One of the biggest international relations stories of the 1990s which captured much of the American public’s attention at the time was the 1994 arrest of 19-year old Michael P. Fay in Singapore. He had been accused of vandalism, and confessed to spray-painting cars and was reportedly found with road signs in his possession, for which he received the harsh sentence of caning by a Singapore court. The caning with four strokes only took one minute, but left blood running down his back, and subsequently strained US-Singaporean relations.

Now another southeast Asian country is being spotlighted in Western media for its longstanding practice of flogging – or caning – as an accepted judicial sentence of corporal punishment, given it even has an all female flogging squad, which was formed almost three years ago. The all-women caning squad is tasked with meting out the punishment for female convicts as part of Indonesia’s strict Islamic Sharia law system.

A photo spread and on the ground report featured in Vice News includes women dressed in head to toe Islamic coverings, administering punishments in a setting that ironically enough looks straight out of the US television series The Handmaid’s Tale.

Typically a rattan cane no more than a half-inch thick is used for all judicial and prison floggings, which can be done for offensives ranging from drinking alcohol, adultery, having any sexual relations outside of marriage, homosexuality, or even being caught in “close proximity” with an ‘unauthorized’ member of the opposite sex. 

Increasingly Indonesia’s only Shariah-regulated province of Aceh is coming under national as well as international attention and scrutiny for the practice, given that in some instances caning can be so brutal as to result in victims passing out, and skin being ripped off.

Vice in its report painted a portrait of the following eerie scene: 

Officials—mostly men—from the Sharia police are gathered at Taman Sari, a popular public park at the heart of the city. Among the scant crowd is a group of college girls and photojournalists jostling to get the perfect shot. In the middle of the park’s arena, a woman cloaked in a white jilbab with her face covered with a mask, is seated on her knees on a carpet. She’s accused of a crime that wouldn’t even be considered a crime anywhere else in Indonesia: meeting a man who is not her husband.

Sharia law dominates daily life in this strictest part of Indonesia, making even immodest clothing among women a potential punishable offense. 

Local authorities claim that female floggers were needed given that crimes committed by women were on the rise. “In official data shared by Sharia police with VICE World News, crimes against morality, such as unmarried men and women caught together, have seen a steep drop in 2021 as compared to 2018,” the Vice report reads.

Last week (or perhaps the Middle Ages): Public caning in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The woman collapsed and fainted as she received 17 floggings of a rattan cane. There are cheering crowds at such public punishments.

News link: https://t.co/sc2yr6F4XZ pic.twitter.com/XzHmqQPFre

— Nityānanda Miśra (मिश्रोपाख्यो नित्यानन्दः) (@MisraNityanand) November 16, 2021

“For instance, khalwat or when an unmarried man and woman are in a secluded place together, was reported 90 times in 2018. In 2021, that number was down to 8. The Sharia police attribute this to flogging. Activists disagree,” Vice continues. 

The hardline province and its police have long been subject of investigations by external human rights groups, given the ‘morality police’ have been documented actively seeking out ‘criminal behavior’ or public displays of vice – however, activities which the vast majority of countries and societies in the world would consider normal everyday things, such as simply a man and woman sitting together in a public park.

Apparently, some among the eight women floggers employed by the province were quite eager to quit their professional careers and conduct physical punishments:

Mariam, Aceh’s first woman flogger, wanted to become a lawyer but joined the Sharia police instead in 2006 and then was appointed by the prosecutor to become a woman flogger in 2018. “I never thought of becoming a flogger but when this regulation was made, I was ready for it,” the mother of four children told VICE World News. 

Despite that regional authorities claim equal justice and objectivity in how flogging is carried out, the report recounts the following shocking episode from years prior to the women floggers being established: “In 2014, the Sharia police flogged a 25-year-old woman for adultery even though she was handed over to them by vigilantes who gangraped her and doused her with sewage water.” And much more recently: “Early this year, a woman was flogged 100 times for adultery while the man involved, who denied the accusations, received just 15 lashes.”

