Gun rights advocates warned that a new change to the credit card industry to add a firearm and ammunition-specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) for gun stores wasn’t about tracking guns necessarily, but could lead to the denial of lawful firearms purchases by law-abiding citizens.

In September, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express all said they would adopt the MCC code to categorize sales at gun shops; months later, several social media posts of alleged gun stores and customers claim they experienced card issues.   

Twitter account “Battlecock Tactical” tweeted, “Federal Firearms License [gun shop] in a Facebook group shared this. Looks like the doomers accurately called how that new firearms merchant code would go down.” 

Battlecock Tactical’s images show what appears to be a retail POS system at an FFL that reads $913.70 transaction was “declined.” The error code on the merchant’s computer read: 

“Transaction declined: Charge declined RESTRICTED CARD Customer bank does not allow this card to be used at this type of merchant.” 

Another picture from the customer’s view had the same error message. 

Battlecock Tactical’s tweet had what appears to be another FFL by the handle “3dprintfreedom.com” who replied:

Holy shit. This might explain the random card issues we’ve been having.

— 3dprintfreedom.com (@YouMayCall_Me_V) December 8, 2022

Someone with the handle “AnarchyCoiner” tweeted:

“I had this happen with my PayPal credit card. I tried to use it to buy ammo at my local FFL and it was denied.”

Another person said:

“Tried to buy a psa dagger slide a bit ago and had the same issue ordering from their website with my debit card – credit card let me order tho.” 

And perhaps the gun advocates were right from the gecko… 

As credit card companies were rolling out the new code in mid-September, National Shooting Sports Foundation lawyer Lawrence Keane explained:

“It was never about gathering data to aide law enforcement. It is, and always has been, a concerted effort to pressure credit card companies to deny lawful purchases of firearms and put every single gun purchaser on a watchlist.” 

Could these be some of the first examples of backdoor anti-gun policies enforced through big corporations? 

Meanwhile, an alleged former FFL holder had this to say:

As a former FFL I would strongly encourage FFL’s, dealers, retailers and consumers to start looking into Bitcoin. I’m a big fan after doing a lot of research. Transactions are peer to peer and do NOT go through a 3rd party (bank or processor). I think it’s the future of payments.

— Jason Armstrong (@jasondataviz) December 8, 2022

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge on Dec. 7 ruled that three high-ranking officials within the Biden administration will not be required to testify under oath at depositions in a lawsuit that alleges federal government collusion with Big Tech companies to censor users.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in October ordered the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, as part of a lawsuit brought in May by Republican Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

The attorneys general claim that high-ranking members of the government colluded and coerced social media companies to “suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content” or what they claimed was “misinformation” regarding COVID-19.

In November, Doughty, a Trump appointee, also said that Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary who now works for MSNBC, must also sit for a deposition as part of the case.

However on Thursday, Doughty ruled that three of the individuals—Murthy, Easterly, and Flaherty—will no longer be required to appear for a deposition after a federal appeals court blocked the move last month, stating that the judge had failed to consider whether alternative and less “intrusive” means could be used to obtain the information being sought.

Biden Officials Won’t Need to Testify

As a result, Doughty said on Thursday that Murthy will no longer be required to appear for a deposition.

The decision came after lawyers for Murthy, who the attorneys general say ran a “public campaign to censor individuals who spread ‘misinformation’ about COVID-19,” had stated there was no need for his deposition.

Instead, lawyers said that written materials provided by Murthy in response to discovery requests would serve as an adequate alternative. Doughty, however, ruled that Murthy’s chief of staff, Eric Waldo, can take the deposition as an alternative.

The depositions were scheduled for early December but Doughty noted on Thursday that this has been extended to Jan. 13, 2023.

Easterly, meanwhile, will also no longer be required to do a deposition after the attorneys general claimed she supervises the “nerve center” of federally directed censorship.

While the court found that Easterly has personal knowledge to be deposed, Doughty said on Thursday that plaintiffs can instead depose their suggested alternative, Brian Scully, an official at CISA.

“Scully is the most suitable alternative for Easterly based on both Federal Defendants’ and Plaintiffs’ arguments,” the judge wrote.

Doughty also said that Flaherty will not need to do a deposition and can instead provide written discovery and “interrogatories.”

Schmitt, who recently won his bid for U.S. Senate, and Landry, who recently announced he’s running for governor in 2023, claim that Flaherty “allegedly holds ongoing meetings about censorship and content modulation with representatives of social media companies.”

Flaherty’s Answers Cannot Be ‘Vague, Evasive’

“After considering the arguments of Plaintiffs and Federal Defendants, this Court finds that there is no suitable alternative for Flaherty,” Doughty wrote. “However, because written discovery would be less intrusive than a deposition, it is authorized that written discovery be served on Flaherty, such as interrogatories and requests for production of documents, rather than a deposition.”

Plaintiffs can serve Flaherty interrogatories and requests for the production of documents within five days of Doughty’s order and the Biden deputy assistant must provide them with his answers by no later than Jan. 5, 2023.

Read more here…

Two-million-year old DNA from northern Greenland has pushed back the genetic record by 1 million years to a time when the Arctic region was 50-65 degrees warmer, and home to abundant wildlife – including mastodons, lemmings and geese, The Guardian reports.

