That’s What You Get

A lot of my thinking lately has been related to what’s been going on with the Libertarian Party.

I will say that I thought some of the ideas that the folks running the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus were generally good ones.

As I’ve spent more time listening to them, I’ve come to a pretty uncomfortable realization — they’re lazy.

The realization came rather slowly. I remember hearing Cyprian discuss some of what he saw going on. I thought he was, maybe, going overboard with the sorts of people who were really backing one of the candidates, and his LPMC associates.

There was some really weird stuff going on with this stuff that happened in New Hampshire summer before last. Ultimately, what happened with the party there was underhanded. What happened with the LP National was similarly underhanded. But the issues were resolved, and most people moved on.

LPNH is putting out some radical things on Twitter (STFW if you’re curious; I’m not going to look at their toxic spew), but whatever. I don’t live in New Hampshire for myriad reasons. (Yes, it looks gorgeous sometimes. I’ve been to Minnesota, and could say the same of it, but I wouldn’t want to be there after the weather gets cold.)

Still, Cyprian’s criticisms, along with the wayward embrace of Ron Paul, and his antipathy towards central banking. I do give him credit, but the whole thing with the insane pandemic spending has really thrown his dogged reliance on “hard assets” into question. Here and there, I’ve been buying precious metals only to see them basically flat, despite the incredible increase of circulating money.

Milton Friedman said that price was a function of supply, demand, and available money. My own education, while I appreciated people from the “Austrian School,” was really flavored more towards the “Chicago School.” My professors really weren’t big on either the Keynesians, or the Austrians. Same goes for my father, who taught graduate students in Finance.

Even with that, I was fascinated by the same sorts of things that Rep. Paul advocated. I kind of just brushed aside things like Ben Stein’s improv’d scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The failure of the hard assets really made me look more closely at some of the Chicago School teachings. In spite of some of the warnings against it, I’ve been using a lot of the things Harry Browne recommended in his financial writings.

The other big thing that was going on, too, was the crypto currency craze. Again, with the fixed currency supply, the price of BTC should be through the roof with all of the money printing. Yeah, about that.

So, I’ve been sticking to the Browne-inspired mix of revenue-producing assets, but making sure I have good diversification. (And I’m not going to go into my other passive income source; it’s personal.) But the folks who really are the Bitcoin Maximalists really have something in common — they hate some math that’s really not that difficult. An equation with more than one variable? No, you can’t have that!

The money supply needs to increase at roughly the same rate as economic output increases.

Even the folks at the hated Federal Reserve understand that. They’ve over-created money.

But so have the other central banks.

I really didn’t know that the Sterling was a “fiat currency.” Same for the Swiss Franc. So I assumed that those should be in good shape, but, no, they’re not backed with solid assets. The European Central Bank has created more money than the Federal Reserve has.

It’s all about the Petordollar! Nope, that doesn’t work, either. Conversions of currency are basically without fees now, and instantaneous.

If you wanted to pay me a large amount of Dogecoin, I’d accept it. The chances of it being in Dogecoin tomorrow are almost nil.

So they hate math. Okay. Got it. Whatever.

But they also hate laws. Can the Federal Reserve actually raise interest rates to where they should be? Strike that, since “Audit The Fed” has turned into “Abolish the Fed,” can the private markets set interest rates where they’re supposed to be without running afoul of various laws and regulations?

Not gonna consider that.

Over the summer, these people took over the LP.

The attitude since then has been, we took over the party, we can do whatever we want.

That’s not working, and it’s not because of the sort of chicanery that happened in New Hampshire previously. People are using various methods to keep from yielding to the new overlords.

Here in Virginia, the party’s charter is governed by laws. The people on the “outgoing” board choose to just go full President Madagascar.

Oops.

I’m reminded of a former boss whose car was stolen. The guy who stole it didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission, and blew up the engine.

Oops.

When I tweeted the story covering the things going on with the state parties rejecting the takeover, I said I shouldn’t be viewing it with bemusement.

You stole it. You broke it because you didn’t understand how to operate it. Now you’ve got nothing. Oh well.

Another Saturday

I haven’t written since my last summer binge.

Lots and lots going on. None of it is really worth writing about publicly.

I wish I’d saved the article I saw about the economic state happening right now. Essentially, the author admitted something that it seems to be tough for many to admit. I Don’t Know.

This started with the debate over whether that US economy is in a recession after the frequently-cited two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

Change the definitions, and hope that people don’t hold it against you that you don’t know.

I don’t know.

Neither do the armchair Austrian economists.

Why are asset prices not following inflation?

I don’t know.

Oil is still very high. Why is the same not true of precious metals? For the crypto-doesn’t-have-any-use-other-than-gambling crowd, looks like Real Estate is about to crash.