European media outlets have over many years documented the abuses of Aceh’s morality police:

In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Sharia police patrol streets looking for couples who are disobeying Sharia law.

Their punishment? Brutal public caning. Revisit one of our most-watched videos this year.

Warning: this video contains scenes of violence. pic.twitter.com/6xRAkkQjwY

— DW News (@dwnews) December 25, 2017

Concerning this year’s incident involving 100 lashes, Amnesty International Indonesia described, “The fact that the woman had already collapsed once and was still forced to undergo more flogging shows a complete lack of compassion and care for her well-being and health.” The statement continued: “Both the use of flogging as a punishment and the criminalization of sexual relations outside marriage are clear violations of international human rights law.”

Vice’s full, lengthy photographic report and interviews can be accessed here.

Authored by Thomas McArdle via The Epoch Times,

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who last year assured the nation that inflation was only a fleeting bogeyman, recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to sell the Biden snake oil of a U.S. economy that we are supposed to believe is “resilient,” “strong,” “healthy,” and “robust” thanks to this administration’s endless inflationary spending, because of which she claims “the U.S. will be in a uniquely strong position to capitalize on the future.”

Funny, but just a few days before her overflowingly optimistic op-ed, Yellen was telling CBS’s 60 Minutes “there’s a risk of a recession,” then craftily adding that “it certainly isn’t, in my view, something that is necessary to bring inflation down”—a suggestion that the aggressive but less-than-Volckeresque higher interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve she once chaired will be to blame for the downturn that likely has already begun.

Before that, early this month, Yellen appeared on the Stephen Colbert show and blamed the American people for the record-high inflation, because they “suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology,” leading to “bottlenecks” in supply chains.

Only last June before the Senate Finance Committee, Biden’s Treasury chief was saying, “I do expect inflation to remain high,” conceding that the administration’s 4.7 percent forecast would have to be revised in the midst of a 40-year high 8 percent inflation rate and a World Bank projection of several years of high inflation and seriously diminished economic growth around the globe. Now, by contrast, she claims “there are signs that the supply-demand imbalances that have been boosting inflation are now easing in many sectors of the economy.”

So when Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin try to alert the administration to the Chinese Communist Party seeking control of an important Silicon Valley company like GEO Semiconductor, they have to wonder whether it will be Janet in Wonderland they’ll be dealing with or the woman who appears not to have swallowed the totality of the Biden propaganda whole.

“As you know,” the two members of Congress wrote Yellen last week (pdf), “the CCP pursues a strategy to acquire cutting-edge dual-use technology overseas in part to help the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) develop and field advanced military capabilities that are then aimed at American forces in the Indo-Pacific. We are deeply concerned that GEO Semiconductor may fall prey to this scheme, as Chinese-controlled companies are often forced to hand over their technology to the Chinese military or intelligence services.”

In a taunt regarding the Democrats’ spending excess, Cotton and Gallagher added that “Given that Congress recently enacted legislation to spend billions to promote the American semiconductor industry, it would be malfeasant to allow the Chinese Communist Party to become a beneficiary of American taxpayer dollars and to seize part of that industry.”

But considering that last month Yellen said, “it’s appropriate for American businesses to be thinking about” China conquering Taiwan, how much action can be expected from her Treasury against Beijing’s infiltration of American high tech?

President Joe Biden’s main response to the China threat is—is it any surprise?—to establish a new layer of bureaucracy at the State Department that Democrat elder statesman Leon Panetta fears could become “another bureaucratic hellhole in which people establish positions for the sake of establishing positions and don’t develop the kind of sharpness that you need in order to get the job done.”

Yellen claimed in the Wall Street Journal that “the policies of the Biden administration have propelled the American economy to one of the fastest recoveries in modern history.” Sorry, but the economic growth that returned when Americans came back to work after the COVID-19 lockdown is not the result of Biden policies, any more than COVID was the result of Donald Trump’s pro-growth economic policies.

The fact that Yellen would make this assertion demonstrates just how dumb she and the president think Americans are.

