I am baffled at how people who understand basic economic principles can fail to grasp the most fundamental, unavoidable flaw of mass democracy.

Universal suffrage is vote inflation.  Making everybody “free” by giving everybody a vote is like making everybody “rich” by printing lots of money.

Yes, that is an original observation on my part.  Analogy credit: nullius.

Whereas the institutions of democracy—the government branches, the political parties, the mass media—all together have the rôle of the big banks in the debt-backed fractional reserve monetary system.

Democracy is a scam.


Needs illustration.  Whereas the voting votaries of democracy can belief six impossible things before breakfast!

Surely, the encrypted hodl of the ship has cargo capacity for a fortune of treasure.

“Due process rights”?  “Big government”?  There is hereby a much deeper issue:  The United States has an awful habit of arrogating to itself the power to impose global jurisdiction of its own laws, and even its mere whims.

I do not sufficiently know the facts of the case to make any particular pronouncements here; and unlike the armchair analysts already prouncing “guilt”, I will not pretend.  That said, however, it seems obvious that there may be some serious jurisdictional problems here.

A legal person (natural or corporate) not subject to the laws of the United States should not want “due process” according to American law.  For American law has no authority to try that person in the first place!

I hope that BitMEX’s lawyers, who are qualified at law and familiar with the facts, will raise front and centre every jurisdictional argument that they properly should.  It is not “a technicality”.  It is a matter of highest principle that bears on issues of sovereignty, and one of the essential differences between just laws and the unrestrained rampages of a rogue state.

To illustrate the nature of the issue, I will remark briefly on a completely unrelated case well-known to most here.

I have long been alarmed and angered by the propensity of some people to wish for the President of the United States to pardon Julian Assange.  How could the American chief executive “pardon” a man over whom the United States properly has no authority in the first instance?

(Of course, as a practical matter and for the sake of decency, I do wish that the American President would improperly pardon a man whose liberty should be posthaste restored, although his remaining health never can be.  That does not change the principle of the matter.  It also does not change the political reality that such a pardon is a pipe dream.)

To ask pardon admits the authority to punish, and guilt to be punished.  At that point, you have accepted the premise that the United States has a right to arrest, try, and convict Assange.

Now, turning back to BitMEX, you did mention jurisdiction:


Whereas if jurisdiction is lacking, then why should a defendant suffer trial before a court lacking proper authority, for alleged violation of laws that do not bind the defendant?  Why is the presumption of innocence even an issue?  Why should proofs be sought?

If a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world were to pass, within his jurisdiction, a decree that I, personally, am completely banned from Bitcoin, and if I were to violate his “law”, then should I seek “due process” in his court?  Or should I laugh?

On these types of issues, the only difference between that hypothetical tinpot dictator and the United States is guns, more guns, bombs, more bombs, tanks, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads, plus the economic and political muscle to seduce or coerce other countries’ corrupt governments without even bothering to shoot up and incinerate a bunch of civilians.


^^^ THIS.

I am alarmed and, frankly, a little bit shocked at the general tenor of some of the talk here.

Just how did this U.S. government action suddenly, within a matter of days, so blacken the name of an exchange that, to my knowledge, has had a sterling reputation?  There are exchanges with credible scam accusations, theft under the rubric of “shotgun KYC”, rampant shitcoin pump-and-dump pushing, and all manner of other sleazy shenanigans.  I have never heard any such thing about BitMEX—still haven’t.  And now, some people are suddenly talking about them as criminals just because a U.S. prosecutor said so!

There’s an old saying—I don’t know where I first heard it—that in the United States, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

All I see thus far is news that, at first impression, looks very much like regulatory and prosecutorial overreach from a country that collectively acts as if it were the emperor of the world.

---

Thanks for indirectly reminding me that I had the foregoing almost completed in my offline drafts box.  (Most of what I write is never posted, and much of it is never completed.)

