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The Great Taking: The Latest “Anti-Mainstream” Conspiracy

December 23, 2023

A new book has exploded on the alternative / conspiracy / fringe landscape over the past few weeks – I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. Zerohedge, Bombthrower Media, et al, we all occupy this space. Let’s call it, “anti-mainstream”.

The book is called “The Great Taking” and there is now a YouTube video documentary of it here. You can’t actually find it on Amazon (deliberate choice by author, I presume); I bought my copy via Lulu, but you can download the PDF for free here.

At the risk of oversimplifying it: The Great Taking puts forth a warning that a virtually unknown entity called “The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation” (DTCC) is effectively the “owner” of all the publicly traded companies in the world, and in fact all debt-based assets of any kind:

“It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass.

Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt.”

Over the course of the book, the author describes a 50-year process by which ownership of shares in public companies, and all debt collateral has been “dematerialized”.

In the olden days, you invested in a company – they gave you physical share certificates – and you were now part owner of the company. This is still how many value investors including me think of stock ownership.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Coming Soon: Your Travel Will Be Restricted By Personal Carbon Allowances

November 30, 2023

“Experts suggest” your standard of living be reduced by over 85%

A report on the future of travel and tourism, co-authored by a travel agency called Intrepid Travel and The Future Labs Institute, posits a future deeply impacted by climate change and restrictions on tourist travel to combat it.

“A Sustainable Future for Travel”, warns of “travel extinction”, where some areas suffer such radical climate change that all tourism there ceases, and “personal carbon allowances” that will restrict how often one is permitted travel.

From the report (pardon the length, emphasis added):

“Carbon Passports

A personal carbon emissions limit will become the new normal as policy and people’s values drive an era of great change.

As demonstrated by a worldwide tourism boom, the frequency at which we can fly is once again seemingly unlimited.

Conscience and budgets permitting, we feel free to hop on planes from one place to the next. But this will change. ‘On our current trajectory, we can expect a pushback against the frequency with which individuals can travel, with carbon passports set to change the tourism landscape,’ says Raymond [Martin Raymond, Future Laboratories co-founder]

Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint.

These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget, which is 750bn tonnes until 2050.

By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.

Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year – the equivalent of taking a round-trip from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia..

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Canada’s Bill C-26: Yet Another Government Power Grab

January 28, 2023

Canada’s Bill C-26: Yet Another Government Power Grab

Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay.

Soviet Era Ethos Stomps Privacy and Due-Process

Another doozy from the Canadian government.

Following along several other bills winding their way along the Road to Serfdom…

  • Bill C-11 regulates the internet under the CRTC and paves the way toward institutionalized content moderation, the requirement for licenses to publish online, and regulation of user generated content (in Senate)
  • Bill C-36 the Online Harms Bill sought to designate political dissent as “hate speech” and invoked penalties for criticizing politicians (not sure where this one is at the moment).
  • Bill C-18 throws a funding lifeline to Canada’s flailing agitprop industry (a.k.a the mainsteam media), in that it will require tech platforms to pay licensing fees for content the media outlets post there (passed third reading in November). This bill will reward big media conglomerates like Bell, while freezing out small and independent organizations.

Here comes another one, Bill C-36: An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, which passed first reading last June.

It’s been largely flying under everybody’s radar so far. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been actively raising awareness and Michael Geist had Brenda McPhail, their Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program on his podcast last October.

 



We mentioned C-26 in AxisOfEasy #273 citing Gowling WLG’s coverage of it by Brent Arnold (Brent Arnold sits on the Internet Society Canada Chapter board, as do I, but I am writing this post from my role as easyDNS CEO, and not ISCC.)The Government Hereby Grants Itself The Following Powers:

The new bill is ostensibly a cyber-security and critical infrastructure bill, but it is riddled with nebulous, open-ended terms, Kafka-esque secrecy provisions, onerous penalties and conspicuously absent of any semblance due process:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

If you thought the Coinbase bankruptcy disclosures were bad…

May 16, 2022

If you thought the Coinbase bankruptcy disclosures were bad…

Just wait ’til you see your government’s bail-in rules

One of the subplots that made for a bad week in crypto included a largely manufactured crisis around “The Coinbase bankruptcy disclosure”.  After posting an earnings miss, the next shoe to drop was the discovery in the latest version of the Coinbase Terms of Service, the addition of text that included the following:

“Custodially held crypto assets may be considered to be the property of a bankruptcy estate, in the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors”

This verbiage became a big deal with every corporate media outlet dumping all over it. It trended on Twitter and quickly went viral, almost as if this was some sort of revelation.