Nobody fucking knows.

Even the people who proclaim themselves to be right on just about everything, and that messaging is the most important thing ever. They knew that this would totally get people on their side.

What’s tougher — admitting you don’t know, or that you were wrong?

Good question.

Twenty

This predictive text stuff is annoying me. No, I wasn’t trying to title this entry as “Twenty Years.”

The show last night was fun. Food at the bar was good.

But today is a day of being finished, and relaxing.

I’m happy I finished.

I still need to listen to and write the latest ep of Notes of a Goon over on Back At Again.

But, at the same time, I’m ready to rest, too.

I have no idea what’s going on with the new days. I’m looking forward to the fall. Maybe there’ll be a place where I can take a breath.

Then write again in November.

Looking forward to the fall. Sounds like there’s a few hot days ahead, but I’m ready to relax. Some.

(And, perhaps out of habit, I was looking for news, but, no, I’m stopping. We’re finished. Happy birthday to me in a few hours.)

Nineteen

Kind of just kicking around before heading to the show for Robbie and Chris in Arlington.

Had to work today to try to get some things finished.

I’ve been getting quite a bit of enjoyment out of Eli Lake’s podcast. It’s refreshing to get some feedback on social media from a source. While I do have my disagreements with him, at least he’s got half a damn clue about the bad things in the world. I can’t say the same for a lot of the people who’ve taken over the Libertarian Party.

The brains behind the Mises Caucus last night on Kennedy was implying that people who get government pensions should be prohibited from making comments on current events.

What’s a nice way to tell him to go fuck himself? I’m sure there is one.

I sent my wife a list of backhanded Southern Women use.

Entertaining stuff. While she was downloaded in Florida, and has spent most of her life in Virginia, her parentage is from the North.

News. This hit from Epoch Times earlier this morning.

Same story, different source, and no paywall. But the big judicial victory the environmentalists had about offshore drilling got wiped away with the big spending bill they passed.

Oops.

A bit of schadenfreude?

My ride’s here.

Eighteen

Winding towards the end of the streak. Happy birthdays flowing to several of the folks I know; so many fellow Thanksgiving babies.

Leftover pizza for dinner. I do have to work tomorrow due to various outages this afternoon and earlier this week.

I have stuff I need to finish, but haven’t been able to get it finished due to technical difficulties.

Still have a few slots left in my fantasy league if anyone is interested.

News…. This one evokes memories of Tommy From Quinzee. (Apologies for the link that sets off the Sekurity alarms….)

FOX5DC has a sidebar with TMZ that’s on in the background. I can’t bring myself to care.

Two more days.

I should look for something interesting to write on. But who knows whether I’ll actually have a lot of time to write, now, that I’m working, then headed to see Robbie The Fire and BK Chris tomorrow.

Seventeen

Very long day with work interrupted by an appointment with the brain docs. Moving closer, but I think I might have to work, and forego some of the days I’d planned on taking off.

But I’m chugging through.

With the doc visit, I think we hit on some of my resigned attitude on so many things, including my family situation right now.

Though getting really bent out of shape about things has never really been my thing, the reality of my health situation really adds to it. Are you upset? No. Not really. It’s just something else I have to deal with. There’s nothing I can do about any of it, so why get angry?

Physically I’m able to persist better than I used to, so even less annoyance/anger.

Did have a podcast this afternoon that reinforced what I think about what’s going on when it comes to public affairs. This.

I’ve been calling the zOMGANTIWAR contingent the “NeoHippies” lately, and this really reinforces that. They’re stuck on latching on to any bit from the 1970s and 1980s that was viewed as being opposed to the evil US regime.

No. Go fuck yourself.

I think I mentioned that I went to high school with fellow military brats who were born in Tehran. I remember reading this about the team put together by Ross Perot who was deeply-involved in US politics at the time.

But I also remember hearing stories about things that happened at the airport/Air Force Base as things were really going nuts during the revolution.

Rumor is that you can make napalm out of foam rubber couch cushions….

But the AntiWar folks make it seem as if they’re perfectly peaceful, and we should be negotiated with. No. They’re still thugs. Just as they were in 1978.

I’m ready to be finished writing, but I’m going to get through what I’d planned. Three more days.

News.

The NeoHippies worry most about nuclear weapons. For them, nothing’s ever progressed past the LBJ Daisy ad from 1964.

Meanwhile there’s still a ton of conventional weapons that are sitting around….and they’ll still blow up. Saw this from Crimea.

I think I’ve written about this before when it comes to the Norks. Nuclear weapons are scary. But so are 170mm artillery shells.

And the latter are going to work a lot more often.

