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#CANNABIS_NATION: BRANDON LOOKING FOR SUPPORT....
Hey cuckoo... Summertime loading season for cannabis stocks ends today...!
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https://www.marijuanamoment.net/top-federal-health-agency-says-marijuana-should-be-moved-to-schedule-iii-in-historic-recommendation-to-dea/
#CANNABIS_NATION: STILL WAITING... HAPPY 2023 SUMMER TIME cuckoo
https://dailyreckoning.com/governors-of-the-mind/
Governors of the Mind
The assault on enterprise of the last few years — meaning not the biggest politically connected businesses but smaller ones reflecting vibrant commercial life — has taken very strange forms.
Ever since The New York Times said the way forward was to “go medieval,” the elites have been attempting just that. But this medievalism has not come at the expense of Big Data, Pharma, Ag or Media.
It mainly hits products and services that impact our freedom to buy, trade, travel, associate and otherwise manage our own lives.
What began in lockdowns mutated into a thousand forms. That continues with daily new outrages. Maybe it’s not random.
It was never really about health care. It was about the exercise of power over the whole population by a tiny elite in the name of science.
The government locked down society, and then tried to make us get the shots through hook and crook, an experimental medicine we did not need and which was proven neither safe nor effective.
Since those days, other strange things have been unleashed: the campaign to eat bugs, end fossil fuel, abolish wood-burning pizza ovens, impose all-electric ovens and cars, stop air conditioning, own nothing and be happy with your digital consumption and even block out the sun, while indulging in every farce such as pretending that men can get pregnant.
Many cities are falling apart, abandoned by well-to-do residents and consumed by crime. It’s all madness but maybe there is rhyme to the reasons for all this?
‘We Must Remake Society!’
In August of 2020, Anthony Fauci and his long-time co-author wrote a piece in Cell that called for “radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
They wanted social distancing forever but that was only the start of it. They imagined the dismantling of cities, mass social events, the end of international travel and really all travel, no more owning pets, the end of domesticated animals and a strange non-pathogenic world that they imagined existed 12,000 years ago.
We can’t go back, they said, but we can “at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction.”
There we have it. Preserve “essential” services (and people) but get rid of everything else. The lockdowns were merely a test case of a new social system. It’s not capitalism. It’s not socialism as we’ve come to understand it.
It feels like corporatism but with a twist. The big businesses that gain favor are not heavy industry but digital tech designed to live off scraped data and power the world with sunbeams and breezes.
There’s nothing new under the sun. So where did this strange new utopianism come from?
The Counter-Revolution of Science
Three years ago, Matt Kibbe and I recalled that in 1952, F.A. Hayek wrote what became The Counter-Revolution of Science. The idea is that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new conception of science was born, which reversed a previous understanding.
Science was not a process of discovery by research, but a codified end state known and understood only by an elite.
This elite would impose its view on everyone else. Hayek called this “the abuse of reason” because genuine reason defers to uncertainty and discovery while scientism as an ideology is arrogant and imagines it knows what is unknown.
I did not have time to reread the book but Kibbe did. I asked him if Hayek said anything that touched on our current problems. His response: “This book explains everything.”
That’s quite the recommendation. So I dug in. Yes, I had read it years ago but every book from the before times has a different feel and message in the after times.
It is indeed prescient. Hayek explores in great detail the thinkers of the early 19th century — successors to and reversers of the original French Enlightenment — and its origin in the writings and influence of Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825).
Simply put, Saint-Simon dreamed of a world without privilege of birth or inherited wealth. The aristocracy can be damned for all he cared.
He imagined a world of what he called merit but it was no merit by means of hard work and enterprise as such. It was a world run by geniuses or savants with unusual intellectual gifts. They would comprise the managerial and ruling elite of society.
The Council of 21
His preferred system of government would consist of 21 men: “three mathematicians, three physicians, three chemists, three physiologists, three men of letters, three painters, three musicians.”
The council of 21! I’m sure they would get along great and not be corrupt in the slightest. And they would surely be benevolent!
We would find out who these people are by having votes placed at the grave of Isaac Newton (Saint-Simon’s god of choice) and eventually the consensus concerning the elite council would be chosen.
They would not be a government as such, at least not as traditionally understood, but elite planners who would use intelligence to shape the whole society the same way that scientists understand and shape the natural world.
You see, to his way of thinking, this is far more rational than having an hereditary aristocracy in charge. And these men would in turn deploy their rationality in service of society, which would be enormously inspired by it, just as MSNBC is so enthused for Dr. Fauci and his friends.
