Unquiet Musings

This is a snapshot of a nation that has reached the end of its rope. It’s not so much just the most recent events (atrocities? trampling of the rule of law? naked excess of power). It’s the decades and centuries of pent-up frustration. It’s little people, who are sick of being trampled upon, taken advantage of, robbed of the fruits of their labor. It’s people that have seen through the veneer of what is supposed to pass for democratic institutions, representative legislature and government and realized (yet again) that the system is there to exploit them – not to serve. It's people that are mad as hell, and are not going to take it any more.

The collective consciousness that is beginning to (re)emerge, and show ever-so-slight flutters of life is something that serves as a source of hope. With each human being a node, the internet makes an adaptive and ever-growing neural network of us all. A network that is already perhaps beginning to rival the complexity of the human brain – which was heretofore already so absurdly complex as to be deemed unknowable for centuries. The narrative provided by the system is no longer being swallowed whole as easily by the population. People are becoming increasingly skeptical as to the official explanation for what is being done to them and their fellow humans around the globe.

These folks took a stand, stood up to be counted. At first through 'acceptable' channels, through law-abiding traditional methods. And when they realized that sanctioned forms of (controlled) opposition such as political activism, protests, letter writing, petitioning politicians, collecting signatures, organizing sit-ins were ineffective, they decided to take a calculated risk with their livelihoods, freedom and reputations, and did what needed to be done. They took no credit, they sought no limelight or recognition. For good reason, of course. Yet, ironically, because they were successful in evading detection, they perhaps lessened some of the impact of their (unquestionably courageous and ultimately effective) deed.

A collapse, no matter how epic, is always a process. Freefall can be engineered in standalone single buildings, perhaps, but the steel beams in the case of the current global monetary regime crisscross too far and wide to pancake all at once. The good news is that we may have some time (Days? Weeks? Months?) between plainly obvious, explicit monetary collapse events. The bad new is that the obvious, explicit ones are still yet to come, and are liable to be nasty, if the endgame truly approaches.

The prices of gold and silver will be relevant when they become indicative of the depths of the waters around us, until then they are part of the scenery intended to shield our unprepared eyes from the reality. For the moment, I believe the time is to be right, and sit tight. There are now SO many situations that can be expected to tip over at any moment, that it hardly seems worthwhile to expend additional energy searching for and painstakingly exploring FURTHER black swan candidates.

Some of Turkey's richest and most powerful men, the kids of several cabinet secretaries, and an Istanbul mayor were among those arrested this week for charges connected to Iranian transactions. The General Manager of Halkbank,the facilitator of gold-for-Iranian-hydrocarbons trading, was also among those detained. Let's take a closer look as to why.

I would think twice about recommending a 60 Minutes segment these days, but this one is worth it for the comedy factor alone. This is simply gold, Jerry, GOLD . Pure, elemental comedy gold.

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Perhaps negative GOFO has no real significance. It's not a causal factor in the discovery of fair market pricing for gold, which in turn is conducted daily through the wonderfully efficient and transparent global bullion and bullion derivative markets… Everything is fine and well, please ignore the explicit incentive for a rational market actor to hold gold instead of cash present in the marketplace. This once-rare event is now a regular daily occurrence, we have all gotten used to it by now, nothing to see here, move along…

Probably not yet. But the question never what it's doing now, it's always what it will be doing in the future. While gold and silver are bouncing along what may (or may not) be a bottom, BTC continues to assault its (parabolically arrived-at) all-time highs .

A short piece on some simple, common-sense indicators that may reflect on BitCoin.

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Stretching the bounds of allegorical cave-climbing, courtesy of Greek thinkers of yore. The allegory can be seen a lot more literally than its author(s) may have originally intended. Just like 1984 was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual, Plato's Allegory of the Cave was intended to bring clarity to the differences between perceptions, concepts and reality. Yet it seems to have become the blueprint for how to pull wool over the eyes of people everywhere today.

(credit: xkcd )