Bitcoin jumps as metals retreat. The plight of the white. Better times ahead for my kids.

This is been a lazy week. I am watching the prices of gold and silver retreat after Trump’s election, as Bitcoin has made a dramatic jump to new highs.  Trezor, the company that makes hardware wallets puts out a newsletter with a greed/fear index. The latest edition puts the needle at 88% greed, suggesting it is more likely to go down than up from here.

A brief word about hardware wallets. Although Bitcoin was initially written to run on a personal computer, almost nobody uses that Bitcoin Core software anymore.  For one thing it is very resource-intensive in compute power and storage for every transaction since Bitcoin’s inception two decades ago. For another, computers are vulnerable to viruses and many other kinds of malware.

The primary alternative is to leave your Bitcoin in the hands of the online broker that sold it to you. Some of these brokers, however, have gone broker than broke, taking client money with them. Moreover, there is no anonymity. They are subject to the same kinds of transaction reporting requirements as stockbrokers.

With Trezor you are putting your trust in the geniuses that cooked up the algorithm to store your cryptographic information off-line. You have to have faith that they didn’t build any backdoors in the system that would compromise the secrecy of your keys. Once you have made that leap of faith, the devices are fairly easy to use. I have to trust that since they have been on the marketplace for 10 years or so and thousands of people have entrusted many billions of dollars to them, it must work.

Subscriber streamfortyseven recently commented that an investor is taking a risk holding precious metals in exchange traded funds rather than physical metal. My own comment in response gave my reasons for my having a reasonable level of trust, but conceded that it is never possible to eliminate all risk. My bottom line is, diversify! Hold more than one metal, hold them in ETF’s, coins in a safe vault overseas, and perhaps buried in your backyard. Hold both metals and metal mining companies.

To that I would add, it looks like having a bit of Bitcoin on the side would not have been a bad bet. It has its risks, but they are very different than those associated with metals. Crypto currencies are very volatile. Also, if you lose your keys, your money is absolutely gone. They estimate that 19% to 25% of Bitcoin is lost forever because people don’t have the keys. There has to be a lot of regret among people who played around with it carelessly around 10 to 15 years ago when it traded for pennies. My regret is that I was too chicken to put my feet in the water when it was that cheap.

One of you readers took me to task for questioning US government statistics.  In my piece I referred to John Williams of Shadow Stats.  Here’s an August interview he did, in which he claims that true inflation is significantly above what the government reports, and GDP growth is negative. How can I be such a contrarian? The government has a strong interest in lying about unemployment and inflation. They influence voters’ perceptions about how things are going, and they vote those perceptions. Williams’ interest is in selling his newsletter for $175 a year. If people perceive that he is wrong they will stop subscribing. His incentive is telling you the truth – the government’s incentive is in convincing you of things that are not true.

One of the ways I waste my time when I have too much of it on my hands is by browsing through YouTube and Rumble videos. I still don’t like video – it takes too much time. Another favorite has been to go to Substack.com and see what they entice me to read. They of course pander to my known tastes and prejudices. That’s how social media works.

Today they introduced me to a poster with the pseudonym of Barsroom.  The topic of the linked piece is a Bloomberg article about the discrimination against white people. Here’s his paragraph citing the article.

A few days ago Bloomberg published a report that should put an end to whatever internal debate you’ve been having over whether or not you’re really being discriminated against: Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did. They analyzed hiring data from 2020 through 2021 for 88 Standard & Poor’s 100 companies, and found that during the Year of the Blessed Floyd’s Coronation, those companies hired 323,094 people ... of whom just 6% were White1.

And the accompanying graph. His text claims that the situation is not precisely as bad as this graph would show. It is worse! The 6% white people shown as having been hired is not broken out among women, gays, and straight white men. One can assume that straight white man got the short end of the stick even among that 6%.

One of the benefits of a long life is that I have a pretty good historical perspective stretching over the gestation period in which this problem was brought to life. I posted a comment to Barsroom to the effect that I would be pleased to write a history. But actually, I don’t need him. I should simply do it for the benefit of you, and send him a link in case he wants to cross post it. I have written quite a bit about such discrimination in the biographical information on my website, but it would make sense to write a long article of my observations on the growth of anti-white, anti-male and anti-straight discrimination since the 60s.

I can write without bitterness. I was old enough, and capable enough to remain one jump ahead of the madness as it seized the entire country, and indeed, most of Western civilization. But on the other hand, I watched what happened to my peers who did not have my good luck, facility with languages, and skill at programming. The competent people younger than me in the Baby Boomer generation suffered more than I, and Generation X and the Millennials more than them. As I have written many times, the three totally unsuccessful children of my first family were of the Millennial generation.

My project at the moment is reading Remigration: Ein Vorschlag.  In English the title is Reverse Migration – a Proposal, by Austrian alt right figure Martin Sellner.  His description of the issues involved of getting rid of the unassimilable, unwanted, uninvited immigrants in Germany and Austria is very useful. They are mostly the same as the ones that will be confronting Trump as he tries to clean up the immigrant mess in the United States. On the other hand, it is a bit boring in that there is absolutely nothing new. People have been writing about what needs to be done for decades. We just haven’t done it. Even Ann Coulter thinks that Trump might, this time, do it.

On the topic of actually doing things, here is a link of Catherine Austin Fitts taking down Greg Hunter as he defends Trump’s mistakes in handling Covid back in 2020.  Hunter says that Trump made honest mistakes.  CAF is having none of it. She says that he absolutely should have known. He was either stupid or incompetent, letting himself be conned into a program that killed millions of people worldwide. This catfight between conservatives would be an interesting thing for you liberals among my readership to read. 

Catherine Austin Fitts argues, along with Michael Yeadon and a growing chorus of others, that the only explanation for the many faceted Covid response, with every facit being 100% wrong, was thinning the human herd. I do not find any holes in their argument. All I ask is that I be left out of it. I look at the impact on my family.

With RFK Junior slated to take over Health and Human Services, including the CDC, I have to assume that the United States will abandon its 78-shot regime of mandatory childhood vaccinations. Moreover, the United States will probably resign from the World Health Organization. Since most of the rest of the world has followed the lead of the CDC and the WHO in prescribing childhood vaccinations, my guess is that nobody will try to force them on my children.

With the European Union itself experiencing increasing skepticism from the nationalist parties in just about every country, there will be less pressure for Ukraine to accept unwanted immigrants. With Trump in the White House, I am sure that USAID will no longer be plastering the Kyiv Metro with posters of men holding hands encouraging people to get tested for AIDS and. Our embassy will no longer be flying the rainbow flag. Not that any of these had much effect on Ukrainians in the first place.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is returning to his workout regime very slowly – adding three minutes per day on the exercise bicycle so as not to bring the sniffles back once again. The kids are healthy, and the good-looking woman, though she doesn’t feel totally well, is not yet sick.

Graham