Quote from: Last of the V8s on October 04, 2020, 08:40:15 PM

Jacob Applebaum

Probably quite old news that I somehow missed, but...  He’s back in action?  Cool.  Although I disagree with many of his viewpoints (like Assange’s), he (like Assange) was always one of those principled types who would not stop at those invisible lines that you are never supposed to cross.^*  I think that that’s why he (like Assange) was targeted in some scandalous way.

(* Just for perhaps the least instance of that, Appelbaum considered Cloudflare to be an Internet-wide security bug, and accordingly opened a Tor issue that I tried to keep open back in 2017—around the time that my first Newbie-rank post here thanked theymos for telling the truth about Cloudflare.  2020 update:  Nothing has changed; Cloudflare is still a tool of corporate censorship and mass surveillance, as Appelbaum said.  They are untouchable.  In tech circles, the talk about them is almost all praise.  And that is relatively nothing compared to the dirt that Appelbaum was dragging out about the NSA and other intelligence agencies!)

I hope that he is still the same will-not-shut-up deadly-principled, stubborn loose cannon as he was before.  The world needs a few more of those.

---

inb4 anyone accuses me of hypocrisy

WTF?  No wonder I don’t vote.  Now, I needn’t feel bad about being officially outnumbered by the bears irrationally exuberant dollar-bulls who expect for the U.S. dollar ever to again exceed 0.0001 BTC in value.

---

WTF?

Should, or could?


Nice pic.  I almost didn’t get it; it took me awhile to puzzle out why the anonymous, entomonymous forum-pest is holding the end of a marijuana joint.  Oh, so is r0ach’s chosen namesake a used-up remainder of dope that transforms its users into grinning idiots?  If so, my estimation of him is not improved.

Of course, I am aware that the word “roach” has divers meanings of diverse origins.  It is even a respectable Norman surname; but I would not expect for a proud heir of such a fine Aryan name to render it in fluent l33t, and use it in that bastardized form as his Internet handle.

“r0ach” seems colloquial, especially whereas the recrudescent r0ach said that he’s a real r0ach.  Thus, my first impression was that he calls himself a cockroach.  I presumed that he must be attempting some subtle irony, and quite failing to achieve it.  When I first started reading his posts, replete with DS links, I nicknamed him “the bug-man”.  The impression was so strong that it was not until later that I considered potential alternative meanings.  I didn’t even think of a weed-butt.

An extended essay is hereby cut for want of time to finish it.  Perhaps some more opportune moment may arise—perhaps.

Prior and potential future context:
Fact check:  I am pretty sure that Hitler was downright fascist against drug abuse, and also that he disliked anthropoid vermin.  LOL.  Oh, and although Hitler was way too friendly with various yellow people, he would have called out the SS to crack down on Anglin’s racially destructive sexual fetish for Asian chicks—das ist verboten!  Damn, neo-Nazis just can’t seem to get anything right.  I think that if the Führer were to rise from the grave and behold their antics, he would promptly die of apoplexy.  What an embarrassment.

Admittedly, some comment comes to mind about waving a Red Flag before a bull.  Go, Bitcoin...

---

So, your argument is an infantile, mentally ill zealot in a state of arrested development whose messianic, eschatological idées fixes are, in substance, deeply influenced by Marxism.  Not that I would expect for the hysterical girl to know enough political theory to be self-aware on this point—or to possess self-awareness on any point.

“The Greta effect? Meet the schoolgirl climate warriors” — BBC Anglo-Pravda “News”
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx


Greta Thunberg is a useful tool for somebody.  A stage prop.


That is the apex of liberal intellect.

I speak thus quite sincerely.

What’s wrong?  You are literate in ancient Greek, and you have a scholarly critique of my admittedly amateurish grammar?  Or do you complain that the word I constructed from Greek roots was inadvertently omitted from your dictionary?

Methinks the backfire is on you:  You are not as smart as you believe you are.  Oh, how I desiderate the bygone days when reading was a privilege.


“Entomonymous” was a part of a play with “entomoid” on the name of a creature thereby mentioned...