Saint-Simon wrote:
Men of genius will then enjoy a reward worthy of them and of you; this reward will place them in the only position which can provide them with the means of giving you all the services they’re capable of; this will become the ambition of the most energetic souls; it will redirect them from things harmful to your tranquility. By this measure, finally, you will give leaders to those who work for the progress of your enlightenment, you will invest these leaders with immense consideration and you will place a great pecuniary power at their disposition.
So there you go: The elite get unlimited power and unlimited money and everyone will aspire to act like these people and this aspiration will improve the whole of society.
It reminds me of the pre-modern system in China in which only the best students could enter into the class of the mandarins, which were the nine levels of high-ranking officials in Imperial China’s government.
Governors of the Mind
Indeed, Saint-Simon invited his followers to “consider yourselves as the governors of the operation of the human mind.”
He imagined “spiritual power in the hands of the savants; temporal power in the hands of the possessors; the power to nominate those called to fulfill the functions of the great heads of humanity, in the hands of everyone.”
Saint-Simon lived a life that oscillated between wealth and poverty, and regretted that condition would befall any man of his genius. So he cobbled together a politics that would protect him and his ilk from the vicissitudes of the market.
He wanted a permanent class of bureaucrats that would be completely insulated from the liberal world that had been celebrated only a quarter century earlier by the likes of Adam Smith.
Here was the core of what Hayek called the counter-revolution of science. It was not science but scientism in which freedom for everyone is a hell, geniuses seizing control was the transition and permanent rule by savants to shape the human mind was heaven on Earth.
The best book I’ve seen that captures the essence of this dream is Thomas Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts. They turn out to be not altruists or competent overseers of society but cowardly sadists who rule with career-driven cruelty and refuse to admit when their “science” produces the opposite of their stated goal.
“Scientism” as an ideology is the reverse of science as traditionally understood. It is not supposed to be the codification and entrenchment of an elite class of social managers but rather a humble exploration of all the fascinating realities that make the world around us work.
It is not about imposition but curiosity, and not about norms and force but facts and an invitation to look more deeply.
Saint-Simon celebrated science but became the anti-Voltaire. Instead of freeing the human mind, he and his followers imagined themselves to be governors of it. Anthony Fauci followed in that tradition.
Their actual goal is to become permanent “governors of the operation of the human mind.”
#CANNABIS _NATION: Looking forward to something...
In the mean time...
https://i.redd.it/r2kb4py7r30b1.jpg
#JNUG
#AGQ
#NUGT
#CANNABIS_NATON: Sure hope so cuckoo...
Peter Schiff time...
#CANNABIS_NATION: Tucker Carlson BREAKS OUT...
BYE BYE FOX....!
#CANNABIS_NATION: WAITING FOR $RWGI :TO SURPRISE...
Hey cuckoo : Could happen any time...
The NWO plan is unfolding right before our eyes...!
Six months before they BLOW UP A PIPE LINE...!
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63297085
Just read the this and weep... They are brain washing the masses...!
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-hottest-date-movie-of-season-climate-change-environmental-activism-oil-1234710016/
Happy Spring time cuckoo....
MJ is setting up 2 MOVE
$DMAN
$RWGI
$AMMJ
$THCBF
#CANNABIS_NATION: HEY cuckoo WATCH $CNBX... 0.09
UP 140% YESTERDAY...!
#CANNABIS_NATION: $DMAN WILL MAKE IT BIG TIME.. $0.005
BUT FIRST THE BANKING SYSTEM WILL FOLD...!
I'M SURE WE WILL BE THERE WHEN IT HAPPENS..
$JNUG
$NUGT
$AGQ
$AG
#SQQQ: SELL IN MAY AND GO AWAY.... $32.23....
The price of even a successful preservation of the banking system is the destruction of fiat currencies, because the bigger picture is still of the greatest credit bubble in history unwinding.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/great-credit-unwind-powells-hidden-pivot
https://www.goldmoney.com/research/the-great-credit-unwind-pivot
We are all now aware that the global banking system is extremely fragile. Driving bank failures is contracting credit, which in turn drives interest rates higher. Though it is not generally appreciated, central banks have failed to suppress them.
Some regional banks have failed in the US and the run on Credit Suisse’s deposits has forced the Swiss authorities into forcing a reluctant rescue by UBS. Undoubtedly, as the great credit unwind plays out, there will be more rescues to come.
In this, the earliest stages of a banking crisis, some questions are being answered. We can probably rule out bail-ins in favour of bail outs, and we can assume that nearly all banks will be rescued — they must be in order to prevent systemic contagion.
In this article I quantify the position of the global systemically important banks (the G-SIBs) and point out that the central banks which are meant to backstop them are themselves bankrupt — or rather they would be properly accounted for.
