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The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts.

The past decade of “recovery” and “growth” has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here’s a short list of what we’ve lost:

1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk. What passes for markets now are little more than signaling devices to convince us the economy is doing spectacularly well. It is doing spectacularly well, but only for the top .1% of 1% and the class of managerial/technocrat flunkies and apologists who serve the interests of the top .1%.

2. Genuine Virtue. Parading around a slogan or online accusation, “liking” others in whatever echo-chamber tribe the virtue-signaler is seeking validation in, and other cost-free gestures–now signals virtue. Genuine virtue–sacrificing the support of one’s tribe for principles that require skin in the game–has disappeared from the public sphere and the culture.

3. Civility. As Scientific American reported in its February issue (The Tribalism of Truth), the incentive structure of largely digital “tribes” rewards the most virulent, the most outrageous, the least reasonable and the most vindictive of the tribe with “likes” while offering little to no encouragement of restraint, caution, learning rather than shouting, etc.

The cost of gaining tribal encouragement is essentially zero, while the risk of ostracism from the tribe is high. In a society with so few positive social structures, the self-referentially toxic digital tribe may be the primary social structure for atomized “consumers” in a dysfunctional system dominated by a rigged “market” and a central state that no longer needs the consent of the governed.

Common ground, civility, the willingness to listen and learn–all lost.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Institutions Are Failing

July 16, 2018

Our Institutions Are Failing

Our institutional failure reminds me of the phantom legions of Rome’s final days.

The mainstream media and its well-paid army of “authorities” / pundits would have us believe the decline in our collective trust in our institutions is the result of fake news, i.e. false narratives and data presented as factual.

If only we could rid ourselves of fake news, all would be well, as our institutions are working just fine.

This mainstream narrative is itself false: our institutions are failing, and the cause isn’t fake news or Russian hacking–the cause is insider plundering and collusion, aided and abetted by a decline in transparency and accountability and the institutionalization of incompetence.

In other words, the citizenry’s trust in institutions is declining because the failure of institutions is undeniably the fabric of everyday life in America.

When was the last time you heard the top management of a university system take responsibility for the unprecedented rise in the cost of tuition and textbooks? The short answer is “never.” The insiders benefiting from the higher-education cartel’s relentless exploitation of students and their families act as if the soaring costs are akin to cosmic radiation, a force of nature that they are powerless to control.

The same can be said of every other cartel plundering the nation: healthcare (i.e. sickcare, because profits swell from managing chronic illness, not from advancing health); the Big Pharma cartel; the military-industrial complex; banking; student loans; the governance-lobbying cartels; the war-on-drugs gulag, the FBI and so on in an endless profusion of insiders whose self-serving plunder and gross incompetence rarely generates consequences (such as being fired or indicted) due to an absence of accountability and transparency.

Incompetence has been institutionalized, and is now the accepted norm.Schools fail, municipal agencies fail, oversight agencies fail, state agencies fail, and the public feels powerless to effect any systemic change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Myths We Tell Ourselves

June 19, 2018

The Myths We Tell Ourselves

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Your average mass media pundit regularly decries the fact Americans no longer have trust in the country’s institutions, yet simultaneously refuse to take any sort of responsibility for the situation. Government bureaucrats and other assorted supporters of our decrepit status quo tend to do the same thing. As is typically the case, I’ll take the other side.

Not only do I think it’s completely sane for Americans to have zero faith in their institutions, including but certainly not limited to the three-letter agencies, Congress and the Federal Reserve, I’ll take it a step further and argue we as citizens remain far too naive and trusting for our own good. If nothing else, the recent Justice Department Inspector General’s (IG) report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server should underscore the point.

First, there’s the now infamous text exchange between between Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page. The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary of the IG report:

We were deeply troubled by text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it” in response to her question “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”, it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Before You Tell Me What You “Know,” Tell Me Your Sources

May 9, 2018

Before You Tell Me What You “Know,” Tell Me Your Sources

We can no longer trust data and conclusions being published as impartial by institutions that were once trustworthy.

