On the dot, Mufti. Where are the others?
Via BBC: Egypt's main Islamic leader issues a fatwa against Bitcoin.

Sheikh Shawki Allam, the Grand Mutfi, said the digital crypto-currency carried risks of "fraudulence, lack of knowledge, and cheating".

The Grand Mufti said risks could arise because the virtual currency was not subject to surveillance by any centralised authority. "Bitcoin is forbidden in Sharia as it causes harm to individuals, groups and institutions," the fatwa said, as reported by Egyptian daily Ahram

In August 2017, Egypt's first bitcoin exchange was opened. The crypto-currency was declared illegitimate by the authorities last month.

Precisely right, Mufti. "Harm to individuals, groups and society" is the key point that nobody else has dared to speak.

Natural Law is crystal clear on speculations and gambling of all sorts. Value comes from labor. Wagers are permissible ONLY if they are specific investments leading to more real production. More life, more value, more beauty. Investing in a farm or factory and receiving part of the profits is a good use of money, but ONLY if you are taking the risk of losing your investment when the farm fails.

Bitcoin is worse than previous bubbles because it doesn't even PRETEND to be based on real value. Tulips and houses and grain and gold have real uses or real beauty. They fulfill a purpose. The trading loses sight of the original purpose, but occasionally helps to develop a resource.

Bitcoin has exactly zero purpose. The "mining" process consumes VAST quantities of electricity. What does it yield? Precisely nothing except a "solution" to a set of calculations that didn't need to be calculated.

If the calculations were done as a service for a real business, such as optimizing routes or trying out chemical formulas, they would represent real value and would be worth whatever the business wanted to pay for the service. I'm pretty sure no business would pay $15k for a few hours of heavy calculation.

But the calculations are EXPLICITLY POINTLESS..... unless, of course, Bitcoin's real boss is simply farming out its own decryption math without paying for the service. Supposedly these calcs are related to cryptography, which is NSA's business.

The worst harm is the waste of power. "Miners" often operate in countries where electricity is sparse. They use up MASSIVE AMOUNTS of coal or oil or natural gas that would otherwise serve NON-CRIMINAL purposes.

= = = = =

Where are the other religious leaders? Google doesn't find anything for "pope bitcoin" or "archbishop bitcoin". "Buddhist bitcoin" leads to this item about a set of fashionable Western Buddhists who claim that they are using blockchain to boost Buddhism in some way that doesn't even make superficial sense. In other words, just another fraud.

If Antichrist Bergoglio really meant ANY of the toxin he spews, he would be issuing an edict similar to the Mufti's fatwa. Bergoglio claims to be on the side of the poor, claims to be pro-life. Like all pure speculations, Bitcoin harms the poor above all. The harm is specific and quantifiable as loss of electric power. If Bergoglio meant any of his screeching about "global warming" he'd put out an infallible encyclical against Bitcoin, the fastest-growing consumer of coal.

= = = = =

Later: Checked the rapture visionaries on Youtube. These folks tend to be closer to God than anyone else in the West. Mixed results. Some are treating Bitcoin as a mark of the beast; others are trying to horn in on the trading by using Rapture as a brand, just like the abovementioned Buddhists. You want a MARK? You want a standard measurement or assay to distinguish God from Beast? There it is.

Later again: I'm surprised Babylon Bee hasn't done a parody on the subject. First Baptist Church changes its sign to First Blockchain Church, gets $10 billion in new tithes....

Labels: Asked and unanswered, Carbon Cult, Metrology, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:21 AM

  Finally a success for Bitcoin! Oops.
Most of Bitcoin's idiotic claims are prima facie wrong.

Bitcoin is supposed to be untraceable. Instant nonsense. Running every transaction through NSA means every transaction is PERFECTLY KNOWN to the Deep State.

Bitcoin is supposed to be stable. Instant nonsense. Any "currency" that can be expanded by one out-of-control "miner" is the exact opposite of stable.

Bitcoin is supposed to be "democratic". P0w3r 2 teh Pplz, d00d. Instant nonsense. The design itself favors rich fuckheads who can afford the supercomputers and electricity and air conditioning for massive "mining".

Bitcoin is supposed to be Green. See previous item, electricity and air conditioning. EACH transaction, EACH single sale, uses the same electricity as 1.5 DAYS of an average American household. Or, as I figured earlier, each Bitcoin sale uses as much power as 450 simple paper-rectangle sales using typical cash registers.



Finally we have a failure that isn't instantly obvious! Bitcoin is supposed to be fast. With all those computers, it must be able to handle BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of sales per second! Nope. Turns out the system CAN'T RUN FASTER than SEVEN total transactions per second worldwide. Not seven billion, not seven million, not seven thousand. SEVEN. You can push a button with one finger faster than that.

Compare this again to a human cashier using a mechanical cash register. Leaving aside the pleasantries like discussing the weather or football, a simple paper-rectangle transaction takes less than 10 seconds.

So: The super-hi-tech Bitcoin's TOTAL WORLDWIDE carrying capacity is the same as one big WalMart store with 70 cashiers, or 70 little convenience stores scattered around the world.

In mathy terms,

(Patel * 70) >= Bitcoin.

= = = = =

When you examine the full picture of Bitcoin and its DESIGNED-IN idiocy, you can only reach one conclusion. The conclusion grows stronger when you look at the "biography" of the "founder", Rakanuki Furoshito or whatever. The biography is furohinto. Ex-CIA, worked for Hughes. What more do you need? Bitcoin is a giant sting, and a giant high-IQ belly-laugh, aimed at those Libertarian hacker types. Good stings are always obvious, as I've noted repeatedly.
  ¶ 8:41 AM

  Nice clear article on Bitcoin
Atypically, BBC has a wonderfully clear account of recent moves in Bitcoin, plus a straightforward and understandable description of how the crime works. The latter is remarkably hard to find.

The article compares Bitcoin's total energy usage with several countries, which has been done before and isn't really useful. Countries have a wide variety of climates and use energy in a wide variety of ways, so the total energy of Holland or Chile can't be compared with anything else.