…

Like other Federal Reserve chairmen before and since, Yellen spent years watching her words and maintaining an image of detachment from politics and ideology. Her contradictory assertions and discredited predictions during her time as Treasury chief have ruined her reputation of supposed sagacity.

*  *  *

Read more here…

Incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busy forming what’s being widely perceived as the most hardline and right-wing government in the country’s history. Netanyahu is set to be formally sworn into office on Thursday, along with his top ministers.

He has already promised to put settlement expansion in the Palestinian West Bank highest on the list of priorities. His Likud party released the new governing coalition’s policy guidelines Wednesday, which opens by vowing to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria.” 

All of these are the biblical and Israeli-recognized names for broad swathes of the occupied West Bank. The new government is essentially warning it will go ‘gloves-off’ in taking more territory.

Given that the United States and the vast majority of United Nations members oppose an official policy of Israeli West Bank expansion, also given the potential for reigniting explosive conflict in the region, it could see a strained relationship between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. 

Already some 500,000 Israelis are part of dozens of Jewish settlements scattered throughout the West Bank, which European leaders especially have long condemned as “illegal”. 

These settler groups frequently clash with local Palestinians – the latter who number about 2.5 million, but who have growing restrictions placed on their freedom of movement as the settlements expand. Israeli troops control checkpoints and Palestinians’ ability to travel depending on the proximity of Jewish settlements.

This leads to frequent clashes and street battles, often with Palestinians hurling rocks and other debris at Israeli security forces. Large-scale settlement under incoming prime minister Netanyahu could unleash another Intifada, observers and human rights activists fear.

Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters at Palestinian citizens at Qalandiya military checkpoint in the West Bank city of Ramallah. pic.twitter.com/rEOPOMsdmI

— Ahmed Shameya (@Ahmedwsh95) December 27, 2022

Some of the incoming government officials under Netanyahu themselves live in ‘illegal’ settlements, as Al Jazeera explains:

Netanyahu’s new government – the most religious and hardline in Israel’s history – is made up of ultra-Orthodox parties, a far-right ultranationalist religious faction and his Likud party. It is expected to be sworn in on Thursday.

Several of Netanyahu’s key allies, including most of the Religious Zionism party, are ultranationalist West Bank settlers.

Netanyahu was removed from office last year over major accusations of corruption and bribery, the investigation of which is still ongoing. He served as prime minister from 2009 to 2021 – and his now rising to lead an unlikely coalition that finally emerged victorious after multiple failed national election attempts. This of course makes him the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

David DePape, the man charged in the hammer attack targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband pled not guilty Wednesday to attempted murder and other state charges.

DePape, 42, previously pleaded not guilty to federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping. Wednesday’s arraignment was for state charges.

The suspect also waived his right to a speedy trial. He will be back in court on Feb. 23 to set his trial date, a judge ruled, according to local media reports.

In November, during his initial arraignment, DePape pleaded not guilty via his public defender and denied all allegations against him. The Canadian national currently remains held without bail.

“Mr. DePape will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and held accountable for his heinous crimes,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement on Wednesday.

DePape’s public defender, Adam Lipson, told reporters that he had no comments after Wednesday’s hearing. He said the suspect is “going to be fighting this case in court, not the hallway.”

Prosecutors alleged DePape broke into the Pelosis’ residence in San Francisco at around 2 a.m. on Oct. 28 before he went upstairs and asked a sleeping Paul Pelosi where his wife, Nancy, was. The House speaker was out of town.

Family members said that Pelosi, 82, suffered a skull fracture and was hospitalized for several days before he was released. He was seen with his wife at a public event at the Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month.

Court papers also said that Paul Pelosi then told DePape that he had to use the bathroom and called 911 from his cellphone. Two officers arrived before encountering DePape and Pelosi struggling over a hammer, prosecutors said. When the officers told the two to drop the hammer, DePape got control of the tool and used it to hit Pelosi in the head.