...but if you not only failed to grasp it, but chose to insult me from your own stupidity and attempt correcting me from your own illiteracy, why should I reveal to you the secrets of the poet’s art?

---

P.S., just in case you ever do catch me in such typographical errors as I not infrequently find in my own posts, keep handy my stock answer for criticisms from creatures far below my level:

Why, yes!  With argument by repetition, you can control the frame of the discussion, and divert everybody’s attention away from all that has actually been said—which you have conveniently ignored.

Oops, not really.  Nice try.

It is interesting that nutildah has never challenged the factuality of my very brief summary of the historical establishment of the original Antifa in 1932.  He can’t, of course; for I am quite correct about an historical fact that he is furious to see even mentioned.  I tossed it in here, not expecting any controversy, just because it is a an interesting fact that most people do not know; I thought that folks might be curious.  Evidently, some people would much prefer for this bit of history to be forgotten.

nutildah doth protest too much, methinks.


Go reread my prior posts and reply to the substance of what I actually said, before you affect an air of overweening superiority over my “rather outrageous claim” that an organization which today overtly uses a Communist name (wtf, “some of today’s Antifa”? all Antifas use the Communist name “Antifa”!), a Communist symbol (their actual logo—not just a few random people making “stickers”), substantively Communist ideology, and Communist tactics, with the same old Communist purpose of political violence to incite riots and cancel free speech, is... Communist.


I won’t be trolled by you that way into writing a book-length post which anyway, by your record, you will either ignore or cherry-pick as convenient.  I am too busy making some stickers, which, according to you, every reasonable person must presume carries no intended implications of political sympathy with a group that, borrowing your exact words, has “technically been defunct” since 1945:


Don’t make any outrageous claims about my stickers, now.  Where is your evidence?

---

bitcoin protocol says NOTHING about regulation by the American world-police of the Bitcoin activities of entities based outside the U.S., which even ban U.S. persons from using the site (I just checked).

Capisce?  ← Protip:  Try to spell your words of condescension correctly.

An exceedingly long rant response was hereby cut, and replaced with the following:

Who appointed the United States and its institutions to supervise Bitcoin?

N.b. that I myself despise financial speculation in principle.  I think that in a perfect world, there would be no significant financial speculation at all.  If I find myself in the unusual position of defending that sort of activity, then that may be a sign that you have stepped into the zone of HANDS OFF MY BITCOIN and AMERICA IS NOT THE GODDAMN WORLD POLICE—AMERICA IS NOT THE BITCOIN POLICE.


That is what margin calls are for.  Fools suffer from their follies.


Suggesting that the U.S. government should or can put “speed limit signs” on Bitcoin!  You, personally, are a part of the problem.  There is already a shitcoin for you:  It is called the United States Dollar.


Also, stop believing urban legends.  Most if not all of the Autobahn has speed limits.  The limits just tend to be... rather high.  Are you perchance American?  I have only ever seen Americans repeat that nonsense.


...oh... oh.  So you think this is because of CME.  Thanks; if (if) you are correct, then I now despise them even more than I already have since that was first announced in 2017.  The Bitcoin futures market should get wrecked, so that it stops messing with the normal Bitcoin market.  If everybody who trades futures and other derivatives were to go bankrupt, it would be better for Bitcoin in the long term.


OK, gotcha.  You’ve a few Horsemen left to go.

---

If it is not something that can be done safely in an unregulated market, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in an unregulated market.  Don’t try to create the clusterfork of the bank-run financial markets in Bitcoin.

<snip>

This stimulus is medically indicated for the treatment of acute hysteria:



High inflation with potential for hyperinflation, however, is rather like taking a cyanide pill to cure a headache.  I suppose that it does work, in a sense.

---

Excellent.  So good that it actually made me go to Twitter and peruse the discussion.  Thanks.

Of course, I did not intend to suggest that Bitcoin was in any way dependent on BitMEX or any other single party.  I should hope that I was not misunderstood that way by anybody!