According to researchers from the University of Cambridge and University of Coppenhagen, the northern peninsula of Greenland – which is now a polar desert – once contained boreal forests of popular and birch trees that were teeming with wildlife.

“A new chapter spanning 1m extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time,” said the researchers, Prof. Eske Willerslev, adding “DNA can degrade quickly but we’ve shown that under the right circumstances, we can now go back further in time than anyone could have dared imagine.”

Willerslev added that similar techniques could someday be used to uncover insights into the first humans and their ancestors.

Willerslev and colleagues worked for 16 years on the project, which resulted in the DNA of 41 samples found hidden in clay and quartz being sequenced and identified. The ancient DNA samples were found buried deep in the Kap København Formation, a sediment deposit almost 100 metres thick that built up over 20,000 years. The sediment, tucked in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point, was eventually preserved in ice or permafrost and lay undisturbed by humans for 2m years.

Extracting and analysing the DNA was a painstaking process that involved piecing together tiny fragments of genetic material that first needed to be detached from clay and quartz sediment. It was only the advent of a new generation of DNA sequencing techniques that allowed the scientists to identify and piece together extremely small and damaged fragments of DNA, through referencing extensive libraries of DNA collected from present-day animals, plants and microorganisms. -The Guardian

Once they pieced together the fragments, a picture emerged of forests teeming with reindeer, rabbits, lemmings and mastodons – the latter of which have previously only been found in North and Central America.

No carnivores were found, most likely because they were fewer in number, however the researchers speculated that there were likely ancient sabre-toothed tigers, wolves or bears.

“We don’t know what was there, but probably something that ate mastodons and reindeers,” said the authors, adding that it’s encouraging that these species have been able to thrive so far north in a region that would have still been cast into darkness for much of the winter due to its location.

“The data suggests that more species can evolve and adapt to wildly varying temperatures than previously thought,” said Dr Mikkel Pedersen, of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen and co-first author.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says a drug called ivermectin does not work against COVID-19 but links to studies that show it does, an Epoch Times review has found.

The FDA’s website states, “Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

But half of the studies to which the FDA points support using ivermectin against COVID-19, according to the review.

The papers cut against the drug agency’s repeated exhortations for people not to take ivermectin for COVID-19. In Twitter posts, public statements, and emails, FDA officials have repeatedly warned against ivermectin. Some of those statements triggered a lawsuit from doctors who say the agency’s role is to approve drugs, not to issue recommendations. The suit was dismissed this week.

Dr. Pierre Kory, who frequently prescribes ivermectin for COVID-19 and co-authored a meta-analysis that concluded the drug is effective against the illness, told The Epoch Times that the government’s position on ivermectin “is one of the most glaring examples of the corruption of modern evidence based medicine.”

“There’s one message they want everyone to understand. And that message is that ivermectin doesn’t work,” Kory said. “That’s not a scientific conclusion, that’s theirs. That’s their perverted and distorted interpretation of the data.”

The FDA’s media office did not respond to a request for comment.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, a top official at the agency who was its commissioner from January 2021 to February 2022, told The Epoch Times via email that “ivermectin has been shown to be ineffective against COVID in large randomized trials.”

Studies

The FDA’s website points to a U.S. National Library of Medicine database of studies analyzing ivermectin against COVID-19. There are 88 studies listed in the database.

Out of studies that are listed, have been completed, and have results reported, most show or indicate ivermectin effectively combats or prevents COVID-19, according to the review by The Epoch Times.

They include papers reporting on results from randomized, controlled trials, which are often offered as the highest level of evidence by U.S. government officials. Such trials feature a group that receives a placebo and a group that receives the drug, randomization into groups, and blinding, or shielding operators and/or patients from the knowledge of which participants are receiving ivermectin.

Among the papers is a randomized, blinded, controlled trial that found people who received ivermectin and doxycycline, an antibiotic, recovered faster from COVID-19 than those who received a placebo.

Bangladeshi researchers reported the results from the trial of 363 participants on May 13, 2021, in the Journal of International Medical Research.

“Patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infection treated with ivermectin plus doxycycline recovered earlier, were less likely to progress to more serious disease, and were more likely to be COVID-19 negative by RT-PCR on day 14,” they said. PCR has been used to test for COVID-19.

Another paper, published on July 7, 2022, in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that that ivermectin decreased the level of COVID-19 and its viability. Israeli researchers in the randomized, controlled, open label trial compared 47 patients who received ivermectin against 42 who received placebos and said that “ivermectin significantly reduced the time of viral shedding and affected viral viability when initiated in the first week after evidence of infection.”

“There were lower viral loads and less viable cultures in the ivermectin group, which shows its anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity,” the researchers said. SARS-CoV-2 is a name for the virus that causes COVID-19.

A third paper concluded that a regimen of ivermectin and carrageenan works as a prophylaxis, or preventative medicine. Argentinian researchers found in the observational trial involving 229 health care workers that ivermectin helped prevent COVID-19 infection. A followup study involving nearly 1,200 workers confirmed the results. Both sets were reported in the Journal of Clinical and Biomedical Investigation on Nov. 17, 2020.

Ivermectin “could have saved so many lives,” Héctor Carvallo, one of the researchers, told The Epoch Times via email, adding that “it’s been a crime against mankind to prevent its prescription.”

Some other studies, including the largest ones, either found indications that ivermectin works against COVID-19 but did not achieve statistical significance or found no evidence that ivermectin is effective.

