Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Four eyed Ukrainian Spetznaz soldiers attend games expo and play online shooter Counter-Strike | Daily Mail Online

Ironic that John le Carre passed last week. Let’s revisit some dialog from the epic screenplay for his “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”:

CONTROL: "Shut up, Esterhase."

     Control waves him down. Smiley considers the report
     dispassionately.

SMILEY: "If it's genuine it's gold-dust.(Beat) But its topicality makes it suspect."

     Control turns to Alleline, with a mocking smile.

CONTROL: "Smiley is suspicious, Percy. Smells a fake."

SMILEY: "Where does it come from? What's the access?

CONTROL: "Percy doesn't feel like telling.

     Percy packs his pipe, enjoys the moment - the young lion
challenging the old.

PERCY ALLELINE: "A new secret source of mine."

SMILEY: "But how could he possibly have access to...?"

PERCY ALLELINE: "He has access to the most sensitive levels of policy making."

     Smiley stares at him, staggered. If it's true, this is the jackpot. Alleline enjoys his amazement, he leans over - points with bureaucratic pride to the FLAMES on the LETTER HEAD.                      

PERCY ALLELINE: "We have named the operation 'Witchcraft.'"                       

SMILEY" (Faintly) "We?"                     

CONTROL: "Percy and his pals have bypassed us, Smiley. Gone straight to the Minister. Everyone's very excited. Percy's to be allowed to           keep the identity of his new friend top secret.

Of course, Christopher Steele wasn’t a character in Tinker Tailor. Unless he was Percy. I would think more likely Haydon.

In any case, here we are again – Russia! Russia! Russia!

Tom Luongo:

“This cyber attack on the U.S. government was perfectly timed with the Electoral College submitting its votes to the Congress and Joe Biden claiming he’s president-elect.

“The reason why the release of this ‘attack’ on our government was perfectly timed is because it is a distraction from the growing unrest over the Democrats’ having stolen the election and cowering the courts into irrelevance.

“This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say it, homegrown operation for the very purpose of blaming the Russians to tamp down the anger and confuse the MAGA crowd.”

Welcome to RussiaGate 2.0, Right on Schedule

Tale of the Tape

From the Blog:

“Today IBM is unveiling a new milestone bringing to light work more than 15 years in the making between IBM researchers and Fujifilm. Together, we have set yet another new world record in tape storage – our sixth since 2006. Pushing the limits, we achieved 317 GB/in2 (gigabits per square inch) in areal density on a prototype strontium ferrite (SrFe) particulate magnetic tape developed by Fujifilm. This is approximately 27 times more than the areal density used in current state-of-the-art commercial tape drives.”

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/12/tape-density-record/

Chris Macintosh responds to Lord Klaus Schwab

Klaus Schwab: Inside the World Economic Forum - WSJ

A sample of Chris’s points before you read the article:

“Those that have thrived are unsurprisingly the very same clutch of folks that are your buddies from Davos. Enormous corporations that benefit from the tyrannical lockdowns. It comes as no surprise that Bezos’ Amazon, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Dorsey’s Twitter have all sucked up more power, influence, and market share while SMEs have been squashed by — again — policy and not the virus. Amazingly you’ve the gall to talk about equality while ensuring all of this takes place. And then there’s your buddy, [Lord] Bill [Gates].

To quote Thomas Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

A Rebuttal to Klaus Schwab’s Article on the Covid-19 Crisis

Fiat Currency Debasement

Global debasement of fiat currencies means steadily rising gold, silver, and BTC continue to rise despite stalling recovery.

Continuing monetary stimulus and suppressed rates mean less confidence fiat currencies will return to past glory.

Von Mises (1966):

“Economics recommends neither inflationary nor deflationary policy. It does not urge the governments to tamper with the market’s choice of a medium of exchange. It establishes only the following truths:

  1. By committing itself to an inflationary or deflationary policy a government does not promote the public welfare, the commonweal, or the interests of the whole nation. It merely favors one or several groups of the population at the expense of other groups.
  2. It is impossible to know in advance which group will be favored by a definite inflationary or deflationary measure and to what extent. These effects depend on the whole complex of the market data involved. They also depend largely on the speed of the inflationary or deflationary movements and may be completely reversed with the progress of these movements.
  3. At any rate, a monetary expansion results in misinvestment of capital and overconsumption. It leaves the nation as a whole poorer, not richer. These problems are dealt with in Chapter 20.
  4. Continued inflation must finally end in the crack-up boom, the complete breakdown of the currency system.
  5. Deflationary policy is costly for the treasury and unpopular with the masses. But inflationary policy is a boon for the treasury and very popular with the ignorant. Practically, the danger of deflation is but slight and the danger of inflation tremendous.”

Von Mises, L. (1966). Human action: A treatise on economics.

