Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

World Domination in An Age for Lucifer

“This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable.

I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them.

A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.“

— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality & The Quest for Godhood

Robert C. Tucker was a Canadian psychologist who worked with an organization called COMA – Council On Mind Abuse (not to be confused with his namesake, an American political scientist who covered the Soviet Union and wrote a biography of Stalin).

Our Tucker worked with “adult survivors and child victims of ritual abuse“ and spent time interviewing self-described “Satanists”. His book was more of a thought experiment, which tried to identify an impelling idea behind the ideology of a cult:

“with destructive cultism, however, I sensed something else animating these stories of Satanic activity and ritual abuse, something familiar yet unspoken. Satanism was a puzzle behind which it hid, or a myth beneath which it lived. Like cultism, Satanism seemed to point at something beyond itself“.

Tucker’s book is not about Satanism: it’s about a theorized class of spiritual predators he called Luciferians. In later chapters, Satanists are almost dismissed as cartoonish, lower order predators. They would be shunned by truly elite Luciferians. “Distant cousins”, at best.

Where Satanists pursue unrestrained ego and impulse gratification, Luciferians play the longest game of them all, and seek to attain Godhood itself. Pure power.

Tucker posits that this type of impulse would emerge out of evolutionary imperatives and that it would begin to form its own psycho-spiritual framework among participants – possibly on a subconscious level.

COMA spent much of its existence waging legal battles with the cults they sought to protect the public from. However, after a protracted lawsuit from the Church of Scientology, Tucker announced COMA’s dissolution in 1992.

But there is something in Tucker’s book, particularly how he ‘described the merging goals of cults and corporations:

“We have to recognize that cults are successful organizations with techniques now being borrowed by other successful organizations”’

Arguably one of the most successful organizations in existence today, is the World Economic Forum. World leaders are known to emerge from annual conclaves chanting the same mantra, nation states actively fund them, the WEF boasts of having penetrated the world’s governments and even the UN seems to take its cues from Davos.

In past articles, I’ve been looked at the thin scab of elites that sits atop the global cap table.

Class structure, now and future

And the story so far is:

• John Maynard Keynes, from whose work the modern economic system is derived, was a Marxist.

• The super-wealthy 0.1% of the 1%  who coagulate into supra-national policy organizations are Malthusians.

• The core premise driving their ideology is a radical reductionist materialism.

While many view the Davos elites as a global, all-encompassing cabal, which Controls Everything™, I could never quite bring myself to accept that description. The fact is, the world is inherently uncontrollable.

We can stipulate that people and groups can acquire outsized influence, then use it to do morally bankrupt things in order to further their own aims. We can further agree that the higher up the sociopolitical hierarchy from where these agendas originate, the more likely it is that the consequences  are borne most heavily by the plebes. Most of the time, those whose machinations were responsible for catastrophic outcomes, escape being held to account for it.

I said most of the time

But the world we live in today is proof positive of one thing: nobody is in control of anything.

However, like Tucker, I look at agendas like Stakeholder Capitalism, The Great Reset or The Great Narrative (or whatever it’s being called these days), and sense something behind it. “Something that points beyond itself”.

Years ago, in what feels like another life-line (a.k.a “Before Covid”), I was supposed to be writing  a book about the dangers of techno-utopianism. In it, I was already recognizing transhumanism as a kind of religion, and deemed it one of the four ideological pillars of techno-utopianism (the other three being: AI, technocracy and fully automated luxury communism).

Very early in my work on that, I concluded that techno-utopianism was ultimately a Luciferian construct. Not necessarily literally Lucifer, but that the aspiration to “usurp God” was Luciferian in character (the plan was for the final section of the book to propose a counter-framework called “techno-realism”, based on humanity’s hyper-adaptability as a superior approach to central planning).

When we seek to shape the world through technocracy – not to mention reality itself through transhumanism and AI – we are pursuing a uniquely eschatological event known as “The Singularity”: a point in time when our technology becomes the base layer of reality.

It is probably not the first time we thought we were capable of leveraging our gizmos into Godhood. The legend of Babel hints at a prior iteration, one that didn’t end well. We don’t know for sure where mythology borders pre-history, but whatever happened most certainly left deep grooves in our collective psyche.

When you consider the positioning and branding of the WEF, with their certitude and paternalism, it all makes a lot more sense when viewed  as a cult instead of a cabal. Cultists know all, they have the inside track – and most importantly, they claim moral authority over us all by Divine Right.

The stated objectives of the World Economic Forum:

From their institutional report “to stakeholders”, the WEF pursues  three Phases of Interaction:

Our activities drive communities through three phases of interaction, each resulting in increased impact:

1) stimulating dialogues and generating insights;

2) shaping agendas and developing influence; and

3) catalysing initiatives and generating impact.

…which in that characteristically banal WEF-speak, is a dog whistle for world domination.

They feel no compunction about it.  An Age for Lucifer posits the emergence of a type of human whose beliefs hold the adherents to be higher up the spiritual food chain than everybody else. Literally a breed above.

The key component of Luciferian metaphysics is predation.

“reality is layered from the physical to the spiritual. Pure power thrums only in the higher reaches of the spiritual domains. The higher dominates the lower. Spirit determines matter, not the reverse… Elitism is of the essence here; only powerful spiritual adepts and Luciferian masters deserve to occupy the higher realms and to enjoy the the benefits found only there.”

If we replace all instances of “spiritual” in the above passage with “intellectual”, then we have an accurate model for the ideological framework of “Davos Man”, because the entire elite ontology (or what passes for it) rests upon radical material reductionism.

And materialism, at its core, is pure nihilism.

There is no spirit. We have no souls. There is only matter, and lower humans are merely “hackable animals”.