It’s not. It’s basically the oldest adage in crypto, “not your keys, not your coins” spelled out in writing.

Do you really think if you’re holding your crypto on some exchange that suddenly becomes insolvent it’s going to make a difference if a paragraph to that effect appears in the ToS or not? Good thing Mt Gox or QuadrigaCX didn’t have that in their ToS otherwise everybody with assets in either exchange would have been really screwed, right?

You’re screwed no matter what. At least Coinbase is calling your attention to it.

Don’t hold your crypto on the exchange, any exchange, full stop. Even the largest crypto exchange CEOs will tell you that.

But if you’re one of those people for whom this is something to be up in arms about, I’ve got news for you:

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

Martial Law in Canada: It’s never been riskier to NOT own Bitcoin

February 15, 2022

Welcome to the era of civil asset forfeiture for your bank accounts. Where governments are woke, broke, and the new f-bomb is Freedom.

Christia Freeland’s edict tonight that the government can now seize bank accounts with no due process and no recourse could only have been made possible by a complicit media, shaping an utterly false narrative about the truckers convoys and even of “freedom” itself.

For about six years or so, the far left, woke progressives have been operating under the assumption of being (ironically) “on the right side of history”, that their pronunciations, accusations and neuroses were canonical truth while all other thought was heretical and offensive.

They believed themselves to be objectively correct about everything, and that they evangelized an all-encompassing worldview of purported fairness and equity. Yet, the vast majority of their rhetoric is the embodiment of flat-out hatred and othering. For self-declared anti-fascists, their prescriptions around nearly everything amount to pure unvarnished totalitarianism.

They’ve destroyed classical liberalism, they’ve hijacked everything to the left of Ronald Reagan and they’ve polarized the discourse to such as degree that anything which is not full throated cultural marxism is deemed far-right.

 

Against this backdrop of institutionalized gaslighting, on the eve of the Trudeau government’s declaration of martial law, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that..

The times, they are a changing

Whether anybody cares to admit it or not, the Truckers Revolt, having spread not only across Canada but around the world, has catalyzed a sea change. The public sentiment was already there: people were sick of COVID Tyranny and they were sick of lockdowns and even a large swath of the double vaccinated (like myself) find the vax mandates to be Orwellian and authoritarian.

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

Corporate Media and Big Tech aligned against #FreedomConvoy

January 30, 2022

Bias, power and gaslighting on raw display

As the pandemic’s grip on society is clearly waning, governments at various levels and locales seem to be sorting themselves into two buckets:

  1. End all emergency measures and learn to live with an endemic COVID
  2. Cling to emergency powers and up the ante

Canada is vast country that is run primarily by left-wing liberals who select their PMs from political dynasties in Quebec and who couldn’t pull it off without the support of urban Toronto (the 416).

The corporate media in Canada is largely homogenous, liberal and unabashedly globalist. To them, anything outside of Toronto or Ottawa is “flyover country”. Anything that happens there doesn’t matter unless it’s some issue that can wrapped within a narrative of victimhood to shame the populace into believing their country is a structurally racist, carbon spewing abomination.

In Canada, a pitched ideological battle between the Liberals and Conservatives would be whether the top marginal tax rate should be 53% (where it is now) or 45%. If things got really wild and bare knuckled, maybe Trudeau would come out with a “double-mask” mandate and Erin O’Toole, a third-rate non-entity who has lost two fat-pitch elections, would say “1.5 masks!” Even then he would waffle as soon as some polling data came out.

That’s the political spectrum in Canada, unless you count the NDPs who are even further left than the Liberals. Federally, the NDPs are led by a millionaire socialist.

The Libertarians here are a joke (sorry, but it’s true. I ran for the Libertarian Party federally in 2015 so I get to say that).

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

We are headed for a geopolitical Minsky Moment

October 13, 2021

King John is forced to sign the Magna Carta, Runnymede UK, 1215AD

Could This be a Blow-Off Top for Tyranny?

King John’s military failure at the Battle of Bouvines triggered the barons’ revolt, but the roots of their discontent lay much deeper. King John ruled England in a ruthless manner at a time when the instruments of government and the practices of the courts were becoming consolidated. Eventually the barons could no longer abide the unpredictable ruling style of their kings. Their discontent came to a head during John’s reign.

