New Norm

Gaming The New Circumstances

September 9, 2020 by wof

Paul Rosenberg;

2020 has proven to be a pivot point. The near future looks massively different than it did a year ago. Our circumstances, that is, have changed. And now, as we move into the latter part of the year, those circumstances are becoming clear.

This issue of Parallel Society will be a study in gaming these new circumstances, with our goal being a freer, more rational, more humane way of life. That’s an optimistic goal, of course, but if we hope for things to improve, we need to aim high and work vigorously to attain our goals.

Hold in mind, please, that prosperity is something akin to our natural state. We enjoy a lot less prosperity than we earn because hierarchies skim it from us as soon as it’s created. Still, we do earn it. And that goes for every productive person: nurses, carpenters, delivery drivers, repairmen, grocery store clerks and so on at great length. We earn far more prosperity than the system allows us to keep. And so we need ways of life that suit us, not the ruling class and their pallet-full of fears.

Even if we include the costs of protection from criminals in our justifications, we still keep far less than we earn. Quality private policing would cost well under $100. per house per month, and perhaps half that amount. It barely changes the overall picture.

The existing system won’t permit people to escape it, of course, and that’s what makes this a struggle. If we had political freedom, we could each choose to live under arrangements that we chose: A constitutional republic (the 1789 US version, perhaps), a monarchy, pure voluntaryism, and so on. Political freedom, then, would make our system-gaming unnecessary. That being forbidden to us, gaming matters.

And so we’ll take the system at present as a starting point, and treat this rather like a war game, planning how to thwart their efforts, evade them, and eventually make them irrelevant.

And please keep in mind that we are morally superior to the ruling systems of this world. They take by force and garner obedience with credible threats of violence… then manipulate people into accepting and defending these arrangements. They are the antithesis of the golden rule.

We productive people, on the other hand, produce value: We work, we invent, we raise children, we educate them, we cooperate voluntarily in everything from commerce to Little Leagues. That is our way, and it is not just morally defensible but morally superior.

And so we have every right to game plan for the morally superior way of life to prevail. Indeed, it would be a crime against future generations if we didn’t do such things.

The Other Side’s Starting Positions

For this exercise, I am treating “the other side” as the entire legacy system, not just governments. Central banks, large corporations, some (or some aspects of) religions and more are all part of this. So are widespread mindsets.

What we’re facing off against is an extremely well-adapted and complete system of mythology, compliance and reaping, albeit one that is over-extended and facing increasing gaps and fractures. So, let’s take a brief look at this system’s pillars:

Compliance Inertia.

The will to go along has probably been the system’s greatest strength. Mom and Dad did it, Grandpa and Grandma did it, and so we do it. People will ignore immense levels of abuse from a system they’ve reflexively obeyed in the past.

This year, however, reflexive following has taken a good deal of damage. As we’ve noted before (and this is especially true in the US), the system created a lot of identifiable pain for parents by shutting down schools, and again by not reopening them. Especially so because family life was constructed around the school. To some significant extent, this has subverted automated compliance.

Beyond that, government schooling has been the greatest engine of compliance of modern times, and perhaps of all history. Homeschooled children are not reliably obedient, and now their numbers will double, triple, or perhaps rise even farther. And bear in mind that the obedience complex fails when even a significant minority persists in asking intelligent questions.

This year has also seen the loss of sports, which siphoned away the assertive tendencies of the populace, particularly of the male populace. Sports engaged vicarious striving, suffering and triumph. It provided images of immense effort, risk and winning that were no threat to the regime. Those energies will be finding new outlets, which may not be so warm to the system.

Automated Wealth Skimming.

The legacy economy was designed to reap from a compliant workforce, and it is very good at what it does. Clever business types have found cracks to exploit, but those cracks have been closed, one by one.

New ways around the skim continue to arise, but still more importantly, many people are becoming economically literate and are questioning the honesty and even the sanity of the present system. The system is still frightfully effective, but blind belief is dropping, not rising.

Control of Energy.

This is another great strength of the present system. Oil, gas and uranium are tightly controlled by the regime, save that this is less true in the US, where private firms handle the extraction and transmission. Still, those companies are very closely regulated and watched.