That includes a randomized, controlled, double-blind 2021 study by Mexican researchers that found ivermectin did not significantly impact hospitalization duration or mortality, and a randomized, controlled, double-blind 2022 trial by U.S. researchers that concluded ivermectin did not prevent hypoxemia, hospitalization, or death.

FDA Intervention

Scientists in Australia in April 2020 found that ivermectin worked well against the COVID-19 virus in cell culture, prompting doctors in multiple countries, including Peru and the United States, to start using it against the new illness.

Ivermectin is approved by the FDA to treat parasites. One version is used on horses and other animals.

The FDA quickly warned against using the animal form and said that people should “not take any form of ivermectin unless it has been prescribed to them by a licensed health care provider and is obtained through a legitimate source.”

Studies later in the year suggested ivermectin worked well in humans who had COVID-19, including halting the progression of disease (pdf), helping patients improve faster, and preventing COVID-19 infection, though other studies returned results that did not support ivermectin as a treatment.

The FDA maintained its stance against COVID-19, and created a new web page on March 5, 2021. It initially said, “The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19; however, some initial research is underway.”

In August 2021, the FDA urged people against using ivermectin by telling them that “you are not a horse.” It linked to the page, which was updated the following month with the language it now contains about data not showing ivermectin is effective.

American doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs approved for one use for a different use, a practice known as off-label. But doctors who prescribed ivermectin soon found that many pharmacies stopped filling prescriptions, citing advice from the FDA and other U.S. government bodies.

Half of Studies Supportive

The FDA does not cite studies on its website to support its statement that data “do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

“Clinical trials assessing ivermectin tablets for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in people are ongoing,” the agency adds, providing a link to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s database.

Of the 88 studies listed there, 56 fall under one of three categories: have not been completed, were completed but results have not been reported, or were completed and have since been retracted or otherwise withdrawn.

Of the remaining 32, 16 found or indicate ivermectin is effective as a COVID-19 treatment or prophylactic, according to the Epoch Times review.

Two of the trials were randomized, controlled, and blinded. Nine others were randomized and controlled but were not blinded at all. Most of the rest were observational, meaning they analyzed data from real-world settings like hospitals, or used observational data to create what’s known as a synthetic control group.

The set of papers includes results of a randomized, controlled, open label observational trial (pdf) that found ivermectin combined with doxycycline, an antibiotic, reduced the time to recovery and the mortality rate, and a randomized, controlled, double-blinded trial that found ivermectin and doxycycline quickened recovery and patients were less likely to see their disease progress.

Of the 16 other studies, six reported mixed results. For instance, Spanish researchers reported in The Lancet in February 2021 that ivermectin did not have an impact on testing results, but that there was “a marked reduction” of self-reported symptoms such as loss of smell and cough, and lower levels of viral loads. The result “warrants assessment in larger trials,” the researchers said.

The remaining 10 studies returned results that did not favor ivermectin or did not achieve statistical significance.

U.S. researchers, for example, found that ivermectin probably worked better than a placebo, but that the results did not achieve statistical significance, prompting them to say in October that “this study adds to the growing evidence that there is not a clinically relevant treatment effect of ivermectin at this dose and duration.”

The FDA did not respond to a request for comment on the revelation that half of the studies it points to support using ivermectin (IVM) against COVID-19.

Woodcock, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, reviewed the studies. She was unimpressed.

The Bangladeshi trial, for instance, was criticized for primarily including young persons, and having a higher number of dropouts in the placebo arm. Woodcock said the Israeli study did not report “clinical outcomes” and noted many of the other papers had small numbers of participants.

“There are only a couple studies here that really look at the effects of IVM and see a positive clinical effect and they are much smaller than the negative studies,” Woodcock told The Epoch Times in an email.

The trials in favor of ivermectin are on the smaller side, and more likely to be observational. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are inferior, Kory said. He cited research that found there was little difference between observational studies and randomized-controlled trials, as well as a paper that said “study design is only one factor that determines study quality.”

The FDA isn’t the only government group opposed to using ivermectin to treat COVID-19. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel recommends against it, citing several of the larger trials that found little or no benefit for ivermectin. The panel cites none of the papers that found a positive effect.

Read more here…

Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A former assistant city attorney and police officer in Atlanta has been charged with defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) out of $7 million.

The indictment alleges that Shelitha Robertson, 60, and other co-conspirators submitted fraudulent PPP loan applications for several companies they owned, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Robertson allegedly siphoned over $7 million in PPP loan funds and used them to purchase luxury items such as a Rolls-Royce, a motorcycle, and jewelry, as well as to transfer funds to her co-conspirators and family members.

On Dec. 6, Robertson was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

If convicted, she will face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each wire fraud charge and a maximum of 10 years for the charge of money laundering.

“Robertson allegedly stole millions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help small businesses stay afloat during the pandemic,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan. “CARES Act loans were designed to help sustain small businesses during the pandemic, not to serve as a source of personal enrichment. We will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute anyone who fraudulently obtains these critical funds.”

In 2020, Congress passed the largest financial support package in U.S. history: the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which authorized $349 billion in PPP loans.

The program provided small businesses with funds to cover up to eight weeks of payroll costs so the businesses could fill in the financial gaps created by the lockdowns.

It was implemented by the Small Business Administration (SBA) through the Treasury Department, and it provided forgivable loans to small businesses for job retention and other expenses.