Indeed, I somewhat noticed that U.S. regulators went aggressively after an exchange that has demonstrated pro-Bitcoin behaviour, instead of ripping into one of the many exchanges that never saw a forked shitcoin they didn’t love.  It’s not as if the U.S. government has ever been in any direct or indirect way connected to shitconery.  Just joking.  I think.


I suppose that that’s called “taking responsibility for your own money”.  I presume that it’s a Bitcoin thing.

Waving my hands a bit over the nature of levers:

If I wanted to gamble in a casino at 100x or even 10000x leverage, I don’t suppose that any do-gooding busybodies would want to protect me from potentially losing my own money through my own choices and my own follies...  Oh, wait!  Meanwhile, savvy traders who do not go insane or get drunk on leverage have probably made a reasonable profit at the MEX and other exchanges.

Aside, it always astounds me that some people seem not to know that market trading is zero-sum.  If somebody lost a fortune, somebody else gained—and vice versa.  TANSTAAFL.

That is good news.  Whereas I am more worried about such things as this—just for instance:

https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/

https://blog.bitmex.com/hdr-global-trading-increases-bitcoin-developer-grant-to-us100000/

BitMEX is far from the biggest funder of Bitcoin development; but their support of the effort that makes Bitcoin work on a technical level is nothing to sneeze at, either.  The number of mutually independent parties funding Bitcoin development is also a centralization issue.  One of the good things about Core is that no single party can call the shots just by tugging purse strings; Bitcoin needs to keep it that way.

Most people do not even think about this.  High-quality free and open-source software engineering just appears spontaneously out of thin air, without funding and organization.  (Rather like revolutions, “amorphous movements”, mass-migrations, etc.; the world is such a random place, in which human events just happen without any organization, leadership, or money.)

From what I have seen from the sidelines, BitMEX has also otherwise been on the good side of many Bitcoin issues.  E.g., “Therefore BitMEX will not be able to support SegWit2x.  [...]  BitMEX considers any and all contentious hardfork tokens as altcoins.”  It would be a shame if they were to diminish or disappear, leaving a void to be filled by some of the exchanges who are practically enemies of Bitcoin.

Note:  I have no connection to BitMEX, and no financial interest in the foregoing statement.  My experience with centralized exchanges is pretty much nil; and I don’t know anybody at BitMEX.

---

Thanks.  I’ll save that for everybody who ever mentions, among other things, the American reality-TV “election” show—about which I was working on a P&S meta-complaint, when I delved into a minor tangent on Antifa.

Well, what am I supposed to call it when somebody claims that an organization which today overtly uses a Communist name, a Communist symbol, substantively Communist ideology, and Communist tactics, with the same old Communist purpose, has nothing to do with Communism?

The point of my Hitler/SA thought experiment was to demonstrate that nutildah’s argument would meet unanimous scorn (plus, I might add, accusations of covert sympathies), if it were applied to people who were overtly labelling themselves with NSDAP symbolism.

---

In the overall context of discussing a self-styled “Antifascist” organization founded in Germany in 1932, any mention whatsoever of Hitler must be nothing more than the convergence of random probabilities involving unintelligent hotheads arguing on the Internet.

Sure, that makes sense.

---

I must surely not be the first to propose Meta-Godwin’s Law:  On the Internet, any mention whatsoever of Hitler will trigger a blind invocation of Godwin’s Law—whether or not the mention of Hitler is reasonable—and whether or not the person mentioning Hitler is comparing his opponent to Hitler, which is actually what Godwin was talking about.

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

Only the braindead, who jerk their knees by reflex, could have imagined that I was comparing nutildah or Antifa to Nazis.  They are Communists!

The only one whom I seemed to be comparing to Hitler was myself.  You know—the Jewish Chinese Nazi, who is just running a Sun Tzu psy-op to keep marcus confused.  Zing.