The article also compares Bitcoin with the total power usage of all data centers, which is a precise comparison. Bitcoin and the cloud are the same thing working for different purposes. Bitcoin uses HALF AS MUCH POWER as the total of all other data servers. The cloud is working for real business and government. Some of what the cloud does is horrible by my standards, but it's unquestionably REAL. Bitcoin is working for nothing at all, just running calculations that are discarded. Absolute pure total purposeless meaningless waste, and mostly run by fossil fuels.

= = = = =

Calibrating: I've been puzzled or bothered lately by the convergence of Bitcoin sellers and truth-tellers. Several of the best HARDASS truth-tellers are also Bitcoin cultists.

Are they cynically using the truth as a 'loss-leader' to attract followers? Or do they have a blind spot? The latter is always possible. Everyone has blind spots, everyone sees the truth about some things and deludes themselves about other things.

No puzzle about McAfee. He is total HARDASS. He tells the truth (as he sees it) about everything, and openly states that he's pushing Bitcoin solely to make money. Sucker Filter right out front.

Labels: Asked and unanswered, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 9:37 AM

  Observations from real experts
Continuing this week's modularity theme....

Some observations on bitcoin from an econ blogger who has contact with real bankers. The bankers are telling him:

1 bearer style assets are user hostile and wont catch on
2 conflating settlement and payments is bad news
3 final settlement not required for payments
4 hard to financialize something which resists regulation

= = = = =

1 and 4 are sort of conditional. It's possible though unlikely that bitcoin will become more user-friendly. Bitcoin resists regulation because bitcoin is NSA, not because bitcoin is "decentralized". NSA wants to avoid the usual written regulations so it can use bitcoin for tyranny and blackmail.

2 and 3 are intrinsic to the whole process of banking and business. These are not usually discussed in the context of bitcoin, and I hadn't thought about them before.

Bitcoin is incurably and intractably GLOBAL. Every transaction requires automatic settlement, and nominal permission, by everyone on the whole chain.

Real banking, like all real business, is always modular and bilateral, a single wire connecting buyer and seller in a trust relationship. The buyer who writes a check trusts that the bank will sooner or later transfer funds to the seller's account, and the seller trusts the bank to give him the money. Neither party needs to know how and when the bank handles the intermediate steps of the transfer.

In earlier centuries, and even now in unconventional banking like scrip and hawala, the settlement happened rarely and bilaterally. Each bank was fully modular. Each bank maintained a pile of real money through its normal savings and loan activities with its own customers. Each bank would keep a ledger page of its credits and debits to each of the other banks. Once a year, Bank 1 and Bank 2 would transfer their net result in gold to null out the differential. Bank 1 and Bank 3 would transfer their pairwise net result, and so on. In an active system those net differences tend to be small because there are lots of checks going both ways between each pair of banks. Each bank's customers didn't know about the transfers and didn't need to know.

Labels: MMT, Patient things, Real World Math, scrip

  ¶ 7:28 AM

  Gresham vs Graybill vs Bitcoin, reprinted.
Looking at the latest shit about Bitcoin, I thought "Hey, I should write about this in terms of Economics As A Verb." Then I realized I'd already done it. So I'll just republish or pop the earlier item as is.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Returning again to Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Let's try to expand the notion of skill-estate.

News item about the alleged developer of Bitcoin got me thinking about Gresham's Law.

The last time we had two INDEPENDENT AND COMPETING currencies was before 1870. Since then we've had one currency .... until Bitcoin. I had a hard time grasping Gresham until Bitcoin.

What Gresham really says is this: If two items both claim to be currency, and one of the items becomes much more valuable, the valuable item will NO LONGER BE A CURRENCY. It will become a COLLECTIBLE like vintage wine or classic cars. And that's Bitcoin. It claimed to be a currency until its value rose quickly. At that point it became Picassos.

But the current Bitcoin system doesn't even qualify as a collectible asset, because it requires ALL OF THE HOLDERS of the asset to give permission for every transaction. The permission is automatic through computers and nets, but it's still permission.

Bitcoin is not a thing you can buy or sell openly and freely. Thus it's not even PROPERTY. More like a trust-based inheritance.

= = = = =

Now think of currency in a dynamic way.

A coin represents a DELTA of value. If you have HONESTLY acquired a coin, it means you have INCREASED THE VALUE of something. You have cut down a tree, or turned the tree into paper, or helped to print a book with the paper, or arranged books attractively in a store to raise the sale price.

We can apply Gresham as a verb to the Graybill world of SKILLS as delta-makers.

The skill that yields the greatest number of coins for a given amount of effort will become a collectible, no longer freely transferred.

What's the highest-value skill? Counterfeiting. Money as pure numbers. What's the SKILL or EFFORT that creates counterfeit money? No skill at all, just access to the treasury. If you belong to the correct tribe you have access to counterfeit money. It's an inherited trust from the start!

Among other traditional skills, what's the lowest-value? Farming. Requires long ownership of property and generations of skill development. Payoff depends on weather, speculators, and the actions of other farmers. BUT farming is critically important to the existence of civilization, so a sane civilization takes steps to subsidize farmers.

Most other skills are in the middle. Pottery, welding, weaving, programming, cooking, selling. These are available to anyone with some innate talent, but the genetic aspect is non-exclusive. Doesn't depend on your name. You can learn them in a year or two of apprenticeship.

These skills qualify as currency. They can be transferred freely to anyone who can use them, and they can be used freely by the recipient. The resulting delta of value depends on all sorts of internal and external factors that don't apply to simple coins, but the basic idea is still the same.

Because these skills can be acquired (comparatively) easily, they don't need subsidies... BUT a sane civilization will take steps to maintain their value, just as it maintains the value of coins.

And there's the link between Gresham and Graybill. Our insane "civilization" is depriving ordinary skills of all value. Hyperinflation of skill currency, leaving ONLY ledger money, aristocrat money, vintage money, with any value. The only skill that counts is the skill of being born into the correct ethnic group.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Make or break, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:59 AM

  He's not that stupid.
The latest Irons podcast features McAfee. Mac is making some really STUPID arguments for Bitcoin. He's not that stupid. He wants to make the suckers stupid.

His biggest argument is the old "decentralized ledger" which "can't be stopped by governments".

Raw ratshit. Bitcoin is NSA. It exists because it's useful to NSA. If it ever stops being useful, it will stop existing.