— Magna Carta, Muse and Mentor

There was a lot of defeatism evident in the comments on my recent series of posts, Why the West can’t ban Bitcoin, How we know Bitcoin is a force for good and No-Coiners don’t get that it’s not up to the government.  The overall timbre being that governments are all-powerful and that they will simply ban or outlaw emergent phenomenon that doesn’t suit their purposes.

For awhile this was also my concern. When I wrote Domestic Terror is a Government Without Constraints it was motivated from a place of angst and hopelessness. However as we’ve all been watching events unfold, my mindset around this has been shifting. I have been coming across instance after instance of historical accounts on how seemingly unassailable and despotic regimes were swept away in mere moments of time, when it was least expected, when they seemed to be at the height of their power and poised to consolidate it even more.

It is in these inflection points where nobody is aware of their existence, a grain of sand shifts somewhere and suddenly a geopolitical Minsky Moment ensues. Then it’s all over:

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

Why the West can’t ban Bitcoin the way China did

September 24, 2021

Only a complete “dictatorship of the proletariat” can kill Bitcoin

Evergrande is being called China’s “Lehman moment” and overnight the PBC closed the loop on their clampdown on crypto with a total ban on virtual currency transactions.

For those paying attention, however, China isn’t just moving against crypto, they’ve been bringing their entire technology sector to heel. They also stated that it is time to redistribute wealth from the top tier of the nations wealth holders to the rest of the peasant class.

This isn’t a return to their Communist roots as much as it is a move of self-preservation against rising internal powers. In the words of my friend Charles Hugh Smith via some correspondence we’ve been having this week “Xi has set out to crush the Network State”.

I said in my earlier Network State Primer about the coming tension between Nation States and Network States: the former will go down swinging.

The power structures of the nation states won’t go gently into the dustbin of history. They will go down swinging, over a transitional era that may span decades or longer, similar to the centuries long tensions between monarchs and the Papacy that shaped the transition from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.

China has decided to make their last stand of the Nation State, now. Here at this moment in time. They will not bail out Evergrande, they will allow their side of the Everything Bubble to pop, and they will use the economic crash to make a final sweep of consolidation of their power. They will make sure their Big Tech knows who is in charge and that it is not them.

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

Why the Technocratic Mindset Produces Only Misery and Failure

June 28, 2021

It has the most fundamental aspect reality backwards

Saw this article come across, come across my news alert for “Transhumanism”. In it Dr. David Eagleman talks about how not only can we augment human senses with fantastic new abilities (like to “see” heat and electromagnetic patterns), but how we’ll even be able to build machines that think too.

There is a line in his thinking that one can glean from the article: on one side of the line are enhancements and augmentations to the human experience which are startling and amazing and which will transform our societies: even more radical life extension will be in the cards quite soon (for those who can afford it).

Like I told Steve Bannon when we talked Transhumanism: For all intents and purposes we already have radical life extension. In the years of the Roman Empire, average life expectancy was between 18 and 25 and most people would die before age 11, from something like diarrhea. This was just normal and nobody thought it would ever change.
Where Eagleman crosses into technocratic thinking is when he veers into the idea of being able to build thinking machines. The logic is that because we’ll be able to increasingly bioengineer our own living bodies, it means we should also be able to bioengineer a mind into machines using the same principles.

I think this is wrong and it’s the same theoretical mistake that leads directly to technocratically inspired catastrophes.

Yes, we continue to build on technological advancements, but we also commit a lot of unforced errors that inflict incalculable misery on humanity. These errors may manifest as policy blunders, economic crises and worse…

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

Canada to censor political taunts. Implement internet kill switch.

April 13, 2021

(Constituents to remain fair game for abuse from party apparatchiks)

A colleague forwarded me the text of an article from Blackrocks Reporter, which covers Canadian politics from Ottawa, our capitol.

It’s a report on Federal Heritage Minister Steven Guibeault’s ongoing vendetta against non-conforming political speech on the internet, in which he’s calling for censorship of “hurtful” comments against politicians and implementation of an internet killswitch to facilitate it.

Blackrocks is behind a paywall, permit me to quote it here:

‘Federal internet censors should target hurtful words against politicians, says Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault. The Minister added pending regulations may include an internet kill switch to block websites deemed hurtful, but called it a “nuclear” option.