What with this being the Internet, I had thought to explain pre-emptively that Godwin’s Law does not mechanistically apply to all historical comparisons or analogies involving Hitler.  Then, I decided that it would be a waste of words:  Surely, people would be more intelligent than that...  Welcome to the Internet.

No, I was not comparing Hitler and the SA to nutildah, Antifa, or anybody whom I dislike.  If that is what you read into it, then that’s on you.

To waste time and text explaining the obvious:  My point was that if, hypothetically, somebody were to use the Sturmabteilung name and symbol, then yes, that obviously would have some relevance to Adolf Hitler.  Neither nutildah nor anybody else would claim that it has nothing to do with Hitler, on the absurd grounds that:


Got it now?  Or do I need to write ten more pages explaining an argument that was intended to be concise?

---

As a relatively minor point that I should mention because it’s quoted above, nutildah’s statement that the original Antifa has been “defunct since 1933” is factually incorrect.  (And that was not the only thing wrong with his post...)  The Antifas functioned as underground/illegal from 1933–45, including amongst Communists imprisoned in labour camps, then lost momentum and faded away in the postwar era of the DDR.  Overt Communists gravitated toward the East, of course; and there is not much room for a street-level gang of Communist thugs in a country openly ruled by a government gang of Communist thugs!

---

By the way, does anyone here have New York Times paywall access?  If so, here are some links that I bookmarked once upon a time, when this stuff was not paywalled.  It was careless of me not to save local copies.
https://www.nytimes.com/1959/03/08/archives/now-castro-faces-the-harder-fight-his-revolution-against-batista.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1959/04/19/archives/castro-hails-newsmen-gives-medals-to-americans-who-interviewed-him.html

It is not about Antifa, but rather, an exemplar of the whitewash of Communists.  (I thought to mention that before, but decided instead to reach back to Walter Duranty.)  But a more accurate metaphor would be the Fair Play for Cuba Committees.

In 1959, nutildah would have jeered at me and traduced my intelligence for my claim that Fidel Castro is a Communist.  That was a wild accusation only believed by “right-wing extremists” with a “conspiratorial theory of history”, who “see a Red under every bed”!  (Until Castro himself came out and proudly announced that he had always been a Communist.)

Now, it is just too bizarre for nutildah to claim that an organization which today overtly uses a Communist name, a Communist symbol, substantively Communist ideology, and Communist tactics, with the same old Communist purpose of inciting riots and cancelling free speech with their fists (as Antifa’s predecessor KDP/SDP gangs did throughout the 1920s—to anybody who didn’t have an SA), has nothing to do with Communism.

---

No, that is a terse way of brushing you off as you deserve.  Though I should thank you for demonstrating the level of your dishonesty:

• If I spend my time and effort writing a cogent exposition of my thesis, you insult it as too long; and you proudly profess not to read it.  E.g.:
  
  
  Quote from: nutildah on September 24, 2020, 01:13:45 AM
  I'm ignoring you in general because you take too many words to say too little.
• If I mostly ignore your nonsense, and concisely dismiss it with four sentences plus one graphic (“long-winded”?) to make a baseline demonstration that it is nonsense, then you accuse me of “[not having] the slightest fucking clue what [I’m] talking about”.  And with a hypocrisy that would be astounding if it were not typical of a certain type, you thereby dodge my point—with a substance-free statement that is somehow simultaneously advanced from a position of conceited ignorance, and loaded with sneering derision.  Per your usual standard.

I am not inclined to engage you in an extended discourse on history and political theory, for the same reason that I have never delivered a lecture on geophysics to Flat Earthers.  But since you are so transparently using propaganda shill tactics that should make hv_ envious of your twistiness, I must ask:  Why are you deadset determined to whitewash Antifa?

It’s odd that an historical observation I tossed off-the-cuff, just because I was examining it again whilst working on something else (as I noted) and I thought it would be of interest to others here, has attracted such opprobrium from someone who claims to be “ignoring [me] in general”.  #triggered

So, you are not old enough to remember even the 1960s—a quite recent time, as these things go.