Irons isn't making a strong enough counterargument. He's arguing for gold against Bitcoin. That's not the choice. The choice is paper currency against Bitcoin. Paper currency has none of the problems. When your web connection fails, or you forget your password, or the power is out because of a windstorm, you can still spend paper. You can also spend paper without NSA tracking the transaction, while NSA tracks EVERY Bitcoin transaction.

This is tiresome. All of these fake arguments have been definitively debunked for at least six fucking years.

Mac also makes a really dumb supply/demand argument for the value of Bitcoin. He says that the total number of "coins" is firmly limited. Untrue. Debt ceilings and credit limits ALWAYS push up when approached. He also says that about 20% of the "coins" already mined have been lost due to failed computers or lost passwords. (Which destroys his other argument, but let it go.) Because the supply is necessarily decreasing, the price must go up. Here he's acknowledging that Bitcoin is a collectible like vintage wine, not a currency. Unfortunately, collectibles don't necessarily go up when they grow rare. The demand side is equally important and much less predictable. Sometimes people lose interest in baseball cards or '64 Mustangs or Banksy paintings. Fashion is fickle. There's no real collector demand for Bitcoin in the first fucking place, so assuming it will be constant is crazy.

Even in his own department he's making a stupid argument. He says antivirus doesn't do anything. Maybe HIS antivirus doesn't, but AVG works perfectly against hackers damaging or locking up the computer. It doesn't stop NSA, but that's not the fucking purpose. I gave up on McAfee antivirus many years ago because in fact it DIDN'T stop viruses, it only stopped my computer. AVG stays out of the way and halts malware.

Ping! That's the key. Everything Mac does, from his "antivirus" to his "coins", is a total brazen open transparent fraud. Everything is designed to harm the sucker and enrich Mac. He doesn't bother to hide it. The ultimate infinite Sucker Filter.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 5:07 PM

  Carney gets it right! (Almost)
British central banker Carney has masterfully destroyed the Bitcoin bubble.

The speech itself in PDF form is even better than the summaries given in various media. It's a well-constructed academic lecture on the broad subject of money and value, showing how Bitcoin fails the test of moneyness.

He includes a couple of fresh insights:

It is important to recognise that modern money takes three forms that are linked by retail and wholesale payments systems. Each link in the chain is critical to the resilience of money. The first form of money is the banknotes issued by central banks. These account for just 3% of the stock but 40% of all consumer transactions. Next is electronic central bank money in the form of the reserves that commercial banks hold with us, including to settle transactions with one another. Finally, and most significantly, the electronic deposits that commercial banks create when they extend loans to borrowers, accounting for fully 80% of money in the system.

We rarely hear about the dominance of plain cash. Both bankers and bitcoiners try to persuade us that cash is extinct. It's not.

The private financial sector cannot create money without limit, but is disciplined by competition, constrained by prudential regulation, and limited by decisions of households and companies that can reduce the stock of money (by, for example, repaying existing debt).

We never hear about our own POWER over value, and I'd never thought of it that way! It's strictly logical. Staying out of debt obviously keeps your OWN life within the circle of real value; it also plays a tiny part in reducing the power of the abstract Tribe over the ENTIRE economy. If nobody ever borrowed, the fractional reserve system would stop creating false value and the Tribe would lose its power.

On Bitcoin, Carney lists the three fake claims made by the racketeers:

1. Its supply is fixed and therefore immune from the age-old temptations of debasement;

2. Its use is free from risky private banks;

3. Those who hold it can remain anonymous and therefore free from the ravenous eyes of tax authorities or worse still law enforcement.

... and demolishes the first two with plain facts and logic.

1. The fixed supply GUARANTEES a bubble. That's the whole point of the fixed supply. Like famous artworks or classic cars or land, there's no elasticity of supply to balance out demand.

2. Free from the control of private banks? Bitcoin places your transaction in the hands of a few unknown and unregulated criminals, who have no particular reason to LET you make the transaction.

And if you use a debit or credit card in the UK, the transaction is completed in seconds and without exchange rate risk. In contrast, Bitcoin users can face queues of hours. Those wanting to get to the front to make time-pressing payments need to offer up a transaction fee sufficintly large to persuade Bitcoin “miners”, who verify and process transactions, to do so quickly. The fees paid vary through time, but reached £40 in late 2017. Fees are currently around £2, but even that is expensive relative to cash, cards or online payments which cost the retailer around 1.5 pence, 8 pence and 19 pence respectively.

3. Anonymity. This is the one point Carney misses, whether intentionally or not. Anonymity is OBVIOUSLY a false claim, since Bitcoin runs through NSA and was designed by CIA to be a trap. I'm not sure why Carney skips this; maybe he's constrained by gov't rules. Good old can't confirm or deny.

Carney then asks what gov'ts should do about Bitcoin, and makes a convincing argument for strict regulation and taxation. Banning a popular activity after it's well under way is the quickest way to force total criminality. Regulating it and taxing it places a counterforce against the scarcity bubble.

Later thought: By stating that taxation is possible, Carney takes down the anonymity claim without explicitly disputing it. So he does destroy all three points.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 1:28 AM

  Good point but backwards
Robert Shiller is arguing that economics pays too much attention to theories and numbers. Perfectly correct. He's also arguing that real economies run mainly on narratives, feelings and gossip. Half correct and possibly deceptive.

We need to separate economics from Dow. The people who call themselves economists have ZERO connection with actual business. The people who call themselves economists are SOLELY stock shills. Their SOLE PURPOSE is to raise share value for their employers.

If Shiller is talking about Dow, then his judgment is accurate. Dow is a number which depends on nothing but fake stories, frauds, cheating and mass murder. Mostly mass murder. The Dow curve surfs on a growing tsunami of Deplorable carcasses.

Many of the cheaters and fraudsters use math jargon to cloak and cover their bad logic. This type of cheating is especially dense in the Bitcoin world. A new example:

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee believes Bitcoin (BTC) will accrue price value following a similar logic to the Silicon Valley tech titans. During an interview for CNBC’s Street Signs Asia on show on Nov. 15, Lee argued that cryptocurrencies “are network value assets” — and share this with the world’s most successful tech stocks.

