Climate Normal

I'd like to introduce a new concept- Climate Normal. The reason why I'd like this concept to take off is because too many people appear to act as if weather events that can be expected in a particular climate are somehow due to climate change.

Example: Hurricanes hitting anywhere from Florida to Texas.

I grew up in New Orleans. Hurricanes were definitely an event, but they were expected. Climate normal. Unfortunately, the various governing bodies involved with planning for normal climate events probably haven't done so.

Additionally, the apparent new game, which is convince very large numbers of people to evacuate, is an ecological disaster unto itself. It's more resource intensive, and people run up more personal debt, than the old fashioned way. The old fashioned way was this- the governments kept the infrastructure strong, and the people kept emergency supplies on hand.

Basically, we could always expect flooding- New Orleans is below sea level- but the city generally managed to pump the water out before our supplies ran out.

Now, obviously, it being January in the Northern Hemisphere- cold is climate normal. Blizzards in the North East. Totally normal.

Maybe not fun, but good governance is about planning for the events we know will happen, and having an insurance policy for things we don't see coming.

Unfortunately, this is an era of bad governance, were idiots decree insurance must cover known costs, and everything is mismanaged until something total obvious happens, and then you blame a Republican, as people did with Puerto Rico.

My Prediction on Bitcoin Seems To Have Come True...

As what I consider to be fake futures begin to be sold, the price of bitcoin begins to fall. For normal futures, the underlying asset you can occasionally insist taking delivery. There are, for instance, apocryphal stories taking a delivery of corn or soybeans. But, these contracts, while they track the Bitcoin price, can only be ended in dollars.

So, I immediately felt this may as well be a sophisticated USG weapon against Bitcoin.

I need to go looking, and see how influential has shorting Bitcoin been in this recent run down. It is highly doubtful this has anything to do with actual bitcoin, because most bitcoin holders don't sell. So it is very likely to be a sort of false supply- since the futures sellers don't actually have to deliver bitcoins, they can create a false supply- the endless billions of dollars that exist or can be made, up against the less than 21 million Bitcoins that anyone could actually get their hands on to make real contracts with.

To make a comparison, pretend this was gold, and on paper people were selling a billion tons worth of gold, but in reality there were only a few million tons worth of gold, and few people actually ever parted with their gold. So, it would look like gold was really cheap, but if you actually went out and tried to buy it, it would be hard to find because no one would want to sell the real thing to you at the fake lower price. This tends to make the dollar look good against gold, so I'm guessing it has happened before.

And I think this is happening to Bitcoin too, because it helps make the dollar look great again.

The Christian Anti-Christs

Bruce Charlton suggests anti-christs may feel quite Christian:

How to penetrate the deception? Well it is seldom a matter of false doctrine - because doctrine is easily faked or distorted - the world is full of people who advertise that they are doing X, but interpreting matters so that they instead destroy X - and humans are very vulnerable to that kind of deception at all levels: the own-nation-hating patriotic politician, the women-destroying feminist, the pro-science advocate who converts research into bureaucracy; the doctor who causes sickness; the educationalists who transform teaching into form-filling...

And mentions what passes for so-called leadership:

The danger is that in today's climate, even someone who is merely interested-in and lukewarmly-supportive-of Christianity (perhaps as a means to an end of a more peaceful and prosperous society), might be set-up by Christian followers, out of a kind-of desperation.

Since this leader is, as a matter of fact, Not primarily motivated by Christianity - he will then use Christianity as a means to socio-political-business ends - as well as to fulfil personal goals such as status, sex, wealth etc. Since he is a leader, he will draw his followers down the same path - thus Christianity is made secondary, redefined expediently, evaluated in materialistic and worldly terms.

If you are an introvert going to Christian events, sooner or later you may suspect that Christ is the excuse, not the reason for the event. Extroverts like to have parties. It can literally be that simple. But you can also see the continued abject failure to achieve any real goals, much moving of the goal posts (to claim some sort of goals were achieved), and a fixation on what are fundamentally leftist goals.