This control of energy is perhaps one or two inventions away from irrelevance, but until those inventions arrive, the choke hold on energy remains. Internationally, the oil and gas cabals are morphing and perhaps breaking, but that is still in flux.

Control of the Public Narrative.

People who fear to do their own analysis (an effect of government schooling) end up living according to stories. Those stories have been produced primarily by network television and a few major newspapers, recently supported by social media. Television news has been riding high on COVID fears (in some cases prolonged paranoia), but aside from that it is dying. Old people watch TV news and read newspapers. For better or worse, young people do not.

Social media is riding high on the manipulation of human weaknesses, much like huge political movements have ridden on the vulnerability of Westerners to guilt. But even these things have a point where they trail-off and vanish. Social media has no more low-hanging fruit to grab.

Control of Money.

The regime’s control of money is essential to them, both for the money itself and for the information that comes with electronic transactions. Having covered it in the past I’ll keep this brief, but the regime is in some danger of losing this power, hence their efforts to ban cash.

Debt.

Debt is an overlooked but very powerful tool of control, and more or less every adult in the modern West is carrying significant debt. Two generations ago this would have been considered irresponsible, but now it is considered normal, and it has massively empowered the system. The rise of private debt has almost nowhere left to go and spawns a great deal of pain (and therefore resentment), but it does convey both control and intimidation.

The Democracy Belief.

Again we’ve covered this elsewhere, but “democracy” is, to most Westerners, a magic incantation. By wrapping themselves in it, the system operators can cloud the vision of millions of people at once.

So, in broad strokes, these are our opponents’ strengths. Now let’s take a targeted look at their vulnerabilities:

Demographic Failure.

The system has made promises that it cannot fulfill, because Westerners are not procreating sufficiently. More than that, ham-handed attempts to rectify the situation in Europe have nearly torn the culture in half.

One way or another, believers in the system are going to be disappointed. What the system operators are doing is trying to delay that day or to make the populace blame someone or something aside from themselves.

The culture they’ve groomed is deeply unsatisfying.

The system has been able to ignore the internal thriving of humans for centuries. They enjoyed this luxury because the entire civilization has been riding on the “long tail” of Western values. Over the past couple of generations, however, those values have been effectively removed, and replaced by ridiculous philosophies. Necessary supports, that is to say, have been removed.

There is no purpose to life in the system, save for consumption, distraction and vicarious experience. The last serious and culture-wide purpose was probably the space race of the 1960s. That’s a long time ago now. In its wake came empty decades and a focus upon anything except the individual as good, heroic and awe-inspiring.

The system’s answer to lives stripped of purpose is the universal basic income (UBI), which destroys most of whatever purpose remains. People need legitimate, earned dignity, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. And this is not a want, but a fundamental need.

Facsimiles for meaning and dignity have arisen in the form of Facebook and its ilk, but they are shallow facsimiles.

Modern society, then, is no longer a fit receptacle for our hopes, desires and energies. Precisely how that underlies forthcoming events is complicated, but it leaves a gaping void where a deserved sense of dignity should go.

There are too many cooks in the kitchen.

The corporations have purchased control, owning nearly all politicians. The mega-rich (Bill Gates, George Soros, etc.) are playing with nations as with toys, precisely because politicians and the lords of academia are so easy and cheap to buy. At meetings like the World Economic Forum (Davos), they get seats at the table and help forge policy. On top of that, the world is now filled with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who affect and implement policies world-over.

The system, then, faces myriad diffusions and alternate directions for its resources.

China and Russia are now potent adversaries.

Both are forming bypasses of the US dollar hegemony, as well as developing new energy delivery systems, new trade routes, and new weapons. They are no longer impotent against Western economic power, and they’re starting to act like it. More than that, they’re starting to carry other nations (like Iran) along with them.

Many more people are seeing through the propaganda and questioning the whole enterprise.

This now includes those at the forefronts of economics philosophy, psychology, history and many other fields. The healthiest humans are pulling away from their previous faith in the system. Many are complying outwardly while trying to protect themselves from a rigged game.

The young generation is returning to traditional ways.