When someone says they “know” what’s happening on the ground in Syria, how can we assess the validity of their claim to knowledge, i.e. their claim to “know” “facts” or (gasp) “truth”?

When someone says they “know” the U.S. economy is growing and unemployment is at record lows, what is the basis of their claim to knowledge?

Before you tell me what you “know,” tell me your sources. We all know how this works nowadays: the sources are rigged or gamed to support the pre-selected narrative.

In “fake news,” the sources are designed to appear legitimate via official-sounding institutional titles for the source organizations and human “experts” / researchers, and the data that’s presented to support the “fake news” is also designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate data.

The cursory consumer of such content will be inclined to grant the institution, source and data as equal in legitimacy to other accepted sources. For example, if we read that the United Nations Labor Information Council has collected data showing the U.S. unemployment rate is actually 7.2% rather than the official 3.9%, the invocation of the UN and the precision of the data point suggests a legitimate source and data base.

But it’s “fake news;” there is no United Nations Labor Information Council (at least not to my knowledge).

Official sources have learned that the most effective way to propagate the sanctioned narratives is to rig or game the data and/or its interpretation. Thus the bailouts of the U.S. “too big to fail” financial institutions in 2008-09 were purposefully obscured; it took independent researchers to assemble all the bailout guarantees and publish the staggering total of over $16 trillion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Never Trust A Banker About Oil Prices

May 7, 2018

Never Trust A Banker About Oil Prices

In recent weeks I’ve commented on the powerful bullish forces that have combined in oil and oil stocks and your need to increase your exposure to them. So, before going on to other topics, this has to be the start of any column until further notice, despite the weakness in stock indexes overall.

OPEC and particularly Saudi Arabia continue to drop not so quiet hints about the importance of higher oil prices – for the cartel and the upcoming IPO of Saudi Aramco. In case anyone might have forgotten about their one-shot chance to remake their entire economy and culture, another ‘leak’ of Saudi oil reserve numbers was served up in the past week – a positive one, of course.

Many of the analysts who previously were pessimistic about the rise in oil prices have been slowly and steadily raising their projections. That should neither encourage us or bother us, as bank analysts have a dismal record of correctly projecting prices much into the future. One should always trust a trader first; whose obligation is to his own investments and money and not to retaining the respect of the community or keeping the job. Always remember: An analyst’s first priority is not to be wrong, while a trader doesn’t care if he’s wrong or right, only if he’s got the right side of the trade and making money.

Similarly, the speculative trade from hedge funds continues to be almost uniformly long – a fact that used to bother me much more in the days when bank proprietary trade desks dominated the speculators. In those days, their own positions would often be in conflict with sales, and, Chinese wall or not – could make for some very sticky and fast reversals of positioning inside the banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Full Faith and Credit in Counterfeit Money

May 4, 2018

Full Faith and Credit in Counterfeit Money

There are nooks and corners in every city where talk is cheap and scandal is honorable. The Alley, in Downtown Los Angeles, is a magical place where shrewd entrepreneurs, shameless salesmen, and downright hucksters coexist in symbiotic disharmony. Fakes, fugazis, and knock-offs galore, pack the roll-up storefronts with sparkle and shimmer.

Several weeks ago, the LAPD seized $700,000 worth of counterfeit cosmetics from 21 different Alley businesses. Apparently, some of the bogus makeup products – which were packaged to look like trendy brands MAC, NARS, Kyle Cosmetics, and more – were found to contain human and animal excrement.

“The best price is not always the best deal!” remarked Police Captain Marc Reina via Twitter. Did you hear that, General Electric shareholders?

Yet the Alley, for all its dubious bustle, offers a useful public service. It provides an efficient calibration for the greater world at large; a world that’s less upright and truthful than an honest man could ever self-prepare for. In 30-seconds or less, the Alley will impart several essential lessons:

The price you’re first quoted is the sucker’s price. To negotiate effectively, you must appear to care far less about buying than the merchant cares about selling. Don’t trust someone that says, “trust me.” And, most importantly, don’t believe what you see and read…or what you hear.