The home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in San Francisco on Oct. 28, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In a hearing earlier this month, prosecutors showed new evidence that included Pelosi’s 911 call, body camera footage, and the hammer that was allegedly used in the attack. A 15-second-long bodycamera clip was also played, according to reports, showing the front door opening, the alleged attack, and DePape telling officers that he won’t drop the hammer.

San Francisco Police Department Lt. Carla Hurley told the court that when she interrogated DePape, he told her that he had other targets, including Hunter Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, actor Tom Hanks, and others. Jenkins and other prosecutors said that the attack was politically motivated—based on statements that he made to investigators.

“There is evil in Washington, what they did went so far beyond the campaign,” DePape told Hurley, according to a recording that was played in court.

DePape also allegedly told Hurley that when police approached Pelosi’s home after he entered, he recalled saying, “I’m not going to surrender, I am here to fight. If you stop me from going after people, you will take the punishment instead.”

Other Details

Family members, however, said that DePape shared their left-wing views and questioned those claims.

“‘I’m surprised about the whole thing. There is still a lot of info that hasn’t been given to the public. I have no clue what happened or how it happened. There are more questions than answers right now. Do we even know what really happened?” Sky Gonzalez, DePape’s son who lives with his family in Berkeley, told the Daily Mail in December.

Front entrance of David DePape’s former house and camper van currently belonging to his ex-wife Oxane Taub at 1526 Woolsey Street in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 30, 2022 (Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times).

While Gonzalez admitted that he hasn’t seen his father in years, he asserted DePape is not “a danger to society” and added he doesn’t “even know if he even attacked Mr. Pelosi.”

“My father had a lot of political views and told me about a lot of different things, but he didn’t subscribe to either political party, Democrat or Republican,” he said, adding that he believed his father was a member of the left-wing Green Party.

Days after the attack was reported, DePape’s former partner, nudist activist Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, said that he suffered from mental illness. Several years ago, he disappeared for months and came back believing he was Jesus Christ, Taub told local media.

In response to a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision to keep the Title 42 illegal immigration law in place, Joe Biden begrudgingly stated that while the federal government is required to continue enforcing them, the removal of covid-based restrictions is ‘long overdue’. 

The comment represents even more proof that Biden and Democrats are intent on creating an open migration environment and will do nothing to secure the border. 

It should be noted that the Biden Administration continues to promote pandemic fear-mongering despite the fact that the vast majority of the country has moved on. 

Yet, when it comes to the disastrous flood of illegal migrants invading the southern border the White House is not at all concerned about the spread of covid and continues to ignore the crisis. 

It is this kind of hypocrisy that leaves border states with little option other than to bus the migrants they can’t send back across the border over to Democrat run sanctuary cities.  

Dissenting opinions from the Supreme Court’s decision argue that the crisis on the border is not a “covid crisis”, therefore Title 42 serves no purpose. 

They acknowledge the crisis exists, but since it is not covid related they (and Biden) want to remove the only legal tool available to deter migrants from skipping across the border with the expectation of a free ride and welfare benefits.

Numerous officials including the Democrat Mayor of El Paso (an epicenter of the border calamity) have admitted that the end of Title 42 would result in a massive spike in migrant caravans well beyond what the US is already dealing with. 

Keeping the law in place is essential if the threat is to be averted.

Oil futures ended lower Wednesday, with optimism over the demand outlook stemming from China’s continued relaxation of COVID-19 curbs offset by a surge in cases of the disease.

“The somewhat firmer dollar and doubts about how quickly Chinese demand would bounce back following the country’s scrapping of its quarantine rules weighed on oil and other commodities such as copper on Wednesday,” said Raffi Boyadjian, lead investment analyst at XM, in a note.

“With Covid infections still very high, it could be several weeks if not months before demand fully recovers in China and oil prices are slipping today as investors reassess the outlook,” he wrote.

With the winter storms, this week’s API report maybe distorted.

API

• Crude -1.30mm

• Cushing -338k

• Gasoline +510k

• Distillates +38k

US Crude stocks fell for the 2nd straight week (6th of the last 7 weeks) according to API, which reported a 1.30mm barrel drawdown…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI hovered around $78.75 ahead of the API report and was unmoved by the small crude draw…

Amid the extremely low liquidity, volatility is heightened this week after the Kremlin said this week it would ban exports of Russian crude oil and refined products to foreign buyers that adhere to a price cap.