“Cryptocurrencies are network value assets, meaning the more people hold the asset, the greater the value. In fact, it’s a log function — so if you double the users hold it, you get a quadrupling of value. To go to $25,000 you essentially need a little less than 4x rise, which means you need to double the number of people who hold Bitcoin.”

In the first place he's got log and exp backwards. Log describes REAL business, rising to an asymptote and settling there. Exp describes frauds like Bitcoin. In the second place, network value asset is a meaningless phrase. (Wolfstreet has a solid takedown of the nonsense!) Tech stocks and Bitcoin are mass hallucinations, depending solely on the fraudster's ability to puff up a giant indescribably stupid fantasy.

= = = = =

Shiller's complaint is ON THE FUCKING DOT for this situation.

But he's clearly talking about more than Dow. He claims to be discussing the entire realm of business.

A real-value economy DOES function more by math than narratives, but NOT the math used by the people who call themselves economists. The math of business is simple, and entirely handled by bookkeepers using ledgers.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The blockchain fad is a bizarre symptom of Deepstate-induced craziness. First let's ignore the simple and obvious facts that (1) Bitcoin's founder openly proclaimed his CIA connections (2) Bitcoin is perfectly centralized, running all transactions through NSA. Even without those blazingly obvious links, the idea is still crazy and harmful.

As an old pen-and-ink bookkeeper, I have a feel for how ledgers are supposed to work. Ledgers aren't supposed to be accessible and changeable by everyone in the world. Ledgers are supposed to be an accurate and unchanging record of the Debits and Credits, the outputs and inputs, of ONE business or organization or individual.

Modularity is IMPERATIVE and BASIC to the functioning of an organism, and thus to the ledger that records the functioning.

Without modularity, without borders and layers and hierarchy, you can't even define inputs and outputs so you can't have a ledger. You can't have any sort of schematic or equation or model unless you have a boundary.

= = = = =

This article in a 'new econ' website invokes the double-entry ledger to explain fractional reserve fake currency creation.

The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who cooperate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset.

If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself. For those entranced by the myth of capitalism, this can be hard to grasp. They’re still stuck thinking of the economy as a two-column ledger, where every credit is someone’s else’s debit. This zero-sum mentality is an artifact of monopoly central currency. If money has to be borrowed into existence from a single, private treasury and paid back with interest, then this sad, competitive, scarcity model makes sense. I need to pay back more than I borrowed, so I need to get that extra money from someone else. That’s the very premise of zero-sum. But that’s not how an economy has to work.

Zero-sum misses the point entirely. The crucial question is where the CRedit comes from.

Value is an increase in order. Value is an increase in life and beauty.

In the most basic agricultural forms of commerce, the CRedit is CReated by plants, who turn sunlight and water into infinitely ordered life, and secondarily by animals who eat the plants and transform the order into a more condensed order.

CR represents an increase in order.

Within the boundaries of the ledger, CR is measuring the number of currency units paid to the farmer or miner or oil driller or supplier, but it directly represents an increase in order, an increase in life.

DR is also an increase in order.

The business processes the raw input, using human labor and machinery, and turns it into a more complexly ordered object, or makes it more convenient to use, or more attractive to buy, or more STORABLE. Storage is probably the most important increase in order.

DR in the ledger measures currency units coming into the business from the customer who gains convenience or storability.

= = = = =

I've often cited Steinbeck's analogy: Real value business brings in salmon, puts it in cans with human and machine labor, and sells it. Capitalists HATE human and machine labor. They would rather can salmon with ledgers, and now they've finally managed to do it.

= = = = =

Using salmon, Polistra shows how the REAL-VALUE ledger measures the increase in order on both sides of a REAL-VALUE business.

On the CR side, Nature increases order by growing a salmon. The fisherman brings in a salmon, adding a unit of life-order to the business. The ledger represents this CRedit as money going back to the fisherman.



On the DR side, the business increases order by filleting the salmon and placing it in cans, then selling it to customers. Canning makes the salmon more convenient for ordinary people without butchering skills, and it makes the salmon STORABLE. The ledger represents this increase in order by showing the money flowing from customers to the business.



A business wants to have input money exceeding output money. Profit means that the business is creating more order than it consumes from its suppliers. In other words, the business is alive. And this accumulation of increased value is where the money supply really increases. The Soviet system recognized this basic fact by using VAT to determine when the national money supply would increase.

= = = = =

From this viewpoint we can see how debt is actually a LOSS of real value. When a business rents money from a bank, the incoming money was NOT generated by nature or labor. It was counterfeited by the bank. The business gets nothing but an obligation to repay the money, which limits the freedom of the business. The interest paid to the bank must be sucked out of the real value accumulated by the business.

Modern economics turns the whole picture upside down by treating the sucked-out interest as the "creation" "of" "value".

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Real World Math, storage

  ¶ 1:06 AM

  McAfee dead
Apparently he committed "suicide" in prison.

I wish I could work up sympathy, but I can't. He didn't NEED to be in jail. He was rich. He could afford to pay taxes. He chose to evade taxes for the joy of cheating. Not a martyr, just a fool.

He was a poetic spokesman for HARDASS realism, but he was also a salesman for Bitcoin, an unrealistic fraud.

= = = = =

Reprint from a few months ago:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Truth is just an advertising gimmick.

Well, not exactly and not entirely. But it's a fairly consistent pattern in political circles.

What does truth advertise? Fake monetary reforms.

In the 1880s, the prairie populists under Jennings Bryan were telling the HARDASS truth about corporations and banks. Their solution was more debt plus Bimetallism, now forgotten. Bimetallism was a variable mix of gold and silver that would remove gold from its position as the one solid measuring baseline. Debt plus bimetallism would give MORE power to the banks, not less.

Now many (NOT ALL!) of the people who are telling the truth about economic crimes and "global warming" crimes and "virus" crimes are also selling Bitcoin. Bitcoin is another scheme to remove solid baselines from money. Bitcoin goes vastly farther than bimetallism, removing money from money. Bitcoin is an abstraction that can't be spent, can't be earned, can't be relied on for stability, and can't be reliably stored. It violates every single rule for currency.

Hardass realists, from McAfee to Assange to AIER, are Bitcoin salesmen.