Reality Bites

For everything worthwhile, there exists a counterfeit. This modest insight extends well beyond the boundaries of flea markets and tent bazaars. It extends outward to news, money, prescription drugs, wars, public schools, Congress, corn ethanol, medical insurance, public pensions – you name it. There’s plenty of fraud, phony, and fake going on.

For example, in the year 2018, the most reputable news outlets have been reduced to mere purveyors of propaganda. The stories they spread are stories of fiction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Things Work Until They Don’t

April 27, 2018

Things Work Until They Don’t

As the world begins its next adventure in financial chaos and rolls over to expose its soft underbelly of lies and deceit that have been perpetrated on the public, those that see the truth have been warning the people once again. You can give people the truth but you cannot make them believe it. That is for them to come to grips with.

Trade wars are usually bad for all parties in the end but between the beginning and the end there can be some surprising developments. Human actions and delusions on the part of the public can produce strange results at times. All of our systems are based on trust. When that trust is lost, everything will come crashing down. Until then, things will go on.

If trade tariffs with China have the short term effect of creating American jobs, that could have a wealth effect by creating more disposable income in American pockets. That in turn can have a positive effect on the stock market and consumer confidence. Also, commodities are set to soar in price soon and this could carry the stock market up with it for a while.

Richard Russell once said he believed we would have a third leg in the current bull market before the bears take charge. He was right in the past and could be right again, only time will tell. This situation can not last long due to the enormous mal-investment built up in the system over many decades. A house of cards will eventually fall and the taller the house the longer and harder the fall will be.

One thing that could destroy the temporary high could be the destruction of the financial system due to loss of the reserve currency status and the replacement of the petrodollar system. If and when that happens things will not be looking good for America for a very long time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Escape the Echo Chamber

April 26, 2018

Escape the Echo Chamber

First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making — wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hearpeople from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trustpeople from the other side.

Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

March 23, 2018

Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that.

Her phone is scanning her emails and letting her know her when her electric bill is due.

I told her Google likely pushed down an update which she agreed to without realizing it (or getting the opportunity to opt-out of) which authorized them to not only scan her inbox but set up alerts for her.

She was angry about it, and rightfully so.

This is why I don’t use any of the Google apps on my Android phone. Outlook for email, Opera for my browser. Office for my productivity apps. It was a conscious choice. I moved to Android under protest because Microsoft willfully destroyed Windows Phone.

I know it’s not much better, but at least Microsoft appreciates my business, now, for the first time in their miserable existence.

And I wasn’t willing to shell out $600+ for a comparable iPhone. Pennywise and pound-foolish, I know, but no one’s perfect.

As a hardware-savvy guy I know when software is over-burdening hardware and why.

And I can tell you the data harvesting on my phone was so out of control by Facebook and Google that it became nigh unusable on wake-up. Upwards of a minute or two would go by before the phone was usable because so much data was being harvested off it before it would deign to allow me to use it.

I will switch to the iPhone when I can justify the money.

Once I deleted Facebook and all its crap from my phone, it miraculously became almost functional again. I could answer calls as they came in. I could reply to texts and approve blog comments/pingbacks.

I will never reinstall Facebook on any device I own.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Film in the Anthropocene

March 20, 2018

Film in the Anthropocene

Film is of course the art form of Industrial Civilization and its mass culture, whether as a simple historical fact, a manifestation of technical possibility, or in the various ideologies it is adept at expressing.

But it is also the art form of the Anthropocene. I am overstating the case somewhat, but not entirely, when I note that the prevailing message of film is the power of belief and trust. This is most visible in the nearly inevitable Hollywood Plot whereby evil, prejudice, self-doubt, or malevolent aliens are overcome, at the plot’s climax, by a leap of belief or trust that transcends the odds. This is true whether we are talking about Westerns, “Star Wars,” “Rocky,” “Pocahontas,” “Toy Story”—or “A Wrinkle in Time,” which I saw earlier today (don’t ask). Never mind the odds or probable limits. Believe. Trust. Take my hand. Look me in the eyes. Close your eyes. Jump. What film doesn’t contain this moment? The force is always with the film’s hero if only he or she will surrender fussy sensibility and give in to it.