“The outlook remains highly uncertain for the oil market,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda.

China’s success in pivoting away from Covid-Zero could be key to a recovery but it will take time to understand the implications on oil demand, he said.

But oil still looks set to close the year with a gain.

There has been some concern with more than a million “active subscribers” on the Starlink network that median download speeds are slowing. To solve this, Starlink has launched the first batch of next-generation satellites into orbit early Wednesday to add even more broadband capacity to the network. 

Falcon 9 launches 54 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit; completes SpaceX’s 60th mission of 2022! pic.twitter.com/MIstToPIyL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 28, 2022

Around 0434 ET, a Falcon 9 rocket with 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The payload was successfully delivered to low Earth orbit. 

“Under our new license, we are now able to deploy satellites to new orbits that will add even more capacity to the network.

“Ultimately, this enables us to add more customers and provide faster service, particularly in areas that are currently oversubscribed,” Jesse Anderson, a SpaceX production and engineering manager, said during live launch commentary. 

SpaceX’s Gen2 of Starlink will help expand bandwidth capacity for the already 3,330 first-generation satellites working to provide high-speed, low-latency internet to customers worldwide. This comes as the network faces congestion issues with many new customers. 

On Dec. 1, the Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX to launch 7,500 upgraded satellites into low Earth orbit. This was only a partial approval of what SpaceX initially wanted of 30,000 of these satellites orbiting the planet. 

“Starlink Gen2 satellites will be capable of beaming service directly to smartphones, Elon Musk has said. SpaceX plans to launch most of these satellites using its huge Starship rocket, which is still in development,” Space.com wrote. 

Authored by NAMCIOS via BitcoinMagazine.com,

The tech company led by Michael Saylor has increased its bitcoin holdings by 2,500 BTC despite selling bitcoin for the first time to generate a tax benefit.

• Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy bought 2,395 BTC for $42.8 million in cash between Nov. 1 and Dec. 21, 2022.

• It then sold 704 BTC at a loss on Dec. 22 to offset previous capital gains.

• MicroStrategy then bought 810 BTC on Dec. 24.

Software analytics company MicroStrategy has sold bitcoin for the first time since it first began adding the digital currency to its treasury in 2020.

The sale took place on December 22, 2022, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The move was carried out in order to generate a net tax benefit, as the losses involved in the sale are able to offset previous capital gains, per the filing.

Two days later, MicroStrategy bought back more bitcoin than it sold, however at a higher price – $16,845 per BTC on the 810 bitcoin purchase vs. $16,776 on the 704 bitcoin sale.

A larger purchase preceded the sale.

MicroStrategy bought 2,395 bitcoin between November 1 and December 21, 2022, before embarking on the tax-loss harvesting strategy.

The purchase cost about $42.8 million, translating to an average price of $17,871 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses.

Ultimately, the transactions resulted in an increase of MicroStrategy’s bitcoin holdings by 2,500 BTC.

The company led by Michael Saylor now holds 132,500 BTC, acquired for about $4.03 billion at an average price of $30,397 per bitcoin. As a result, the Virginia-based firm currently faces an unrealized loss of over $1.8 billion.

Update (1500ET): US federal officials have stated that the US will require travelers from China to submit a negative COVID-19 test beginning on January 5th.

Why not now?

Is the Biden administration xenophopbic for singling out the Chinese travelers?

As we detailed earlier, Bloomberg reports that Italian health authorities will begin testing all arrivals from China for Covid after almost half of the passengers on two flights to Milan were found to have the virus.

Additionally, in Germany, health authorities are “closely watching” the situation in China, according to Health Ministry spokesman Sebastian Guelde.

China’s National Health Commission announced on Dec. 26 that the country would end all quarantine requirements for inbound travelers from Jan. 8, 2023.