This contradiction doesn't fit the usual Sucker Filter pattern. The usual scammer is looking for suckers who are unmoored from reality, who will believe any sort of nonsense if it's presented convincingly. The sucker category here is based on social position, not truth detection. In a time of total lies, people who see the truth about anything at all are dissidents, constantly mocked and shunned and punished. They need reassurance and respect. The scammer creates respect by agreeing with the sucker on most of reality, and then uses the respect to sell one obviously unreal product.

In between the 1880s Bryan types and the 2020s McAfee types, there were two giant exceptions to the rule. Harding and FDR. Both of them told the hard truth about economics, and used the truth to create GENUINE REFORMS that dethroned the bankers and restored human skill and human culture.

How do we break out of the Bryan/McAfee side of this cycle and get back to the Harding/FDR side?

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: infinite STUPID, MMT, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 1:56 PM

  Bitcoin point-missing and point-catching
Most point-missing on bitcoin is fully intentional, coming from the fraudsters and scamsters who promote this nonsense.

Via Eurekalert, here's a misunderstanding by academics who are trying to explain the nonsense objectively.

The concept of cryptocurrency has settled in general public for some time. This financial instrument has both enthusiastic supporters and implacable opponents. What does this term mean? Simply put, a cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual means of payment that exists only in a computer system and therefore has no physical equivalents in the form of banknotes or coins. More technically, it is a type of decentralized register consisting of independent devices, based on blockchain technology, using cryptographic solutions and storing assets information in contractual units. All transactions carried out in the world of cryptocurrencies are anonymous, but each of them is publicly available.

Nope. Simply put and wrongly put.

Clearly none of these academics have ever done bookkeeping, and clearly they don't understand what REAL currency is.

"Existing only in a computer" is not a relevant variable. Real currency can certainly exist only in a computer. Before computers, real currency existed only in real ledgers, which evolved from clay tablets to wood sticks to paper books. Transactions were made and marked by various devices, from beads to gold coins to paper bills to checks.

When real currency was transferred from paper books to computers, only the physical form of the record changed (again). The overall structure of modular and private ledgers for each account and business remained intact.

Bitcoin is EXACTLY NOT "decentralized". It's EXACTLY centralized. Blockchain intentionally destroys the modularity and privacy of real ledgers by forcing all ledgers to be global variables. A global variable can be changed by the global controller, forcing all businesses and individuals to adopt the same number. This can't happen in a modular system.

HOWEVER! The same article catches one point that I hadn't noticed before.

The first of them - Bitcoin - was proposed in 2008 by a person or group of people nicknamed Satoshi Nakamoto. This event coincided with the epicenter of the global financial crisis.

As an old bookkeeper and programmer, I was able to spot the fraud instantly, and as an old Deepstate-watcher, the NSA and CIA connections leaped out with Sucker-Filter transparency. But I didn't notice the temporal synchronization. (I had the impression that bitcoin started in 2012.) So bitcoin was an integral part of the 2008 globalist coup. Crash real business, replace real business with the Dow, replace real modular ledgers with global ledgers for total control.

Labels: AI point-missing, Sorosia, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 6:46 AM

  Reprint on skills and deltas
Ran across this from 2017, and it seems to be worth reprinting again. Vaguely related to this week's topic of rentalizing and one-way obligations.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Returning again to Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Let's try to expand the notion of skill-estate.

News item about the alleged developer of Bitcoin got me thinking about Gresham's Law.

The last time we had two INDEPENDENT AND COMPETING currencies was before 1870. Since then we've had one currency .... until Bitcoin. I had a hard time grasping Gresham until Bitcoin.

What Gresham really says is this: If two items both claim to be currency, and one of the items becomes much more valuable, the valuable item will NO LONGER BE A CURRENCY. It will become a COLLECTIBLE like vintage wine or classic cars. And that's Bitcoin. It claimed to be a currency until its value rose quickly. At that point it became Picassos.

But the current Bitcoin system doesn't even qualify as a collectible asset, because it requires ALL OF THE HOLDERS of the asset to give permission for every transaction. The permission is automatic through computers and nets, but it's still permission.

Bitcoin is not a thing you can buy or sell openly and freely. Thus it's not even PROPERTY. More like a trust-based inheritance.

= = = = =

Now think of currency in a dynamic way.

A coin represents a DELTA of value. If you have HONESTLY acquired a coin, it means you have INCREASED THE VALUE of something. You have cut down a tree, or turned the tree into paper, or helped to print a book with the paper, or arranged books attractively in a store to raise the sale price.

We can apply Gresham as a verb to the Graybill world of SKILLS as delta-makers.

The skill that yields the greatest number of coins for a given amount of effort will become a collectible, no longer freely transferred.

What's the highest-value skill? Counterfeiting. Money as pure numbers. What's the SKILL or EFFORT that creates counterfeit money? No skill at all, just access to the treasury. If you belong to the correct tribe you have access to counterfeit money. It's an inherited trust from the start!

Among other traditional skills, what's the lowest-value? Farming. Requires long ownership of property and generations of skill development. Payoff depends on weather, speculators, and the actions of other farmers. BUT farming is critically important to the existence of civilization, so a sane civilization takes steps to subsidize farmers.

Most other skills are in the middle. Pottery, welding, weaving, programming, cooking, selling. These are available to anyone with some innate talent, but the genetic aspect is non-exclusive. Doesn't depend on your name. You can learn them in a year or two of apprenticeship.

These skills qualify as currency. They can be transferred freely to anyone who can use them, and they can be used freely by the recipient. The resulting delta of value depends on all sorts of internal and external factors that don't apply to simple coins, but the basic idea is still the same.

Because these skills can be acquired (comparatively) easily, they don't need subsidies... BUT a sane civilization will take steps to maintain their value, just as it maintains the value of coins.

And there's the link between Gresham and Graybill. Our insane "civilization" is depriving ordinary skills of all value. Hyperinflation of skill currency, leaving ONLY ledger money, aristocrat money, vintage money, with any value. The only skill that counts is the skill of being born into the correct ethnic group.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 12:19 AM

  Graybill and Gresham
Returning again to Graybill's Law:

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

Let's try to expand the notion of skill-estate.