Everyone has likely seen this montage, but it does capture “The Essential Harari”, who I personally think talks about all this in more of a descriptive than prescriptive timbre. But he is undeniably a Davos darling and when you get him going, he has that pronounced Dr. Strangelove-style glee.

Through the utter domination of what is intellectually permissible – and with expert technocratic oversight – matter can be subjugated to models …and elites can ascend to Godhood. All in a metaverse of their own making.

Cabals are self-serving and mundane. And while Davos Man is certainly that, a cabal is missing that essential element that makes for full-throated commitment – that thing that “points beyond itself”. Participants in a cabal will abandon it the moment it ceases to serve their interests… but cultists will double-down. They will burn themselves alive and eat their children. They are ideological berserkers.

What is this thing “that points beyond itself?”

I frequently say that the reason I think Bitcoin ultimately prevails, and industrial-era central planning fails, is because the former has sprung forth from a higher order of intellectual abstraction than the hierarchical, centrally-planned one.

This is all part of an inexorable progression, an unfolding, if you will. It distinguishes itself from a techno-utopian singularity, in that it is not something we’ve seized control of and are expertly managing, it’s something coursing through us. Impelling us, in fact all living things, forward.

I’ve never found a great word to describe this “thing beyond itself” that runs through everything; obviously it’s the inspiration for spiritual movements throughout the ages, for mythological constructs.  I’ve always just called it “The Great Externality”. It’s the indescribable (“the Tao which can be explained is not The Tao”), and ineffable. It can be experienced as “I am”, but if you try to put that into a Ted Talk it’ll probably stiff.

When I talk about how the architecture of intellectual abstraction has shifted from centralized to networked, that’s just a surface attribute. I’ve never really done an adequate job of explaining the fundamental change in the level of intellectual abstraction and how important that is. Jean Gebser called it the aperspectival world in “Ever Present Origin”, his exhaustive study of the evolution of consciousness itself.

“The condition of today’s world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex; nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.

We have only one option: in examining the manifestations of our age, we must penetrate them with sufficient breadth and depth that we do not come under their demonic and destructive spell.

We must not focus our view merely on these phenomenon, but rather on the the humus of the decaying world beneath, where the seedlings of the future are growing, immeasurable in their potential and vigor”

Gebser wrote Ever Present Origin in 1949; it wasn’t translated into English until 1985. He understood that crises of modernity were brought about not by differing political views or even economic incentives, but in collisions between successive iterations of consciousness itself. Humanity, according to Gebser, arced over three broad phases of Unperspectival (we could barely differentiate our own minds from the wider experience of the world), Perspectival (linearity and rationality) and into Aperspectival (what comes next – a level that integrates those which came before).

Perhaps one way to make the analogy is to frame it as the layering of dimensional orders:

In the Unperspectival world, our minds basically merged with reality; we were largely undifferentiated as self-aware creatures. It was a zero-to-one dimensional existence:

‘The initial, archaic structure is zero-dimensional; it is thus spatial and temporal, although our present mentality, if it grasps this at all, will see this in a paradox. It is origin; only in a terminological sense is it a “first” structure emanating from that perfect identity existing “before” (or behind) all oneness or unity which it initially might have represented. It is akin, if not identical, to the original state of biblical paradise: a time where the soul is yet dormant, a time of complete non-differentiation of man and the universe.’

Over the Perspectival Era, we became self-aware and to underwent individuation, straddling two-to-three dimensional constructs. I’ve mentioned before W R Clement’s “Quantum Jump”, which described the Enlightenment as a leveling up in mental abstraction. The discovery of perspective in art both impelled and signified this jump.

The fiat, technocratic era, is essentially the tail end of this Perspectival mindset – and what comes next contains yet another higher-order dimension, an axis into an Aperspectival construct… like a hypercube.

How high does the dimensional ladder go?

String theory posits a universe existing in ten dimensions.

A ten dimensional hypercube? Who in their right mind comes up with this stuff.

Anyway, this thing that points beyond itself isn’t arising from within the 3D construct that materialists assume forms the edges of existence. It comes from one level beyond.

There are phenomena that exist in this larger, super-reality that when experienced here, from within the perspective of our limited awareness, we struggle to contain within our senses. We may experience them as egregores or morphic fields, even a zeitgeist.  The Russian mystic Vedim Zeland’s concept of “The Pendulum” has aspects of both absorbing and channelling thought energy:

An energy pendulum is created when a group of people begin to think in a certain way and then:

“their thought energy finally unites into a single current. When this happens, as if in the middle of an entire ocean of energy, a separate, independent energy-information structure is created which is referred to as an energy pendulum. Eventually this structure begins to live its own life and subjugate to its laws the very people who created it.

The structure is referred to as a pendulum because the more people-adherents that feed it with their energy, the more powerfully it sways”
— from Vadim Zeland’s ‘Transurfing’

A pendulum is self-perpetuating with a single imperative: to draw as much energy into itself as possible. More importantly, it is agnostic about the energy charge – it doesn’t matter if people are in harmony with the pendulum or opposed to it. Both poles create the energy that the pendulum craves.

This is why the New Thought philosopher Neville Goddard’s advice about the need to renounce evil rather than resist it, is so important.

There is a great difference between resisting evil and renouncing it. When you resist evil, you give it your attention; you continue to make it real.

When you renounce evil, you take your attention away from it and give your attention to what you want.

Now is the time to control your imagination and give your energy to what you want.”

— Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

Pendulums can be benign or malevolent – the conditions that bring them forth make it so.

The world’s great religions can be seen as super-pendulums. Movements and cults could be minor ones.  In any case, once the pendulum has formed, active opposition to it only has one effect: to give it more energy and amplify it.

