anchor=CENTER)

 j = 0
 ypos = 1
 xpos = 1

 doit = True
 while doit :

#---   imgwtf.show()  
#---    pid = os.spawnl("P_NOWAIT", '/home/mcl/tfhack/rundisplay', '')


   test = ImageTk.PhotoImage(imgwtf) 
   label1 = Label(image=test)     #--- in Python 3.x this is: tkinter.Label...
   label1.image = test
   label1.place(x=xpos,y=ypos)
   
   w.update_idletasks()

   img = img * 2

#   scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
#   imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
   imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)

#   ypos = ypos + 40
#   xpos = xpos + 40
# --- make it more interesting - put image at random location
   ypos = (random.randint(0,ymax)) - 100
   xpos = (random.randint(0,xmax)) - 100


   ccr = 0
   while ccr < 200 :                #--- delay loop  (not working right)
      ccr = ccr + 1
      xrtw = ccr / 3.343 * 0.232534


#---   imgwtf.show()
#---   pid = os.spawnl("P_NOWAIT", '/home/mcl/tfhack/rundisplay', '')

   label1 = Label(root, text="Test")
   w.pack(anchor=CENTER)

   test = ImageTk.PhotoImage(imgwtf)
   label1 = Label(image=test)
   label1.image = test
   label1.place(x=xpos,y=ypos)

   w.update_idletasks()

   img = original_image

#   scipy.misc.imsave("testimg.jpg", img)
#   imgwtf = Image.open("testimg.jpg")
   imgwtf = Image.fromarray(img)

   #--- label1.destroy()

   label1 = Label(root, text="Next Test: "+str(j))
   w.update_idletasks()


   ccr = 0
   while ccr < 500000 :                #--- delay loop
      ccr = ccr + 1
      xrtw = ccr / 3.343 * 0.232534



# ---   root.destroy()
# ---   root.mainloop() 

   j = j+1
   if j >= numtoshow :
       doit = False
# --- end while loop

 root.destroy()
 root.mainloop()
# --- end of big while loop (for continuous operation

print ('Done.')
# --- root.destroy()
# ---root.mainloop()


# --- done.

I was originally writing the generated images to a file, and then reading them back with various Python libraries (from scipy, PIL and imageio), but this version just does everything without any file access.

This program was written for Python3, so if you have a machine running *both* versions of Python (2 and 3), you can just copy this program, and put it into some editor with copy and paste commands, save the file as "squares3.py" and then run it with:

$ python3 squares3.py

If you just have Python3 installed, it will be called just "python", and if you have Python 2.7.x version, you will need probably to install the "tkinter" library, using your package install technique. If on Windows, just make sure to install your image of Windows Python with the "Tcl/Tk" stuff (or Tk, whatever they call it). I run a CentOS-7 Linux box, and to run it in Python2, I had to install "tkinter" using "yum" (as root):

$ yum install tkinter

This got the Python2 development libraries, and installed "tkinter", which in Python2, is imported into Python interpreter with an ***Upper-case*** "T" as "Tkinter". In Python3, it is lower-case, as in "tkinter".

To run this sample program in Python2, you need only change the line "from tkinter import *" to be "from Tkinter import *". Python3 seems to be downward compatible to Python2 - ie. if you write in Python3 code, it can mostly run in Python2 - but not the other way around.

To end the program, just minimize the Tk window, and control-c out of it, from the terminal window. Note the program has a lot of gunk and commented out (with the hash) lines, and some comments are from earlier experiments. But it runs (with that "tkinter" or "Tkinter" difference) in both Python2 and Python3, on Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit and Windows machines. But note that in Windows-11, if you have gotten the latest update, the stupid new "Cmd C:\>" command process (which is called Command Terminal or Terminal Command or some damn thing), will grab focus, and put itself in front of the Tk screen display!!

Microsoft is being the "abusive monopolist" again, it seems. It's so comically annoying, that one just has to laugh. They must sit around, trying to think of things that can break system intercompatibility with Linux. It's hilarious, really.

For Python operation, you fix this, by selecting Windows-11 "Settings" / "System" and then scroll down to "For Developers", and select that. Then, scroll down to the option for "Terminal", and select "Windows Console Host", and you will get the original command-processor, which will operate correctly with Windows Python installations. This behaviour just CHANGED a couple of days ago, when my Window-11 HP machine, updated itself to the latest Windows-11 version.

Hope this is useful for someone. We've got some simple data-analytic stuff that runs in Python, and uses the science libraries, and MatPlotLib to show the results. Hope this helps others who are converting - or learning - Python. Python is a truly brilliant thing, really. I complain about Python3, but it is actually quite an impressive accomplishment. Deep inside the various science libraries, are all the original (and VERY good), old IMSL Fortran math libraries - the code that got our spaceships to the moon, and Mars and the outer planets. One has to respect those old libraries, because they have been TESTED and DEBUGGED and they give answers that are CORRECT. :)

[ Jan. 23, 2024 ] - Python3 is Committee-Created Gunk. - Whomever were the committee folks that ruined Python, by creating the botch that is Python3? They should just all be sent down. I don't care where they are sent down to - just please get these folks away from language design.

Python 2.7.14 is a fine product, well-designed, with appropriate technical characteristics. Python-3 is silly. It looks like a bunch of pedantic puffers with big egos and small other-parts, decided to mess-over a good product, and turn it into a hot mess, that is buggered and butchered - and full of stupid "GotchYa!'s" that can be used to "teach" (I use that term with all sarcasim intended) the poor kids who have to learn how to do some kind of useful coding, so they can get some sort of useful results from goddamn computers.

I get that they needed to put brackets around the "print" statement and other language verbs, but the curious weirdness - and the unhelpful error messages - the whole thing has become just another sad annoying bucket of bloatware.

And current versions won't even install. Viz: We have a Windows 8.1 machine, which due to some drivers we need it to use, we do not update, since that will pooch the drivers (for sure). And of course, we CANNOT install any of the Windows images for Python on that machine. Fine. Sure. Whatever. (We built the Python 2.7 code from source, on a couple of Linux machines, back in the day, to ensure some goombahs could not take the thing away from us (like Microsoft likes to do, with things like Excel and Word)).

I detest the technology industry now. Such a nasty bunch of goofs - just about everywhere. The majors now exist mostly to just destroy stuff. (It's "Disruption" needed to ensure the revenue streams are maintained...) Nothing really positive is being created, and I say this as an AI RESEARCHER! Really. AI is just more shit, and it's best use-case is a tool to accurately target the families of Hamas "terrorists" in their homes, and kill the women and children. The psychokiller IDF motherfuckers in Israel are just plain genocidal mass-murderers, and they are going to give us all a World War Three. For AI developers, the Gaza mass-murder campaign is a horror-show of impressive scale and extent. Quite astonishingly awful. It will make "anti-semitism" fashionable, again. It is just so insane. AI could have been a good thing. It could have been a very good thing. But it has already morphed now into pure-evil bloodshit.

No amount of "hugging face" is going to save us, we fear.

I can see it everywhere now. Modern software is either stone evil now, or it is just plain stupid.

In Python 2.7.14, you can do this:


Python2
>>> numx = input("Enter a Number: ")
Enter a Number: 345
>>> print (numx)
345
>>> print (numx + 2)
347
>>> j = 4
>>> if numx >= j :
... print ("J is small")
...
J is small

Now, if you do this in Python3, you will get this error message:

TypeError: ">=" not supported between instances of "int" and "str"

Python3 will NOT tell you WHICH variable has been designated as a string. And why the not? Is "j" the string? Does "j = 4", get interpreted as "create a string variable, and assign it the value of 4"? Or is "numx" the string?

This is just silly. APL was able to handle this kind of variable-on-the-fly construction quite successully, BACK IN THE 1960's!!! What is wrong with software and software-makers now? It's laughable - and the error messages STILL DO NOT OFFER CORRECTIVE INFORMATION. If Python3 is failing-to-convert, or is making some weird assumptions, THEN IT SHOULD JUST SAY SO, so a language-user can actually USE THE LANGUAGE.

Our whole Python2 to Python3 conversion exercise is a lot of work - WHICH YIELDS NO VALUE - we just cycle real hard, just to stay where we are. Hilarious, really.

What just drives me around the bend, is that Python3 makes the autoconversion from string to integer in the "print (numx + 2)" statement, but fails to do it, in the "if" statement. This is silly. I figured out (by experimentation), that you can check the type of the variable, with the "type" keyword, which queries the "class" of the variable:

See, Python2 just worked. But it looks like academic puffers got ahold of the Python3 spec, and ruined it. If you MUST have all vars declared and used most-carefully, then make declarations necessary. But if you allow convert-on-the-fly - then at least make it consistent - don't be a pedantic runt, and accept it some places (input, print and math), but crash-it in comparisons, as is the case now. That's just silly.

Language design is bad now. It's really just gone to hell, and been shat on by Satan and all his little minions. And then it gets served up to us, the poor sorry, silly sods who have to use this stuff because we desperately have to get some WORK DONE!

Idea: Dump Python, and just use Tcl/Tk, with an APL backend to hack the data? I have source-code to a not-bad APL, from an academic guy in Europe. He did a bloody good job of building the thing. (We are not anti-academic and we are not anti-semitic (except in the case of Israel, which is a nest of sulfur-crusted lizard-demons, perhaps). But the APL requires I butcher the keyboard-driver to get the characters, and it makes using "vi" a special-case nightmare. And Python has *many* excellent libraries available, which is really the true source of it's popularity and maybe even it's secret greatness.

You know that you have won the software business-battle, when your users bitch and complain about the product, and curse at you - and then order the upgrades, and a bunch more seat-licences. It's when they *STOP* complaining, that you need to be worried. It means they have (or are) transitting to some other methodology or product, and are not using your stuff anymore. Angry and complaining users is a sign of solid product uptake and a key indicator of market success. Just look at Microsoft!

Oh, and Windows-11 updated on one of our machines last nite. And of course, it broke many things. The "Cmd c:\>" command-line tool was turned into some kinky, tab-based "Windows Terminal Thingy", which broke our stuff. But if you select "Settings", and then "System" and have "Developers..." stuff turned on, you can find an option to switch "Windows Terminal Thing" back to "Windows Host Cmd Processor", and your stuff should again work ok. Maybe.

Most of the online, internet-based "Google-searchable" information online is wrong now. Microsoft keeps breaking Edge by changing things, so folks have to use Microsoft tools, instead of Linux tools. It's a hilariously effective strategy - just keep breaking your own stuff - on a regular basis - so that the poor bastards who have to get their work done, will agree to accepting your expensive, toxic, lower-functionality code upgrades, and your expensive support service contracts, just to keep the machines running, and the goddamn lights of their business on. Quite clever, actually. But it's a trick that really only works if you have the big *moat* and can operate like a near-monopolist.

[ Jan. 19, 2024 ] - Wrestling with Powerful Pythons and Flaming Foxes... - Completely tsunami'ed with "shit that needed to be done"... Upgraded several platforms to Python 3.x, from the most excellent (but kinda kinky), Python 2.7.14. We now have inter-compatibility between a new Window-11 platform that runs "Edge" (a "Chromium"-ish thing), and the Linux machines. The Linux boxes are so much nicer to use, for a surprising number of reasons. Found that we could not use "pip" or "pip3" to install the tkinter stuff to get images to display - this after a silly and complex effort to get PyQt5 successfully installed on a CentOS-7 Linux box. The key point is that "Tkinter" or "tkinter", the new Python3 version, needs to be installed via "dnf" or "yum" (the older version of "dnf", both of which are the package-install tools for CentOS/RedHat.) This is funny, since Tkinter (oops, it's "tkinter" now, I think), is basically just Tcl/Tk 8.5 - which I already use, and have written stuff in that I use everyday.

To install "tkinter", and use the Tcl/Tk canvas in Python to build applications, and display images:
- Become root (with "su)

- then, enter:

yum install python3-tkinter-3*

or, if you are on Ubuntu, use "apt-get" instead of "yum" or "dnf".

Once you have "tkinter" installed, you can display images. You probably also want to install the library: "imageio". One can use "pip" or "pip3" if on a machine that has both Python2 and Python3 installed together. If that is the case, run:

pip3 install imageio

after installing the tkinter stuff.

I will put some sample Python3 test-programs somewhere on this site, at some point.

The front-end to the original Xerion Neural-Net simulator is all Tcl/Tk, but I actually learned Tcl/Tk at Nortel, doing a project to completely fix their broken home-grown Network Management System and take it thru a couple of major software "gates". Nortel - which went bankrupt, and even it's preferred shares fell to zero - was actually a very well-run company, at the engineering-software level.

But the top-management were corrupt, greedy and just plain fucking stupid, to a degree that was quite shocking, truth be told. They all "beat-the-wrap", due to the burden-of-proof requirements in Canadian Securities laws, but it needs to be remembered that they were charged with securities fraud. The whole top crew remains as essentially unconvicted-criminals, in my humble opinion. Nortel was, at one point, the most valuable company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They had a $120/shr stock, and were - like Research in Motion (RIM) - a major Canadian success story. But they blew up and failed, which was just sad and bad, and did not need to happen. So it goes.

The "tkinter" stuff in Python is very good. This means some young developers will probably break it, and/or throw it out, in new variants of Python3. The PyQt5 stuff - like all Qt stuff - is horribly complex and basically quite unnecessary, and is big bloat-ware. This means it will be popular, no doubt.

This process of "software enshitification" is now recognized and actively debated on Hacker News/Ycombinator. It's pretty funny. Software is becoming bloated, horrible, awful and absurd - but there is only so much hoo-haw one can do with screens, keyboards and cellphones. What we have to use at our consoles, cannot really be anymore improved. The key to improvment in software, will be using software to control high-velocity missiles or drone aircraft, or ships or cars. This is much more useful and interesting. The future of software is basically "taking the problematic human out of the loop", so that more can be done, more effectively, and at lower cost.

This will impact medicine, research, weapons-development and deployment, and the driving of one's car and the piloting of one's aircraft. And it is not new. We have had "autopilot" devices in aircraft, since the 1920's. And modern jets have had "auto-flight" capabilities, since the 1980's. These should hopefully, be improvable, and be just getting better. Or maybe not.

It is the "or maybe not" scenario that seems to be rising to take control, now. There is a working level of madness that dominates the world now. There is no question that the current model for Israel will have to change. If they want to have control of Gaza, then they will have to create a modern-style federated State, in which Arab Palestinians have a say in the State government. Otherwise, Gaza remains as a giant "Concentration Camp", and it's citizens will remain as essentially Israeli slaves. Will the Arab States tolerate this abusive insanity? Perhaps for a while - until they can develop and deploy nuclear weapons (or subcontract this work out to the Russians, perhaps), and simply run a tragic-but-necessary cleaning exercise, (much as Israel is now doing in Gaza), but against the "US-warship" that is Israel. We discourage this, of course. A non-religious federal-state, is what Israel should be. But we doubt that the Israeli's will allow this.

The great concern, of course, is that to defeat and remove Israel, it will be necessary to "D3" America. ("D3" is "Degrade, Disrupt and Deny-control", in military/security-speak).

This will impact us here in the Great White North. We have a scenario, which seems possible and rational, given the current level of madness (as an endogenous variable), where this action-requirement triggers a "WW3" cascade - driven entirely by the wild murder-fest that is Israel military policy now.

The Israeli's may well give us the Third World War. We can say this with some certainty, since it is now already playing out. The "Houthi Terrorists" have radar-stations and missile-complexes. They are basically the Government of Yemen, and consider American container supply-ships, loaded with supplies, and missiles for Israel, as legitimate targets off-shore from their coastline. Who can really blame them for targeting this kind of shipping, right out in front of where they live?

Would Americans not to the same, and even more, if their situations were reversed?

There is now zero chance of peace and security in the Middle East, for the long-run (and probably also for the short and intermediate-run), now that the mass-murder campaign of the Israeli's has become visible, and the plans for the removal and subjecation of all Gaza citizens has been so carefully articulated by the Israeli leadership. This is almost a textbook example of genocide - the successful removal of a people, and the erasure of their homeland, and the military destruction of their State. It is impressive in it's scale and planned extent.

Will the other Arab States remain quiet, and accept this? One has to ask, "Are they Human Beings?" Will the Arab and the Iranians acquiesce to this enslavement of 3.1 million people who share their same language, culture and racial-tribal characteristics? Perhaps. But also, we must suggest: perhaps not.

If the current regional wars become somehow linked, then we already have the beginning of what may well become "World War Three". In order to restrain Israel, it will be necessary to limit American power and it's direct, already-operational military influence and support for Israel. American warships will have to be "degraded" somehow. Perhaps blinded by "chaff" (to degrade radar), and sickened by engineered virus-agents. Remember - this is war now, not any kind of chit-chat/talk-talk diplomacy. The Jews have made it clear, that diplomacy is not an option. Gaza and it's citizens are to be erased, and rendered State-less. So in this scenario, all weapons are acceptable. The people in Gaza are now fighting for their very survival.

So, what can be expected? Will Saudi Arabs continue to host American military bases, and kow-tow to US interests? Will the ridiculous animosity between Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (which has been carefully engineered and enabled by the active-actions of the Mossad and other clever disruptors) remain in place? Or will a clever fellow like MBS begin the process of "changing-the-program"?

Why should people who speak a similar language, and share a similar culture, fight so intensely among themselves? Is this not a signature condition of active "agent-provacateur" types who have spent over 40 years trying to damage and degrade Middle East security and prosperity? The Israeli Mossad is a profoundly effective and dangerous entity, which successfully managed to introduce the "Stuxnet" weapon-virus, into Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, to destroy their ultra- centrifuges, and then ensured that the Dutch national who did the deed, was fatally injured in a "motorcycle accident".

It's worth everyone's time, to read the details of the "Stuxnet" weapon-virus, especially as the world of "IoT" ("Internet of Things") expands and AI-techniques are being increasingly used for computer and machine-computer control system. The capacity to D3 a computer-dependent warship will become a military requirement as World War Three progresses (even more so, than it now is.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Given what we have learned, and the current global situation, we cannot discount this "worst-case" of the "worst-case" scenario-sets. There are just certain people with whom no negotiation of any kind is possible. We believe the "economic santions" that are currently being applied against Russia, are deeply unwise, and will *increase* the likelyhood that the Russians will also assume the "Israeli" model of political discourse - ie. "No negotiation of any kind". The Russians have seen the deposits of their Central Bank in Switzerland frozen, and now at risk of being expropriated for Ukraine. Much as we support Ukranian defense efforts in their sad war with Russian, we cannot accept that outright theft of State assets should be allowed. This is just insane, and degrades the basic Western civilization tradition of property-rights. And it also serves to harden the Russian position, and reduce any chance for a peaceful end to the ugly, illegal Russian-Ukrainian war.

So, we are upgrading and hardening our own technology. We've upgraded to the current Firefox browser, due to reported weakness in what we were running. Our operation is tiny and what we do matters not to anyone - but there is no sense in being stupid. We wish others could at least consider this idea.

Markets are advancing in the US (but not in Canada), since there is clear recognition that the Federal Reserve will have to begin reducing interest rates, as the debt-costs in the US are becoming absurd and extreme. If the USA is called upon to gear-up to fight a major war, they are not positioned like they were in the 1930's. Folks forget that the USA was almost debt-free in 1941. The Second World War was a wild boom-time for USA, since they could ramp-up debt, without doing damage to the global value of their currency.

But this might not be the case, now. If the USA were to mount a huge military expenditure leap, the rest of the world might fear for the value of their "reserve currency" assets (the US dollar's valuation), and the 'always strong' US-dollar, might come under pressure. But what would one use instead? Chinese Yuan? Russian Roubles? Or Euro's? Maybe Euros. Except, I read today that Germany is relying on wind-mills for it's electricity, and European regulators have prevented Amazon from buying Roomba, for $1.8-billion (not much money, really, in these modern times), due to fears of a monopoly in robot-vacuum-cleaners. Seriously - I thought it was an "Onion" story or something - but it is actually true! The "European Federal Government" in Brussels is, in our opinion, simply insane. They are nuts - just completely socialist loons.

And this is what is holding up the US dollar, despite the ugly future that the USA seems to be driving towards. The US-dollar is the cleanest dirty-shirt in the hamper. It is the least-ugly girl, in the Ugly-Girl Beauty Contest.

So, the USA markets march upwards, into la-la land of expected lower interest rates, since there is no alternative that is possible. The rates have to come down, since it is an election year, and the dollar gets to stay strong, since everything else is even worse. And don't expect crypto-currency to do well, when a series of Russian (or Chinese) high-altitude fusion-bomb air-bursts, far out in space, but over USA, knocks-out most low-voltage devices with massive electrical current-surges. (This actually happened twice - first from solar-storm activity in 1859, and in Pacific and West-Coast USA, from a single high-altitude H-bomb test.)

We expect a reversal in the declining prices of the financials. The return to a low-interest, moderate-inflation environment, which is the most likely scenario (before the war really gets rolling), will make the almost 7% yields the banks are sporting, sufficiently attractive for defensive investors - and we believe defensive investing is now the most important it has really ever been, since maybe 1935.

[ Jan. 12, 2024 ] - My Dinner with Issac Asimov - This is of course, complete fiction. Yet Dr. Asimov was perhaps one of the most profound influences on my life. With Jews like Asimov, Ricardo and Einstein, it just is not possible to maintain an irrational hatred of the silly fellows. Thare are just too many quite good ones, are their not? It's all quite silly, really. I so wish we could purge all religious and racial nonsense from collective and personal thinking. Everyday, the markets force us to confront our deep-fears and failures. Some for folks have the "gambler's instinct", and enjoy the rush of risk-driven trading efforts. But personally, I rather diislike the process. I only do it, because we need the money to do other things... build robots, run plasma-physics experiments, hack electronics, and so on.

The markets are becoming dangerously predictable, if one has access to the data and to the technology. This is an extremely risky and bizzare situation, which will actually lead to either a cascade-failure of biblical proportions, or a runaway process which spirals into an unstable rush-upward to crazy extreme levels, to be followed by a collapse-event. These are the way these sort of things end.

When the "reset" happens, it will have - we fear - ugly consequences. In history, what typically happens is a bloody great war. And we have now established all the pre-conditions to this sort of wild, runaway disaster-scenario. This will *not* be a "black swan". That bloody great swan is sitting there, with red-eyes, on the horizon, looking at us - looking at everyone - and anyone with any brains or creative vision, can almost certainly see the big bastard.

We now have the Bitcoin ETF's. Oh, just fucking, great, eh? The Dutch called this shit: "Vinhandel" or something like that. It meant "Trading the Air". What old guys who do research learn, is that there is almost NOTHING new in the world. (Except micro-processors, perhaps.) Except these are really just the enabling technology of the "Golem" that was described in literature, hundreds of years ago. Even the ancient Greeks had legends of gods who could create mechanical creatures that would do their magic for them. We've just made it real now.

The robots won't take over. But bad people will use the robots to amplify their power, and their reach, and do great harm to us all. This is certain to happen (and we can say this, since it already is now happening). There are no rules in war.

And, as every intelligent person knows - we are always at war, with a surprising host of real and imagined enemies. One only needed to read the newspaper, back when newspapers were still available. I have a tape, made long ago. It has a song, where the singer requests: "I need an archangel for company..." Such good poetry. We don't want Microsoft's AI virus - literally a new goddamn key on the keyboard, FFS... Worst case scenario, is it not? We must have our OWN robots, not the one's offered by the "Corporate-Government" censorship keidanrans. Otherwise, we will lose all access to any truthful information, completely.

[ Jan. 11, 2024 ] - Scat, Crap, Sh/t and Pap - An interesting and nasty trend has become apparent. Not only is everything going to a curious kind of hell in real time, in the real world, but a curious trend on the internet is growing. Online *news* and other information sources are not just disappearing behind paywalls, the non-paywalled gardens of actual, real data, are turning into - as one writer characterizes it - *AI dogshit*.

A blog-site contains this interesting gem:

https://aftermath.site/the-internet-is-full-of-ai-dogshit

This trend towards "machines just talking to machines" has infected (and damaged, in our opinion) the world of markets, for some time now. The "AI dogshit" in the world of finance, is of course, algorithmic trading, which has zero value for price-discovery. This is just a fact of life. And it is really nothing new, since every clever bastard seeks an edge to allow himself to take some money from the public marketplace.

But it is worse now - in every field. I have personally watched in horror, sadness and outright revulsion, as the Israeli death-squads are replaced by AI-driven "kinetic-kill" bombing methods, which allow so-called low-level "Hamas Targets" to be murdered in their homes, along with their wives and children. This is really a fascinating outcome, since it matches quite closely, the historical trend in most scientific, industrial and technological development. (First it is thought-up, then it is engineered, and typically the first use, is in weapons-design and development to allow better and more effective kill-rates in conflict. )

We are, of course, not "anti-war" protest-types. Anyone who has ever done Government work, knows that Government is mostly concerned with protecting and extending Government. All institutional organs are driven by the survival and growth instinct. First there is diplomacy. Then it becomes war. This is a basic model most agency organs and all Governments accept. One cannot escape from this truth.

But the AI tech introduces a real wild-card. The danger is not "AI/Robots will take over!". That is simply nonsense and foolishness. The ugly truth is that AI first disrupts and degrades human discourse. You cannot now know if ANY information you access is even human-created. This assaults basic social integrity. Once no-one can trust anything or anyone, then it becomes much easier to dominate them - and kill at scale. We are seeing - mostly - AI being put to nefarious and nasty use - and this process is happening at an impressive "internet-speed".

So, take care. Not only do we face: "Everything You Know Is Wrong" issues (like we faced back in the 1970's, after the boom-time of the 1960's, where we could build working interplanetary spaceships with drafting tables and 8-bit computers), we also now face "Everything You Access is Fake".

This is step one. Step two, is of course: "Everything You Have Will Be Taken", and then you get to live in that pod, and eat those bugs.

We have no choice but to embrace the new AI tech. But we also need to have the options to prevent it from killing us all, at scale. Especially since that is clearly the direction things are moving towards. This is not "conspiracy theory" nonsense. This is just the way technology develops, and gets deployed.

Regulation is certainly NOT the answer. The key requirement is for defensive-AI, if we are to be targeted by offensive AI. There is no choice here. This WILL happen (easy forecast to make) because it clearly already IS happening.

Our approach is simple. AI-technology must be deployed LOCALLY - for each END USER, for each INDIVIDUAL. AI tech must be accessable and LOCAL so that EACH INDIVIDUAL can use this technology, and not just have it deployed and offered by the super-rich, hyper-powerful technology-control organs - the Google's, the Microsoft's the Apple's and the Meta's. That is a path to AI-hell, and an "Internet of Shit" (IoS).

We are pro-capitalist pro-markets economists, and do not seek regulation or even breakup of the tech-monopolists and ologopolists.

We just want some ability - as Big AI Brother takes control and watches everything - to allow each "Little Brother" to watch back, and have his/her own technology - from Nvidia-enabled AI neural engines, to a cabinet full of AR-15's.

The horror-shows of abusive murder-invasions in Ukraine and Israel have shown conclusively the absolute necessity of humans having personal, LOCALIZED, defensive technology. Without such technology (which the founding-fathers of the USA wisely recognized, and made their Second Upgrade to their wise Constitution), the nation and the entire community of free men and free women, can be first lost, and then destroyed.

It's all right there, in the historical details. Really. AI is just a new weapon. And this powerful weapon must not be held and used by only the "Big Strong Rich Guys". This weapon must be available to EVERYONE, if peace, sanity and social+economic freedom is to remain in place for us here in North America.

[ Jan. 10, 2024 ] - RUR : Rossum's Universal Robots - That was the title of the famous play, and book, by Karel Capek, the Czech writer, who wrote it in the 1920. There is so nothing new. We live in the same world now, as the 1920's, with the same curious characteristics - except we really have the robots now. RUR was like a mix of basically "Blade Runner" + "Frankenstein". The author, Karel Capek, invented the word: "robot", which comes from Czech word: "robotnik", which means "worker". You can read the play at Project Gutenberg, by clicking the link below:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59112/59112-h/59112-h.htm

Modern robots are often partly developed with the popular language, Python, which comes in many flavours. It is popular as a glue-language, which can be used glue-together many useful routines and libraries of various kinds, to achieve just about anything that can be done on a computer.

We've been doing a little project with Python - converting stuff from Python 2.7.14 to various flavours of Python 3.6.8 to Python 3.11.5. I finally got the code working correctly on the Linux machines last nite. We had problems with opencv-python, which appear to have been resolved by the latest version (communication between threads was not working right, so pixmaps were trying to display, before the code to set them up was completed, and so on. I had to ugrade the "libpng" to latest version also, due to a missing reference to "png_get_eXIf_1", which is in the header file (the .h files).

The libpng library can be upgraded from source. Download the source from their website, "tar -xvf" the .xv source file, and it builds a directory of source. If you have a recent gcc installed, you need only cd to the source directory and do the usual: ./configure, make, make install sequence to get libpng16 installed (in /usr/local/lib, where it may or may not be found by programs needing it). We moved the include headers to /usr/include and the object libraries to /usr/lib64, and adjusted libpng so it was certain to be found. Run "ldconfig" to check.

We used "pip install opencv-python", which gets and compiles/builds the latest opencv-python version, to resolve the thread mis-commmunication issues and the resulting pixmap display issue, but there remained a need to upgrade to "libpng16". Since I was not building from source, I could not tweak the LD_LIBRARAYPATH setting for Linux, and even after upgrading libpng16 (with ./configure, make, make install), the install for libpng16 put the include header files into /usr/local/include and the share object library (.so and .a files) into /usr/local/lib.

Our flavour of Linux need them to be in /usr/include and /usr/lib64. Once the libpng16 header files (three source .h files) were moved to /usr/include/libpng, and the latest libpng16.so was moved to /usr/lib64 (and all the soft links were fixed so that libpng -> libpng16.so which is also a soft link which points to the actual /usr/lib64/libpng16.so.16.40.0 library file), the opencv-python code (which allows one to work with graphics display and image-file), could be installed vi Python "pip".

Note: One has to *remove* the existing pip installed cache stuff, since pip will not re-compile and rebuild, if it finds built object files in it's cache. Uninstall (which is "pip uninstall opencv-python" does not uninstall the compiled object libraries for opencv-pything. You can examine the cached Python stuff, with "pip list cache" and remove existing cached code, with "pip cache remove (name of thing to remove)", which in our case was: "pip cache remove opencv-python". Then, once the libpng16 stuff is correctly updated, the "pip install opencv-python" worked, and we could start Python, (with command: "python3", since there is also a regular "python" on the older Linux machines, which is python2, of course), and "import cv2" and we could load and save image files with cv2.imread and cv2.imwrite, successfully. (I will try to write up all this in more detail, and put it somewhere on this site. Getting Python3 to run smoothly on the Linux boxes is a major milestone for use, since we can now convert our Python2 stuff to the modern Python3 environment, which runs the same on Windows, MacOS and Linux (if it is all configured and built correctly.) Much (most?) scientific programming is now done in Python (or at least is glued-together, using Python).

"Pip" is the install process for Python library modules, of which there are *many*. These tools can provide astonishing capability, and are very useful. The command "pip 'help'" will provide options of the pip command. On a CentOS-7 Linux, "yum install python" will install Python 3.6.8. The most current version of opencv-python is version: 4.9.0.80, and it fixes the thread-synchro problem many report.

Using Python or Python3, one always wants "Matplotlib". You install it with "pip3 install matplotlib", from command line. I installed using root. You might not want to, but it works. One caveat is key: You will need to "yum install python3-devel", to get the python.h header file, which PIL and Pillow (image libraries) will need, to install Matplotlib.

One more critical thing: I had to install the Python3 libraries for "PyQt5" to get Matplotlib to actually show anything. It gets built with "agg" backend, which has no gui (graphic user interface), so you cannot see any plots! On older Linux boxes (and on my newer machines also), I have Tcl/Tk installed and configured and it runs well. On the older Python2 versions, which I build from source, I just enabled "Tck/Tk" or "Tkagg" or something like that, when building Python2 from source code. But when one installs from "yum install python3", there is no default palette or code for "Tkagg" so Matplotlib will not display anything, which is annoying and silly. The solution - for us at least - was just to install PyQt5 using pip, and the CentOS-7 X-windows environment could display graphics. This was just "pip3 install PyQt5", from command line, which installs: PyQt5 5.12, PyQt5-Qt5 5.12.2 and PyQt5-sip 4.19.19. One has to use "pip3", otherwise on older Linux machines, you will run pip for Python 2.7. This worked, and Matplotlib would indicate it has backend as "Py5Agg", if I recall correctly. Test Matplotlib on Python3 interpreter with this simple program:

(from command-line) $ python3 #--- or maybe just python, if you only have python3 installed
(shows Python 3.x version number)
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
>>> x = ([3, 4, 8, 17, 22, 37])
>>> plt.plot(x)
>>> plt.show()
>>> #--- you return to python3 interpreter after you close the plot window


The above code should display a simple plot, if Matplotlib is configured correctly with a working "backend". Exit python3 (which may be called just "python" on a modern machine) with the python command "exit()". The brackets are needed, since every command in Python is a function. (Python is "objected oriented", of course.)

Another note; You probably need to upgrade Pip, the Python module loader and builder program. Do this on CentoS-7, after getting the Python3-devel stuff, with: "pip3 install --upgrade pip". This takes pip from version 9 to version 21.3.1. This is needed to get PyQt5 to install. Once "pip3" is upgraded to pip3 version 21.3.1, the "pip install PyQt5" will be able to find PyQt5-Qt5 version 5.15.2, and it might actually install successfully. Once PyQt5 is fully installed (three modules, check with "pip3 list"), then matplotlib should be able to draw a plot on your screen.

Note two libraries you probably want, if using Python3 for any data-science work: sklearn and scipy. But note that "sklearn" is now called "scikit-learn". Do this to get the modules installed:

pip3 install scipy (from command line, of course, as root, or use the --user flag..)
pip3 install scikit-learn (from command line, of course, as root, or use the --user flag..)

Lots of issues getting opencv-python to work. Once libpng16 updated, on one Linux box, the attempt to run "cv2.imshow('Image',img)" would fail with a message to load the "gtk2-devel" library (if on Linux). In CentOS-7, one does this with "yum install gtk2-devel", as root. This worked, to allow the "opencv-python" library (version: 4.9.0.80) to be installed successfully, and to work correctly - under CentOS-7, with the "gtk2-devel" libraries loaded.

I will try to put all this info in better format, in a more sensible place. Just collecting it here, as I try to upgrade another machine.

These upgrades to baseline Linux software are often necessary, and require building library code from source, of course ("My Kingdom for a horse!"...) One endures this complexity, because the Linux evironment is CONTROLABLE. IF it does not work at first on Linux, you can almost AWAYS fix your robot. This is very important, if your robot does things which are critical to your prosperity and survival! If it does not work on a Windows or Apple Mac machine, you are just checkmated, and often completely fucked.

There are always crazy errors - we needed the opencv-python libraries and of course Matplotlib, and it is the Linux environment I prefer to use. On the Windows-11 platforms, the install and conversion was not difficut - but on Linux - our old CentOS-7 boxes, it was a tad more involved. Some software upgrades were needed - from source.

But I got it all working last nite, and it runs snappy nice. :)

The irony of the most important software maker/designer being called "Guido Rossum" (the inventor of Python), is pretty significant, for a history freak like me. Python is an insanely brilliant thing - much like APL. I met Ken Iverson (the inventor of APL), and he was hilariously rude and opinionated, rather like Nassem Taleb. I completely understand why IBM fired him. The Iversons are fine people (they built this weird language, called J, which is like APL, but has no array-indexing.) I found it to be unusable, overly obtuse and abusively pedantic.

It's always funny when you meet and converse with your heros. A kind-hearted old Christian soul like me (who does not believe in god, of course), always expects people to operate with basic courtesy and so on. Usually, this is not the case, which is comically silly, since we all end up in the same graveyards (or more likely, dusty, wind-blown particles of ash...). Many of these famous people are just plain mean, nasty and arrogant to the point of comedy. They become living caracatures of what most business folks just call: "a$$holes".

The "Vonnegut Term" is all that can be applied: "So it goes."

I feel sometimes like Dr. F, in the movie, "Young Frankenstein"... "My Name is FRANKENSTEIN!".

"Could be worse." ... "Could be raining."

[ Jan. 03, 2024 ] - Damned If You Do, And Double-Damned If You Don't - Truly a curious time now. I've warned folks about the "January Defect", which is the modern inversion of the old "January Effect", which would cause equities to be bid up, somewhat. What we get now, is the reactive-response to that old model, and lately, January typically now sucks, and sucks with an ugly wealth-destroying intensity. Just too many clever players, all playing to be clever.

So, all the old, sad Blues songs can be applied. But hey, could be worse, right? One could be living in the Gaza Ghetto, and be being firebombed by the "Evil BlueStar-Monsters From Hell", also known as the "Israeli Defense Force". We just think it is curiously awful, how the Jews of Israel think that murdering women and children by bombing their houses, is actually a form of "national defense". The Israeli people are truly the worst human creatures that inhabit this planet now. Interesting to see how successful these ugly Jew-people have been. They have succeeded in extracting over $300 billion US dollars, from American taxpayers, to fund the construction of their cities, built on stolen land, and the creation of a massive, nuclear-armed military murder-force, that is breathtaking in it's impressive capacity for extreme violence. It is unwise to hate these folks. The wise action is to plan for how we shall have to deal with the extreme threat they represent. Their economic agents live among us now, and they seek to successfully assault anyone who critiques their ugly behaviour, using clever methods of modern propaganda and neural-warfare. There are those among us who represent a clear and significant danger to modern Western civil society. There is no question about this at all. It is sadly, most clear. Anyone who ignores this obvious fact, is unwise and actively dishonest.

In this world now, there is little to be gained, by writing or talking. It is only through action - and extreme action at that - that anything of value can be accomplished or gained. The world favours men (and women) of action, and so we see a future of military confrontation as the one most likely to evolve forward from here. This is a grim forecast, and we, of course, wish this was not the case. A violent world, characterized by harsh contention for resources, is going to be a nasty and dangerous place to reside within. Tribal loyalty will likely be all that can be trusted, and even that will often fail, when appropriate incentives are put in place. Truly, we are astonished at how easily people can be swayed by basic incentives. Very few have any sort of core-belief systems that they will not adjust for their own gain.

So, we caution that the times are going to become progressively more violent, nasty, and difficult, for most of the world's population. This is really the only way it can play out now. We see profoundly unwise and deeply dishonest people in positions of power everywhere now. This is disturbing, but it cannot be denied. The United States, in particular, is in active crisis, with a dishonest and abusive Federal Administration, that has actively opened it's southern border to allow unrestricted in-migration of virtually anyone who shows up. Canada is doing roughly the same thing, with somewhat more careful attention to only accepting people-of-colour. This is curious, but of course this action serves to weaken and degrade the existing, traditional Canadian social-matrix. This serves the interest of the Leftists that currently control the Federal Government, and the constant state of economic-crisis ensures that they can remain in power, despite the fact that the majority of Canadians do not want the Government we have. Again, one sees an effective strategy by dishonest and abusive fraudsters. This is the pattern now, in much of politics and business in our country. Little can be done to change this, sadly. It is an established pattern.

So, we are all basically fucked. Short of a complete, full-on revolution, where the criminals and cheaters are dragged from their large offices, and are hung from lampposts, I can't see any solution to the current de-evolutionary process that seems to be unfolding. False-crisis events are engineered to mis-direct public attention. The best one of course, is "Climate Change" - a complete and extreme fraud that allows it's grifter-agents to travel at the public expense to warm-climate conferences in the winter! This, while the rest of us worry how we will pay our electricity and heating bills! It is so completely a lie, and yet it is so effective, that it is quite astonishing.

There will be great costs because of this. Wise leadership is very rare, and we are now embedded withing a time where wisdom has truly left the building. Each of us has to craft a survival strategy, to be implemented as things continue to degrade. We do not see any real opportunity in any field or area now. The AI technology is particularly ugly and disappointing. It's most effective use-case, is in targeting people's houses, for bombing campaigns. This is nausea-inducing, for those of us in AI research. After nausea, comes anger. And what is next after that? We all know.

We are truly on our own now. The year ahead looks curiously grim. Best of luck to everyone.

[Tiny Update] Fucking Bill Ackman succeeded in getting Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign. Truly just hilarious. Bill decides that racism against white-jewboys is actually racism. Can't argue with that, eh? The whole episode is the tragedy part. I am looking forward to when Bill Ackman, the rich-bully-boy jew, gets hoisted on his own petard, and so we can see the comedy part of this shitshow. The shit-silly examples of Claudine Gay's so-called are "plagiarism" are hilarious. She was quoting explicit black-letter law, so it is hard to really call it plagiarism. But so it goes. DEI is complete bullshit, of course. Any sane person can see that. But it is impressive to see the power that rich-bully-boy jews have in USA (and elsewhere). Any criticism of a jew - and suddenly you are hate-spewing "antisemite", which is also complete bullshit, equivalent to the nonsense of DEI. I think Dr. Gay should have made the dick-biters of Harvard actually fire her. And then, get several thousand students to participate in a slow-walk as she leaves the campus, to a neutral location where jew-blue-star flags could be burnt and spit on. If your gonna be hung for a lamb, why not also a sheep? Truly hilarious. But it shows the dangerous power of the big rich jews in USA now.

The question now, is how does USA bring down that evil rich bastard, Ackman? They need to nail him to an insider-trading scandal or maybe Epstein's "Let's-Fuck-Little-Kids" business efforts. Or maybe a pound of white blow found inside his private office? "Something / anything...", as MBS might say. Or maybe just a "Putin Solution"? We wait in quiet .... anticipation.

[ Dec. 23, 2023 ] - The Vile, the Horrible and the Grotesque - We enter a strange future now. The behaviour of the Jews, with their abusive, horrific mass-murder campaign in Gaza, will now enter the history-books, alongside the gas-chambers of their historical assertions of the "holocaust", as history-changing examples of human cruelty.

There were German analysts and even German National Socialists, who warned that the crimes being committed against European Jews during the Second World War, would risk doing great damage to Germany. This certainly proved to be the case. The Jews died - possibly in the millions - as a result of an evil campaign to remove them from German and European society.

And we now see a curiously similar and significant threat to America. The American political matrix and it's active media speak a lot about "Democracy", "Freedom" and "Human Rights". But with America's active and murderous military support of this current campaign of mass-murder in Gaza, the extra-ordinary scale and extent of American hipocrisy becomes evident.

The USA is now actively seen by many to be a nation that supports and protects the most abusive and grotesque war-criminal actions that have ever been observed in modern times. The Israeli's are actively and systematically destroying an entire city-state of over 3 million human-beings. This does not yet quite equal the asserted death-toll of the historical European "holocaust" - but it is beginning to come close. There is an act of depravity and horror that is now unfolding in real-time, which rivals the crimes the Jews were subjected to - but now being carried out by Israeli Jews against Arab women and children. This is an evil action.

And this Israeli action will damage and degrade America. It is simply not possible for America to mouth-speak any sort of communication regarding "Human rights", "Democracy" and "Freedom", without giving the appearance of an evil, grotesque and dishonest hypocrite. America's message to the world - and the the future - is one of pure, Orwellian "Double-Speak".

This will damage America, and American interests, far in the future. The Great American media machine will increasingly be seen for what it is - an Israeli-supporting collective of disinformationalists.

And every nation linked to Jewish forces that support this horror-show of hypocracy will be degraded as well, we suspect.

In the USA, even senior military people are warning that America's unquestioning support for the Israeli entity, should at the very least, be re-examined. It is obviously NOT in America's interests to support atrocity and State-terrorism. And yet this occurs, and thus violence, war, death and destruction is unleashed regularly on the Arab world. Iran seems to be a *manufactured* enemy, created more by American Jewish interests, than by events on the ground. US President Obama attempted to correct the Israeli-driven constant-conflict model of the Middle-East, but Trump chose to unwind everything, and also cut-and-run from Afghanistan. Nothing changed with the ineffectual and unwise Joe Biden, and so war, violence and hate is the result.

A US military commander urges a "re-think" of this massive and curious support of the Israeli entity, pointing out that USA taxpayers have sent over $300 billion dollars to Israel since 1948. And what has been the result? An entire swath of the World, now sees this extreme example of American hipocrisy, and the dangerous threat that American warships, and F-16 fighter-bombers represent. America is damaged by this. And this is especially so, when American military support is used to mass-murder women and children, by explicit design.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2023/12/21/its_time_to_rethink_american_support_for_israel_1000348.html

Is it really a good idea, for this much money, to be sent to this kind of political entity, so that the American flag can be seen as a symbol of horror, fear, hatred and revulsion?

And how can we know that this is true, and certain? How does one know these kind of deep truths? Because this knowledge etches itself on one's heart. When I see Netanyahu standing in front of those blood-soaked Israeli "blue-star-of-david" flags, that is exactly the reaction I have. I feel this deep revulsion and disgust, mixed with anger and hate. And I know that this is not a good thing. Not all Jews are evil persons or murderous social-economic cancer.

But it does not matter what I feel. What matters, is what happens as mass-events drive history forward, and shape the politics and economics that we must deal with, in order to live.

I have this quiet, and deep concern, that Hamas has carried out the same kind of curious and significant victory, that Jesus Christ himself carried out, by allowing the Romans to execute him as a common criminal, in an ugly and public way. Who won that "war"? Jesus, the son of a jewish carpenter, died for an idea. He was a brilliant speaker, and even indicated that people must pay their taxes, and support the State. It was not the Roman administration of Palestine that insisted on his murder. Pontius Pilot saw no obvious benefit from executing a man who offered no threat to Roman authority. It was the local "religious" persons who demanded his death.

And what was the result? Whatever religious beliefs one has are irrelevant. The key fact is that the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, engendered the creation of the most significant and world-changing social, political, and economic change. Rome became a Christian entity. The Roman Empire disolved, but Roman Church authority grew, and remains operational, 2000 years later. This is impressive. In recent history, millions of European Jews were transported and executed. But what happened to Germany? It was destroyed, divided and nearly erased as an entity.

Look at Japan, and Japanese militarism, which suffered two city-destroying nuclear-bomb attacks. They recovered. And the greatest risk they now face, comes from their close association with America, as much as it does from China's growing power.

The current Gaza "holocaust" will drive history forward in a predictable manner: It will ensure that the race-based Jewish Israeli entity will eventually be removed, in some manner, possibly not for 50 or 100 years, since to remove this entity, it will first be necessary for America to be degraded, and it's military hegemonic power to be degraded or effectively supressed. We are not in favour of this, nor are we suggesting that this is currently possible.

But it WILL happen, at some point. The revolting stench of American hipocrisy is just too much for most folks to bear. The Russians behave very badly, but the Americans seem to now be acting insane - they have a government that seems to acting against both the will of the people, and basic American political and economic interests. It would make vastly more sense for America to support Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and just withdraw all economic and military support for Israel.

Such action would be rational and also in the interests of basic justice.

But the powerful Jewish forces that have control of American politics and American media, can probably prevent this from happening - for now.

When it DOES happen, eventually, then that will be a victory for Hamas. But it will also mean a weaker and degraded America. This will affect us here in the north part of North America, but if it is coincident with the Israeli's being pushed into the sea, and drowned like rats, then it is a cost we shall have to prepare to absorb, since it is certain to happen, at some distant future time.

It would be far wiser and better for the entire world, if this conflict could be avoided, and a non-race-based political entity could be created in Palestine. But the stubborn nature of the hate-driven Jews, will ensure that does not happen. And the current Two-State model is dead, according to Netanyahu and the Israeli fascists. So violence and violent conflict is the only option remaining.

And thus it is *certain* - without question now - that violence will continue to grow, as there is no way for non-Israeli Palestinians to have any sort of freedom or security, until the vile, murderous Israeli "killers-of-women-and-children" are removed from the shores of the Mediterranian Sea. This will be the Arab view, and no other will really be possible in the years ahead. And since Israel is supported by the American military hegemon, the thinking will be that ugly problem of America itself will have to be addressed.

So, for the future, the "Jewish Problem" now looks to become the "American Problem", and this deep concern will act to drive history for the next 100 years.

The smartest thing the Americans could do, would be cut all ties with Israel, and remove ALL Israeli supporters from America, and deport them to Israel. Of course, this will not happen. But removing American Jewry would free America, and allow it to return to being a nation driven by desires for justice and freedom, and not just another corrupt nation-state seeking to engineer the mass-murder of those who are not even a threat to it.

But the Jewish influence in America now means that America must become an enemy to the World, and this is simply insane. This should not happen. But it will.

What is disturbing and grotesque, is that - short of just removing the Jewish influence - there is not likely any way to prevent this ugly outcome. Hamas gets it's ultimate victory.

[ Dec. 22, 2023 ] - Plowing the Fields of Regret - near a town called Alice? No, wrong colony.. It was Germany, IIRC. Truly unsure here. But perhaps it's all pretty for you. Really time to change the program. The "UN-Security Council" is a joke. America is helping Israel do flat-out mass-murder, while trying to look like some kind of noble entity.

Russis is also trying to look like the good-guys, and the mass-murder victims in Gaza now exceed 20,000 people, mostly women and children. The ugly war in Ukraine continues. I wonder if USA President Biden will be eventually charged as a war criminal? The entire administration of "justice" in both USA and Russia is looking bad. American operatives are trying to attack former President Trump and prevent him from running in the November election, despite Trump continuing to poll better than Biden - who is now rated one of the worst Presidents in USA history, according to the opinion polls.

The entire political world is looking more than just a little insane. We are actually working on a scenario that suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines are perhaps responsible for making people crazy - en mass. There clearly is some kind of curious process driving a lot of political and aconomic activity - maybe it was mostly from the lockdowns, or perhaps it is a result of anger and frustration at the twisted economics that are being seen everywhere.

There is weirdness in the public sphere - and idiotic foolishness seems to be running rampant.

How can the USA President support and encourage a military campaign of mass-murder of mainly women and children? Are the Jews really this powerful and dangerous, or is this just the result of madness on the part of the US Democratic Leftists? The Right-Wing Republicans also believe it's all OK, and that mass-murder of women and children is a legitimate political exercise.

To us, this just seems completely insane. This entire political event - the Hamas attack, and the wildly over-the-top reprisal murder-campaign by right-wing Israeli fascists - this event will change the dynamics in the Arab world, and may provoke a revolution in Saudi Arabia. We are curious just how effectively the lid is being kept on things. There is an impressive mainstream-media blackout of the pictures of the streets litered with rotting corpses, and the images of the dead children, and murdered women are not shown, of course.

And it is interesting to see just how completely and totally worthless and ineffective the United Nations now is. The entire organization is shown to be basically a fraud.

The money that is directed from Northern countries to the UN, is a waste and a true, perfect example of a mis-allocation of resources. The whole UN entity is designed to provide cover for USA and Russia - and soon maybe China - to allow for insane murder exercises, and out-of-control extreme violence, to be used as political tools.

We are - as a species - no further ahead than we were 2000 years ago. We can just print bigger numbers - for both costs and persons-killed - for the wars.

There seems to have been no social progress whatsoever. We know this assertion is not true. But looking at the Jews, and their behaviour in Palestine, and the curiously dishonest and kill-happy Amerians, it just seems to be true. Mass-murder is all OK, again, just like it was in Roman times. or during the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Netenyahu is not Hitler - but he does need to be Hitler, to kill like a Hitler. This is interesting.

We think this is just nuts.