News item about the alleged developer of Bitcoin got me thinking about Gresham's Law.

The last time we had two INDEPENDENT AND COMPETING currencies was before 1870. Since then we've had one currency .... until Bitcoin. I had a hard time grasping Gresham until Bitcoin.

What Gresham really says is: If two items both claim to be currency, and one of the items becomes much more valuable, the valuable item will NO LONGER BE A CURRENCY. It will become a COLLECTIBLE like vintage wine or classic cars. And that's Bitcoin. It claimed to be a currency until its value rose quickly. At that point it became Picassos.

But the current Bitcoin system doesn't even qualify as a collectible asset, because it requires ALL OF THE HOLDERS of the asset to give permission for every transaction. The permission is automatic through computers and nets, but it's still permission.

Bitcoin is not a thing you can buy or sell openly and freely. Thus it's not even PROPERTY. More like a trust-based inheritance.

= = = = =

Now think of currency in a dynamic way.

A coin represents a DELTA of value. If you have HONESTLY acquired a coin, it means you have INCREASED THE VALUE of something. You have cut down a tree, or turned the tree into paper, or helped to print a book with the paper, or arranged books attractively in a store to raise the sale price.

We can apply Gresham as a verb to the Graybill world of SKILLS as delta-makers.

The skill that yields the greatest number of coins for a given amount of effort will become a collectible, no longer freely transferred.

What's the highest-value skill? Counterfeiting. Money as pure numbers. What's the SKILL or EFFORT that creates counterfeit money? No skill at all, just access to the treasury. If you belong to the correct tribe you have access to counterfeit money. It's an inherited trust from the start!

Among other traditional skills, what's the lowest-value? Farming. Requires long ownership of property and generations of skill development. Payoff depends on weather, speculators, and the actions of other farmers. BUT farming is critically important to the existence of civilization, so a sane civilization takes steps to subsidize farmers.

Most other skills are in the middle. Pottery, welding, weaving, programming, cooking, selling. These are available to anyone with some innate talent, but the genetic aspect is non-exclusive. Doesn't depend on your name. You can learn them in a year or two of apprenticeship.

These skills qualify as currency. They can be transferred freely to anyone who can use them, and they can be used freely by the recipient. The resulting delta of value depends on all sorts of internal and external factors that don't apply to simple coins, but the basic idea is still the same.

Because these skills can be acquired (comparatively) easily, they don't need subsidies... BUT a sane civilization will take steps to maintain their value, just as it maintains the value of coins.

And there's link between Gresham and Graybill. Our insane "civilization" is depriving ordinary skills of all value. Hyperinflation of skill currency, leaving ONLY ledger money, aristocrat money, vintage money, with any value.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, skill-estate

  ¶ 4:03 AM

  Of course this won't persuade anyone.
It's nice to see attempts to impose facts on the bitslave types. It won't work, but it leaves the bitiots without ANY excuse for their criminal activity.

We already know from simple logic that the entire purpose of Bitcoin is fraudulent. When you run the entire currency system THROUGH the web (which is another name for NSA), you're not HIDING the system from NSA. You are GUARANTEEING that NSA knows about all your transactions.

We also know from simple logic that the system DOES NOT FAVOR the poor. The only way to create "value" is by buying lots and lots of expensive computer setups and running them hot and heavy to make some equations.

This is not "value"; it's just an indication of your own riches, EXACTLY like the creation of "value" by central banks. The counterfeit equations created by QE processes go directly into the bank accounts of the Chosen.

Now an article in Vice estimates the energy usage of EACH single transaction in Bitcoin, and finds that EACH transaction, EACH single sale, uses the same electricity as 1.5 DAYS of an average American household.

= = = = =

Compare this with a plain paper transaction.



In many parts of the world ordinary trading uses no technology. People who use TRULY SECURE paper currency are not leaving an NSA trail. Most importantly, they are creating REAL VALUE by making or fixing or cleaning or painting or growing things. These are activities that anyone can do regardless of income.

LABOR IS VALUE.

And a paper currency transaction uses no energy AT ALL.

= = = = =

Even if we consider a more modern transaction via cash register, the energy usage is minuscule compared to Bitcoin.

Let's try a somewhat high estimate, based on a business that makes fairly sparse transactions. A small service business like a barber shop or dentist office will make about 10 sales per hour. A basic cash register uses about 1 KWH. Thus each transaction accounts for about 0.1 KWH. (The transaction itself is much less, but the register is running all the time, so I let each payment account for 1/10 of an hour.) Using the household usage figure in the article, 30 KWH per day, this means each transaction is about .003 of a household day, or 0.3% of a household day.

Thus the Bitcoin transaction uses about 450 times as much energy as a cash-register transaction.

= = = = =

Summing up:

If you want real security and low energy usage, use paper currency with no records. Zero NSA, zero energy.

If you want 'normal' and 'legitimate' operations, use paper currency in cash registers. Because you're reporting your income to IRS and other agencies, NSA can access the overall figures but can't identify the customers. Energy 0.3% of a household day.

If you want absolute intimacy with NSA and wildly profligate EVIL KKKARBON, use Bitcoin. Inside the belly of the beast. Energy 150% of a household day.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Danbo

  ¶ 2:46 AM

  Truth is just an advertising gimmick
Well, not exactly and not entirely. But it's a fairly consistent pattern in political circles.

What does truth advertise? Fake monetary reforms.

In the 1880s, the prairie populists under Jennings Bryan were telling the HARDASS truth about corporations and banks. Their solution was more debt plus Bimetallism, now forgotten. Bimetallism was a variable mix of gold and silver that would remove gold from its position as the one solid measuring baseline. Debt plus bimetallism would give MORE power to the banks, not less.

Now many (NOT ALL!) of the people who are telling the truth about economic crimes and "global warming" crimes and "virus" crimes are also selling Bitcoin. Bitcoin is another scheme to remove solid baselines from money. Bitcoin goes vastly farther than bimetallism, removing money from money. Bitcoin is an abstraction that can't be spent, can't be earned, can't be relied on for stability, and can't be reliably stored. It violates every single rule for currency.

Hardass realists, from McAfee to Assange to AIER, are Bitcoin salesmen.