Techno-communism as typified by the WEF, and crypto-anarchism as embodied by Bitcoin, are both pendulums.

This is why taking up arms against the WEF doesn’t hurt the WEF – it strengthens it. And this is also why Bitcoin is an anti-fragile honey badger.

Pendulums feed on the energy of both their adherents and opponents, but their centre of gravity forms an axis through our experiential world and anchors them into The Great Externality.

The WEF pendulum is distinctly Ahrimanic. 

Ahriman is traditionally an evil spirit of chaos from Zoroastrianism, however I’m drawing on the work of the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, who had been trying to warn us of the coming Age of Ahriman almost exactly a century ago.

From lecture GA 191 delivered on 1 November 1919, Dornach (excuse the length):

Whenever preparation is being made for incarnations of this character, we must be alert to certain indicative trends in evolution. A Being like Ahriman, who will incarnate in the West in time to come, prepares for this incarnation in advance. With a view to his incarnation on the earth, Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him….

The right stand can be taken only by recognising in one or another series of events the preparation that is being made by Ahriman for his earthly existence. And the time has now come for individual men to know which tendencies and events around them are machinations of Ahriman, helping him to prepare for his approaching incarnation.

It would undoubtedly be of the greatest benefit to Ahriman… if the vast majority of men were to regard these preparations for the Ahriman-incarnation as progressive and good for evolution. If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all. 

Here’s the punch line:

One of the developments in which Ahriman’s impulse is clearly evident is the spread of the belief that the mechanistic, mathematical conceptions inaugurated by Galileo, Copernicus and others, explain what is happening in the cosmos.

Pure materialism. Pure reductionism. Pure Harari.

Steiner warns that:

“The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness…; for by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the Luciferic stream everything they introduce … What men eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!”

Here Steiner is talking about spiritual predation and warning those who think they’re the predators, are actually the prey for the egregores they serve. (Ahriman and Lucifer were two separate incarnations in Steiner’s cosmology, yet they worked in concert across the three thousand years that separate their physical incarnations in earthly terms).

This materialist undercurrent that forms the basis of our conventional paradigm is anchored in this, and it cleaves our earthly existence away from our souls. Is it any wonder why reductive, technocratic impulses and hyper-normality increasingly permeate our elite institutions?

“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that politics lures disordered, Messianic personalities into positions of power”.
— Rees-Mogg & Davidson, The Sovereign Individual 

It isn’t so much  cognitive incoherence afflicting the psyches of those both attracted to and ensnared within the corridors of power, as aperspectival madness – a term coined by Ken Wilber, the integral theory philosopher who has picked up the baton from Gebser here in the West.

Wilber used the phrase in his 2017 ‘Trump in a Post-Truth World’, which is arguably a book from the left about excessive wokery and Trump Derangement Syndrome. We’re seeing these types of infections of the psyche play out in escalating waves, going under different names:

Hyper-normality; TDS; …apersepectival madness.

“Mass Formation Psychosis” being most recent.

Of course, our expert overlords are having none of it…

Some day they will inform us that “Experts say there is no higher-order reality” (string theory having been stricken down by MSM fact checkers).

But this soul sickness that threatens to overrun the world is the result of ignoring these higher order constructs, and of attempting to pack reality into a 3-dimensional, materialist box. Everything has to warp just to attempt to fit it all in there.

Pick Your Pendulum

The Party at Davos is increasingly being regarded as a malevolent and controlling force on society, and with ample justification.

Yet they seemingly wield so much power and wealth; how can one hope to counter their influence?

By actively going out there and resisting the WEF, you are giving your energy to it.

The key is to put your energy into what you want, not what you don’t want.

The counterbalancing pendulum to the Luciferian-inspired fully automated luxury communism of the WEF  is a distinctly Promethean construct – an impulse that had been building for decades, perhaps longer, and then revealed itself during the Global Financial Crisis.

Via TheBitcoinTimes

That emergent impulse manifested in Bitcoin. I’ve described elsewhere the seemingly preternatural circumstances behind its emergence and the mind-boggling synchronicities I’ve personally experienced around it.

That trend has continued.

We’ve already had certain warnings  of the similarities between CBDCs and Revelations-style “number of the Beast” prophecies even before the freakishly numbered WIPO Patent 2020/060606 which described implantable digital-currency systems:

(Owned by Microsoft, btw.)

That previous article put me in touch with someone who made me aware of Revelations 2:17:

“Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches. To everyone who is victorious I will give some of the manna that has been hidden away in heaven. And I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.”

You mean everybody gets their own private key? Kinda sounds like it.

So on one side, we have an implant or a mark on the hand or head “without which one cannot buy or sell or conduct business of any kind” – while on the other there’s this group of the victorious who have possession of their own private keys.

As I said in the other article, I don’t subscribe to Biblical prophesy in the literal sense that it predicts the future. What I do believe is that we exist in a multi-faceted reality that transcends the material, 3-D reduction, which conventional thought insists upon. These mythologies attempt to describe something glimpsed in hyper-dimensional constructs from beyond linear time.

Sidebar: Life is but a dream

(Here’s an analogy for how I look at these concepts: think of a dream. My guess is whatever is happening in them, is happening at light-speed. The reason why is because you can experience a dream in which you seemingly pass hours, or even a lifetime – and then your snooze goes off, again. Turns out it’s been 10 minutes.

Then in that dream, something starts to happen, usually a sound but maybe it manifests in other ways, and when you wake up and you realize that your dream was reacting to something external to it, something happening in your waking world, like the doorbell ringing or a loud truck driving by.

When we wake up we have a hard time parsing what we experienced in the dream state – my theory there is because we dream in at least one additional dimensional axis – so of course it would be near impossible to unpack what happened in the hypercube back into 3D experience.)