Interestingly enough, I think my first line above is actually wrong because Charlton actually doesn't suggest anything about an anti-christ's emotional state at all. Instead, what happened is that I read his post, and I remembered- a: the people who fit his description, and b: that they display great emotion for Christ. So, an undiscerning person might see this display of emotion as 'motivation' for whatever it is they are doing. But, although they have had plenty of time to iterate- to stop doing things that don't work, and start working on what might, they don't. So, there must be other motivations- desires achieved now, despite the apparent failure.

Another Place To Look For Fraud

We have seen this troubling tendency in which the left does evil crap, and then raises concerns that the non-left may do what they did.

Thou dost project too much: Worries over the 2020 census.

Good enough to launch and investigation right now. If the Trump administration can wrest the census out of SJW hands, we may see things are significantly different on the ground in America.

Political Word Association

The progressives try to associate Alt-Right with Nazi, but what does it really track with?

Anti-war.

There are those who get called alt-right and don't like it.
There are those who identify as alt-right and are probably genuinely right in a true political sense.
Then there are those whose ideas are mostly left, but are pro-white and/or nationalist. They identify as alt-right and they are also most likely to Seig Heil on camera.

But they are all anti-war, making even the supposed Nazis massively less Nazi than the Nazis.

So, perhaps the response to an accusatory 'Are you alt-right?' should be 'Are you pro-war?' and immediately go on to suggest the accuser is participating in the cover up of the largest anti-war movement in the history of man. Because they are, whether they intend to or not.

A Weapon Formed Against Bitcoin

Last Saturday, Tyler Cowen posted his Saturday assorted links and this one was bothering me to go back and look at it:

The Bitcoin futures contract on the CME will have cash settlement, not Bitcoin settlement.

Tyler asks, "What should you infer from that?"

Well, apparently my mind has been cogitating on this one. Matt Levine sets it up in the article this way:

Ha, it's true. If you buy an oil futures contract on the CME, and you hold it when it expires, then someone hands you 1,000 barrels of oil, and you have to find a place to put them. If you buy a bitcoin futures contract, and you hold it when it expires, nobody hands you the 5 bitcoins underlying the contract. Instead, CME computes a daily "Bitcoin Reference Rate," "which aggregates the trade flow of major bitcoin spot exchanges during a calculation window into the U.S. Dollar price of one bitcoin as of 4:00 p.m. London time," and if the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the expiry of your futures contract is higher than the Bitcoin Reference Rate when you opened the contract, you get paid the difference (times 5), and vice versa. In dollars. You get exposure to bitcoin without ever actually handling bitcoins.

So, these futures contracts aren't futures contracts at all, but tools for global finance to fight back against bitcoin. In other words, they don't have to buy bitcoin while attempting to manipulate the bitcoin price.

I vaguely remember various speculations about financial and/or state action in particular markets- especially gold, oil- markets taken as indicators of general economic health- meant to prop up the current system. Well, these new bitcoin futures are arguably not futures at all, but tools actually designed to push bitcoin lower.

I wonder if these guys are just going to try and take it down, or will they attempt to drop the price, and then buy bitcoins when they are cheap.

Time Is Less Real Than River

Time is less real than a river. This has to do with the fact that a river is bounded by other things. Indeed, a river must have water, but it must have water under particular conditions. And there are river banks made up of (not-river) soil, trees, grasses, etc...

So, time is basically a word that refers to our experience of movement. All things exist in relation to one another- some, being much bigger than others, exert a stronger force. Day, night, month, year- the influences of larger bodies on our own. But if you want to think about time in general, something becomes clear- there is no boundary- at least, not one like the riverbank.

Because, for instance, God cannot be analogous to the riverbank. He is everpresent, thus He is ever-present to both the river and the river bank- and all the actual things in time. There's simply no reason to assume He also has to be present to them in the aggregate as 'time', nor is there any evidence that there is anything to time apart from its parts.

Spatially bounded concepts seem more real, but this is because a place like France is more than just the space, but the things in it (as well as their relationships to one another). If you somehow removed everything, it would no longer be France. Similar things are true with a river.

I don't know if any of this is useful. After all, it is like a fish not only trying to describe water, but the fishbowl too. But I recently saw something disappointing on this topic, not least of which was that I and others had commented on a previous post about it, but it seemed not one of us had made an impression.