This is happening inconsistently and sometimes poorly (what else could we expect from the very young), but very notably. Contrasting the golden rule with the excessive and always-for-sale laws of the nations, the better choice is obvious. And with boys and young men being told, year after year, that they are deficient and toxic, shouldn’t we have expected a backlash? Even guilt – always Western civilization’s kryptonite – has ceased having an effect in many circles.

And after two generations of wild reaction to reliable birth control, it’s probably just time for old values to return, albeit in new forms. (And excuse me for not giving you the proper background on that statement today.)

The system’s operators – at least those who are less than true believers – know that the system is primed to fail. They are working to keep it going long enough for a solution to appear. These people have an institutional environment to protect; that’s what they were selected for and that is what they see. And regardless of rhetoric like The Fourth Industrial Revolution, they don’t actually have a vision for the future. Almost all they do is reactionary, treading water while waiting for a way forward to appear.

What Happened In the 13th Century

Again I’m going to leave out a lot of necessary background, but you can find a good deal of it in our back issues and in my book Production Versus Plunder.

Between about 300 AD and 800 AD, a new cognitive system replaced the paralyzed cognitive system of Classical civilization, aka Greece and Rome. The new system of thought (including useful things like the brotherhood of man) spread throughout Europe, expanded, eliminated slavery, but then began to petrify like the system before it. Under the reign of Platonic Christianity and what had become a monolithic and dominating Church, people generally did not believe they could change the larger world. Just changing their personal world was close enough to heresy.

And so the Western cognitive system was heading into trouble by the 13th century and was clearly seized up by 1300 AD. It was unable to expand and became a weight upon the culture, and particularly upon those who were struggling to make progress.

Our time is analogous to the 13th century. As noted above, our present culture majors on slogans and distractions because it has so very little substance to offer. Reason, as we’ve all noticed with disgust, has become a non-factor in public discourse. Carol Quigley described this very well:

We no longer have intellectually satisfying relationships in our educational system, in art, or in anything else. Instead, we have slogans and ideologies… When a society is reaching its end… you have what I call a misplacement of satisfactions.

Meaning has no more place in the academy because any context for it has been removed by lunacies like post-modernism and deconstruction.

Another of these misanthropic philosophies, critical theory, has metastasized into “cancel culture,” a dishonest and thuggish tool for getting rid of anyone who has ever made the wrong kind of mistake, and even those who can be portrayed as having made such a mistake. There is no satisfaction in such a system, save for crushing an opponent. There is no mercy, no forgiveness and no benevolence; only a strange and horrible self-righteousness.

So then, intellectual satisfaction from here on will come from without. I find it at the annual hacker’s congress, at Bitcoin meetups and similar places. I suspect that’s the way things will continue for a while.

And so the system is losing the best and brightest of the younger generations. They’ll be moving toward our time’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. New ways of thinking and understanding will take shape; they are already in places like those noted above.

What we are facing in the short term, then, are separations. As Quigley says in another place,

In its final stages, the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.

This is why the late Roman era saw so many “mystery cults” and why we are seeing literally hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of Facebook addictions: These are the only places left where some type of status, some form of acknowledgment and value, can be generated. The general culture can no longer supply it.

Benevolent side-cultures, however, are able to provide satisfaction.

How Do We Game This?

There are two primary points to guide our strategy:

It is far better to build than to tear down. We want to build a new way that makes the old irrelevant. That doesn’t entirely preclude sabotaging immoral actions against us, but it does resonate with a critical truth: If we want to build a benevolent world, it cannot be centered on defeating enemies. This comment from James Baldwin expresses the concept very well, and should not be forgotten:

“I would like us to do something unprecedented, to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.”

We may do best with a sort of guerrilla warfare: Attacking where the enemy is weak, filling the gaps they leave for us, exploiting their errors and not interrupting them as they make mistakes.

To these we can add two more:

Take those actions which are particularly suited to you: Doing things you understand, using your strengths, and so on.
Communicate (very privately) with others about what has and hasn’t worked for you.

I could continue on the immense hazards of violence, but you’ve already heard that from me several times.

So, we want to build rather than tear down, play to our strengths and against the adversary’s weaknesses, and to share our successes and failures.