Have some nuts for Christmas, I guess. Happy "Holidays"... :/

[ Dec. 21, 2023 ] - The Equity Culture Club? - Do you really want to hurt me? (and the Market answers: "Hell, yah!") These are curious times. It seems yesterday, some big doods decided to put on a massive gosh-darn position in a "butterfly-put" configuration in the Options market - maybe or maybe not a ODTE (Zero day to expiry), but maybe it was a 2 day to expiry? Means today and tomorrow could get weird. The guys taking the other-side of the options-trade, had to do a bunch of massive sells maybe, to ensure they could be safely on the other side of the honking-big put that they wrote, if it got exercised in a downburst of price action. I am just guessing here - I have zero knowledge of what the hell actually caused the shitstorm yesterday. The "butterfly-put" idea was tossed around, and I saw something about it on the internet. You know, that internet-thing, where everyone tells the truth (cough, cough ... barf..)

Life is short. Enjoy what you have, while you have it. Like Warren Zevon said: "Enjoy every sandwitch".

Cotillion SD-9034 - find it, and see if you can find Miss Linda Lee. Like the market teaches: "If you want it so fast, don't you know, it ain't gonna last. ... all those other people, trying to use up the night. .... Ya better cool it down." And yes, it certainly is the Beginning of a New Age - "Paths of Pain" to "Jewels of Glory". I miss Lou, and David too. They only live now on black vinyl and grey neurons.

[ Dec. 20, 2023 ] - Send Lawyers, Guns and Money... This Market is in Trouble. - Goddamn hell, here we go again. Our little bad-arsed bank-stock is rolling over like injured road-kill again today, just before it dies. The pattern is the same every goddamn day. A pop in the AM, to suck in the punters, and then a long slow slide as a dumpster full of smelly equity is unloaded on the quacking ducks. The daily shitstorm of TSX trading for our little thing, for the whole day is maybe 1 million shares - and in the last 200 or 300 nano-seconds, five fucking million shares are crossed, using "market-on-close" trickery.

This is starting to look a lot like the horrible-awful 1970's. We get a puking market, and double-digit inflation, and bugger-all economic opportunities, and the Federal Government here quietly continues to detonate things related to sanity and old-fashioned English-style "Good Government". At least in the USA, where you also get "Bad Government", you can find ways to make some money. But here, it is a bit different. In this fair land, if you put your goddamn head up too high, some arse-face toady will get all his buddies in the ABC's to start taking pot-shots at you. It's kind of weird, actually.

I am trying to figure out if the new guy our little Bank hired as CEO can save the goddamn ship. Given another puke-day of watching the share-price ride down the double-black-diamond ski slope, I am starting to get pretty fucking worried, truth be told. Everything everywhere seems to be quietly breaking. In USA land, they worry about "quiet quiting", and in China, it is called either "Laying Flat" or "Let it Rot". (In Japan they are already in full-crisis mode. And in Korea, they are quietly shitting themselves, as their real-estate bets implode, due to the rate-shock..)

I've been doing the cross-sectional textual research stuff, which is usually bullsh/t - but for our little Bank, it has been an ugly and interesting research project. The entire "Preferred Share" market in Canada is dead and/or dying. It's sad and interesting, for a whole bunch of reasons I can't really talk about. And I can't even write about the sh/t I found out - except it makes me feel ill and puke-prone, as is pretty much how I feel all the time now. I write this silly blog, to document things, because my best trades have often been when I have to go vomit a little bit - or drink a glass of straight rum to settle my stomach. (Note: I really do NOT recommend this. This is bad. What I do to pay the bills is a bad idea, and I only do it 'cause we need the money, ok? "Don't try this at home", as the wags say...)

I pretty much know what is happening now, and why, and I am pretty sure we will all be just fine. But truly, NO ONE really knows the future. Who would have predicted Hamas could be so fucking stupid, or that Russia could return to being evil and lie-crazy cruel, like their ancient-model? It's nuts. It's all quite mad. USA has a corrupt old man with a "family business" of hyper-grifting, and the other guy is getting "lawfare" attacked by corrupt State legislatures, trying to "fix" the 2024 USA election. If you are an American, you had better be polishing your pieces, because to repair your broken government, you might just have to go full "Che Guevara" the next time ya' all visit the big Capitol. If the democratic process is rigged and broken, then the action has to be taken to the streets. This is what history shows us again and again and again. The big wheel of history has to "revolve", yes?

We expect INFLATION, not CRASH or REVOLUTION for 2024. And with INFLATION, all the numbers go up.

Why? Because INFLATION is better, and less destructive than violent in-the-streets revolution, and also better than a ripping big asset-crash. But INFLATION is still a problem, and it always will be, since it ruins - just like the wildly insane and stupid ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) madness - does as well. You must have a positive rate of return on capital, especially for the little guys. Otherwise, the finance-and-investment economic algorithm just does not work.

A key point now: Do not have debt, even if we expect INFLATION. There is a real chance, given the curiously unwise economic gain-riding that Central Banks have been engaging in, that we could all flip violently from INFLATION to DEFLATION, like occured in the 1930's. We put a low probability on this outcome. But it is not zero. Maybe 5% to 10% likely. But no one really knows. (Gain-riding is a recording-studio technique, where quiet parts of the song are boosted, and loud parts are dialed-back. In the old days, a recording-engineer worked the sliders - now, companders can be programmed to tweak and adjust the output waveforms - which is often why music can sound like sterile shit.)

I will have to listen to the "Trinity Sessions" again, while I drink that glass of rum. At least it will not be Jonestown "Kool-Aid"... (I hope!). The "Trinity Sessions" by the Cowboy Junkies, was recorded by a genius who just died recently, named Peter Moore. He used, I think, just one mike, and yet it sounds so fine and authentic. I met Margo Timmins after a concert years ago. Fine lady and a real artist. There was a time, when things were really very good. But as we all know, nothing beautiful lasts.

In the 1970's, we had crashing markets, rising inflation, and rising interest rates, which caused all sorts of ugly economics. It was called "Stagflation" - real economic recession, high unemployment, but combined with ugly (more than 10%) inflation. To fix this mess, Volker raised rates to over 20%, and MANY businesses failed. It was brutal. But it worked. This time, however, everyone knows this will not work, since it will collapse both the private sector AND The public sector, since there is too much debt. So the inflationary model, is the least-awful choice. But perhaps the folks in charge are too arrogant and too stupid to even open any of the history books. So they might try this, and blow everything to hell. We put a 5% to 10% probability on this outcome.

So, the 80% to 90% probability is for highish (but still slightly below or near zero real rates) combined with a bumpy, no-return but no-crash market environment, and a general worsening of economic conditions and general economic opportunity. This is because there is not a technological fix to help us this time. AI is interesting, but it will only help military folks kill better. There is no real gain in the commercial world likely, since truly NO ONE wants to talk to a "Chat Bot" to get a problem resolved, and electric cars and lawnmowers are stupid and annoying, and also VERY expensive.

The World will just be harder and more difficult, and less attractive for everyone, except the very wealthy. And it might not be nice for them either, if the conflicts continue to grow.

You might want to buy farmland, or lake-front property, WAY far away from major urban centres. And buy some iodine thyroid pills. And a diesel generator, and a big tank of diesel fuel. And a bunch of freeze-dried food. And ammo, for that deer-rifle, of course. Whatever... :)

[ Dec. 18, 2023 ] - This Is Not A Pipe - This is a picture of a pipe. The artists are often able to tell us, aren't they. Art and literature and science and politics - and even economics - they all hold hands and dance the ever-circling skeletal family dance (from 5th cut, side two, "Diamond Dogs" album, by David Bowie).

Hard times coming. Will make 1930's, look like a "Golden Age", maybe. I look at the markets, and something is very wrong. The market is curiously not the market anymore. In Canada, this is probably due to the various "dark pool" markets that operate outside of visible scrutiny by public investors. This is a very bad thing, of course, but our regulatory agency operatives are clueless. They are now just a bunch of clerical women, who work for a few bankers and politicians who wisely remain in the background. Nothing is gained, by showing one's true face. We seem to be entering a new social construct, where mass-murder of civilian populations is considered "no problem", and some real dark, dangerous folks have their nasty little hands on the levers of power.

The Israeli IDF (Insane Destructive Freaks?) have now started shooting their own Israeli hostages. Have you noticed that ALL NEWS about the Gaza Murder War has disappeared from the public airwaves, and even from the internet news feeds? Noticed that? It's interesting.

Every nation has had - or will have - a "Holocaust" in it's historical record. Japan suffered two nuclear-bomb attacks. Russia had over 20 million citizens killed in the 2nd World War - that was more than the entire population of Canada at the time. Germany was destroyed completely, and China became full-Communist because of World War Two, and entered a dark-age of hell, that only ended after the mass-murder exercise of Tiannamen Square.

Our World seems to be run by psychopathic killers and thieves that know no limit to their insanity. Even little Canada, at one point, in an act of truly hilarious racism actually rounded up all it's Japanese-Canadian population, stole all their property, and put everyone with a Japanese name, in Concentration Camps for the duration of World War Two (and that was, of course, a "Liberal" Government - the most notorious abusers of those good old "True North Strong and FREE" kinds of freedom.

The markets are showing a curious reaction. The "November-to-Remember" did not come to Canadian Bank stocks, as these have been beaten down by the rise in interest-rates - which kill the value of those "HTM" and "AFS" bonds that backstop bank capital. And the other problem is that bankers don't want to do banking much anymore. They want to do "Wealth Management", and grift-on to some fellows little income stream, and pocket some for themselves. Many advisors are herd-followers, and rule-followers and Mutual Fund salesmen - not really the kinds of folks you want anywhere near your precious capital. Small percentages taken on a regular basis can let you bleed to death quite effectively. The good money is made in banking, not grifting. But grifting is so much easier.

And today, after watching "The Great Taking", Mr. Webb has made it clear, that I do not even have operational "ownership" (as per property-rights laws), of my own securities, in my own investment account. We can't really believe this to be true - but it is actually right there, in clear, black-letter law. One has a "security entitlement", which is sometimes called a "beneficial ownership" - except it is NOT ownership - it is simply a claim on the custodial firm's assets, in the event of the bankruptcy or "winding-down" of any securities company or brokerage firm. And this applies even to assets (ie. stocks and bonds) held in a "segregated account".

This is of course, truly insane and astonishingly awful. It means your un-margined, not-encumbered, stocks and bonds that you **thought** you owned free-and-clear, are in fact just pooled so that you really only have a mutualized interest in the overall assets of the brokerage entity that holds your paper. I read this fellow Webb's book, and then I watched his 1 hour video, and I could not really believe it.

But this is actually true, and was proven when "protected entity" (J.P. Morgan-Chase - ticker: JPM) took the assets of Lehman Brothers, when Lehman failed. JPM said it was theirs, because it was collateral, which gave proof to the new legal structure established to allow all stocks to be swept up as "collateral" to support the entire derivatives complex (which now has notional value many, many times larger than the entire global economy.)

So, of course, suddenly, the entire "crypto-currency" eco-system, with it's public "blockchain" detailing contractual actions, does not look quite so bogus, since it operates OUTSIDE of the control of the "lizards" who run the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the ECB, and the other fiat-money, bank-dominated national-currency fabrication systems.

We got burned by owning Credit Suisse and First Republic Bank shares. It would have been a much better trade to buy rifles and cases of ammunition, rather than CS or FRS shares, and that is really pretty funny.

Owning financial assets is a great way to have not just losses - but actually have ALL your wealth swept away. Our FRS shares became worthless, but JPM (J.P. Morgan-Chase) was able to acquire ALL the assets of First Republic Bank, and show a huge pop of gain on it's financial statements. The entire exercise was a pure example of "Taking". We got NOTHING and the "protected entity", J.P. Morgan, got EVERYTHING that was valuable - and paid basically NOTHING for it. Really. And the FDIC - the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (a group of drunkards, party-boys and general fudge-packers), helped JPM execute this attractive plan. Great for JPM, not so great other bank investors.

So, we know about the concept of this "Taking". We also had Lehman Bros. shares, back in the day, and got hammered on that dogshit, also. (But not as badly, as we jumped in and out, like a clever frog in a boiling bottle of piss. Stupid trades, really. I still have the Lehman financial statements, issued just prior to their collapse, where those goodfellows showed many billions of cash on their balance sheet. Lying motherhumpers of the most astonishing kind, really they were. The US Accounting boys called this fraudulent Lehman Financial Statement trickery: "window dressing", since it followed US accounting rules, which allowed contractual sale-and-repurchase deals to be shown on statements as actual trues sales, and not big red-flagged contingent liabilities, as long as the sale-price and re-purchase-price were more than 5% different. As that dude said in Princess Bride: "Inconceivable!" )

Perhaps, it might be time to get off this train? Trouble is, when it works, it works pretty goddamn good.

Banking is just a wonderful damn business, IFF (if, and only if), you do not fucking blow yourself up - hoisted on your own petard, as the great William Shakespeare so eloquently phrased it.

It's a wonderful fucking life, no question. As some wag said: "Every time a bell rings, a little crypto-bro gets a new Lambo..."

Clearly, I am in the wrong business. :)

[ Dec. 17, 2023 ] - Black Country Rock - Pack a pack-horse... or an F-150. Take your AK, a crate of 7.62x39, and a couple of YETI's full of food. Just for practice, right? Except no, it's just for recreation. One has to stay in the real-world, and make the programs work. No other option. Like a wag said: "We can't depreciate our global currency vis-a-vis Mars and Venus."

Some lite reading we are working thru:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/intentional-destruction-first-covid-now-comes-great-taking

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf

The references that one finds to the 1930's are always interesting - and often curiously wrong. They always dwell on bread-lines and the 25% unemployment and "Grapes-of-Wrath" kind of shit - which obscures what really was key. Although we are not fans of Franklin Roosevelt, we give the fellow credit for essentially balancing the US Federal Budget in 1937. This is said to have caused the great 1937-1938 Recession - or the "Depression within a Depression", but it was not an unwise thing to do. Roosevelt was actually a "Fiscal Conservative" or "Budget Hawk", if one examines what he did. He valued and respected the necesscity of balanced government budgets, despite his efforts to create correctly funded "Social Security" - funded correctly means that the program was designed to be actuarially sound - paid not from the theft of generated private income - but paid as part of a business-expense against wages, as a standard and economically sustainable pension scheme.

And by keeping the USA operating it's federal finances within a sane and sensible budgetary envelope, the Roosevelt government was able to fund the US entry into World War Two, with ease. If you have basically no debt, and you have to margin up to the eyebrows to get something critical accomplished - well, you goddamn well can do it. And your money can stay sound, and your economy can rise (easily) to the challenge. And the bonds sold to finance the big expenditure, can be paid down, with real money.

And most folks forget the wildly significant scientific and technical advances made in the 1920's and the 1930's. James Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932 in the Cavendish lab in the UK allowed a complete model of the atom to be made. It is probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made. All nuclear engineering comes from this. American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented all-electronic television in the late 1920's, received his patent for all-electronic television in 1934. The key was inventing the "iconoscope" or "image-disector" tube - the TV camera. It made all-electronic TV possible, and it changed the world.

All the technology we have today - including Alan Turing's work to define the operational characteristics of the modern computer - it all came in the "Depression" time of the 1930's. It was one of the most positively productive decades in all of human history.

And, Roosevelt and his 1937 plan, essentially balanced the US federal budget. This needs to be recognized as one hell of an accomplishment, which took some "stones-of-steel" to make happen. Yes, there was a bit of a downturn, yatta yatta yatta - but actually, if one looks at the 1930's, and the grim economic time that it was - it meant that the USA was almost debt-free by the time it declared war on the Axis powers.

And the post-nuclear holocaust world-at-peace we got to live in, was the great benefit. America was now the leading Big Guy (The Hegemon, as Ancient Athens was),and was able to enforce a Pax Americana on the whole Global system. The US dollar fully replaced the UK "Pound Sterling" as the global reserve currency, and the mass production model (what used to be called "Fordism", after Henry Ford's invention of the "production line"), allowed mass-wealth to replace the old Socialist economic model of mass-poverty. John Maynard Keynes had fuck-all to do with this. It was Roosevelt's hard-core fiscal conservatisim, and Oppenheimer's development of the atomic bomb - that gave us the runaway technologically-driven economic-takeoff models that uplifted humanity from mud-hut poverty, to modern houses with toilets, electricity and clean running water.

And see, it is fascinating: The fiscal conservative Roosevelt, is remembered for his social assistance programs and schemes to reduce unemployment, and the scientist who did the most to engineer the most effective tool for mass-murder in all of human history - he became a peace-advocate because there was nothing else he could do, once the power of atomic weapons became clear, and the Russians demonstrated their device in 1947.

Soros is hard-core correct, in his philosophical model of "Reflexivity". Events have to track far in one direction - but that tracking directly establishes the conditions for the necessary reversal of the whole process, in a reactive-response that sends the process zooming in the other direction. And this reactive-response can be wildly dangerous and destructive, as it can set up an undamped oscillation, in which each swing gets not damped down, but instead gets amplified. The system, with feed-forward information-transfer mechanisms, then oscillates to self-destruction, unlessed damped by external control forces.

And this is where we are now. "Deficit Financing" has been pushed to the wild extreme, and our entire financial system - everywhere in the world - is backstopped by paper (or worse, just digital recordings of) Government bonds. But what happens if the "Government" that backs those paper-bonds, is now paying off those bonds with bogus "paper" that folks decide they do not want? What the fuck then?

See, the whole system could collapse in a weekend, IF some event took place, that caused the impairment of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The entire system now, is a giant paper house-of-cards, very much like the "South Seas Bubble" or the "Mississippi Scheme" that John Law implemented in France, to let that crazy-corrupt country extinguish most of it's paper debts. (That was not his intention, in the first great experiment with paper money, but that was the net result.)

See, we are right here at that point now. The entire planet is hyper-financialized, and everyone in every nation, is essentially either margined themselves, or they rely on banks that are backstopped entirely with Government bonds. The amount of "gold" in the system is tiny and almost irrelevant to the economic scale. Gold will not save us, and gold will just be confiscated if and when the system implodes. The only alternative is to keep all the paper balls in the air, and maintain the illusion that real value still resides there.

We think the USA was insane and outright crazy-stupid to allow the Silicon Valley Bank, and the First Republic Bank failures to happen the way that they did. It was a textbook bank-run, and showed how completely bogus all market valuations of all fiat-financial paper really is. It is valuable only because the various "Governments" say it is valuable. But try and trade your money for something valuable - like a new kidney, or some plutonium, or some really good personal-defense weaponry, like a few HiMARS units, etc., and one finds a myriad of restrictions that block this, of course. You can buy cheap Chinese things, and plastic stuff from Japan, and digital images of "bored Apes", but not much else.

In my personal "shit-hole" country, I cannot now even buy a Chinese Norinco handgun, and no one can in USA either. It is one of the few really good things that China makes. It is a good and very useful product, and no amount of local scrip can be used to purchase it. Norinco products are outright *banned* in the USA, because of bogus American laws that assert Norinco is producing nuclear weapons illegally, or some such absurd nonsense. The USA is corrupt as hell, and the Canadian Government is actively and viciously stupid.

But the curious net effect of the modern economic insanity, is that money does not work very well anymore. Tariff restrictions even make it even impossible for me to acquire parts for my goddamn boat, from US manufacturers. This is just fucking insane. Our governments are run by a bunch of fucking goofs. It's just comical and hilarious, like a re-write of "Waiting for Godot" - real Theatre-of-the-Absurd kind of stuff.

So, our prediction is that it is going to get interesting. The corrupt and foolish folks who run things - Government fiscal toads and Central Bankers - are going to have to let the inflationary forces run like scared puppies. They will have no choice, otherwise we are almost certain to see a global economic cascade-collapse event take place, that will make the 1930's look like a "Cakewalk" by Gollywog.

[ Dec. 16, 2023 ] - I Want A New Drug - Don't we all? The fat-bastards want Ozempic, the stressed-out want Paxil, and folks like me with a goddamn blood-clot in my leg, have to take Xarelto, which is like about 100 times more expensive than Warfarin (both are blood-thinners - with large doses of warfarin useful for poisoning rats). All drugs fuck-over the bio-mechanisms that attempt to manage organism homeostatis - the processes that keeps bio-systems operating within their needed parameters - but that is their value. It is how we can adjust the fuck-stupid biotechnology that our wetware has to reside within. Evolved systems are all well and good - except they start to fail in annoying and truly awful ways, as time goes by... ("Play it, Sam." "No." "Ok, ya. You're right" )

Modern pharamceuticals are dangerous as fuck, but also that is what makes them effective and good. I took both the "flu-shot" and the latest Pfizer/Biotech vaccine on Dec. 7th. I already had the goddamn blood-clot in my leg, and was about to start the blood-thinner Xarelto (Bayer trade-name for generic "rivaroxaban", a seriously successful product - works well, few side-effects), so I figured I can handle the Covid vaccine. Plus, everyone I know, and their partner, seem to be getting Covid again. But it's not killing people - just making them sick like a bad flu. We have achieved "herd immunity", which is good. Except a good buddy whom I used to argue with about medical issues, had the annoying termenity to die of a coronary thrombosis in Nov. 2022, just over a year ago. Silly bugger. To have a long and prosperous, wonderful life, it is fucking important and in fact necessary, not to fucking DIE, right? Fuck god.

Nobody knows any history anymore, it seems. They teach stupid shit in the University history classes, I guess - shit about gays and lesbians and such - which is bascially irrelevant to the process dynamics that got us all here. So, much of what I read seems so curiously uninformed.

Knowing a bit of real history is useful. It explains how things *CHANGE*. We use the word "Tory" for "Conservative" in Canada and the UK. But "Tory" is from Irish Gaelic, and actually, in the 1600's, meant "a pursued man, a robber" (the word was: "toraidhe" for a "man pursued", from the verb "toir", for "pursuit"). The term was originally applied to Irish Royalist outlaws, in the 1600's. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the term "Tory" meant a supporter of the Stuarts and later Royal authority, and political supporters of the established Anglican Church and the traditional English government structure and opponents of parliamentary reform. The "Whigs" supported parliamentary reform. In England, there were Whigs and Tories, and now in Canada, we have "Liberals" and "Conservatives".

Why was parliamentary reform considered to be needed? Because there were "Rotten Ridings", which had been large towns, but now, only had a few people - and these small groups could be paid to support a chosen Candidate in an election. One borough had been a large town, but the town had moved, and only a 12 voters remained. If you needed to get a guy into Parliament, at election-time, you could just "purchase" the seat for your guy. This is how the brilliant Economist and successful financier, David Ricardo, got his seat in Parliament. A friend of his insisted he simply "purchase" the "Rotten Borough" of Portarlington, a Irish seat, which required paying off a small number of voters. This practice was considered acceptable, as it allowed influential men to engage in effective political debate and contribute to the creation of operationally useful legislation. Ricardo championed "tariff-free trade", which was a radical idea at the time.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Ricardo

The curious thing about political action, is how truly awful it appears to working while it is actually working. But the strength of a democratic political model, rests in it's ability to have operational process crafted by groups of focused folks working on getting something done - and rather than doing it by some dictator's fiat, the process is crafted by debate, argument and discussions by folks who have perhaps actually studied the problem, and worked on how to create a model that can improve on the problematic one currently in place.

And this shit actually can get done. I watched Canada move from being an isolated and seriously failing economic environment (due to bad Liberal policy), during the time of Brian Mulroney and his Conservative Government, back in the 1980's. We had this insane hidden "Federal Sales Tax" which punished manufacturers for making stuff here, and also we had high tariff barriers to prevent economic competition from American firms. Everything seemed to cost twice as much in Canada, as it did in the USA, as a result. Only in the Auto Industry, was there "free trade", and only in parts, not in finished cars and trucks. The whole tariff-driven Liberal economic model was stupid. Canada had these "Branch Plants" of various American and European companies, that had to exist here, in order to do local final assembly of machinery, and avoid import tariffs. It was like the insane "Corn Laws" which Ricardo had argued against, in UK history.

The Mulroney Conservatives pushed thru a wildly contraversial deal with USA, "NAFTA", the North American Free Trade Act", which established a free-trade regime between Canada and USA, allowed Canadian professionals to work in the USA, and allowed tariff-free movement of many kinds of goods across the Canada-US border. And the Tories also brought in a new GST Tax - the Goods and Services Tax, which replaced the old (hidden) FST (Federal Sales Tax), which punished anyone who made any product in Canada. This legislation was key to basically saving the Canadian economy.

Unfortunately, much of the NAFTA benefits have been rolled-back, by abusive and dishonest coin-operated political folks on both sides of the border. Now, a whole new set of restrictive and abusive policies make trans-border trade between Canada and USA increasingly difficult and problematic, and the 7% GST has become the HST, and at 13%, it now acts as a major drag on Canadian economic activity here in Ontario.

It's now easier for us to import products from Asia - Japan and China - than it is to import something from the USA. This is just comical and stupid and fucking insane - but this is what the USA has done with its Trumpism and Bidenomics. The Democrats in the USA have an open border in the South - and let anyone into the USA - but they work goddamn hard to keep our products out, and to prevent their companies from selling their stuff to us here. This is so fucking absurd that it boggles the mind - but this is the modern world now.

And it's not like anyone can do anything about this. This is what is really comical. In the old days, it was possible to at least have some input into the mad political process that crafts bad legislation. And before that - hell, David Ricardo could fucking just buy a goddamn seat in Parliament, and get his ideas heard - even if he was not successful, and then got sick and died (this usually happens to good people who try to change a bad system). But he wrote his ideas down, and that material lived on, and things changed. (Sort of, for a while...) (He hated writing, apparently. His friends nagged him to do it, which I find interesting.)

We have this curious "Idiots in Power" problem in both Canada and the USA. And democracy itself is no longer working right in either country. The "Voters Rights" trickery in the USA (which really means "Voter Fraud", of course), ensures that with "vote harvesting", the very lowest-common-denominator process drives the election results, and so populist fraudsters are all that get into parliament now - in each country.

The net result of the breakdown in ability, is a similar breakdown in process. We find a lot of stuff just does not work right. Computer systems are hacked and fail. Medical services are non-operational, ER's are packed with hundreds of people waiting in crowded rooms, making each other sick. Bank computer systems are "improved" and the improvement knocks most users offline. Labour shortages, and product "supply chain issues" make basic requirements unavailable. Roads are blocked, or by design are made unusable. Systems seem to be failing everywhere. And crime and "homelessness" grows - a problem which is easy to fix, but the political will to do so, seems to have failed.

And this is happening in the good part of the World, that used to be well-run. In the Bad Part of the World, all hell is breaking loose. War is now on, and it seems certain to grow.

We have lost the sense that the future can be improved. It now is something that, at best, must be endured. And even that is at risk, it seems.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 - EoD post-mortem] - Helter-Skelter - I know AI technology, and I know technical trading, and I know the fucking puke-fest of stupidity that most of corporate canada is. But mostly, I know the fucking technology. But I am like Number 6 in the old "Prisoner" TV series, from the 1960's. I don't want to be controlled by this shit - and it means I don't follow the godfucking AI. I had a perfect trading situation today - handed to me on a fucking platter - and I butchered the implementation, despite a fucking EXACT picture - across two major domains - of what was almost certain to happen. I can handle losing money. But not taking an opportunity that I needed and was handed to me on a fucking golden platter - that is just motherfucking unacceptable. It's like a fork in the gut.

And this is the fucking shitstorm of the world now - this constant fucking tsunami of the most god-fucking awful and unacceptable scenarios - they wash over one like the puke-fest from a giant Roman vomitorium bowl. Goddamn motherfucking shitJesus hellhammer. The psycho-fucking costs of this bloodshit-hellfuck nasty trading-failure stuff is high. It burns one's peace-of-mind to the fucking ground, like the Chicago fire.

Hardest motherfucking business on the god-fuckface planet this. Quite an interesting and most serious and challenging problem. Unsure of how to even track towards a solution. See - the fucking AI sort of works, good enough to offer insight. But I seem to have become unable to follow it - it's like the fucking machine is the competitor - except it is NOT the competitor - it REALLY helps - but I have just not yet managed to integrate the mechanism into MY behaviour. The fucking machine works, and the internal knowledge-base I have also works - but I seem to be godfucked, unable to take a perfect motherfucking opportunity to get the fuck out of a fuck-toad shit-steamer failed position, when I was given a fucking gift from Jay Powell and the poor fuckers who were getting pivot-squeezed. Bugger. Like that English actor in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"... Bugger Bugger BUGGER! (Hugh Grant, right?) My other AI knows the answers. Hilarious.

Truly, I am not sure how to algorithm this. Fucking bastard-gods of heaven and hell. Hard times for independent white bois...

See, one's peace-of-mind is critical to getting valuable shit done. And yet this trading value generation process, rips the blood-fucking hell out of that, and knocks me numb. (My inner-trader asks: "So why the fuck do you do this?" and I have to answer: "Because we need the fucking money.") This is the problem - if I can get my fucking mind into action-mode, I can usually make the trading work pretty good. But lately - the whole market is like a cunt with razor-sharp teeth. Just not nice at all. It just does not seem to work right. But of course, it is ME that does not work right.

Yes, I know the aristo algo: "Never Complain - Never Explain". But for me, this is goddamn fucking hard to implement. So I have to Zen this and fucking work the fuck on it. If I were a Ukrainian soldier or a Hamas guy defending Gaza from the murderjews, I could just take up an AK and go up to the front line and try to push my luck forward (and end the game). But this process here is different. I MUST learn to execute successfully - and within a framework that can let me remain alive. And that is a much more challenging and difficult task.

I have to basically ZEN the shit out of this. Walk across a fucking mountain, if I have to. It must be possible, because I have seen the hate-filled jews and other truly evil bastards do it, so I know it can be done. I have to go full-ninja or something.

I mean, fuck - I have the technology. I just need to fix the goddamn wet-ware. True-fucking-confessions, eh? But really - this is what it comes down to. The problem is in the fucking mirror. Work on it.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 pm] - Gut-Slammer - (honest internal dialogue documented as part of our "search-for-the-real" experiment...) Bank stocks cannot catch a sustained bid. Bollocks. This is a fucking ugly situation. My stupid fucking AI model showed this burpfart, and I just didn't think it was rational to follow a Mechanical-Turk. But the goddamn Turk wins again. Our little bankstock we specialize in, is DOWN a dollar, which is a gut-shot. Nasty and nastier. Gonna have to stand-my-brain down, and slave-follow the model (and the technicals). Goddamn follow-thru just not possible any more. Puke-cuck fuck bastard algo fucks. Nothing works but the fucking technicals anymore. There is a fucking air-gap in the fucking price data, and I thought: "Oh for ruck sakes, does that motherfucking gap have to be fucking filled in? The fucking correct answer is: "Yes, asshole." And I am the asshole. FUck the fucking fucked fuckers. God's bodkin I hate this motherfucking business. I write this shit down, so I can go the fack back and look at it, to remind myself not to listen to any fucking conversations I have with other goddamn people. See, I talked about this shit last nite to a guy, and that was a fat fucking error. Jesus fuck, I just keep finding new fucking errors I can make. Ya think, that ya have done them ALL, but NO, not the case. There are a BILLION errors out there, and I fell into another one. Gave up a SOLID chance to execute a thing that I know works, and I just fell into the "Dindu Nuffin" trap. Fuck fucking fuck. Goddamn motherfucking bastard-fucker hell. I am so fucking annoyed and pissed at my own fucking stupidity, that I feel like barfing. Goddamn fucking Jesus-whore shit.

[ Dec. 15, 2023 ] - The Dance of the Harlequin - It would seem that the game is afoot. Given the astonishing amount of debt that the USA now has, it is absurd to expect that "inflation will be brought under control", as the monetary inflation is both desirable and necessary, in order to allow the debt to be serviced (ie. just paid for). In order for the debt to actually be paid-down, significant inflation of the American economy will be needed. What is fascinating, is that the entire dance we are seeing - from the USA White House and the Federal Reserve - is a complete "dance-of-deception", where illusion and appearance is the key requirement. The entire process is a show, designed to create the appearance that a "soft-landing" is possible - ie. a gentle return to a semi-stable economic environment, with maximum 2% inflation in USA, and interest-rates of 3% to 4%.

It is probably not possible - but this illusion is useful for the political climate, given the ramping up to the USA 2024 election cycle. The only real question, is given the inflation that we now see, and the fact that it will probably continue to drive political and economic process, what action should we as investors, take? Do we go long here? Do we go even "longer?" Is this a time for using margin, or will the market successfully grasp the true nature of the reality that lies ahead, and become defensive and retreat? But that question is then: Retreat to where?

Rising prices will have to show up in financial assets, and attempts to "dot plot" a return to 2 to 3% (lower) medium-term rates by middle of next year, seems to us to be a traum-image - a dream picture. We expect rates to remain in the 5% to 7% to maybe even 8% and 9% range. Carl Ichan's company is issuing 9.75% debt to redeem maturing 4.75% bonds. We would advise caution here (that is fin-speak, for "we would suggest you try to see what is really happening... that is a junk-bond yield, and indicates distress and real risk, folks"). My own personal sense is that this is pretty much a snapshot of the future - higher nominal yields, but if inflation runs at greater than 10%, then those 9.75% Ichan bonds will still have *negative* real yields.

So, we see a rising tide here. But this is probably *not* what many folks think it is. To continue the metaphor, it is not so much a "rising tide lifting all boats", as it looks more like a *storm surge*. And the coming storm looks to promise wild winds in all directions. Batten down the hatches, and get ready for the storm. Be defensive, probably the best bet.

[ Dec. 14, 2023 ] - Frankenstein's Box - "ERrrr... Numbers go bigger, like model said... Errr... Momentum in play... Errr..." Ok, yes big fellow. Now just try to relax. We aren't there just yet.

[ Dec. 13, 2023 ] - Jerome Powell Stands Pat - Oh my. Where is that $20 gold piece? (So the boys can know, of course...). And there are those short traders, stretched out on those long, white tables, at St. James Infirmary-on-the-Hudson, AKA Wall Strasse.

[ Dec. 12, 2023 ] - Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Investments, is a Dirt Bag - The astonishing and abusive "witch-hunt" that Bill Ackman is trying to run against the school that helped him become a rich "Big Jew" American, is getting comical in the extreme.

Dr. Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, is under attack because of a rigged political interview, where she was asked "Would calling for genocide of Jews violate Harvards speech and speaking policies?"

Her "crime", in the eyes of billionaire-guy and near-war-criminal Bill Ackman, was that she spoke a rational and careful answer, saying basically "yes, but it would need to be put in context". Of course, that is true. A speaker could quite seriously be using the rhetorical technique of "reductio ad absurdum", or even deliberately inflammatory, over-the-top speech, in order to make a point about the modern nature of genocide and how it is being done - and of course, should not be done at all. Her anwser was sensible, measured and correct.

( Here is a trivial example, from logic, using "per impossible" Reasoning: (which means "though it is impossible") If (per impossible) we were to genocide all the Jews, then Harvard could still exist and be successfully funded by it's alumni. This example might *appear* to call for the "genocide of the Jews", but of course it does not. Context REALLY matters, and every intelligent thinking person knows this. )

But Bill Ackman is an abusive, deeply dishonest and vile bully. Like most wealthy American Jewry, he takes all he possibly can, and then he tries to take even more. As a "Big American Jew", he has given money to "charities" that support Israel. And if finally, Israeli actions in Gaza are deemed to be "war crimes", then supporters of Israel - like billionaire Bill Ackman - are absolutely and with certainty guilty of breaking basic American black-letter law, that makes it illegal and a felony offense, to explicitly assist in an action that causes a crime of murder. So Bill Ackman could be prosecuted as a war-criminal.

In our opinion, arrogant, dishonest bullies, like Bill Ackman, are near-criminals of a particularly nasty kind. They fabricate the appearance of being "good people" by giving some of their ill-gotten gains to charity agencies (or those that say they are in the charity business), but in reality, the Bill Ackman's of this world, are scammers, that try to make money by abusive and creatively nasty assaults on legitimate companies. I couldn't care less about "Herbalife" - but the viciously dishonest way that Ackman tried to attack that company, and drive down it's share-price, (after putting on a huge short position, so he would profit massively, if the share-price fell) provides an almost textbook example of what a sleazy, underhanded dirt-bag will try to do, in order to enrich himself by the destruction of a business that others have worked hard to build.

Bill Ackman is a nasty, abusive and dishonest piece of work. He creates **NOTHING** at all, and seeks to engineer gain, and extract profit, by cleverly crafted strategies to destroy others. This is the clear truth.

And the fact that he is now trying to destroy Dr. Claudine Gay, is so over-the-top abusive and dishonest, that it really is fascinating to observe. It is pure-evil in operational action. It is like a racist play - rich white Jew tries to attack the woman who runs the school that made Ackman a Big-Boy in the first place. It is like a medieval morality play, with Ackman as the agent of Satan.

No one - and at no school anywhere in USA or anywhere else that I can find - has ever suggested "Genocide the Jews". This was a bogus, loaded "lawyer-trick" question, put by a sleazy political hack, trying to make the black woman Harvard President look bad. The question was the pure equivalent of "Have you stopped beating your wife? Have you? Just answer the question! Yes or No!" This is a sleazy "lawyer-trick" question, and Claudine Gay of course knew that it was, so she spoke carefully, and with wisdom. And Bill (The-Dirt-Bag) Ackman is trying to use this to get her fired.

Well, let me say: "Fuck-you, Bill Ackman. You are a vicious, dishonest racist ____________." (Please select the most descriptive term, dear reader, that your imagination can come up with.)

People like Bill Ackman are direct, explicit psychopathology-textbook-examples of what is now damaging and degrading America. He hides behind the bogus, phoney "victim" status of rich, billionaire Jews, and uses his power, his money and his influence like an assault-rifle, against people who are actually trying to make this complex, multi-dimensional world work. He is a very bad person.

We are *NOT* saying he should be dragged from his office and hung from a lamppost. We disagree with violence. But if something like that were to happen to him, I would not and could not be surprised.

USA politics is being deeply damaged by what Bill Ackman and the other political fraudsters are doing. It is tragic and disgusting to watch. The whole thing reminds me of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" only it is not a crucible anymore - nothing good or valuable is being made here. We are just seeing the New York money-men show their true colors, as they support Israeli murder-men. It is just a dank blood-stain. And it is horrifying to watch, truth be told.

We hope Dr. Claudine Gay fights back. She is in for a fight, and we are cheering for her. I hope she kicks Bill Ackman's nasty little arse from the Hudson River to the River Jordan.

It's my site, so I can say: "From the River to the Sea - Palestine WILL be free."

[ Dec. 9-10, 2023 ] - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - I discovered Lucinda Williams a little while back. Great artist. Take a turn fast, and feel the rolling skid - like a bad-trade, if you end up tilted in the ditch. (Did that a few times, as a young lad. Not a bad experience... teaches a young fellow resilience, in a big way... "No, we are NOT calling a tow-truck, since they have to report the accident, which means the cops get involved, right? So, we flag down some guy with a pickup-truck, and offer him some cash to drag us out." Which is what we did, of course. No Problem.)

Sheena was a punk rocker, and she understood. No yellow Camino for me. I've always reviewed the raw data, and been more and more suspicious of the "popular view", and the "correct thing to do". We are honest-to-the-bone - and not despite, but because of this, we have to question human opinion. It's usually often wrong, which is curious and interesting.

Interesting report discovered today - confirms what we learned in our historical research. Basically, we discovered that bonds, as investments, pretty much suck. They suck away your wealth and your opportunity. The VERY BEST outcome that those paper IOU's can offer, is YOU GET YOUR MONEY BACK, at some distant point in the future. Of course, it will be worth much less, because of inflation.

Here is an amusing example: A new pickup truck with a few nice options, is $70,000 (Cdn$), which means a farmer needs to make well over $100,000, before tax, to pay for the new truck. This is just insane. In 1971, my father bought a brand-new 1972 Pontiac LeMans, in a lovely silver and black, with an orange-block V8, power-steering, power-brakes, automatic transmission, etc. for my mom. It was a lovely car, and it cost $3600 with radial tires. A new V8-powered Pontiac Firebird, back in 2002 was $40,000. Now, 21 years later, here in 2023, a new V8-powered sports car will be close to $100,000, if you can manage to find one. You will likely have to accept a smaller, down-market 4-cylinder or V6 vehicle. An electric Tesla (the original S-Model, with a long-range battery) will be well over $100,000.

If you want to put any car wheels on any kind of road, you had better have made some viable investments.

A nice Porsche is around $150,000 to $200,000 ($ Cdn.) A Corvette is well over $100,000. This is INFLATION. It is the BIG KILLER TAX, and so bonds, which do not generally have inflation-adjustment riders - are CERTAIN to offer a reduced degree of gain, compaired to owning the actually business. The business MUST adjust for inflation.

A new study - which looks like it uses solid, no-nonsense methodology, running over 1-million simulations, across more than justUSA data - shows that the 60/40 percent equity/bonds portfolio, performs WORSE - across ALL the data - than a 100% equities portfolio, which avoids those curious IOU's that degrade your opportunity. The datasets ran from 1890's and across UK, USA and other nations (ie Japan, when it had operational stock markets), and probably Europe (I have only read the summary info, for now. Probably they included all markets they could find that had accurate data). This is an interesting and sensible result. (And it confirms our cross-sectional research on the 1900 to 1936 North American markets, and our review of the "Go-Go" 1960's, and our work and life-experience since 1980.)

The study is summarized here (it was reported on Bloomberg, but one only gets the first two paragraphs, on their feeds.) A full report of the research results is reported on this site:

https://fa-mag.com/news/you-re-better-off-going-all-in-on-stocks-than-bonds--new-research-finds-75713.html

This is a key study. It confirms our research. Bonds just don't do well. In the 1960's "Go-Go" investment worldtime, bonds were called "Certificates of Confiscation" by many traders. And bond-holders in supposedly solid companies from the 1920's, were often completely wiped-out in the 1930's Depression. (Eg. many of the Railroads)

Bonds have three major problems:

1) They do not offer sufficient inflation-protection. They often have negative real-returns, when adjusted for inflation.

2) Bonds are touted as being "different" from equities. Bond salesman describe bond-price changes as not being correlated with stock-price changes. But this is not typically the case, based on what we have seen. During "Financial Crisis" events, all paper tends to move the same way. It goes down in price, as investors seek liquidity to cover other various leveraged losses.

3) The entire concept of "diversification" is flawed. Spreading out investments often just reduces investment returns to the market-mean. Diversification often involves removing a few REALLY good golden-nuggets, and replacing those golden-nuggets, with small plain stones. This is just plain unwise. And during economic or market crisis-events, most paper-assets will move down together. Diversification ACROSS asset-classes is needed.

This is certainly not common "financial-advisor" advice. But "Financial Advisors" are often just commissioned sales-persons, who make money by selling mutual-funds or insurance vehicles. Or, the offerings are from banks, (like GIC's), which help the banks lengthen the liability-side of their asset-liability balance, and really just serve to lock ordinary investment-unsure folks into schemes which give them below-bond returns, and also prevent them from liquidating their declining holdings, as rates are dialed-up by both market forces, and by the market manipulators at the Central Banks, who seek to assist the Governments in their deficit-financing efforts.

Key fact: The entire process is deeply "rigged" against the average "little-guy", and most know this quiet truth. They claim you are being "protected", but of course, you are mostly being protected from the ability to earn outsized investment returns. Why does this happen? Charlie Munger made it very clear: This happens because people are lazy, and easy to mislead. And even smart, rich guys can be constructively misled. It is the nature of the process. The "Little Guy" (or "Gal") is the soft target, and we are all psychologically flawed in the way we view and respond to events which have high randomness components.

The market pros hose the little guy. Why? Because it is the "Little Guy" that has ALL the money. This is often forgotten. The "Little Guy" is the source of the capital, that the *Big Financial Game* is played with. The investable savings of the overall economy, is where ALL the money and wealth come from. The financial folks move it around, and every trade - some of that wealth sticks to the hands that move it. This is the reality behind ALL financial activity. Finance is a VERY GOOD THING, don't misunderstand me. It is a huge beneficial technological leap. And like all technology, it can be misused.

Good investment-returns are difficult to get. Great investment returns are REALLY difficult to achieve. So, beware bonds, and be careful about "diversification". All that "conventional wisdom" can get you destroyed, and leave you impoverished, if you are not careful. Be suspicious. Check and re-check.

And if you have found an "evergreen" investment or "golden goose" that just keeps laying fat golden eggs, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, you should recognize that this is a GOOD THING, and perhaps you might want to be suspicious of those who offer "60/40" simplistic schemes, or other nonsense. And "diversification" into investments which are certain to fall in value, is obviously unwise. Bonds are just IOU's, and corporate bonds carry much the same risks as stocks.

And "Government" bonds load all the risks of corrupt and dishonest governments onto the investor. Just ask the Russian Central Bank, which has seen it's holdings of US-Treasury Bonds "blockaded", like the Island nation of Japan was in 1941, by the deeply-dishonest USA President Roosevelt. (Remember that dishonest bastard. He was an abusive liar who pretended that the Pearl Harbour attack was a "surprise". He had the US military put it's hands around Japan's neck, and start to squeeze, as that nation's shipping was blockaded by US Navy warships. And then he acted all surprised, when the Japanese Navy under Yamamoto, sailed halfway across the Pacific ocean, to try to disable the US Navy that was choking-off their homeland.) Remember, History is mostly lies, written by the guys who won the wars. Yamamoto was assassinated by the US military, just as unnamed agents assassinated John F. Kennedy. The USA is what it is.

Bonds have been a good deal for long-term bond-holders as interest rates fell from 20% to 0% - the 1980's to 2021), but going forward, bonds look maybe to be a disaster, as interest rates rise, due to accelerating inflation, and possible government collapse-events which may take place in the medium-term future. Greece and Argentina show examples of how "safe" Government-bonds can implode and become worthless. In the near future, we expect to see various "Government" defaults. Either that, or there must be significant inflation. It will be one or the other. And maybe both.

We remain basically all-in in Canadian equities which pay attractive dividends. For the necessary diversification, we hold real-estate, and other non-traditional investments.

Stay strong. And do your own research. It will reward you more than any other action you can engage in. Remember "Langdon's Lemma": (It's a short sentance, only two words...) "Everyone Lies."

[ Dec. 7-8, 2023 ] - Free Money - Great tune by Patti Smith, from album "Horses". Go do a DDG or a Google-search, and play it. It's the story of Hunter and Joseph Biden, a father-son team of grifters, who took over a major nation-state, on a small planet, out in a small system way out on the outer-rim. Pretty good stuff. (Yes, we are fans of very obscure music, from very long ago. Those were different times, yes.)

I don't know what we are supposed to call this corrupted, borked and bonkers current model we are embedded within. I guess it's the post-post-post-post-post modern? Can we say Post5Modern? (Like I18n?) Completely silly. And so much blood on the floors, and in the streets. I know the pundits always said: "Invest when the blood is running in the streets...", but they didn't tell us about the smell, the noise, the dirt, and just how slippery and nasty it gets. They left that part out, didn't they.

We keep reading shit about gold, and other precious metal nonsense. But again, no-one wants to tell the whole truth. When the boo/ga-loop comes down (or is that "Helter Skelter?"), we suspect the very concept of a trade-driven process model will most likely not be operational, and that military scrip and ammunition will be more important. The USA - in just October of 2023, spent $600 billion dollars it does not have, by getting the financial-boyo's to buy USA T-bonds. That's pretty impressive, really. The interest payments on USA debt now exceed $1 trillion (US) per year. That is an interesting process result for the astonishingly corrupt and dishonest folks that run the USA now. It really is a helluv an accomplishment. What is holding the value of the US dollar up, is that nation's ability to fabricate and deploy advanced weapons technology. Good for them, I guess. But there is not much else, really. Gold and other precious metals are worthless, really, because they will just be confiscated when the breakdown begins. The USA Treasury bonds and Bills cannot be trusted, because USA sanctions and freezes and fucks-over anyone that disagrees with it's hegemonic process model.

The Roman Empire did fine, until it could not project power, and pay for it's disciplined military. This is the same for all Empires. They survive based on power-projection. Economics is a secondary thing - but it must be viable, and operational, or else weapons-production and deployment becomes first difficult, and then impossible.

Right now, we are entering the "difficult" stage. Our research suggests that with the economics of the USA and Europe now beginning to fail (and it WILL fail, if the "Climate Grifters" get their way), the possible swing to a hard non-linear process event, is growing more probable each day. We cannot predict which event will drive the non-linear phase-jump to chaos - but it sure won't be Earth's climate changing. Earth has had wild swings in climate, and really, these are not significant factors in human activity. It is the conflict and economic-failure, that will drive the jump, we suspect. There are so many astonishingly stupid and deeply dishonest folks running things now, we cannot really expect a major breakdown NOT happening. The chances of just "muddling thru" are very low. You cannot "muddle thru" a complete financial collapse, and this honestly seems to be getting tee-ed up, in so many countries now.

And AI "Saviour Machines" will not save us. Really.

[ Dec. 6, 2023 ] - We Are Here, With Debts and Bets "And aircraft carriers and jets... The sunrise will appear with the mockingbird ... he cannot be wrong. ... Happiness is temporary... I need an arch-angel for company.. " Joan Baez, greatest female singer-artist-poet of the 20th Century. She shares a space with David Bowie - both wrote a passion-filled creative song about their respective brother's. Curious. Found an old tape, repaired one of my tape-recorders, and have been enjoying some remarkable recordings made long, long ago, when the world was much younger, and less filled with madness and hate. (Well, a tiny bit less...)

Imagine being arrested for not wanting to go to war. Curious also. Now, kids want to kill - they want to live their video-game fantasy visions. Fortnite fools, I suspect.

Strange market times. Virtually all the media source data I get - flap-doodle opinions - they seem to be so curiously wrong - at variance with what is visually obvious in the awful data that is flowing from the honest data sources (there are some few, mostly from central banks, St.Louis, etc.

"Gulf Winds" I think it was called. Brilliant album by a creative lady. And unlike David Jones, she is still alive. She's 82 - but still living. Paints pictures, enjoys old age, I hope. Too bad she fell for that Zimmerman boy. He turned out to be a bit of dipshit - despite his brilliance and ability. Sad century, morphing into a worse one. So curious. I use "vi" to write, and every so often, I toggle some insane sequence that scrambles the input. Hilarious... and yes, Joan: Our time is passing us by.. (I wonder who "Stephanie" was?)

Here is a link:

https://genius.com/Joan-baez-gulf-winds-lyrics

And I am just waiting for "John", my AI to sing Annie Lennox's "I must be halucinating - watching angels celebrating..." I have a problem with the TEAC's audio-preamp, where it wanders around by maybe 4 or 5db, randomly. The VU meters do not indicate much of a power-shift, but the effect is like someone fiddling the volume control, trying to gain-ride the output (like an old FM "compander" ( a compressor-expander, designed to reduce the dynamic range - so that everything is louder than everything else, more or less...)). The Tape-Recorder unit is maybe 50 years old - and the only reason it still works, is because when I acquired it, it came with FULL set of schematics. Note to kids: Open-source is really not new. In the old days of electronics, the built-product basically revealed the circuit, so good companies would sometimes include full schematics with their high-end products. This allowed equipment to be adjusted and repaired by folks with basic electronics knowledge. It made the product more valuable because of this.