This contradiction doesn't fit the usual Sucker Filter pattern. The usual scammer is looking for suckers who are unmoored from reality, who will believe any sort of nonsense if it's presented convincingly. The sucker category here is based on social position, not truth detection. In a time of total lies, people who see the truth about anything at all are dissidents, constantly mocked and shunned and punished. They need reassurance and respect. The scammer creates respect by agreeing with the sucker on most of reality, and then uses the respect to sell one obviously unreal product.

In between the 1880s Bryan types and the 2020s McAfee types, there were two giant exceptions to the rule. Harding and FDR. Both of them told the hard truth about economics, and used the truth to create GENUINE REFORMS that dethroned the bankers and restored human skill and human culture.

How do we break out of the Bryan/McAfee side of this cycle and get back to the Harding/FDR side?

Labels: Metrology, MMT, skill-estate, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 11:28 PM

  Exception to incompetence
In yesterday's piece on Deepstate's lost magic, I wrote:

Our spy agencies USED to be masters of multi-layered trickery. Their magic art was so well-developed that they could let the suckers see PART of the trick to conceal the real trick.

Later thought: There's one GIANT exception to this loss. Bitcoin is a massively successful trick in every sense of the word. Tech cultists organized to serve NSA, worshipping a hat full of NOTHING. Bitcoin is NOTHING.

Ordinary money, even in the digital era, retains the natural function of exchanging portable PHYSICAL tokens for real work and real products. Real money has always involved a layer of abstraction and trust (reconciliation of ledgers between banks) and a layer of physical tokens (checks and currency). Bitcoin removed the physical layer entirely, and removed the basic function of exchanging value for labor and products. You can't get paid in Bitcoin, and you can't use it to buy a hamburger. You can't store it reliably because there is NO PAPER and NO METAL involved.

Nevertheless the self-bamboozled cultists are FEROCIOUSLY convinced that their delusional anti-money is MORE REAL than ordinary money, and will spew gallons of Tourette juice at anyone who claims otherwise.

This magnificent trick works AFTER an open and full confession of the trickery. The "founder", who is also non-physical, is an avatar named Satoshi. When you look at Satoshi's official cover story, you see several OBVIOUS clues to a CIA connection. If you know anything about that part of the world, you are immediately warned to stay away.

Sucker filter, as always. Just like the classic Nigerian email, packed full of obvious fakery. If you can detect the fakery, the scammer doesn't want to waste time cultivating your cultish belief. If you can't see it, you're a prime prospect.

= = = = =

A stage magician benefits from his work in a simple direct way, by receiving ticket money or sponsorship money. He doesn't expect the audience to go out and perform evil deeds for him.

A cult-master magician receives ticket money from the audience, and also gets FREE LABOR from the enslaved cultists who obey his commands. NSA gets FREE LABOR directly from the "miners" who are solving difficult crypto math, and gets ticket money indirectly in the form of information on all transactions in the Bitcoin system. NSA can then use the info to penetrate or cultivate various forms of criminal and radical activities, "justifying" an increased budget and workforce.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 12:49 AM

  False binary
Subhead on a ZH article boosting Bitcoin:

Good ideas don't require force. That describes the Internet, mobile telephony and cryptocurrencies.

Cute misuse of logic. You're supposed to think "Bitcoin is an idea that was spread without force, therefore it's a good idea."

No. Stop.

Which innovations required force to spread? None.

Are all unforced innovations good ideas? Not by a fucking country mile. The vast majority of unforced ideas are stupid or trivial or fraudulent. The fact that Bitcoin spread without force doesn't separate it from hula hoops or Cosmic Disks or Segways or goat gland transplants.

Which ideas DO require force? Force.

The only idea force can spread is force.

When we invade a country that didn't attack us, we're NOT spreading "capitalism" or "democracy" or Bitcoin or the internet. We're spreading bullets and bombs and misery and starvation and disease and death. Force.

Or witch-hunts, as I've been discussing lately. The idea of executing an innocent person because the Bureau of Inquisition wants to execute the innocent person was new at one time. It wasn't an innovation in the same category as wheels or clocks or steam engines. It was just murder. Just force.

= = = = =

Footnote for clarity after rereading: I'm not saying that force is always bad. Sometimes it's necessary to protect your life or your family from the EFFECTS of bad ideas. I'm only talking about how ideas and concepts are propagated.
  ¶ 12:20 PM

  Superfiat
I've pointed out before that ... the Populists of the 1890s were good diagnosers but terrible prescribers. They analyzed the problems of financialism and globalism beautifully, but their proposed solution was always a weakening of the gold standard. Exactly backwards. What happened when Nixon finally killed the gold standard? Final victory for the bankers and globalists. For some reason the usual Populist Pill was Bimetallism, which mixed 15 parts silver and 1 part gold into a magic token that would destroy all bankers.


It's not clear from available documents whether influencers like Jennings Bryan were Agents Provocateurs or just poor economists. In fairness, they didn't have a lot of experimental data on the effects of breaking gold. Bubbles were common during pure gold periods. Gold doesn't prevent bubbles. Only regulation prevents bubbles. Gold DOES discourage infinite creation of fake value. Those populists couldn't have imagined monstrosities like QE and MMT, but they should have remembered Madman Lincoln's inflation, and the inflation in the first decades after 1776.

Modern bad prescribers don't have that excuse. They are living inside an era of infinite QE and MMT. We can see clearly that true nationalists like Russia and Persia are moving back to gold and savings as fast as they can, while globalists are spinning out of orbit toward infinite debt and total abstraction.

Nevertheless, the "independents" continue to prescribe Bitcoin, the modern magic token that will destroy all bankers by giving total control to Deepstate.

Via ZH, a perfect parallel. The author claims that nationalism and Bitcoin go together, just as nationalism and bimetallism supposedly went together. The author sets up two alternatives: Central bank fiat vs Bitcoin. He doesn't even mention the other end of the scale. Bitcoin is super-fiat, not anti-fiat. Gold is anti-fiat.

Labels: MMT, Pluponents

  ¶ 1:01 AM

  "Struggling"
Via Eurekalert, the usual trivially obvious "social" "science":

Researchers at the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Social Work have found a link between frequently trading cryptocurrency -- a digital and virtual currency -- and problem gambling.