Now, moving into specifics, I think it’s a no-brainer to begin with things that are already springing up among the young generation. Things like these:

Growing one’s own food. There’s a lot of this going on these days, and it seems to be a gateway for the younger generations.
Championing marriage and family. As I’ve said in the past, we have no right to tell people how to live, but we can certainly support young people who are creating families, especially because the system degrades them.
Likewise we can help to recover masculinity proper. The system has been at war with men for a long time, giving us an opportunity to champion masculine virtues without endorsing ridiculous macho substitutes.
Championing and supporting Bitcoin and other efforts toward decentralized money, truly free markets and so on.Any currency not based upon debt deprives the system of crucial advantages
Build up daily commerce in silver and gold. You can see PS #4 for details, but there is a lot of silver and gold in private hands, and these are decentralized currencies also.

As I say, more and more young people are doing these things. Helping them is clearly a great use of our time. And since homeschooling is being thrust upon so many of them, encouraging that should also be on our list.

Bear in mind also that these are gateway drugs; first steps into a life based on the golden rule and decentralized away from violence-backed systems. Bitcoin has been a great example of this: Thousands got in simply to get rich, but after a year or two they become strong advocates for decentralization.

With those things in mind, here’s a list to work from:

Decry merciless, cold and cruel dogmas. Better still, make jokes about them.
Call attention to the fact that the regime is forever attacking non-conformists with shame, guilt and intimidation. By exposing and ridiculing this, their go-to weapon, they will be deprived of it.
Draw attention to the system’s complete lack of satisfaction for anything north of one’s belly. Contrast it with the various new movements – Bitcoin, the broader crypto economy, homeschooling, makers and hackers, new biology groups and so on – people and places where one can find actual ideas, and where we can create wonderful new things with the like-minded.
Blind Sauron any time and in any way you can. Support, use and understand anonymity and encryption. Require your friends and associates to use it.
Support any honest attempt at free economics you find.
Support and interconnect every honest counter-culture you can find. You don’t want crazies, but eccentrics are okay. If they can cooperate honestly and are not sowing destruction, we want to befriend them. Remember Jesus’ comment, “Who is not against us, is on our part.”
Expose the arrogance of the system and it’s operators, thinking that they know how everyone should live and ordering violence to make them. It’s hubris to the point of insanity. They act as though they have perfect knowledge. We act as though we have incomplete knowledge and carefully make our way toward more of it. Our way works; theirs enslaves.
Support WikiLeaks and others doing the same work. What these organizations are really doing is breaking up elite power networks. WikiLeaks was designed to hurt power that hides its intentions, and especially to stop elite networks from trusting themselves.
Separate from, and do not support, the system. Stop selling them your services, deprive them of whatever fees and extractions you can. Don’t listen to the people who empower them and definitely don’t treat them and their positions as legitimate.

Build any missing or incomplete piece you recognize. We’re after a fully functional and separate economic system. We’re after fully functional and separate communications. We’re ultimately after true private property, as opposed to property we rent from violent dominators who register it and ultimately control it.
Encourage and assist new entrepreneurs and those who aspire to self-directed living. Encourage them to work outside of the system, not to play in a game that is rigged against them.
Show compassion to people suffering at the system’s hands. Pay attention to the many people who aspire to more in life, who found debt as their only path to it and were ruined by it. Tell them that they were right to want more, then help then recover and find it.
Help people of whatever kind who are injured and spat out of the system. Show them that there is a humane and benevolent outside.
Get ready to organize. We’ll devote whole issues to this as the time approaches, but once the legacy systems begin to slip away, we’ll need to re-organize the fundamental operations of life. We’re already doing that with cryptocurrency, homeschooling and so on, but once the doomed systems of the West fall apart, we need to have answers, reasons and models; we’ll be reorganizing daily life inthe rubble ofa broken world order.This will be akin to rebuilding in Europe after the collapse of Rome, and it will be crucial to the future of humanity. Start thinking about it now.See this issue’s Final Thought for one more.

Please bear in mind that you don’t have to do all of these things, and certainly not all at once. Pick things you can do well, and do them with all your strength. Have some faith in the rest of us: you do your part and we’ll carry the balance of the load.