“We have seen too many examples of public officials retreating from public service due to the hateful online content targeted towards themselves or even their families,” said Guilbeault.  “I have seen firsthand alongside other Canadians the damaging effects harmful content has on our families, our values and our institutions. As a dad and a stepdad to six kids, I know more can and should be done to create a safer online environment.”

Guilbeault made his remarks in a podcast sponsored by Canada 2020, an Ottawa think tank affiliated with the Liberal Party. Legislation to censor internet content will be introduced shortly, he said.

“I am confident we can get this adopted,” said Guilbeault. “Once the legislation is adopted, clearly creating a new body, a new regulator like that in Canada, would take some time.”’

The same story is covered here by the Post Millienial (the rest of Canada’s “approved media”, as in the ones who received hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies from the Federal Government in the run up to the last election, are not giving it a lot of airtime for some reason).

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

When Central Bankers Take Credit for “Solving” Crises They Created

April 4, 2021

File under: “It is impossible to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on his not understanding it.”

This morning  I came across a Bob Murphy tweet replying to Mark Carney, the Canadian central banker and Davos darling:

It turned out the tweet he was responding to was the fourth in a 5-series tweetstorm, fittingly authored on April Fool’s day, extolling the virtues of central bank mangling of stewardship over the financial markets.

The series was extraordinarily devoid of self-awareness, taking a victory lap on behalf of central bankers and  The Saviour State.

The market certainly can “be wrong” longer than most participants can stay solvent.  Especially when “being wrong” means mind-bogglingly overvalued and being propped up by central bankers like Carney printing money out of thin air, holding interest rates to the floor and exacerbating wealth inequality.

Carney is right. Hoping that central bankers finally figure it out isn’t a strategy.

That’s is precisely why when the central bank induced asset bubble popped in the GFC of 2008, and central banks simply doubled down on the failed policies that created it in the first place, Bitcoin was born.

After that it took on a life of its own, myriad other crypto currencies followed in its wake and now, these non-state, decentralized crypto currencies are sucking wealth out of bonds, fiat and cash.

The slower moving gold hit two successive all-time-highs while the central bankers kept printing. And now with the Fed, the ECB, the BOE, BOJ and the BOC trapped with yield curve control as the only play left, everything else is screaming higher. Bang up job, guys.

You may not be able to spin yourself out of a crisis. The only move is to print money.

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

MARK E. JEFTOVIC , bombthrower.com, mark carney, central banks,

We’re in a Bubble that’s Too Big To Fail

March 14, 2021

I’ve been hearing the phrase “Everything Bubble” come up more often lately. This isn’t a new phrase, Graham Summers was among the first to coin it in his 2017 book “The Everything Bubble: The Endgame for Central Bank Policy”:

“The Everything Bubble chronicles the creation and evolution of the US financial system, starting with the founding of the US Federal Reserve in 1913 and leading up to the present era of serial bubbles: the Tech Bubble of the ‘90s, the Housing Bubble of the early ‘00s and the current bubble in US sovereign bonds, which are also called Treasuries.

Because these bonds serve as the foundation of our current financial system, when they are in a bubble, it means that all risk assets (truly EVERYTHING), are in a bubble, hence our title, The Everything Bubble. In this sense, the Everything Bubble represents the proverbial end game for central bank policy: the final speculative frenzy induced by Federal Reserve overreach.”

Most recently the idea of the Everything Bubble came up on Coindesk’s Breakdown with NLW edition about NFT’s and the record setting sale of Beeple’s The First Five Thousand Days for $69 million USD. I say this as a guy who has been into crypto since 2013 and is getting even more involved today: I don’t get NFTs. Or rather, it only makes sense why they’re selling for such excessive valuations when you consider it to be a phenomenon occurring within the dynamics of an Everything Bubble.

Endgame is another theme asserting itself, that’s what Grant Williams and Bill Fleckenstein call their podcast (it recently went premium, but the first bunch of episodes are widely available across all major platforms)…

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

 

Domestic Terror is a Government Without Constraints

February 5, 2021

Ruh Roh: That Unhinged Canadian Conspiracy Theory is 5-for-5 so far…

A friend I’ve referenced in my writings before as “an unemployed tech CEO” (he’s been unemployed since one of his exits about 10 years ago) sent me that link that was making the rounds back in October..