I went on that tangent because I often suspect something like that is happening with synchronicities. Even prophesies or premonitions may be akin to this: an incursion into our waking world from some stimulus originating from a higher dimensional order outside of our conventional state. It would be exceptionally hard to make any sense of it because we’re missing a dimensional axis when we even try to think about it.

Our collective thought energies are responding to higher-order impulses, and we create or join pendulums. Those pendulums are further shaped by larger, underlying morphic fields and act as filters or bridges to The Great Externality. We gravitate into benign, healthy pendulums or malevolent self-defeating ones.

If we persistently engage in contemplative or spiritual practices, we may garner enough self-awareness to recognize these larger currents and make conscious decisions about which ones to put our energy into.

Conventional material reductionism would have it that our minds are just something our brains are gassing off, and there’s nothing more to it. But there is more to it than that, a lot more – and we aren’t consciously choosing what to think or how to steer our own evolution, as much as we’re akin to iron filings arranging ourselves in line with one magnetic field or another.

If we’re really aware, we can make a conscious decision around which one to align with. The majority of people just go with whatever ones they get swept up in.

Digesting it all

There will never be path function where the WEF either loses their power or reforms their ideals. The only option is irrelevance (which is why I’ve always told the cancel-culture and deplatforming crazies that the one, true magic bullet for killing a truly indefensible idea, is indifference).

The Party at Davos is under the impression that they are the vanguard of neo-Darwinist evolution – when it’s looking instead like they are functionaries of a larger morphic field that is distinctly Luciferian or Ahrimanic in character. This field encapsulates transhumanism, techno-Marxism, technocracy and social credit.

The antidote in our age is to choose a life path of radical sovereign individuality, and to embrace the Promethean impulse that gave rise to Bitcoin, public cryptography, and decentralization. This field is expressed through crypto-anarchy and network societies, yet with a grounding in spiritual expression, contemplative practices, family, community and tribes.

So when the next Davos meeting comes around, don’t bother picking up a placard and demonstrating in the streets; stack some sats and orange-pill your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. That’s how we win.

I cover macro tensions between the globalists and sovereign-individual extensively in The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter, along with a tactical focus on CBDCs, pending legislation, digital assets and crypto stocks. Get the overall investment / macro thesis free when you join the Bombthrower mafia. Follow on Twitter here,  Gettr, or join the Bombthrower Telegram

You know the old saying: when bribery doesn’t work…just bribe using more money…

Such is the unfolding case in Vietnam, where G-7 nations have made a $15 billion offer to the country to try and wean it off of its reliance on coal, according to a report by Reuters. The country is among the top 20 coal users in the world and had previously turned down or ignored prior offers, the report notes.

Vietnam had already agreed to sign up for an “energy transition partnership with G7 nations” at a global climate summer this November, but high-level talks “broke off” before the meeting, the report says.

To bring the country back to the bargaining table, the EU and Britain are leading negotiations on behalf of the West, who have offered a financial package that includes $7.5 billion in loans from the public sector and loans totaling about the same amount from the private sector. 

Sources told Reuters this was the West’s “final offer” from the G7 before a December 14 deadline, when a summit of EU and Asian nations will take place. As Reuters notes, this $15 billion offer has grown from an “initial pledge” that was just $2 billion in public funds. 

Despite the bigger offer, it “remains unclear whether Vietnam would be prepared to accept the increased offer”, Reuters wrote. 

Vietnam had previously asked for more grants instead of loans, because the country is “traditionally opposed” to taking on loans. Sources indicated the chance of a deal getting done was at “50/50”, while others said talks are ongoing. 

After Vietnam walked from talks in November, its authorities cancelled a planned meeting with US and EU climate ambassadors and instead drafted a new long-term power plan that actually increased the country’s use of coal. 

The country is left to consider how much of its energy security could be put at risk during a switch to renewables, the report says. A transition “may result in power shortages in the booming nation without a credible backup in the event of low power output from wind farms or solar panels”. 

Personally, if we’re Vietnam, we hold out for $100 billion. At the pace with which the G-7 keeps upping its offer, it should only take a couple of weeks…

It’s no secret Philadelphia is a dangerous city.

In 2019, the murder rate was 22.47 per 100,000 residents according to FBI data, with 331 homicides that year. Fast forward three years, and there have been 480 murders year-to-date.

 Most affected are black males between the age of 18 and 45.

According to city statistics released in September, overall shootings have increased by 3% over last year, while violent crime is up 7%. Robberies involving guns are up 60%, while rapes are down more than 25%. Property crimes are up over 30%. Businesses getting hit particularly hard – with commercial burglaries up a staggering 50%, according to Axios Philadelphia. What’s more, the city’s drug crisis is spiraling further out of control with a new drug called “Tranq” – an anesthetic and pain reliever used to treat horses and cattle, and which turns people into zombies.

Crime is so out of control that the Philadelphia City Council recently approved a 10 p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of 18 – making a temporary summertime law permanent.

To combat the crime wave, Philadelphia gas station owners have turned to hiring heavily armed guards.

“They are forcing us to hire the security, high-level security, state level,” said Karco gas station owner, Neil Patel, who has recruited Kevlar-clad S.I.T.E. agents packing AR-15s or shotguns. “We are tired of this nonsense; robbery, drug trafficking, hanging around, gangs,” Fox5 reports.

The final straw for Patel after his business was reportedly vandalized by young people who stole an ATM machine. His car has also been a casualty of crime, according to the report.

“We wear Kevlar, we are trained, my guards go to training every other week, they’re proficient with [their guns] and with their taser, they know the law,” said police chief Andre Boyer.