Travelers will need to obtain a negative PCR test within 48 hours of departure, it said. Currently, travelers entering China need to undergo five days of mandatory quarantine in an approved facility, followed by three days at home.

The health body added that outbound tourism, which plummeted to almost nothing during the pandemic, will resume in an “orderly” fashion.

It also removed the cap on the number of international flights to and from China.

Crucially for the rest of the world, as The Epoch Times reports, data from travel sites show that Chinese residents are rushing to book overseas trips.

Chinese travel platform Tongcheng Travel released data on Dec. 27, showing that the number of searches for visas to go abroad increased by 10 times, and the search volume of international air tickets soared by 850 percent.

Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and the UK were among the most searched destinations.

Sean Lin, a virologist and former lab director at the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) opening up of the country is actually a strategy to get everyone infected not only within China, but around the world.

“When they can’t control the outbreak, they push it to the whole world. Just like when COVID first broke out in Wuhan, people who had been infected in Wuhan were allowed to travel around the world. The strategy is the same now as before,” he said.

Lin pointed to the regime’s lack of transparency amid the latest outbreak, a consistent behavior over the past three years during the pandemic.

“The CCP is not sharing data, and the international community doesn’t know how many different virus variants are spreading in China, and whether there are other compound infections,” he said.

“Under such circumstances, it is extremely irresponsible for the CCP to let the people out of the country which is a huge epidemic area. Put another way, it has a very treacherous purpose and is very malicious.”

Bloomberg notes that Italy is now sequencing those tests to see if there are new variants coming from China, the Health Ministry said in a statement. If a new strain is found, officials may impose stricter curbs on travel from China.

“We have no indication that a more dangerous mutation has developed in China that would give rise to a declaration of a virus variant area, which would result in corresponding travel restrictions,” he added.

Finally, the critical question for the world’s liberal globalists – will it be xenophobic again to block Chinese visitors?

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Before I took on my current persona as either a “Putin Stooge,” a “shill for the Fed,” or a naïve apologist for neoliberalism, I used to be a chemist specializing in process efficiency and root cause analysis.

While I learned many things during those twenty-plus years, the most startling conclusion I came to was that laziness has a real place in process improvement.

If you really want some industrial or bureaucratic process streamlined, give that job to the guy who most hates having his time wasted. He will invariably find a way to make that ‘work’ into something he only has to do sparingly.

It led to one of my first rules of organization, if you want something done right give it to the “lazy” guy.

That “lazy” guy isn’t really lazy.

What he is, is unmotivated, because all he sees is waste and waste offends his narcissism. Nothing is worse than wasting his time doing unnecessary tasks. So, give him some tedious thing to improve and he will find not only the fastest way to do it, but also very likely the best way because while he doesn’t want his time wasted, he also doesn’t want to be yelled at by someone he sees as inferior.

Only then will you get an honest day of work out of someone like him.

It’s not like I wouldn’t know this from personal experience or anything.

When I was a chemist, I was obsessed with doing everything I could to optimize internal processes, be it shaving a few seconds here or there off a temperature program to analyze heavy metals by atomic spectroscopy or optimizing the deposition rate of a plating bath.

For me, the goal was always the same, work hard now to generate free time later to devote myself to something more valuable.

I benefited from having a less stressful work environment, the company benefits from lower COGS and the goodwill you generate leaves you far less vulnerable to middle-management scrutiny.

It was this ‘laziness’ that afforded me hundreds of hours over the years to pursue my hobbies while at work. Those were, in short, board gaming, monetary theory and politics.

One could say y’all are now the ‘beneficiaries’ of all that ‘laziness.’ (sic)

While podcasts are all the rage now, and with good reason, during my last ‘corporate’ job (which is really stretching that definition) I consumed every internet radio show I could on gold, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Buffalo Sabres.

But simultaneously I also produced reams of data in service of putting strict process controls on a novel nickel-boron coating whose lack of such had the company hemorrhaging capital.

Respect the Order

What you learn in all of this is that “order of operations” matters.