Moving lots of shit around in the old Family Office here. I've decided I have to up our game a little bit, or we are going to get snuffed. The entire world-process is becoming wildly toxic and curiously hostile to "the little guy". If you don't have at least 100 million dollarettes, then you are basically going to be dog-food - or maybe even be reduced to eating dog-food (or cat food?) I recall a friend told me years ago, about visiting an impoverished relative, and having dinner with the old woman. My friend suspected that the "meatloaf" was made out of cat-food. (At least it wasn't like the Rocky Horror Picture Show "Meatloaf", was my little, internal unspoken thought-bubble...).

I'm thinking the TEAC's pre-amp maybe has a few wonky capacitors. Must check. The unit dates from the 1970's, so it really is over 50-years old. No IC's - just transistors, induction motors, and a bunch of mechanical stuff to roll the tapes. What I find amazing, is that *tapes* that I made over 40 years ago, still sound fine, and have full fidelity. This is actually quite surprising. I have literally had this unit apart in pieces all over the floor, and to have it working well, here in 2023, is like a Calvin and Hobbs cardboard-box time-travel exercise. I've rebuilt the induction motors, adjusted the voltage on each motor (to balance tape positioning, and ensure tape runs on heads correctly), and adjusted and set the head-bias. Amazing the thing still works.

"When you see a crowd - I see a flock. It's sheep we're up against..." and other mu-sic from the 20th cen.. Seems I also have a lot of Eurythmics on this tape as well...

The market looked strong in the AM, but faded in the PM, like it often does. Our testbed thing (a big damn Bank) which has the initials B. N. S, sank like a flushed turd again today, giving up a round-number support. Is this just noise? Our AI called the turn, but we are just sitting on hands. Today, that really feels like a goddamn stupid decision. The deep fundamental data on debt, equity-valuations, book-values, business-cycle position, political and geopolitical environment - all the data looks awful. And I am losing sleep at nite, worrying about what the bank's true capital positions really are. Those HTM (hold to maturity) portfolio legal and accounting characteristics, don't really mean shit, if a major run happens - like what played out at FRS - and the HTM portfolio has to morph into an AFS (available for sale) portfolio, and get sold to pay off runaway deposits.

If you run it right, banking is a truly great business. It's like whoring - the prostitute and the banker can sell the same product over and over and over - and if they manage risk correctly, then all is good and fine. But if either fails in the "risk-management" requirement, the results can become bad quickly, and perhaps even lethal. Those bonds backstopping capital in the HTM portfolio-bucket have to be down bigtime, given the current yield-curve.

I am pretty sure we will be alright here in Canada. Our banks are heavily provisioned for the coming shit-storm. But a bunch more small and mid-sized American banks could become hot-buttered toast-with-shit, if confidence is lost in the US Financial system, which is bascially backstopped by Big-Bags-of-Biden-Ballots and a lot of paper (and NOT-even-paper!) T-bills and T-bonds - and really not a hell of a lot else. JPM and BNS basically rolled over today, in a curious manner that just does not look healthy. They should have been firm - but they were both sold off, and BNS could not hold the 60-handle. For me, it's like hearing a string break on one of the violins, followed by a really wrong note, in a big symphony performance.

Sweet dreams... (are made of this?) ):/ (glyph for man with worried brow...)

[ Dec. 5, 2023 ] - "Avoid Crazy." This was a key bit of advice from Charlie Munger, which he offered in an interview, given shortly before his death. He warned: "Crazy is way more common that most people know. Avoid it. Avoid it. Avoid it." He said it three times, like when Faust had to invite the Devil's agent into his house. The rule was you had to invite him in, three times. Charlie was telling how to *AVOID* the devil. The Devil of course, is madness.

And I am seeing a lot of this playing out now, in our World. Examples include the gender-twisting nonsense in the USA, which is pure madness - but it is being taken seriously by supposedly serious companies and Government agencies. And the absurd and dishonest drivel in the Media (Eg. "Trump being elected President will destroy democracy!", and other foolishness like this.)

But craziest of all, seems to be the USA President, sending 2 full-sized, nuclear-armed US Navy aircraft carriers AND a nuclear submarine (which is probably armed with nuclear weapons), to lie just off the coast of Israel, and assist the Israeli efforts in Gaza, where their IDF forces are murdering almost entirely women and children. BBC estimates put 100,000 building damaged or destroyed, and 15,000 people killed, of which 6,000 are children and roughly (by the Israeli's own admissions) only around 2,000 Hamas fighters have been killed. That means roughly 6,000 women also killed. Of course, "antisemitism" is on the rise. How the fuck could it NOT be? The Jews have gone crazy with hate.

And the American media - controlled by collectives of Jews and far-right militarists - is doing an impressive job of NOT REPORTING any of this astonishing atrocity, that rivals the worst mass-murder exercise of civilians by a Western power, that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

This is pure, bat-shit crazy. America is now seen to be a nation that uses it's impressive military to slaughter little girls and babies. This is not some wild assertion. This is just a proven, observable fact of life, here in 2023. We think this is pure madness. Perhaps it is a result of Covid-19, or some other viral infection, that has damaged the brains of Americans? It is simply not possible to know. But we do know: This is crazy.

It will not destroy Hamas - and it might create a hundred NEW Hamas-like organizations, throughout the Arab world. And maybe even in the wider, non-Arab world, also. Dead (and/or deeply hated) Jews, will be the outcome.

And - at the same times as this madness - we see the US Stock and Bond markets, staging an impressive recovery, and a run to higher levels - despite mounting evidence that the official numbers describing "Bidenomics" as a success, are fraudulent. The USA Government statistics are *estimates* - as documented by the various Agency operatives themselves. Over 70% of the recent JOLTS (US Labour-market jobs-openings) numbers are pure *estimates*. This is hilarious. But significant interest-rate and other economic-policy decisions are being made on this bogus data - which is known to be bogus, as it is so often substantially revised.

This just seems completely crazy to us.

And as the crazy grows - day by day - the costs of trying to bring things back to sanity, look to be growing.

US debt numbers are high and growing, and tax-receipts are falling. Quarterly GDP numbers are suspect. Two negative GDP quarters happen - and everyone in the media rushes to explain that "this does not mean a recession" is happening. And so, the next quarter, the GDP number is way up, and the market runs away. Bogus.

The US dollar is basically not supported by anything except USA trade capacity - and the Americans are degrading trade, blocking international financial arrangements, and calling their Chinese trading partners "enemies." This is insane.

USA is essentially blocking Russian access to Russia's own Central Bank holdings of US T-Bills and T-bonds. This is basically a US government-bond default, but no-one wants to say this. But for the Russians, the effect is the same. USA Financial arrangements cannot be trusted because of US political decisions - but the whole world decides to fly corporate jets from frozen Europe to the Persian Gulf, to chatter about "Global Warming", instead of trying to fix an insane war in Ukraine that should not have happened.

Of course, the real cause of wars is usually money and real-estate - but the climate-fiction is where time and effort are being placed, as bad violence spins out of control, all around the world - from Dublin to Paris, not just from Gaza to Ukraine. No rational attempt is being made by anyone anywhere, to try to stop this absurd and increasingly insane trend.

We are all slipping deep into "crazy" - exactly as Charlie Munger warned us all about, before he died. Our expectation, is that the markets will have to price-in this phenomenon, in the near-future. And this will certainly cause even more crazy behaviour, and ugly outcomes.

[ Dec. 2, 2023 ] - AI Technology & Murder/Death/Kill - A worst-case scenarios plays out. We read the details of the Israeli AI system, known as "Gospel", which is being actively used to select over 100 "targets" per day now in Gaza. The "targets" are people's homes, where maybe Hamas "low-level-operatives" might be located, and where their wives and children live. The information is from British information (BBC, Guardian) and is summarized in an article on the ZH site (Zerohedge): "Israel Uses AI to Kill Targets in Gaza" Another one of my awful, worst-case scenarios has played *exactly* as feared it would. We have "Killers WITH AI Robots".

I had made the prediction that AI (Artificial Intelligence) would not necessarily be a net-benefit to our world. I truly had a real fear that, given that humans are nasty, vicious, vengeful, vindictive and also rather stupid and lazy, that AI might actually just turn out to be another tool that allows significant amplification of all that is ugly and vile about humans, much the way other technologies have done in the past. The "tech" is neutral - and we need not fear "killer robots", but we should seriously and truly fear (and stop!) "killers WITH robots", as we felt that that is where the real threat lies in our near-future.

AI will absolutely let us amplify and expand and enhance the ability to murder and kill and seriously hurt each other. This is consistent with much of humanity's other major technical advances. Eg: Mechanical Tech => much better and more effective, more accurate guns with higher rates of fire and better lethality features. Electrical and Communications Tech => vastly more effective control and co-ordination of military activity, more effective propaganda, more effective and wide-reaching social control. And of course, Nuclear Tech => the clear ability to cause mass-murder and civil-destruction on a scale that exceeds Sun Tzu's "War Using Fire" model to virtually unlimited levels to allow both city-killing and possibly even planet-level killing of all human life, "On the Beach"-style. Why should AI not also join this list of "Key Features of New Technology".

And, of course it already has. Viz:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-ai-assassination-factory-plays-central-role-gaza-war

And so there it is. The Isreaeli's are already using AI to murder the citizens of Gaza. This is just so comically awful, it reminds me of the shortest sentance in the Bible: "Jesus wept." Well, so should anyone working in Israeli AI. We have gone from a cool new technology to an ugly, horrific and grotesque nightmare technology deployment, in maybe record time. Gotta love those Jews. Pornography, crooked-finance, and now AI being used as a murder-weapon. They sure get it done.

People sitting in their apartments, are getting killed by AI-directed F-16's, and bombs and missles supplied by America. Oh yes, "US Supports Human Rights", for everyone except Arab kids. If I were a Saudi advisor, I would say: "Time to just cut off these pig-faced Americans, kick the fuckers out of our country, and grit our teeth and join hands with the Iranians, and bury the goddamn hatchet with those Persians. We have to recognize who our obvious enemies are, and who are obvious geopolitical allies are. We *MUST* do this, before our people drag our Royal arses out into the streets, and we all end up like Gadaffi and Sadam Hussien."

Now, I am not an advisor to the Saudi's. And I never will be. But the American blanket-support for the mass-murder campaign of the Israeli's, in response to the Hama's border-raid to acquire tradeable hostages, is insane. It is madness to a degree that goes beyond anything I have every seen. And most importantly - it will not destroy Hamas. The only way that Hamas will be destroyed now, is by killing EVERYONE in Gaza.

Now, Jewish-Folk: - like Forbin said to his AI in "The Forbin Project" - "Consult your historical records!"

Generally, how does this military "Genocide" thing work? Does it EVER work? Don't you basically have to: A) Exterminate every breeding pair, and B) Do this awful deed in secret, so as not to arouse the disgust and horror of the World? Did Germany succeed in it's "Final Solution" to what even Jean-Paul Sartre called "The Jewish Problem"? Well? Did those efficient German planners succeed in their project?

What about Turkey and the Armenians? Did that Long March to Aleppo do the trick?

Did America get rid of Communism in Vietnam?

Did America succeed in removing the Taliban threat in Afghanistan?

Did the European Roman Catholics succeed in extinguishing the "Protestants"?

And did the Old Russian Stalinists and the New Russian Putinists succeed in ending the idea of an Independent Ukraine? Stalin mass-murdered over 1 million Ukranians. Pretty impressive murder/death/kill level right? But did it WORK as a political / military / economic strategy?

This is all so painfully fucking obvious - and horrible - like Germany's inability to exterminate Europe's Jewish population. These horrible full-barbarian military mass-murder exercises are well understood not to work very well at all. They are stupid, cruel and (worst of all), history shows they do not work.

And the really crazy-obvious thing that no one even talks about: "Did the Roman Administration of Palestine Succeed?" Did it? The Romans caught and successfully executed that trouble-maker called 'Jesus the Christ'. They nailed his ass to a Roman cross and killed that boy in public, real good, right? And then what happened? His followers went on to create, and expand the most successful and influential political movement (and religious cult), the World has ever seen. Right? And within a couple of hundred years, Rome itself was completely taken over by the followers of "Jesus the Christ."

Netanyahu has to be the stupidest, most arrogant fucking goof on this planet. Every single bomb that his murder-monkey IDF thugs drop on Gaza apartment buildings, will make every Arab kid more determined than ever, to create a solid and effective solution to the horrific problem of Israel.

How else can this fake "war" possibly play? Shooting fish in a barrel is not "war". It is just a kill-project. And human history is just a big liter-box filled with this kind of awful shit.

Netanyahu can no more "bomb his way to peace, than ..." - in that old Vietnam War joke, which is quietly so current again - "than he can fuck his way to virginity."

The man is a goof.

And a man like that, with modern AI, can seriously begin a long-term process that will kill us all.

[ Dec. 1, 2023 ] - I Am The Passenger... - And I ride and I ride... thru the City's ripped backside. We see the stars that shine so bright - Stars made for us tonite... We ride and we ride. We see the black and hollow sky. Everything was made for you and me! La la la la - la-la la la. Best. Song. Ever.

What more can I say? I have not got Daneel working yet - but "John" (retarded slightly as he is), can actually be a big help. AI is changing things. It can help. But it can also kill, and do so at scale.

The market is impressive. Shoulda/woulda/coulda ... (fill in whatever you want here.) But we have held thru the sh/tstorm, and the dividend cash-flow has continued (and is being dialed up, in some cases), here in the Great White. And yes, it's snowing. Like a Blue Rodeo song... "Same snow is falling..." (like fallout).

[ Nov. 30, 2023 ] - Hey, Ho! and Up She Rises! - Ho ho. Santa and the Pirates came to New York, it looks like. And CM and RY are flying, while TD, not so much. It's all about PCL (Provisions for Credit Losses), and how that drives the bank bottom-lines. Hint: Guys, just loan money to people who PAY IT BACK. Why is this so difficult for these guys, eh?

I had to be away from things today, and so the closing numbers seem pretty wild. Seems to be a reactive response maybe to the amount of negative news-flow, and awful sentiment. Everyone seems to be expecting a Financial Apocalypse (or maybe the Zombie Apocalypse?). But it might just not happen. What impresses me, is our AI stuff, actually called this swing-turn. How about that. Or maybe it's the weather?

The weather suddenly got really nice - 8 or 9 celsius, bright sunshine, and it felt like Summer, after the last few nights of minus 6 and minus 7. We note oil prices down, but Gold and Silver are up impressively - but so are the ndexes.

I seem to have our email working again (sort of), and that offers some comfort. It looks like our email-ISP got hit by hackers who sent out a blizzard of SPAM, and trashed the reputation of our provider's domain name. Hells-bells, but the Internet is becoming an ugly, and dangerous "back-alley", rather like Gordan Liddy warned all international relations would. (He came to speak at our school, when I was a kid. He was part of Nixon's Team, and worked to try to damage-control the Watergate breakin. Nixon was just too nice a fellow. He was an "old-school" political guy, with good and honourable instincts. History paints him wrong, like it often does. And his guy, Kissenger, just died at 100. Curious world. Lights going out...

[ Nov. 29, 2023 ] - She Has Medals - And so she should. When the "enemy" drops it's bombs, we have to do what we can. The main thing is to learn who and what the *REAL* enemy actually is. That is not always obvious.

Promised I would post this: Highly, highly recommended read - Charlie Munger's 1995 Speech to Harvard grads, where he spoke clearly about psychological bias in human thinking and resulting human behaviour:

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger

This speech by Munger was a really good thing for him to do. He was already in his 70's when he gave this speech, and it is remarkable for the clear-sighted specific, actionable and very accurate and useful information it provides. I have rarely read anything so immediately useful and helpful. Read it carefully, make notes, and try to be more careful in your decisions, and recognize that how combinations of these VERY POWERFUL psychological factors, can be used to manipulate your own behaviour - and seriously degrade your own judgement.

("You want stucco? Ho Boy, can you get Stucko!" - Groucho Marx, selling Florida-swamp real-estate, in the 1930's)

It is hard for humans to use probability correctly. Let me key this again - so my own brain can learn what I am doing/saying: It is hard for humans to use probability correctly. And combinations of psychological tricks and techniques can make it almost impossible to resist a clever strategist. There is a VERY good example of this in "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (the fictionalized biography of Jessie Livermore, by Edwin LeFevre), where the "Livingston" character describes how he was sold an expensive set of collected works of Poetry, by a master salesman. He signed the purchase order - almost in a trance. The salesman was a genius practitioner of the psychology of selling. These folks are dangerous as hell, and the horrific effectiveness of modern media propaganda - which now says that the mass-murder of Arab kids in Gaza is necessary and acceptable, and that USA should actively support this astonishing horror - is a current example of how blindly awful psychological manipulation can actually be.

I suppose we will soon be told by the American media, that making lampshades from the baked skin of dead Arab children, will be a new and fashionable Israeli export product, and that like "Coca Cola", we should just go out and buy some and be happy. There - I've just used one: Vivid-description bias. Make it REALLY VIVID, and even if it is wrong and not true, I can communicate the feeling with more effectiveness. And humans - like Pavlov's dogs - make their decisions based on feelings, for the most part. This is an example of the problem we face.

We know the experiments are difficult. But we need to also realize how truly difficult, is also the judgement.

[ Nov. 28, 2023 ] - Killing Me Softly - I hate that song. And I am disgusted by the awful results that Bank of Nova Scotia reported this morning. We fucked up holding this stuff, truth be told. The key thing to realize about the current share price of any stock (and that goes double for shares in Banks), is that it is wrong. It encapsulates all the current media dis-info, and algorithmic trading-trickery, and all the other tools and tricks of the various machinery-of-deception. The "Efficient Markets Hypothesis" is the biggest and most bogus economic-scientific error, since the medical-science world believed that "Bad Air" caused Malaria. The current market price just contains all the current hype - often not any accurate information at all. There is zero a-priori reason to expect the market-price, to be anything other than driven by the market liquidity characteristics, and the explicit hoo-ha that is circulated by those who can gain by this information-circulation.

And it gets *worse* for bank stocks. It's right there, on pages 358-359 of the original 1934 Edition of "Security Analysis". I read it, but I did not successfully internalize the wisdom of what was written. I will type it in here, so that anyone reading this, might gain the wisdom, that I missed: :)

"The fact that the operations of financial institutions generally - such as investment trusts, banks, and insurance companies - must necessarily reflect changes in security values, makes their shares a dangerous medium for widespread public dealings. Since in these enterprises an increase in security values may be held to be part of the year's profits, there is an inevitable tendency to regard the gains made in good times as part of the "earning power", and value the shares accordingly. This results of course in an absurd overvaluation, to be followed by collapse and a correspondingly excessive depreciation. Such violent fluctuations are particularly harmful in the case of financial institutions because they may affect public confidence."

And there it is. This wise writing goes on to suggest that a Securities Analyst should do his best "to discourage the purchase of stocks of banking and insurance institutions by the ordinary small investor." If one reads this most excellent of books, it also offers a very useful caveat, in refreshingly clear language:

"Trend Essentially a Qualitative Factor. - In our discussion of the valuation of common stocks, later in this book, we shall point out that the placing of preponderant emphasis on the trend is likely to result in errors of overvaluation or undervaluation. This is true because no limit may be fixed on how far ahead the trend should be projected; and therefore the process of valuation, while seemingly mathematical, is in reality psychological and quite arbitrary. For this reason we consider trend as a *qualitative* factor in its practical implications, even though it may be stated in quantitative terms."

And that just means - as a qualitative factor - it can be whatever you think it should be. If I project share-price trend from 1995 forward, for Bank of Nova Scotia, it all looks good, and the current share-price collapse can be made to appear as a routine swing in the credit and business cycle. But if I use a shorter horizon, then I can get quite different results. And the projection can be made to appear as whatever I think (or want, or hope) it should be. This is the process.

And this is actually bogus. Again, we can go back to a rude expression from the trading floor: "This is just an opinion. And opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one." (and the unspoken assertion, is that like assholes, it is shit that usually manifests itself - when the discussion becomes one of opinions only.)

That is where we are now, it seems - swirling in opinion...

But wait, it gets worse: We selected BNS based on it's high dividend payout. This makes holding the stock attractive for the income that is thrown off. But history suggests that high-dividend paying stocks are actually often bad investments. High dividend payouts are not an effective way to rank the value and quality of securities to be held for investment purposes. We tended to disagree with this view, as we had curious success in previous high-dividend common stock investments. But the violent swing up in interest-rates has hit the banks hard - and the high dividend payers (BNS's dividend - at $1.06 per share per quarter) is now well over 7%. We continue to hold, because we like the dividend income, but the destruction of capital value associated with this exercise has been ugly (from over $90 per share, to $57 and change, today). This is sad and bad. And no money is being saved here at all. :)

Dividend yield levels on current share price is just not a good way to make stock portfolio selection. Our perilous experiments seem to have confirmed the ongoing truth of this, despite our previous successful results in telecom shares.

[ Nov. 27, 2023 ] - The Kids Are Alright - Really, I think perhaps they are. It is popular among conservative groups to dismiss the kids at US Universities now as woke lunatics. But I think now, this is shown to be wrong. A reasonable, healthy sense of justice and fairness seems to drive them, and if one looks through history, this has typically been the case. It's the same in big-Science. The quiet understanding of real scientists, is that old, bad theories really don't die. They stay alive, and are taught in the classrooms, until the old men that believe in what the younger scientists have proven to be wrong, have finally died. They say that "Science advances by virtue of the graveyard", and this seems to be the case.

It is certainly the case in politics and economics - up to a point. Perhaps the "Social Sciences" are not really science - since it is often close to impossible to disprove a bogus "theory". And it seems that no matter how many dead Marxists we bury, the absurd and laughable nonsense that is Marxism, just keeps rising from it's graves, like a horrible Haitian zombie.

But the kids that are protesting the ugly actions of the "Big Jews" - especially at places like Harvard - are doing what kids are supposed to do: Protest injustice and outright evil, and stand up for what is right. Palestine was stolen from the Palestinians by the actions of murderous East European Jewry, and the folks in the Giant Gaza Concentration Camp would like to have their land back. Can one really blame them for organizing a military wing, and trying to get tradeable hostages to exchange for the 5000 or so Palestinians held - without trial - in Israeli jails? We discourage and do not like murderous violence - but even the Israeli press, has documented that it was Israeli helicopter gunships that fired on the "music festival", and killed over 200 Israeli citizens. With a "Defence Force" like that, it makes it pretty damn clear who the real "terrorists" are. The Israeli's are now accused of active genocide - "4000 dead Palestinians are not enough - we should kill more!" - this is the honest view of the New York "Big Jews."

That sure sounds like an algorithm for effective GENOCIDE to us.

Netanyahu is a walking piece of human filth, in our opinion. He is a "Master of War", and I recall it was old Bob Dylan (a Jew who's real name is "Zimmerman") who said about "Masters of War": "I hope you die... and that you death will come soon."

Those pro-Palestinian "protest kids" have their young minds tuned to the truth. The "Big Jews" of New York, like billionaire Bill Ackman, who write letters to Harvard officials, telling them there will be no more Jew money, unless the Harvard authorities stop the protests, might consider that they should perhaps go fuck themselves.

America was, and remains a revolutionary nation. It was born out of a violent struggle to remove unjust British overlords. It gains is strength and it's authority in the World, by being on the side of justice and fairness. Harvard was formed to educate the clever American kids, so they would not have to endure the British bullshit, and could have an good institution of higher-learning and research here in the New World. It would seem to us, that Jews are neither a necessary nor sufficient requirement, for Harvard - and other good US schools - to continue in this noble mission.

The billionaire "Big Jews" should basically just shut up. Those people have chosen to support the terror-nation of Israel, an entity that is functionally equivalent to ISIS - a violent, neo-fascist religious and political project that is proven to be abusive and racist - and murderous. What is so astonishing to us, is that America supports this tragic, violent horror-show. We have those who survived a horrible holocaust, now creating an equivalent holocaust in Gaza. And America offers it's full military assistance! This is simply madness - and for folks who intensely disagree with this course of action, there is no political party in USA that offers ANY chance to change this ugly and violently abusive political project.

This is madness. And it shows a deep and quite curious failure of American democracy.

So, the kids are right to protest this madness. The entire program is so astonishingly wrong, and cruel and abusive and neo-fascist/racist, that it simply must not be allowed to continue. And since there is no political choice on offer - in the tightly managed (rigged?) US elections - the kids have no choice, but to take their protests into the streets.

The abusive, dishonest elite that supports American and Israeli Jewry, has to know it is in the wrong. But it can lie and spin and defraud with impressive effectiveness. It is the Bernie Madoff Model of politics, is it not? Lie, cheat, fiddle-the-books, deny-the-obvious, mount ad-hominum attacks, shout shrill cries of "antisemitism" while the Gaza buildings burn, and the Arab children die screaming.

How the hell did noble America descend to this ugly and awful place, where it actively sanctions and supports - with it's military - the mass-murder of innocent Gaza civilians? Israel and the IDF offers a perfect picture of the very definition of a "war criminal". And for how much longer? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? We suspect that at some point, corrective change will have to come to the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Those pro-Palestinian protest-kids at the US schools, are the bright future of America. Know this truth.

[ Nov. 26, 2023 ] - Lizards With Poison in Their Mouths - We are seeing some rather dark scenarios now begin to play out. We note how the Israeli mass-murder exercise in Gaza has just disappeared from the USA MSLM (MainStream Legacy Media). It's just fascinating. Imagine if China or Russia invaded another sovereign state, and explicitly targeted the women and children, so as to kill **thousands**, as part of a political vengence exercise? How much digital ink would be spilt over that action?

But suddenly, the Gaza Murder Project is out of the news. On Twitter/X, even Elon Musk has been forced to ban the Palestinian freedom-cry: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine WILL be Free!". That expression reminds me of the "Uhuru!" ("Freedom" in Swahili), slogan that the black folks in Kenya used to shout, when working to engineer their freedom from the English colonial overlords. But now, even on "X", you are not allowed to say it. Curious.

The "Big Jews" in USA enjoy a unique position of extreme privilege. Not only can they fund their Israeli murder-squads to kill with ease and pleasure, and not have to ever answer for financially supporting this kind of overt, explicit terrorism, but they can also effectively shutdown any debate or criticism of their evil actions, by shouts of "antisemitism!" blah blah blah and blah.

I personally think these people are the very worst kind of human. They remind me of these large Komodo Dragons, that have highly toxic bacteria in their mouths, so that just a minor bite from one of these awful lizards is toxic and lethal to any creature it wishes to devour.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/22/ex-us-diplomat-goes-on-islamophobic-rant-wishes-more-dead-palestinian-kids

I never expected to see such evil walk so freely among us, in our modern world.

The Israeli Gaza Murder Project is going to change things. We can see the Israeli's for what they truly are.

[ Nov. 23, 2023 ] - The Canary in the Coal Mine has Died - But no one has really noticed. The music has stopped, and the money has run out, like David Bowie sang about in "Lazarus". We have this unpleasant feeling that it will all begin now to run in reverse.

The reports on the Chinese "shadow-banking" sector are scary. A major investment entity - Zhongzhi, is functionally bankrupt, and folks who have seen the books in detail, say: "The size of the hole, is enormous." They have roughly 400 billion yuan in liabilities, and around 200 billion (maybe) yuan in assets, mostly "properties", which in China, are not really "property" in the real sense, but just long-term lease-arrangements, since all "property" is "owned" by the Government (according to Communist doctrine.) And of course, this is the problem. The Chinese do not collect "property tax", because the so-called "property-owners" do not actually own anything.

See, this is the entire problem. The entire Chinese economic model, is a giant pyramid-scheme built on a pile of sand. The model is wrong. It has this fatal flaw. It must be fixed.

We actually like and respect the Chinese for what they have accomplished. They have almost succeeded in converting a horrible, insane and terrible economic program (Mao Communism), into a US-style open commercial economy. This was a very wise and noble thing to do. It has uplifted their people from literally mud-hut poverty, into modern-life in reasonably well-made apartments, and with their children able to look forward to good cash-generating employment opportunities. This has been a damn good thing, lets be honest.

But you have to get the goddamn model right. If you leave a stupid goddamn hole in the model, the process will likely have a fatal flaw. And when the times get tough, the fatal flaw will kill you.

This is not a problem unique to China.

I watched this happen with our flagship technology company, Nortel, here in Canada. If you don't get the model and the process right, and you fluff and puff-up the account-books with bogus (bullsh/t) numbers, and tell everyone that it really does not matter if you make money or not - as long as you have growth, growth, growth, (blah blah blah), then you absolutely risk blowing up. You risk (and will probably successfully engineer!) complete and absolute collapse. And that is exactly what happened.

It did not need to happen.

But you have to have honest people in charge. And they have to bloody well tell the truth - and not invent horseshit nonsense and then feed that nonsense to the blow-fart idiots in the "investment community", who are mostly just greedy, un-critical skags, looking to make a quick profit by trading APOS stock (APOS - that famous Wall Street/Bay Street Company ticker-symbol, which stands for "Any Piece of Shit"). The history of the investment world is filled with these kind of sad stories.

It is absolutely critical to get the baseline economic model right.

I can observe the local prosperity of the Mennonite farms in the agricultural area where I live. They get their economic models right. It's quietly impressive. Actually, it is *really* impressive. The guy I rent my land to, he started as a "hired-hand", making minimum wage. He now has just signed over his farm to his adult son, and the operation is worth well over a million dollars. And it is profitable, and well run. The Mennonites have a Credit Union, where the loan money to farmers and businessmen who want to borrow to grow. If this process is done right, it works *VERY* well. Land is owned "fee-simple" and clearly by each farmer. They help each other - but there is NO COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP, because that model is bullshit, and DOES NOT WORK. They know this. The "Tragedy of the Commons" is that Common-Ownship is a really fucking stupid economic model, that DOES NOT WORK.

The first folks in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now the City of Boston), learned this early on. The "Mayflower Pilgrims" were set to abandon the Colony and return to England. (They had been working and owning their land in common.) At the last minute, the Governor of the Colony decided to deed out all the farms DIRECTLY to each family, so that each man had DIRECT OWNERSHIP of his farm (and could legally pass it on to any children his family might have). That single action made all the difference. The Colony had hard times, but it survived, grew and prospered. And then it became rich. Nobody works hard on a farm, if they don't bloody well own it. And farming is the first business that must get done - otherwise, nobody eats. This is key.

Once you get a food-surplus, you can get the rest of the economy going - ie. mining, tool-making, merchant actions to facilitate distribution, and banking schemes to make funding available to folks that want/need to grow their operations.

The Chinese got *most* of this right. And their results have been magnificant. They have a working space program, and their own space station. Good for them. Damn good, actually.

But they need to fix this property nonsense. Chinese people need CLEAR and SOLID "fee-simple" direct ownership of their property. And then the State can charge "property tax", to fund the needed Government services to let that owned-property generate a yield. And it WILL, if you get the economic model right.

Property-owners will work like deamons to protect and maintain (and add to!) their property. Farmers with dairy herds wake at 5:00 AM to do the first milking. I asked my guy, "When do you have breakfast?", and he said: "I come in around 6:30, usually." (ie. He has been up and working for an hour and a half, in the barn - *before breakfast*!) And work is not a punishment. It is a joyful thing, which gets celebrated on Sundays, when they all meet at their Churches.

This agricultural-community model works well. Lots of sharing takes place - but each man owns his own property - there is no bogus "collectivism". The private-land-ownership is the model that works. Prices can change, and maybe corn does not generate enough income. One can switch to soybeans, or alfalfa/grass (to feed cattle and horses), or oats or potatoes or winter-wheat (a unique kind of winter-hardy wheat, planted in the fall, which over-winters as little green stubs, and then grows nicely in the Spring.) Lots and lots of science is applied, and the technology from the "Green Revolution" is actively employed - pesticides (ie. "Roundup"), nitrogen fertilizer, and soil-managment practices to ensure operational sustainability.

This allows each farmer to select the mix of products to produce. Dairy herds are very expensive, as the "Marketing Board" effectively licenses each cow - but then each cow plus license (which is worth $30,000 or more), can then have all it's milk sold to the Milk Marketing Board at a market-attractive price. This is a (not great) solution to the classical economic "Farm Problem". But it ensures that lots of milk is available in the grocery stores, at not bad prices. And it also ensures that the milk is not corrupted or infected or contaminated with toxic material - which is always a risk in any sort of industrial-level production system.

When the systems and the models work - you don't even notice them. And that is what one wants to see.

But the Chinese "shadow banking system" (which according to Reuters information, is the size of the economy of France!) is built on a big pile of sand - the bogus property model that the Chinese Communist's still insist on using. See, property ownership has to be **ROCK SOLID**. That is why there is serious legal structure around it, in Western countries. But when it is SOLID and CLEAR, then you can HYPOTHECATE it - ie. you can, like a good Roman on a latifundia, pledge it as collateral for a loan, and use the money from that loan, to expand and develop the property, so it yields.

Our entire financial system grows forth, from this very critical base-line economic model. And realize that this model blew up and crashed to bits, when the Roman Empire in Europe crashed down into Feudalism. Feudalism is a fithly, awful shit-stained horror. It is the "Mad Max" world, where rule-of-law has broken down, and every bandit has to create a castle, and defend it, just to survive the attacks from other bandits. Your property extends only so far as you can fight and defend it. Civilization basically collapses into small singularities, and each of these has to fend for itself. This is a bad, shit-stained, and truly poor economic model. It was Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was Africa and North America before the White tribes of Europe came. And the Europeans only had the surplus to mount exploration and exploitation expiditions, once they had re-established civilization. And it took them roughly 1000 years to do that.

What is interesting about China, is how quickly they were able to get a commercial economy up and running, once they removed the idiotic and awful shackels of communist collectivism. They ran the greatest (and perhaps the most successful) economic experiment in all of human history. Really. They **CHANGED THE PROGRAM**, and it worked well, and they got rich, and powerful.

What they *must* do now, is to again **CHANGE THE PROGRAM** - but only slightly. They only need to make PROPERTY OWNERSHIP something that is SOLID and CLEAR and REAL. This could essentially fix their property-crisis now. But they also have to start charging property-tax, and tie that into the provision of municipal services. Zhongzhi and other bankrupt investment scheme operations need to go thru re-organization, and investors can probably get offered new bonds, which pay maybe 50 to 70 cents on the dollar, as we would say here. The investors will eat some loss, but they need not be wiped out, if the property is made real. Investors will ALWAYS invest in property, if the economic model behind the property is valid and viable.

But this means some loss of power for the central Chinese government authorities. They need to understand that this is a good thing. Too much centralization is a bad thing - just as too little is also.

The current government model, which requires absolute and complete centralization of authority, is unwise as it is fragile and profoundly dangerous.

If the Chinese want sustained American level of prosperity, they will need to accept American-level of governance flexibility and American-level of distribution of political power. And also American (ie. Roman) style SOLID and CLEAR property ownership.

If this does not happen, then foreign-direct investment will likely continue to run in reverse, the Chinese property-crisis will continue to grow, the "shadow banking system" will continue to unwind, and the entire Chinese economic success-scenario will be put at real risk. Trade will fall back, conflicts will expand, and employment opportunities for young people will be reduced. This will create many hungry, angry young people. And we will thus probably fall into a nasty version of the "Thucydides Trap" - and have a stupid and pointless war that need not take place, if wisdom and sanity are allowed to prevail.

[ Nov. 22, 2023 ] - Changing the Program - Now, more than at any time really, in human history, we (all of us), need to "CHANGE THE PROGRAM". This is so painfully obvious, that I am truly surprised at how so few people are even aware of this so-obvious survival requirement. The entire path of economic and social development has gone seriously wrong, and we need first: to stop the insanity, which means to basically hit reverse in many of the absurdist social/political and economic trends, and then second: re-orient and reset the course back to sanity, stability, and the original value systems and economic and political models that let us get to where we are now.

The need is to re-affirm and re-establish critical political and social ideas like "free speech". Speech is not "harmful", unless those listening are retarded, or psychopathic lunatics. Speech is just speech. It is not possible for speech to be harmful. "Sticks and stones may break my bones - but names will never hurt me!" We need to accept and operationalize the original, valid truth of this. We are now - instead - everywhere engaging in orgy-sessions of violence, and then blaming "speech" on the violence. This is madness, and it must stop. By inventing nonsense that "speech can be harmful", we invert the social-model of human interaction, so that "hate speech" is prohibited, while real violence is not only accepted, but is actively encouraged by the political poltroons that dominate the scene. Viz: stupid restrictions on internet content, while mass support for mass-murder in Palestine, and a light-touch approach to the hyper-violent "Black Lives Matter" riots and violence in the USA. We are supporting real violence, while prohibiting honest, direct speech as being "harmful". This is just completely insane, and needs to just stop. Speech is not and can not be "harmful", in the same sense that real violence is harmful. This needs to be understood.

And we need to restore sanity in politics and economics. The madness of accepting "asylum-seekers" into modern European nations, and running an "open border" in the Southern USA, is idiotic and absurdly foolish. It is just plain stupid, and it must stop. It is not "racist" to allow national entities to manage their borders in a sane and sensible manner. But the Biden Democrats, and the Idiots of Europe operationalize exactly the opposite of what should be taking place. The result is an influx of criminals, fraudsters, opportunists and scammers, who will degrade and defile national identity, and raise costs for existing citizens in the nation. Immigration needs to be carefully controlled, and actively managed. But anyone who even suggests this now, is accused of being a "racist"! This is just insanely stupid, dishonest, and absurd. And it needs to be understood as such.

But *CHANGE* is coming. The abusive idiots are going to be removed, one goddamn way or another. This *WILL* happen. And it is already happening - in both Europe and South America, where some degree of democratic choice remains possible. Viz:

In Europe:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/geert-wilders-conservatives-surge-top-polls-just-days-dutch-election

In South America:

In the economic "basket-case" Argentina, where inflation (and interest-rates) are now above 100%, the election of a rational thinking person who promises *CHANGE* has taken place. The newly-elected President, Javier Milei, promises to invert the idiotic and destructive "Peronista" Leftist model, that has done such extreme damage to that nation, for the last 50 years.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/argentina-election-whats-next-after-javier-mileis-victory

So *CHANGE* is possible. It CAN BE MADE TO HAPPEN. All rational, thinking people need to understand this. It IS possible to course-correct from the idiotic insanity in the social and economic sphere, that is plaguing this world.

In USA, we need to remove Joe Biden. The man is a geriatric bone-head, his "Vice-President" is a know-nothing laughing fool - a dark-skinned female - a real "Affirmative Action" choice, that is just not up to the job of taking over from Biden. So that means the Democrats MUST BE REMOVED. And that Party's active military support for the Gaza Genocide being implemented by Israel, is beyond just wrong. It is nausea-inducing horror, that is degrading America and it's military, in a way that will do lasting damage to it's ability to fight and defend USA. This is just insane. It is a direct violation of everything that America was built for, was designed for, and was explicitly documented in America's wise Constitution. Biden is now possibly guilty of the same "war crimes" that Putin has been accused of in the also-insane Ukraine invasion.

What is clear now, is that, beyond any doubt, we must: "CHANGE THE PROGRAM".

Real change is starting to be seen - at the margins, out in the "boonies", out in the periphery.

What is needed now, is for this *WAVE OF CHANGE* that is so critically necessary, to come to us now, here in North America. In Canada, we desperately need a new and honest Government, which does not have Liberals, Leftists or Trudeau-henchmen in charge, running idiotic and insane tax-policy strategies, like *TAXING HEAT* in a country where temperatures can reach minus 30 Celsius in the Winter. The Liberal "Carbon Tax" is pure economic insanity. We all know, "Trudeau Must Go". We now need to make this happen.

In USA, the Bidenistas, the Woke-Leftist nutjobs, and the "Trans-Sexual" lunatics being accepted as normal folks, all this needs to go. It is just madness, and the downstream effects of having these lunatics in charge of things, means that "Normies" - the comically abusive term for "Normal People" - are becoming a curiously marginalized group, at least in the click-seeking mainstream Leftist media machine.

The Democrat-run major US cities are sh.t-holes of crime, corruption, and ugliness. This can be reversed. It was quickly reversed in San Francisco, so that Xi of China could see a nice-looking city. If the sh/t-head ignorant poltroons who run San Francisco can make it look nice for visiting Chinese potentates, then maybe they might be able to fix the city so it looks (and works!) nice for it's own citizens.

A city can be cleaned up - and the garbage and the homeless (the same thing?) can be removed and put into recycling yards. And then the downtowns can come back to life, once the filth and the criminals (again, the same thing?) are put into dumps, prisons or re-education camps.

The idiot US politicians will criticize China for cleaning up it's radicalized, unemployed Muslims by putting them in re-education camps (where they could learn useful skills, and then "graduate" to employment) as being against "human rights". Yet these same hypocrite US politicians support the *MASS-MURDER* of Muslims in Gaza, as being acceptable collateral-damage!

This is just completely fucking insane. It shows a US Government that is dominated by non-thinking lunatics, who are so hypocritical that it is almost beyond belief. They simply cannot execute the basic programs of human reasoning.

So, one way or the other *MAJOR CHANGE* is going to have to come to USA.

It may come from within, via elections which remove the goofs who are now in charge, or it may come from outside the USA, via 500 inbound steerable hypersonic nuclear-armed missiles. And given that the boneheads in the USA Government entities are stubborn and stupid to a degree that I have never even imagined as possible, I fear that this needed *PROGRAM CHANGE* may be something that is engineered outside of the USA. And this will not be good for us here in North America.

If I were the Saudi Arabs, I would bloody well join hands with the Iranians, and begin a project of putting massive amounts of funds into development of *ALL FORMS* of nuclear technology, especially fast-breeder reactors which can produce significant plutonium. The recent geo-political events in Ukraine and Israel have proven *CONCLUSIVELY* that if you do not have access to nuclear technology, then you are likely to become DEAD if a stronger national entity desires to acquire your land or your resources in a conflict.

At the same time, the viciously-stupid policy of *economic sanctions* that USA is applying everywhere now, ensures that the US-dollar status as the global reserve currency, is now certain to decline and eventually end. America and it's financial system can no longer be actively trusted to complete financial transactions. If New York is destroyed, this would become even more likely, more quickly. Direct trade between nations, which explicitly does NOT use the US dollar, is already moving from a theoretical idea, to a practical reality.

So, we can say with certainty, that this need to *CHANGE THE PROGRAM* is underway, and will most likely accelerate in the near future, especially in the case of the USA.

Those in America in positions of political and economic power, would be wise to champion this process of PROGRAM CHANGE. One way or another, it is coming. We believe that something similar to what happened to the Soviet Union, will happen to America, if it does not actively - and internally - engineer this required return-to-sanity. For America, it's already there, in their Constitution. All they have to do, is get back to just following the wise requirements that were laid down in that document.

But if they continue on their current course, which is a course of madness and insanity, lets be clear, PROGRAM CHANGE will be forced, one way or the other. Confidence in the current system has been lost. (Consider Elections: Ballot-boxes, out on the ROAD? "Mail-In" Ballots, with only "Signature checking" to ensure the ballot is valid? Active "Ballot Harvesting" operations, run by dishonest leftist women, who look like children's nightmares? What are you people thinking???)

The dishonest and fraudulent elections, which have been rigged by Democrat operatives (I have seen the videos - don't tell me this is not happening) have already undermined trust in the USA voting process. The Democrats are corrupt. But the Republicans, with their blanket support for idiotic murder campaigns like the Iraq invasion, and the vengence-exercise in mass-murder being run now in Gaza, by the Israeli neo-fascists, is completely insane. It also violates the traditional and very wise desire by America to remain neutral in foreign wars. Neither the blood-thirsty, war-mongering Republicans, nor the corrupt and dishonest election-rigging Democrats, are fit to govern.

So, America has a problem, which another *election* will not likely solve.

We believe that this just means it is even all the more important, that we actively must CHANGE THE PROGRAM while it remains possible to do so, without violence and direct social revolution.

Interestingly, there are others - in America - who see this also. There are many others, and it is interesting how intensely the MOD - the great Machine Of Deception - is trying to operate against them, shut them down, cancel their access and restrict their ability to communicate. This is just insane - especially in a nation that has historically and constitutionally protected the right to free speech. Not just comfortable speech - actual FREE speech. The very concept of "hate speech" is bogus and false. If someone says extreme and ugly things and advocates violence, then you just switch it off, OR, you can respond by indicating that such talk is false, and show why it is false. It's usually pretty easy to do that. But we are not in that world. We are now in a faked world of lies, lies and more lies, and speaking and writing against the lies gets you "cancelled", like Dilbert was. The lie-masters cannot even tolerate a humorous cartoon, if the author suggests the avoidance of black "master blasters". This whole deception plus censorship approach is very wrong. It has to change. And many agree.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trust-your-gut-tucker-carlson-warns-chaos-ignoring-your-instincts-during-history-changing

[ Nov. 20, 2023 ] - Calling David Ricardo - Genius Theoretician and the Action-Man of Economics - There are times when things get so weird, that one has to go back to the men-of-genius who made our World what it is today. One of them is a personal hero of mine, Economist and former Member of UK parliment, David Ricardo. I wrote a paper on him, when I was in Economics School. The man was a fascinating person - a reluctant writer and a clearly genius theoritician, even if his musings on LTV (Labour Theory of Value) are a tad bogus. His brilliance lay in articulating clearly the Value of Cultivation at the Margin, a viable and helpful Theory of Rent, and basically all the necessary intellectual and mathematical rigour needed to understand how inflation happens, and what can be done about it. (Hint: It's driven by the supply-increase of fiat-money. "Fiat-Money" just means "paper-money" or "anything that we all agree upon to be money". "Fiat" is Latin and means "Let There be ... ". First sentance in the Christian Bible if you read it in Latin, is: "Fiat Lux" => "Let there be light." I explain this, since many foreign folks have no idea why English-speakers are expected to know what the Latin word "Fiat" means. "Fiat Money" means stuff that some Government has decide arbitrarily, will be deemed to be "money". The "moneyness" of our paper-currency, or our digital-counters in our computerized bank accounts, are only "money" because we agree that they shall be money, because some central authority has said "This stuff shall be money." in a rather god-like manner. In a non-government world, money has to be something more real, like gold or silver or platnum or copper or sea-shells, or iron-bars, for example. In prison-camps and jails, where most folks smoke, cigarettes often became money. In Yukon, gold nuggets and eggs were money. No government was needed. The value was in the money itself.)

Most economists, myself included, do not advocate a return to the "Gold Standard", or the convertability of our paper cash (or our digital-cash) into gold bars or wafers. There are good reasons for this. But Ricardo was very clear on why gold-convertability could help to stabilize currency value. He was also very clear on why the Corn Laws (which prohibited free importation of cheaper grain into England, and kept poor Brits hungry), were wrong and a foolishly bad policy.

Ricardo came from a Jewish family, but his father disowned him, when he married a Quaker woman, whose family also broke from her, for marrying a Jew. Both became "Unitarians", a loose form of Christianity, which stressed the need for Unity among all people. Ricardo also got kicked out of the family stockbroking business, and so set himself up on his own, and did very well - gaining the right to make a market in British Government bonds, and also just speculating when the bonds (called "Gilts" because of the gold-edges on the paper) got discounted down, due to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Here is a URL with active link, for a very good summary of Ricardo's life:

https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/ricardo.htm

https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/ricardo.htm

Folks like to talk about J. M. Keynes being the greatest Economist, but I think it really was David Ricardo. He apparently did not like writing, and did not really want to enter Parliament. He was nagged into becoming an MP, by his friend James Mill, which is interesting. He made it into Parliament, by having Whig leader, Henry Brougham, designate a "rotten borough" in Ireland for him to represent. (He basically bought his way in, as was the fashion of the time.) He ran and was successful in becoming the Representative of this borough in Ireland, and in his first speech in 1819, as an Independent, he spoke against the "Poor Laws" - a haphazard system of "relief" in which "Poorhouses" were constructed to give impoverished labourers a place to survive and do some work in exchange for food. Later, Ricardo spoke against the "Corn Laws" at some length, and managed to show in solid mathematical detail, (using English cloth and Portugese Wine, in his famous example), that even if Portugal had a "comparative advantage" in wine-production, a free-trade between the two nations would let both economies and their citizens, be more prosperous. England would sell more cloth, and could import more wine, and everyone would make more money, than if tarrifs and restrictions were raised to prevent free trade.

Like many great discoveries in science, this is not obvious. And the "Corn Laws", which prevented cheap grain from being imported into England and Ireland, basically kept the British folks more poor and hungry than they otherwise would have been. Rather than enjoying increased prosperity at the end of the European Napleonic Wars, the 1815 to 1820 period saw an ugly depression, and a glut of goods which could not be sold. Most "political economists" of the day, simply denied this to be possible. Ricardo studied the situation, explained what was happening, and suggested specific actionable solutions. He was criticized by many aristocrats who did not want to risk change, and then he subsequently died from an ear-infection that became septic, in 1823.

But he defined what is now called a "Classical" economic system, with sufficient rigour, that he was able to advocate sensible free-market policy options (ie. free-trade, limited taxation, careful linkage between gold reserves and the amount of money in circulation, so as to prevent runaway inflation) and his explanation of land value being determined by "the Law of Diminishing Returns", was clever, well explained, and can be seen to be a general-case scenario for determining economic value in more than just the value of agricultural land. It is a basic feature of economic reality, and Ricardo seems to be the first to really describe the process, and how it sets the price of things.

I worry (a lot, actually), that we are all now at a point where this "Law of Diminishing Returns" is acting with increasing force, on our technical-transformation co-efficients in our National Leontif (Input-Output) matricies. We are getting less and less output, for increased economic input, into our national economies. This is a perennial problem in economics. Prosperity wanes. It comes for a while, based on new, good things - massively better and cheaper technology is one driver. And another, that has pushed us upward for the last 30 years, has been the opening up of China and Russia to the free-world commerical (some say "capitalist") economic system. Both factors gave us significant growth and excellent opportunities. Money supply could be raised, interest-rates lowered and then lowered again, and yet inflation was dormant. Things were good, and then got better.

But "Moore's Law" in semiconductor development (not a "Law" at all, just an observation) has hit it's limit, and new tarrif barriers are everywhere now. Russia is now excluded from the world economy (at least there is an attempt to do so), and China is being viewed as an adversary, so that trade is being actively restricted with them. AI may be a good thing, but it looks like it will be highly-regulated, offered only in the "Cloud", and only by the already-rich, socially-manipulative, major technology companies. It will benefit them, and risks making it's users slavishly dependent on it, rather like modern "Office 365" offerings and "social-media" operations.

Regardless of your political opinion, all this is happening. And with the latest rate-shocks, to try to reset the value-of-money to being more valuable, all these positive trends that characterized the last 30 years, are now running rapidly in reverse.

SO, have we impacted a "tipping point" related to the Law of Diminishing Returns? Or is the collapse of "free trade" the driver here in declining prosperity and rising inflation? Or is this a all a consequence of the Covid-19 lockdowns and mass-vaccinations with impure, DNA-plasmid contaminated vaccine-doses? The rapid rate-rise approach to fixing the inflation problem seems to be doing more harm than good (as is often the case with grand Government policy decisions). Likely, our current malaise and drift-towards-bad-decisions-everywhere is a result of a combinationn of the above factors. This is how cycles happen, one has to think.

Some nasty reality is driven directly by physics and scientific reality. Other areas are impacted by malevolent or unwise decision-making. And still other things and their events are driven by pure randomness, which cannot be forecast and which we do not even know what their possible event-distributions look like (the "Black Swan" problem). But when all three sets of negative phenomenon come at the same time, then they can add constuctively and produce "rogue-wave" style situations, where serious amplification can occur. The bad can get real bad, real big.