Since its implementation, the program has been open season for multiple fraud schemes.

The DOJ’s Fraud Section leads its Criminal Division’s prosecution of schemes that target the PPP.

The Fraud Section has prosecuted more than 192 defendants in over 121 criminal cases and has seized more than $78 million in cash proceeds derived from fraudulently obtained PPP funds, as well as several real estate properties and luxury items purchased with those proceeds.

In December, the DOJ indicted defendants in more than 10 cases.

The good news is that they still have jobs (if one believes the goalseeked propaganda spewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The bad news is taht soaring rents have forced millions of young Americans to move back in with their parents this year, according to a new survey.

As Bloomberg’s Alex Tanzi writes, about one in four millennials are living with their parents, according to the survey of 1,200 people by Pollfish for the website PropertyManagement.com. That’s equivalent to about 18 million people between the ages of 26 and 41. More than half said they moved back in with family in the past year.

Among those who slunk back to their parents’ basement, the surge in rental costs was the main reason given for the move. About 15% of millennial renters say that they’re spending more than half their after-tax income on rent.

The disruptions of the pandemic, which triggered massive job losses as well as a spike in housing costs, have driven an unprecedented shakeup in living arrangements. In September of 2020, a survey by Pew found that for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans aged between 18 and 29 were living with their parents.

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

The FTX scandal has thrown the future of cryptocurrencies into doubt. Supporters of bitcoin, which has proved to be remarkably robust at a time when the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem is threatened by scandal and a systemic collapse, are still asserting that it is the future money.

This article addresses a number of issues that next year will make or break bitcoin’s claim over gold. Besides the interest of governments to prevent it having any monetary role, hodlers ignore the legal status of gold as money, and the different treatment likely to be accorded to bitcoin in criminal law. Furthermore, bulls of bitcoin are mainly only that: speculators hoping for a profit measured in their fiat currencies.

This is not to deny bitcoin’s virtues: only to question its monetary future relative to gold at a time when the period of declining interest rates, which played a large part in fuelling the cryptocurrency phenomenon, appears to have ended. Furthermore, the financial considerations in the geopolitical context centre on the dollar’s relationship with gold, leaving cryptocurrencies as wallflowers in the financial conflict between east and west.

Introduction

If there is one uncontroversial fact in the science of economics, it is that the central issue is the inflation of currency and credit and has been increasingly so since the First World War. The debasement of the circulating medium has always been western governments’ principal monetary policy. The last British attempt to stand in the way of the inflation steamroller ended in 1931, when economists, such as Keynes, pointed out that a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages that results from a reduction of the currency’s purchasing power would be less strongly resisted “than attempts to revise monetary wages downwards”.

This statement was economical with the reality. The error was found in the difference between pre-war and post-war gold standards. It should be remembered that the UK’s 1925—1931 gold standard was a bullion standard, as opposed to the sovereign coin standard which existed prior to 1914.  From 1925 when the new standard was introduced, the issue of sovereign coin was no longer at the option of banknote holders, but at the Bank of England’s. The Bank was not interested in redeeming its own notes for coin. Therefore, only the very wealthy would be able to redeem currency and credit sufficient to obtain 400-ounce bars, which valued in today’s sterling is about £586,000 ($714,000). The ordinary person was disenfranchised by this arrangement, compared with the pre-war coin standard when a single sovereign could be obtained for a single paper pound. The result was that abandoning the bullion standard in 1931 was the political option of least resistance.

Instead of a bullion standard, if the British government had resurrected the pre-war coin standard, public opposition to inflationism would have most probably ruled against monetary debasement; and crucially, the government’s room for economic intervention would be severely restricted. But so entrenched is the ideology of interventionism that no British economist today would agree with this analysis.

Not only can inflationism not be easily refuted today, it is lionised as being an essential policy. Nearly a century of inflationism has conditioned establishment economists to reject the restrictions of gold as money and as the sheet anchor for the valuation of credit. But the few of us conscious of the true cost of monetary debasement are increasingly aware that the commitment to inflation of fiat currencies and credit is rushing us all towards a final crisis. It is this awareness that has also fuelled speculation in cryptocurrency alternatives to gold. But as interest rates began to rise thereby expected to stabilise fiat currencies, the cryptocurrency bubble has deflated. 

An interesting debate is whether cryptocurrencies, particularly bitcoin, can secure advantage over government currencies if their purchasing power continues to diminish at an accelerated rate. Bitcoin and those of its stablemates claiming a currency role will have to overcome the consequences of a reversal of falling interest rate trends towards higher levels in future. The debate will almost certainly intensify between parties for and against, none of which have a life experience of sound money, of its role as a stabiliser of credit values, and how this might be achieved under a cryptocurrency regime.

Assuming the reader of this article is aware that after a near four-decade decline to the lower bound, interest rates may have entered a new phase of rising rates, we should address the gold versus cryptocurrencies debate first, before looking at the consequences of rising interest rates for currencies, and therefore gold and bitcoin in 2023.

The problem with bitcoin as money

The supreme cryptocurrency standard is widely acknowledged to be bitcoin. It is bitcoin which is currently promoted as the private sector replacement for government currencies. But even to talk of bitcoin as a currency is to mislabel it. A currency is a form of credit, where there is a counterparty risk. This risk is absent when a bitcoin is both owned and possessed by a person or business. It is therefore a competing form of money, which legally is physical gold and silver coin, the international legal position for which is laid out in the Appendix to this article. If it is anything, then bitcoin is not currency but a competing form of money.

