What's interesting is that the majority of their proposal (access to IP addresses, device IDs, data retention) is completely illegal under EU GDPR 🥰

Biden won't run. He's letting Kennedy et al. spend all their resources without damaging whoever he, and the DNC, will ultimately annoint.

Lol, I dont care about politics but had to put this out there so I can congratulate myself later if I'm right 😂

You may have seen the clip of Steve Baker

doing the rounds this weekend. You may have laughed or dismissed his comments, perhaps because you disagreed with him on Brexit. But if you did so, please listen again, because what he's saying is important:

"Your government rode an enormous credit boom within which the money supply tripled, leading to the global financial crisis…and a sense of injustice which has led to many of our subsequent troubles.”

Then read the article shared in the thread, on the $91 trillion debt burden that is currently facing nation states around the world.

There is an unpalatable truth here, which sooner or later we are going to have to acknowledge:

The only way to get rid of a $91 trillion dollar debt is to debase the currency to the point where a trillion dollars will only buy you a loaf of bread.

There’s no sensible way in which a debt of this magnitude can ever be repaid, either through growth or taxation. So what may be likely to happen in the coming years, as this vast web of obligations compounds and continues to grow at an accelerating rate? This is a problem currently confronting Rachel Reeves, our new Chancellor, and Labour, and with which they must engage.

Debt, and credit, are not necessarily bad things. Credit oils the wheels of commerce, and enables us to pull profits from the future to invest and to grow businesses today.

But the warnings of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans that we should do ‘nothing to excess’ were as true for them as they are for us (nihil nimius in Latin, meden agan in Greek – common sayings for each culture, but sadly forgotten by us). There is no sense in which government debts equal to the size of the entire global economy are not excessive and are not a gigantic problem almost beyond resolution.

There are ways out, but none of them palatable. Default, refinancing, or inflation – which will we choose? (Remember that inflation, the enemy du jour, is actually rather good for some people – especially those who owe large sums of money; like nation states).

In our credit-based system, money is nothing more than another person's liability (whether the liability of a central bank, or of a commercial bank). It is backed by absolutely nothing other than the belief that the liability will be repaid (to quote even more Latin, this is the origin of the word 'credit', which comes from the Latin credo credere, to believe).

If a person holding your liability money begins to believe that you're not good for the money, the entire edifice collapses.

Governments cannot allow this loss of faith to happen. Remember, modern money is backed by absolutely nothing other than faith and belief. So a voluntary default (a refusal to pay) is off the table.

Refinancing is possible - issuing new debt to pay the principal and coupon of the old. This is the route most governments that can still access the bond markets have taken to date. This works up to a point, much like taking out a new credit card to pay off a previous one.

This doesn't get rid of the debt – it merely moves it around and can make it easier to service, but ultimately adds to the debt burden in the long run and has the unfortunate effect of compounding it at the same time. If you’d like to see this in highly unpleasant action, just read up on how the IMF and the World Bank treat borrower nations in the global south. I would recommend the excellent book 'Hidden Repression' from Alex Gladstein (link in the thread).

Which leaves us with debasement through inflation.

Governments will almost never admit or articulate this, but the surest way to get rid of a trillion dollar government liability is to debase the currency to the point where the nominal value of their obligations is negligible when measured in a currency whose actual value they have destroyed.

The quote below is from ‘When Money Dies’, a seminal work on the Weimar inflation. Bondholders and mortgage holders might eventually have got repaid in nominal terms – but the amounts they received were meaningless in comparison to the actual value of the assets that the debtors held (such as houses).

This is a nation state problem, but the profligacy of nation states has also made it YOUR problem.

Governments are by their nature unproductive - their sources of income are typically either their citizens (through taxation) or accrued via issuing liabilities against their good name (which, in a circular fashion, is actually yours). In one sense, nation states levy taxes not because they need the money – they can usually print it, after all – but in order to reassure the potential purchasers of their government debt that they are good for the money (belief, once again).

The exceptions to this tend to be the states that are the net exporters of the fundamental currency that actually enables civilisation to exist, namely energy.

So how can you protect yourself, if the conclusion is that the only likely solution to this gigantic problem is strategic inflation and currency debasement?

One option is to save whatever you can in hard and finite assets that cannot be replicated or produced with zero cost. That is, don't think you can save in government liability money.

Unfortunately, this practice has already hugely contributed to housing inequality in the UK, where, whether they know it or not, the richest among us have figured this out and keep their money not in cash but in houses.

You too should have the right to protect yourself - but I'd also like to see an alternative to a 'flight to housing' that exacerbates other social issues. Perhaps find something else. Ideally something that the government cannot confiscate when the house of cards finally comes tumbling down.

You'll likely know what I would recommend. But this is something you'll need to decide for yourself, and on behalf of your children, who will unfortunately inherit the mess that our governments and central banks have made.

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

AI HAS AIDS

Overton window shattered.

Germ theory is an unproven and scientifically unverifiable globalist banker cartel scam.