Outside Standards and Competing Powers

One of the best political situations for progress has been divided power: Catholic versus Protestant overlords, Church-aligned versus empire-aligned, and so on. These are situations where rulership is both incomplete and distracted. It’s the kind of situation that produced Renaissance Florence and the Scottish Enlightenment.

It is also a tremendous advantage to have an outside standard of reference. Within the modern regime, politics is all, and there is almost nothing outside of it; that’s a primary reason why it can control everything. At times when the ruler could be judged by something outside his or her system, the ruler was much restrained.

Judaism, of course, has been a perpetual outside standard, and that’s a big reason why it has been so continually hated.

Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism and carries its subversive nature. Granted, various forms of Christianity have whored themselves out to power many times and even played the sole power when they could, but the subversive nature is still there. Drawing it out and encouraging it would be a tremendous help in the formation of a better world. That’s a subject and set of skills all its own, but you should probably hold this in mind; it means that billions of people are our natural allies.

Our Status Is Better

Every counter-culture allows for more potent status than people can get through the system. To get status in our world, you have to earn it. You have to do things that impress others, whether it be caring for the downtrodden or inventing a micro-fusion power generator. Our status isn’t free and it isn’t easy, and that’s precisely why it has value. It doesn’t come from symbolic acts or associating with the right cause, but by concretely and actually doing beneficial and benevolent things.

Ours is direct and real; theirs is illusory and fake. We earn ours; they imagine theirs. Ours is a house built upon rock; theirs is a house built upon sand.

Cultural Confidence

Aside from those with experience in counter-cultures, only the oldest among us (and mostly Americans) have a gut understanding of what cultural confidence was like. Here’s a condensation of such memories that I pulled from a recent Internet posting:

The future was ours.

We mattered.

We believed.

We looked out for each other.

We were proud of who we were.

These attitudes are healthy for us. The knee-jerk against them is that they’ll lead to arrogance and the abuse of minorities. Don’t you believe it. It’s not confidence that impels people to abuse the other, but insecurity, and particularly over-compensating for insecurities.

It is common for the attitudes above to exist in counter-cultures. In giant systems they thrive only at the top levels, and in a corrupt version at that.

Honest cultural confidence is not “we’re above those rotten others,” but simply “we are good.” That’s a beautiful thing, and a solid base for improvements.

And it’s true that our new cultures are good. (Not perfect, just good.) They hold to the golden rule, they seek only voluntary interactions, and they seek clarity rather than dogma.

Nearly every large system in this world is built upon the assumption that mankind is weak, stupid, infirm, and generally inadequate to a moral existence. We not only believe the opposite, but we show the system’s assumptions to be false.

One of our central jobs, then, is to provide clear and compelling images of men and women who feel capable, who enjoy using their minds, who thrive by the use of their innate abilities.

If we can deliver those images, those who absorb them will come to see fear-based systems as barbaric and will condemn them for teaching mankind lies about itself.

Last Words

Please remember that real power comes from production, and that this is utterly taken for granted by the system: The system is a skimming machine; it glorifies order-givers and paper-pushers who ride atop the dupes and rubes who do the actual work.

Thus, the structure of real power is not reflected in the system’s assumptions and arrangements.

Our new world, on the other hand, sets production free from skimming and constraint. We, then, are the better natural choice. It is our job to act like it.

Likewise, bear in mind that taking responsibility for ourselves tunes our mind toward better things. And so we should encourage people to take on responsibility for the sake of their own satisfaction. (See PS #14.) Finally, don’t neglect to improve yourself. You are the channel through which all of these ideas and actions must enter the world. Make yourself better and you become a better agent of improvement for the entire species.

(And thanks in advance.)

What’s Going On

September, 2020

Overview:

The battle of 2020 continues. The operators of the legacy systems are using the corona virus to punish their opponents, to terrify the populace, and to make themselves feel powerful. They are running full speed toward total control, and for the moment objections are relatively few. The populace is almost fully polarized and has only just started to feel some economic pain.

The Legacy Economy:

The legacy economy is treading at water at great cost. For the moment its head remains dry and its friends are doing very nicely. Main Street is facing deep trouble, but checks from the government have been (until recently) preventing a lot of sharp, personal pain.