Theoretically, as opposed to the legal position, it is not up to an economist to choose what is money. Ultimately, it is the public that decides. Undoubtedly, for some enthusiasts, bitcoin might be money to be hoarded, and spent as a last resort. This is precisely the established role which gold coin fulfils. But there is good reason to believe that the majority of devotees are in it for speculative profits. In other words, they do not intend to ever spend bitcoin, but to sell it for national currency. Now that interest rates have risen from the zero bound, the test will be whether bitcoin turns out to be no more than a speculative counter, aping the performance of high-flying technology stocks, and correlating more with the Nasdaq index instead of discounting the inflation of state currencies and associated bank credit.

To its credit, through all the cryptocurrency scams and collapses, bitcoin has retained its integrity. There is no doubt that in its construction bitcoin is remarkably robust. And for the international traveller it retains the advantage of not yet being subject to extensive regulations and restrictions on capital transfers. But the belief that it is a realistic form of money must be based on either the ability of bitcoin to work alongside the fiat currency system or in the event of a total breakdown of the monetary system that it will be replaced by bitcoin. And supporters seem to think that the established international legal definitions of money can be ignored.

Where this is a particular problem is in the different property rights accorded to money and currency from other forms of property. In criminal law, if, say, a painting is stollen from you and you manage to trace it to a new owner, you can reclaim it as your property, even if the current possessor acquired it in good faith. This is what allows Jewish families to recover artwork stolen from them in the Second World War.

If, however, someone steals money, currency, or access to your bank account and transfers your property in them to another party, so long as that party was not acting in concert with the criminals, you cannot reclaim this form of property. But when we consider the case of bitcoin, it does not appear to fall into the categories of money and credit for the purpose of the law. Through the blockchain, the trail of previous owners is recorded pseudonymously, so property rights can be established.

This means that the authorities can also trace the ownership of bitcoin. If you have left them on an exchange wallet, they can be identified as having come into your possession. Even if you have moved them into your own wallet (pseudonymous ownership) the know-your-client and anti-money laundering regulations which would have been completed by you before you opened an account on an exchange would trace possession to you.
If the authorities know or suspect that at an earlier stage of its ownership, your bitcoin were the proceeds of crime, then they can be confiscated. This means that unlike the possession of money, cash, or bank credit you cannot be certain that you do indeed own your bitcoin acquired in all innocence.

It might not be beyond the bounds of possibility for the state to use this criminal law to attack bitcoin as a rival to its own currency. So far, this form of attack has not been deployed, but the threat remains.

In addition to ignoring its legal status, bitcoin enthusiasts do not appear understand the implications of entire economies operating on credit, being central bank credit in the form of banknotes and bank deposits in the commercial banking system. If bitcoin is to act as money, it must support the existence of related credit, and in doing so it will have to provide price stability to goods and services over the long term. But bitcoin’s hard limit of issue makes it more likely that its purchasing power would increase significantly if commonly adopted as money. Furthermore, so far it has proved to be extremely volatile valued in fiat currencies. Both the hard limit to its quantity and its volatility makes it unsuited as a reference point for credit, which is the lifeblood of every economy. It would be impossible for businesses to calculate financial returns for commercial investment, a problem made more acute by today’s borrowers used to their miscalculations being rescued by continual credit debasement and suppressed interest rates.

Even if they were permitted to do so — which is difficult to envisage ¬– banks will almost certainly not wish to extend credit based on bitcoin. A bitcoin anarchist might respond that the entire banking system should fail with the end of fiat currencies. But this assumes that in this extreme event, the state will not come up with a solution which allows it to maintain control over credit. The best we can hope for in these extreme circumstances is that central banks and the political class learn the painful lessons of inflationism and vow to return to a credit system based on sound money — which is legally, and always has been gold.

Gold and rising interest rates 

It has been pointed out above that bitcoin’s value has declined along with rising interest rates. In derivative markets, rising interest rates are also seen as being disadvantageous to gold and favourable to fiat. Indeed, for most of 2022 rising dollar interest rates have seen gold decline, at least until recently, when expectations for higher interest rates softened. It has been that way for gold because the dominant players in derivative markets believe it to be so, and they account for their financing costs in fiat currencies. But while admitting to the accounting issue, the belief in the relationship between interest rates, gold, and currencies is based on a common misconception.

Both Keynesians and monetarists claim that interest rates are the price of credit, so if interest rates are raised, they say that demand for credit will be reduced. It is on this understanding that central bank interest rate policies are based. But empirical evidence shows that this relationship is incorrect. The explanation is simple. As a reflection of time preference, interest rates compensate creditors for loss of possession of currency or credit in the form of bank deposits. To the loss of use value and a risk that the borrower might default must be added the expectation of any changes in the currency’s purchasing power.

Unless this last factor is recognised by rate-setters who lean towards suppressing rates, a currency will suffer on the foreign exchanges accordingly. And if policy makers for other fiat currencies are similarly supressing interest rates below their time preference values, then it will be reflected in higher gold prices rather than exchange rate adjustments. With respect to gold, it is not the fact that gold yields a low interest rate on loan: that is a function of gold’s stability relative to that of a fiat currency. Therefore, what matters in the relationship between gold and a fiat currency is the degree to which the interest rate demanded in the market for the currency reflects the prospects for its purchasing power.