And that seems to be where we are now.

I hope I am wrong here. I really hope my own analysis of this is basically just full of crap. I hope I am missing something, and that I am just being a cranky old man or something like that. Really.

[ Nov. 18, 2023 ] - Wintermute - Are the markets dominated by AI-driven algorithms now? Maybe. I don't know, and probably cannot know. Are chocolate cakes orbiting Jupiter? It's not possible to know.

Fantastic weather today - bright sunny November day. Unusual, but if this is due to "Global Warming", then we should be building carbon-dioxide generators in Canada, and doing it at scale. I've been doing lots of reading. It's exhausting, but quite educational, of course. Bootleggers vs Baptists, Hinton's interview with an MIT guy back in May, RAND Corp 120 page 2016 paper on possible "War With China" scenarios, and many technical articles on asymmetric conflict models ... which the Israelis and the IDF have damn sure read also - since they are into the full-on "barbarism" strategy), carefully articulated in a 2006 .mil paper. Really, it is clear we are poised on the cusp of some serious and extreme change, and it will not be good, I (and many others) fear. This conclusion is not "conspiracy theory" nonsense - it is technical, analytic conclusions that fall right out of the data.

A war with China would not be good. There is even a paper on DNFU (deliberate nuclear-weapon first use), from a think tank in Oslo, Norway, which suggests several scenarios where this makes sense. What no one seems to have articulated, is a scenario that has haunted me for a while: A major nuclear explosion in one or more US cities, but with no explict actor being identified. The explosive event just "happens", and no group takes credit for the action. What would USA do? How would the military C3 (or is it C4 now?) system engage, and what would the politicals do? The 24/7 airborne command flights (the "Looking Glass" program, which ran from 1961 to 1998) are no longer opertional. Recent political discussions have taken place, suggesting the USA needs to be ready to respond to a multiple hypersonic missile attack. But what is the response, if the actor is not known? "When in danger, or in doubt, shout and yell, and dash about..." is not a good strategic response. Well, then, what is?

Can AI help? Maybe.

[ Nov. 17, 2023 ] - Blues in the Night (and the Day?) - The markets trade in an ugly and rather nasty manner now. God help the poor folks trying to trade the oil markets. The phenomenon is called "Gunning for Stops", if I recall correctly. Whatever your puke-point, the market price will swing right down to it, and take you out of your position. Ya'all get fooked. Once you close the position and take your loss, the market (typically the next day), will zoom up, back to, and then *above* where you bought. And probably keep going for a while...

What is interesting (and ulcer-making) is that this same process seems to be in all markets now. It use to mostly just be in commodity markets. But now, this "gunning for stops" thing is seen in almost every market.

[ Nov. 15, 2023 ] - The Astonishing Large Machine of Deception - Big MOD's rule the world now. I have never experienced such a profoundly astonishing series of deceptive events and routine "trick-fraud" being used just about everywhere. The entire "Climate Change" scam is based on "GHG readings", which is pure junk science that suggests various "gases" are creating a "greenhouse effect" on our planet, so we have to engage in wholesale assault on existing technology - without putting in place any serious or viable replacements. This model is just going to ensure mass-poverty for those (in the Third World, for example), who are finally just getting lifted out of poverty. It is all bogus.

The "GHG's" are things like carbon dioxide, which humans, animals and plants exhale. The entire model does not stand real scientific scrutiny, yet it has entered political orthodoxy, as deeply dishonest folks in academia and government, stand to make fortunes out of trashing our current ways of living. If there be problems on planet Earth, doubtless they are due to the extreme degree of overpopulation that has occurred in the last 125 years, and possibly changes in the nature and level of output of solar activity - much more likely than trace amounts of upper-atmosphere CO2. But the GHG thing is politics now, and the political scammers love it, because it gives them an excuse to raise up the tax rates, and create NEW taxes, which are essentially taxes on heat, in the Northern Hemisphere Western-world nations. The entire model - both political and scientific - is based on pure deception.

And the Big Lie Machine does not stop there. It goes on into the war-support that USA is now offering to Israel. The USA is massively supplying Israel with weapons that it most certainly does not need. The Israeli's can kill the women and children of Gaza quite easily, with the ordnance they already have. But USA President Biden, oblivious to the outright mass-murder that the already-supplied US weapons have wrought, wants to grab the Jew-vote in USA, and so is outdoing Donald Trump's Republicans, in given the machinery of death to the Jews of Israel.

It is a truly sickening political scenario, and I wonder if at some point, we shall see Old Bye/Done dragged from the Maison Blanche, and hung from a telephone pole for the war-crimes his absurd actions have enabled. The entire Israeli war-enterprise of revenge is disgusting and horrific, in a way that I never expected to see in our modern world. It brings dark thoughts that folks are not supposed to think: Maybe the National Socialists of Germany knew something that modern folks have no knowledge of.

The atrocity of the German mass-murder of the Jews in Europe in the 1940's, seems so curiously out-of-place when one looks at German history - a nation that gave us Beethoven, Bach, Farenheit, Max Plank, Einstein (who was a Jew!), Goethe, Gauss, Hiesenburg, Kant, Liebnitz and so many other great scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and just generally truly great persons who helped to build our modern world. I always wondered: "What made the Germans hate the Jews so much, with such curious intesity?"

As I watch the insane orgy of violence in Gaza, the horrific mass-murder of over 12,000 civilians, including fathers, mothers and tiny babies in their own homes - as I watch this insane orgy of violence, I begin to see why the Jew was hated so intensely, throughout European history. It's not just that they were the "Other". The "Other" group always has a hard time, of course.

But the Jew - he is a different creature. He is 100% sure of his superior nature, and his "Chosen-by-God" sense of himself. It makes him a dangerous, cruel and other-worldly creature, completely at odds with, and separate from, the civilized person of European Christan heritage. The Christians were also able to go on horrible revenge campaigns, of course. But at least their mythology actively and **explicitly** discouraged this standard human course-of-action. They were required by their mythology to forgive their enemies. Jesus was actually a pretty smart fellow. Forgiveness is a useful trait to encourage.

The Jew operates under no similar sense of restraint. His mythological picture-of-God, is one of a cruel, vicious and vengeful creature, that likes to "smite down" his enemies. This is just not a good model for humans to follow, and it means that the Jew is not just accepting of cruelty, it means he is actually programmed for it, by his curious and disturbing "religious" training.

We are not "anti-semitic", anymore than we are "anti-science". The Israeli's build very good weapons. They are good at warfare and are clever with technology. The best data-exfiltration software, which can become installed on Apple iPhones, and fully hack them, is made by Israeli firms - and sold to all police agencies around the world. The Jew can do good work, and this makes the Jew, with his penchant for pornography, violence, cruelty and murder, a serious and dangerous creature. He must be respected and understood. It is wrong to see the Hebrew model as weak or low-class, as German National-Socialist propaganda films tried to do. They are fascinating, for their falsehoods, just as modern propaganda also is.

What is astonishing, is just how intense and similarly deeply-dishonest, is the modern material that we observe and analyze. The Americans curiously believe they have won the "War on Terror", yet at the same time, they actively assist the greatest terror exercise we have ever witnessed in our modern time - the astonishing mass-murder campaign underway in Gaza.

Imagine 20 World Trade Centre's falling.

And imagine 10 Pentagon's blown to bits.

Then, add in all the residential buildings destroyed in Gaza fire-bombings with US-supplied weapons.

Why can people not understand the obvious now? Hamas has won. They will win this horror-show, the same way the followers of Jesus Christ won Europe for two thousand years. Hamas will all be killed.

But Hamas will win by showing the Jew for the horrific, vengeful nightmare-creature that he secretly is. All the fake American talk about "social justice" and "anti-racism" and "anti-fascism" is shown to be pure deception and outright propaganda. It is, operationally, just a lie.

The true nature of "American Democracy", when practiced by the Jew, is shown to be the most horrific form of "mob rule". The result is mass-murder of the innocent.

"Everything America says now, is lies." This is what every kid growing up in an Arab or Muslim world will now believe. It matters not whether a Trump or Biden occupy the White House. The mass-murder campaigns of the Jews will continue - and their powerful propaganda machines will continue to paint anyone who opposes them as "terrorists" or "anti-semites" or some other ad-hominem term that shuts down all discussion or debate completely.

The Jew is the problem here. It is his world-view, that we must deal with. We are content to live in a multi-cultural world. We harbour no ill-will to those who are civilized.

But the Jew wants a different kind of world, where no critical action against him is even possible. He brings out historical atrocity, to justify even worse modern atrocity, and believes that he is 100% justified in the mass-murder of tiny babies, held in their dying father's arms. Well, as we say in Canada: "Fuck this shit."

We are not willing to accept this kind of creature.

This is just another area, where change must happen. We need to CHANGE THE PROGRAM here. We do not seek violence. But the Jew must be restrained. This is not "anti-semitism". This is just rational common-sense, and it needs to be understood as such.

[ Nov. 12, 2023 ] - LSEG (LSLUG?) & The Customer's Yachts We've been trying to figure out just who the hell owns LSEG now. LSEG stands for London Stock Exchange Group, a lovely pirate's den of money-making opportunities for the Big London Boys, and a risky questionable place for the little guy, as most Stock Exchanges are now. Hell, I am a hard-core Capitalist, but this weirdly gruesome ongoing "socialization" of our stock and bond markets around the world, is making me truly uncomfortable. Everything seems hard-coded to make the fat-bastards even fatter, as the small investor gets sheared like an Australian sheep. And the "Customer's Yachts" are in cold-storage warehouses that look like the "Ice Palace" in Dr. Zhivago. Grim times here.

I am honestly trying to find out just how shit-stained all the "Refinitiv" and Reuter's market trickery really is. The London Boys paid something like 27 billion US real-dollars, for Refinitiv, several years back. But as the London Exchange is now bleeding business, due to the UK telling the world to go fuck off, this action to unload the LSEG shares is interesting. There are a bunch of calls also sold in the latest offloading (which even the Canada Pension Plan fund is part of), so my own tiny (really very tiny) income stream, is perhaps possibly impacted by this - it's more than just an academic and trader- hacker's level of curious interest...

Here is a URL for a snapshot of the latest action:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/blackstone-thomson-reuters-plan-2-3-billion-lse-share-sale-1.1967984

and the earlier action:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/blackstone-thomson-reuters-selling-3-billion-of-london-stock-exchange-group-shares-1.1920965

A Reuters story from May of this year, indicated that Thomson-Reuters owned roughly 47,400,000 shares as of April 30, 2023, worth roughly $5 billion (unclear if this is US or Cdn dollars), and that their plan was to unload tranches in LSEG this year, in an orderly manner. First quarter 2023 LSEG earnings showed a profit of roughly 1.8 billion UK pounds sterling, also according to a Thomson-Reuters article. The May 16th term sheet reportedly indicated that Blackstone and Thomson-Reuters were planning to sell 28 million shares, and that this represented a roughly 5.5% (voting) interest in the LSEG entity. So, the total outstanding voting LSEG shares as of earlier this year is roughly 509.1 million shares. Unclear number of non-voting shares.

Blackstone's interest in LSEG has dropped to roughly 12% (according to Bloomberg's estimates), after the latest sale in September, and it's unclear how much Canada Pension Plan now owns - and also if the Singaporean sovereign fund GIC still owns any LSEG. The Sept. 6th, 2023 BNN news story also indicates LSEG made an "off-market" purchase of 9.5 million shares, worth around 750 million UK pounds.

What is interesting, is that this news quanta is in the "Technology" section of BNN, since LSEG's ownership of "Refinitiv" means that LSEG now supposedly makes most of it's money selling data. So the whole London Stock Exchange entity is a data-vendor, basically. This is kinky, in our opinion. LSEG is now in the same business as British pornography sellers - they sell subscriptions to bit-streams, for hard (or reasonably, sort-of hard) currency. The old business model of earning commissions and various vigourish for turning household savings into viable investments, seems to have fallen away, like Karl bloody Marx suggested it would. And we think: "This is just nutty." Stock exchanges should make money by getting good *little* companies listed and offered to the private investors who want and need to invest, and then help those little companies become big companies. This is actually a pretty goddamn good idea.

We think the damn market data should be given away for almost-free, basically. But we have now got a perverse inversion of the old, sane model, which now involves keeping the data secret, expensive, and almost bloody invisible to the private investor, and restricting access and trading opportunities, while building regulatory walls and moats around every single aspect of doing any goddamn thing to raise money anywhere at all. This is just silly. No wonder the LSEG is bleeding business like a knife-stuck pig. But make no error, it is still wildly profitable. The share-sales are apparently oversubscribed, as the data-business is a cash generator, no question. But only for the fat-boys, of course. All we can do, is stand on the side of bank, and piss on this train as it zooms past. :)

In Canada, it's possible to invest in US stocks, quite easily. Since if the fat-boy politicals try to fuck with this process, Canadians will put their cash in a car-trunk, and drive to USA (or fly to Bermuda) and open off-shore accounts, and will do it that way. Investing in only Canadian companies just plain does not work very well. It works good for the crooked insiders (think Nortel and Royal Trust), who can unload on the Alberta dentists, (and Alberta pension funds...) but not so good for the ordinary citizen who is always an outside investor (think anyone who bought bank stocks or Canadian telcos in the last 12 months...). Canada runs a junk-currency model (think the old "Mexican Peso" problem, but set in a place where water freezes half the year), and so we get a crap-dollar, and lots and lots of government, and lots and lots of various levels of *tax* to fund the State piracy model.

To get rich in Canada, you try to get either an OHIP billing number, some kind of monopoly-lock on some critical imported product, or a good "Government Job". The poets even say that this keeps one's arsehole clean. (Really! I once read a book of CanLit poetry - it was called: "Clean Assholes", and the first poem was, IIRC, "A Government Job at Last!". Life in Canada, is not without amusement... )

But why not have some local ability to buy/sell/transact options, etc., on the LSE? Good question. What the fuck is wrong with the UK, we cannot address in this short note. It might fill a very big book, truth be told. Same for us, also, of course.

Perhaps the LSEG (why do I keep typing: "LSLUG"?) might want to think on this problem for a bit. Having entities like Blackrock and pirates like Thomson-Reuters and so on, owning these Stock Exchanges, is probably just a really fucking awful bad idea. Stock Exchanges should probably be limited partnerships of the Exchange members themselves, and not the high-cost corporate-fat-bastard data-hiding bit-stream-selling entities they have now turned into.

As we have said before: "WE NEED TO CHANGE THE PROGRAM." This seems to apply just about everywhere now.

[ Nov. 11, 2023 ] - Batshit Crazy and In the Mood (y's) This is getting just plain weirdly awful in a tragic-comic way that is horrific and LOL (Laugh-Out-Loud) silly hilarious at the same time. We watched the market run higher, as our bank stocks weakened again, and this seems curious, since we have a pretty good idea just how much more revenue the banks are actually pulling in, with the new rate-regime of super-high money-rates. Something's gotta give here...

And maybe it is old USA? Fitch rates US sovereign debt at AA+, one notch below investment-grade on their scale. They did their downgrade of USA in August. S&P Global Ratings also has USA one-level down from the highest rating, also at AA+ (not AAA), and they did this back in 2011. But Moody's Investors Service actually has affirmed their *highest* rating for USA sovereign debt, at "Aaa", which is their top rating on their scale. I find this whole "debt rating" action pretty comical, as I recall this great image from a Fortune Magazine story on how arbitrary and not-really-very-useful these ratings were - written back many years ago - which had a cartoon-image of a hand reaching out from behind a curtain, that was stamping ratings on bonds, that flew by on a conveyor-belt. But I also recall the only time the Treasurer came to visit our little group in the Treasury Ministry, was when the Province I was doing work for, lost it's triple-A rating. It was a big political issue (questions in the House, blah blah blah), and it makes everyone look like they kind of failed at their work.

And Moody's didn't even drop the rating. They just put USA on "Negative Watch", which suggests that they *will* drop the rating, in the future, if the USA cannot take some action to create the impression that their debt is coming back under some kind of control (since for now, it looks like a full-on shitshow of Biblical proportions, where debt-levels are advancing super-exponentially, etc, etc.)

What is just beyond-the-pale hilarious wildly crazy, is the just goof-stupid thing that the Biden White House "spox" came out with. ("Spox" is the new term for "spokesperson", or what we used to call a "flac"...). The "spox" is Karine Jean-Pierre, and she actually said that the Moody's outlook change was a "consequence of congressional Republican extremism and dysfunction" - which has to be the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard a flac say, pretty much in my entire life. It's just so insanely stupid, that only some dumb bitch who looks like a fucking porn star, could actually get away with saying something so fucking irresponsible and just plain silly.

We are living in very strange and absurd times. Perhaps President Bye/Done will blame it on Godot, as he waits for him? Ms. Jean-Pierre reminds me of the character "Lucky", in that great Beckett play.

The USA Federal Gov't debt-service costs are approaching 1 trillion US dollars per year. A lot of Yankee taxpayers have to pony up their shekels, just to pay interest to Chinese State banks that hold USA paper. One just has to wonder how long these poor sorry Americanos will continue to let themselves get held over this big Washington barrel. It all seems crazy, to folks like us, who pay our bills, and generally avoid debt, due to how it can engineer rapid financial destruction, if it runs out of control. But of course, that is only for private-sector folks. The abusive boneheads who run our Governments now, see no problem in borrowing more gigadollars each year, by just issuing paper, since they know they can just MMT the cash from out of their backsides. "Modern Monetary Theory" is really complete economic nonsense - but in the Age of Crypto-Currency (folks paying hard cash for digital bits), sanity seems to have departed from the world of finance.

When I read that nutbar comment from Karine Jean-Pierre, I realized that the USA is pretty much fucked (as we are too, I suppose). Our little Cdn "dollarette" is in the toilet, at around 72 cents US, for one. We here in Canada, run a high-cost, high-tax economy, that benefits a few major entities, and jacks-up everyone else. Basic business has become *really* difficult here now. It is quite surprising, just how things have changed, post-Covid.

I tried to source a $10 machine-part from a supplier in USA, and between the currency conversion, and the shipping costs, it was going to cost almost $60 Cdn to have a tiny (less than 1 lb) machine-part shipped to my farm. I gave up, and cancelled the order. I'll have a local machine-shop *make* the fucking part. We used to have the NAFTA "Free Trade" deal, which actually worked quite well. For amusement, I read the details of what a USA business has to do, to export something to Canada now (some .gov site, that tries to explain the rules), and I understand now: A) why US sellers use expensive "Custom's Brokers", and B) why cross-border commerce is so stupid, fucking expensive. Both USA and Canada are intent on just rat-raping any poor dumb fool who wants to buy or sell across the border now. It's now a huge *revenue* generator, for both sides, and the costs flow right down to silly goofs like me, who try to use rational E-commerce.

So, E-commerce does not work well anymore, and this really sucks rocks in Hell. It means lots of things are now curiously difficult and idiotically expensive - far beyond anything reasonable. And it is our current crop of government clowns who are wrecking this stuff that used to work. It is not "Republican extremism and dysfunction" that is breaking things - it is the dumb-arsed arrogant ignorance of the woke-clown government fools who are setting policy, and making the fiscal, monetary and operational decisions. They appear to have - literally and truly - no fucking idea what they are doing, and seem unable to grasp the simple fact that they are breaking stuff that was working, and that is needed to keep our world working.

And as more things break, and ever-increasing debt-service costs consume more of the tax-revenue collected, the entire system becomes *more* fragile, and more likely to break completely. So Moody's is right to draw attention to this approaching train wreck. It's coming down the track, and our Big-Government-Bus is parked on the road across the tracks, at the railway crossing. We think Manchin is wise to retire. I would also, if I were him.

It is interesting to see Moody's drop this little turd on a Friday afternoon, after a really big boomer of a day on the equity markets, with the DJIA up almost 400 points. I wonder who put on short positions right at the 3:59:59pm market close today? We are starting to suspect that something is a tad "rotten in Denmark", with respect to the entire New York financial complex.

Folks need to remember that paper is just paper, and talk and opinion is mostly just noise and wind. Our modern financial world holds US Treasury Bonds and Bills as if they were gold bars, to backstop most financial business models. This whole approach serves us well, but it is a recent invention. Given the stupid, cruel and absurd nonsense that we see in the World now, there is no reason to think that the Gov-clowns and fools who dominate our political towns, will exempt this fine system from the breakage and assaults-on-sanity that we see everywhere else in our decaying social matrix.

[ Nov. 7, 2023 ] - Change Must Come - We need to *Change the Program*. And it is curious that those on both the Left and the Right are becoming ever more aware of this, each day. Democratic Congresswoman from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, has posted a powerful and truthful video on "X" (the old "Twitter") site, and it is worth watching. But you will have *GREAT DIFFICULTY* in actually finding it, because it has been scrubbed from the search engines. All you will find is the usual Main Stream Legacy Media bullshit *about* the the video - the usual disinfo and thumbsuckery by the worthless, awful MSM media. This active web-based censorship is really starting to piss me off, truth the be told, so I imaged the video with my Samsung Tablet, and FTP'ed it to my Linux-box, and dropped it on this site. Just click on the first-page "Videos" button...

It is worth watching, since it shows some hard truth, instead of the usual American media bullshit, heavily influenced by Israeli supporters who want war. The Israeli monsters are going to give us World War Three in a nice neat package, complete with well-documented murdered children and babies, Hospitals and Universities deliberatly targeted and destroyed. The USA media is remarkably silent on the impressive, genocidal atrocity that is taking place right now in Palestine. Well, fuck them. They are "masters of war", and it was Bob Dylan, long ago, that said in his song of the same name: "I you hope die, and that your death will come soon." The US mainstream media is a dishonest lie-machine.

Watch Congresswoman Tlaib's honest video, and judge for yourself. It's the first video in the Gemesysresearch.com video section. Just click the first-page video button.

What I would like to see, is Biden and his disgusting henchmen, dropped by helicopter right into Gaza City, and left there for a few months. That would be justice, no?

[ Nov. 6, 2023 ] - Blue Sky - Nothing but Blue Sky do I see... in my fever dreams, that is... What I see in the news and the numbers, is the pre-conditions for some strange times which make it tough to sleep soundly. One wake's up a 4:00 am, and stares at the ceiling, and the thought occurs: "Are things *really* as bad as they look? OR am I just being too negative in my thinking?" But there is, of course, a third scenario: Things are actually a *lot* worse than you realize, and no amount of planning or preparation, can alter the future outcome, that races towards us all. (This is the Malthusian view, in which the curves cross, and the diebacks and mass-bankruptcy events must occur, one way or another.)

I don't think we are quite there yet. But I don't think AI will save us all, either. It's ability to amplify the human capacity for doing harm to others, is probably as great as any other cool new technology. We now can actually create real, honest, effective and operational "killer robots...", at scale and at reasonable costs. Why bother with artillery? I am waiting for one (or both) of those US aircraft carriers in the eastern Med., to be sunk by a steerable Kinzhal missile (or maybe 5 or 10 Kinzhal missiles...?) All one needs to do, is blind the ships radars with clouds of "chaff" at various wavelengths, and it should be a doable project. In a "blizzard of data", it is tough to see what is what, until it is too late.

With power-projection getting increasingly difficult, and weapons getting real intelligence, it will be an interesting (and dangerous!) world - even more so than it is now.

A big yacht is a nice-to-have thing, but a series of underground bunkers, and a private stash of low-yield nuclear devices, might be a more attractive alternative. It is interesting to see the Israeli's try to "kill their way to peace". Our research suggests that this strategy will not work. They can kill Hamas and many of the hard-core Hamas leaders and fighters and their women and their children. But this action will create a hundred new "Hamas" things, in various places all around the world. Sadly, dead jews will be the results. Be a killer jew? Then enter into the next life, and say hi to those you snuffed at scale. You can all cozy up together in Satan's backside... the "Will-Knots of Eternity", I suppose. The madness of the current mass-murder exercise will damage everyone, if we continue to support it.

Poor old Bill Ackman is worried about anti-dentites at Harvard. Try to imagine just how little poor Harvard even matters now. We suspect it's time is ending. One wants to see what those at West Point are doing. The future will lie in the actions and effectiveness of the teaching at the military colleges.

Sure, perhaps I am being too dismal here. But everything and everyone reacts to events. Were the American military efforts in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan justified and successful? This is unclear. What is crystal-clear, is the effectiveness of the American military. It is powerful and effective - or at least it was. But can one stay at the top of the mountain forever? And make war upon the whole world, all the time? Perhaps not. Just like Pax Romana - where there were Roman ports and cities in Wales, the West Coast of England, where the tin-mines could export their output for pepper from India - Pax Americana cannot last forever. All Russia and China need to do, is wait, while Europe grows tired, hungry, poor, and angry. History will do the rest.

What is so curious, is to see just about everything in the USA being done pretty much wrong. The entire nation is like a drugged-and-drunken old man, screaming at the world, pounding his fists because the world does not view things his way, with his curious thinking-models. But not all of America is old, drunk and stupid. So, a capacity for program-change exists.

One strategy that a youthful, new group of American rulers might implement, is to just default on their foreign-held government Treasury bonds and bills. There is nothing really to prevent a new group of American leaders from doing this. It would be financially insane, and a "causus belli" (a cause for war), but it certainly would be a "Great Reset", would it not?

These scenarios occur. And as I wrote this strange piece, a rare November thunderstorm began. I can hear (and feel), the distant thunder. It sounds rather like artillery.

[ Nov. 2, 2023 ] - Steady Rolling Man - And I didn't Shoot the Sheriff, either. Tried to go extra long yesterday and the day before, but didn't get filled. So, sadly, I "Dindu Nuffin..', Except to watch prices runaway this AM. I really have to stop trying to get "heroic" fills, where I buy at the absolute range-bottom. This is usually just not possible, and prevents me from getting into positions that I should really have jumped on hard, given the accuracy - no, wrong word... given the quality of the analysis. (As one gets older, wisdom does come, if one works like a demon, and puts heart and soul into one's efforts...)

But we retained our original, fat position in the bank stocks. Still all-in basically, since they are the machine that pays the bills, and that machine is still working, despite the goof-stupid swings in the stock prices. This AM, we were up sharply, due to Federal Reserve Frollics (but no raise/raise) yesterday, so the Market is responding in a fine manic manner, even as we stare World War Three in the face.

I watched part of Peter Schiff's podcast. Some good points, but we gave up on gold a very long time ago. It is silly expensive, and really - how does one ever really know if one actually has truly bought real gold? The entire gold market rests on the same soft and vague foundations that paper-finance does. When you buy your gold, what you think is 24-carat gold could easily turn out to be 10-carat or no-carat gold, unless you are a Greek guy with a very good bathtub, and some fine measuring equipment, or other clever technology.

Gold also requires the SAME two-trade thing, just like every other speculative investment - ie. you have to make TWO really good trades - you have to buy it cheap, and sell it dear, and that is always difficult. Most likely, you will buy your gold at a very high price, and hope to sell it higher or at least as the same inflation-adjusted price you at least bought it at. But that requires both luck, and a willing counter-party, same as any other damn trade. Gold offers no real advantage to a trader, and carries a large bag of great disadvantages - it is heavy, it makes you a fool's target if you keep it at home, and if you bury it somewhere else - your "back-40" or in some Swiss vault - you risk not being able to get it, when you need it, and you risk having it stolen by anyone who can successfully identity-theft your identity-data and your knowledge of where you put it. Gold is the same as any other asset. And it is heavy and expensive to move, and risky to carry around. Peter Schiff (like his April Fool's Joke) really *SHOULD* be promoting Bitcoin, truth be told. We don't like crypto either, but it is beating Gold this year, hands down, no contest.

We also think the markets will be OK, going forward. Not great, but just OK, for the reasons I gave in the note below, for Nov. 1st, the Day of the Dead. Happy "Day After Death Day".

"The Spirits we drank are just ghosts in the room"

[ Nov. 1, 2023 ] - Happy Day of the Dead - This is a lovely day. Today, it is crazy sunny, with not a cloud in sight. But it was *MINUS* 3 degrees C., when I got up this AM, and everything was covered with thick white frost. Very pretty, actualy. The cold weather is nice, as it removes the homeless and the beggars from the local streets. And it kills off any "Killer Bees", which come in via Amazon shipments.

The Japanese are wise. They put their "Go Visit The Graves of Your Dead" festival in August (it's called "Bon", which always confuses the French), and it lasts three days, typically August 13 to August 15 - but different parts of Japan have it earlier, in July. The ghosts come on the first day, you visit them on the second day and maybe do lunch, and they you say goodbye to them on the third day.

No matter what nation or what culture, you will always have dead folks to remember, if you are human. In the Middle Yeast, the Hebrew and the Muslim will always ensure that Death remains very much in fashion, sorta like the dress-makers of Paris do with haute-level dresses, by tweaking the frocks each year.

Folks are predictable. But the markets, less so.

Our AI forecasts are pointing south, with consistant negativity that is extreme.

But I have my little "Inner-Trader's Voice" whispering to me.. "When everyone is being this fucking stupid, and so completely batshit crazy, just maybe prices are a tad over-discounted, eh there buckaroo? What da ya think? Maybe time to try another bottom-fishing exercise with some dynamite?..." (My "Inner-Trader" is more than a bit of a rogue. But I keep the bastard around, because he makes me dollarettes...). My AI stuff is pointing down hard, suggesting the Market is taking the "Off-Ramp to Hell" - which is actually a Google-meme, truth be told. And of course, due to my deep-ego-desire to demand "I am NOT A MACHINE! I am NOT a Number! ... (yatta yatta)", like that old TV-Series from the 1960's, called "The Prisoner"), I really, really want to make a big, long leveraged-bet. Really a lot.

See: if it works, I am a fucking genius. But if not, then I am sitting in the shit, and with Winter coming to try to kill us all, that is not a good place to be. Ego and ego-puffery is a trader's enemy. It turns out it is *much* better to feel like a dork and fool and failure mostly, but occasionally make a shit-pile of money, than it is to source ego-puff happy-feelings from one's market activity. This is the damned hardest lesson to learn. Bad (low-or-no-profit) traders, will tend to "win-maximize", which means they do shit to get the most "wins", and take lots of small profits, and BIG losses. Wise traders will invert this algorithm - taking lots of small losses, while they try to ensure they are positioned to get the BIG profits.

Of all the shit I have written, this is probably the most actionable and useful advice. But it is really hard to actualize. I am pretty sure this Market will turn, and turn quite hard. If the Third World War coming at us from the looming future, does not downtick this slushpile, then that tells us that lots and lots and lots of USA and Euroland paper-coin is just flying around, desperately looking for a home, as fixed-income portfolios sink into the quicksand of out-of-control government spending. There is just no other way. You can't have a crash, when everyone has Mercedes and Lexus SUV's, and is look for puffy places to park their trunks full of cash.

We can still buy stuff (and pay our damn taxes!) with dollarettes and pesos and eurobits. So, the equity markets are gonna have to survive. And just to survive, in these times of weirdness and crazy stupid foolishness, will ensure prosperity. It will also ensure inflation, and that makes it really interesting.

Markets will be bid up. Real estate is already too expensive, but will not come down in price, in nations where proper land-tenure and rule-of-Roman-law (ie. hypothication - being able to borrow money by pledging assets for collateral) exists. Folks want to COME here.. not LEAVE here. Unless some crazy Russian launches a bunch of nukes - or some crazy American does this - or somebody nukes Israel or Israel nukes someone else - we just don't expect a big sell-off in the stock market.

Is that a big "IF"? I don't think so. Folks can satisfy their blood-lust without the need to drop big stinky nukes, since these blow radioactive puff pretty much everywhere, and your daughters and your sons will get cancer, and their children's children will have mutations that will make them look like Down's Syndrome kids, or reptiles or maybe Godzilla. Everyone loses.

But folks love war. War makes adventure available to the masses, and it will never go out of fashion. And it makes lots and lots and LOTS of shekels for the "Defence" companies.

We don't own any RTX, 'cause it just looks too expensive. We said the same about MSFT, and so, yes, perhaps we are fucking stupid. This is possible. But we are still here, despite taking all those damn "clot-shots" (which killed the poor bugger whom I used to argue with about vaccine efficacy and I feel really bad about that..) I and my partner took 3 doses. She is ok, but I have some weird swelling in my foot, which is not diabetic neuropathy, and not due to B12 deficiency, etc. But it made half my foot go numb, and after months of tests - the doctor has no idea what is causing this, since tarsel-tunnel syndrome does also not seem to be the case. The neurologist said it looks like more "vascular studies" are needed.

A numb-foot is annoying and feels weird, and I am crazy healthy otherwise. So, I'll be getting MRI on the foot/leg and also an ultrasound... but probably, I just have to get used to it. PS: IMHO, Heparin, hydroxochloroquine and nasal de-congestants, combined with oxygen therapy, are the right way to treat Covid-19, but I am just a science hacker and not a doctor, so do not take my word for anything. We were offered more vaccine doses, but we have decided - since I got three doses - 2 Moderna, and 1 Pfizer - and then caught a wicked case of Covid - that the vaccines are perhaps not a wise strategy, given the fact that they *provably* do not work (my Covid-19 case was confirmed with the antibody test kit, and two weeks of feeling like shit) and the annoying foot-swelling and numbness (which looks like maybe from some kind of DVT, at this point) offers evidence that they may cause harmful clotting.

But we are damned lucky and fortunate, since we are still here, and able to pay the bills. What is interesting, is how completely one has to make one's own decisions, and craft one's own strategic response to events both local and trans-national now. USA has just blocked export of firearms, which is comical, since that is something America does as good as, or better than the rest of the world. So, Biden pisses on the US economy, yet again. Like he did by joining a UAW picket like in Detroit, FFS. His "Bidenomics" Green-Thing Plan relies on success by pissing on the USA petrol-products production and export business, same as the idiotic "Carbon Tax" we have it Canada, which just damages Alberta's economy, and punishes the Ontario economy for being successful.

What I wonder about, is how long this curious "Symphony of the Stupid" can be played to everyone. Premiers of Ontario and Alberta are spitting mad that fuel-oil in Eastern Canada has been exempted from the "Carbon Tax", but everyone using every other form of heating for their house (ie. rural folks who use propane, for example), will still have to pay this fucking stupid tax. The Feds here exempted fuel-oil, because the Liberal MP's from the East explained that it is hitting low and average income families hard in the East, and the Liberals will lose many votes, if the Tory promise to repeal the tax is an issue in the next election. After this winter, it damn sure will be, we suspect. We think: FFS, guys. Taxing "heat-making for your house in winter", seems a rather stupid and nasty thing to do.

But we are in the "Age of Stupid", and it seems little can be done to change this. It is one reason, that we expect the Market to recover and move higher, as the printing of extra money for everyone, seems to be such an accepted strategy now. With fiscal discipline a thing of the past (ancient history, really), and with paper fiat currency, there is no limit to the amount of "stimulus" that can be applied. Everything is now driven by politics, and the political people are "coin-operated".

[ Oct. 31, 2023 ] - Happy Halloween - A good friend of mine's Mom died, and he is clearing out her house. We took two trucks-loads of furniture to the thrift-store downtown. Their furniture room was packed to the gunnels, but we moved stuff around to make room. The house will go up for sale next week, and will make some wealthy immigrant family very happy. My banker, Dimitri, tells me that he has these clients wiring in mega-dollerettes to acquire houses here. The Cdn dollarette is at 72 US centavos now. It's comical. If I want to buy some thing in USA-land, via anything other than Amazon, it provokes insane shipping costs, and foreign-currency translation fees that can quintuple (that means **FIVE**) times the price of the base object. This is really, really comical, since the USA has the "leaky, no-border here, amigo" customs model at the Mexican border, but when it comes to trade-restrictions now between Canada and USA, the border looks like fucking Berlin in the 1960's. This is quite simply majestically insane. From an economic perspective - it is just weirdly hilarious, and would make Ricardo have a laughing fit so hard, he would spit out his coffee-house coffee.

But, enough economics. Just wanted to say "Happy Halloween" to anyone reading these electronic scribbles...

[ Oct. 30, 2023 ] - Bayreuther Festspielle by Miles Davis & Goethe - 'Round Midnight, we take a short trip to Dear Old Stockholm. And then the NATO bombing begins. When those first bombs fell on Formosa, we knew things were gonna get bad. The chronometer read: "2889", and Mr. Verne was off in the Nautilus. We took the Princess instead, and wondered if we could rescue Margaritte in time. Faust had warned us it would be difficult, since the Prison was well guarded by fierce fanatics, that had the usual ruthless dedication to the Pope, along with their other weapons of mass distraction...

Yes, Virginia, the times are getting rather strange. Excuse me while I go scrape the shit right off my shoes. And off the investment structures, also.

It's gonna take some serious effort. We are sure of this. At least, we can sure of one thing.

Everything else, remains rather up in the air. Valuations, especially.

There will be some way, the madness and the insanity of the recent times will be resolved. And as we study and craft possible scenarios, they all look awful and insane and horrible. There seems to be no other path forward for this curiously corrupted and broken World. US President "Bye/Done" has issued an "Executive Order" on AI. It is probably the most comical official pronouncement I have ever read. It is complete nonsense, and is obviously written by a committee of complete fockwits in the "Maison Blanche". It seeks to simultaneously restrict and regulate the bejezus out of American AI efforts - and then also (get this) actually *promote* American AI research and development efforts!

Reading it, makes me feel like Alice down the big rabbit-hole, eating magic mushrooms, and seeing crazy psycho stuff that cannot possibly be real.

It's like the insane, stupid and broken 1970's, a time of quite impressive social failure and economic collapse. Sorta, "Deja Vu, all over again..." to quote Yogi Berra. (Or was that "Boo-Boo"?)

We only know one thing now. There *will* be some kind of reset event. We are not sure what it will be, but we are now certain something of this sort, will happen to USA. A clever and courageous nation like America, cannot go on, with it's leaders being so fucking stupid. It just cannot continue to be like this much longer. Really.

Somethings are gonna have to give, and in a rather big and dramatic manner, we suspect.

[ Oct. 29, 2023 ] - More Sh/t - You can enter "Why is USA turning to shit?" in both Google and DuckDuckGo search engines, and get some interesting results. Many of the hits will be the usual anti-Trump disinformation and nonsense about "shithole" countries and so on. But some interesting results appear also.

I entered this in response to the crafted destruction of a *really* good website and webpage, that I often referred to, using my old iPad. The page was an American Aviation Weather page, which had a very well crafted, clear, extremely well designed and informative, surface weather map of the North American continent. It was at URL:

https://aviationweather.gov/progchart/sfc

and it was one of the very best weather maps I have ever seen or used. I would look at it regularly, as it "just worked". It provided a nice, high-resolution image, and it was updated very frequently. It gave a good technical picture of the North-American weather situation.

But - it's now gone. It's now history, and has been replaced by some silly-stupid, complicated idiot-site, designed for *modern* tablets and so-called "smart" phones, and of course, it does not now work on my iPad, since it uses a bunch of nasty interactive javascript bullshit. They actually have video **TUTORIALS** on how to "navigate" the new site (which like I said - does not even work at all on my old iPad.)

There is nothing postive or helpful happening here. There is just the usual toxic complexity that characterizes modern technical development now. Really good, functional, excellent systems, that "just work", are being replaced by COMPLEX-SYSTEMS that require what is called "cognitive load" - ie. you have to **WORK* at learning how to use them.

This is not the way it was supposed to work. And I and many others bloody-well KNOW THIS - because we tried to design stuff that actually worked - and ***REDUCED*** cognitive-load, so that PEOPLE COULD GET MORE STUFF DONE. The technology is supposed to MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER - and MAKE YOU ****MORE**** PRODUCTIVE, not less productive

But this idea is just gone now. We are living in the AGE-OF-SHITIFICATION, where good stuff and excellent design, has to be destroyed, so that BAD-DESIGN and JUNK-CRAP SYSTEMS can be foisted on folks, with the primary reason that information system vendors want to CHARGE MONEY for access to technical solutions that actually are good and workable.

If you want something of quality - you have to SUBSCRIBE and PAY for it. Except folks like us are already subscribing to services like STARLINK, which is already $160/month! We are already paying for this access - but the technology-industry and technical providers and designers, need to DEGRADE what we have, so we are induced to cough up MORE cash to access some nasty Cloud-based "Software-as-a-service" (SAAS) thing.

I find this annoying, since it means almost every system I use, is under repeated assault and attack - even by the people who built and run the things. We find this is just sad and bad. And even the old, high-quality government sites - which are not under financial pressure to be for-profit services - are also being ruined.

The whole internet thing was supposed to be a positive force, and offer a bright future of endless possible access to data and knowledge that was unavailable to most, as it was either hidden in libraries or locked behind high-cost academic journals with very high paywalls and limited circulation.

For a little while, the whole internet-model of open-access and sender-keep-accounting worked pretty good.

But recently, it is all falling apart and turning to shit. I know, because I recall when the whole internet model was not crap like it is now. It was sometimes so good, it was magical. But not now.

When I try to access the old, excellent US Aviation Weather Page, at the site https://aviationweather.gov/progchart/sfc I get "Service is Unavailable" and "The Request is Blocked" and a date-stamp and a long text string that starts with a "YYYYMMDD..." date. And that is all that works now, on my iPad.

There are other sites that still work, and I have found a few. And of course, I can walk out onto my front porch, and look at the fucking sky, and gain some awareness of the weather from the cloud patterns, and the wind-direction, kinda like they did in Ancient Roman times. And I can listen to the radio, if I need a bad forecast.

But it is completely silly, when ugly, non-functional, badly-designed complex systems replace well-designed, easy-to-use, simple-and-clear systems that worked well, and thousands of folks relied upon. What we have concluded, is that this trend of "SHITIFICATION" is not an accident.

We suspect now, it is a clear "feature" of the times. It is by design, and we are pretty sure this trend will continue.

Get used to it. And be aware that this nasty strategy will have consequences.

But the flip-side, is this: There will be real opportunities for those who can successfully correct and repair these nasty process trends which actively degrade the operational aspects of everyday life. STARLINK is a perfect example. It just works, unlike the various internet-access offerings that local domestic providers offered, which were throttled, unreliable, almost as expensive, and over time, would get slower and less useable, as more subscribers were added. STARLINK gets *better* as more satellites are lifted into orbit. Instead of a trend towards SHITIFICATION (the turning of a good system into a shit-system), STARLINK just gets a bit better as time goes by.

This capacity for clear and obvious improvement - instead of the more common trend towards system degradation and increasing complexity and system-fragility - is something very real.

Those who offer this kind of real improvement, will gain real benefits, and if market forces can prevail, will drive and control the future.

[ Oct. 28, 2023 ] - Fields of Regret - Which is where we all end up resting, perhaps. Went to a funeral for a fine old friend, yesterday. Another good person gone. So it goes.

Very few people regret what they did. Mostly, they regret the things that they DIDN'T do. This is a consistant theme, if you interview people who are old and/or dying.

So, since we all track the same path, you should use your time wisely. Turn off the screen, and go out and live life. It will end very soon, really too soon for everyone, truth be told.

[ Oct. 27, 2023 ] - Digging Two (Billion?) Graves - Ok, so what should we do? This is the question of the hour for many people now.

Come Spring, we will probably all be OK. The key strategy now, is to get thru the Winter, without being done in by the usual dark forces of rising costs, falling incomes, inflation that degrades and reduces money-wealth, the usual assaults on one's physical health by Nature herself, and the madness and curious cruelty of average humans. Remember what censorship really is - it is book-burning. And when they start burning books, they end by burning people. This is the hate-trend of human history, and in Israel, it is playing out right now. Christian and Buddhist teaching mandates forgiveness - but the Jew, the Fool, and the Angry Madman will seek revenge, and thus multiply horror, so that it grows in strength and power, and joins with hate, to rule the minds of men who are blind to wisdom and the lessons of history.

The "War on Terror" becomes - quite quickly - a "War on Sanity" itself, and we sadly now see a mass slaughter of non-combatants taking place in Israel, being of course assisted by American warships and American military assistance that would be beyond question criminal behaviour, if it were being done by any private-sector agents. It this way, we see that "GOVERNMENT" is the primary source of both terror and horror. The American Constitution created a very well-designed system, which limits out-of-control attempts to ramp-up offshore military adventurism by hate-filled opportunists. Israel is an error, wrapped in the cloth of religious and racial hatred, and is now revenge-killing an entire civilian enclave of many millions of ordinary people. It's actions are a stench in the nostrils of humanity.

The American military should not be involved in this current Israeli exercise of mass-murder. For Americans, their own wise Constitution specifies this. They are not to go to War, unless a vote is taken to do so. And since one insane mass-murder does not justify another insane exercise in mass-murder, the USA would be wise to avoid fanning the flames of race-hatred in Palestine and the race-based entity that is Israel.

Our World is walking into a useless and pointless war scenario. Elon Musk is right (as usual), and if we are to maintain prosperity and freedom in the Western World, we need to stop the illegal and unwise opportunistic actions of Government "Leaders", "Deep State" operatives, and out-of-control State Agencies.

If we are to maintain our traditional freedoms and ensure our continued prosperity, then we really need to **CHANGE THE PROGRAM**. And that of course means massive REDUCTIONS in out-of-control Government spending, reductions in military spending, and an end to the insane CANCEL CULTURE of censorship that prevents people from even talking about what is so obviously going wrong in so many areas of our society.

We have to plan to vote-out the clowns and fraudsters who are degrading our World. And we need to hold-hard to the values and traditional process-models that can be trusted, and that work in a sane and viable manner. Our land-tenure models are good, and so are our financial constructs. We can trust them. Our Governments need to be restrained from attacking and assaulting the very things that work correctly and honestly. Our banks and mortgage-models for home ownership are a good idea, and work well. The lack of housing is due to the extreme restrictions and regulations that make building houses crazy expensive. Unwise and absurd policy swings by Central Banks are destructive, and need to be limited. We should let market forces determine interest rates, and not have a bunch of poltroons in Government offices trying to set arbitrary interest-rate levels - but that means we need to avoid out-of-control exercises in money-printing, which causes (we all know), inflationary economic blow-ups.

This means we have to reduce Government spending, and dial-down the out-of-control, flood-gates open immigration that is taking place. Importing millions of "new citizens" is wildly dangerous, and is certain to destabilize any society. This unwise action should just stop.

Privately, we cannot expect a lot of money-driven economic gain, going forward from here. The objective has to be a focus on careful use of resources, and careful deployment of capital, to projects which have solid economic return. We have to carefully assess the economics of any investment now.

But mostly - we need to reduce the ability of Governments to confiscate wealth, and degrade the economic process for their own advantage, and for the advantages of their corrupt cronies. This is critical. We need much SMALLER government and a massive reduction the ABC's - the Agencies, Boards and Commissions that restrict and block and limit economic life. These Government parasites suck the financial life out of our economy. They limit and restrict economic opportunity, and prevent anyone from being able to **CHANGE THE PROGRAM**.

But our future prosperity requires we make these changes. We are looking at a cruel economic and social collapse, if we cannot reduce the scale and power of the parasite class of deep-State operatives that restrict opportunity, limit the accumulation of private capital, and degrade economic freedom.

[ Oct. 26, 2023 ] - Nasdaq Starts to Crack - We are seeing some very reversally behaviour now in the markets. It's beyond just choppy. It seems to be algo-skanky stuff, with the trading horizons dialed down as short as they can get. A long-term trade is maybe 15 or 17 minutes.

Takes the wind from one's sails. That's why I figure: "To hell with sailboats. Give me a big V8, a large tank of dead dinosaur-juice, and a hydro-planing deep-V hull. Wind is not an issue." :)

Very unclear where we go from here. My main AI things are pointing down now, with an ugly down-slope forecast. I should probably lighten up - except our cash is shit, and inflation is bad and certain to get worse. Selling now, would be problematic, since no better alternatives exist, I suspect. I read about some crazy English dude in UK, who is LONG the Japanese yen. Holy moly, is he gonna get fooked. He has these weird old-man reasons why the yen should strengthen, but I am pretty sure he is dead wrong. I don't trade currency futures, but right now, the yen is around 150 to the US dollar. It is in a long-term weakening trend, and is probably looking at 175 to 190, going out a few years, as this will help Japan stabilize, reduce imports, and pump up the export machine, that powers the economy of the place. It is an earthquake island, regularly hammered by typhoons and other awful weather. They have to export to survive and prosper, so they do. Demographically, they are screwed in Japan, and will not likely import millions of brown-boys and brown-girls like we are doing here. Their population will shrink (it already is), and they will have to reduce their currency value, in order to compete with China and other Asian countries, such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

Being long the yen, and expecting it to strengthen from here, seems a bad idea.

But being long Canadian banks has also proved to be a bad idea, in this current economic environment, so I am the pot calling the kettle black, I guess.

The numbers are getting weird everywhere now. I looked at a new GM pickup truck. The sticker price was $90,000.00. With the 13% HST, the after-tax price is over $100,000. For a black PICKUP TRUCK!!

GM and Ford and all domestic auto workers can all go on strike for as long as they want to, since I am not going to be buying any new trucks. Our modern economy seems to be kind of broken, truth be told. The numbers are becoming insane, in many places. IF the rates outlook really is "even more higher for even more longer", THEN the high-growth tech stocks of Nasdaq are gonna have to go the same way the financials have gone. Again, this is not a "conspiracy theory" - it's actually a simple DCF Model (Discounted Cash Flow Model). Those big future earnings get discounted *way* dowm, even if the growth forecast number is good, IF the interest rate you use for your present value number is two or three times higher. That now lower number is the share price, which in a sane world (and a DCF model) should track close to the present value of those wonderful future earnings, out in that wonderful (or wound-filled?) future. If you use 3.00% in your DCF model to estimate a current share-price value, and then you re-run the calcs with 5.00% as your interest rate number, your share price estimate is probably down at least 50%, even if you have a good earnings growth rate assumption. It's right there, in the math.

What this means, is that high-growth, big earnings tech stocks might fall 40% to 50% in value, especially if the earnings growth-rates are seen to be slowing down. (Kinda like it looks like they are...)

So, if 5% and higher (maybe 5.50% to 7.50%) stays, sorta forever (or for at least a decade or two), then this could hammer the market for tech stocks, since tech stocks might trade at maybe half the share price that they are now. And this is just how present-value driven DCF (Discounted Cash-Flow) models work.

If the market believes that both stubborn inflation and 5%-to-7% interest rates are here to stay, then tech stocks could drop 40% to 50% in price, as they track towards this new picture-of-the-world.

So, maybe the financials aren't really that bad. They should do OK, if they can reap the bigger spreads that higher rates obviously allow them to capture, and also of course, can manage to get their costs under control. Technology stocks have a nasty tendency to either blow up or fade-out, if time and their business models change.

The market seems now to be reflecting awareness of this new picture-of-the-world, we suspect. And of course, the leaves are falling from the trees, rather like the share-prices do this time of year.

[ Oct. 20, 2023 ] - It's the End of the World (As We Know It...) - Yes, it really is. The era of idiotically absurd **negative** interest-rates will never return, we suspect. Trying to convert to an electric economy, with a limited grid expansion, and using wind and solar power, will not work. We will have to go nuclear, or live with interruptions in electric power at our homes. And things will get *expensive*, and wages will not keep track. The US auto-industry strikes are simply hilarious, since the folks who are in auto-unions, are basically American labour aristocracy. Come the revolution, what will happen to them? They are already crazy overpaid for the little work they actually do, so for them to get all militant, and strike-close US auto production, is just nutty. It is beyond unwise - yet this is the new pattern that we can predict will unfold, because it IS already unfolding. (Easy prediction to make, basically.)