Still, the old economic virtues are dead, and more or less all the economies of the West (and East) are in uncharted territory. The question is how long this condition will last. The last time the West tried to solve its debt crisis with more debt (2009), they got more than ten years out of it. I don’t think they’ll get anything close to that long this time. For one thing, we’ve all seen the trick before. For another, such efforts have a declining marginal utility. That is, it takes more and more new dollars to get any given amount of financial improvement. Still, they may get a couple of years out of it before the world gives up their dependency on dollars. But once that happens, an inflationary mess will follow.

The New Economy:

The more that the legacy system devolves into chaos, the better the new economy appears. And the new economy now has a lot going for it. We have rock-solid currencies, a variety of exchangers (including non-KYC exchangers), multiple open commerce platforms, and an ever growing number of people who have actually used cryptocurrencies in real life.

The new economy needs to grow and spread, of course, but it’s now tried and tested, with new products coming online in a regular stream. We just need more people.

Bear in mind, please, that while we’re seeing some mainstream acceptance – investment funds, companies treating Bitcoin as a store of value and so on – we don’t need mainstream acceptance; we’ve continued and grown for quite some time without it. If those outfits want to jump onto the bus, fine, but we don’t actually need them, and we very certainly shouldn’t sacrifice anything for them. We are a new thing, and as Jesus noted so well, it’s a massive error to put new wine into old skins. We’re different, and that’s a feature, not a bug.

Political Idiocy of Some Effect:

Mr. Trump again appears to be on his way to an election victory. His “delay the election” comments were walked back and wiped from memory by the next televised spat. Then came Mr. Trump’s executive orders, positioning himself as trying to give money to the middle class and the Democrats as trying to stop him. That worked and is still working, because it’s true!

At this point, the strategy of the Democrats seems to be to cause as much economic pain as possible before the election, thus hurting Mr. Trump.

(Mr. Biden is having trouble even speaking well.) It is easy to speculate that Blue State governors are keeping their states locked down (even as COVID deaths have massively fallen) for just this reason.

The Blue States have managed their finances horrendously, and without a stupendous bail-out, they’ll be declaring some form of bankruptcy, disappointing their entrenched constituents and their union partners. Mr. Trump is most unlikely to agree to such a bailout, and so these states and their bosses are making an all-or-nothing, last-chance drive to removing Mr. Trump by any means necessary.

The big question is what happens after the US election. If Mr. Biden somehow wins, we can expect most of the looting and nearly all the COVID fear to vanish. If Mr. Trump wins, things will likely get ugly.

Beyond just riots, the Democrats are setting up to create a major shit-storm by disputing the results of the election. (Unless it’s a a blow-out and thus beyond their reach.) Doubtless all the television networks will support this, as will all the Blue state governors and a wide range of others. Under the 20th amendment of the US constitution, there is an opening for the President to be chosen by the congress if the election can’t be certified. The critical passage is this:

Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President.

I’ve said before that Americans (and perhaps Europeans) should position themselves for physical safety in early November. If the election is close enough to be disputed, and if the Democrats go scorched-earth (and Mrs. Pelosi is already into this effort), all bets are off and I may have to start distributing material on personal safety in the worst of conditions.

Culture:

Movies have vanished for half a year and we’re not sure when they’ll come back. Netflix tried to push into new levels of perverseness with a TV (streaming) series portraying 11 year old girls as lurid sex symbols, but were forced to pull it back. Social media seems to be despised everywhere and yet, people can’t pull themselves away. Live music is gone, new recordings lag at best, and I still can’t find much new that inspires me. *****

¹Another of the executive orders (which hasn’t yet been implemented) was a temporary elimination of “payroll taxes”… which means the collection of Social Security “contributions.” This (and Mr. Trump says he wants it to become permanent) would wind down the Social Security system. That would remove a financial load from younger generations and bring a doomed program to it’s end.

Our Seed Statements

A core objective of ours is to plant seeds: Short, clear, uncomplicated
statements that make single, important points and no more. Please take these
to heart, modify them for yourself and sow them into the world.