A realtime online poll on Fox5‘s website reveals that 93% say they feel safer with guards who have AR-15s at gas stations:

When asked about residents who are concerned over the gun-toting guards, Patel said: “I listen to them, but according to some people, violent people, they carry the guns, they’re not afraid of them? This is the protection for the neighborhood and the customers.”

Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times,

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison were attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5.

The women, representing mainly feminist and lesbian groups, said they are opposed to a California law that allows male inmates who self-identify as women to request to be housed in women’s prisons.

Watch a woman peak in real time

She begins by using ‘she’ for murderer #DanaRivers “Do you think it’s justice if she’s put in a violent prison with other men?”

Seconds later “What the hell? I don’t get that! They took your sign! OMG freedom of expression Who are these people? pic.twitter.com/YjB4xG7aig

— mazeks (@JeanMazeks) December 7, 2022

One hooded assailant was caught on video, obtained by The Epoch Times, throwing an egg into the group of women and also seen striking one with an umbrella, while another attacker in all black garb with red armbands on a bicycle plowed into the women from the opposite direction.

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison were attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

The women, who wore sashes reading “Woman Adult Human Female,” and carried signs saying “No Men In Women’s Prisons” and “Dana Rivers Is A Man,” were also pelted with pies in the video.

Rivers, born David Warfield, was convicted last month on three counts of first-degree murder and felony arson. He was found guilty in the 2016 slayings of lesbian couple Charlotte Reed and Patricia Wright, and their teenage son, Benny Diambu-Wright, as well as setting their home in Oakland on fire.

According to multiple news reports, Rivers shot Reed multiple times and stabbed and bludgeoned her. He also shot Wright twice and the teen in the heart.

A hearing to determine Rivers’ mental competency at the time of the murders began Dec. 5. If found “insane,” Rivers is expected to be sent to a mental hospital for part of or all of his impending sentence.

Rivers waived his right to a jury for the insanity plea phase of the trial.

If the judge overseeing the trial determines Rivers was sane when he committed the murders, it is unclear if he will be sent to a women’s or men’s prison.

Several sources told The Epoch Times he is currently being held in protective custody in the women’s section of the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif., in Alameda County.

“We are firmly opposed to housing any men in women’s prisons under any circumstances, including Dana Rivers,” Kara Dansky, president of Women’s Declaration International, told The Epoch Times preceding the protest. “All men are male, regardless of any administration of hormones and/or surgeries, and our view is that women’s prisons ought to be for female inmates only, which is in alignment with the principles of international law.”

Dansky said the women had planned the peaceful protest to demand justice and stand in solidarity with lesbians and incarcerated women.

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison are attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison are attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison are attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

Women protesting the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison were attacked outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

In 2020, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, authored by State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The law, which was enacted on Jan. 1, 2021, allows prisoners who identify as transgender, non-binary, and intersex “to request to be housed and searched in a manner consistent with their gender identity,” according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

There are currently 1,657 incarcerated people in California prisons who identify as transgender, non-binary and intersex,” according to the corrections and rehabilitation department. The agency additionally reports 342 men requested transfers to women’s jails since the end of November. Of those, 47 have been approved for transfer, 19 were denied, and 31 changed their minds. The remaining requests remain under review.

Women protest the possible transfer of convicted killer Dana Rivers—a biological man who identifies as female—to a women’s prison outside of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Courtesy of Women’s Declaration International, U.S.A.)

“It’s happening in numerous other states. We just rarely hear about it because the media doesn’t like to talk about it,” Dansky said. “We know that the state of Washington also houses male prisoners in the women’s prison on the basis of their so-called female gender identity. We know that it’s happening in New Jersey on the basis of a settlement that was entered into between the state and the ACLU.”

Danksy, who is also the author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls,” said her chapter of the organization has more than 5,000 U.S. signatories supporting its declaration, “ to advance women’s sex-based rates in law and throughout society all over the world.”
Lierre Keith, of the Women’s Liberation Front, a group that is suing the state over the issue of biological males in women’s prisons, said female inmates are “living in terror” of violent male prisoners entering women’s facilities.

“Right now, in California, any man can simply declare he is a woman and get transferred to a women’s prison—even if he’s murdered two women, even if he stabbed a woman 28 times in the face,” she said.

Jesika Gonzalez of TERF Collective, a group “working to end the international campaign of female erasure that is transgender ideology,” also spoke at the protest.

“In California … even the most dangerous men are moved to women’s prisons upon request. Dana Rivers is the kind of man that proves the need for single-sex prisons,” Gonzalez said.

Oh the irony…

While questions remain over what was known and by whom about commingled FTX client funds being used to fill a vast and leaking bucket of a balance sheet at Alameda, it appears, based on a report from The New York Times (NYT), that the catalyst for this whole debacle could have been none other than the world’s (second) greatest Democrat donor and (ineffective) altruist – Sam Bankman-Fried.

NYT reports that federal prosecutors are investigating whether FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and his hedge fund orchestrated trades in a way that led to the collapse of two cryptocurrencies in May – TerraUSD and Luna.

Specifically, Manhattan prosecutors (US attorney for the Southern District of New York) are examining the possibility that Bankman-Fried steered the prices of two algorithmically-interlinked currencies to benefit entities he controlled, including FTX and Alameda Research.

According to two people with knowledge of the matter, NYT reports that the focus on possible market manipulation adds to the legal storm brewing around Mr. Bankman-Fried.

It is illegal for an individual to knowingly stage market activity designed to move the price of an asset up or down.

TerraUSD was a so-called stablecoin, but unlike other stablecoins, its value wasn’t backed directly by the U.S. dollar. Rather, it maintained its value from a second coin called Luna through a complex set of algorithms. Traders within the digital ecosystem could mint these coins, the prices of which would fluctuate based on how many were in circulation. Anytime the price of TerraUSD fell, the supply of Luna would increase, as traders created more Luna to try to capitalize on the difference.