It was purportedly from an anonymous Liberal Party “Strategic Committee” leaker that laid out a plan where the Canadian federal government, in collusion with world governments everywhere, were going to use the Coronavirus pandemic to impose a New World Order, distinctly communist in nature, replacing private property with Universal Basic Income and immunity passports.

I wrote it up at the time pointing out the various holes in the narrative, not the least of which was that it was completely unsourced. You had to decide to believe something like that.

My response to him was:

I saw this months ago and kinda ripped the guy who sent it to me because it sounded very Qanon-ish and just batshit. No sources, no attributions, it could literally be anything. I hate this kind of stuff.

Next thing I know my phone is ringing, and as I plug in my earbuds I hear his thick middle-eastern accent:

“Ok junior” (he had picked up my knickname from my punk rock days nearly 30 years ago, although he was never in that scene), “bring it up and let’s just walk down the list”:

  • Phase in secondary lock down restrictions on a rolling basis, starting with major metropolitan areas first and expanding outward. Expected by November 2020

Well, here we are under lockdown in Toronto, again – and most other Canadian cities as well.

  • Rush the acquisition of (or construction of) isolation facilities across every province and territory. Expected by December 2020.

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

Enough conspiracy, let’s stick to data and science to end the lockdowns, Part 1

October 27, 2020

Enough conspiracy, let’s stick to data and science to end the lockdowns, Part 1

(Part 2 is available here)

A couple of recurring conspiracy theory themes keep being circulated to me, they are specific to Canada but I’m sure these are typical across all locations.  I find these maddening because there is plenty of factual, well sourced and scientifically verified counterfactuals to draw from when being critical of the near universal mishandling of pandemic response by national governments worldwide.

For lockdown skeptics, embracing or amplifying fact-free hysterical conspiracy theories makes them look like lunatics, so they should stop doing that.

Allow me to dispense with the two big Canuck-themed conspiracy theories and then inject some much needed sanity into the conversation via a recent Triggernometry podcast with guest Ivor Cummins.

These conspiracies are:

#1) The Federal Government RFP to build “internment camps”

Sent to be multiple times privately. “Have you heard about the interment camps?”. Etc. They all refer to this actual, Canadian federal tender #6D112-202772/A “Service Provider(s) for Federal Quarantine / Isolation sites” which really does exist.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it. “Federal Quarantine / Isolation Sites” you mean like this kind of thing, nationally?

That’s actually a screen grab from Amazon’s Utopia series, which is a reboot of an earlier BBC series by the same name. I haven’t finished watching the Amazon version, but the BBC was originally about an elite cabal’s conspiracy to depopulate the planet by creating a false pandemic and then releasing a vaccine that would make people who took it, sterile. Pretty far out,  huh?

Anyhoo, back to reality and the Canadian RFP for “The Interment Camps”. If you actually read the tender, you would see that the specification calls for  bids to provide “Lodging for up to 1600 people spread across Canada”.

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

Quick: What’s The Difference Between Fake News and Hypernormalisation?

April 18, 2020

Quick: What’s The Difference Between Fake News and Hypernormalisation? 

Before the current Coronavirus pandemic, the Canadian government took delivery of the Broadband Telecom Legislative Review.  The 235-page report offered 97 recommendations for revamping internet and broadcasting oversight, most of them bad ones. Among them were provisions for requiring all content creators to obtain a license for operating from the government and “discoverability provisions” to force major tech platforms to emphasize “credible sources of news” over others (what the government calls “Approved Media”).

I wrote an article about it at the time and tabled a petition into the House of Commons to call on the government to reject BTLR in it’s entirety (still open, so please sign and share). More recently the Internet Society Canada Chapter (of which I’m a board member) submitted a point-for-point critique of the framework (it’s not on the site yet, will link when it is).

Shortly after that the government-funded CBC marshalled a gaggle of “Approved Media” in Canada (no doubt one of entities who will receive part of that $600,000,000 subsidy package announced in the run up to the last election) to call forth the government to legislate “trusted sources” of news…..

If you’re with me so far, the logic flows like this:

The latest beat in this march toward CCP-style control over the narrative is the federal governments’ latest declaration that “they are open to new laws against spreading pandemic misinformation”

The federal government is considering introducing legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people, says Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc. 

Rex Murphy was quick out of the gate with a scathing criticism of the idea, drawing the quite apt parallel to the similarity any Canadian legislation to control the narrative would be the same as the Chinese Communist Party’s total control in that country, and we see firsthand the horrors that causes.

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

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