Happy Festivus: Let's Put a Bow on 2022
I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a very happy new year. Now, it's time for the 'airing of grievances.'
2022 is almost over. And boy let me tell ya, I’m glad for that. In many ways, this was yet another year of absurdity. If it feels like each year gets crazier, its possibly because we’re living in the beginning of the fourth turning of a generational cycle. The Strauss-Howe generational theory essentially breaks down American/Western history into 80 year cycles consisting of 20 year ‘turnings.’ The final, or ‘fourth turning,’ period is usually highly chaotic and often violent, ending in loss of life. This time though, we’re not sending our young people off to fight in combat at scale (yet). No, people seem to be dying in a completely different way:
The non-natural cause mortality figures are absolutely astounding and significantly above trend since COVID started. And it’s not just because of COVID - it’s almost a certainty at this point that the response to COVID is playing a significant factor as well. Injuries from the magic juice, deaths by suicide, addiction-related deaths, and denial of treatment deaths have all played a major role in the sickening rise in excess mortality.
It’s devastating. But it could be argued we’ve done this to ourselves because we’ve placed too much trust in the eXpErTs. Or is it not enough trust in experts? I suppose that depends on who the expert actually is, doesn’t it?
The Death of Expertise
Faith in expertise is on the way out. Rejoice! Or cry. You pick.
Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself. - Tom Nichols, via The Death of Expertise
That quote comes from an essay written by Tom Nichols back in January of 2014 that was published on The Federalist. He later turned that essay into a book. Reading the original work close to 9 years later is actually incredible. He goes on to blame lay people like Jenny McCarthy for a resurgence in whooping cough and basically makes the case that we’re being misguided in not believing the experts. I don’t want to dunk on the entire piece because there is actually quite a bit that I agree with, but I can’t help but wonder if he still feels the same way after what we have all been through over the last three years.
After all, it’s the ‘experts’ who were working on gain of function research in a lab in Wuhan. The ‘experts’ are the ones who couldn’t keep an expert-engineered virus (that could probably be viewed as a bioweapon) safely locked away in an expert-run facility. Yet it’s the anti-science layman who has to manage the consequences of the failing of the experts. It’s the layman who wonders if intentionally engineering a deadly disease might be a bad idea. Us rubes just must not get it.
Then the experts shut down the world. Then they forced gave us inoculations that almost certainly carry a net negative reward calculation for young, healthy people - something that was absolutely known in real time. Heck of a run for the experts. The reality is trust in expertise is dead. Who wants to guess who killed it?
To be clear, I’m not saying go completely off the grid and avoid your family doctor because he/she is out to get you. Exercise. Eat right. Get good sleep. You know, the things Lord Fauci championed in 2019 before ‘the science’ took over. Get your vitals checked. If your arm is falling off, go to the emergency room; I’m sure they can help you. But does that mean we need to give our complete unwavering trust to a person like Albert Bourla? I can’t really get there.
The Golden Era of Grift
Good or bad, I will remember 2022 as the year of the awakening. We’re living in the golden era of grift and more people are starting to figure it out. It is absolutely everywhere:
Regulatory agencies
Financial institutions
Corporations
The media (social and traditional)
Fiat currency
How can a guy like SEC Chair Gary Gensler possibly be taken seriously when the biggest crypto fraud (that we’re aware of) happened in a company that his agency was meeting with? It is incomprehensible to me. There is not knowing that your neighbor is hiding children in the basement and then there is helping your neighbor hide children in the basement. Gensler is a little too close to the latter in my view since his agency was literally working with Sam Bankman-Fried on scam-like policies:
The problem is that cop-on-the-beat Gensler not only failed to spot the crime—he appeared set to go along with a legislative strategy that would have given SBF a regulatory moat and made him king of the U.S. crypto market.
Even the Wall Street Journal has contributors who are starting to say the quiet part out loud:
A cynic might wonder if Mr. Gensler was waiting for a crypto disaster to serve as the impetus for Congress to grant him authority to regulate the industry aggressively. Increased regulation wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the FTX crack-up, though it would have raised the barriers to entry for competitors, as Mr. Gensler noted in an MIT lecture on crypto-regulation.
Gensler has shown on numerous occasions that his application of securities law is at best inconsistent and at worst intentionally arbitrary. His position on a spot Bitcoin ETF is utterly insane and very likely a contributing reason why Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC) is trading at a 47% discount to net asset value:
If the SEC is supposed to be about protecting investors, then as a GBTC shareholder, I have a bone to pick with him. The referees aren’t supposed to be players in the game. And this is just one chairman of one agency in the federal bureaucratic, BS machine. I could do this for 3 or 4 more with one hand tied behind my back but I think the point has landed. Gensler is not an expert. He is an eXpErT.
Indeed, in an ideal world, experts are the servants, not the masters, of a democracy. - Tom Nichols, via The Death of Expertise
And that concludes the airing of grievances.
I sincerely hope all of you have a wonderful holiday season. Don’t forget the Heretic Speculator Equity Portfolio goes live on January 2nd. I already know what the first position is going to be. It should be fun. For those of you who subscribed this year, thank you. To those of you who have paid subscriptions, you are awesome and you keep me motivated! Can’t thank you enough. Once more, I consider myself a doomer optimist. I do think things will ultimately get better. Stay strong, stay positive, and try to be kind to each other. You are in control of your own destiny no matter what the people controlling the screens want you to think.
Experts are paid liars that hide deceit in complexity.