In May, major cryptocurrency market makers — exchanges or individuals who arrange for buyers and sellers to be matched — noticed a flood of “sell” orders coming in for TerraUSD, said one person with knowledge of the market activity.

The orders were in small denominations, but they were placed very quickly, the person said.

The sudden jump in sell orders for TerraUSD overwhelmed the system, making it hard to find matching “buy” orders for them. Under normal conditions, any sell orders that remained unfulfilled for too long would be matched with buy orders at a lower price.

The longer the orders lingered without being matched, the more they forced down the price of TerraUSD and caused a corresponding drop in Luna prices because of the way the two coins were linked..

The exact causes of the collapse of the two cryptocurrencies remain unclear. However, the bulk of the sell orders for TerraUSD appeared to be coming from one place: Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency trading firm, which also placed a big bet on the price of Luna falling, according to the person with knowledge of the market activity.

[ZH: Note the action in late January, early February, when pressure to the downside on Luna saw a positive reaction (flight to safety perhaps) into FTX’s Token (FTT). Did Bankman-Fried and his girlfriend think the same would happen when they tried to pressure Luna lower in May?]

Had the trade gone as expected, the price declines in Luna could have yielded a fat profit.

Instead, the bottom fell out of the entire TerraUSD-Luna ecosystem.

The collapse caused more trouble in the cryptocurrency industry, sending several prominent companies into bankruptcy and erasing about $1 trillion in value from the crypto market.

The ripple effects from the Luna crash ultimately contributed to the collapse of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s business empire.

Bankman Fried reportedly told NYT that he was “not aware of any market manipulation and certainly never intended to engage in market manipulation.”

“To the best of my knowledge, all transactions were for investment or for hedging,” he added.

NYT does note that the investigation in early stages and that it is unclear if prosecutors have determined any wrongdoing by Bankman-Fried. All of which would be glorious for the screenplay of this whole farce as the ‘smartest man in the room’ – having been trained on ‘arbing’ such assets for ‘months’ – suddenly fell victim to the first lesson learned in any veteran arb-trader’s risk management book – volatility wounds but liquidity kills – just ask the Nobel-prize winners at LTCM.

Not realizing that the interlinked and levered chaos that his Luna short’s success could cause is perhaps the greatest sin of someone who – for all intent and purpose – could see almost the entire market (positioning, inter-linkage, leverage, and liquidity) through his two toys – FTX and Alameda.

And don’t forget that FTX is also under investigation for violating U.S. money-laundering laws that require money transfer businesses to know who their customers are and flag any potentially illegal activity to law enforcement authorities (but we are sure Bankman-Fried had no knowledge of any of that).

On Tuesday, Binance Chief Executive Changpeng Zhao called Bankman-Fried a “master manipulator” and “one of the greatest fraudsters in history.”

Still, we are sure that Maxine Waters will ask him all about this during the hearing next week.

By Martina Lu of Container-News

COSCO Shipping Lines has withdrawn its express China-Canada-US intermodal service that was launched in October 2021, as carriers continue to trim capacity to respond to falling demand.

Container News was informed that the CEN-EXPRESS service had its last sailing when the Xin Ying Kou arrived at Prince Rupert on 29 November.

The service used five 4,250 TEU ships to move containers from Qingdao and Shanghai in China to Prince Rupert in Canada, from where the containers were railed from DP World’s terminal in Prince Rupert port, via the Canadian National Railway, to Chicago in the United States.

The ships have since been redeployed to COSCO’s Pacific Northwest services.

At the time it was launched, CEN-EXPRESS was marketed as an alternative way for shippers to move boxes from China to the US West Coast; at the time, the lane was suffering unprecedented congestion due to Covid-19 restrictions. Since then, however, the situation has reversed, as global economic uncertainties and inflation affects consumption.

Freight rates have fallen to almost the low levels seen before the pandemic, and carriers have been blanking sailings as a result.

The Biden administration has unveiled a sanctions blacklist of two dozen companies and other entities accused of supporting Russia militarily, as well as who have violated sanctions on Iran. But perhaps most surprising is that among the 24 companies also includes entities charged with illicit activities related to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. 

The US Commerce Department identified companies based in Latvia, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore and Switzerland, including Russia’s AO Kraftway Corporation, considered among the country’s largest IT companies. 

Fiber Optic Solutions in Latvia is named as well as Russian AO Scientific Research Center for Electronic Computing, LLC Fibersense, and Scientific Production Company Optolin, AO PKK Milandr; Milandr EK; Milandr ICC JSC; Milur IS; Microelectronic Production Complex (MPK) Milandr; and Ruselectronics JSC and Swiss based Milur SA, according to a press release.

Regarding the Iran-related sanctions, “The Commerce Department also added four trading and supply companies in Singapore for supplying or attempting to supply an Iranian electronics company, Pardazan System Namad Arman,” which as Reuters recounts was initially subject of US Treasury sanctions in 2018 following the Trump administration’s pullout of the Iran nuclear deal.

While over the past many months sanctions on Russia and Iran have become a normative thing in Washington, the Pakistan-related development is what’s most interesting. As Reuters explains:

The Biden administration also added 10 companies in Pakistan and UAE that it says pose unacceptable risks of using or diverting items for Pakistan’s unsafeguarded nuclear activities or are involved Pakistan’s “nuclear activities and missile proliferation-related activities.”

Pakistan, it must be remembered, is a nuclear-armed ally of Washington, but one which has always made US officials incredibly nervous given the alarming possibility of nukes ‘falling into the wrong hands’. Of course some of the world’s most notorious Islamic terror groups have had a significant presence inside Pakistan and especially along the Af-Pak border for decades.