It is easy enough to make a connection between the narrative of belief in yourself against the odds in the context of competitive capitalism, especially as it increasingly becomes a game of roulette in the financialized casino capitalism of today. But the story of self-overcoming through belief in oneself is more broadly suited to the Liberal life-plan of self-creation. You can be whoever you want—as long as you dream big: that’s the narrative line of almost every “age appropriate” (a phrase I use in both of its senses) movie or TV show produced for my children. The meta-myth of Liberalism is that there are no limits, that ideas and ideals can create reality, that any obstacle can be overcome by human ingeniousness–if, that is, we don’t lose faith and fall victim to the sensible or moderate law of averages that are so often represented by the foil if not the antagonist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An American: “Why I Don’t Trust My Government, At All”

March 16, 2018

An American: “Why I Don’t Trust My Government, At All”

Would you trust your government if it were headed by a President who just now appointed to become the head of the CIA, the very same person who had headed the CIA’s interrogation of a 9/11 suspect whose interrogation consisted of 83 waterboardings (plus other tortures, which blinded his left eye), all in order to get him to say that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, so as to ‘justify’ invading Iraq?

Current U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed, to head the CIA, Gina Haspel, who, as a CIA official in Thailand, the Chief-of-Base there, or Thai “COB”, in 2002, had headed the interrogation of suspect Abu Zubaydeh, and kept using waterboardings and other means of torture against him until he would implicate Saddam Hussein. He told them what he thought they wanted to hear, but didn’t know that this was what they wanted the most to hear. As Raymond Bonner described it at propublica on 22 February 2017:

chief of base and another senior counterterrorism official on scene had the sole authority power to halt the questioning.

She never did so, records show, watching as Zubaydah vomited, passed out and urinated on himself while shackled. During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah lost consciousness and bubbles began gurgling from his mouth. … At one point, Haspel spoke directly with Zubaydah, accusing him of faking symptoms of physical distress and psychological breakdown. …

The CIA officials in Thailand understood that the methods they were using could kill Zubaydah and said that should that happen, they would cremate his body. If he survived questioning, Haspel sought assurances that “the subject will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

So far, that promise has been kept. Zubaydah is currently incarcerated at Guantanamo. His lawyers filed a court action in 2008 seeking his release, but the federal judges overseeing the case have failed to issue any substantive rulings [after now 16 years]. …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Do We really Hold: In God We Trust?

March 12, 2018

Do We really Hold: In God We Trust?

QUESTION: I was wondering some of your thoughts on “God” and “The Creator” throughout US history? Is “In God We Trust” really a statement that if our most basic rights such as speech are not licensed by a government, then they are natural and thus come from God? Thus cannot be denied through evidence otherwise? What are the legal extents? Also, besides tradition, what are the significances of using the Bible during congressional swear-ins and testimonies? …

ANSWER: The origin of the motto “In God We Trust” dates back to 1864 and it was proposed by Samuel Chase, Secretary of the Treasury at that time. It first appeared in the 2 cents coin in 1864. After the Civil War, it then appears on the silver coinage from 25 cents to $1. It also appeared on the 5 cent coins in 1866, which were of a similar design to the 2 cent coinage. It never appeared on the penny which was reduced in size during the Panic of 1857. While it became the official motto of the U.S. state of Florida, it was not adopted as the nation’s motto until 1956 as a replacement/alternative to the unofficial motto of E pluribus unum (from many, one), which was adopted when the Great Seal of the United States was created and adopted in 1782. President Dwight Eisenhower on July 30, 1956, declared “In God We Trust” must appear on American currency. This phrase was first used on paper money in 1957 when it appeared on the one-dollar silver certificate. The first paper currency bearing the phrase entered circulation on October 1, 1957.