Coders understand this explicitly. So do engineers. It’s especially true in chemistry, where for one reaction to take place another reaction has to happen before it. Do it in the wrong order and you get a mess at best, or blow up the building or poison yourself at worst.

Switching metaphors, in your typical “euro-style” board game, the order in which you take the actions necessary to fulfill your strategy matters greatly. In these games, where luck is minimized or removed completely, players fight for access to a limited number of places to ‘do a thing,’ be it play a card, place a worker, build a city or whatever.

The goal is to collect more of what you need to win while subtly denying your opponent what he needs.

Sometimes you have to make a sub-optimal move for yourself in order to block someone else getting to that thing that would benefit them more. It’s incredibly passive-aggressive, but it’s also instructive, because it is so unabashedly human.

Math has it’s order of operations as well, PEMDAS for short — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. We’ve all seen the quizzes on social media testing our knowledge of this.

It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.

One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.

In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed.

By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.

While this is an important first step in waking people up, it’s also absolutely why, as a political force, ‘libertarians’ are spent. Ron Paul broke through into the popular zeitgeist in 2008 and 2012 with “End the Fed” and his critiques of foreign policy.

The problem was, however, the movement never grew up. It never engaged with the world that was versus still selling the world we’ll never get.

And rightly, people wandered away looking for those with real answers to today’s problems.

I’ve been there and made many a decision based on the equation I solved only to be frustrated like many others by the future not working out like the model I’d constructed.

The typical cope then is to scream, “Corruption!” and bitch about them rigging the gold price or trashing Bitcoin or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, I’m with y’all on that. They are rigging the markets, intervening at every turn, if not turning them into completely fake markets.

But that should have been expected. Because in the proper ‘order of operations’ those with power and money will always react to defend themselves against the growing realization that they are fucking us over.

Remember, they’re trying to ‘win’ this game as well.

And so, if they can get to that richer spot on the board before you do, they will. Don’t bitch about the game board being tilted against you, accept that it is part of that mini-game and widen your perspective on the larger game afoot.

And that’s the real problem. We have too many ‘lazy’ analysts who got red-pilled, saw the game for what it was and stopped at “anger” rather than doing the hard work of reaching ‘acceptance.’

This is where we are today and why, for many, the world is so hard to make sense of.

The Larger Bowl

When you realize that everyone’s incentives map to their own particular definitions of winning that’s when real headway can be made in understanding.

Because here’s the thing. Our insights into the world aren’t novel or unique. In fact, more often than not they are just our finally understanding the reality that’s always been in front of us. We’re latecomers to a geopolitical party that’s been going on for decades.

I know I feel like that on more days than I care to admit.

They’ve finally told us what their end game looks like. It speaks to a confidence of their making that real. If we ignore the order of operations of how we get to our preferred outcome — a decentralized world with private property and sound money that should maximize human dignity — the irony is we’ll have a lower probability of it occurring on any time line that matters to us or even our children.

This is why I’m willing to see The Fed and the NY Boys as our temporary allies in that fight for human dignity. They have their definitions of winning the game they’re playing and should act accordingly.

So, while we should all long for the day that these assholes are dead and buried by the natural forces of decentralization and entropy, there are a thousand interstitial steps that have to happen first.

And it won’t matter if bitcoin eventually wins if the world goes through a sixty year Dark Age in the meantime. That’s not leadership, that’s cowardice.

So, yes. Davos has their definitions of winning. The Russians have theirs. China theirs.

And we need to have ours.

It is this curious admixture of incentives, this coincidence of wants, that is the interesting part. It’s where the game actually lives.

And while we don’t have a crystal ball as to how well everyone in the game will respond to these pressures and counter-pressures, with an accurate map of their incentives we can, at least make some observations.

The problem for many is they checked out long before they’d even identified the players at the table, so the game seems incomprehensible and the players wiser and more powerful than they actually are.

That’s why I think this year is going to be one of the most interesting to analyze in real time and why we all have to up our game.

Laziness only gets you so far, it may get you to the root cause of the situation, but that’s when the real work begins.

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