Because even a minor failure in the banking system could undermine the entire global banking system, the much heralded pivot is now here, but not in plain sight. Because central banks have lost control over interest rates, the focus on preserving the financial markets underpinning the banking system has shifted to supressing bond yields. This is why the Fed has introduced its Bank Term Funding Programme, likely to be copied in other jurisdictions.
It is Powell’s hidden pivot — his line in the sand. But it is the last desperate throw of the dice and depends entirely on inflation being transient and interest rates not rising much more.
The price of even a successful preservation of the banking system is the destruction of fiat currencies, because the bigger picture is still of the greatest credit bubble in history unwinding.
And that process has only recently started...
The great unwind accelerates
Now that everyone in finance knows that there is a banking crisis, cynicism prevails. When a central banker or treasury minister tries to reassure the public, it is disbelieved. The risk to an extremely fragile global banking system is that if disbelief in public statements spreads from financial sceptics to the wider public, the system is doomed. All credit is based on confidence and confidence alone.
It is still too early to say that confidence has been irretrievably shaken. But last weekend, UBS was unwillingly forced by the Swiss authorities into taking over Credit Suisse on a share swap, which valued the latter’s shares at about 70 centimes. That put Credit Suisse’s shares on a discount to book value of 94%. Admittedly, this figure is unreliable when deposits are running out of the door and the full value of foreign exchange derivatives are not accounted for. But it does raise a question over the valuations of all the other global systemically important European banks. And why stop there — the G-SIBs have all taken in each other’s laundry, so if one fails so might all the rest. Perhaps they should all be similarly valued.
Presumably, in their groupthink the central bankers represented by the three wise monkeys in the illustration above never thought it would come to this. After all, their regulators have frequently conducted stress tests and all major banks routinely pass them with flying colours. But as Kevin Dowd, Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University put it in 2016 in one of his several critical reviews of bank regulation,
“The purpose of the stress testing programme should be to highlight the vulnerability of our banking system and the need to rebuild it. Instead, it has achieved the exact opposite, portraying a weak banking system as strong. This is like having a ship radar system that cannot detect an iceberg in plain view.
“As the EU banking system goes into a renewed crisis, the UK banking system is in no fit state to withstand the storm. Once contagion spreads from Italy to Germany and then to the UK, we will have a new banking crisis but on a much grander scale than 2007-08.
“The Bank of England is asleep at the wheel again, and we will be back to beleaguered banksters begging for bailouts – and the taxpayer will be ripped off yet again, but bigger this time."
Unfortunately, it is Professor Dowd’s analysis and conclusion that have stood the test of time. And nothing, repeat nothing, has been done to alter this situation. Only last Monday, the President of the ECB proved this point by releasing the following official statement:
“I welcome the swift action and the decisions taken by the Swiss authorities. They are instrumental for restoring orderly market conditions and ensuring financial stability. The euro area banking sector is resilient, with strong capital and liquidity positions. In any case, our policy toolkit is fully equipped to provide liquidity support to the euro area financial system if needed and to preserve the smooth transmission of monetary policy.” (italics are my emphasis)[ii]
The group-thinking on stress testing is based on commonly agreed parameters between central banks and regulators for constructing stress models, and their desire to be seen discharging their duties rather than the actuality. That being the case, what we have seen in Switzerland which led to Credit Suisse being valued at only 6% of its book value is an important message not just for European bank regulation, but elsewhere as well.
Whatever their mollifying statements, the central bank groupthinkers must now be very worried. But they appear to lack coordination. The Swiss National Bank decided that as part of bailing out Credit Suisse, it would bail in higher ranking bond holders, writing off Sf17bn. That shareholders should get something while senior creditors get nothing is a travesty of company law. Following the market’s reaction, it has been swiftly denounced by regulators in Europe and London, only days after the ECB President issued the formal statement above, extoling the Swiss authorities for their actions.
The consequences of the Swiss National Bank writing off senior creditors are likely not just to impose losses on other banks which are in a fragile state themselves and can ill afford their senior debt to be traduced in this way, but to make future bond financing of banks more difficult. Furthermore, banks, insurance companies, and pension funds will be reassessing their risk exposure to all Swiss franc denominated bonds, even to the extent of impacting UBS, Credit Suisse’s rescuer.
The legal wrangling and rating downgrades probably start here, and no one comes out of it without damage to their reputations. And as already noted above, credit depends entirely on confidence. One can only assume that this will get central banks and their regulators to drop the whole bail-in concept in their attempts to ensure the survival of their commercial banking systems. Perhaps the Swiss should backtrack on their decision to save a paltry Sf17bn. We can understand and accept that Swiss banks get into trouble. But the Swiss authorities’ clumsy handling of the Credit Suisse crisis is risking its national reputation for financial probity and stability.
The broader problem is that confidence in