However, traders account in fiat currencies. So understandably, they are more interested in maximising nominal interest rates and view the lower rate on gold as a cost. But as we can see from the chart below, in the 1970s official rates (in this case the Fed funds rate) rose and at the same time the gold price rose as well.

The day the Bretton Woods gold peg was finally abandoned in 1971, the dollar price of gold was $43. Between 1971—1972, the Fed funds rate had varied between 3.3% and 5.5%. By the end of the decade, on 21 January 1980 at the PM fix gold was priced at $850, an increase of nearly nineteen times. At that time, the Fed funds rate was at 14%, clearly forced higher by the markets in accordance with time preference theory. Chairman Volcker subsequently increased the funds rate to 17.5% by April, and then to 19% in January 1981 to slay the inflation dragon. At that rate, the Fed’s dollar was yielding more than warranted by time preference, which in effect was Volcker’s policy objective.

For derivative speculators, the condition which breaks the accounting relationship between gold and dollar interest rates is when markets begin to take the inflation threat seriously. Today, that does not yet appear to be the case. We can say this because derivative markets impose a relationship between fiat currency interest rates and that of gold which denies the existence of time preference. It is an important conclusion which begs the question: will 2023 see a return to time preference considerations for the relationship between gold and fiat currency values, and how will bitcoin’s price behave in these circumstances?

To affirm its status as money, bitcoin will have to obey the laws of time preference. In other words, its current relationship with interest rates must change, so that rising interest rates reflecting fiat currencies’ loss of their purchasing power should become reflected in rising values for bitcoin. We will not try to guess this future. But we can say confidently that if the debasement of currencies accelerates, gold’s relative value will increase accordingly while that of bitcoin might not.

The geopolitical wildcard

To the extent that there is a financial war between the American-led western alliance and the Russian Chinese nexus, gold plays a far greater role than any cryptocurrency. Since the early 1980s, China has embarked on a policy of secretly acquiring unknown quantities of bullion none of which has been permitted to leave the nation’s territory. It has financed gold mining, so that for over a decade it has become the largest national producer in the world. And when it was decided that the State in various accounts had accumulated sufficient bullion, it set up the Shanghai Gold Exchange and encouraged its own citizens, previously banned from gold ownership, to accumulate large quantities —so far, totalling over 20,000 tonnes.

And Russia, implementing gold accumulation policies more recently, has declared that between reserves and holdings in other state accounts it has about 12,000 tonnes. Legislation has been passed in the Dumas which will allow some or all of this gold to be transferred into official reserves, when they could easily exceed the reserves declared at the US Treasury. Moscow is setting up a new bullion exchange. Other Asian central banks have been accumulating gold as well. And tellingly, European central banks refuse to admit to any reduction in their reserve positions.

The battlefield in this financial tussle is over the US dollar. Russia and China, with the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, and BRICS (shortly to be joined by Saudi Arabia) either want to dispose of the dollar for the purpose of trade settlement entirely or want to become less dependent upon it. How is that to be achieved? The actions of Asian powers and their central banks are signalling to us that they will do so with gold.

This could become increasingly relevant in the months ahead. With Europe entering a continental winter, fuel and food shortages risk splitting the western alliance. The ascendency of gold-backed Eurasia over a divided western alliance can be expected to lead to further dollar weakness, reflected in the value of true money, which legally is only gold.

Appendix — The legal position of gold

As a medium of exchange, the function of money is to adjust the ratios of goods and services, one to another. Thus, the price expressed is always for the goods, money being entirely neutral in transactions. It is therefore an error to think of money as having a price, but it has a value relative to exchangeable items. This should be borne in mind when considering the relationship between legal money, which is habitually given a price nowadays in fiat currencies, and the fiat currencies themselves which, given the status of legal tender, are erroneously assumed to have the status of money. The magnitude of this error becomes clear with understanding what legally is money, and what is currency. And this understanding starts with Roman law.

Roman law became the basis for legal systems throughout Europe, and by extension those of European settled regions, from North America, Latin America through Spanish and Portuguese influence, and the entire British Empire. In common with the Athenians, Rome held that laws were the means whereby individuals would protect themselves from each other and the state. But it was Rome which codified law into a practical and accessible body of reference.

The first records of Roman statutes and case law were the Twelve Tables of 450BC. These became the basis upon which individual jurors expounded, developed, and evolved their rulings over the next thousand years. The whole legal system was then consolidated into the Emperor Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, otherwise known as the Pandects. When the empire relocated to Constantinople, the Corpus was translated into Greek and eventually reissued in the Basilica, at the time of the Basilian dynasty in the tenth century. It was that version which became the foundation for European law in the Middle Ages, except for England. As an eminent nineteenth century lawyer specialising in banking put it, the reason common law differed in England was that:

“The Romans abandoned Britain at the end of the fifth century and the common law of England on the subject of credit was exactly as it stood in Gaius which was the textbook of Roman law throughout the empire at the time when the Romans gave up Britain.  But on the 1st of November 1875, the common law of England relating to credit was superseded by equity which is simply the law of the Pandects of Justinian.”[i]

In all, two thousand years of legal development had elapsed between the Twelve Tables and the reaffirmation of Justinian’s Pandects in Dionysius Gottfried’s version in Geneva of the Corpus Juris Civilis, translated back into Latin in 1583AD from the Greek Basilica.