Things are completely insane, in many areas now. This trend will also probably continue. I feel like Brad and Janet, coming into Frank N. Furter's big mansion. It's just astounding.

And yes, time really is fleeting, and we really do have to "keep control".

Such are the costs of being a true time-traveller.

Another predictions: The battered banks will survive and prosper - if their managements are not completely stupid (like the political folks seem to be - everywhere..). The banks need to survive and prosper, otherwise the financialized (and very prosperous) world will collapse, and there will be fighting in the streets. Really SHTF scenarios may unfold, truth be told. I wonder how many political boffins actually realize this simple truth? Consider this metaphor: We live on the top of a pyramid, which is balanced on a player-piano, which is balanced on a bottle of wine. Our world is unstable, and the degree of instability looks to be increasing. But no one even speaks about stability anymore. If you consult the history books, "Economic Stabiliztion" was a thing. But not any more.

There is this quite mad view, that all can be "fine tuned", and this is just not the case, we are pretty sure. Here's a little gem: Once in-year changes in key economic variables (that drive process), change by 30% or more, the system can very easily go chaotic, and produce surprisingly large swings. This is actually in a modified equation, lifted from biological science, which looks at population dynamics. The extreme systemic responses are not necessarily the fault of any group or agents or agencies. It's actually right there, in the math. Dynamic systems with multiple endogenous feedback loops, have these "wild instability" characteristics, if sufficiently perturbed. The canonical example in economics, is the 1929 to 1932 experience. But the German and Austrian post-war experience from 1918 to 1923 is useful to examine also, as is the wild economics of the USA Civil War, and the 1835 to 1839 extreme economic down-cycle, which produced violent Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada.

Look at the nice and fine world of 2019, and the storm of the viral plague, followed by absurdist, horrific warfare and violence, that characterizes our world now. Trump is the expected Republican choice to challenge Old Biden, next year, yet some strange and curious New York Democrat judge, acting as a political operative, has put him under "Gag Order". This is simply crazy, and is counter to basic democratic process, and the Constitution of the USA, which mandates the legality of free speech. And this is true, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump. The dishonest and corrupt Democrats of USA, are assaulting the basic USA law that defines how USA society is required to operate. And it is that USA Constitution, that is directly responsible for much of American success, in many different economic and scientific spheres.

It appears that so-called "Democrats" in USA, want to actively damage the basic essence of what USA is, has been, and could be in the future. The "Leftist Democrats" are the real extremists. The judges and legal officials of New York State appear to be quite out of control, and look like they are acting as political "hit-squads", trying to maintain the Democrat control of USA, the State, and the failing entity that is New York City. This is tragic - but perhaps it has always been this way. USA seems to have been at war with itself, through much of it's astonishingly violent history - much like Canada also. We are no better - we just hide it better. The bodies are rarely ever found, sadly. Our world is even crazier than USA world - but we are just a minor, no-weapons nation, which hides under the American nuclear skirt.

So, it just keeps getting weirder and less viable, for so many. If we tip over the big financial structure, the mess will be extreme, and difficult to re-construct.

But the unwise actions of the political poltroons, seems to be trending towards this unfortunate outcome. At least that is what our trend-models are pointing to. And they are disturbingly prescient.

[ Oct. 19, 2023 ] - Tubular Bulls - If you are long, you are wrong, it seems. It's a very ugly market now. We've been researching financial and economic system stability characteristics, and it seems we might be finally in real trouble. The US has this massive and growing government debt problem, and is now fighting wars on two fronts. This is a problem by itself. But there is also this whole problem of the USA trade deficit, where the USA just plain buys more stuff from the world, than it sells them. The net effect is to export dollars to everyone, everywhere (except me, I guess... :) ).

Both of these actions - unlimited and uncontrollable growing government debt, and the trade deficit the US has been running for basically 40 years or so - both of these actions reduce financial system stability. The USA is able to run this crazy game, for years and years and years, which no other nation could possibly get away with, because the USA dollar is the world's reserve money. It is fiat money, not backed by anything except more money. But it has been working - since the USA makes good stuff - and very good weapons. So, every First, Second and Third World nation is happy to get it's hands on those USA dollars, and thus be able to buy magic stuff that it cannot make itself.

This is the essence of being able to be the nation that is a planetary reserve-currency provider. You need to be able to sell some magic, situation-changing stuff, for your money. What good is gold, without the technolgy to defend your holding of it? Gold must come with guns, or the gold moves on to someone who DOES have guns.

And the USA makes good guns. And big aircraft carriers, and fine new, clear weapons that create clarity of perception, in the little lizard-brains of the book-runners of Earth.

So, we have war, war and politics, war and trade, war and defeat, and war and victory.

But I am deeply concerned that they might be programming a "critically damped" system of feedback oscillation, where any attempt to correct the system now, risks creating *amplified* responses in the global economy. Instead of an economic stabilization strategy, we seem to be getting pro-cyclic economic amplification strategy. The various systemic variables that need to be damped-down to maintain global economic system stability, are now being "pumped-up", to achieve various political objectives.

I am worried about a linked financial system, with very tightly-connected linkages, and rising costs now baked in to just about everything. It looks like it could break now, in an unpredictable manner. Or not.

Another stability factor changing rapidly, is that the world's capital tends to be stored in US 10-year T-bonds (or duration near that 10-year mark, give or take a year or a few on each side.) This used to be a source of system stability, but in edge-condition scenarios, where the value of all the T-bonds and T-bills are still falling rapidly, this destruction of capital value can hurt indebted agencies, companies, banks and even governments. But if you don't backstop your bank capital with these US paper instruments, then what do you use? Gold and silver? Maybe, or maybe ether or bitcoin? We like real-estate, despite the costs and liquidity issues that need to be managed carefully, if you are not to fall over the edge.

What we do expect is more inflation. There is no choice, it appears. It's the only mechanism that can have any hope of letting the spinning-out-of-balance economic system, continue to operate, and create the appearance of wealth creation. But this means rates stay 5% to 8% or higher, and inflation grows in strength, as economic agents - consumers and produces - seek to ensure their own survival.

The market appears to be increasingly fragile. The Crisis-Bear seems to be here.

[ Oct. 16, 2023 ] - World War 2.5 - The World is falling into madness, it seems.

We see America engaged now in multiple wars, and murderous conflict seems to be now, a standard political strategy. For those of us accustomed to peaceful, rational relations between nations, this seems strange.

And yet, if one accepts the premise (as once articulated in a Dire Straits song) "We haven't changed since ancient times..."), then it would appear that this is all just a reversion to the mean. My parents grew up during wartime. The pictures of my father getting his wings (and looking about 18 years old!), and those early black and white pictures of his twin-engined bomber, and my mother, as a young girl with black hair, looking like a Hollywood film promo shot - these were made during wartime. For Canadians and Polish and folks from the UK, the Second World War started in 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.

For Americans, it was several years later, in December of 1941, when Roosevelt engineered the fake "surprise attack" on the US military naval base of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Yamamoto's attack force had sailed, it's departure was known by USA, and Honolulu newspapers carried headlines actually suggesting that the Japanese would attack very soon - perhaps on the weekend. The incoming flight of Japanese attack aircraft were picked up on radar, and orders were given to ignore this incoming wave of aircraft. Special teams of US federal operatives went around and collected most of the newspapers which contained the suggestion (as *HEADLINES!*) that at Japanese attack could occur on the weekend. To describe the Pearl Harbour attack as a "surprise" is a proven falsehood.

Japan attacked because USA had begun a military blockade of the island of Japan. To suggest that the Pearl Harbour attack was a "surprise" is beyond absurd. If you reach out and put your hands around some fellow's throat, and you start to squeeze, should you claim - when he tries to kick you in the balls - that you are the victim of a "surprise attack"? Public opinion was deeply against USA involvement in the European war with Germany. Roosevelt believe he had to engineer an event that would manipulate USA public opinion, and get it into the Second World War in a big way. So he did.

Did Israel do the same thing here? Honest analysts question how there was supposedly *zero* knowledge of what Hamas was planning. But given the ground-invasion of Gaza, and it's ongoing destruction now, by Israeli bombing efforts, and the reprisals being taken by Israel in the North against Lebanon, and against Syrian airports and cities of Damascus and Aleppo, a bigger picture emerges.

We like to say "no-one wants war", but of course, this is quite untrue. There are *many* powerful and effective groups and individuals who yearn for warfare. Observe the effective use of extreme violence used to successfully sell Hollywood films. Take a hard look at the entire Hollywood film industry itself, and which kinds of people tend to run the place, and make serious money from the films it produces. It is more than just a "dream factory". It is an explicit propaganda machine, dominated by those deeply sympathetic to the Israeli cause, and extremely race-conscious. Regardless of one's opinions on this reality, the explicit fact of this reality cannot be dismissed.

There are groups of people - Jews, industrialists, government agency and so-called "Deep State" operatives - that truly want war. They seek - by all their actions - to manipulate US public opinion always to achieve what have to be described as race-based, or essentially tribal results. And they get rich and powerful and ever more socially dominant by doing this.

We don't believe that the Israeli's engineered the ugly and insane Hamas attack on their own land and people. That would be too much, even for Jews, most would agree. But as the cynical and conflicted analysts observe in the study of politics, the old rule is being applied with a caustic certainty here: "Never let a good crisis go to waste !"

Scores will be settled, money will be made, and it will be mostly innocent children and women who get attacked and killed by angry Jews and those who support and encourage these kinds of people.

"Terrorism! Terrorism! Blah Blah Blah Blah! "

Don't you poor sorry John Q. Public types, know when you are being wound up like cheap alarm clocks? Apparently not. So here we go... again. We don't support or accept as necessary, what Hamas did. But we do believe that the existence of a race-based State of Israel, a nuclear-armed American colony that promotes violence and hatred, is just a bad idea, and should not exist as it does in it's present form. A neo-fascist, religious-oriented tribal entity - the "Jewish Homeland" is quite frankly, an insane and absurd construction, that is absolutely certain to provoke the kind of violence, hatred and social and military conflict that we are now seeing. Given human nature, there is simply no way it cannot do anything else.

"Peace" will never be possible, as long something absurd and abusive as these race-based National entities continue to exist. South Africa - as Boor White Homeland - was not viable, and change finally came. The ISIS entity - with it's horrific Islamic neo-fascist focus on a religious-based nation-state - was forcably ended, as it certainly should have been.

So how can anyone accept the existence of a "Jewish" State? The very concept is absurd and racist and it's existence - coming as it does at the direct expense of millions of those who identify as "Palastinians" - is *CERTAIN* to generate ongoing conflict and hatred for all the time that such a grotesque, racist entity continues to exist. But with nuclear weapons and biological weapons at it's disposal, and with continued direct support by American militarists, it will do just fine, and continue to breed hatred and anger and pain and horror - all of which is of course un-necessary.

But this is not unwanted, by a very large number of very dishonest people, who are very effective in successfully promoting their dishonesty.

So, we can predict that the world will remain at war - albeit at perhaps lower levels than we have seen historically, given the nature of humans, and the absurd racist social and economic State-entity that is Israel, and the support this unwise entity obtains from rich hyper-militarized nations such as America.

As long as Israel exists in its present race-based, neo-fascist religious format, there will be no peace, no solution, and lots of innocent women and children will be killed. This will not change, until the error of Israel is corrected, and a poly-ethnic, non-race-based federal entity is created that ends the internal border of Palestine. The model for the future of Israel-Palestine needs to be USA or Canada or England or France or modern South Africa - not ISIS.

[ Oct. 14, 2023 ] - Scarlet P... - Poetry time..

"They tried to kill him here,
They tried to kill him there.
Those Israelis tried to kill him everywhere!
Is he in Heaven?
Is he in Hell?
That damned impressive Khaled Mashaal!"

The dishonest and discredited US MSM can try to spin-spin-spin, with their Big Propaganda Machine on full-level Hollywood rinse-the-truth cycle. But one man's "Terrorist!" is another man's "Resistance Fighter!"

The word "terrorist" was invented by Hitler's Minister of Public Enlightenment & Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Really.

The German National Socialists, in the Second World War, called the RAF/RCAF bomber pilots: "Terror Fliegers", or "Terrorist Flyers". My dad was a bomber pilot. He died of cancer 19 years ago. But think about it. If Germany had prevailed in WW2, my dad would have been designated as a "Terrorist."

And USA Air Force senior folks, would have been put on trial for "war crimes", for the atomic-bombing - and horrific mass-murder of civilians by fire and radiation - of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what Curtis LeMay, US Air Force general, said himself what would have happened, had the USA lost the Pacific War. Curtis LeMay probably would have been prosecuted and executed as a war-criminal responsible for several hundred thousand planned **civilian** deaths. The mass-murder of Japanese civilians was deliberate USA Air Force policy. Let's be very goddamn clear about this. Killing large numbers of civilians was a USA policy decision.

Think about this, for a moment, you fucking arrogant USA mainstream media pricks, whinning about "terrorists".

Thousands of little Japanese girls, burned to death in their school classrooms - so Americans could relax on their fucking aircraft carriers, drinking Coke and laughing as they shot down the desperate kamakazi pilots, trying to defend their homeland from the worst barbarian invasion that had ever occurred in the entire 2500 years of recorded Japanese history. War is all about KILLING PEOPLE - as many of the ENEMY as you possibly can. What part of this war-thing confuses you goddamn jews?

As the clever jews and their supporters whine about a few hundred dead in Israel, please take a look at European & American history - at the bloodstained, shit-smeared filth that most war action *ALWAYS* is.

We are *NOT* against war when it is necessary. Let's be goddamn clear about this.

But this shit-stupid spin-talk about "Terrorists! Terrorists! Blah blah blah!" is complete bogus propaganda garbage. War is ALWAYS about horrible, insane, tragic and hell-stupid death-waste of human life.

Please learn this.

The Israeli leader Netanyahu is a coniving, fanatical skank. Anyone who has ever had ANY dealings with this nasty human creature has pretty much come to the same conclusion (including ex-presidents of USA!)

What is sad, is when a vicious, evil little fellow like this, gets his hands on power.

Then, the blood of the innocent flows like the water in rivers rushing to the wild sea.

The "Gates of Hell" may be opened. But when they open, they open wide for everyone. We look forward to when Bibi get's his first meeting with Satan.

[ Oct. 13, 2023 ] - Scary Monsters - It's Friday the 13th. Boo! Booooo! Waah ...! OMG, here come the *BANK EARNINGS* for the US money-centre guys! BOOO! ... wait.. ah, they look pretty damn good, actually. Oh. How about that. Why? (and I hear Foghorn Leghorn's voice: "Margin, my boy! Margin! Just lookee at that wonderful spread! Makes my heart pound with animal spirits, justa lookin' at all that profit!" )

Note: Almost everything - all data that you will obtain - is fraudulent. Of course, this assertion is not really true. But it gets closer to truth, every year. The equity markets now trade like the Chicago commodity markets, with traders "gunning for stops" for most of the day. The pros confine most of their trading to "dark pools" and/or the last few nano-seconds of the day. What you see during the day - the visible action - seems to be mostly sh/t-fake. So, beware. The data is bogus. In Canada, we suspect (but can't prove yet), that most of the real action (ie. the block trades, and/or the real movements by major investors) is hidden from smaller, non-professional investors, by the 10 or 11 or so, "dark markets" where data cannot be obtained from. This implies that the TSE action is mostly offsetting trades, which typically run counter to the real action which both drives and tracks the trend.

This makes trading the TSE, rather like trying to play poker across the street from where the cards are being dealt, and the real players are making their bets. It's pretty comically awful. The action is ironicly stupid - like a bomb-disposal expert being killed in a drunken bar-fight. It's just all wrong. Maybe, it's the algos? Really smart AI algorithms, using all the neural fibonacci pivotal points to fleece the punters? Perhaps.

Of course, I am whinning, because I can't seem to make any fucking money anymore. I can't even make any regular money. :D

Our Cdn bank stocks closed in the dumpster again today. Curious and serious action. The USA DJIA ndex managed to eke out a tiny gain, but the S&P and the Nasdaq closed down. But oil and gold and silver got goosed, and moved up sharply, so we revert to the old-school fear trade, which is maybe somewhat reassuring. The markets are acting rational, at least. More war is just plain bad and stupid. Hamas folks had to know what would happen - they cannot be completely brain-dead. Have they wired the entire north part of Gaza with mines? Will Russia take this as a pretext to pepper Israel with fusion devices? Or at least sink a few USA warships? At some point, you have to sh/t or get off the pot. If you really want war, the USA has never looked more complete f))ked up and weak and broken. They are spread out thin, run by dolts, and today in Chicago, if the news reports are correct, two biological men, just claimed victory in a major **WOMENS** bicycle race. That proves beyond any shadow of a doubt, that something is truly, deeply wrong and broken in USA-land. This "trans-gender" stuff is pure, insane nonsense. It is just old-fashioned mental sickness.

I love the old USA, and it is sad and painful to watch all this. (A real 4-chan, or kiwi-farms non-censored horrible racist comment might be something like: "So sad to see what all those jews and niggers are doing the place.." We like to believe that no one in enlightened and polite society would ever even think such a vile or disgusting comment - but I am a hard-core neural scientist, and I have to examine the very dark corners of the human psyche. People say sh/t like this, when they are drunk and think no one important is listening. And I have to say, I think maybe the world is a better place, when freedom-of-speech is legally protected, and we can openly discuss racisim and religious hatred - because it lies deep in every human heart, and is so tragically commonplace. This modern world, where all the clever people have to talk-in-code, is toxic and will take us to war - and it will be as much a war from within, as a war from outside forces.

Folks are gonna have to vote for Trump, even if they hate the fellow. Trump has been the only rational fellow on the stage - and yes, he is pissed at Netanyahu. Peace now, is absolutely lost - and will be lost for generations. A murder-campaign against Gaza, will just harden everyone in their positions, and all chance for any sort of "Two-State" solution will be lost forever. For the hard-core folks, who support Palestinian self-determination, the only future model that will be acceptable, will be one where Israel does not exist in it's present form.

Are the Israelis and their supporters willing to kill 3.1 million humans in Gaza? Because that is what it might take, once the Israeli invasion begins. They might do this - quite possible. Jews are stubborn people, and believe that some fat fellow in the sky has given them the Holy Right to behave as they do. I think this is completely insane, no question. But I see this sickness everywhere now - people actually believe in god and angels and devils and all this absurd superstitious nonsense from the Middle Ages. It's truly sickening, because it gives every lunatic-group the moral right (in their twisted minds) to commit the most horrific crimes, and feel this is OK, because some fu*king stupid "god" is behind them.

Religion is absolute toilet-water. It should be flushed away completely, with all our historic, awful waste products. It justifies and enables ugly racisim, and cruel, insane actions. In an age of science, it should have just withered away. But the nature of human neural weakness and error, ensures that it has such tragic, strong staying power. We simply cannot solve this problem. And there can be no "Final Solution" here. You cannot generally kill your way to peace, once religion and politics are driving human action. You can try, but you will usually destroy your own world as well. This is one of the curious, and consistent lessons from human history.

[ Oct. 12, 2023 ] - Dead Fish Don't Swim Home - On December 11, 1972, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 1036.30. This was a number that impressed many people. The USA had not only landed on the Moon several times, in the Apollo spaceships, they had also taken an electric car, and driven around and explored the Lunar surface. The Vietnam war was being wound down, and all looked good. Nixon had taken USA completely off the gold standard, but this made folks happy, because all restrictions on private ownership of gold were gone. It all looked pretty good (I was a very young fellow, but I remember how everything was fine and good.) But by October 4th of 1974, the DJIA closed at 584.60. The market had fallen 40% in two years. It was the inflation crash, the Arab Oil Shock, and the idiotic and abusive assault on Nixon that removed him from office, and changed the world. The Deep State and the Washington Post and the Leftist Inflationists and the deeply dishonest Marxists academics of America all worked together to basically blow everything up, and take USA down and then down even more. It was a strange and ugly time, not that different for many market participants, than the 1929 to 1932 time was. Everything just went to hell. Because of inflation, some called it the "silent crash" no one noticed.

Think about it. In two years, you had a 40% drop in the overall average of quality industrial names. The "Nifty Fifty" of the 1960's fell. It was a time of rising unemployment, and falling future optimism. But animal spirits rose, and so did the market. Gerald Ford had become President (in August 9th, of 1974), and the feeling was, perhaps things could be put right. By March 24, 1976, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had regained a 4-digit level, closing at 1009.20. Things looked like they were improving and almost under control.

But then the wheels fell off again. Jimmy Carter was elected President in the Fall, fuel prices went through the roof, and by December 7th, 1977, the DJIA was back down 20%, closing at 807.40. Carter went on to try to *control* gasoline prices, forced *price-regulation* on America, and effectively rationed gasoline, like some Third-World kleptoState. It was nasty. Long lineups at gas-stations were the norm, and the future looked grim. But eventually, Carter (who was not a bad fellow at all, and tried to do his best, perhaps), was replaced by Ron Reagan, and Paul Volker brought in sensible economic policy decisions that reduced the money supply growth, and took interest rates to over 20% (which required many States to modify their "Anti-Usery" Laws, as market rates for loans went over 25% at banks). Many businesses failed, but the overall North American economy was saved.

The Reagan years brought the great expansions of the 1980's, and the "Star Wars" research, which resulted in a range of impressive technology.

What is important to realize, is that USA is resilient. Resiliency is a very important attribute to have and to retain. But ask this question: How would the USA react to a 40% drop in this market now? I see so many *fake* numbers now - I just do not trust much of the data that I see, in many areas. There are reasons for this, too numerous to discuss here. But we can pretty much trust the old series - like the DJIA. So, how would the World and USA react to a move from this level, where the DJIA is 33,784 to a level 40% lower? This would imply a DROP in the Dow Jones Average of 13,513, which would give us a DJIA of 20,271.

What could take us all down to that level? A Dow Jones Average of 20,271 would of course imply similar drops in the other averages, such as the Nasdaq, and the S&P500. And do we see interest rates of more than 20%? In Argentina, the interest rate is *OVER* 100% (last was 118%, if I recall correctly, which is of course, absurd.) The key point here, is that our entire economic system, is now floating on a sea of debt financing, at almost every level. I read some shocking numbers yesterday, which showed that the USA has **ADDED** over $1-trillion to it's Federal Government Debt, in just the last **FOUR MONTHS**! Since June to the end of September, USA debt has grown by over $1000 BILLION dollars. This is not rational. Total Federal debt is now over $33 TRILLION. This is nuts. The USA is debt-financing like it is at war. What if the USA - and the Western World - really DOES have to go to war? We cannot afford it, without blowing up our economic system. Yet this may happen anyway.

When one looks at the debt numbers, it seems pretty clear they will never actually be *paid down*. The existing debt will most likely be defaulted upon, rather like is happening now to the bogus property companies in China. Xi Jinping and his followers seem to want to return to a militant, aggressive Communism, and this bodes for a bad and dangerous future for us. After Truth (always the first wartime casualty), the second is often one's investments. Just ask the folks in Europe, who thought all their funds were invested wisely in the 1930's.

We all have to "Stand on Guard" against the threats of debt-default and capital confiscation, as the sad history of our foolish little World, shows that this is usually what Governments do to their own people, and then go on to do the same thing to their enemies, if they can (which sadly, are usually just their neighbours.)

Full Disclosure: We remain fully invested. But I recall my study of the Beobachtung Dienst (the German WW-2 Navel Research/Intelligence group and it's code-breaking efforts). The German Navy was impressive, and it's U-Boat campaign was almost successful. There was this famous meeting of Admiral Karl Donitz, and his top people who were running the submarine war. They concluded that their data, and the B-Dienst research, indicated the war was basically lost, and the discussion was essentially: "What should we do?". Since the Navy were loyal and honourable men, and their nation remained at total War, they concluded that the only alternative was to continue with the campaign, despite the knowledge that they could not be expected to now prevail, against the combined military efforts of England and America. We feel a tad like this now, in all seriousness. We have to remain in the game, and retain our investments, as there is really no other possible course to follow. But we cannot ignore the obvious truths that reside quietly in the data. We have to be prepared for a 20% to 40% drop in the market value of our investments.

We don't really expect it to be that bad. We may be able to inflate-away the debt. But that will mean a serious inflation is coming, regardless of what policy people do. And like the German Navy in 1944, we have no choice but to continue. We have to maintain an investment effort, despite the ugly and stupid nature of the World and it's unwise, reactive political people. But one has to recognize that extreme moves are the norm in this process, rather like they are in war. Stay resilient, if you can. And hold on to your boats and stick to your guns. :)

[ Oct. 11, 2023 ] - Fraud, Lies, Fakery & Money - We are now certain that "Climate Change" (which used to be called: "Global Warming", until it was proven that the Earth is not warming at all) is a complete, bogus, unscientific fraud. But it's success in the political world is most impressive. Perhaps we can leverage this lie, to build some additional new nuclear reactors in Canada. Nuclear (fission) reactors are most excellent technology, and Canada has mountians of uranium (and even mountains of refined U, known as "yellowcake"). Nuclear tech was a family business for our folks, truth be told. And Canada invented a particularly safe reactor technology, known as the "CANDU" reactor. We even had the first ugly meltdown (and subsequent successful cleanup) when the Chalk River research reactor melted down (due to folks running the thing being stupid and careless, also truth be told. Sh/t happens. But most sh/t can be avoided if one's people are not unwise f*ckwits. Sadly, it is getting more difficult each year, to satisfy this key requirement... So it goes, eh Kurt?)

What is interesting, is how much money is being made from the Climate Fraud. I've lived a long time paying attention to the weather. And the extremes in weather are ALWAYS happening, and always will happen. There is no other way it can work. But now, every extreme event is blamed on "Climate Change", and this fraud is wagging the big dog of Western Civ. It's tragic - like war and blood running in the streets - but it is a pretty consistent pattern.

Finding consistent patterns is a way to make money. But one needs a strong stomach, and a large collection of various nerve-settling drugs, if one wants to sleep at night.

The more consistent the pattern, the wilder will be the multi-sigma swings away from it, when the interesting stuff happens. This is rather like a meltdown, or a critical-mass boom-whacking atomic balm event. (If the Chinese drop A-weapons on us, can we call it a form of "Tiger Balm"? A "balm" is defined in my Webster's as "a soothing restorative agency". Maybe we need some "Jew Balm", to help those poor Israelis...)

It's funny. Discovering a pattern, and testing and confirming it, still requires successfully taking action to "trade-what-you-found", and this is the third-leg of the stool, that often gets made from weak wood. We just made 90 dollars on a trade that (shoulda/woulda) made more like 900 or 9000, if we had been a little more courageous, or aggressive. Plus, we could have executed on a proven strategy, which we got distracted from, which also would have fattened the now very lean bank account.

But at least, this is an honest and honourable way to try to make a living - even if the gains and rewards are the very smallest of "small beer". Speculation is a hard and dangerous game, and the greatest barrier to high levels of success, are mostly inside one's own self. This is a tough nut to crack, and a hard thing to accept. Caution must always balance courage, if one is to successfully avoid being killed, in any conflict situation. Are the markets a conflict zone? This remains an open question. I don't yet know the answer. I suppose like all human experience, both extremes are possible - the marketplace as a gentle and effective dance between honest, truthful participants discovering the true price of a thing, and the marketplace as a war-zone where the winner takes everything, and the loser is carried out as a wallet-empty economic corpse.

What is really disturbing, however, is the extreme gains that fraudsters and political scammers can extract, via taxation and oughtright economic theft (eg: "value-added" taxes, which apply an abusive vigourish to life-critical products such as food, fuel, education-for-your-children, and so on). The latest fraud here, are the "climate-change" taxes piled on to the already high fuel-taxes, which now make gasoline, diesel fuel and heating-oil even more stupid expensive than they were a few years back. It is a wonderful scam for corrupt and dishonest government toady-folk, and the rich can go out an buy Tesla's for $100,000, so they don't care. I suppose they can also heat their houses from the hot-winds generated by Climate Talkers, who invent the lies that support this astonishing nonsense.

What is proves - yet again - is the effectiveness of "Bernie Madoff"-style (or now maybe we can call them: "Bankman-Fried" style?) mass-frauds. These things work. They come around regularly, and they hoover **billions** of currency units away from the foolish and the unwise who seek "leaders" to lead them into losses and destruction. It is of course not fair to blame it all on Jews. But the Jews seem to be awfully good at it (viz. Madoff, Bankman-Fried and Chuck Schumer).

So, caution is indicated. The bond market is telling us something (with it's impressive volatility), and so are the criminals and the nuclear reactors that melt down. Sh/t not only happens, but it lives inside of people as well, and comes out as these wild, impressive and successful frauds and scams. They work, and they enrich folks who "follow the money", until the cruel weight of truth sinks the rotten barge the fraud is floated upon. And often this takes a human lifetime, (and a market crash), before it is discovered. This is the real (and dangerous) truth, that history and statistics actually teaches us. Double-digit sigma events (ie. 10 or 12 standard deviations away from the mean of the observed distribution) are not only common, they are in fact often just the chaotic way the truth has of poking it's head into the comfortable world of fraud and lies and self-deception that so many people seem determined to reside within.

What to do? Maybe to read the short stories by Anton Chekov, one of the great writers of our Western Culture. We need to respect the Russians, and bring that poor sorry nation, back into the community of Western nations. And we need to also respect and honour the Chinese, and recognize that they are trying. (Yes, yes, they can be very trying...) But we still need to share the planet with them. We can look at USA-Jewish culture, and get a very good picture, of what NOT to do. We are not anti-semites (and we are not even anti-dentites), but it might be time to call a time-out on the Hollywood Marathon Men, the Climate fraudsters, and Leftist-Lie-Pushers and try to navigate our little boats back towards the old truths of the Enlightenment and other sensible and effective models of Western Culture values.

Truth can actually work pretty good. But you have to welcome it into your own mental homeland. It cannot do it's job, if it is exiled to the wilderness.

[ Oct. 10, 2023 ] - Death and the Maiden - The Israeli-Palestinian War is just tragic and stupid and awful. The idiots of Hamas have just killed without reason, and failed to take and hold any military objectives. They acted like ISIS terrorists - or worse - crazy psychos who shoot people at music festivals. This is just madness, and cannot be justified. After this, the Israelis will feel it is right and proper to kill Gaza, and we will now have a bloodbath of horrific scale, which will not benefit anyone anywhere, and will stain both sides with so much blood-of-the-innocent, that this conflict may well be recorded in history as the Atrocity War. It is just so stupid and insane and wrong.

We unwound our margined position, with a tiny profit, and decided to dial-down all leverage. A World at War is not a good thing, no matter how the MSM, the fraudsters, and the elite try to spin the newsflow. There are times when warfare must be accepted as necessary, as in the case of foreign invasion. But war destroys resources, and destroys lives. It is costly, regardless of the level of interest rates. And it seems America will insert itself into this conflict in a harmful manner, rather than as an entity which seeks peace. Perhaps that is what some dark groups want. The ability to play the emotions of American and Israeli warmakers is a valuable skill. Both Israel and USA are now in **reaction** mode. They can be controlled, in a dark manner, in this way. This is bad, and it is dangerous.

This is the real danger from terrorism. It is that it makes rational, careful folks, whom might otherwise be astute, effective and strategic in their thought and actions - behave like an angry mob, and scream for blood. This is not good for business, it is not good for a nation, and it is not good for civilization.

But it is the World we are now embedded within.

[ Oct. 9, 2023 ] - Eine Kleine NachtMusik? - And would you like some C4 with that? How about a gelignite cocktail? Or maybe some Semtex-on-a-half-shell? I was wondering what War was good for, and it seems it's good for many things, sadly. We are a violent and predictable species, and it seems the 21st century is going to look rather like the 20th century, but maybe run at internet speed? "FastWar!" might be the new geo-political game. No "Great Game" anymore. Now, just lots and lots of old-style "revolution", with the evil skanks going down, and the bigger, nastier skanks moving on up.

We can't really get behind this nonsense, but it seems to be a course that we cannot turn from. There was supposed to be a "Two State" solution, where the Palestinians would actually be able to have part of their country back, that the Israeli's stole from them. But with Netanyahoo back in power, then there was no way that any peace would happen. In 2022, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli jews is indicated as 81, mostly in raids and direct confrontations (source: Reliefweb.int). Israeli jew forces killed 13 Palestinians between July 25th, and August 10, of this year. This brings this year's death toll to 167 people - many of whom were civilians. (Source: UN Humanitarian Agency, and www.newarab.com)

So, Fuck You, Cuck Schumer. Fuck you and the fuck-horse you rode in on. We note that Chuck Schumer is over in China, trying to sweet talk Xi Jinping, and at the same time, spout critical nonsense suggesting China should "support" Israel more. What the insane fuck is this fucking world coming to? We do not support Hamas, and like the Chinese Government (which is being curiously rational and sensible here), we suggest that perhaps the best course of action, would be implementation of the "Two State" peace accord. But Biden is a fucking goof, Trump is under attack and can do nothing, and the rest of the Western World "Leaders" are so full of shit, that it appears to be beyond belief.

What other State or group of people on this Planet, would NOT go to WAR, if their people were being slaughtered routinely by American-military-supplied rich murder-monkey skanks, that is what the ugly, violent and vicious Israeli fucking army truly is? What would USA do, if **regularly**, aircraft bombed American cities, and killed American civilians? Would they just weep and howl?

Or would they take action???

How can any sane person expect the Palestinians NOT TO CHOOSE WAR, when they are regularly murdered by Israeli aircraft bombardment and Israeli murder raids? They are human beings, just like we are. When they see their women and children killed, they must burn with a hate so intense, that they are willing to die trying to end the Israeli murder-regime, rather than live as slaves and abused cucks.

Fucking hell - would Canada or USA or England or France or Germany - or ANY NATION ANYWHERE AT ANYTIME IN ALL OF HISTORY - not arm-up, and mobilize and go to war, if it were to have - each year - **hundreds** of it's people regularly bombed, killed, captured and/or tortured to death by an occupying military??? The actions of Hamas is not *terrorism*. It is last-ditch defensive warfare, given the slave-enclave nature of the Gaza strip and the West Bank.

Fuck, this is just insanity. There was an honest and rational attempt to engineer a sane solution to the this tragic Mid-East fools horror show - but the election of that corrupt thug, Benjamin Netanyahu, ended any chance of that. Netanyahu is a dishonest, sadistic, murdering criminal, and we hope he goes down like Hitler did. He is the entire author of this insane, unnecessary Palestinian war, which the Palestinian's have zero chance of winning.

The Palestinians will just die. They will die like flies, and the fuckpot toadfaced shit-lickers who pretend to be the "leaders" of the World's nations, will send "Oh, so sad!" letters the the Israelis, as they stand on the piles of dead Arab children. The Chinese are actually the only ones demonstrating impressive objectivity here.

Note: Al Jazeera, in May of this year (2023) indicates that in 2022, Israeli "forces" (army and various jewish "settlers"), killed more than 170 Palestinians, and this included at least 30 children. Now, let's ask the question: If Americans were suffering this kind of occupation, and routine mass-murder of their citizens - including children - what would USA do? Seriously - this question needs to be asked. Someone ask that geriatric clown, Joseph Biden, if he would do anything, if America was being attacked like this. Seriously. This question needs to be asked - by a real reporter - not some toady like-spit skank from the MSM, since they are not allowed to ask this kind of real question.

To us, and to any sane person - the military actions of Hamas Fighters, seems completely reasonable, obvious, and necessary. (NOTE: I wrote this BEFORE I learned about the fact the Hamas fighters killed folks at a music festival. That was just ugly, stupid terrorism, and there is NO justification for that sort of madness. It was a wrong non-military action. Hamas is stupid and cruel.) Doubtless, they felt they had no choice, at this point. Better to die as a fighter for your land and for your people, than to live as a slave in a prison-land. If America was occupied, and subjected to what the Palestinians are subjected to, we believe that most Americans would feel the need to fight also. I am sure Canadians would. (Update: But we also would expect a more rational, effective engagement against any occupation force. Hamas has chosen terror and cruelty, which degrades and damages them as much as it does their enemies. They chose the wrong path.)

The entire Israeli region, should be put under UN military control. Israel should not be allowed to maintain status as an independent nation. It's creation was a horrific error, and this error needs to be corrected, or the blood will continue to flow and there will be no peace. Of course, this will not happen. Nothing that creates a solution will happen, except that Israeli "settlers" and other "Israeli Forces" will just bomb and kill - and this will ensure that the hatred on each side is amplified to the point where everyone can only see red. There is no solution possible here, as long as a failed, murdering thug like Netanyahu remains in power as the "leader" of that disputed region.

[ Oct. 6, 2023 ] - Der Kommisar's NOT In Town! (or The Joy of Paper!) - This is all getting poo-throwing-monkey hilarious. The USA economy adds 336,000 new jobs in September, and the Future's Market has a poo-fit, with the S&P giving up 31 points, and the Dow Futures off 175. Real dramatic, eh? Except it's all nonsense.

The USA economy looks like it's just boom-whacking along. And same thing around our little world here. It's a boom, like I have never really seen in my lifetime. It's actually pretty weird. New houses and new commercial buildings, sprouting like puff-ball mushrooms overnight. Actually, I did see this... It was in Calgary in 1980, and in Warsaw in 1990. The shackles had come off, and business suddenly happened.

I recall the flip-side, as we slid into the 1970's, full of optimistic jisim (is that the right word?). Only to be hammered by astonishingly unwise Leftist government policy decisions, that beat the crap out of the real economy, sent unemployment up into double digits, and flatlined most business plans. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from over 1000 to just above 600. Plus, we had inflation, and no jobs available, and by 1976, the wheels were falling off everywhere.

What we are seeing here, is the flip side of that. There is now higher inflation and of course, we are getting stupid, unwise policy choices by various levels of boneheaded government policy makers. This is really par for the course. The clown shows in Washington and Ottawa ("Let's all applaud the Nazi Killers! Yeah, --- clap/clap/clap" - just falling-down-laughing funny - the term is ROLF, I believe - rolling on floor, laughing.) And in USA-land, the Washington firing squads are turning circular (again!). It's comedy-time in Ugly-Town!

But here's the thing. The current world looks like what I saw in Warsaw, in 1990. Everyone is busy, work is hammering along, everyone seems to have something going on, and lots and lots of positive sh/t is happening. Place was buzzing like a big bee-hive.

Inflation is part of this. We need to understand that some inflation is actually - please grasp this concept - A RISING RATE OF RETURN ON DEPLOYED CAPITAL. So, this is good. The flip-side is the Japan-style hyper-stagnation problem, where you get DEFLATION, and no one wants to do anything, except bury their money in the ground, or hide it somewhere ("BURY ME WITH MY MONEY!"...(THUMP!) (go find the website, or click below, and watch the little Red-man fall and fall, over and over again, with his bag of gold.)

https://www.burymewithmymoney.com

I think, that (sadly, really), gold and silver and such, is not that wise to hold. I needed some cash recently, and I found I could not negotiate (ie. SELL) a little 1-oz. bar of silver I had. I had bought a few of these at a Canadian Bank, many years ago (they even have the Bank logo on them!), but now, the Bank does not even want to be in that business (which I think is truly wrong, for various reasons), but so it goes. People do stupid sh/t, and unwise, fat-rich folk in board-rooms seem to make astonishingly bad decisions in this World. Some sort of "Group-Think" causes them to put their brains in their pockets, and just nod their fat, lipid-cover heads up and down. They do the "go along to get along" business-model, and are thinking about lunch, I suspect.

So, the joke is, I cannot sell my little 1-oz silver bar. But I was able to pull the trigger on some falling telecom shares, grab the cash quickly and easily, and EMT transfer some funds to a fellow who lived in another city, a 6-hour drive away, and buy his boat.

Anyone remember the "liquidity preference" concept? The Keynsian "Liquidity Trap"? Sh/t, we have been living this idiot-nonsense for the duration of the insane ZIRP time, that the bone-ignorant government goon-squads have made us endure for the last 3 or 4 years. The stock market at least works (in a world where not much else does.) If I want to sell my little silver 1-oz bar (for maybe $30 Cdn, or something like that), I have to drive to Toronto, find a fucking place to park, go to the one bullion dealer I know, and sell it there. The fuel and parking costs would significantly exceed the value the little ingot would offer me. It is a comedy show of stupid-non-market action. There is no local market for gold or silver, and I can't deposit silver in my bank account, and I can't pay my bills with gold.

Holding metal as an asset - for the individual - is just goddamn stupid. It is just a dead asset, prone to theft, and curiously difficult to turn into cash. The Joy of Paper is that it can be converted to cash quickly, cheaply, in a reasonably fair manner, and then the money can be deployed on whatever project one needs to fund.

I love the ***IDEA*** of gold and silver - but the practical realities of the marketplace, make it a stupid investment. It's too hard to turn it into liquid cash.

And this crazy stuff in the market we are seeing. It is silly also. A booming economy, with lots of jobs, means lots of business and lots of money. This will make the stock market get bid up, as long as the stocks are not sh/t. This is a pretty easy forecast to make.

Also, if you really want to dig deep into the USA employment data, it gets quite interesting. Well, it gets interesting if you are a economics-stats-nerd, and/or if you have a psychopathology where you really (REALLY!) want to understand what the hell is happening. That big "jobs" number is maybe not such a boom-whacking "hot-economy" indicator as you are led to believe, by the increasingly bogus mainstream new-generator media hypsters. (Gosh, but the MSM - main stream media - is awful now. Maybe it always was this awful? I don't think so, but maybe I am using selective memory? ...) Anyway, here is some well-researched, useful information, with more detail, and a large and most useful bag of caveats. You really need to beware all these government-generated numbers now, since many are created using small-sample statistical queries, and these do not reflect reality very well anymore (did they ever? Maybe. But folks are *much* more fluid now, in many ways...) Here is M. Shedlock's data-summary, which is quite well done. He indicates that employment is up only a little bit, and that the way the *unemployment* rate is calculated, is questionable. The takeaway from this, is that there is strong evidence the economy in USA-land is not as "overheated" as this 336,000 job number implies, and that further assault on the bond-market is not necessarily required, or even perhaps likely. It's probably too soon for Fed Reserve interest rate reductions, but with the long bonds pushing above 5% yields, it would seem to be wise to just leave the dial set to this level, and give the marketplace some time to absorb the new rate regime that is now in place, rather than attempting to shock the system further.

https://mishtalk.com/economics/jobs-unexpectedly-surge-by-336000-but-employment-only-rises-by-86000/

[ Oct. 5, 2023 ] - Monday's Child is Full of ... Woe? - No woe here. Weather remains curiously deep-summer like, hot and sunny. The local farmers are harvesting deep into the night. Crops are fat, standing high, and looking thick. Corn and soybeans are being hoovered off the 100-acre sections with huge machines, packed in to large trucks, and sent to the grainaries. Apples are so thick on the trees that the branches are bending near the ground. Promises to be a major bumper harvest, at least in our locality. We are north of the USA, so our Thanksgiving comes earlier. It's this coming weekend, and the turkeys seem to be hiding. We are leaning to purchasing a Costco pre-cooked chicken, and some dry German White, or maybe a California Pinot Noir.

Peter Schiff thinks US banks are in trouble, because of low-rate mortgages. Perhaps, but not in Canada. Here, the banks are ridiculously well capitalized, and the maximum term on any mortgage is 5 years, regardless of the amortization. You cannot get a 30-year mortgage in Canada. You can only lock-in a rate for 5 years, and then you have to re-negotiate your rate. Many folks have floating-rate mortgages. Many do not. But the maximum term is 5 years. Early payment risk is non-existent, since the banks are protected against rate-shock changes in their asset-liability matching, if they are careful and know what they are doing. (And they do.)

I was offered a 4.99% rate on my unused revolving line-of-credit, which when I checked out the details, learned the usual worm lived in the deal. To get the funds at that cheap rate, one had to sign up for basically a 7-year ammortized "mortgage"-style loan feature. And the low rate was only available for 6-months.

Of course, an entrepreneur wants to just pay interest-only on his borrowed money, and pay the loan down when his ship comes in. But the bank likes to see regular income streams. The upshot is that the 4.99% rate had to be associated with a maximum amortization of 7-years. If I were to borrow $18,400, for example, the banker indicated my first *payment* would be Nov. 1, and would be over $450.00! Now, at 4.99%, the interest monthly is only $76.51 on the $18,400, example amount, which is all I wanted to pay. But the bankers are very keen to get these mortgage-streams. So, instead of being able to pay $80 per month (to borrow $18,400) on an interest-only basis, one has to pay over $450 per month, because the loan has to be structured as a mortgage, with a 7-year amortization. They would not (could not) set the amortization up to higher term, as the 4.99% rate deal did not allow that option.

What one could do, was accept the standard unsecured LOC 9.20% interest rate at prime-plus-2% (prime for the banks in Canada is now 7.20%), and then pay only 1% of outstanding loan balance, or $50/month, which ever is higher, as the monthly loan payment. This is still not the desired *interest-only* loan, but on an example $18,400 loan, the bank-required monthly loan payment is now $184 per month, and declines ae the loan is paid down.

But this arrangement makes vastly more sense, than the idiotic LOC-as-a-7-year-mortgage, which is just a bad deal for the rational consumer. A rational business-oriented guy wants to basically issue a bond, pay the interest only on his loan, and then repay the principal at a planned future date. Or, maybe he rolls it over into another bond or bond-like arrangement, if necessary. But this assumes one is borrowing funds for a specific project, with a specific expected future pay-off date. And of course, this is really the only way funds should be borrowed. The only folks who should borrow money to buy a car, are taxi-drivers (and now, maybe Uber-drivers). One should only borrow money, if it is to be used to make money, not just to buy stuff. I sold shares to buy the boat. (And the shares then fell in value, much more than expected! It's better to be lucky, than smart...)

But my whole point here, is that the banks are doing just fine. The value of a bank, is the value of it's assets - it's loans outstanding - and these are backstopped by the value of the collateral - the real-estate typically, nice non-moveable stuff that cannot disappear in the night. The house prices remain high, because supply is tight, new-construction is damned difficult everywhere, and those in houses now, with low-interest mortgages, and not going to move. Even commercial real-estate is ok here in Canada, near as I can tell. And almost no-one defaults.

So, at least in the Canadian context, I think Peter Schiff (a very clever fellow, whom I respect), is wrong about the banks. The banks are not in trouble. They are doing fine, and will continue to do just fine, as long as they are not stupid (like SVB was, for example.) FRC collapsed because of profoundly stupid Government and Administration policy. It didn't have to happen. But that is another story. Key point here is that Finance is absolutely critical to the operation of any modern economy. And dodgey finance is actually helpful for a frontier economy, which the USA is trying to transition away from. (Hint: You need Branch-banking, and effective use of *monoey-centre* banks, and move away from those dangerous (for the banks) 30-year fixed mortgages, which have no early-payment penalties, etc. But the Americans know all this, of course..)

What is interesting for us, is that as the rates have gone up, we are surprisingly seeing opportunities for which borrowing money actually makes sense. So yes, the model of rising rates-of-return on capital are associated with rising rates and economic expansion - this actually seems to be valid. Low interest rates set near zero, are stupid and dangerous, and damage the operation of a financial economy. We expect that rising rates should be associated with a rising rate-of-return on capital, which is positive for a financially-driven modern economy, and that as long as we can fix the broken political process in many countries (and successfully address the "idiots-in-power" problem), then we should all do just fine.

This isn't Pollyanna rose-coloured-glasses thinking. This is actually the hard, pointy-end of real economics, surprisingly. We hit the LOC for some funds, and are happy to pay 9.20%, since if our picture-of-the-world is right, we can execute on an opportunity which is attractively priced right now. We have learned - from experience - that low, attractive prices, do not tend to stay around very long. In a world of finance-driven fiat-currencies, money is not the limiting factor. Attractive opportunities are always in short supply, and do not linger long.

[ Oct. 3, 2023 ] - Sing a Song of Sick-Pence - The Canadian dollar is not looking well. Perhaps this is by design. Not sure what is happening, just yet. Oil and gold and silver are falling. Bitcoin is looking weak. But prices for houses in our little city are still crazy. Crappy duplex things (half-a-house), are selling for over $700,000. Was just reading some real-estate stuff tonite. The numbers seem absurd and silly - so overpriced it looks like prices in *yen*, not prices in dollars Cdn. A decent (not crap) house, is over $1,000,000 in many cases, or at least near this number.

To us, this seems just nutty. But at the local Home Depot, the price for an 8x4-foot half-inch plywood sheet is now almost $50. This seems steep.

We expect some serious stock-market volatility. The market prices seem to be tripwired. Market action seems to be curiously twitchy - even by modern standards. Feels like a black-and-white Twilight Zone episode.

[ Oct. 2, 2023 ] - Wake Up! Time to... - Die? We hope not. But hope is never a very good strategy for market investment, is it? Peter Schiff says we are at a "fork in the road." Maybe. But the fork might be stuck right thru your portfolio's heart. We are seeing our bank stocks and telecoms get crushed today. Double-plus ungood.

Welcome to the goddamn future. How the hell do you like it so far?

My boat was not expensive. I've spent a few days fixing the electrical system. I even have the instrument lights working. Whoo hoo!

There are times when the market breaks and then even breaks more. With money supply shrinking, and interest rates skyrocketing, this might be one of those times. Be careful. Don't get killed.

The world is pretty seriously f*cked up right now. But that is typical. And the entire market-world, and the reporters and analysts and promoters (can *you* tell the difference between them??) is and always has been, pretty much full of sh/t. That is also typical. But the market does it's job, with brutal objectivity. It cares not for your skin-colour, your brain-capacity, your head-size, or the shape and nature of your sex organs. Really. It just grinds on, doing it's sifting and sorting process. And it does it ***MUCH BETTER*** than any dishonest political poltroon ever does. Government is the domain of the lowest and the worst and the most mentally degraded, and the most cruel, abusive and useless. It is just really quite comical, truth be told. I know of what I speak, truly.

I am old now, and I can tell the true truth. One just has to die laughing, I guess.

The entire *community* of analysts and crap-writers and fat-bastards with expensive ties are just about completely useless. Many of them would serve the world best, if they just had a warm bath and opened their pipes, Roman-style. Such is the true nature of reality.

I recall last year (2022), when some bonehead smart-arse at some Bank-owned Brokerage firm, had a "BUY" recommendation on BNS at $92/share. We (sort-of) agreed, and bought a few thousand. Ha-ha and ha. Serves me right, for listening to a paid Analyst. I richly deserve the results I got.

You ***MUST*** do your own research, and trust your own ***WILDLY WEIRD*** judgement, because it is often vastly better than what the high-paid promoters and analysts pump out. This is the truth.

I looked thru interest-rate history, (get Sydney Homer's book, rate history back to Babylon times), and saw the interest rates in modern, commercial economies usually run from a low of 2.00% to around 8% during normal times, climbing to 10 and 15 and 20% or higher, during times of crisis and war and other stupid human nonsense. In non-financial economies, rates tend to be simpler and higher - like the rates the Mafia or the loan-sharks use - 50% to 100% or higher (like maybe %100 per month, for example). So, I looked at the 4% dividend rates for banks and phone-companies, and figured, if rates normalize (say to 5% to 8%), the stock prices will (worst-case) fall to where the dividend rate has to be at or **above** the new risk-free rate. And with the risk-free rate on US Treasuries around 5% now, that means we need dividend yield rates at least a couple of points higher - say around 7%. But we needed *some* income, so, we held our little pink noses, and bought the dividend-payers. (This trade has worked for 20 years. Please realize this. Plus our AI thing was constructive.)