Since when is “bipartisanship” a good thing?  That is simply an obscurantist way of saying that (a) nobody should have principles, and (b) officially permissible opinion is narrowly confined to a false dichotomy:  One-party rule, with two faces.  That is, in fact, what you have in America.

The only “extremes” of anything that you have in either official faction of your bipolar uniparty are extremes of criminality.  In both factions.  Dominating both factions with nigh unanimity.

The much-ballyhooed “polarization” and “end of bipartisanship” are only a ploy of media hype, to regenerate interest in an entertainment that had been faltering.  Voter turnout rates were plummeting, and that was not “apathy”:  It was wising-up!  More and more people were realizing that they are under one-party rule, and that the one party is a criminal gang hostile to the interests of the vast majority of Americans.

The illusion was being lost—and with it, the consent of the governed upon which the power of all régimes must ultimately repose.  Thus stepped onstage Trump, a professional showman, to stir the pot just enough to get the enthusiasms flowing both for and against him.

Yes, Orange Bogey is manipulating the idiotic left just as much as he is manipulating the idiotic right:  Without Trump, would anybody be eager to vote for Biden?  Both sides are stupid enough to believe that Trump means what he says in his Presidential Tweets!

I think this means that his opponents must be marginally stupider:  The Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd needs for me to explain to them that Trump is a liar, and his fans are fools, and all of Trump’s grandstanding rhetoric is meaningless.  In substance, Trump is approximately equal to Biden—and vice versa.  (As a matter of form, I will admit that Trump is much more amusing.)

This relates to what I intended to post in P&S earlier.  Your whole reality-TV “election” is a dialectic between the followers of Lenin (D), who scream that Kerensky (R) is a right-wing extremist, and the followers of Kerensky, who scream that the extremist butcher Lenin has betrayed the revolution.  This circus would be merely a cheap comedy—if America were not a nuclear-armed rogue terrorist state, which also has had the whole world’s economy by the throat ever since the Nixon Shock, if not earlier.  The tragedy is that neither possible “election” outcome will change that.

---

To cut a tedious argument against your habit of arguing from conceited ignorance, let us test your stated principle empirically.  Why don’t I change my nickname to “Sturmabteilung”, and my avatar to this:


Surely, you will be the first to say that that it has nothing to do with Adolf Hitler!  The original NSDAP, including the SA, has been defunct since 1945; and “not many people... identify themselves as [National-Socialists] anymore”.

Indeed, most of the people using Nazi symbols today have much less connection to Hitler than Antifa actually does to Communism.  I always find it remarkable that in 1930s Germany, the ilk of Anglin and r0ach would have been arrested as asocial and sent a labour camp to be made useful.  They come off as badly as if, by analogy, a Jew were to read Der Stürmer as a positive guide to Jewishness.  My first intended WO post, never published, was actually begun as a reply to the aforesaid entomonymous cretin; therein, I described a conversation I once with an old Jew about the worst humiliation to Hitler being entomoid neo-Nazis.  But that is another subject.

---

Indeed, they rebranded so well that you suppose that Communism “failed”.  No, it did not fail:  It conquered the world.

Perpend the juxtaposition that in substance, America is today the most International-Communist country in the world, just as J. P. Morgan, et al. intended—and Red China is the most Global-Capitalist country in the world, with masses of proletarian wage-slaves ruled from the stock exchanges by giant global-international corporations.  It is no accident that Marx’s Bible is titled Capital.

The reason why “the left” so excels at “rebranding” is that Communism is not an ideology.  The ideological component is only idiot-bait:  A disposable tool, to manipulate other disposable tools.  At the highest level, the leaders have no ideology at all; they are only pragmatic.  They have no attachment to the espoused ideology which happens to be most convenient on any particular day—nor, of course, to the name “Communism”.  I still use the name “Communism” because a word is needed, and I do not chase after Communist-forced changes in language.  “Communism” concisely identifies the practical doctrine of world revolution by mass subversion that is still being run on a foundation systematized by Karl Marx, although it was not really invented by him.