After Intertubes outage, I’ve kind of lost where I was.

So let’s call this finished.

Three more days.

Sixteen

I think I should have done more when it comes to prompting out this period. I didn’t, and am almost finished, so continue on with what I’ve been doing so far.

I glanced to see what I’d written in the past, and there’s something from an unidentified journaling site whe3re I was writing my thoughts about the then-new MacOS X 10.2.

I wasn’t writing about the fun with 10.1 where Finder would crash, and you could SSH in to reboot the system, but not much else.

Random aside — this predictive text stuff in the browser is annoying gas hell, and I’m too lazy to STFW and figure out how to turn it off.

I did take a company DIEEI survey. *mumbles something about HR being the root of many the problems in the western world*

My wife asked if I wanted to move to the couch. I do, but I’m kind of staying where I am to finish up the things I’m working on right now.

Oh well.

Still kind of in the relaxed mood from some recent writing.

When it comes to the news, I’m kind of sparking on my past from systems engineering.

The climate bill is totes going to work.

Establish your measures of effectiveness comprised of quantifiable measures of performance.

That sort of thing is a terrible idea for anyone up for election.

More on the writing, however, I also need to build in more time for free-writing. Yes, a lot of what I’ve done so far this summer has been that, but I wonder if it’d be better if I really had specific spaces set aside for that.

Speaking of blog organization, though, Rooskie comment spammers have been something that’s been popping up last couple of days.

For the foreign attackers, “drop” target. For the ones from domestic providers, “reject.”

Fifteen

I have almost nothing from when I was fifteen.

That year wasn’t great. I had what was probably my first really major MS exacerbation.

Incredibly introverted. Lots of acne.

I watched something this weekend, somewhat with my wife (she bailed towards the end). The episode of this on Y2K.

It was a lot as I was doing some IT and radio engineering in those days. There were satellites that got retired early because of the problem. Generally, however, everything worked.

Still, there was a lot of worry about what would happen.

When the year changed over, pretty much all the lights in the studio were off, generators running. I had CBS Radio on a phone coupler in case the satellite didn’t work.

VICE, however, has really gone off the deep end when it comes to tracking minor conspiracies.

Speaking of VICE, interesting live event on Substack with the The Fifth Column folks last night.

It’s refreshing to have something I consume that’s not constant doom-and-gloom.

Same could be said for Brad and Hannah over at BASED Politics.

But what I’ve really come to the conclusion on lately is that the experts don’t know.

The RONPAUL/AUSTRIAN ECON crowd can’t explain why precious metals haven’t gone through the roof price-wise when it comes to increased currency liquidity. And, no, it’s not just the Federal Reserve. If it was, USD <–> EUR wouldn’t be basically 1:1 really for the first time ever.

I don’t know what’s going on. Neither do you because you read a thirty year-old Rothbard book.

I mentioned BASED because Brad had a guest talking about some of the provisions as the horribly-rebranded Inflation Reduction Act.

While I’m still skeptical that many of the provisions in the bills will do much of anything, but it’s not the disaster that was the Build Back Better package, with the PRO Act.

Things aren’t as bleak as I worried.

Today’s fun was taking half a day of vacation to go to the dentist. Party.

But whittle down the unused time a bit.

More tomorrow.

Fourteen

Just a few more for this period of writing.

Had an incredibly odd dream yesterday afternoon. I think it involved one of the maintenance men where I live now who’d been living surreptitiously in our old apartment 200 miles away….with some appropriately-aged woman who I think was on staff here, too.

Probably a combination of the issues dealing with my mom’s house, and all the craziness happening with her right now.

*shrug*

Looking backwards at old entries, I guess there was a quiz I’d taken in 2006.

What kind of sex are you?

You are Foreplay

Um. Okay?

Can I miss being young, and healthy? That was taken right about when my wife and I were getting really serious. If the quiz wasn’t lost to the Intertubes history, I mihgt re-take it to see what I get today.

But I’m comfortable that there’s not been anyone else for, really now, more than two decades.

News.

My representative, following Mrs. Pelosi’s lead, went to the Republic of China. Amazingly, enough, I don’t think it was broken clock syndrome.

Several likes on a Twitter aside.

This was a bit of a left-handed compliment. The folks running the messaging are amazed by the bullshit that folks like Zinn peddled.

This is as I’m struggling through one of the Soho Forum Debates about Ukraine. Yes, it’s a violation of the restriction I set on myself of turning the fucking channel when Horton is on, but, given that it’s more than a month later, I have a sick curiosity to see how wrong the arguments are.

It’s not disappointing me in that regard.

To quote some pandemic binge-watch I didn’t consume, Winter is coming.

Might be something to revisit during NoJoMo in November.