Following the Taliban reconquering of Kabul in the wake of the US pullout from the country, the Brookings Institution warned of the following: 

The president will not have to look too far. Bordering Afghanistan, now again under Taliban rule, is Pakistan, one of America’s oddest “allies.” Governed by a shaky coalition of ineffective politicians and trained military leaders trying desperately to contain the challenge of domestic terrorism, Pakistan may be the best definition yet of a highly combustible threat that, if left unchecked, might lead to the nightmare of nightmares: jihadis taking control of a nuclear weapons arsenal of something in the neighborhood of 200 warheads.

Wednesday’s fresh US Commerce sanctions apparently have the above unpredictable nature of the Pakistani political and security landscape still fresh in mind. Currently Pakistan has the sixth largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

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

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held a panel on COVID-19 vaccines in Washington on Dec. 7, featuring experts including Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough.

Experts discussed vaccine development, vaccine composition, data from insurance and adverse event systems, and other topics.

Here are four takeaways from the panel.

Insurance Experts Record Jump in Excess Mortality

Edward Dowd, a former BlackRock analyst now with the Humanity Project, showed data from the Society of Actuaries 2021 Group Life Insurance survey that showed a jump in excess mortality among young and middle-aged adults starting around the time the vaccines began being administered.

The only thing that changed at the time, Dowd said, was “vaccines and mandates.”

He pointed out that Denmark and the United Kingdom, among other countries, have stopped recommending or entirely halted vaccination of young, healthy people because of growing concerns over side effects like heart inflammation that can lead to death.

“Why are our health authorities still pushing this vaccine if other countries are backing off?” Dowd asked.

Representatives from major U.S. health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), were invited to the discussion but did not attend.

Josh Stirling, an insurance analyst, presented an analysis of data from the United Kingdom that concluded death rates were higher among the vaccinated as of May 2022.

Doctors Report Increase in Heart Inflammation Since Pandemic Started

Several vaccines have been linked to side effects such as myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation that can turn deadly.

Doctors testifying during the panel said they’ve seen an increase in patients with the inflammation.

“It’s been very high,” Dr. Reneta Moon, a clinical associate professor at the Washington State University College of Medicine.

Moon said she saw a handful of cases in her 20 years of practicing before the pandemic. The number has jumped since the pandemic started, she said.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatrician based in Hawaii, said he’s also seen more cases.

Milhoan said that the research that’s emerged shows myocarditis and a related condition, pericarditis, are caused by the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Moderna and Pfizer have not responded to requests for comment on heart inflammation.

The studies show that the spike protein, which the vaccines cause the body to make, is “cardiotoxic and cause the heart to be inflamed,” Milhoan said. “Let that sink in, the current public health plan is asking our own body to make a cardiotoxin.”

COVID-19 can also cause myocarditis, according to some studies, though other research has challenged that view.

Young People at Little Risk From COVID-19

Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, presented data from the CDC that show young people face little risk from COVID-19.

The share of infection among those aged 0 to 17 that led to death, for instance, was just 0.01 percent through September 2021, while the share was 0.05 percent among those 18 to 29.

“When you have such low or nonexistent mortality in these low age groups, the potential severe adverse effects of the vaccine will surmount the nonexistent mortality of these age groups and therefore, what we’ve been told, that everybody has to be vaccinated … had no reason to be there in the first place, because there was no mortality they were trying to prevent,” Risch said.

The share was much higher among older people. Among those 85 and older, for example, the share was 24.6 percent.

Because vaccines have little to no impact on transmission or infection, the only point of getting vaccinated is for treatment, but most young people “had no reason to choose that when mortality from infection is orders of magnitude is much less than from vaccination,” Risch said.

No Strong Trials

As the vaccines have performed worse and worse against infection, health officials say they should still be taken to protect against severe disease.

But McCullough, chief scientific officer of The Wellness Company, said that no randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has shown the vaccines reduce hospitalization or death.

Such trials, known as RCTs, are generally considered the highest form of evidence for a drug.

Both the emergency authorization and approval for the vaccines have been on the basis of preventing infection. In fact sheets, prospective recipients are told the vaccines “have been shown to prevent COVID-19.” There’s no mention of severe illness or death.

Read more here…

The last Boeing 747 jumbo jet rolled off the production line at the company’s factory in Everett, Washington, on Tuesday night, marking a close to a significant chapter in aviation history. 

Aviation historians call the 747 the original jumbo jet was first produced in 1967. Three years later, Pan Am started flying the double-decker jumbo jet that could haul over 500 passengers worldwide. 

“For more than half a century, tens of thousands of dedicated Boeing employees have designed and built this magnificent airplane that has truly changed the world. We are proud that this plane will continue to fly across the globe for years to come,” Kim Smith, Boeing vice president and general manager, 747 and 767 programs, wrote in a press release. 

Last night, the 1,574th 747 rolled out of the Everett factory. 

There she goes!

The last 747 has left our Everett factory ahead of delivery to Atlas Air in early 2023. #QueenOfTheSkies

Photos: Boeing/Paul Weatherman pic.twitter.com/duzgr6MzQl

— Boeing Airplanes (@BoeingAirplanes) December 7, 2022

The 747 was once the premiere choice of aircraft for airlines and has since been replaced with a twin-engine, wide-body aircraft that is more fuel-efficient. Still, 341 of these jumbos are in use but only as freighters. 

“The 747-8 is an incredibly capable aircraft, with capacity that is unmatched by any other freighter in production,” UPS wrote in a statement in 2020 when Boeing said production of the jet would end in late 2022. 

“With a maximum payload of 307,000 lbs., we use them on long, high-volume routes, connecting Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” the shipper continued. 