---

In America, before the rise of the 1970s Christian-televangelist New Right (which hijacked quite a few things), “conservatism” meant some concept of Constitutional ordered liberty, with respect for long-existing social institutions.  Obviously, the “liberty” part includes not having a Marxist government steal your money.

In Europe, before people became too Americanized, “conservatism” meant a respect for social class (not Marxist-American “socioeconomic class”), and monarchy and/or aristocracy.

Anywhere else, it means, by definition, conserving the existing order of things.

No “conservatism” can exist without cultural traditions; for otherwise, there is no foundation for anything else to conserve.  Fiscal policy does not exist in a vacuum:  To the contrary, it is only a secondary effect of the ordering of a society.  The worldview that holds economics as primary is actually Marxist, and is designed to dissolve a society to the point that Marxism can take over.

Whilst working on something else, I will just leave this here for now...

Most people don’t know the origins of Antifa.  Antifascist Action (Antifaschistische Aktion), or “Antifa”, was originally founded in 1932 as a merger of the private armies/militias of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD in the below photo), a “liberal” Marxist-socialist party—and the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD).



The current version of the original Antifa logo, seen above:



The banner in the centre reads:  “ES LEBE DIE ROTE EINHEITSFRONT”.  In idiomatic English, I think that that slogan should be rendered:  “THE UNITED RED FRONT LIVES!”

The banners on the left and right read respectively:  “As the SPD [Social Democrats]” and “As the KPD [Communists]”.

The hammer-and-sickle flags need no explanation. ☭

So, yes:  Antifa are Communists.  It’s not merely my opinion that they are Communists; it’s not that they are like Communists, or maybe crypto-Communists:  The group originated as a merger of a self-described overt Communist group and a liberal-Marxist-socialist group, under the International Communist Red Flag.

N.b. that I knew the above-stated history before the pomo-Jacobins started bragging about it.  I’m not getting the history from them (or their twisted version thereof).  I have know the history for a long time.  I found the photo floating around the web somewhere awhile ago, and I have been trying properly to identify and to source it.

Are you seriously glorifying the guillotine as “Justice”?  Never mind that all three panels are nonsensical idiot-bait propaganda:  That takes the cake, so to speak.  What’s next?  Glorifying the justice of the Soviet dekulakization?

Something on the order of a million people were gruesomely massacred in the French Revolution, for no reason but a hellishly depraved sense of “justice” and égalité.  Mob rule plus “liberal” ideologues equals bloodbath—always.

Either you are completely ignorant of history, or you are a wannabe bloody murderer, or both.  Pick your poison.

---

What do you expect?  He is American, and therefore fat.  “#MAGA”, LOL.

Interesting idea.  Though it’s pretty shot-in-the-dark speculation; and I don’t think that the past day’s events “confirm” anything, except that a government deeply dependent on the dollar is on another one of its insane rampages.

I also am not a fan of the ETF idea (same as I was never overly fond of CME futures, etc.), though of course, there is nothing that I can do to stop it.


I don’t think that central banks will ever invest in Bitcoin, in the sense of viewing it as a valuable asset (like gold) that they want to have for that reason.  Bitcoin is their competitor, in its fundamentals.  They are too strategically-minded to attack it outright; and they will try to exploit it as they can.  But if they can avoid doing so, they will never accept Bitcoin as some sort of key to the international financial system.  (“...if they can avoid...” whereas they have more power than their governments.)

So, has the Fed been buying ETFs this year?  —As anything other than their recent habit of being a “buyer of last resort” to prevent the stock market scam from imploding too quickly, which also has the benefit of draining non-imaginary capital out of the markets and giving some of those inflationary new dollars somewhere to go on paper without crashing?  Killing two three birds with one stone, that.

---

Interesting day.  “Interesting times.”

Outdated, obsolete language.  Don’t you know that this isn’t the horse-and-buggy days?  Language evolves.

There is now a much worse “four-letter word”.