It is the Digest section of the Corpus which is relevant to our topic. The Digest is an encyclopaedia of over nine thousand references of eminent jurors collected over time. Prominent in these references are those of Ulpian, who died in 228AD and was the juror who did most to cement the legal position of money and credit. The Digest defined property, contracts, and crimes. Our interest in money and credit is covered by rulings on property and contracts.

The regular deposit contract is defined by Ulpian in a section entitled Deposita vel contra (on depositing and withdrawing). He defined a regular deposit as follows:

“A deposit is something given another for safekeeping. It is so called because a good is posited (or placed). The preposition de intensifies the meaning, which reflects that all obligations corresponding to the custody of the good belongs to that person.”[ii]

Another jurist commonly cited in the Digest, Paul of Alfenus Varus, differentiated between the regular deposit contract defined by Ulpian above and an irregular deposit or mutuum. In this latter case, Paul held that:

“If a person deposits a certain amount of loose money, which he counts and does not hand over sealed or enclosed in something, then the only duty of the person receiving it is to return the same amount.”[iii]

So, a mutuum is taken into the possession of the receiver and in return for a right of action in favour of the depositor to be exercised by him at any time with the receiver having a matching duty to return the same amount, it becomes the receiver’s property to do with as he wishes. This is the legal foundation of modern banking.

Clearly, the precedent in the Digest is that money is always metallic. While anything can be deposited into another’s custody, it is the treatment of fungible goods, particularly money, which is the subject of these legal rulings. It is only through an irregular deposit that the depositor becomes a creditor. By laying down the difference between a regular and irregular deposit, the distinction is made between what has always been regarded as money from ancient times and a promise to repay the same amount, which we know today as credit and debt.

There is one issue to clarify, and that is to do with credit rather than money. As noted above, Justinian’s Pandects were compiled a century after the Romans had abandoned Britain. From what was subsequently unified as England and Wales out of diverse kingdoms, common law differed in that debts were not freely transferable as property. The transferee of a debt could only sue as attorney for the transferor. This placed debt as property in a different position from other forms of transferable property. Justinian took away this anomaly as a relic of old Roman law (the laws of Gaius, referred to above), allowing the transferee to sue the debtor in his own name.

The anomaly in English law was only regularised when the Court of Chancery merged with common law by Act of Parliament in November 1875. Since then, the status of money and credit in English law has conformed in every respect with Justinian’s Pandects.

While the legal position of money is clear, the economic position is technically different. Jean-Baptiste Say pointed out that money facilitates the division of labour. Technically, money is unspent labour, and is therefore a credit yet to be used. Various other classical economists made the same point. Adam Smith wrote that a guinea might be considered as a bill for a certain quantity of necessaries and conveniences upon all the tradesmen in the neighbourhood. Henry Thornton said that money of every kind [including credit] is an order for goods. Bastiat and Mill opined similarly.[iv]

But it is the legal difference which is of overriding importance because it was founded on the principal that there is a clear distinction between metallic money and a duty to pay. Money is permanent while credit is not. Money has no counterparty risk, whereas credit does. By way of contrast with money, we can define credit: credit is anything which is of no direct use but is taken in exchange for something else in the belief or confidence in the right to exchange it away again.[v]

So far, in this article we have established that gold has a legal status as money, which bitcoin lacks. We can also rule out legislation to raise bitcoin to a legal monetary status, even if law makers are prepared to consider doing so — which is unlikely. From the rulings in the Roman Pandects, we can see that a regular deposit differs from an irregular deposit because it is identified as the depositor’s property. Identity is the key to property’s recovery, and in bitcoin’s case the blockchain provides this identity. Attempts to classify a blockchain based cryptocurrency as money fall foul of the established legal position.

SpaceX revealed that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had selected an unorthodox crew of artists, athletes, and entertainers for an upcoming privately funded lunar mission called “dearMoon.” Starship, SpaceX’s most powerful next-generation launch vehicle, will propel the crew around the moon, orbit for several days, and return to Earth. 

The lunar mission has been in the works since 2018. Maezawa bought every seat and will now be joined by DJ Steve Aoki, K-pop star Choi Seung-hyun (known as TOP), choreographer Yemi AD, photographer Rhiannon Adam, YouTube creator Tim Dodd, photographer Karim Iliya, documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall, actor Dev Joshi, and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.

The lunar mission is expected to launch sometime in 2023, though Starship has yet to conduct its first orbital test flight. If early Starship tests are successful, then dearMoon could beat NASA’s Artemis II mission to fly astronauts around the moon by 2024.

Maezawa has already been to space. In 2021, he flew to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket and spent two weeks living in zero gravity. 

The six-day mission will spend three days orbiting the moon before returning to Earth. 

Authored by Ray McGovern via Anti-War.com,

Five years ago today, Congress learned from sworn, horse’s-mouth testimony that there is no technical evidence that Russia (or anyone else) hacked the DNC emails showing how the DNC had stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination.

I can almost hear readers new to this website cry out in disbelief: “That cannot be. Official Washington and the media assured us that the Russians hacked those emails in order to help Trump win. And didn’t Obama throw out 35 Russian diplomats in reaction? And what about those 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted for hacking?” Were U.S. officials and media mistaken?