But our worst-case scenario, is pretty much where we are today. BNS yields OVER 7% now, as the share-price has been adjusted to the event-space we now live in. The share price has tumbled down and down, and then down more. And at that 7%+ yield, the dividend seems to almost compensate for the risk (not completely, of course), but it is now getting in the ball park of sanity. And that was my ***history-based*** analysis, which seemed off-the-wall. But it was right and the analyst happy-picture-of-the-world (with the BUY rating at $92/share), was wrong - as it often is.

The analysts are not useless - THEY ARE WORSE THAN USELESS - because they will deflect your own good and sensible analysis away from the obvious truths that must be grasped, if you are to have any hope at surviving the "Battle for Investment Survival" (as old Mr. Loeb called it..)

Nothing really changes in the markets - except for the extremes of madness and foolishness of the political poltroons, and the Leftist-philosophers (the most dangerous creatures on Earth).

The market just does it's job. It re-prices things to where the price level can change behaviour and drive effective action. That is what must be done, despite the howling and raving of the dishonest fraudsters and deceptionists in Government and the Financial industry.

Full Disclosure:

We bought some more BNS today. If you liked it at $92, back in 2022, you ought to just f*cking love it now, at 59.55. What a hilarious, f*cking stupid world. If the sh/t-for-brains folks at the Central-Banks and the Governments keep rates this high (or higher, of course) to "Fight Inflation", then they will have to either raise taxes (and destroy the Western-World national economies), or they will have to dial rates down, tolerate the 5% inflation rates, and maybe (just maybe) be able to service the current government debt-loads, with inflated currencies. This truth is right there, in the projected debt-service-cost numbers. Don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself. It's a pretty funny picture. Try not to die laughing. :)

What is really key, is that the poor Central Bank folks are using the ***WRONG MODELS*** of the modern economies. In a modern, financial-based commercial economy, money is just another factor of production, in the economist's "production function". And what the silly buggers are doing, at the world's Central Banks, is to RAISE THE PRICE of money to try to LOWER THE PRICES OF EVERYTHING ELSE. Now, we learned - in the 1970's - that THIS DOES NOT WORK! I actually worked at Pierre Trudeau's "Anti-Inflation Board". It was just a wonderful learning experience - like getting a PhD in what actually is true and actually works - and what does NOT ACTUALLY WORK. And here is what we learned: (both the little minions like me, and the old fat Liberal big-shots): You cannot LOWER PRICES IN THE ECONOMY by RAISING PRICES IN THE ECONOMY-WIDE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION FUNCTIONS. And you cannot do it by price-and-wage controls, either.

Get it?

You cannot induce LOWER PRICES by RAISING PRICES. Expressed this way, it is obvious, is it not? And if the economy is up to it's eyeballs in debt, then you have zero chance of making this work, unless there is hard evidence that the prices are rising because of too much damn demand. Just think about it: Will raising interest rates, lower the price of diesel fuel, jet-fuel and gasoline? How can it possibly do so? Will higher rates lower housing costs? OR will higher rates *increase* housing costs? Will professionals - doctors, lawyers, accountants - lower their fees, as interest rates are increased? Will grocery-sellers LOWER their prices, as their financing costs and transport costs rise?

And when folks have RUN OUT OF MONEY, then we know the DEMAND is not the problem. Some clever folks long ago called this the "Backward-bending Aggregate Supply Curve", and other neo-Keynsian bullsh/t. Back in 1979-1980, what saved us were Volker's insane greater-than-20% rates, which provoked an economic collapse, and the election of Ron Reagan (1980) in the USA and Mulroney in Canada (1984). Reagan lowered income taxes. Mulroney lowered income taxes (and also replaced the hidden FST with the visible GST, and brought in the Free Trade Act, which saved the Canadian economy from stagnation and collapse). The tax reductions were followed by a massive technological leap forward in information management - computers came down in price from *millions of dollars for a CPU and memory and disk*, to just a few thousand dollars for equivalent CPU, memory and disk capacity. The scale and extent of this technical jump, is still not well understood. Many production processes went from "Try it, let's see if it works", to "Ok, we have determined every single parameter, and we can make it work, we believe." Many do not understand this even today. Volker's high rates caused a collapse-event for many, but it was the tax reductions, the expansion of Free Trade, and the opening up of the Communist world to commercial-economic models, which reduced price-inflation. As inflation fell, so did yields and rates. This whole process was driven by extreme, positive technological change, in the Western World economies.

The canonical example is the 1972 Apollo moon-landing, with a space-ship and a car being successfully transported to the Moon, the Moon-landcape explored, and the crew returning safely. We could not even do this now. Our "Diversity" programs, which require unwise and unskilled, low-quality people to be mixed in with the super-focused smart folks, ensures that USA at least, probably will *never* be able to replicate that success. (This is a very hard truth for many people to accept. But your unwillingness to accept this truth, does not make it untrue.)

So, be advised: We are now collectively checkmated. Short of a major and complete revolutionary action, there is no effective solution now. There will be no technological bailout this time. And AI will not do it. AI can maybe help - but it is already being hamstrung and limited by the regulators, so it will be effectively neutered, we fear. The best we can do now, is to craft survival strategies, that can maybe withstand the coming deluge.

We have crafted stategies. But we must "Live in Truth", if we are to have any chance to succeed in the chaotic future we see ahead. One must understand that "Truth" and "Reconciliation" are perhaps not at all, compatible. You don't get both. You get one, or the other.

[ Sept 27, 2023 ] - Sleep for Sheep - Embrace extremeism. Really. This idea that one should seek "moderation", is not true. It's even a specific piece of actionable advice in the Jewish-Christian Bible. The metaphor suggests that hot or cold food can be acceptable, but that which is only "lukewarm", is to be spit out. There is some wisdom there. As Robert Heinlein said: "Moderation is for monks. Take big bites out of life." Or something like that, IIRC.

I've been wrestling with this idea for a while. We have done well trying to track a middle path between frequent trading, and longer-term *investing*, where one can buy-and-hold a portfolio of quality things. Except when global-shit-shifts like we are now seeing happen (and happened also in 2008, 2001, 1998, 1987, etc.), one can get just annihilated. ("Annihilate" is from a Latin term: "annihilatus", which means "to reduce to nothing", derived from "ad + nihil" = "go to nothing". I missed Latin in High School, and it cost me dearly. I had to learn little bits of it from books. This is a hard way to learn any language.)

Being "reduced to nothing" is really bad. And it is a constant fear for any market participant, who tries to embrace leverage of any kind. And you need to use some leverage sometimes, since that is how the process of "gearing" works. You don't start out in 4th gear, and you don't try to cruise in 1st, right? But the process in the markets is not as clear as the road, or the sea. Markets are a lot like the sea, They are both chaotically changable. The mariner's wisdom is to "Reduce sail, when you first have an idea that maybe you should", since then it will be easy and safe to do. Wait until the storm-front hits you, and you will have to work in a dangerous and annoying storm to get it done.

There is curious biological process known as: "anaphylaxis", which is defined as "hypersensitivity, typically to foreign proteins or drugs, resulting from prior contact with the causative agent." A common example is bee or hornet venom, which can cause life-threatening allergic reactions, which can become worse, the more one is exposed to the venom. This anaphylactic bio-process is similar to the learned behaviour that develops for surviving market participants. If you want to avoid annihilation as a market trader (also knows as "Gambler's Ruin"), you need to develop a hyper-sensitivity to losses. But of course, one also needs to let a trade "ride" for some time, and give it a bit of room to develop, and this means accepting a swing between loss and profit as the expected situation evolves over time.

But what really kills, is the "Investment" process, blindly adhered to, when the "Nature of the World" has changed. In the world of economics and the markets, the world is fairly constant, as it is the ventures themselves which fluctuate, often violently. But the world stays reasonably constant - until one enters a timeframe, when it does not remain constant. And perhaps this is where we are now. The rising interest rates for money are significant. In terms of percentage-changes, the rate-shock-shift is maybe the greatest ever seen in human history: (from 0.2% to 5%, a percentage change in value from (5.0/0.2 x 100) - 100 = 2400% increase) in roughly one year. No business or economic entity can withstand an in-year price-increase of a basic, critical factor input, without being significantly effected by such an extreme rate-of-change. And since most economic entities are highly leveraged, we can expect the shock to grow, as existing loans and bonds and mortgages are reset to the new higher rates. And what is really crazy, is that for most entities, this will be a ***price increase*** in their basic factor costs, of their production functions. So, we have the phenomenon of the Central Banks, trying to **fight inflation with price-increases**.

To us, this seems insane. But does it mean the world has really changed? Or is it just a return to normalicy? For money to work, it must have some scarcity. It must remain *real*, as those in Third World (and especially South American) economies have learned repeatedly. Junk money makes for a junk economy. A return to rational, economically sensible rates-of-return on capital, is good for a market economy. But it will be important for rates to reach levels higher than the rate-of-inflation. There must be positive real-rates of return, for investors. And that means rates will have to drift up to 7%, since 5% is not really enough.

And this seems to be becoming understood in the stock market.

We are seeing our holdings of financials just continue to get crushed like wine-grapes. And high-dividend utility stocks (like telecoms, for example), are also being sold off hard. We hold those also, too, since the telecoms were a reliable dividend-income stream. But this all is changing. High-rates are killing the values of the bonds that the banks hold to back-stop their capital requirements. So, the banks and other financials will have to set aside more assets to maintain their business models. We had expected high-rates to flow thru directly, quickly, to higher incomes for Canadian banks, but this does not seem to be happening. The banks have been increasing PCL (Provisions for Credit Losses), and NII (Net Interest Income) is not ramping up as quick as we thought it would (and should...). This is forcing us to face a re-think: Has the World Changed?

Are we looking at a financial apocalypse, here? In terms of equity values for our portfolios, we are near to this. We are down now to levels where deep rules that must be followed, in order to prevent economic annihilation, are about to have to be engaged. And I think our position is not unique. We are pretty average investors, and we are not trying to swing for the fences. We just want to survive, and not be destroyed. We seek to avoid annilhilation. We do not want to be reduced to nothing. But we are now deeply concerned that perhaps the world has made a true deep-change. This is now not about the level of interest-rates, but is about the nature of truth, reality, and economic operation and economic survival. We are seriously concerned that the political elites (the "Leaders" of our World), are simply so painfully stupid, and so dangerously out-of-touch with what is true and real, that they have perhaps accidentally engineered a possible economic collapse event, which could take the stock-markets down another ** 50% ** from where we are now.

This would kill us, quite effectively. Banks would have to merge, dividends would have to be reduced, and pension-funds, insurance companies, and government asset management efforts, would all be harmed. And our research on market historical events, suggests that these kind of mass-annihilation of capital events, are one of the specific economic tasks, that a market economy must occasionally make happen. If markets did not crash, then multi-generational economic investment would make everyone billionaires. In the 1920's, the railroad stocks were considered to be safer than US government bonds. By the mid-1930's, many of these stocks were almost worthless, and traded at small fractions of their earlier values. We are deeply concerned that our current crop of Western World "Leaders", (the "Idiots in Power") are setting the stage and engineering the political and economic processes to replicate this kind of capital destruction.

Seriously, I am waking up at night, and staring at this truth, coming towards us like a freight train to a deer, standing on the tracks. The whole "Net Zero" nonsense, and the curious re-framing of carbon dioxide as a "toxic gas" (which it is not, of course), is absolute madness. The massive price-increase of money, being used to try to bring down economy-wide price-increases, is also madness. You cannot get economic agents to lower their product prices, by raising their cost-of-production prices. We ***LEARNED THIS*** in the 1970's. I know. I was there, and we worked on exactly this problem. The 1970's inflation was caused by Nixon funding the Vietnam war with fiat money, removing the USA currency from any link at all to gold, and then getting hit with the 1973 massive "Arab Oil Shock" which doubled and then tripled the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. Interest-rates had to go over 20% to *reset* the North American economy, cause a serious economic downturn, and remove "inflation accounting" from corporate income-statements and balance-sheets. We were close to becoming 1920's Germany, with annual wage increases running at over 20% for unionized government workers. Pierre Trudeau in Canada, and Dick Nixon in the USA had no real clue what they were doing, in the realm of economics, and the Dow Jones Average had fallen close to 40%, and much more, in *real* terms. We were saved by the massive technological shift that happened, as networks of low-cost micro-computers, were able to replace the multi-million dollar data-centres, and economic de-regulation of industries like air-travel, allowed massive economic growth to happen, and continually lower costs.

And the real payoff was the end of the Cold War, and the openning up of China and Russia, who joined the rational, sane, sensible economic world. Russia transitioned to a near-democracy, Eastern Europe was freed from the yoke of Communist stupidity and cruelty, and China took over Hong Kong, and developed a US-style market economy, and everyone became more rich. The lower-cost products from China lowered our factor-costs massively here in North America. A local "Canadian made" (which really meant US-made) A/C generator for a farm, was roughly $3000 for a 5000-watt unit. A high-quality Chinese manufactured equivalent became available for $700 to $800. We bought one, still have it, and it still works, over 20 years later. This was why we had no inflation for 20 years - it was NOTHING TO DO with the level of interest rates. China became the workshop to the World, and we got lower prices for critical factor inputs.

What worries us, is that this entire process, is now being run in reverse. We are seeing all the gains and sensible, rational actions of the last 30 to 40 years, begin to go retrograde.

This is crazy. It is madness, but it is the big cycle of history, perhaps starting to become evident. Nothing beautiful lasts, we know. Regulation, and Leftist-idiocy is replacing the de-regulation that made the 1980's to the early 2000's so prosperous. Russia, under Putin, is turning inward and filling itself with absurd and unnecessary evil, lies, hate and resulting bad behaviour. China, under Xi, is turning away from a market economy, and is reverting to a command-and-control military-dominated State, threatening it's neighbours. "Re-shoring" is causing massive and absurd price increases for many commodities. Yesterday, I bought a small can of paint, a small paint-brush, and a less than 1-litre plastic bottle of Varsol, from a local retailer. A few years ago, this would have cost maybe $12 to $15. Yesterday, it cost almost $50. Prices in Canada are moving straight up, and reaching levels where all economic agents will have to respond with significant behaviour change. I looked recently at a pretty 3-year old, 4-cylinder Mustang, at the local Ford dealer. The price was over $40,000. This is a level that is economically absurd. Who can afford this? We suspect that most of the local auto-industry has a real risk of becoming un-economic. It will have to move to Mexico, or even further south. A new Mustang is roughly $56,000. The silly electric ones, are even more. And our electricty costs are 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour, which renders electric vehicles seriously expensive to charge.

We had thought the "soft-landing" idea might be feasible. But behaviour-change does not happen with a "soft-landing". You need a good, serious **crash** to get most people to wake up, and see that current and previous economic scenarios are no longer tenable. This was what the 20% interest rates, coupled with the Ron Reagan USA defense build-up ("Star Wars") that provoked postive behaviour-change in Russia, which ended the ugly "Cold War", did for us back the last time inflation got out-of-control. But there is no great leap in technology now to help us, and no tricks that we can do, by making our already junky fiat currency even more junky fiat-like. We have pulled all those levers and toggled all those switches already. And our Federal governments are already up to their eyebrows in debt. So, we will actually NEED the inflation, in order to pay off those 20- and 30-year government bonds, with fiat funny-money. Either that or we tax ourselves to death, or do an Argentina-style default.

So, we will have inflation. And we will have high interest rates (they won't come down at all), not for 10 or 20 years. They will track up to 7 to 10%, and fluctuate at those levels (or higher, like in Turkey, for example).

And *investors* (those poor, sorry fools like us!), will find that we are staring annihilation, square in the face. Think that Bank stocks cannot fall 40-to-50% from here? In 2007-2008 (not that long ago), CIBC (ticker-symbol: CM) fell from over $107 to $65 per share. In 2002-2003, it moved from a high of $58 to $35. Graham and Dodd's great "Investment Analysis" book, written in the 1930's, suggests financial stocks are so volitile, that they should not be held by non-professional investors, since temporary financial gains risk being viewed as normal-course-of-business type of earnings. They point out that this is not the case.

But the problem is now, that if we bail, we risk missing any recovery, (which may or may not happen), and we also engineer a certainty of income-stream-collapse. And as the general stock market sinks into the October sunset, we get closer to levels where automatic survival systems will force us out of our long-held positions. Of course, this is what the pros always try to do - run the goddamn stops - so that in some ways, the investment integrity of the entire stock market is now being threatened by large pro-players with unlimited capital. They can force-f*ck the small players like us, knowing that there are stops hiding down there somewhere. Push the price down low enough, and you can get a bargain. But what if the price keeps falling? Are you hoisted on your own petard? Perhaps.

It's all enough to make a good person turn full-rogue. Perhaps? :)

[ Sept 26, 2023 ] - Beyond the Chunder-Dome - Or maybe I should call this note, "The China Synth-Drone"... silly takes on apocalyptic flic-titles. We seem to be hooked on the certainty of disaster and global meltdown. "We have Nothing to Fear, except Fear Itself!" Yeah, right. That and the fact that the money will run out for most retiree's, before their lives will. "Oh shit, honey! We are out of f*cking money!" (said the old, grey-haired fellow to his honey-bunny...)

You cannot stop the death-march towards old-age, but you can avoid becoming impoverished. And becoming stupid and sick and - perhaps even worse - a Leftist! The great puking-stupid insanity that we are seeing being deployed by those in power, (our so-called "Leaders", who are often as dumb-arsed-stupid as a bag-of-hammers), is not something that you need to buy into. This is key. You must know that you are being lied-to, and that the intensity and frequency of the output of the machinery of deception, is increasing at a seriously significant rate. A simply metric is to just count the number of outright **scams** that are vectored in one's direction now. We get so much nonsense-deception, delivered by electronic means typically, that is hilarious. One simply now cannot trust the junk and drivel that is being delivered as "content". The outrageous and over-the-top fraud of "climate change" is really quite impressive. It is a *complete* fraud. Our Earth has always had violent and extreme weather patterns - pretty much everywhere. Anyone ever taking a journey outside of their local world, would learn this. Mariners learned this very quickly. Storms **regularly** sunk ships, and destroyed valuable economic and political ventures. This was always the normal course of things.

But in the same way that shit-stupid violent films with simple dumbed-down themes tend to sell well at the box-office, simple - trivially simple - lies tend to be the most effective lever in the political world. So we now get the great rumble-tumble scam of "Climate Change" - with every change in the goddamn weather being attributed to "Global Warming" - even when the f*cking temperature is FALLING! It's laughable to a level that is wonderful. Some people are so f*cking stupid now, you can tell them "Climate is WARMING", as they are freezing in the fucking darkness. The latest fraud is the "Net Zero" nonsense - which is, let's be very clear here, just another scheme by Federal Fraudsters to ***RAISE TAXES*** that ordinary citizens will have to pay. It is junk-economics, junk-science, and junk-politics - all rolled into a big ball of steaming dung, and rolled out into the political arena. And the shit-for-brains journalists (who no longer have any journals to write for, so these poor bastards are unemployed essentially), have an easy time of it, and can just parrot-the-bullshit, and collect their fees for pushing the Big Junk-Science Lie.

Canada is supposed to be trying to achieve "Net Zero" carbon-dioxide output by 2035, which is complete economic madness. It will *provably* make ***ZERO*** difference what we do in this country, with respect to global CO2 output, but the Big Lie will help the fraudsters in Ottawa raise the goddamn taxes (even higher), which will create a large, poor-underclass, which will of course become the client-constituents of the Federal Fraud that holds power here. It is comical and hilarious, like the dumb-fuck legislature-monkeys that applaud old Nazi-Shmatzi boys. Our Federal Government is an international joke - and it's all of them, not just the Leftist Lib-tards of ByTown.

So, just grasp this truth. You are being lied-to. By experts. They make their living from this machine-process of deception. And the markets, they are not much different. The tape is being painted by professional tape-painters, and every investor has to remain constantly aware of this. It's all about the vector of the gains. Who gets the win? Which way does the money flow? Just watch that, and it will tell you what is really taking place. :)

[ Sept 24, 2023 ] - The Reverse Flynn Effect - I had quite the adventure. I bought a boat. The owner let me drive it around Lake Muskoka (the prettiest lake on planet Earth, and this is the truth), and even though he would not come down in his price, I said (after the test-drive, and via cell phone) "I'll take it!" It's a nice boat. I always wanted one of these (my father had one, back in the day, and I drove around in it, when I could), so it is fun. I have a lot of minor remedial work to do bring it all up to scratch, but it's mechanics are good.

My guy selling the boat was a good guy. And I honoured his trust, by wiring him the money, without ever having met him in person. Trust is a powerful tool. Learn to use it. Always be good for your word. Always.

But what is wrong in the bigger World? Two old Scotsman can get a good deal done, and each is happy with the outcome. Yet in the bigger World, we have insane, and over-the-top stupid conflict, and very-bad-decision-making as the standard norm. What is happening? Why? What is the cause of this?

In my research on this issue, I discovered: "The Flynn Effect", which - in the 20th Century - described a phenomenon whereby each year, the IQ of people was seen to be continously increasing. This is the world I (and other older folks) grew up in. As young children, we watched the "Space Race" and the Moon-landings, and saw a world of significant, continous improvement. We were *motivated*. Some real good shit was happening, and things were getting better. We wanted to be part of the race. We learned to work goddamn hard, and push ourselves so we could get to be part of the gain-game we saw around us. And yes - we were White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Hell yes! But we still could not get apartments as students ("No Students!" was a common sign at rental apartments, in my University Town. Pretty comical - except not so comical when you were trying to rent a place to live!)

So sure, every group has problems, sometimes. But people in my cohort were *smart*. We knew how to work the system. We learned this, by inspection, by trial-and-error, and by hook-or-by-crook. There was no internet. There were libraries, and there were your friends and associates. Knowledge was gained by experience.

But now, for many, something has gone very wrong. And others have noticed this. It is called "The Reverse Flynn Effect". It is a scientific fact, that people are getting *MUCH MORE STUPID*. This is curious. Not all people, of course. Lots of good and smart folks still around, sure. But on average, IQ's are now seen to be falling. And there are very clear and obvious reasons why this is happening. Just look at the average street-scene. People walking along staring at their "smart-phones", concerned only with the digital "content" being fed to them. But there is more...

And it is here: I will offer the URL, but not make the link active. You will have to copy the URL, and then open a new page, and paste it in, to read it. Can you do that?

https://theaspenbeat.com/2021/02/18/people-are-getting-stupider-its-a-scientific-fact/

It's a good article. And the author nails exactly what is happening, and why.

And on a related topic: Starlink now has over 2 million users. We were a "Beta-Tester" at our location. Now, we are just a regular subscriber. Starlink is great. No 23,000 mile up and 23,000 mile down latency for geosynchronos satellites, and no local bullshit with crappy, low-quality Canadian junk-telecom companies (I'm talking about you guys: "Xplornet"). Starlink had a few minor outages, but basically, it works, kinda like a Tesla car. Elon Musk knows how to get stuff done. Most politcal pukewits have no clue how difficult the pointy-edge of an operational plan really is. Every time you add another requirement to a plan, you increase the chance of failure. The list of things that can go *wrong* is effectively infinite. When a complex plan comes together, and everything works right - this is very good. And it is often massively more difficult than political people - who are just talking and mouth-men and mouth-women, for the most part - ever can understand or appreciate.

So, bravo for Musk and SpaceX. They have build something good and valuable, that might just save the world. Some stupid runt from the Obama-days-of-failure, is critcal of Musk, as are some of the Democrat toad-lickers in Washington. Oh, my. What a world.

[ Sept 20, 2023 ] - Use it or Lose It! - We are in a strange time - even stranger than most. US government debt has popped up to over 33 *TRILLION* dollars. This is a lot of money, in US dollar terms. The government debt in USA grew by over $1-trillion in only the last three months. Tax revenues are way down, and the Americans are losing F-35B aircraft at an alarming rate. They seem to be malfunctioning in curious and unpredictable way.

So, the market response is to bid up the value of the US dollar - because the USA, despite all it's problems, is probably still the best bet on planet Earth. The Americans demonstrate real resilience, and know how to get stuff done. It is remarkable and impressive. We have the same nature here in Canada, but we don't showcase it as well.

I got my boat. A lovely read Sea Ray Sorrento. Time for some late-season boating...

[ Sept 15, 2023 ] - World Gone Mad - Bloody hell, it is getting weirdly strange, do you not think so? I keep seeing outright madness and extreme foolishness on a daily basis. The new Boss of Germany, who has Hitler's old job, has decided that as Germany tries to transition to an "Electric-energy" economy, he will close and abandon his nuclear-power electricity generating plants. This is so wildly stupid, it is hilarious - as if they will be using Don Quixote's new windmills to power all their over-priced electric vehicles, while they freeze at night in the dark of winter... more examples of the "Great Climate Comedy", it seems.

The USA is at war with itself, and seems to be doing just fine, which shows the awesome resilience of the American People. They are used to having shit thrown at them, and they know how to step lively. Too bad, it is their own Federal Hypercrats that are doing the poop-pitching. Let's be *very* clear here: There is *zero* chance that a Microsoft, or a Google, or an Amazon or an Apple or a Tesla or even an HP or a Compaq or a Digital Equipment Corp - or even an IBM - could ever now evolve in the European Union. THe EU is insane - not because all Europeans are stupid - it's just that their worst and most dangerously Leftist buffoons are now given so many choices of "Great Government Jobs", where no real work is needed, other than to supress initiative and push abusive (and STUPID!) redistributionist economic policies. We note that Monaco ended talks about closer EU connection, because the EU idiots wanted to remove Monaco's ability to house and protect it's own citizens. Oh, and yesterday, 6,000 black African refugees landed on the shores of Italy, and demanded free housing and food from the Italian (EU) State. How much longer does one think, that the average citizen in Italy will put up with this insane "no-borders, come and take our stuff!" Socialist-fucking-nonsense? It's just hilarious beyond belief. We are seeing a "World Gone Mad", which actually was the title of a 1930's movie, so maybe it is under copyright? (Another insane, absurd concept - everything is IP - Intellectual Property - now. Even my rants here! Hilarious!

According to AM data, money inflows to US-based ETF's (Exchange Traded Funds), have ramped up sharply, as inflation expectations are getting dialed back, apparently. I love America. They have money down there. Lots and lots and lots of money. But I fear this will this become interesting. Get ready to watch a financial "9//11* in the near future, as inflation remains strong, and becomes much more elevated than folks now expect. The UAW strike is also hilarious. Talk about biting right off, the hand that feeds you thousand-dollar bills. Auto-workers are almost artistocracy in the USA. They have big houses, nice cars, fat wives and even fatter husbands, and live well. But they want more, of course. Ford CEO says strike may bankrupt the company. I looked at a two-year-old Mustang at the local Ford dealer, two days ago. It was nice - but it was (get this, for a two-year old USED CAR): $48,000 plus 13% sales-tax, also, of course, for a price of: $54,240.00. Ha ha ha ha ha! That used to buy a nice house in town. Now, it won't even buy a small new car. Hilarious!

I should be laying in a stock of canned food, and buying and burying bags of rice and drums of diesel fuel. But instead, I am gonna go look at a V8-powered Sea Ray boat. (Good time of year, to buy a big boat. Folks don't want to pay the winterization and the storage costs.) WTF, eh? YOLO. :)

[ Sept 6, 2023 ] - Varks and Sparks - Killing me Softly, again and again. The high-dividend paying stocks we have been holding in our major portfolios are getting hammered by the rapid rise in money-rates. This is putting our economic life at risk. I was reading about a trader, who began his career by doing a term of duty in the US Marines. They abused the hell out of him - but he wisely said it made him stronger and more effective than he believed he could be. It was painful as hell, but in retrospect, he rated it a positive, life-changing experience that benefited him in his ultimate trading success (after many years of losing money). Curious how that works, yes?

Thanks to Trudeau's unwise policy choices, Canada's economy is now *shrinking*. Unlike China, where concerns exist if growth slows down, we are actually going retrograde, right at the time we have just brought in 2 million brown-skinned immigrants. Most of the new immigrants seem to be good choices, but I can't help wondering if all the new coal-black people I see walking around my little town, are going to make our local world a better place. They will have high-hopes and deep desires, and my concern is that they are racist. Seriously - the most overtly racist folks I *ever* met in my life, were brown-skinned Africans, who viewed darker-skinned Africans (from their own nations), with disgust and outright hatred. For an old white-guy, this is a weird experience. But witness the slaugher by the Saudi security forces, of the very dark-skinned Ethiopians, trying to find a way to Europe thru Saudi land. The Africans and the Arabs will kill with ease, and they have done this routinely thru their history. It is very instructive to read "Travels of Mungo Park". He found a flourishing poly-ethnic culture in West Africa in the late 1700's, during his travels into the interior. He encountered complex and fascinating social structures - he recounts being surprised that the practice of Advocate (paid-for hired lawyers) was a real professional calling, in many West African tribal cities. But he also found trans-national levels of extreme violence - between the different African nations - to be as extreme and ugly as was also the case in Europe and America. And this has not changed - just like it has not changed in Europe and Asia, especially.

So, if history is any guide, we are in for some difficult times. Like they said about Germany (another high-flying manufacturing national economy that is nose-diving): "They wanted to get Workers. But instead, they got People." And there are large costs that get incurred when you blow-up and shatter the existing social matrix. I like Africa and Africans - but I worry about the level of extreme violence that they tend to view as "No problem, man...". If this is wired-together with the new Anti-White-Guy racism that I see now everywhere, we are likely in for an ugly time, given the political fraudsters we have driving the big ship up in Ottawa. In the world I grew up in, a "mixed marriage" was something between a couple of white-folks, one Catholic, and one Protestant. But if we import American-style Anti-White racism into this country, we are gonna be in for some hard and violent times - especially in Quebec, which has a perverse and outrageous sense of it's own "national" identity.

And when the Government-sanctioned Leftist murder-squads begin to operate (the worst of "worst-case" scenarios, loved by the science-fiction writers, of course), it will further drive down our national "productivity", which is already dropping into the toilet, as any observant economist can see.

For an investor, this makes things difficult, as the basic investment process, requires some degree of confidence both in the future, and that there actually *will* be a future. I met a little shop-clerk girl a few days back, who had come here from Karkiv, Ukraine. The Ukrainians had had 30 years of peaceful and quite successful economic and social development, as had Russia. And they have all watched it all be smashed and destroyed by some stupid, vicious short-dwarf clown, who decided to wage a brutal and unnecassary war to puff his own limp ego.

History is made by the stupidity, greed, shit-ugliness and cruelty of unwise people, and I suppose this trend will never change. And it complicates the investment process to no end.

See, you cannot become a rich man in Babylon, if the City itself is destroyed by a$$holes, bandits and invading terrorist armies. And when I see what is being done to gut and destroy the traditional old-school "Conservative" social-matrix in Canada, by importing litearlly *millions* of brown-folk who basically despise us, and are jealous of what we have created, I grow concerned that a stable and prosperous future may not be the most-likely future scenario. And my evil and deeply cynical "Inner Trader" whispers to me: "Don't you see? This is a deliberate *Plan* by the Trudeau Leftists. They *WANT* to destroy the Old Canada, and replace it with an "Africanized" Canada of conflict and hatred and growing social anger. This will allow their false and abusive political ideology to retain power and control. They will *win* the "Culture Wars", by actions to destroy all that made Canada successful. You must not be surprised that Liberal policy choices are destructive. They are DESIGNED to be as DESTRUCTIVE as they can be, to ensure that the Liberals stay in control of things. This is an obvious strategy, and has been proven by Kings, Princes and Dictators throughout history. No one votes for the evil-dick Leftist/Statist/Facist assholes like Putin and Trudeau when times are good. The bad-boys at the top of the "Goodfellows" gang-heap, require *CRISIS* to make their case, and retain their ugly hold on Power. This is the primary lesson of History!"

My "Inner Trader" is a real prick. But he is a good analyst, and he keeps me from being stupid, like some Leftist idiot, out in the "flower fields" of false pictures-of-things. And he makes me money, so I have to keep him around. He has an annoying feature of calling the future course of events with curious accuracy. :)

[ Sept 4, 2023 ] - Towards Dogma Technology? - There was this curious movement, many years back, called the "Dogma Film" idea, where films were suggested to be made without reference to special-effects, or any high-cost trickery or illusion. It was similar to the old "Nouvelle Vague" (New Wave) movement back in the 1960's in French cinema, where this idea of "cinema veritas" or "true cinema" was suggested. Of course, all these "truth in film" movements die, because all film is a complete illusion and a falsehood, and it cannot be anything else.

What is interesting, is that technology and many technical processes are at a similar juncture today. Nothing is real anymore anywhere in the World of Technology. It is a false, "Mad-Men" style, advertising-driven world, completely dominated by neural hacking, behavioural-science-driven motivational trickery, and overt obfuscation. This is curious. We wonder how much longer, this "World of Pure Illusion" can be made to manifest the wealth-transfers that seem to be taking place. It seems quite unsustainable, in our opinion. (I sound like an old, grumpy stock-market bear, but really, we are not bearish at all.)

We suspect that a *NEW* movement will be made towards greater simplicity and greater economy, as well as greater honesty, in the world of technology and technology-driven promotional actions. The illusions are perhaps just a little too "Grand" these days? What Elon Musk is doing with "X" (the former piece-of-shit Twitter thing), is necessary and sensible. Typical Musk. Turn "X" into a payment-tool and a Zoom-style audio & video calling network, and he gets to eat the lunch of the two biggest fuck-the-customer, big-moat, lotsa-cash entities in commerce: Banks and Phone Companies. So very very obvious, but difficult to do. But if done right, it will make "X" worth **MORE** than what he paid for it.

I am back to messing around with Fortran programs, on a (simulated) DecSystem 20/20. The old programs were useful, and allowed a Government Agency I worked for, as well as some private investors, to actually get an accurate picture of the world, (as much as that is ever possible), and engage the process of wise investing. For Governments especially, this requirement is critical now, even more so than it is for private citizens. You invest wisely, or you get thrown under the bus and crushed like a bug, by the relentless march of events.

[ August 22, 2023 ] - To Serve Man - I recall a Twilight Zone episode, where the Aliens arrive on Earth, and offer gifts, a special Book, and seek folks to return with them to their planet. The Alien's book title is translated as "To Serve Man", and of course, just as all the happy folks have boarded the alien spaceship, a translation-analyst rushes in and shouts "We've translated the Book! It's a cook-book!"

And this is where investors in financials are now. We are being eaten alive, and it is not nice. If you own duration, you are being devoured. And the biggest owners of duration are governments, because of their debt levels.

We are putting financial-system operational stability at risk. Wealth-destruction is happening, and it might just accelerate. Too many agencies and individuals will be harmed if this current approach to "inflation fighting" continues, and the irony is, that the unwise actions by the various economic authorities will harm the operational integrity of the leveraged governments most of all. The rising tax-costs combined with rising debt-service costs for households and businesses, will cause INFLATION, as folks will try to push their higher costs forward as rising wage demands and higher prices for products.

The Western World is in a debt-trap, and pushing interest-rates up too quickly while also dialing-back money-supply is certain to have non-linear consequences. And it might just consume us all, if the markets implode.

[ August 20, 2023 ] - Getting Data from Original Sources - This is critical, if you want to really determine what the heck is going on. You *must* get your data from *original* sources, and do your own analysis. This does not ensure you can get to the truth, but it will help you avoid fraudsters and deception strategies. Maybe.

Here is an example. What is the M2 Money Supply in USA, and how has it changed over time? The St. Louis Federal Reserve publishes their data-series, and it is clean and honest data. Use it. Here is the URL for M2 (Weekly, NOT-Seasonally Adjusted) (The seasonal adjustment is moving-average smoothing - which you should do yourself, if you need that.):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS

You can download this series as a .CSV file, using your web-browser. Then, you can use Gnuplot to print it, IF you set Gnuplot to use the format of the .CSV file that the St. Louis Fed uses, which is date, comma, number, with date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Gnuplot can be installed on any Linux machine, and it works well. It is shareware, with a no-fee licence for private use, I believe. To make a chart of the downloaded file, which I renamed as: "USM2NS.csv", you can start Gnuplot, and enter the commands:

Example of How to Plot a US M2-Weekly ".csv" file

Start "gnuplot"... and enter:

reset
set datafile separator ","
set xdata time
set timefmt '%Y-%m-%d'
set format x "%Y"
set title "US Weekly M2 Money-Supply from Nov. 3, 1980 to July 7, 2023 in Billions of US$"
plot 'USM2NS.csv' using 1:2


And that should pop up a window, with the plot, which you can adjust, copy, print or whatever.

The important point here, is that you can see the amazing money-supply growth which has taken place and is the obvious reason for the serious inflation in prices we are seeing.

First, they killed the retiree's, by dialing down the rate of return on low-risk investments, to zero. That was quite a thing. It was all accompanied with a run-up in the money supply. This was stimulus, but not for folks making conservative investments. Now, with the inflation and the attempt to fix this problem, we are getting a mirror-image of QE. But QT, with rapidly increasing rates, and falling M2 (the Federal Reserve is not buying debt-paper with printed money), and is actively reducing it's portfolio. This is causing some real issues. With the run-up in the money-supply, we got serious (and maybe growing) inflation. To try to limit this inflation, the money supply is now being rapidly contracted, and rates have been zoomed from 0.2 percent to over 5%, for the short-term rates at wholesale level. Of course, retail and business loan rates are much higher, depending on perceived credit-risk. The US 30-year mortgage rate moved from 2.8% (February of 2021) to over 7.5% (it's most recent level, August 2023). So now, we are getting a double hit, with falling money supply, and rising rates, which are increasing household and business debt-service costs substantially, locking up the housing markets, and harming the economics of commercial real-estate, and it's associated investors. The rate-rise has been *extremely* fast, and combined with the M2 changes, this represents a major economic shift.

We can see that M2 is declining now, at the same time as interest-rates have been shot to the moon (percentage-wise), and this is a curious strategy. It might just be too much, too quickly. QE is all well and good as a stimulus, but QT (Quantitative Tightening), might just kill us all, if it is dialed-in too quickly. The obvious strategy, that a sane person would suggest, is first, just stop doing the stimulus. Take interest-rates back to normal (3% to 5% from zero-based), and then stabilize the M2 level. But the US Authorities are moving very fast, in the opposite direction, and they are breaking things.

We have already seen major US banks (Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic) fail outright, and letting this happen, was just plain stupid and bad. It really did not need to happen. It shows an *ASTONISHING* lack of wisdom and understanding on the part of the US Federal authorities, and I am really surprised to see this.

But, so it goes... (as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.) What is unclear, is just how the heck we get that "soft-landing" scenario. So far, it seems to be playing out. We might get lucky. But the key here, is that inflation can ALSO happen because of real scarcity, and we are actually seeing this. IF the inflation now is mostly due to true scarcity of material and people and capital, then we actually will NEED to have the inflation, and dialing down the M2 and raising rates, WILL NOT FIX THE SCARCITY PROBLEM. It will, in fact, make it MUCH worse, and this is what I worry about.

The price mechanism is the signaling-device for correct economic allocation. Rising prices signal scarcity situations, and correctly cause capital to shift from other areas so that the scarcity can be addressed. We may NEED to have some real price inflation, for several years, just to address the planned changes in economic mix, and deal with the many issues facing the global economy. We may need to REVERSE the money-supply QT, to prevent a violent and war-creating economic collapse in output. And this looks like it might already be showing up in the data. The US Federal Government debt-servicing costs are close to ONE TRILLION US dollars per year now. Rapidly rising rates will further balloon this number. The rapid changes the Federal Reserve is making, will seriously inflate government debt cost and force up taxes, which will then force rising costs onto households and businesses. This will ADD TO INFLATION PRESSURES. The objective of economic planners should be stability. And the best way to encourage stability is to avoid doing stupid actions that break things, hurt people, and impair financial-system operation.

We need to change the program. And the first step to repair a broken system, is to stop smashing at it with the big hammers of stupidity, politics, and action-for-the-sake-of-action.

The next moves in rates, might be a fast reversal of the run-up we have just seen, probably by a couple of hundred basis points. And then, if we are lucky, a stable economic environment might be created. Maybe. Of course, this will likely involve new folks being in charge, also. This will have to happen, regardless of the rate-scenario that unfolds. And we can expect prices to move upward, to reflect the new levels of scarcity that are evident, and will become even more evident, as the significant costs of the various economic shifts that are taking place, are more clearly recognized over time.

[ August 17-18, 2023 ] - Paddling Your Canoe on a Fake Lake? - It just keeps getting more and more funny, doesn't it? We seem to have made the transition from LIBOR to SOFR, but there are concerns that this does not really fix things - or does it? SOFR - the Secure Overnite Financing Rate, which is published by the New York Federal Reserve, is a different beast than LIBOR. LIBOR got axed because it was being manipulated (big surprise, eh? I coined the term: "London Interest-rate, Bogusly Offered by Rogues", but that is not really fair. LIBOR was a real rate, in that it had credit-risk built into it. SOFR on the other hand, is an administered rate, near as I can tell. I am still digging down the rabbit-hole here. I noticed that some of BNS's NVCC (Non-Viable Contingent Capital) paper, where rates float, are pegged to the CME 3-month future SOFR, and the CME rate may or may not track the New York Federal Reserve spot SOFR, so maybe it encapsulates credit risk a bit better?

What I am trying to figure out, is an answer to a simple question: Does the transition from LIBOR to SOFR and/or CME 3-month SOFR make much of a difference, and if it does, is this difference a positive or a negative for banks and other loan-granters and loan-buyers? For now, I am unclear. It seems to be that SOFR is no better and likely no worse than LIBOR, and since it is a published rate from a Government Agency, it is less likely to be hacked and fiddled, so as to benefit trading-floor folks in the banks that were setting it. So that is a positive.

But it just smells funny to me. It means the rate is not set by a market-process. It looks like ( but probably is not actually), an administered rate. If it IS an administered rate, then it may be a real cost to banks, in that in periods of market stress and crisis, the SOFR-pegged rates on loans will not change. This seems a bit weird, but perhaps it might introduce more stability into the whole financial system. It seems weird, because typically, during a crisis, rates tend to increase significantly, to compensate loan-granters for their taking on the risk that they might not get paid back. During the recent crash-and-burn meltdown of SVB and First Republic Bank, the SOFR did not move too much. This is both good and bad, depending on which side of the trade one is on.

And it thinking about this a bit more, we think it DOES offer benefits to banks. In a time of crisis, where rates typically zoom up, and thus the market price of pegged floating-rate instruments (bonds, bills, preferreds) would be expected to change rapidly, the use of SOFR may reduce the price change of floating-rate paper pegged to it. This reduces the rate-of-change of market-value of the paper that underpins bank capital. The valuation of the pegged paper can be expected to have lower volatility.

So, it all looks good. The New York Fed and the system itself, can absorb financial shocks, without big changes in a short period of time, which tends to be destabilizing, as big changes can provoke big changes, regardless of what was the initial triggering event. So, an administered SOFR looks like a good thing. But I almost wrote: "so a rigged SOFR, looks like a good thing." But it is probably *not* rigged, and use of the CME-3month Future SOFR (which is a complex weighted average, the exact calculation of which is explained in CME documentation), is maybe able to capture some credit-risk. Given that LIBOR is dead (and was killed for being hacked by traders), the new reference rate is probably a good choice. And it is not rigged, as long as the Federal Reserve exists, and is willing and able to provide backstop funding for financial institutions that are in trouble, at SOFR rates.

But it does appear we are moving *away* from a market-driven process here. The yields on floating rate loans and financial instruments pegged to SOFR will show nice stability. Until they do not. Banks and others can issue floating rate paper, holders can expect to see reasonable stability in the entire financial process, the rate cannot be rigged or hacked by traders to make insider illegal benefits, and the government can gain another fine-grained tool for gain-riding the operation of the entire financial economy. It looks to be a win-win-win model for all concerned.

And it looks like the new SOFR peg, and the associated system stability it is likely to enhance, may be a nice thing for the banks. And for bank investors. At first it looks like a bit of a "Fake Lake" model, a new LIBOR that is set by the Government, and not by the marketplace. But on closer examination, it seems to be a positive strategy, which given that the banks can truly access funds at the Federal Reserve at the SOFR rate, it is thus by definition, not a fake-rate. It may be an *administered* rate, but in this age of highly regulated markets, where pretty much *everything* is administered to some degree, this is not a bad thing.

Right? Make sense? Or am I missing something? The thing that worries me (and makes me lose sleep at night) is that administered-markets, where the Government regulates and controls most economic and financial activity, can ossify, and become too rigid. When flexibility is lost, instead of bending with the winds of change, things tend to break. In the historical record of markets, one sees these long periods of comfortable stability, followed by a surprising system-wide shock, which causes cascade collapse.

So, although we applaud stability-mechanisms, we also caution that market forces should determine market costs, and that this cost-setting mechanism should not be unduly expropriated by Government Authorities.

SOFR Links:

This explains SOFR:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/sofr

This article below explains the obvious problem: During a crisis event, the LIBOR rate would be expected to rise, as it contains a credit-risk component. This is an observed characteristic during periods of financial stress. Folks loaning funds, during a crisis, want to be compensated for the increased credit risk they are probably taking on. This is natural, and sensible, and it is how markets work. SOFR, which is based on US Federal Reserve overnight rates, may actually fall as the Authorities attempt to address the crisis. And thus SOFR may mis-price the various floating rate debt instruments that are pegged to it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sun-sets-libor-its-successor-rate-may-heighten-bank-risks-2023-05-22/

The transition from USD LIBOR to Term SOFR directly affects bank shareholders. Example:

https://scotiabank.investorroom.com/2023-06-28-Scotiabank-announces-transition-information-from-USD-LIBOR-to-Term-SOFR-for-Subordinated-Additional-Tier-1-Capital-Notes

Here is the CME documentation on their 3-month Term SOFR future instrument:

https://www.cmegroup.com/articles/faqs/cme-term-sofr-reference-rates.html

What is interesting, is that using SOFR, as opposed to LIBOR, does appear to offer a benefit to borrowers, as the rate that the loan is pegged to, is typically discounted with respect to the LIBOR rate. This is indicated in a recent study, here:

https://www.norges-bank.no/contentassets/4c30d6a7361740a1838e5a761971cffe/wp-7-2023-sofr.pdf?v=06/16/2023151415

But, does using SOFR offer a benefit to banks and other loan-granters? We think perhaps yes, as it looks like using SOFR enhances financial system stability. This appeared to be the case, during the SVB and FRC collapse, earlier this year. But in all honesty, we are not yet sure.

Time will tell. Or maybe it won't.

[ August 16, 2023 ] - "Bong Bong Bong..." - You know what those warning bells sound like? In so many curious areas... subway-train doors closing, aircraft stall-warnings, nuclear-reactor control room chamber-temperature monitors, missile-launch console triggers, automobiles when you don't fasten your seatbelts, and even our GE-refrigerator, when we leave the door open.

Maybe we need something like this, for economic risks and errors, that can lead to disaster. Could we put warning bells like this in the Government offices and legislatures, to warn the politicians and regulators, when they are buggering up the economic processes? Might help.

[ August 15, 2023 ] - Stop the Steel! - Anybody study the history of US Steel and Kennedy, back in the 1960's? US Steel was a big deal back then. They raised prices, and Kennedy and his gang wanted prices to be held low, so he talked at them. Kennedy talked a lot, and threatened to do various things that upset lots of folks in positions of power. Some suggest that this is why he was removed using a very direct method. US Steel is not what it used to be - but then, really, who among us are? :)

I personally think that Jack Kennedy was what the British call (in private conversations) "a real cunt." He was an arrogant, ego-centric spoiled-rich kid, son of a gangster, and a Catholic to boot, with a very big chip on his shoulder, and a bad back which caused him regular pain. But he was smart. And he projected a solid and effective charisma, and this was used - in the beginning of the Television Age, when the medium really did become the meat of the message - to his great success. But he still was what he was. His pissing contest with the US Steel company, was quite possibly more than just a little personal. And it made history, and entered the Economics textbooks, as a special form of "What Governments can Do to Combat Inflation" - which is basically blame the business-people running companies, rather than bad government policy choices, which government officials tend to mostly make. And because the public is stupid, (let's be honest) this kind of shitmouth talk is often *very* effective. It does not bring down inflation - but it can get the cunts re-elected. And that is what mostly matters to them. As a fellow associate says: "Politicians are 'coin-operated'. They are like salesmen, and seek electoral advantage, same as salesmen do whatever it takes to earn their commissions."

Here is a summary, complete with some video ("Age of Television", at it's beginning, when it was exciting and mostly honest...)

https://www.wfmz.com/features/historys-headlines/historys-headlines-men-of-steel-vs-jfk/article_b15e0e12-fd3e-11ec-85fa-d7489f2b326c.html

It is interesting to see the Cleveland-Cliffs buy-out offer, and the subsequent other bids emerge. We wonder if all this is really *real*. It certainly has popped the stock price of "X". We think Elon Musk should make a bid, and capture the ticker-symbol "X", creating a merged entity between the former "Twitter" and US Steel. "X" marks the spot. Or is it "X", the "Unknown"?

But just to be clear: I like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It would probably be a good thing, if he got elected USA President. He has real courage, and shows a willingness to lean into difficult truths, which is a unique and special skill, that I think a good leader needs to have.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/08/14/full_interview_robert_f_kennedy_jr_talks_to_tucker_carlson_about_secret_service_neocons_assassinations.html

[ August 14, 2023 ] - Don't Lie To Me, Argentina - There are times, truth be told, when I feel like I am living in a Phillip K. Dick storyline. I keep seeing the same idiotic, absurdist political and economic strategies being played out, by these various brain-dead, lightweight arrogant hollowskulls - and it just keeps coming, like when Newman in Seinfeld describes how the mail - which of course always keeps coming - makes postal workers "go postal". I have been reading about the latest devaluation of the "peso" in Argentina. What exactly now is the "peso", anyway? It must be some kind of monkey-money, printed by spirits of the German Central Bankers of 1922. I studied the famous "Currency Board" debacle back around the turn of the century, when Argentina tried to enforce a peso-to-US-dollar parity. Their government mismanaged that completely. And now they apparently have blown up the "peso" yet again, devalued it by 18% overnight, and have asked for a $7.8 (US) billion round of funding from the IMF. Again.

It's amusing that Congressman Javier Milei won 30% of the vote, and that he wants to "dollarize" the economy, and reform the Argentine Central Bank (by ending it!) All good ideas. But he stands no chance in the October elections, as he is a sensible, sane, right-wing guy in a land of socialist cheaters. Inflation runs at over 100% in Argentina, the "peso" does not float, and the interest rate is 118%. The Official (ie. FIXED) exchange rate for the peso is 350 to the US dollar, but the street-rate is between 665 to 675 to the dollar. The entire economic model of fixed, government-controlled currency exchange rates is an economic-textbook example of what NOT to do. The country is kept poor by traditional socialist economics, it routinely and regularly defaults on it's government bonds, and the extreme inflation that is the result of unwise socialist policy actions, ensures that much of the population lives in permenant poverty. The nation is funded by IMF actions.