We don’t know anything properly until we’ve favorably consider its opposite. Collective guilt is the root of genocide.
Our group is always great, and the others are always monsters.
Don’t cower before imposers of guilt.
The values of productive people are better than the values of politicians.
To obey authority is to displace your own mind and conscience.
Every law is an authorization to use violence, otherwise it would be a suggestion. Everything Hitler, Stalin and Mao did was legal.
A lot of adults are still obeying Teacher.
And yet we obey them. Why is that?
Compulsion displaces compassion.
Where the money is, there shall the thieves be gathered.
It’s your life; you can live it yourself or let other people live it for you.
It is not right for important people to order us around.
Our obligation to others ends at “do no harm.” More than that comes from the goodness of our hearts, and we deserve credit for it.
We are more charitable, compassionate and noble than the systems that take our money from us.
Everyone should be left alone to do what they want, so long as they don’t hurt others.
Cooperation and good faith make life livable.
Whatever you don’t want to see as corrupt or wrong is precisely what can be used against you corruptly and wrongly.

The Parallel Society Portfolio

September, 2020

We’re on the way up again. Bitcoin had to fight to get past $10,000., finally did, and is now fighting a pitched battle for $12,000. But battles aside, I think we can expect the upward curve to complete its run.

More than that, traditional companies are starting to use bitcoin as a long-term store of value, which is only sensible, considering the wild and continuing dilution of the biggest government currencies.

In addition to this, the use of Bitcoin as collateral will almost certainly be coming. Bitcoin is more or less the perfect collateral, presuming one wants it to be honest. The typical Wall Street operator doesn’t want that now, of course, but once financial players experience the consequences of the present game, a large new demand for bitcoin will arise.

All that said, we stand in a lovely position:

Bitcoin (BTC):

Average recommendation: $4,539.57 Current price: $10,451.00 Up 130%

Litecoin (LTC):$

Average recommendation: $49.96

Current price: $50.38

Up1%

Monero (XMR):$

Average recommendation: $52.90 Current price: $81.92 Up 55%

Zcash (ZEC):$

Average recommendation: $57.65 Current price: $60.11 Up 4%

Dash (DASH):$

Average recommendation: $121.76 Current price: $71.68 Down 41 %

Historically, a crypto bull run starts fairly slowly (as it is now), then accelerates, hits a bump, goes wild, then goes absolutely wild, and then falls back part way. It promises to be an entertaining ride.

* * * * *

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Prague October 2-4 The New World Top 40

September 2020

A Final Thought

As I write this, the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin is in the news. And as it happens, I spent a day in Kenosha less than a year ago. What I saw troubled me. That small city was once a thriving place, with factories, comfortable neighborhoods, and so on.

Now it is hollowed out and decaying. (The newer and prettier areas are well away from the original city, being little more that sleeping places for people who commute to Chicago or Milwaukee. They’re technically Kenosha, but no more than that.)

My primary thought was a sort of pity for the young person growing up there. That young man or woman, unless their family had some wealth or connections, would have precisely three opportunities available to them: The Army, teaching in a government school, or law enforcement.

Kenosha is hardly alone. America is full of Kenoshas, from ocean to ocean. They don’t appear on news and Internet feeds because nearly all of those feeds are produced in large cities. The Kenoshas and their hundred million residents are invisible to the rest of the world. And they are bereft of opportunity.

Opportunity, in fact, is shrinking all over the US. Governments, trying to address the problem, have taken the ridiculous path of “spurring development” with mere consumption: coffee shops and so on. Endless consumption doesn’t actually work: someone, somewhere, has to produce.

What’s necessary for gaming the system, then, is give these people opportunity… opportunity in our world, not in the old, abusive world. The grandparents of today’s Kenosha kids had opportunity. Their parents had less, but at least some. We need to tell these kids that it isn’t their fault; that the system has failed them, that if they want opportunity (which they need terribly) they’ll have to find it elsewhere… and that we can point them to it.

These people can make up their own minds what to do, but they need to know that we have protected communications, private money (everything from cryptocurrency to gold and silver to cash) and millions of others who are already taking steps out of a parasitic and abusive Matrix.

We have the tools; they need to see them. With opportunity, these people can thrive just as well as their grandparents did. It’s our job to let them know.

See you next time.