The last 747 was sold to air freighter Atlas Air which will use the aircraft to haul goods worldwide. 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Our times of boom to bust are the perfect illustration of the credit cycle first presented in its fullness in the 1920s. Why then? Because this was the first decade after most countries created central banks. They caused some very odd behavior that made 19th-century-style economics seem to have less explanatory power.

That was when a few economists working in Vienna put together a model for understanding how business cycles work in a modern economy. Their names were Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They drew on their theoretical knowledge based on the following inputs:

Richard Cantillon (1680–1734) observed that when governments inflate the money supply, the effects are unevenly distributed among economic sectors, affecting some more than others and in different ways.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) explained that a critical element of rising wealth is embedded in the division of labor, in which individuals specialize in tasks and cooperate across firms and those firms cooperate with each other.

Carl Menger (1840–1921) saw money as an organic market creation, not an invention of the state, which implies that it should be produced like any other good or service.

Knut Wicksell (1851–1926) demonstrated that interest rates function as a price mechanism to allocate investment decisions over time, which is why the yield curve exists. Manipulation of the interest rate disturbs the natural allocation of resources.

Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk (1851–1914) explained the structure of production as consisting of far more than just consumer and capital goods. Capital itself is heterogeneous in that investment decisions include a forecast of time expectations, and the interest rate is crucial to coordinating them.

You can put all those pieces together to come up with a mental model of a well-functioning economy as described by Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) who saw the alignment of supply and demand as a law of economics, which is to say that a market economy is inherently stable.

The Central Bank

One can see, then, how a central bank messes everything up. By lowering the interest rate, the central bank fuels the creation of new bank credit that otherwise would not exist. An artificially lowered interest rate acts like fake savings.

Savings are resources drawn from deferred consumption. They serve as the basis for sustainable investment. But artificially low rates signal the existence of savings that are not there.

Not only do low interest rates create fake savings, but they actually draw real savings away from short-term projects toward longer-term projects, thus distorting the production structure as described above. They create a kind of subsidy toward capital products that would not exist had the interest rate stayed at its natural market-based level.

Massive Distortion

The result then is not just inflation, as the monetarists would describe it. It is also a distortion of the production structure.

Capital gets a subsidy over consumption goods, and not only that, but longer-term projects get a boost over shorter-term projects.

Bottom line: The last 14 years of zero-interest rates have created a paradigmatic case of the Austrian business cycle theory. It has massively distorted interest rates, more so than ever before. This was Ben Bernanke’s wonderful innovation. Many people thought his move in 2008 would generate inflation but he found a workaround.

Bernanke paid the banks to keep their new and faked resources locked away in the vaults of the Fed. This kept the hot money off the streets and kept prices stable. But that only solved one problem. It created another: It created huge malinvestments in a whole series of sectors in tech and media and housing yet again!

What resulted was a disgustingly overbuilt tech world replete with Zoom-class employees with college degrees earning six figures without limit. Central bank credit caused the creation of an overclass that eventually caused all sorts of mischief, economic and cultural. They invented idiotic ideas like ESG, DEI and woke philosophy in general.

None of this nonsense had anything to do with reality but in Bernanke’s world, reality didn’t matter anymore. This sector got so huge that it became a critical number to push lockdowns under the slogan “Stay home, stay safe.” These privileged elites forced the working classes to serve them food at their doorsteps and face the virus while they luxuriated in their fancy apartments pretending to work on laptops.

The Chart That Reveals All

So that we understand the radical nature of this experiment, please study the following chart carefully. This is the federal funds rate adjusted for inflation. What we see is the longest period of production distortion in American history. This chart goes from 1950s to the present.

This whole policy becomes unsustainable once the value of the dollar begins to fall due to price inflation. At some point, the central bank has to turn things around. When things become shaky or prices start to shift and the central bank starts to back off its pillaging policies, the house of cards starts to fall apart, as resources are drained from long-term speculation to shorter-term consumption and the restarting of real savings.

That’s precisely where we’re in the cycle. Long-term projects are falling apart. Consumers and investors are turning away from the long parts of the yield curve to make money in the short term. Resources in general are going through a massive shift in terms of time allocation as interest rates shift.

The Yield Curve

That the yield curve has dramatically inverted is hardly a surprise. It is a sign that the ship of production is turning very slowly, and investors are unconvinced yet that the Fed will keep this up.

But that point is that the Fed must keep this up if it intends to get inflation rates back to the target. The federal funds rate will have to enter back into positive territory in real terms. That means 6%, 8% or even 10%, pushing long yields far into the double-digit range.

To be sure, we should all in a macroeconomic sense look forward to a new age of more honest finance. The disaster of zero-interest rate policy is finally coming to an end. Former Fed chief Ben Bernanke’s Nobel Prize notwithstanding, this policy massively distorted capital allocation in the economy and around the world for the better part of 14 years. With its end, we’re going to get a taste of some economic and financial rationality.

We might even be able to save money without losing money. So in that sense, the man who bears the main responsibility for inflation, current Fed Chair Jerome Powell, is the same guy who will finally fix what Bernanke broke all those years ago. Remember those days when everything seemed too good to be true? There was a financial crisis that the Fed magically fixed with no downside.

Except that there was a huge economic, cultural and social downside. Frugality and prudence gave way to massive excess and a level of craziness in culture that we never imagined we would experience.

What made this preposterously unjust system possible was the Fed with Bernanke at the helm. Quantitative easing turns out to mean upending all normal life and paying the horrid price for this a decade and a half later.

Someday historians will look back at our times as a great turning point. We’ve been through calamity, and it worsens by the day. Will we enter into a new Dark Age? Or find the light and crawl our way toward it before it’s too late?

If we find our way, it will be because the Austrian economists of old will guide us.