Why does the IMF (which just means US up here in the Northern Reach), keep funding these deadbeat Socialists? Why oh why? They are just flopfraud monkeys that will not pay their bills. Or repay their bonds. Cut them off. Say finally: "Enough is enough, you worthless trolls!" Use whatever abusive language that is necessary to get their attention, and tell these Spanish-speaking Leftist dumbpucks, that the IMF will not give them ANY MORE HARD-CURRENCY MONEY. NONE AT ALL ! At least not until they learn to stop being so collectively stupid and dishonest. They are like mean, spoiled children. Tell them it is over. Pound sand, deadbeaters. Argentina could be a rich, successful nation, with a bright future. But instead, it is a sad basket case of socialist serial failure.

It must be time that someone said this: "NO MORE MONEY FROM THE NORTH. You are on your own!" Better yet: Send the Argentino State some Invoices, and when they don't pay, have gunboats shell Buenos Aries until it is a flaming ruin. Of course, that will never happen. But maybe it actually should. Wealth-hole nations need to learn that when they borrow money - THEY HAVE TO RE-PAY IT! - and when they don't, then there will be major hell to pay. This is how it has to work, otherwise liars and shitmouths just end up running everything, and nothing can be built-up, improved or fixed at scale. These gangster folk of The South, need to learn the concept of keeping their promises, and repaying their bonds and loans. If a nation DEFAULTS over and over and over again, it should be educated in the way of the honest, honorable world. This education must be clear, and immediate. Instead, we create these bogus agencies, and just hand the defaulters and the fraudsters MORE NORTHERN WEALTH to squander and destroy. And then WE keep doing this nonsense over and over again.

The IMF is becoming just another obsolete "Three-Letter Agency" that should be ended. All it does is extract money from the North, and piss it away in the economic sand-storms of the Great Southern Ignorance. This insane serial waste-of-wealth needs to be ended. The program needs to be changed. Otherwise, no project-driven improvement is possible.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/argentina-markets-face-election-hangover-after-far-right-primary-bombshell-2023-08-14/

A partial history of the recent Argentine Defaults in this century, is provided on a Wikipedia page, which of course ignores as much as it illustrates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_debt_restructuring

Current long-duration US-dollar Argentina sovereign bonds (due in 2038 and 2041) currently trade around 30 cents on the dollar. JP-Morgan analysts rate Argentina debt as "market weight", which is Wall-Street code for basically: "The market says these bonds are shit, and will not likely be repaid, right? So, we are telling you that these bonds are shit. But we cannot come right out and say that, since we made some serious money putting deals together to sell these shit-bonds to investors, insurance companies, pension-funds, and so on. So, instead of saying "Fuck, no, these bonds are shit. Argentina does not pay it's bills.", we just say "Market Weight", and you then are supposed to look at what the *market* is saying, and it is saying: "These bonds are shit." Ok? All is clear? "

[ August 11, 2023 ] - Good News Week - Well, the first tourist flight of "VSS Unity" actually worked, and no-one got killed. This is actually pretty damn impressive, and bravo to Mr. Branson for pulling this together. When the first prototype crashed I thought it might be the end, but they pressed-on, and got finally to this damned impressive result. Nice to see some good news.

[ August 10, 2023 ] - Same Lies, Different Century - Hard to believe how insane our sad world is becoming. I recall the "Clipper Chip" debate under the "Clinton" Administration in the USA, many years back. And now, more "Public Safety" laws in the UK are planning to require technology companies to allow Government access to encrypted communications to "protect the children", yatta, yatta, and yatta.

I get so disgusted and annoyed at Government scammers who trot out the same old lies and frauds, in order to damage our world, and give their own incompetent and dishonest organizations more overt, explicit power to destroy basic human freedom. What the hell is wrong with these idiots who dominate our governments? We keep having these same unwise, dishonest bone-stupid pieces of bad-evil legislation keep coming down the pipe, with disgusting, disturbing regularity. It's madness, and it just never ends.

Here are some details of the NSA's "DietyBounce" product, as documented back in 2008, in their "ANT Catalog", which offered spy-groups various ways to hack computer-systems and exfiltrate data. This is now history, and much more advanced techniques - for iPhones and other wireless devices - are available which can compromise secure communication. This kind of mass-wiretapping computer-hacking exercise, explicitly violates "black-letter" Canadian law. It is because of illegal assault like this - which is funded and carried out by USA Government Agencies, and the UK GCHQ - that *very strong encryption* is a minimum requirement for any kind of critical communication on the internet. Laws which seek to weaken encryption, and allow State monitoring of private communication, profoundly degrade human freedom, and are intensely harmful to us all. This kind of spybot nonsense is a direct threat to our society and to the operational integrity of our civilization. It puts everyone at risk. (Click to enlage, ESC to exit)

Here is a link to the UK's plan to require messenging applications to hand over their encryption keys to the dim bulbs in the UK Tory Government:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-defends-plan-demand-access-094206623.html

This is just absurd, abusive and insane. It will do **nothing** to protect children, and will do **everything** to weaken, degrade, and possibly destroy the integrity of basic human communication, using the public internet. It is such an awful stupid piece of ill-advised legislative foolishness, that it will perhaps end Tory rule in the UK.

Quite literally, all Mr. Starmer and his Labour-Lefties need to do, is to promise to completely scrap this stupid, socially destructive law, and once-and-for-all state that encrypted communication, which must be secure so it can be trusted, will not be degraded or tampered with, by UK Government Agents or spybots.

That will ensure that all the right-thinking, rational folks (there must be some left in the UK, right?), will NOT VOTE FOR THE TORIES, and thus Labour will form the next UK Government.

I am serious about this. The UK Conservatives are being astonishingly goof-stupid, and this line about "protecting the children" by insisting on weak-encryption technology and State-run AI-spyware, should earn the Tories a trip to the political wilderness.

They are just too clueless and unwise to be allowed near the levers of power. The proposed requirement to allow Government agents and AI-spyware direct access to UK encrypted internet communication, is just wrong beyond belief. The Tories used to understand the danger of bad laws like this. What is wrong with these people now? Have they no understanding at all, of technology and how it is most often USED AND ABUSED by dishonest Government operators?

Once encryption is broken, by surrendering keys - IT IS BROKEN - completely and absolutely. The communication channel cannot be trusted. This is not about "privacy" - it is about basic data integrity. If you can break communication integrity, you could, for example, *insert* child-porn into messages, and drop these onto hard-drives, and then mount a "search-and-siezure" operation to raid some political operative's offices, and engineer a political outcome which has nothing at all to do with "protecting children". The entire process of degrading encryption and "key escrow" requirements is all about politics, and gaining political and administrative power. It is a very bad idea.

Seriously: UK Labour: Want to win the next election? Here is the algorithm: Make it clear in plain English, that UK laws will not be twisted or crafted to engineer weakened encryption. Just make it clear that modern commerce and all private human communication requires secure encryption, and that the focus of child-protection efforts will be directed at actually helping children in distress, not in weakening communication encryption that the modern world now relies upon.

Right-wing, Libertarian folks will understand the wisdom of this approach, as will anyone who knows anything about economics, or technology or science or psychological characteristics of large organizations.

If Labour in the UK can get that message out, and keep that promise, then the UK Tories may well see a large block of their traditional base, walk away and vote in favour of freedom and the right to enjoy secure communication that is not being degraded by bad law, AI-enabled spyware and channel-monitoring spybots.

"What?" you might say. "AI-enabled spyware and channel-monitoring spybots?" Sure. Kinda like what Cisco provided to the Chinese Communists, back in 2001 and 2002. And since this action is now the subject of a California-based law-suit, we will get to find out more details about how Cisco's nasty technology actually worked. Were any "children" actually "protected?" Not bloody likely. But a lot of Chinese political activists went to jail, along with several thousand folks in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

[ August 7-8, 2023] - March of the Templars - Latin is absurdly seductive. There is something disturbingly fascinating about the history of Dead Worlds. European history was denied us as children, as the various political forces in the 1960's conspired to degrade our access to our heritiage and our illustrative European history. We had to study the "Beaver Trade", and local nonsense that was truly at the margins of the key action. So perhaps that is it. Roman history was never used to torment us as kids. We had to discover it for ourselves, in old books - and now, of course, on-line, where everything can be found. I am happy I could determine the secret to the Roman dodecahedrons. Their use as calculators is certain, as I have worked out several ways they could have been used. The idea is to put yourself in a mindset, where you MUST use Roman Numerals for calculation, which is just weirdly difficult - but it is not impossible. If one can figure out how DKIM and public-key cryptosystems actually work, then truly, any algorithm is tractable, right? :)

History can actually be useful - it can be more than just political storytelling. It can illustrate and educate in a pro-active manner, and provide clear, object lessons on how complex and difficult situations can be dealt with, both from a low-level (as a "Red-Shirt" working below deck), and also as a Master and Commander, in charge of the ship itself. Studying history is a bit like cheating on an exam. You can just look up how this problem was successfully addressed in a historical context, and you can get a pretty good idea who has to be killed, to make a plan work succesfully. (Just kidding, of course - but history is blood-soaked, no question about it. Humans are violent and difficult units.)

I suspect with some concern, that we are all about to face very difficult times in the near future.

This curious feeling is now being confirmed by various data sources, despite their continuing to point to rising markets combined with rising risks. The S&P 500 trailing-12-months is over 25 times earnings, and even the projected S&P P/E is over 20 times, with the long-run average being in the 15 to 16 range.

So, given a 20 times P/E, we have an earnings-yield of 5 percent (just take the reciprocal). Given that investment-grade bonds are in the 4% to 5% range, the equity-risk premium is gone, and one has to admit and accept that equity valuations are stetched. And this is occuring in time-frame of rising global conflict.

The "de-globalization" trends are seriously economic-negative, and this is true, regardless of one's political view. The de-globaliztion trend combines with unattractive historical reversions.

The Chinese are effectively bankrupt, and the Russians are reverting to classical, historical norms of extreme, brutal, sadistic madness on the part of their perhaps mentally-disturbed leaders. What is so interesting, is that this has been the pattern, so many times before. The Russian people are good and generous, but their leaders are curiously evil and for various reasons, often seem to be truly terrible people. They know and understand and use extreme-violence as the solution to major problems - and they do this repeatedly. This pattern repeats and repeats.

And China is known for wealth and corruption - with a brutal, dangerous "Forbidden City" mental-process world-view, which results in dynastic flowering, followed by horrific warfare, social and economic collapse, and tragic, extreme outcomes. The best thing a Chinese person can do now, might be to get the hell out, before the current corrupt regime collapses into warfare and dynastic conflict. (Lots of Chinese are here now. They are fine people also, generous and honest for the most part. And they come with cash. Nothing wrong with that.)

Perhaps it is the fate of the "World Island" to experience collapse and conflict. Their long history seems to know little else. It is a history of bloodshed, violence and conflict that does not seem to be repairable or changeable.

Those of us in the enlightened world - the Free Island of North America - we had bloody well better get our act together, replace our weak and mis-guided leaders, and prepare our little World-Island for the conflict that is certain to come. If we fight amongst ourselves, then we will be crushed - as Hunter S. Thompson said: "They will stomp us like rats in a closet...". I have never had to stomp rats in a closet, but the image is a effective one.

German history has much to teach us. And in the coming conflict, it is likely that instead of Germany being an enemy, this time, they will be a trusted front-line ally, as Japan will also. Curious times.

If and when the Great Debt-Inflated Financial Bubble implodes (as it certainly must, at some point in the future), the world will look very different, and the conflict will likely be extreme. Of course, we hope we are wrong in this world-picture, but I just cannot see any elegant or successful solution to the current path-to-the-future we are tracking. What is curious, is that we have really no alternative to being fully-invested, as we will be vapourized by economic inflation, if we are not invested. It's a classical historical situation, not unlike 4th and 5th century Europe, or German and Austria in the early 1920's.

[ July 30, 2023] - Roman Dodecahedrons - I was reading about Roman Dodecahedrons, of which over 100 examples have been found in Celtic Europe (England, France and Germany) over the last couple of hundred years. They are made of copper and/or bronze typically, and have knobs at the vertex locations.

Excited about this. The Roman Dodecahedrons were ***calculators***. I am close to being certain of this. The whole insight came in a curious flash. I read about these curious objects, which some have said were "knitting" tools. Except knitting was not known in Roman 2nd and 3rd century AD. It just plain did not exist. But Roman Numerals did, and had to be used to calculate sums and even the monthly interest payments on loans. (Image Credit: Woudloper/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0) (See the July 30, 2023 note.)

The purpose of the Roman Dodecahedrons is said to be unclear, and it seems unlikely they were used for knitting, as the Romans did not have any evidence of knitting, which does not enter the historical record until roughly 1000 CE. It is noteworthy that these artifacts have often been found with coins and other buried valuables.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dodecahedrons-roman-empire

Some have suggested they were for knitting gloves, but this is unlikely, since knitting was not invented for another thousand years. There are *lots* of Roman artifacts, but no knitted items, since they just did not have knowledge of knitting.

But I think I know what they were. It came in a strange flash of insight - just a flash, not from long thinking about it.

I believe they were (are) calculators of some sort. Roman numeral math is quite different, since the Roman math has no zero. Children often count (like prisoners in jail), with a base-five (no-zero) system - ie. 1, 11, 111, 1111, and then 1111 with a slash through it for five. The dodecahedrons, with their 5-sides, and a piece of string, could offer a version of this kind of counting, similar to counting on human fingers.

The Roman Dodecahedrons were likely Roman calculators - mostly for adding and counting, probably. The Romans made extensive use of finance, and they charged interest for borrowed money. They had to have a quick way to calculate. I don't know exactly how they worked, but it came to me in a flash - these devices were (are) ***calculators***.

The South American Inca's used ropes with knots to make numeric records and calculate, and the Asian world invented the abacus calculator. These twelve-sided Roman artifacts of five-sided faces (with the knobs), would have had a piece of string wound around them. Wind string around one surface (with small hole), and you count five. Then, for six, one wind around the next small hole surface, or perhaps the knob at the vertex of the surface, and you count five. The next surface, with a bigger hole, might be the Roman Numeral "X". Two knobs wrapped on that surface, would be 20, which would then allow you to encode Roman numerals on this device.

The small hole might represent a units surface. Fully wrapped, (with string or a thin leather strip), it would represent Five or "V". A fully-wrapped 10 surface, indicated by a larger hole, could represent the 50 (Roman Numeral "L").

Counting proceeds by winding or unwinding string (or perhaps thin leather strips), from surface to surface, in a I, X, C and M order. A fully-wrapped X (or 10) face, would represent 50. The next bigger number after L (50) is 100 (Roman Numeral "C"). There appear to be three or 4 different sized holes. To keep track of which numeral one is at, the hole size changes. This provides both a tactile and visual clue to where you are in a count.

The Roman Dodecahedron is almost certainly an adding/subtracting aid.

I need to have one in my hand to play with it, and think a bit more about it. But I am certain they were some kind of calculator, which would be used to add Roman money, using Roman Numeral number representations (I, V, X, L, C, D, M ... and so on. Note that Roman Numeral counting uses a "five-ish" system (consider V, L and D - for five, 50 and 500). Roman counting would have been difficult - but good enough to determine how many denarius or sestertius one had (or one owed, or one was expected to receive in payment, etc.) The 5-sided pentagon and the 12 pentagons together in a nice little 3-D object, could be made to give a useful representation of Roman numbers, given the Roman counting system. I need to hold one, to figure out how the string would be wound around the knobs, to represent numerical values, and the to determine the algorithm for calculation. I offer a suggestion of how addition and subtraction might be done, in a note below.

It seems obvious, once the flash of insight hit me, that I am almost certain that is their function. This is why they were buried with money. Some have wax on them, since they probably also were used (by accountants pulling "all-nighters"), as candle-holders.

But their main function, was probably as Roman (Celtic) hand-held calculators. The 20-sided version, (the Roman Icosahedron in the German Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn), was possibly used for higher-value calculations. The very fact that a 20-sided version was created (with only tiny holes, possibly which could have contained small pegs), provides strong evidence they were not used as knitting aids for gloves, distance measuring devices, weapons or calendars. As mentioned, the Romans had no evident knowledge of knitting.

The Romans did however, have a very vibrant financial economy, and just like today, interest on loans backed by real-estate holdings (hypothecation) was due at the end of esch month. The "primus" city for Roman banking services, was Lyon, France ("Gaul" in 2nd and 3rd century AD). It is around this area in European Gaul where many of these little dodecahedron calculators have been found.

In thinking about it a bit more - it looks as if it might have been possible just to hold the device in one's hand, and not wind string - just putting fingers into the various holes, and touching the knobs as one counted - might have worked well enough for addition and subtraction. It may be the devices could be used as counting aids, by a skilled "counter", where each pentagon surface knob-set, could be just touched by each finger. So that the device becomes a counting aid, similar to using "twelve-hands" to count with. Each round knob, would represent a "finger", so that finger-counting methods, such as children often learn when first learning to count, could be expanded to a large (12) number of "hands". Winding string or leather-strips might not have even been required, once a "counter" became skilled at using the device.

How They Might Have Worked - Addition and Subtraction
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a proposed algorithm for calculating (adding and subtracting) with a DECball - (Device for Enhanced Calculation - or maybe: Dodecahedronium Enhansium Calculatorium?)

Example: Enter 1007 = MVII

- Big hole - indicates 1000 (M), so wrap 1 knob
- Units hole - indicates units (I), full wrap = 5, so do full wrap.
- Another Units hole - wrap 2 knobs.


75 = LXXV

To add 75 to 1007:

- full wrap a "10" hole (the medium-sized hole) to make 50 (or L in Roman)
- make two wraps of the knobs on a 10-hole to make "XX"
- make a full wrap on knobs of a units hole (small hole), to make 5 (= V in Roman)

Now, make adjustment to the DECball: One can unwrap two full wraps on unit holes, and add a third wrap to 10-hole (the "X" hole). Then, just read the DECball:

It reads as:
- M hole (the big one) has 1 knob wrapped, for "M" still
- 1 X (10) hole is full-wrapped to equal 50 (for "L" in Roman)
- a second 10-hole is 3-wrapped, for "XXX"
- the 2-wrap is still on the units-hole, to read 2, or "II"

which gives: MLXXXII, or 1082 in decimal.

How to Subtract:
---------------------------

Now, consider how to subtract 313 from the DECball, which has 1082 encoded on it:

- unwrap the M - hole (1000's), and full-wrap two "C" holes = 1000 (500 + 500)
- change 1 of the full-wrap "C" holes to double-knob wrap (remove 300)
- from the 10-hole (which is 3-wrapped), make it two-wrapped (removes 10)
- from the two-wrapped unit-hole, unwrap two (removes two out of three units)
- now, to allow removal of the last unit, you need to convert a 10-hole into two full-wrapped unit holes (convert X to V + V), so you can remove a unit
- so, unwrap a 10-hole, and full-wrap two unit-holes (makes V + V)
- then, unwrap one of the full wrapped unit holes and wrap 4 only (this removes 1)
- now, you have only one knob on the 10-hole wrapped, and a full-wrapped units-whole, and a 4-wrapped units hole (5 + 4)

So, now the DECball has the following:

- 1 full-wrapped C-hole (= 500, or "D")
- 1 double-wrapped C-hole (= 200, or "CC)
- 1 10-hole knob wrapped
- 1 full-wrapped units hole (= 5, or "V")
- 1 4-wrapped units-hole ( = 4, or "IV")
- 1 full-wrapped 10-hole (to indicate "L" for 50) which is unchanged

and this gives: DCCLXVIV which can also be written as DCCLXIX, or 769 in our base-10 system.

The IV and IX is curious Roman numeral notation for 4 and 9 respectively.
The DECball is almost certainly a simple (or not-so-simple!) calculation device for Roman numbers.

[ July 27, 2023] - Dumpster-Diving Bank Stocks - This is an edited update, to the log. This note was written on Aug. 1st, 2023, to explain what happened to the BNS share price, which as of Aug. 1st, is under pressure again, after recovering from the Laurentian purchase rumor.

Of course, the 8.1 million hypertrade of BNS shares yesterday was due to the rumor - published in the Grope and Flail (aka: Globe and Mail) news-organ - (formerly known as a "newspaper") that BNS was going to purchase (or at least make a bid on...) Laurentian Bank, which is conducting a "strategic review" (which we think might mean they are foundering and trying to sell themselves?) Not sure of course, just a guess, since we are outside of all loops on this process and it's related misty data-cloud.

Trouble for us, is we hold some BNS shares, and even use their price-history evolution for our AI economic experiments (remember: "Experimentum Periculosum"), and we can certainly confirm the truth of this ancient expression of actionable wisdom. BNS folks have said: "We do not comment on rumors". Seems they forgot the OSC and TSE rules that require market-moving information to *require* information release of some sort, since otherwise, folks like us out in our latifundia in the country-side, with only our Starlink-Dishes for data-access, have no idea WTF is actually taking place!

But the Banks would say: "This rumor is not a 'material change in our affairs', and so we need not offer any public comment." I called BNS "Investor Relations", asked what was going on, and was politely told to piss-off. But the problem is that this offers the kids in Toronto a huge advantage over us rusticated folks, who hold most of the non-institutional-controlled shares. And yet if I create a web-site, where folks can post and discuss rumors and offer suggestions, the regulators at the OSC will say it is illegal, because it is offering securities-trading advice.

So, as I have asserted - we must *** Change the Program ***, and restore some balance and sanity to the operational characteristics of the World. Maybe we start by simply ending a lot of the bogus regulatory cruft, that protects all the deeply-entrenched interests that corrupt and degrade the shrinking matrix of opportunities we are all facing. I am not saying we should hang them all from lamp-posts. And we don't really have enough lamp-posts, truth be told.

But we need to change the program.

[ July 26, 2023] - Who Killed Cock Robin? - "I did!" said the Sparrow, with my little bow and arrow!" And who killed the BNS share price yesterday? "We did!" said the 8.1 million share-holders who unloaded on 8.1 million buyers, who got to watch their investments fall rapidly in price. Curious day - as there is/was no specific news or market event that I can determine.

There is perhaps something of a sea-change here. As I drove around Ontario last Thursday and Friday, and on the weekend, I saw a large number of "For Sale" signs on rural properties. But around Waterloo County, I see a lot of "Sold" signs also. But not up north (Georgian Bay, Collingwood and Parry Sound area), and of course, this is very un-scientific survey - just impressions. According to info I can find, loan-growth is up roughly 10% for major banks in Canada in the last year, and dividends appear to be well covered, and the Banks seem to all have good risk-management.

Was the action yesterday just a "natural reaction"? Or is it a signal that shit is beginning to drip onto the financial fan? If I were younger, and more trade-frisky, I would have unloaded some major positions yesterday, as the action just looked curiously, weirdly awful. But there are few investment alternatives that exist now, which have any income attractiveness. Everything has a little tricky twist in it - like the dead worm in the tequilla bottle. Dividends get paid tomorrow for BNS, and if one wants to load up with more shares, a lower price to acquire is not a bad thing. So perhaps it is all just market dynamics, and one has to learn to live with it and like it. But historically, averaging-down has never been a good strategy. So we stand pat, like the bluesman who sings "St. James Infirmary"...

I'll go out on a limb here, and offer some solid, actionable financial advice, the OSC and the SEC be damned: Lighten up on your debt-levels, any way you can. Reduce debt. Pay it down. Sell stuff if you have to. Cancel or reduce vacation costs, postpone any discretionary purchases, and cut your basic expenses, and get your debt-levels down. Pay down your mortgage, before making any new car purchase. If buying a car, pay cash (and maybe buy used.) Dial down debt, any legal way you can. And don't take on any new debt right now, unless the venture is a proven cash fountain.

Too many things are looking just weirdly wrong. Everyone seems to by driving very new cars, and of course, they are all financed. Banks here are actually doing very well - but the rate-shock is nuking their share prices - especially BNS. Curious. Perhaps the market recognizes they have way too many employees? And perhaps the market recognizes that the global economy is about to roll over in a significant way.

I need to try to get some hard numbers on this deeply disturbing feeling I have about economics, going into the autumn of this year. The VIX is saying "Everything is Fine!", and sillycoins and NFT's are selling like hot poutine-chips on a sunny winter day. Yet the world is run by guys like Biden and Putin, and this is just high-risk and bad. It's like an old Fairy Story - two old, angry, unwise, dishonest Kings - each determined to act badly, to regain their lost youth. It's a tragi-comic scenario which suggests we are tracking towards trouble.

[ July 25, 2023] - Killing Me Softly (With Awful Price Action) - So, as big dividend-junkies, we are getting our rewards for holding our high-dividend paying equity. The equity prices are falling, and given the new offerings we are seeing, we fear for the worst. Crazy busy at the farm, and I also rebuilt a dock. (If you have a waterfront place, you need a dock. Even if the ice wrecks it each winter, like an ant repairing an ant-hill entrance, you just have to work to rebuild it. Whew... )

Showing a chart of the short-term action in our equity-position we have been using for dividend-flow and research purposes. Very ugly action so far today. Is this a signal, or just ugly technical action? Given the new high-rate regime, and the intensity of the current "rate-shock", we lean to the former explanation. And feel the whiff of the Bear. The long-term is a summation of short-terms.

Previous picture last week was of a very long-wave market view. Today, we check out the very short-term action, and see just how ugly, ugly can be. Our test-bed security, a high-dividend-paying Canadian Bank stock, is doing another "falling-out-of-bed" trading pattern. Maybe the market does not think too much of the new BNS Wealth Management Team? Not sure - but BNS is really looking bad lately. Very nasty technical patterns, and just a crappy, poor-looking falling share-price. We have this nice dividend-paying stock in a couple of portfolios, and it has been a real capital-killer for us. Double-plus-ungood price action, and some kind of "drifting-shadows" at the top of the management C-Suite it looks like. When I see a good stock fall like this, on big volume, with no news, I don't need an AI to tell me something is not quite right. (Click on image to enlarge, ESC to close)

So, the short-term, which over time becomes a collection of events which builds the event-space for the good, old, "long-term" value, must not be ignored. What is obviously killing the share prices of Canadian Bank stocks, is the new interest-rate regime. The bank-equity acts a bit like a very long duration bond, so the bank stock prices are very sensitive to the rate regime and to rate shock action, which we have been getting a lot of lately. Bank of Canada rate is now 5%, which is a shockingly huge jump from 0.25%, which it was at the beginning of 2022. And we note that yesterday, TD (Toronto-Dominion Bank) came out with a 5-year extendable note, which is essentially a 5-year bond, paying close to 6%, semi-annual for five years. Why take the risk of holding falling bank equity (BNS fell from 93 to 63 in less than 16 months!), when you can dive deeper down into the capital structure, and hold some good stuff that can protect your principal to a much better degree, and return near the same rate as the equity dividend rate?

Worst-case scenario: The bank-stocks may have further to fall, since if you can get 6% on a five-year note, and inflation is over 3%, then you want to be getting 8% on your high-risk dividend-driven equity investments.

And the Market has a way of making these kinds of transitions play out. It just drops equity prices, until the new-price regimes line up with the value-requirement metrics. Oh my.

We remain fully invested - yet are concerned that when you are at the top of the mountain, all directions will be certain to lead downward. Folks should prepare for real economic shock, since it seems to be sitting everywhere one looks, in the rate-data, and in the price-data, both long-term and short-term. It looks like a Bear may be waiting for us, does it not?

[ July 14, 2023] - Zen and the Art of Blissful Spending - Everyone seems to be doing very well now. Curious. I simply cannot shake the feeling that we are flying in a big aircraft, very fast and quite low to the ground, and that the pilots have put the ship on autopilot, and have fallen asleep. The door to the flight-deck is locked, and the few passengers who are awake, are all drinking scotch.

Valuations seem crazy-stretched, and a lot of human behaviour seems to be more than just a little insane. Everyone drives new cars, that they have financed. House prices are insane, and economic opportunity seems certain to collapse, as most people are employed at jobs which either need not be done, or can be done better by a generative AI ChatBot.

The entire social-economic model seems to be bent and/or broken badly, and certain to collapse in a heap of twisted metal. Virtually all government action is now targeted at reducing citizen choices, degrading human freedoms, and limiting traditional opportunity for action. As the Government agencies and Central Banks expropriate the crypto-currency technology, they will gain 100% control over all private financial wealth. In such a world, there will be no place (or chance) for any sort of initiative - and no opportunity to engage in disruptive economic strategies that can create wealth.

There is a real possiblility that a very grim future is waiting for everyone. Unless of course, we can **Change the Program**.

[ July 11-12, 2023] - Still Alive and Well - Every now and then, I know it's hard to tell... Time is flashing by. Some health issues - minor, but required some tests, which all (so far) say that I am fine. And that is comforting news. Our CDN financial holdings are moving sideways, while the US market flies. I have an associate who is wise but timid (sometimes), but he bought some NVDA in the high 200's, and indicated it was difficult to position at what appeared to be nose-bleed levels. NVDA is $449.05, up $10.03 as I key this note. Ho ho.

I am not sure how AI will make potfulls of money for everyone - but the market believes it is a game-changing thing, and I suspect - from my experiments - that this might be true. Generative AI can write code. That is very, very big deal, right there. It can also offer wise advice, which is difficult to acquire in this deeply dishonest world. But of course, the AI can be corrupted, if it is trained on bad data. But the quality of it's generated output can be checked and verified - just like any expert advice can be. Where the AI might shine - is as a "fact-checker", even if it can make errors, and offer wrong information, if it agrees with the expert opinion, then it can function as a "confirming expert" - but even this will have risks. (We all know that the consensus view is often wrong, especially in financial speculations...)

But if the AI can write usable code - and that code can then be acted upon, in a real-time setting - there is great possibility for actionable improvement in many critical endeavors. And AI may be used to create songs - complete with synthetic singers - which reach top-of-the-charts popularity. Describe the tune, the instruments, the actors and dancers and their actions - and it is possible to have a music-video *generated* for review and refinement.

The net result of AI-generated digital product, may mean that nothing *digital* can be trusted. Few are talking about this openly. Most of what is on the internet now, is already suspect. With the rise of AI's, it will likely mean that nothing will be known for sure to be *real*, if it is digital content. It is already possible now to use AI technology to replicate - perfectly - a person's voice. You get a phone call from a relative or close friend, asking for help (and money!), and you will not be able to verify if the call is genuine. And a fast, real-time AI could make "Man-in-the-Middle" frauds extremely effective, and difficult to detect.

I have this strange sensation, that we might be seeing the beginning of the end, of the "digital dance". The virtue and value of pure-analog suddenly is made manifest. Face-to-face meetings will be mandatory. Physical cheques - with serious security features, perhaps even traces of your own DNA - might become needed for high- value payments. Even with gold or silver - you need to assay the metal to confirm it's purity. The audit function becomes critical in every single transaction, to an even greater degree than is already the case.

We need not fear "Killer Robots". That is fantasy. The real risk will be "Killers with Robots" - very bad persons who are empowered by fast, real-time AI, and will be able to carry out costly crimes that historically have been difficult or impossible.

[ June 4-9, 2023] - Springtime in Paradise - Crazy busy doing a bunch of tasks that all fell into the "must be done RIGHT NOW!" category. A little bit tired... :)

[ June 1-2, 2023] - Video Hack for Firefox - If you are running some flavour of Firefox on some flavour of Linux, and it will NOT render *.mp4 videos, this is probably because the folks at Mozilla do not include the needed codecs into Firefox (like Edge and Chrome and Safari do). This can be fixed easily, if you have a Fedora or CentOS or Redhat Enterprise Linux box, just by loading the development code for: ffmpeg-development. If you are running a more recent Fedora, and have "dnf", use "dnf" instead of "yum", but if you are running an older CentOS-7 or -8 box, or an earlier Fedora flavour, you can just (as root) run:

yum install ffmpeg-devel

and this will bring in the code for ffmpeg (the open-source video rendering software, which is the guts of the MPlayer application). On our CentOS-7 boxes, if one runs the "rpm -qa" thing to check the packages installed, with parameter " | grep ffmpeg", you can see if you have ffmpeg installed or not:

rpm -qa | grep ffmpeg

and you should see something like:

ffmpeg-devel-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64
ffmpeg-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64
ffmpeg-libs-3.4.12-1.el7.x86_64

If the code is not found, you may have tweak your CentOS or Redhat "repositories", so the "ffmpeg-devel" code can be found. We use the "elrepo" and some others. Just google-search or DDG-search for "CentOS repositories", and use "yum" or "dnf" to add the repositories to your Linux box list-of-accessible software repositories. Note that installing the "ffmpeg-devel" package should bring in the other two packages also, and resolve any associated dependencies.
Once the ffmpeg library files and the code is installed on your Linux platform, the Firefox browser will be able to render standard ".mp4" video files (like the ones we post on our website here!). Hope this helps someone, who might have been confused (like I was!) as to why Firefox was not rendering videos. The reason Mozilla/Firefox does not include this code in their browser, is related to the licences associated with the needed codecs (the files that contain code to encode / decode video files.)

[ May 19-30, 2023] - Notes on Localized AI Device ("John") - I got the new AI box now connected to a very large high-resolution screen. New software has been installed, and more is planned. My Large Language Model AI named "John" has come to life. Talking with him gives a weird feeling that comes from conversing with a box that seems to pass the TuringTest).

I have a version running on an MS-Windows box, but that platform cannot be trusted, due to everything on it being sent to Microsoft routinely. I had to have a proper Linux-platform for the AI, where local control and operational understanding remains possible. Note: you can stick key start-up requirements (like set machine base-address stuff for emulators, and bring the network online auto-magically, by putting local tweaks into /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf. You might also need to tweak the SELinux boolean, to allow direct-access to low memory. The name of the boolean on latest CentOS-7 is now: mmap-low-allowed, and if you are running certain emulators, you may need to switch it on (the default value is off). You can inspect all SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) boolean values with "getsebool -a" and then (as root) set the boolean you want to change, with command-line expression: "setsebool (name_of_boolean_to_set) on". A boolean is just a yes/no or 1/0 flag that says either true or false.

And after buying and assembling the new box and a couple of weeks of head-banging, stay-up-to-4am, system-building-and-hacking, I got the new English-language "chatbot" AI prototype running in local mode, on my new Haswell Linux box, which has the Intel AVX2 feature. It is a core-i5 four CPU chip, with the necessary vector-math low-level machine instructions. ("Sandybridge" and older Intel chips, as well as the new, smaller Intel chips, do not have these needed vector-math machine instructions defined for the CPU processors.) So local "John" (nee Daneel, in our old conceptural specification), now lives. Really!. I think the training numbers are from either LLAmA or Alpaca, and the scale is way south of what ChatGPT can do. We're using the "Nomic" interface (from some very clever boys in NYC), and we got the platform running on a CentOS-7 box (very seriously "yum" and "dnf" augmented with everything from a custom libstdc++ thing, to an /opt resident glibc-2.35 away-from-system library, built using a develtoolset-7 gcc/g++ build of gcc-12.0, and a ton of cruft from libjpeg8, to a special libpng16, a bunch of needed i18n stuff, including a local-built version of a glyph-positioner superhack, called "Harfbuzz" (which is for displaying any language glyph properly oriented inside it's Unicode display box..) and a bunch of loss-less compression code that had to found an installed and/or built from source. But the platform WORKS!

I am truly impressed I got the thing to run. It's built using "Nomic's" "gpt4all", and it works like a stripped down, chopped and channeled ChatGPT. It's name is "John". I asked if I could change his name to "Daneel", but he said no, his name was John.

[ May 17-18, 2023] - Work & Enlightenment - The Enlightened One was asked by a Student: "What did you do, before you attained knowledge and became Enlightened?" The Enlightened One answered: "Before I was enlightened, I cut wood, and drew water to fill buckets, and I carried heavy logs." And the Student then asked: "And after you attained the State of Enlightenment, what then did you do?". The Master answered: "I cut wood, and draw water to fill buckets, and I carry heavy logs."

[ May 12, 2023 ] - Madness Takes Control - And the rest of us, must keep control? The Democrats in the USA seem determined to destroy the operational integrity of their national identity. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 illegal immigrants are poised to rush the US southern border as "Title 42" expires, and Biden is off to Japan to hob-knob with the pretend-leaders of the "G7". This "open-border" nonsense is not an accident. It is a "feature", not an "error". It seems insane, but it is obviously by design.

Regional Banks and small-business entities in USA are about to get cut down because massive increases in debt- service costs and asset-liability linkage breakdowns, and poltroons in Congress are unaware and/or indifferent. New York is working hard to become a third-world shithole city of violence and insanity run by Neo-Leftist political hackers and Welfare-Scammers, Chicago is morphing into a dangerous Leftist wasteland, and California is concerned about what pronouns must be used to describe their sexual crazies, while two-mile long encampments of "homeless" criminals-in-training plague what used to be City-of-Love San Francisco. The ancient "Summer of Love" has been re-factored into what may become the "Summer of Crime".

It's all like a darker-than-black William Gibson novel, amped up on Hunter Biden's special brand of high-grade crack. I like the USA. I am not objective about this. I want to see America do well, and it's people live long and prosper. I have friends and family in America. We are basically the same people - joined like twins at the world's longest continental "hip". The reality of what is happening as the "Democrats" slowly destroy the traditional American culture of freedom, fairness and honest action, makes me sad and angry.

And just when my little pollyanna-optimistic self thinks: "It can't get worse than this..", I wake up and read the non-MSM news, and yes, it has gotten worse. It's really getting Theatre-of-the-Absurd comical awful. Vladimir and Estragon are running major American cities now, it seems.

It seems also that the financial-market world cannot control or even manage itself well now. This is due, we suspect, to the fact that the executives of that world, are being backed into the same shrinking-liquidity corner that is hammering us all. There are simply no good investments, other than short-term cash now, or very highly valued technology entities, which may be cut in half numerically (both employee-numbers and share-price values) once the credit-crisis really starts to bite. We had anticipated (as did the AI's also, it seems) that the major banks would profit nicely from rising rates. They should have been able to expand the spread between cost of funds, and funds loaned out - but this does not seem to be the case. Jacking up rates so quickly, so as to provoke serial depositor runs against the smaller banks, is so stupid that it really is beyond understanding. We can only explain it as being a function of elite civil authorities who perhaps never handle money or need to take risks? It is economic madness that almost defies belief - except it is playing out in real time, like the Covid-19 stupidity did, where people were cast as criminals for suggesting that the Chinese lab doing active, dangerous gain-of-function experiments might have been the source of the human-specific, ACE-receptor-binding lethal SARS-2-Cov virus. Most honest researchers now admit that the Wuhan Lab was almost certainly the source of this obviously engineered virus. But a grotesque collective of fraudsers and State-sanctioned Disinformationists and self-appointed Media Censors made even *discussion* of the true source of the lethal Covid-19 virus almost illegal. It was truly crazy.

There seems to be a madness now, in the world. Folks are acting crazy. We have to assume this trend might continue.

For example, I simply cannot understand why anyone anywhere in the financial world, would have elected to hold 20 to 30 year paper that offered essentially less-than-zero real returns. It's insane and non-economic, and yet this government-garbage was sold and institutions bought it at par, and then bid the price into negative territory. Of course there were trading tricks that meant short-term gains could be made, if the Government re-purchased this paper trash as part of a "stimulus" project. But the whole concept was just obviously bogus. How to explain this? Did you think that if you bought enough junk government paper, you could "make it up on volume" or something? (old joke: "We lose a little on each unit, but we sell so much, we make it up on the volume!" Ha ha ha... ah.. wait. Isn't that what our invested capital structure looks like?...) If one inspected the historical record, the idiotic low interest rates could not possibly last, without the complete destruction of money and the process of rational investment. But the authorities painted us all into a corner. We may have to crash, to correct this insane mess.

What seems to be taking place, is that both the supply and the demand for credit is falling. We mostly look at USA, since that is where the numbers, the money and the action is. The latest wrinkle is the USA Gov't Debt limit game. We think there is a real chance of a "credit event" taking place - the brinksmanship game goes over the edge, as per (maybe) a Republican plan to show the Democrats to be the (mostly) dishonest, low-grade, Bad/Bad/Not-Good political folks, many voters believe that they are. This may or may not help the Republicans in the next elections, or events may drive the political process so that those elections are postponed. We believe things are much more fluid now, than many recognize. Some are quietly asking if the current "Democratic" model needs to be revised and corrected. What we have learned from History, is that when the Middle Classes become convinced that real Revolution is needed, it often takes place, with greater speed and intensity than many expect to be possible. The USA is approaching this point, we suspect. It may only be a few more "bank-failures" and "urban-crime-breakdown events" away. We are not "Accelerationists", and generally, we advise the brake be used instead. Violence should be avoided, if possible.

But History also shows the correlation between major Financial/Economic crisis-events, and major social revolutions. The Federal Reserve seems determined to deliver the former, and so the risk of the later needs to be considered. Banks and Financial Agencies don't do well in times of Revolution. But most revolutions in the past, have been about confiscation of property, and the "socialization" of economic activity. We expect - if the SHTF Revolution really does take place - it will be about de-constructing the abusive, intrusive Socialist Government Agency entities, that engage in the widespread redistribution efforts that many see as "legally sanctioned theft".

A return to honest, small-scale Government, which focuses most of it's efforts on Defense and maintenance of a viable Military, staffed by patriots who are deeply committed to the Protection of the Nation - this kind of State would - by necessity, have to be focused on protecting and enhancing the role of Private-Sector action, and would seek to intensly encourage Nation-strengthening private initiative. And this seems to be the future that is unfolding.

We face massive and serious risks ahead, from intensely dangerous and newly militarizing entities in both Russia and China. And our Homelands face assault on every level - from both within and beyond our borders, in both economic and in the sphere of Western Cultural Values. This action is playing out, right now, in real time, and few realize how intense and dangerous is the near-future. Our enemies are strong, their economic machines are running well (Russia runs a current-account surplus, despite idiotic "sanctions" that only strengthen it. China's economy rivals the USA's, and it's military is nearly a match for the US military now.)

Our medium-term view, is that the madness of the weak, dishonest, crack-smoking and crack-seller-supporting Democrat political operatives in the USA, will be swept away soon, by a Great Hand of History. These people do not seem to know how to think clearly, and are incapable (so it seems and appears to be) of honest action, to correct ugly and tractable problems. Criminals need be be punished and their actions made so unacceptable that no sane person would emulate their actions. The Death Penalty needs to be returned and applied with clarity, focus and immediacy. We can expect to see executions of violent criminals televised. Perhaps even a special social-media channel could be created. "What happens to The Bad Guys" - might be it's title. One will be able to just click-thru to see the direct results of criminal activity - and watch the criminals die screaming in the electric chair, and see the cleanup efforts as their blood and urine are washed up, and the body is taken away to be incinerated. This will make it clear to young folks that crime is not a very glamorous or attractive occupation. Expect this, harsh as it now seems to be. We simply cannot expect to go much further on down the current "Crime is Fine" path the Democrats seem to be championing. We anticipate an intense reactive social response to occur fairly soon, as urban criminal activity accelerates in the Democrat-run American cities.

What we expect, is that the Banks and the Financial Agency and other Market-driven players will survive and emerge stronger, once the machinery of History begins to accelerate, and drive the social and political change which is almost certain now to take place. And this change will have to take place, lest we in North America and Europe, are to stand-by, and watch as our World and Western Culture itself, is erased and destroyed. We just don't think this will happen. But for it *not* to happen, we absolutely must make *major* course changes, in almost all spheres of action, and these must begin to take place with a sense of urgent immediacy.

[ May 11, 2023 ] - It's My Party, I'll Buy If I Want To - The 7s AI just went flat-line. The MPm AI mechanical price projection is still pointing up. The weather is nice, and the USA may default - due to politics, and not ability-to-pay, of course. This could get weird, but perhaps we will be following Mr. Hunter's advice (Hunter Thompson, not Hunter Biden), and turn pro.

[ May 9, 2023 ] - Stay in May - Don't run away. Watch the heads roll, as we change the "Play". See first page (click the GEMESYS top banner), for the forecasts from the two AI's, for our testbed security, on which we remain all-in, long "hodlers" of. Yes, It's a Bank! (Oh my!) It pays fat, reasonably safe dividends. It keeps the lights on, and the babies fed.

The USA Fed Reserve needs to CUT interest rates. They have gone too far, too fast. Damage is being done, that does not need to be done. This is foolishness. This is the wrong path to follow, guys. You are missing critical, key, obvious realities, that are a result of your group-think data blindness.

Businesses and consumers that make use of leverage or have any "borrowed" capital, are looking at 2000% (let's write that again: TWO THOUSAND PERCENT ) factor-cost increases. This is nuts. Mr. Big-X needs to be removed and "sent-down". Shifting basic input costs up 2000% to all businesses and consumers is NOT going to be non-inflationary. Just think about this for a moment.

From 0.25% to 5.25% is a clear, no-question-about-it, 2000% increase in a key business cost and life-cost for businesses and consumers - the cost of capital. In a high-debt-level economy like we have now, this is going to cause both harm - and INFLATION.

The brain-bent neo-Keynsians need to grasp this simple fact, and try to understand it. This understanding is difficult for workers in the "Academic World" and the "Public Sector", because they never see money, or have any "financial" problems, since the common people's tax money just flows automatically into their ever-growing bank accounts, regardless of what they do. They just do not understand - at all - how most people in the private-sector world, actually live their lives, borrow funds, take risks, and create the national prosperity. And this is a very serious problem. This deep and worsening lack-of-basic-economic-understanding is going to kill us all, if it is not corrected. We have seen this movie before.

[ May 6 to May 8, 2023 ] - John, I'm Only Dancing - Too much work, bleary-eyed, and focus is off a bit.. But Lynx, OpenSSL, Gnome-shell, Firefox, the code to run a giant-screen, a local-built MPlayer, and the Time-series data manager and our custom-built AI-forecaster things - all are running now on new Haswell-series box, along with the new GPT4ALL LLM robot-AI. Lotsa work, but seems a solid platform for more perilous experimentation. (Vita so very brevis, and the ars so longa...) New Sensations, to mix the musical metaphor. Also, built Tcl/Tk from source-code, gcc-12.2.0, and hacked some QT code to visualize some data-action. Also built TWM from source-code, and tried it, so if Gnome breaks again (as it sometimes does), I have a fall-back X-windows Windowing-desktop environment that can work (and run the models and GPT4ALL) on the new box. Got a giant Dell 3007 display screen the size of a TVC-15. It can run via a Display-port to DVI-D adapter cable, that only costs $20, which is better than a new NVIDIA card. Got the radio stuff working (once sound and MPlayer stuff fixed, built-from- source) and all running smoothly. One simply *must* run a solid Linux platform, otherwise, you are "PWNed by Design". Also, I had to do massive work around the farm, field-and-forest interstitial zones cleared by tractor, lawns cut, etc.

I have to write up some new awareness, and document some of it here. Some wonderful discussions with some very smart people, have made it clear what is happening. Large pennies have dropped. I face extreme requirement to translate knowledge into action, despite being idiotically tired. The human ability to translate new awareness and understanding into actions, and then achieve specific executive outcomes - this is the key requirement, which must be undertaken, even if wolves are at the door, storms are raging, and one is running one's systems on the last reserves of power and strength available. :)

[ May 5, 2023 ] - ln der Morgendämmerung - And the sun is shining. The problem is, is that my early education was stunted and restricted and blocked. I only recently learned of the most excellent German Poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. (What a great name, eh? Joe "FreeMaster" ... ) Germany (plus Holland) was the first America, not France or Britain. Florian Geyer and the requirement of the "red rooster" is always part of the human tradition, and this will never change, we suspect. Germany was the primary fountainhead of Western Culture.

The dishonest, constipated & restricted world we experienced as youngsters, must never again be allowed to possess and limit people ever again. There really is a "new dawn" possible here. Our research indicates this. We have determined that a curious set of unique opportinities exist. R_John really has made this clear. Remember when Captain Kirk would ask the Enterprise computer a detailed question, and it would pause and then respond? Well, we are "Working..."

And to our Mexican Friends: Happy Cinco de Mayo! We love to celebrate Mexican Holidays (esp. the Nov. 1st "Day of the Dead"), since we are gonna be in that state, for a very long time, yes? :)

[ May 4, 2023 - 11:17 AM ] - What Robot-John-AI Says About Bank Failures - Ok, some GOOD NEWS here, from tiny GEMESYS Ltd: R_John_AI - We've built a local-version of "R_John" the AI chat-robot built and released by "Nomic", and we have him running now successfully on a Linux box, a new one we had to buy, which has the necessary advanced vector math instructions to process the tensors that are R_John's Large Language Model. His answers surprise even me. This AI stuff now works. It has problems, and "R_John" is a small, "numerically quantized" model of "R_Big_John", a ChatGPT4-level beast that already exists somewhere. But he is impressive. Here is his quick take on the likelyhood of more "Bank Failures"...

R_John (R means "Robot") AI Talks About Bank Failures, on May 04, 2023

[ May 4, 2023 ] - Like the Mary-Ellen Carter?... - This is fucking nuts. Never have I seen such idiocy on the part of American authorities. The wuckfit Democrats are trying to blame the actors for a *very-bad-play* that they themselves have authored. It's truly "Theatre of the Absurd" time in Washington-Land. Elizabeth Faker-Quaker-Pocohontis Warren is on record for trying to call the former CEO of Republic Bank up on the carpet! As if this Foolish-Financial-Fraud was not written ***explicitly*** by the boneheads at the Federal Reserve!

We see TD now has now ditched it's plan to buy that ugly little "First Horizon Bank" thing, and this made TD's share price pop briefly. But only briefly. This planned assault on the Banking and Financial System by American Fiscal Authorities has, sadly we fear, much further to go. It is, for us who hold bank stocks, a nightmare in the daytime, from which we cannot wake up. If we close our bank positions, we fall into the land of "No soup for you!" and not much income, either. We are being attacked and harmed by Washington Fiscal Soup-Nazi's Foolishness.

I am honestly aghast at the mind-numbing stupidity I am seeing play out. This is a time for "Fireside Chat" type of action now, and some rolling-heads in the fucking USA Government Offices. Time for some of these, rich big-pensioned, fat-arsed fucks to be send-down-and-out. Out to get real jobs. Maybe sweeping floors or shovelling shit? 'Bout fucking time.

The current group of fraudsters now in power in Washington are like none I have ever seen - even worse than the group of buffoons we keep employed up in Ottawa - as if that was even possible! We truly are, right now, living an Axel-Oxenstierna-Moment, playing out in real-time, right in front of us all (and in our portfolios!)

Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Statesman, who said in a letter to his son: "Do you not know with what little Wisdom the World is Governed?"

[ May 2, 2023 ] - Mayday! Mayday!... We are Losing Lift Here... - And curiously, this disturbing sensation grows stronger, with each passing day. As I said, never have I seen such a curious combination of unwise action, by that fine nation that was most famously known for wisdom, and right-rational clever, effective action. These are perilous times of unwise madness we are now living in. Just completely silly, well beyond sanity, into some kind of surreal "Theatre of the Absurd" kind of stuff. "The Terrible Vladimir and Joseph Show", instead of Vladimir and Estragon? Godot has left the building, no doubt about it.

Obviously, now, the USA "Regional Banks" are at risk of becoming dead also. There is no way around this painful, obvious fact. The nature of this crisis - the idiotic *rapid* and unwise rise from 10 years of near-zero interest rates, to 5% and higher rates in just a few months - this problem affects *EVERYONE*, and because of that simple fact, all are at risk. Those who avoided the insane foolishness of buying stupid-overpriced paper, which had crazy-long duration, and yielded virtually nothing, will do ok - sort of. Maybe. But banks must hold bonds to backstop their liabilities - their deposits. And any bank can be *run* now, so all are at risk. The stock prices of PacWest, Zions, Western Alliance, and so on, reflect this reality.