Who Owns Corrupt Joe

Monarchy, Democracy, and Plutocracy ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Top Contributors, federal election data for Joe Biden, 2020 cycle

totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Contributor      Total

Bloomberg LP [Michael Bloomberg] $56,796,137

Future Forward USA [largely Dustin Moskowitz] $29,917,229

Priorities USA/Priorities USA Action [Hillary backers] $25,841,199

Asana  [Moskowitz & Rosenstein] $21,937,902

Sixteen Thirty Fund [dark money] $19,874,655

Democracy PAC [George Soros] $19,000,000

Senate Majority PAC [Democratic billionaires] $12,371,874

American Bridge 21st Century [largely Soros] $10,260,573

Paloma Partners [Donald Sussman] $9,016,248

Euclidean Capital [James Simons] $7,006,805

——

The 11th-largest (which will now be shown) happens to be not Democratic billionaires but Republican billionaires. However, Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican Mayor of NYC, was Biden’s largest donor, and therefore could also be considered to be a Republican donor to Biden’s campaign.

Defending Democracy Together [Republican billionaires] $6,776,862

The Top Owners of America’s President-Elect Joe Biden

“You Met Me at a Very Strange Time in My Life”

Fight Club | 20th Century Studios

Tyler Durden: “We are consumers. We’re the by-products of a lifestyle obsession.”

Tyler had a point. How’s that working out for you? Being clever. Obsessing about lifestyle.

Well, Chris Hamilton has a point of view as we sit on the edge of plutocracy’s apparent recapture of the US executive branch:

“To begin, I’ll divide the world into two roughly equal groups, consumers and non-consumers, using the World Bank gross national income per capita.

“‘Consumers’ are half the worlds population, have average income per capita above $4,045…enjoy 80%+ of the income, savings, access to credit and likewise consume 80%+ of the worlds exported commodities and 80%+ of the worlds energy. 

…

“‘Low or Non-consumers’, the other half of the worlds population, have average income per capita of a few hundred dollars to $4044…earn less than 20% of world income, savings, access to credit and consume less than 20% of all exported commodities and burn less than 20% of global energy. They have average income of about $1,200 a year…10x less per person among non-consumers than the average ‘consumer'”

A Pareto distribution.

Or, if you prefer, my old professor, Murray Rothbard: “The necessary result…of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes…tax-payers and tax-consumers.”

Of course, Rothbard was merely quoting Calhoun who said: “… it must necessarily follow, that some one portion of the community must pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements; while another receives in disbursements more than it pays in taxes… The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.” (J. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government (1848)):

Rothbard: “For taxation, Calhoun’s inspired division of society into taxpayers and tax-consumers is applied. Inflation is shown to be binary intervention because it consists of fraudulent issuance of ‘counterfeit’ warehouse receipts.” (M. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (1962))

Back to Chris in the present:

“For those paying attention, inflation (as represented by the Federal Reserve set Federal Funds Rate) has been declining nearly in tandem with the declining consumer nation births, and global debt has blasted off inversely…with the impact of pulling demand forward against a future with organically declining demand. The question here, how would an ever smaller future of consumers pay off or outgrow ever more debt??? [Comment – the old fashioned way states have dealt with this problem: asset inflation and wealth debasement]

“Narrowing in on high income nation births versus low income nation births…Not hard to see where this is going.

“Given 30 years of declining consumer nation births, no surprise the childbearing population among consumer nations is now in decline versus ongoing growth in the low consumer nations childbearing population.”

Murray Rothbard: “The State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State…does just that.”

Tyler Durden: “Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

https://econimica.blogspot.com/2020/12/you-met-me-at-very-strange-time-in-my.html

What Risk?

Chris Hamilton (Econimica.com) is known for his insightful statistical analysis of the economy. And, last week, Chris did a great job poking through the CoV data in response to Oregon’s lockdown order.

But, first, the order.

Last week State Potentate Kate Brown issued the following statement:  “As we near 100,000 cases of COVID-19 in Oregon, and with hospitals and health care workers stretched to their limits, there is no doubt that COVID-19 continues to pose a public health threa. These are the darkest days in the pandemic”.

“Darkest days.” OK, that’s a pretty dramatic statement.

Now for Chris and Oregon public health data.

The graph on the top shows current year death rate following the long-term trend. Certainly the “darkest days” are not obvious in that plot.

OK, so maybe it’s the hospitalization rate – you know the usual “stretched to their limit” comment.

Personally, I don’t know what “stretched to the limit” means.

Oregon’s Department of Health and Human Services (updated last 12/15, link HHS) reports Oregon is among the states with a below average percentage of Covid patients in the hospitals (10.6% of beds occupied by Covid patients), among normal total hospital utilization (75% of available beds are filled), and among slightly elevated ICU utilization (about 75% of ICU beds are occupied).

Anyway, here’s Chris: https://econimica.blogspot.com/2020/12/response-to-coronavirus-in-oregon-has.html