Simply because we have this motto on our currency does not mean that it guides Washington at all. Some have argued that the Roman architecture and the Egyptian style obelisk for the Washington Monument are somehow signs of a deeper cult at work.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beware The Smiling Face Of Establishment Politics

February 18, 2018

Beware The Smiling Face Of Establishment Politics

Image from official music video for “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden

The most damaging people you will ever meet in your life are not those who are overtly hostile to you, the obviously malicious individuals who openly pursue your harm. The people you will look back on as having had the most pernicious impact upon your life are those you allowed in close, those who presented a friendly, trustworthy face and then used the intimacy that you naively gave them to insidiously sabotage who you are as a person.

The exact same thing is true of politics. American TV screens blare away about the horrors of ISIS, Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons and white supremacist demonstrations, while US military drones have Middle Eastern children terrified of the sky. The man in the scary mask in a terrorist beheading video elicits a very clear, strong “NO!” from the audience, despite the fact that his faction has killed and terrorized far fewer people than the US war machine has, and despite the fact that he’s likely enjoying the benefits of US funding.

You see this dynamic everywhere. There’s no good reason Hillary Clinton voters shouldn’t be okay with President Trump, for example; all the evil stepshe’s taken on behalf of the US power establishment are no worse than all the many warmongering, racist, ecocidal and corrupt things her supporters insisted everyone look past because nobody’s perfect and purity is bad. The only difference is that his establishment politics have a slightly uglier face, usually expressed via his Twitter account. Clinton knew how to look into the camera and recite the right lines with the right Black Hole Sun grin plastered across her bloodthirsty neocon face, and Trump doesn’t.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Battle for Truth

January 24, 2018

The Battle for Truth

As we begin 2018, we find the world in a new phase in the loss of trust: the unwillingness to believe information, even from those closest to us. The loss of confidence in information channels and sources is the fourth wave of the trust tsunami. The moorings of institutions have already been dangerously undermined by the three previous waves: fear of job loss due to globalization and automation; the Great Recession, which created a crisis of confidence in traditional authority figures and institutions while undermining the middle class; and the effects of massive global migration. Now, in this fourth wave, we have a world without common facts and objective truth, weakening trust even as the global economy recovers.

Gresham’s Law, based on the 18th century observation that debased currency drives out the good, is now evident in the realm of information, with fake news crowding out real news. Leaders are going directly to the people, bashing the media as inaccurate and biased. These forces are taking a toll. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, media has become the least-trusted global institution for the first time, with trust scores of over 50 percent in only six nations, five of which are in the developing world. Putting pressure on trust in media are declining trust in search engines and social media. People have retreated into self curated information bubbles, where they read only that with which they agree, as if selecting their playlist for music. Fully half of respondents indicate that they consume mainstream media less than once a week. Nearly six in 10 agree that news organizations are politicized, and nearly one in two agree that they are elitist. Nearly two-thirds agree that the average person cannot distinguish good journalism from falsehoods.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

December 28, 2017

If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics

If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us?

“Ordinary people can’t be trusted to make the right decisions about what’s best for themselves and others. That’s why we need government to decide for them.”

“And who will we trust to decide who these government officials are?”

“Ordinary people, of course. It’s only fair.”

I hope you see the irony here.

I also hope you see the irony in expressing mistrust in human nature while also expressing faith in the idea that human nature will somehow become trustworthy when those humans work for the government. If people can’t be trusted to make their own decisions, why would those same people be trusted to make decisions for the rest of us? This line of thinking has never made sense to me, and I hope it starts to make a little less sense to you.

Here’s one of my favorite clips where the economist Milton Friedman addresses this fallacy in response to Phil Donahue’s concerns about capitalistic greed:

The way we’re going to move forward in this world is not by finding a person who’s good enough to make bad systems work, but by investing in systems that incentivize even the bad person to make himself or herself accountable to creating value for others. And I know of no other system like that other than the free market.

If you’re interested in hearing me elaborate on this theme, check out this talk I gave at The Nassau Institute & The University of The Bahamas on the power of free markets and why we need to look beyond politics if we truly want to create a freer society:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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