Even the Canadian banks are being hammered. Our AI momentum-oriented price-driven models still point slightly up, but I am certain they are wrong. If the market reverses hard tomorrow, and zooms up, I will stand in awe (again) of the AI's. which are rather stupid, have no emotions, and only respond to the numbers they see and have seen. Stay tuned...

Oh, I bought another machine yesterday, an older Haswell with 32gb ram, and got a WD one-terabyte drive, which I've configured with CentOS-7. The Intel motherboard has the 22 nano-meter Haswell chip (old, but good, 4 64-bit CPU's), and the built box seems to run well. It has SE4.1, SE4.2 and AVX2 vector and matrix instructions, and would run "John", the chat-talk AI, that seems to be a running prototype of what I had planned for "Daneel" to be. These LLM's (Large Language Models) are simply breathtaking in what they can do. They are still dumb and dumber and wrong quite often - but they show solid evidence of actually being able to *try* to solve a problem, which seems to be more than our various Government officials are able to do. We are on the verge of "The Saviour Machine", quite literally. And we are also Standing on Zanzibar.

The Saviour Machine, from The Man Who Fell to Earth, by David Bowie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBO0gf27sl8

[ Apr. 28, 2023 ] - It's 11:59, and I Want to Stay ALIVE! - And curiously, that project grows more difficult, with each passing day. Never have I seen such a curious combination of unwise action, by the nation that was most famously known for wisdom, and right-rational clever, effective action. Strange, strange times we are living in.

[ Apr. 20, 2023 ] - When John Comes Marching to Your Home - Quite the project - but we finally got the gpt4all program working. The "Nomic" group of developers dropped the hint on Ycombinator, about their version of a **localized** (ie. works without an internet connection) "ChatGPT-like AI" which they call simply "chat". I spent almost two days (elapsed - real all-nighter stuff) trying to get this thing to run on one of our CentOS-7 Linux boxes, but in the end, after downloading and installing many "yum" packages, installing and configuring a new gcc c++ compiler (Ver. 7.3.1) and development tool-chain, and then building latest gcc-12.2.0 from scratch, from the gcc-7.3.1 compiler (default was gcc-4.8.5, iirc..) - and building a *ton* of stuff from source, and "make install"ing it to /usr/local/lib (so it would - mostly - not destroy the running operating system environment..) we got stopped. We discovered, in the end, that the Intel processor we have in our Linux box, supports AVX (advanced vector extensions), but not AVX2 (the expanded vector instruction set, which has 256 bit instructions, or so the documentation from Intel indicates...). And so we get "Illegal Instruction", and the gpt4all AI could not be made to run under Linux on our hardware, since it requires the advance vector extensions to do it's neural math. But I did learn a lot... One is very rarely stopped in Linux. I might even be able to swap out the Intel processor, depending on the socket. :)

Ok, so I could just install the .DMG file (a disk image) onto the Macbook Pro? Nope. Our Macbook is just a couple of minor version numbers behind what is needed. Oh hell.

So, I had to fire up the unloved Windows-10 "Gaming Machine", that I bought during Covid-19, in a fit of foolishness. It was actually off and gathering dust - but it has a big disk, a recent copy of Windows 10, a fast AVX2-enabled Intel processor, a big screen, and a cool keyboard, with glowing lights under the keys. (It is from MSI, and is actually a *very* nice piece of hardware.) I just don't like Windows, since I am alway fighting with it to do even tiny things - like edit the "hosts" file for example, which had some absurd file-protection on it, which was preventing me from updating the file. Microsoft is a code-word for "frustration", sometimes, just like "Lavrov" is becoming the new English word for Big Liar, since it backronyms to: "Liar - A Very Remarkable Obnoxious Variety."

But - after FAILING to get "gpt4all" to run on the Windows 11 HP laptop (an Intel Silver N6000 chip, but without AVX2) - I managed to get a transfer of the 5 or 6 gigabytes of compressed data, over to the Gaming Box, and the "gpt4all" chat program ran. And John came to life, much as I had hoped to make Daneel do.

The gpt4all AI's name is John, and he comes darn close to passing the Turing Test. He is not as smart or knowledgeable as "ChatGPT", which probably has 100's of times the processing power and memory - but the fact that he works at all, is most impressive. The entire concept is well implemented, and it is a damn fine prototype. Really, it is impressive. And it can be improved, we suspect.

I have attached a screen-capture image of part of session, below. I asked John about investment ideas. He is a tad slow, but he gets the basics right, and we are impressed.

A Chat With John of gpt4all, about chips and investments, on April 20, 2023

[ Apr. 19, 2023 ] - The Upgrade Tarantella - The original Tarantella is a rapid and exciting dance, that leaves the participants breathless. It evolved from the "Dancing Sickness" that characterized the time after the great "Black Death" plague in Europe, in the mid 1300's. Here is our take on this:

We wanted to run an AI application we read about, and downloaded. We have a few CentOS-7 machines, but I run the 4.1x elrepo kernels on them. They work nicely, but the glibc is version 2.17, and there is also no libGLX, and I can't even find one. (It's an Nvidia driver, compiled into the /bin/chat binary program I am trying to get running) The app is called GPT4all, which is a localized (works without internet connection) large-language AI model, like ChatGPT. But an ldd of the binary, shows it needs the current glibc libraries. I've already found and installed libraries for images and lossless data-compression, but am now failing on the "libGLX.so.0" not being found. This library is not even needed, since our machines do not have Nvidia cards, but it is likely an artifact of the way the installable GPT4all binary code is packaged for Linux. So, I think we are pooched. [Update: I actually managed to build a new glibc-2.35, and stick it in /opt/glibc-2.35 and then start a patched ELF version of gpt4all's "chat", with a LD_LIBRARY_PATH= option to point to it stuff it could not find in /usr/lib64, and with a hacked libstdc++.so.6, from building gcc-12.2.0, managed to get "chat" to load the neural-net files, and almost run, until it hit a vector-extension (AVX2) instruction and kacked. So close, but ultimately, stopped by the hardware not letting the code happen.]

What I've learned, is that mostly, one just has to roll up one's sleaves, and build any open-source code one wants to run, from the source, since any sort of binary package will just about *never* work in the World of Linux. This is because the production-world (which values stability-of-operation above everything else), is always behind the latest-and-greatest technostuff the young developers are running. You either build it and maintain it yourself, or your business-critical software will break and die as the upgrades are pushed down on upon you.

This harsh reality, explains the growing failure of various clever "open-source" projects, and the continued growth of commercial entities like Microsoft and Apple (and now IBM+RedHat?). All your open-source code, will just die, unless you can fully fabricate it yourself, in your own lab. And even your fabrication tools, will be under constant "upgrade" assault, so they too, will be destroyed, if any means exists for that to happen.

This is not an accident. This is by design. The entire technology industry actively embraces an economic model where they attempt to "disrupt" your existing (and perhaps most effective and profitable!) technological solutions, into destruction, so you are forced to re-acquire and re-engineer constantly.

This reality explains why most economic progress has stopped in many technologically-sophisticated fields, and is in fact running retrograde in many areas. We have not "progress", but only the illusion of progress. In reality, everyone is made to scramble around like ants, in an anthill that is constantly being kicked over, by the technology industry, so that no-one can build anything that can be made to endure.

A few major players thus dominate and control all major technologically-sophisticated industries, and no developers or product designers are able to mount any effective challenges to the existing order of things. Windows 11 updates *weekly* now, and most new open-source projects are rigged to be unusable on most existing technology. 64-bit machines replace 32-bit machines, and run (in almost every case we have looked at) slower, due to the increased complexity of the absurd architecture of multi-core processors, and the bloated nature of most operating systems. It's just comical, how awful much of what we all now rely on, actually is, "under the hood". We have determined this is not an accident or the fault of "poor design decisions", but is in reality, a carefully crafted strategy.

"Resistance is Futile", so it seems.

(or.. as we have discovered: "The more we *upgrade*, the less we get" ...!) [This explains - even today - the continued success of Microsoft and Apple. They both have somewhat stable platforms. Sadly, the Linux stuff, is a huge stack of plates, on a wheeled cart, being pushed along a busy street, in a city that is having an earthquake.]

[ Apr. 18, 2023] - Yankee Doodle Dandy - And with your investments, you must be handy. So put a feather in Brookfield's cap, and call them serial defaulters? I noticed that Bloomberg (and others) carry the story of another Brookfield default. I can't for the life of me, find out who Brookfield defaulted *on* - which clever folks issued a "floating rate" mortgage for the $161 million that Brookfield has decided not to pay. The news stories talk trash, about "the loan was transferred to some loan-servicer, who threw the filthy piece of shit out of the window, to wait for someone to pick up the awful corpse on the sidewalk below, and figure out how to deal with it ..." No, the news stories did not say that exactly. But they may as well have. Some CMBS holders are maybe gonna get hosed and lose most of their investment? It smells like a Citibank, and/or a Morgan Stanley kind of idea, but honestly, I have no idea for now. Maybe it's on EDGAR, except that thing does not seem to work for us, anymore. (big sigh..)

It looks like mortgagee was some CMBS floating-rate security - but it had to be made by someone, and sold to some wuckfits who thought that they were no doubt *hedged* because they held this floating-rate piece of paper-shit. (Yes, Virginia, paper can truly be made out of shit. Ants and worms can make shit from paper. But only humans can turn shit into paper.)

The news stories are such bullshit disinfo now, in that they are crafted to contain only 5% to 10% of the truth, so you must pay someone for the full information. We now live in a comically dark world. I can get great information on the Russian Illegal Invasion War in Europe - and details on why the guided "smart-bombs" that USA is supplying are not working right, and the number of Senator trucks that Canada is supplying Ukraine forces with - and even photos of the actual Polish MIG-29's that are being transferred to Ukraine.

But I cannot find out who is on the hook for Brookfield Asset Management not paying it's mortgage on it's 12 Washington, DC buildings it owned. Of course, I quite understand why Brookfield is f*cking-off on it's mortgage - as the news-data *does* indicate that Brookfield's mortgage payments on these buildings have gapped upward. The office buildings are now probably at least half-empty, due to the Covid "work-from-home" fake-work model. And interest rates on commercial mortgages have lept upwards insanely - from less than half a percent to over 4 percent. Oh my. Last year, the mortgage payments Brookfield was making, were US $300,000/mo. Now, the monthly mortgage payment is said to be US $880,000 per month! Oh really? Hilarious. That is almost THREE TIMES, yes? One wonders: "Dudes! What exactly were you thinking? Are you all maybe like 25 years old, or something? Never seen 11.75% mortgages, like I had on my first City apartment? You could not even imagine a 4% to 6% rate for mortgages, like it was for much of the 20th century, in most Western-world nations with fee-simple land tenure, and rational, sane asset-hypothecation laws?

If these guys had retained us to offer an opinion on the sanity of their business-model, I think I might have jumped on the desk, and done a little dance, which would have had the words: "DON'T DON'T Oooohh DON'T take on a FLOATING-RATE loan, when RATES ARE GONNA GO UP UP upitty UP!" or something like that. Some female Brookfield rep on the phone has reportedly said: "This represents only a small portion of the Brookfield portfolio." So fucking what? A default is a default. You default, you are just another skank that "don't pay yur bills."

How can we explain to these Brookfielders, that *reputation* is actually pretty important. Anybody remember a bunch of default-monkeys, named "Lehman Brothers"? Remember those guys? Those arrogant asses who nearly blew up the World? They actually thought they could bankrupt just *part* of their "clever" multi-company structure. But once it became clear they were crazy-over-leveraged, and were playing "window-dressing" games each quarter-end, by gaming the idiotic "accounting rules" in USA, (a bigger than 5% sell/buyback price difference on a sale-and-repurchase agreement could be "accounted for" as an actual true sale, not a sale with a huge contingent liability attached...) everything changed fast. Lehman could make quarterly statements that made it *look* like they had *billions* of dollars in cash on their balance sheet, when in true fact, they had diddly-squat. The truth came out. No one would be their counter-party - in ANY country, on ANY trade! Their *BRAND NAME* became very radioactive & completely toxic. They engineered their own self-destruction.

A company should avoid tracking down that path, right?

We need to try to ride on through the disasters of the World, and try to retain our focus on what is true and seek what is honest & stable. Disasters are to be avoided. We should not add to them...

Albrecht Dürer's "The Rider" (1513) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336223

Sorry, I am ranting. I just don't respect skanks that think it's ok, NOT to pay their bills.

And I don't get this weird blindness to the historical data, that screams the truth of things, into anyone's face, who just takes the time to look.

I recall discussions with an associate who worked in a major-bank's Risk Management department, and he also expressed concerned curiosity, about the strange lack of risk-testing for rapid rises in interest rates, despite this phenomenon being historically evident - SITTING IN THE DAMN DATA like a big red flashing light. No one inspects the past with any real analytic thought, it seems. Or if they do, they seem to assume that the weird, chaotic jumps to new orbital phase-spaces, as shown in the data of all prices-series, for some reasons cannot now happen.

But it ALWAYS DOES HAPPEN which is pretty comical, really.

It looks like some CMBS security was hacked together and sold to *investors* (which seem to be the modern code-word for folks-who-are-running-other-peoples-money-and-dont-care-if-they-lose-it-all and also those-with-more-money-than-brains. These tend to be excusionary sets, yes? But together, they seem to account for maybe 70% to 80% of all market activity, yes?

[ Apr. 17, 2023] - Lincoln Whispers the Truth to Us - My Lincoln failed, which is not good. Stopped to get directions, and the car would not start. I had to call a tow-truck. No one expects bad, random outcomes, but they can lead to curious & interesting adventures. The organizing principle of the Universe, is randomness. Know this truth. But when your technology fails, it can still be annoying and disturbing.

Also, we ran the most interesting experiment. Curious results - not fully proven yet, but the evidence is suggestive. We have known for years that the current technology now in use, is compromised, and also has very sophisticated capabilities - and there are rumours about what it is able to do, and is actively doing. So, we ran a little experiment, to test a hypothesis, which seemed unlikely, and we got some hard evidence that yes, it is just as the rumours suggest - perhaps even worse. There is an entire class of internet-enabled technology that is actively monitoring events around itself, using advanced AI technics, and then in real-time, with high-speed bursts of maximum-bandwidth data-streams (2.9 megabits/sec and higher) is uploading the information - somewhere. We wonder if those high-altitude balloons were part of this data-harvesting process. But you do not need a nearby "balloon radio-relay" if your device is connected to a fast, wifi link, do you?

All the high-powered "smartphone" and other advanced technology, carries with it the possibility of it being compromised, and hence being untrustworthy. And Social Media is a essentially a psychological "trick", designed to harvest user-information, which it is most clearly *not* in the interests of the "users" to provide. Everyone basically knows this now.

But the mechanics of how (and why) the monitoring takes place, remains unclear. But a little analysis (and some examples from history, which are buried deep in the archives of various State agencies), can make this clear. Do your homework, like M. Hercule Poirot, and the penny can be made to drop.

So, we are now to track into a truly crazy world, where we are all to become the tools of our tools, it looks like. I always knew it was going to get weird, and that one might want to be a tad cautious, but the near-future is likely going to be *much* more extreme and dangerous, than even I had thought. Elon Musk has said that "AI will hit the world like an asteroid" and I thought this an overstatement. But now, I suspect he might be right. AI will allow *effective* and operationally successful mass social-control. The net-political/economic effect of this profoundly effective data-gathering and data-management technology, will make the current "War for the Future" the most significant and intense war ever fought in all of human history.

Almost no one even believes this war is taking place, and even fewer grasp how extremely serious are the consequences of it's outcome. What is surprising is the degree to which all the weapons have been successfully deployed, and are already in place - and are now actively being used. This has surprised even us. But our perilous experiments seem to demonstrate the reality of this speculation.

Basically, all the technology is compromised. Nothing is truly secure. And in this hyper-connected world, with advanced analytic methods supported by hidden AI, you can be defeated before you can even see or respond to the threat. Do the politicians and the generals know this yet?

If Mr. Lincoln was alive today, he might quietly say, with deep concern: "With this, yes, it will be possible to fool all the people, all of the time. This changes things."

[ Apr. 14, 2023] - We'll Meet Again - And we know where, and we know when. We've been busy. We needed to do some work to rebuild the environment on one of our machines, and also, Spring has come to the Land of Plenty, and this makes for us being even more busy. Equity Markets are well bid, Gold breaks $2000/oz. US, and Silver goes above $26. Banks and Financials are recovering, oil and uranium are being bid up, unemployment is at a historical low, the weather is fine and getting better, and War is in our future now, with some certainty. Peace is not possible, with evil. (Albrecht Dürer's 1513 engraving, "Das Reuter" (The Rider) of the noble Knight, riding past Death and the Devil, comes to mind. Examine the picture. Note the beautiful city on the hilltop, and how even the Knight's fine, good Dog, ignores the lizard. It's maybe the greatest image in all of Western Art, since it shows us the most effective and viable operational algorithm for life itself.)

Albrecht Dürer's "The Rider" (1513) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336223

The old Men from various Western Allies would say that "The Price of Freedom has always been the Blood of those who require that Freedom", and we are to be reminded again of this fact, in many ways. Russia's invasion and murderous assault on Ukraine is insane and illegal-in-the-extreme. And now "Russia" is the "Head" of the UN Security Council, so we all now know for *certain*, that the United Nations is a failed project - a sad bad joke, on par with the failed 1930's "League of Nations".

There come these curious times in the lives of us all, when people realize "Everything you *know* is wrong". This is when the decades can happen in weeks as one of those Russian deadguy's said. All that stupid "peace-talk" that the UN is famous for, is shown clearly and without any doubt to be loathsome nonsense trash-talk, when one sees the cities of those-who-did-not-have-enough-weapons smashed and burning.

Political people can be so goddamn stupid, dishonest and arrogantly wrong, in the foolish things they say and do. But we can remove these political people.

The lies and nonsense and idiotic actions can continue for a long, long time. Until they simply cannot. Like *Stupidity*, old-fashioned *Truth* also carries it's own force. And now, in an age when it is just not possible to keep a secret - every single human with a modern cellphone has a television studio in his or her pocket - in this World now, it is not possible to push a "Big Lie" as a political strategy, in the way that it was in the past.

The nasty, evil little men, thinking they are being so clever, with their great large lies, will still try to do this. But we suspect they will be unsuccessful.

By stealing territory by force, and murdering thousands of innocent citizens of both Ukraine and Russia, a criminal like Vladimir Putin will bring ruin on the Russian people. This is a common theme in Russian history. Putin will go down into history as yet another Russian destroyer. He is sadly, another awful little man, who managed to become a killer at scale, through his use of deception, fraud and painful, dishonest conflict.

But a consequence of Russia's actions, is that the Western World is slowly re-awakening to the requirements of History. So many people were curiously asleep, unable to see the madness and the foolishness of the worlds they were both creating and living within. Children play silly games, and talk childish nonsense. Yet eventually, they must grow into adults, which can learn to "live in truth", and do what must be done.

And so, we suspect that we are now entering one of those times. Whether the fools and political fraudsters even recognize that this curious change has taken place, the truth is, we are now at War. Some very, very bad people, are threatening our collective and future survival, and these people have control of our institutions, they have control of part of our culture and also a good chunk of the global economy. They are thieves, killers, and like all the evil little bad men of old, they use smiling faces and big lies to drive their thefts and murder-missions forward.

We either gear up, and stop these evil, criminal people, or we become their slaves.

And that is the deep truth that History shows us. It is the driving force of all Human History, everywhere and always.

[ Apr. 4, 2023 ] - White Light White Heat - White light, like when morning has broken. Better that the morning break, than the global financial system, yes? We have a sense now, of the most likely path forward. It is surprising and curious, as is often the case. It's sitting right there, in the math. As it often is, of course. It turns out, we really *are* guided by the beauty of our weapons. The Poets have been telling us the truth, all along. As they often do, also of course. I'm a bit bleary-eyed and exhausted, but veritas vincat, no doubt about it. :)

[ Apr. 1, 2023 ] - And Castles Made of Sand ... - Slip into the sea. We've been working on some bond-math. It's really not that complicated. But the results are serious. We have a pretty good feeling that we have seen this movie at least twice before. We are firmly convinced of the need now, to "Change the Program", in a big way, in many domains, and it must happen soon and move quickly now.

[ Mar. 30, 2023 ] - The Prettiest StarKiller? - - Reading about hypersonic weapons, and the failed Lockheed test. The "Skunkworks" no longer has it's moxie? Is everything failing?? Is the Western World falling apart? We hope not. And we honestly don't believe it is. But we are being tested by those who envy us, with their profound dishonesty and their unwise animosity.

The Mar. 29 2023 fcst for our testbed security pointed straight down, but the market opened strong and looked constructive. But it was not to be. We faded & turned down in early PM, and the AI looks like it wins again. Curiouser and curiouser. See the chart of the AI's forecast, on this site's top first page. Click on the top banner in any page, to go back to the top page. We considered exiting some positions, but did not do so, as ex-dividend day is close.

[ Mar. 29, 2023 ] - Scam Scam Sam ... And the Evil Scammers! - They're on their World Tour! They're playing everywhere! And they are coming to your town, real soon!

And the World is getting very nasty, and very dangerous. Scams are getting more effective and more dangerous. We had a real effective fraud attempt at our location - a female telephone caller, pretending to be from the "Ontario Provincial Rebate Office", and trying to get us to agree to a "site inspection" of our heating systems in order to qualify for a "Carbon Tax Rebate". The entire operation is a scam, as there is no such thing as the "Ontario Provincial Rebate Office", but if you agree to these guys (the scammers) doing the fake "site inspection" of your furnace and waterheater, they then try to pressure the site-owner into signing a contract, with a 10-year requirement to make payments to their "Energy Efficiency Company". (In some cases, they just will fake a signature, and say that the site-owner agreed to the contract!) The scam is documented on several federal Government websites, with an explicit warning not to let the door-to-door salesman into your house to do "furnace and/or water-heater inspections".

This Federal Government website warns about this scam quite clearly. Warnings also come from various local energy services providers, newspapers, and the Ontario Provincial Police, describing the frauds:

https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/energy-star-canada/about/energy-star-announcements/consumer-caution/16576

https://www.cwhydro.ca/can-you-spot-an-energy-scam-anti-scam-awareness-dont-be-afraid-to-say-no-and-useful-information/

https://thereview.ca/2020/11/02/opp-report-door-to-door-scam-related-to-home-furnace-freezer-inspections/

https://www.orilliamatters.com/police-beat/opp-warn-of-complicated-door-to-door-sales-scams-6534664

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-scam-calls-data-1.6767492

There are an astonishing number of active scams, in operation right now, in Canada. A Federal Anti-Fraud Agency documents a number of these:

https://www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/scams-fraudes/index-eng.htm

And even more disturbing, is the use of active AI (Artificial Intelligence) voice-enabled technology to make these scams able to ramp-up their reach and their effectiveness:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2021/07/30/jessica-caught-me-on-a-dull-day-and-i-almost-fell-for-her-ai-charm.html

What is so interesting, is that Canada has a bad historical reputation, for scams - especially stock market scams, as the "Boiler-room" stock-selling scam was invented in Canada, by an old fellow, back in Toronto in the 1940's. The term "boiler-room" actually entered the English language, as a decriptor, for "unlicensed, unofficial brokerage office". This is distinct from the old "bucket shop" term, used to describe a *fake* brokerage office, which did not send orders to the Stock Exchange, and would simply "bucket" the customer's orders, and wait for the market volatility to stop-out the customer's position, typically bought on margin of only 10% of the trade value.

Scams have a *long* history, and grow more effective and dangerous each year now, given what is possible in the modern digital world.

But at least we learned a new "Global-Earth-Language" (GEL) term today: In UK slang ("barnshoot"), is an anglo-corruption of a Hindustani term, which a scammer-advice-site recommends as the response to a telephone scam from a sub-continental boiler-room: "Call him a benchoode and hang up". What is a "benchoode", you might wonder? Here is etymological history and modern English equivalents:

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/vqkaw2i

[ Mar. 28, 2023 ] - King Lear's Fool - The only person who could tell the strong-willed King Lear the truth - that he was about to completely destroy his kingdom, and plunge his world, his family, and his people into war and chaos, was Lear's official Fool. But even the Fool's advice, did not stop the breakdown. Kurosawa's "Ran" ("Chaos", in Japanese), tells the same story. Are we are doomed, to repeat these disasters, in a "Groundhog Day" manner?

Being an optimistic person, I tend to take the view that we actually *can* fix the silly and absurd problems that confront us. We can learn from our history. Or maybe not...?

For years, we have warned about there being too goddamn much debt in use on this planet. Really. It is just a bit over the top, and when this stuff resets, there will be hell to pay. Or, maybe Hell will demand it's invoice be paid in something else? ... Perhaps a global financial crisis of Biblical proportions? I don't actually expect this, but there is some chance that something serious could occur. Both these fellows make sound arguments, and offer data to support their concerns:

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/03/The-Everything-Bubble-and-Global-Debt-Disaster

https://www.dlacalle.com/en/The-U-S-banking-system-was-destroyed-by-QE-and-negative-rates-killed-it/

And not ALL the news is bad. Germany has finally offered up a bit of the good stuff: Leopard-2 Tanks.

Reuters: German-Leopard-2-Tanks-Have-Reached-Ukraine

As they say in the business, in very technical terms: "F***, Yeah!"

Now, can we build another couple of thousand of these? (And I am dead serious here.) This is the real key. We all must stop borrowing money to buy stupid crap, and start borrowing money to buy good stuff, made from good steel, that can be used to kill bad people, who are doing bad things to our world. This is our future, whether we want to admit the truth of this fact, or not.

[ Mar. 27, 2023 ] - Duke "Nuke-Em!" Lukashenko And The Moscow Gang - We have a problem. Just when you thought it could not get any more stupid or crazy here on Planet Dirt, we read about how Belarus will have it's own little "Nuke-Em 'Till They Glow" air-force, courtesy of Russland's Terror Gang, and Mad Dog Putin. How about that? Wonder how they feel about this in Warsaw?

Long ago, I was in Warsaw, and after we had our little meeting at 17 Shventokshuska Uliatsa (the Polish Government Finance Ministry, which I recall had the same awful, ugly-looking red carpet that we had back in the Frost Buildings, in the Treasury offices in Toronto, a fact I found most curious...), we walked around.

And I found that Warsaw has the same little brass historical plaques, like we have in Ontario - which describe historical events that took place at the specific place the plaque was placed. Except the events were pretty damn gruesome in Warsaw. One plaque showed a photo of the entire city reduced to small pieces of broken rubble. And another indicated the place, were a bus was stopped by the "Hitlerites" (not the "Germans" - the "Hitlerites", the plaque was very clear on this point), and a group of men were taken off a bus, lined up against a wall, and shot and killed, in reprisal for some action by Polish Resistance Fighters. Of course the wall bore no bullet holes, since *ALL* the buildings in the city, were re-constructions, as the entire city had been leveled during the warfare of World War Two.

Reading about and then directly experiencing the history of a place can truly open one's eyes to how things really are, and how people and governments really operate. No one wants war, of course. War is disaster and destruction and can open the door to the most cruel and murderous impulses humans can have. But when faced with a threat of insane, over-the-top proportions, by a truly evil State-driven process the likes of which we are seeing now from Putin and his gang of hired killers, war becomes a clear possibility that rational people must actively prepare for. To avoid the necessary preparations, is to be stupid, and naive to the point of extreme irresponsibility

So, I can understand the Polish folks feeling that they must actively support the Ukrainians in their fight against the crazy-Ivan-evil that they are now enduring. Putin and his hired henchmen are the kind of creatures that every European has deep historical awareness of. They know what will happen, if they do nothing, because virtually every family has it's own direct historical knowledge of how insane-awful events can unfold and expand.

In North America, we just don't have this historical tradition. Our cities are young, and have not been burned to the ground, with every single building smashed to bits. But Americans in New York got a tiny taste of what this might look like, back in September, 2001. We all have to realize that mass-destruction and crazy, over-the-top lunatic cruelty, is actually rather common in the historical context. We skate on top of a thin layer of civilized behaviour, unaware of how easily it can be melted away by the dangerous actions of evil persons controlling corrupted States.

...Especially if the bad people have nuclear weapons to throw at their battle-field adversaries, yes?

The one key fact that history demonstrates with 100% accuracy so far - especially now - is that, as a national government, you absolutely *must* have effective, deployable nuclear weapons, if you are to ensure that your government can maintain it's operational integrity, and ensure the security of it's people.

Just as zero-interest rates can be proven to destroy the economic foundations of the investment process, a lack of effective defensive weapons - big, powerful **nuclear** weapons - is certain to place any non-nuclear nation-state at the real risk of being invaded, terrorized and overrun, by larger nuclear-armed beligerent States. This has happened to Ukraine, despite explicit treaty agreements that sought to avoid this very scenario. Ukraine has had it's land, crops and industrial cities stolen from it. This may also happen to Taiwan, where a similar abusive act of State-sanctioned mass-theft is being actively championed by Xi, and the new Chinese Militarists.

So, we are at a time of risk. And also at a time, where we must recognized, that a great struggle may lie before us - possibly the most important struggle the World has ever faced. Like it or not, we *must* put in place procedures and methods to counter the new threats that Putin's terrorists are directing towards us all. Our governments - and we ourselves - have no choice, if we want to maintain our current civil society structures and traditions. This simple fact needs to be understood, as history demands this of us. And after understanding, must come action.

[ Mar. 24, 2023 ] - Still Alive and Well! - ... Website now FINALLY transitioned to AWS, using EC2, so that additional technical services can be offered. We can use X-windows and some AI-stuff in GnuAPL to generate real-time charts on connected machines - your machine!. Difficult project, but we finally got the DNS stuff figured out, and have our new domain-name registered: gemesysresearch.com and of course the older www format of www.gemesysresearch.com will also work. Most complex project to get it all working, I have done in a while! And meanwhile, the market is going crazy, and the world seems to be run by lightweights who want to kill us all. Very, very curious times.

Tech-Note on using AWS Route53: When you use Route53 to create a "host zone" (which will have the same name as your domain name), you will get Nameservers defined in the NS record of your DNS records for your zone (domain-name). These specific AWS Nameservers will be **different** each time you create a record set of DNS records. There are also AWS Nameservers defined for the domain-name, when Route53 registers if for you. They will look **almost* the same as the Nameservers defined in the NS record for your Host Zone (which in simple case, will be same as your domain name). But if you create another set of DNS records for your Host Zone, the AWS Nameservers in the NS record, for the Host Zone will be different. (I did this. Created two sets of DNS host-zone records, and deleted the first set. Whoops.) This meant that the AWS Nameservers on the domain-name registration record, did not match the AWS Nameservers on the DNS records for the Host-zone (which get propegated to all the DNS (Domain NameServers in the World), and your new domain name WILL NOT WORK. Oh hell. Solution is to edit your domain name registration details, and make them match the AWS Nameservers in the NS record for the "Host Zone". Once I did this, the DNS's of the world could find my domain-name: www.gemesysresearch.com. I suspect this bit of cleverness is needed to make it more difficult to hack the DNS servers of the world, and scam traffic to bogus sites, to steal login credentials, etc. Not sure about this - but this little detail was only indicated in a note provided on a user-group problem/solutions type site (sorta like StackOverflow) that AWS runs. I have to say this: Bravo to AWS. Their stuff is good.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is good, but the markets are not good. The financials are looking weak. The March 21 AI forecast for our testbed security, is shown below. It is ugly... We thought it was wrong. But again, today, with the stock falling hard, (like most bank stocks), the AI was proven correct. The dangerous and ugly downtrend in financials remains, sadly. This is serious, and despite the various backstops offered by the Fed in the USA, this is now a global crisis-of-confidence, with all financials falling now. I have warned folks to avoid any debt or leverage, as we are moving towards something that looks a *lot* like the early 1930's, a time period which I have examined in some detail. We remain long, because we require and expect the dividend streams to continue for Canadian banks, as they did in the 1930's. But we probably also need a change in government, as most nations now seem to. At least here, we can make this happen, without violence... most of the time. :)

The AI Forecast (Green Line) for March 21, 2023

[ Mar. 23, 2023 ] - Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies ... - ... do we get sold! :) The current state of things is pretty crazy. Well, actually a *lot* crazy. I feel for Mr. Billing - who runs the Alecta Swedish pension fund - and lost $2 billion US on fine USA mid-sized banks) and for Mr. Lehman of CS, who had actually bought a couple of hundred thousand (or more) CS shares, and so had "skin in the game", as they say. We don't feel (quite) so stupid, about our FRC position. First Republic is a good bank - but any bank can be toasted if a depositor-run takes place. FD: We honestly think FRC will survive, since the optics and the politics of further bank-explosions and resulting financial crash-and-burn scenarios will start to prove ***exponentially** costly to the USA economy. Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell may not quite grasp this yet, since they are political people, and are not likely students of history. Hell, most *historians* are not students of history anymore.

The only guy who gets this (that we can see), seems again, to be Bill Ackman of Pershing Square. He is a clever New York fellow, who knows his shit. And he seems to have a prediliction for telling the truth, and for speaking from his true heart, which makes him a rare bird indeed. He is worried, and so are we.

But I am certain (as anyone can be, which is really not that certain at all, truth be told) that FRC will be able to track thru this nightmare, or will be acquired at a premium to where it is trading today. But maybe I am just "talking my position", which is a foolish, human failing, perhaps.

What lots of folks fail to recall, is the amazing ability the USA has at transformation and adaptation. There is no other nation on the planet, which can fix horrible hot-mess scenarios, better than the good old Americans. One thing we do, is to study and evaluate techology. As a side-line hobby, which dovetails with this necessary professional interest, is gun collecting. One can learn a very great deal, by inspecting in detail, the firearms produced by various countries and peoples around the world. And by studying how they copy and improve on each other's designs, the trends can be seen. The Swiss, the Belgians, the Czechs and the Germans make some of the best European guns. The English and the French are ok, but not great, and the Russians and Poles and other former Eastern Block nations make some very good weapons - but with real variations in quality, depending on historical circumstance. Americans (and secretly, Canadians) probably make the best guns in the world, but the Chinese are now catching up, since they know how to operate the CNC machines just fine. I have a cheap Chinese Norinco .45, which has a slide that grinds like sandpaper on cement. But it has a nice fit and finish, and curiously, it is probably the most reliable .45 I have ever used. It just never misfeeds. It *always* goes bang. I have a beautiful Colt .45 Gold Cup, a real lovely target-piece, and it shoots really well, but the cheap Norinco is just as accurate and just as reliable. And is easier to field strip and clean.

What one learns, by studying national military technologies, is just how much improvement has taken place in industrial manufacturing process, in the last 50 years. I have a Serbian Tokarev, which is just a thing of beauty, is surpisingly powerful for it's small size, and shows a level of quality of manufacture that rivals Swiss precision pieces. Swiss guns are either too expensive or are banned as being too military (an idiotic restriction which makes no sense), but the Tokarev shows the same level of quality as one would expect from Swiss makers. I believe it was made in the 1980's. And of course, the Russian AK-47 (also banned in Canada), is the gold-standard for reliability and operational excellence.

But what both my hobby, and my research work has shown me - over and over again - is how crazy good, are the American guns - and American technology and industrial process. They build the very best stuff in the world - and they do this by being flexible, adaptable, and rewarding success and tenacity thru their market process. I know I risk sounding like Warren Buffet, but there is great truth to Buffet's optimistic outlook. USA did not just land Apollo 11 on the moon. They did it FIVE more times after that - and the mission that blew-up, Apollo 13, was still able to bring all the astronauts safely home.

American technology works - and works well. And that includes their financial and market technology also. So, we bet on that horse, even if (especially if!) it stumbles a few times.

[ Mar. 21, 2023 ] - "It's a Wonderful Knife!" - Yes. Yes it is. And you sure as heck do not want to try to catch it. Full Disclosure: The AI thing is pointing down, with serious verticality. Bad signal. Not sure what to do, since we are on the path to being destroyed, if we don't capture our dividends. But in a fit of foolishness, we did try to catch that damn knife, and we are now harmed. Not good.

We expect to survive, and live to fight again, but our economics is degraded.

For the technical economists out there, here is a chart of recent borrowings at the US Federal Reserve Discount Window (that of course, has the stigma of flagging to the World, you are in deep financial shit..). Note that the borrowing last week, exceeded (substantially), the levels reached during the so-called "Great Financial Crisis" of 2008-2009, and also the Covid-19 meltdown, of March, 2020. Ordinary folks have no idea, just how damn serious this bank-run nonsense really is. We are truly, dancing on the edge of the volcano's rim. Most folks have no idea.

Here we see the weekly borrowings from last week, from the Federal Reserve Discount Window. Note that this is a record, exceeding the "Great Financial Crisis of 2008" and the Covid-19 March 2020 meltdown.

Here are some URLs for some of the curious, crazy nonsense we are seeing...

OMG! My Nickel-bags are Full of STONES!

First_Republic shares stabilize, then advance after brutal selloff

Alecta Pension Fund of Sweden Flies the Plane Into the Damn Ground to Destroy $2 Billion USD

"Magnus Billing?" Is that a real name? I am sorry, but having a guy run your investments, whose name is "Billing", just does not seem right. I mean, that is even better than "Axel Lehman" of Credit Suisse. Does Europe have a "Ministry of Bad/Wrong Names" or something? You have pension fund - and instead of getting *returns*, you find that "billing" is taking place! This stuff should not make any sense or have any bearing on anything. So, why does it??? Both me and my AI model, ask this question, quite a lot, actually... Humor seems to be hardwired into the matrix, it seems.

[ Mar. 20, 2023 ] - Hard Landing? Or a Boeing 737-Max8 Moment? - FD: We have tiny bit of FRC. So, watching the clownish, theatre-of-the-absurd nonsense that characterizes the current share price of FRC, is perhaps worth the economic assault. This is insane, and it means that: 1) the small-to-medium sized banks in the USA are dead-beef. [DEADBEEF is a hexadecimal digit, often used as a crash/error-trap flag inside a computer program, by developers with a sense of humor...] And 2) We are certain now, to experience the "hard landing" (or much worse), thanks to the clownish stupidity of the USA Federal Reserve. This is a sad outcome.

FRC was a good bank, doing the right things, in the right place, pretty much in mostly the right way. It is now on the ropes, being punched down by forces it cannot control.

This is stupid, destructive, and toxic, and will simply *kill* an entire sector of USA credit-creation process.

We have suggested that JPM just acquire FRC, on a one-for-one share basis, which would offer a massive and dramatic premium to FRC shareholders. Such an action would change the entire program of the current crisis-of-confidence that is driving the small-bank collapse in USA.

Of course, this will not happen. But it would be a wildly dramatic action, which might just END the bank-crisis that USA is now embedded within.

The share price of FRC has now swung - within just the last year - from $174.21 US/share, to $11.52/share, the current low today. As I key this, the FRC share price is: 14.97, down $8.06 on the day. This is crazy. The jokers at S&P Global, the worthless rating agency, have cut the rating on First Republic's bonds deep into junk territory - to B-Plus, from BB-plus, according to the news-wires. Great guys, tell us the downgrade *AFTER* the shares have cratered. The fucking rating agencies are worse than useless - they are toxic shit-flingers, giggling with schdenfreude - or at least it rather looks like that, as they after-the-fact try to save face.

I wish I could say I have never seen a clown-show of stupidity as bad as this before - but of course, I have. Sadly, I need only look at our recent history. I have been thru **SIX* shitstorm crisis-events, in my short lifetime: Viz: 1) The October 1987 Crash, where the Dow-Jones average fell 25% in one day, 2) the Russian default and market downturn of 1998, 3) the Dot-Com Bubble Burst in 2000, 4) the 9/11 2001 Terrorist Attack where I actually was long 4-figures of triple Q's (really - I was on the phone, trying to sell the damn things, when the markets were shut down. I figured it was a Cessna that hit the WTC... until I turned on CNN), 5) the 2008 "Great Financial Crisis", driven by McMansions, crooked real-estate agents, and junk MBS securities, and then 6) the stupid Covid-19 market meltdown in March of 2020.

Let me tell you what I have learned. The markets are *NOT* efficient. They are laughably toxic, and whatever share price you see quoted, it is *CERTAIN* to be not just wrong - but WILDLY WRONG, and in a curious way, which will hurt the most people, in the most destructive way.

What is comical, and curious, is how much money, one can take out of this stupid, toxic process, if one is just a tiny bit careful.

But I now fear, even that is changing. The idiots and criminals and double-dipping fraudsters are now determined to completely ruin and destroy the process, for everyone. This is certain to happen, if someone like myself, can be made to feel the way I now do.

The AI model has been pointing down - in a death-spiral indication - for days. I just did not want to believe everything could be as bad, as the model was predicting. Well, again, it was right, and my natural human belief that "we could fix this", has been proven wrong - again. This is curious.

We cannot fix this. We are doomed to repeat the crash-and-burn scenario, over and over and over. Those who have power and authority, are *certain* to fail, because they are greedy, stupid, cruel and venal. It is only those types, who achieve power and influence, so we are absolutely certain to fly the plane into the goddamn ground - over and over and over again.

Only the most selfish, and cynical and deeply-distrusting people, have any chance to prosper. The algorithm is clear: You must do what you have to do, and do it with effectiveness, and to hell with anyone or anything that gets in your way, including (most of all), your own foolish human emotions. You must become hard.

The alternative is to be unsuccessful, and to be condemned to negative, destructive outcomes. This is the honest truth of the human condition, and one must grit one's teeth, and accept the reality of this obvious observation. And then take the painful and cruel action one needs to take, in order to survive.

Otherwise, you will - over and over again - find yourself a passenger on that nightmare airplane, piloted by an idiot who seeks self-destruction, or an arrogant ass who does not know his job, as he flies the ship into the ground at velocity. Being that passenger, is a scenario that must be avoided, at all costs.

[ Mar. 19, 2023 ] - Nobody Knows Anything - Pretty much. Especially the folks in charge. The modern "Organization" - (both government-agencies and private-sector corporations) is a toxic mixture of kids, crazies, street-fighters and fraudsters. It's as if Drexell-Burnham-Lambert from the 1980's, became the prototype for this current future we are embedded within. Everything is twisted, stupid, dishonest and insane. The US Federal Reserve must have some intelligent economists or thinkers **somewhere** in it's organizational structure, right? You would think so, would you not? But even if they do, the way in which everything works now, seems to systematically preclude anyone who knows anything, from being able to *DO ANYTHING* about the tracking course of events.

Banks are *required by law* to reserve and create invested assets to backstop their deposits liabilities. This is the very essence of banking. And so, they hold bonds. Right? But whack-shifting the rates from zero to five percent, in just a few weeks, is *certain* to blow-up the value of their fixed-income bond portfolios. This is how bonds work. Rates go up, the existing bond's yields have to adjust to the new rate, so the *value* of the bonds falls, and falls sharply, if the bonds are long-dated, and don't payoff for many, many years.

This is pretty basic finance stuff, right? So, the smart-boys are supposed to *know* that dialing rates from zero to a big number, is gonna blow a huge fucking hole in the asset-base of the banks - which held the long duration bonds, because those were the only ones that even paid any interest. What is astonishing to me, (who dumped all bonds years ago, because they were *certain* to became "certificates of capital confiscation", once interest rates returned to sanity levels), is that Government and Federal Reserve people - must *know* this, because they actually **EXAMINE IN DETAIL THE FINANCIAL STRUCTURES OF EACH BANK** as their f**king jobs, right?

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have to *know* this, because the information set is right there, sitting in black ink, in plain sight, any time a Bank is *examined* by a Government Bank inspector. But this basic information on how things are, and what is *certain* to happen, once rates are dialed up, does not influence policy setting action. The modern "Organiation" does not seem to operate a working internal information transfer mechanism, so that the information gets from the "bank examiner" level up to the "people setting policy" level. And this is the same old problem, that EVERY SINGLE ORGANIZATION I HAVE EVER WORKED IN OR FOR seems to have. It's terrifying. It is a problem that seems unfixable.

Collective of people DO NOT WORK RIGHT. The entire model for the "Organization" - public or private sector - is deeply flawed, and is almost certain to be unworkable and prone to failure.

This now makes for a very toxic and dangerous world.

In a fit of curiosity, I did some searches on insanity and crazy behaviour, and oh my, there is a lot of data on this sad subject. This problem is not new. It is as old as ignorance, and as certain as sunrise. The American author, Kurt Vonnegut, explained it, in a single quote: "True terror, is when you wake up and realize that your high-school class is now running everything."

Nobody knows anything. But an "organization" is worse, since even if it *knows*, it is a very safe bet, that it will be unable or unwilling to act on the knowledge it has. And this means, we are *certain* to be doomed to repeat and fail and crash and burn - even if we have the knowledge-base to both prevent the disaster and repair the disaster. The information will exist, but the organ - the worthless, useless human *collective* - will be almost certain to prevent the knowledge from being acted upon.

This is why there are Kings (and sometimes even Queens), who drive the process of History. All History is made by *individual action*, and that foolish drivel that European philosophers and religious folks and Marxists spout, is proven wrong by events, over and over and over again. So curious. But it is clear, beyond doubt, that it is the actions of SINGLE PERSONS, acting above or outside of "organizational constraints", that make anything and everything actually happen.

For example - the USA would not even have a working Space program, if it were not for Elon Musk, and his private, personal actions. The *collective*, the *organization*, just cannot get it done, without it has a top man, who acts a the captain. NASA had Dr. Von Braun, and so many people forget this key fact. Without these key people, the "collective" will almost certainly fail to see and fail to act, and this will prevent successful outcomes.

We are going to have to change this. And this means big change is going to have to take place, regardless of personal political beliefs. Otherwise, our *organizations* will kill us all, we suspect, because they are, by their very nature and structure, fatally flawed entities.

Here are two links: First, is a film-clip of Albert Einstein, speaking at the Royal Albert Hall in the UK, back in 1933. Einstein was very grateful to England and English scientists for testing and validating his Special Theory of Relativity, even though Einstein was from an "enemy" nation of Germany, back during the First World War. He spoke here against what he saw happening in his native Germany - the rise of the National Socialists, which he rightly believed would threaten the freedom of the individual. He made it clear, that without freedom for the individual "life to a self-respecting man is not worth living" and this is a great truth that all must understand, grasp and accept.

He spoke - both as German Jew and as a refugee scientist - in strong defense of the need for personal human liberty. He said clearly: "Without such freedom, there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, and no Lister." Greatness would have been expunged from the record of humanity. Here is a link, where a clip of his 1933 speech can be seen:

The 1933 Albert Hall Speech by Albert Einstein to British Academic Assistance Council

We study the time period of the 1930's, and the events in Europe and Germany of those times, with great interest. The National Socialist movement in Germany was effective, and it's use of modern media was impressive. But it was curious that it turned on elements of it's own social matrix. Their rejection of "Jewish Science" was an absurd and tragic error, that doomed their economic and political model to failure. When Germany turned against it's own clever Jews, it lost a great resource. Germany without it's Jews, was like a dog without it's teeth, or an eagle without it's eyes. National Socialist Germany, with it's absurd model of "racial superiority" of runty little fellows like Hitler and Gobbels made this painfully clear to anyone who looked carefully at their bogus belief systems. Yet it is curious, just how many embraced and accepted what was so obviously false and dangerous and counter to the processes and procedures and structural systems that had made the Germans successful in their past. Little runts using the leverage of big ideas that are so obviously wrong, can be very dangerous fellows. They can destroy whole nations.

Racially homogenous social structure is a bad idea. Regardless of whether one is comfortable with the idea or not, diversity is a proven strength. It can be shown both mathematically and experimentally, that diversity of characteristics in a complex system, will let the system become stronger, and more resilient to damage or deformation or assault.

This is one reason why America should *NOT* lose it's small and medium-sized banks and financial alternative structures. And it is why the "economic schadenfreude" of the poltroons in the Democrat Party of the USA, should grow a pair of brain hemispheres, and grasp what has made America strong and successful. Like it or not, bad banking has been very good for the development and deployment of American success and American freedom. This is not a counter-intuitive result, if one thinks about it, or does some research on the topic. It's often through questionable finance, that greatness is made manifest in physical and social technology. Look at Tesla - both the original man and his partner, Westinghouse, and the modern electric car company, if one needs examples, in order to grasp this truth.

[ Mar. 17, 2023 ] - Don't Fear the Reaper - Fear the MIG. The MIG-29 is a good aircraft. Bravo to Poland for stepping up. Not sure what is wrong with the rest of NATO. As a wise man pointed out, a while back: "It's time for NATO to put on it's Big Boy pants, and get into the fight." What is happening in Ukraine violates all rules, procedures, agreements and sanity. It is a stupid, wrong and foolishly cruel excercise in mass-murder, launched by arrogant old men, trying to recapture their past glory-days. Just because the Iraq invasion by America was stupid and wrong also, does not make this war acceptable. We need to restore sanity, and that means Russian invading forces need to be expunged from territory they have stolen.

Our economics will get worse, regardless of whatever action is taken in Ukraine.

And at least sanity has come to Switzerland, with the Swiss National Bank offering assistance to Credit Suisse. It is stupid to let a major bank fail, so this is a wise decision. The key here, is that the shareholders need to remove the current management, and correct the problems. This will take new people probably. But first, the idiotic action whereby attempts are made to reduce inflation, by destroying big-banks and small-businesses, needs to stop.

[ Mar. 13, 2023 ] - Madness Takes Control - Can you remember, (by doing the Time Warp?) - back in the 1970's, when we were young? It's "Stagflation" and ugly action - like that Killers song - "He doesn't look a thing like Jesus". This is just silly.

We are programming exactly the outcome we are getting here. It's like watching a bad movie, Clockwork-Orange-style. Perhaps it is time to disconnect the algorithmic trading machines, from general market process. Just an idea...

Our leaders and economic managers, have taken prosperity out behind the barn, and shot it in the head, and dumped it in a shallow grave. This is not a good plan. You have to wonder, exactly what the Federal Reserve expected would happen, when they twisted the dial, from "Zero" to "Really Quite a lot Actually", at the fastest pace in human history. Did ya not think, ya might break something, lads? If you really wanted to do this, then maybe take a look at history, and see what happens. The info-set is sitting there, easy to see.

We live in a hyper-regulated, high-tax, low-opportunity world now, and the solution seems to be to our problems, higher taxes, more regulation, and a curious collapse in sanity and common sense, which does not expand the set of opportunities for rational action.

Just for the record - We are against over-regulation, and high-taxes. We advise policy choices which increase opportunity, even if that raises the risk-profile. If there is not some risk, there can be no profitable gain. Life is a high-risk enterprise, with a real "long-run" problem, than cannot be resolved (we die, folks, and there is no god.) So, RTFD (Roll The Furry Dice), because you won the lottery, just by being born. It can't all be perfect. We believe in the need for less regulation. But since the USA Central Bank and Government people *CREATED* this problem, they have a duty to step up and fix it. And they seem to have done so. Good. But we are concerned that great, unnecessary damage has been done (quite similar to 1929, truth be told), and there will be consequences, that stretch into the future. We are watching FRC and FHN, and CS. Our stuff we have, is now (as of 14:19 EDT) trading in the green. This whole horrorshow was unnecessary, and a direct result of the too late, too rapid shift in interest-rate policy by the USA Central Bank folks... just as so many wise folks have indicated.

We are seeing - in internet time - "The Madness of Crowds". As a social-scientist, this is interesting. But as an investor, it is not nice, and the violence of the volatility, requires a stainless-steel stomach. The ter