No, not mistaken. They were lying.

“But … but, does this mean Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew there was no concrete evidence of Russian hacking just six months into his 22-month investigation into Trump-Russia collusion?”

Get Him Under Oath

On December 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, head of the cyber security firm CrowdStrike, testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there was no technical evidence that Russia hacked the DNC emails that WikiLeaks published in July 2016. CrowdStrike had been hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign (with the FBI’s blessing) to investigate “Russian hacking”.

Shawn Henry is a protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber-crime investigations unit before he went to CrowdStrike. What are the chances that Shawn Henry did not keep his former mentor, the Special Counsel, informed of this critical factoid?

Why are some of you readers just now learning about this – five years after that testimony? Short answer: Adam Schiff (D, CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee was able to keep Henry’s unclassified testimony secret from Dec. 5, 2017 until May 7, 2020, when he was forced to release it. Schiff gave the silencer-baton to friends in the corporate media, who have now suppressed Shawn Henry’s testimony for longer than even Schiff could.

In sum, five years (and counting) after Henry’s testimony, the corporate media are still keeping viewers/listeners in the dark. Were we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) not banned from corporate media, those interested in the “hacking” hoax could have learned what was going on by reading our Memorandum “Allegations of Hacking are Baseless”, of December 12, 2016 – a year before Shawn Henry, under oath, came clean. Henry’s confession came as no surprise to us. (Updates are available here and here.)

Yet, the New York Times, for example, keeps up the drumbeat. Charlie Savage was careful last week to insert the following, in an article about Julian Assange (don’t miss what the New York Times itself embedded):

His [Assange’s] public image shifted significantly after WikiLeaks published Democratic emails that had been hacked by the Russian government as part of its covert operation to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

Thus the words of Charlie Savage and the Gray Lady. There is always some clown who does not get the word – but Charlie is no clown. He knows what the narrative still has to be, and adheres to it (and, thus, to his job).

The reasoning behind suppressing Shawn Henry’s testimony appears to have gone something like this: The truth about “Russian hacking” cracks the centerpiece of Russia-gate; it pulls the rug from under what we corporate media have been saying about the evil Putin and what we label Trump’s “bromance” with him. Worse, the truth could deny the MICIMATT the image of the threatening “enemy” it needs to “justify” building and selling weapons. Besides, Americans probably can’t handle the truth. And what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

What Americans Don’t Know

Humorist Will Rogers had it right:

“The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem.”

What Americans “know” is that President Vladimir Putin is evil and that Russia must be stopped in Ukraine. This comes of six straight years of indoctrination/brainwashing. Putin and his colleagues, of course, are aware of this. It must seem to them that people in the US an Europe are being steeled with the propaganda basis for wider war. This gets extremely dangerous. What people don’t know can really hurt them and lead them into another misbegotten war – this one far worse than other recent misadventures.

If the sophomores advising President Joe Biden refuse to acknowledge that Russia has escalation dominance in Ukraine, the likelihood of wider war in the coming months looms large. And despite recent optimistic projections by top intelligence officials, Ukraine and NATO are far more likely to run out of ammunition before Russia does.

*  *  *

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The Biden administration on Friday unveiled another $275 million in weapons and defense equipment for Ukraine, which crucially will come via the presidential drawdown authority.

This means the Pentagon will pull arms from its own stockpiles to send to Ukraine to fulfill this package, despite defense officials having long been on record expressing deep concern over dwindling supplies necessary to protect and defend America.

A Defense Department press release indicated the package is to include “more ammunition for high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), 80,000 155 mm artillery rounds, counter-unmanned aerial systems equipment, counter air defenses, additional High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, ambulances and medical equipment, 150 generators and other field equipment.”

The Ukrainian government and armed forces have been especially interested in procurement of more and longer-range anti-air defense systems. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal indicated the Pentagon had altered missile systems transferred to Ukraine to limit their range at 50 miles, in order to prevent the Ukrainians from targeting Russian territory.

The Friday DoD press release stated further, “This security assistance package will provide Ukraine with new capabilities to boost its air defenses in addition to providing critical equipment that Ukraine is using so effectively to defend itself on the battlefield.”

This brings US defense aid commitment since the war’s start to $19.3 billion, while the total tab at the American taxpayer’s expense for Ukraine has reached $20 billion since the start of the Biden administration (accounting additionally for aid sent just prior to the Russian invasion). 

One “lesson” on display this week (and an obvious longtime trend) is that the deep state and military-industrial complex will always opt for more spending and less accountability – even at the expense of national defense readiness. On Thursday the House passed the massive, record-setting annual defense authorization bill, which will now see the $847 billion measure go to the Senate. Its mammoth size includes plans for much more Ukraine aid to come for the next fiscal year.

Ukraine is fighting for “Western Values”… Well, you can keep your Western values thank you very much. pic.twitter.com/WwGMaI3aVi

— ThinkDeeper (@ThinkDeeper71) December 9, 2022

Just two days prior to the House approving the massive, record-setting NDAA, the Democrat-led House Foreign Affairs Committee voted down a bill to audit the tens of billions of dollars that Congress has approved to spend on the war in Ukraine. This despite high-level admissions that much of the weaponry sent to Ukraine has little to no oversight once it enters the country, thus it could end up in the hands of terrorists or criminal gangs outside the borders.