The study, the first to explore cryptocurrency trading among regular gamblers, suggests crypto trading appeals to people struggling to manage their gambling participation. The research appears in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

As always, "social" "science" is either unnecessary or evil. "Proving" tautologies that no sane person ever bothered to doubt, or "proving" bizarre nonsense with zero connection to reality, or running torture chambers. No middle ground, no useful science.

I'm not really bothered by the tautologous crap. I'm really bitching about the dangerous euphemism struggling to manage.

This is a false description. Serious addictions are binary. Either you're firmly hooked or you're perfectly abstinent. Go or stop, on or off, 1 or 0. No middle ground, no struggling, no managing.

When you're hooked you're not struggling or managing. You're just hooked.

= = = = =

And via ZH, another universal distortion of thinking related to bitcoin.

Some of bitcoin's harshest critics have likened the mother of all cryptocurrency to a pyramid scheme.

But as thousands of marginal buyers have learned, that distinction can be subjective. But when it comes to OneCoin, a cryptocurrency project launched in 2014 that purportedly attracted more than $3.5 billion in investor capital, that label is unquestionably appropriate. To wit, federal prosecutors in Manhattan this week busted what they described as an "old-school" pyramid scheme supercharged by blockchain technology when they arrested one of the founders of OneCoin at LAX.

"Some critics have likened bitcoin to a pyramid scheme."

"Some critics have likened automobiles to vehicles."

"Some critics have likened circles to round things."

"Some critics have likened sound to vibration."

No. Bitcoin is a pure fraud. Painfully obvious from the start. No middle ground, no room for subjective judgment.

When you start with the assumption that a scam is only subjectively viewed as a scam by its detractors, you are participating in the scam. You are an accessory to the fraud.

= = = = =

Sidenote for clarity: Some of the entities we treat subjectively are NOT perfectly binary, and truly deserve nuanced description. Tesla is not essentially a fraud. It's a company that produces and sells real cars. Elon uses cult hypnotism to create fraudulent impressions to boost his share value. In earlier eras when laws existed, he would have been prosecuted for those hypnotic tricks. But Elon could have continued building a small number of luxury cars WITHOUT committing any fraud.

Sidenote for even more clarity: Well, no, Elon couldn't do that. Another executive could have continued to run the original company, contracting with Lotus to build a small number of luxury electric roadsters. Elon is physically incapable of honesty. He took over the honest company to use it as a tool for fraud.
  ¶ 12:41 AM

  What's it all about?
The Bitcoin part of this WannaCry hack raises two (so far) unanswered questions.

= = = = =

First, VERY FEW PEOPLE know how to get or pay a specified amount of Bitcoin, and even those who know might have legal trouble acquiring it. Major corporations and government agencies are among the victims, and they are generally required to deal in real money.

You basically have to be inside the hacker community to get and handle the stuff.

Therefore, the attackers don't expect to gain lots of money. Most victims don't know how to pay or are legally unable to pay.

= = = = =

Second, as I never tire of pointing out, Bitcoin is NSA's own currency. Unlike green rectangles or metal circles or various forms of scrip, every Bitcoin transaction passes through the Net, and NSA can track the sender and receiver even if it can't immediately decrypt the content. Large numbers of victims are specifically known. If any of them have paid, the other end of the transaction can be spotted and the criminals can be caught. When law enforcement WANTS to find the recipient of an electronic message, it can always do so. But it hasn't.

= = = = =

Putting those questions together: First guess, the hack is another NSA/CIA effort to start a war with RUSSIANAGGRESSION. Second guess, NSA/CIA effort to develop charges against RUSSIANWIKILEAKS.

Later third guess: Extortion to force Microsoft into the Deepstate loop.
  ¶ 3:21 PM

  Ignoring history as usual
Three beautiful examples of completely ignoring history in today's news.

= = = = =

(1) Joe Manchin, one of the few halfway sane Congresscritters, proposes banning Bitcoin. The techies are snortling and chortling in their usual way. WTF???? There's no possible way to ban Bitcoin!!!!!! Why? Because Halliburton! Because Keystone! Because West Virginia! Because neanderthal hillbillies! Because 0x4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b! Because Bernard von NotHaus...

Oops. The Feds have succeeded in banning "alternate currencies" many times, and they have full and obvious authority to do so. It's right there in the old Constitution, though it's a rather nuanced authority. The Feds don't have to ban other currencies, and they don't have to print their own currency; but they have the power to decide which currencies are valid.

Of course the silliest thing about the Bitcoin bubble is that Bitcoin was clearly created BY the US gov't as a sting operation. How do I know that? Because unlike all previous "alternate currencies", they haven't banned it. Tells the whole story.

= = = = =

(2) Greenwald gives us an inside view of NSA/GCHQ methods for infiltrating the Net. Apparently we're supposed to be shocked. Nope.

I was hoping he'd name some names to make the news useful, but this is just normal intel stuff. Exactly the same set of ops that FBI, CIA, etc have been using in personal and radio infiltration for a century. Any activist who doesn't understand this is doomed.

There's a huge intrinsic difference between the Net and all previous communication modes.

Human speech, printing, paper mail, telegraph, telephone and radio were not designed by the intel agencies. All of them had to be used within physical boundaries that were set by Nature or by pre-existing commercial companies. When intel agencies monitor or intercept these older methods, they are limited by the same boundaries, including permission by commercial companies.

The Net was designed by NSA for the specific purpose of monitoring everything. In this case non-NSA uses are the overlaid and by-permission functions.

= = = = =

(3) As the Crimean area of Ukraine declares its independence, NATO is starting to rattle swords.

Meanwhile Nato defence ministers warned that they considered Ukraine’s future to be “key to Euro-Atlantic security” and assured the new government in Kiev that the alliance would back its “sovereignty, independence [and] territorial integrity.”

“A sovereign, independent and stable Ukraine, firmly committed to democracy and the rule of law, is key to Euro-Atlantic security,” they said in a statement.

Yes! Yes! Let's do it!

Forward, forward to total victory! Half a kilometer, half a kilometer, half a kilometer onward! Total victory! Just like the other time!

Oops.   ¶ 4:29 AM