Belatedly, I just finished Season 1 of True Detective, a dark crime drama with a backdrop of cultism and human hypocrisy/cruelty. I can’t help but notice the abundance of surrealism in this first season; and that makes me think.
Surrealism is generally thought of as an artistic style, — one I can never relate to, I might add. But if art is a creative expression of human emotion, then its popularity is a statement of social mood in aggregate. One doesn’t need to be either an art devotee or a psychologist to know that surrealism was born in the 1920s…
Written June 20, 2021
Epistemology teaches us the value of knowledge, as opposed to dogma, lies in its enduring and persistent nature. You may strongly (but wrongly) believe your favorite restaurant stays open until 10PM. The day you show up and find it closed at 10PM is the day you instantly let go of that previously held strong belief. But now you know for sure they only stay open till 9PM. That new knowledge-based belief will be immutable in you.
But not all knowledge, immutable as it may be, is useful. What good is knowing the King of Hearts is…
Written June 18, 2021
History “repeats” in cycles. Strauss and Howe’s bestseller The Fourth Turning examines these cycles from a demographic angle. The same cycles can just as well be studied from, say, the financial/economic angle; or the war/peace angle. They all lead to observations about “mood swings” with “the times”, both in the individual and in aggregate.
We are clearly in a Fourth Turning, — a period of global turmoil when the current world order is in chaotic end-stage, and a new order has yet to emerge. These times trigger soul-searching, both on the personal and institutional levels. Most…
Written Apr 27, 2021
Arguably, the world is in a very precarious situation, despite the absence of global war. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is palpable on multiple fronts: The threat of a 12-year long financial bubble bursting, the economic malaise following an unprecedented global shutdown (despite official “happy talk”), the prospect of geopolitical hot-spots (from the S China Sea to the Black Sea and the Middle East) blowing up, a Pandemic still “morphing”, ongoing global migration crisis (albeit in respite due to Covid), and continued social decay/unrest everywhere.
Entropy (order disintegrating into chaos) is visible everywhere, and people instinctively…
Written Apr 23, 2021
“Fake news” is a term popularized by Donald Trump. It suggests people are programmed daily by lies and propaganda. This immediately brings to mind the movie The Matrix and specifically, this scene.
The vast majority of people opt the blue pill of (wilful) ignorance. I suspect that has a lot to do with “normalcy bias”, — the tendency to disbelieve or deny persistent abnormality. People can handle temporary abnormality, as long things return to normal. Permanent abnormality, or transition from familiar normality to a “new normal”, is change. People resist change. Mild change is unsettling. Severe…
I learned a long time ago that knowledge of people (including self) is more important than knowledge of things. The military strategist Sun Tzu wrote “Knowing thy opponent and thyself will win thee every battle fought”. He didn’t write “Knowing thy weapons and terrains will win thee every battle fought”.
As a leader in any context, one has to motivate and enable one’s followers to perform. As a follower (except for someone in a lab coat locked up in the back room), one’s performance depends on the cooperation and support of peers. No man is an island.
Knowledge of people…
Written 1/30/2021
In a concerted fashion, the major central banks of the world (the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of Japan), via “QE Infinity” and Zero Interest Rate Policy, created trillions of money (i.e. debt) outside the physical economies and artificially kept interest rates at near zero for 12 years since the 2008 crisis. This combination inflated asset prices and enriched the financial elite, and allowed corporate CEOs to hyper-borrow for stock buybacks thus inflating their own stock prices and bonuses. Meanwhile, there was no growth in broad money or the general economy because the trillions of new…
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is where the richest and most powerful gather annually in Davos to plot the future of the world. Luminary attendees include current and past heads of states, captains of industries, royalties, top bankers, and celebrities who influence the world. You get the idea — there is nothing second-class about the Davos crowd. It IS the collective “Elite” that controls our present and future.
The agenda for the Jan 2021 virtual gathering (due to Covid lock-down) was published well in advance, in June, 2020. And it has been generating a lot of controversy ever since.
(These are not normal times)
Written Apr 15, 2021
2020 started a new decade with an unprecedented shocker. No, I am not referring to the Pandemic itself, — the world had seen quite a few pandemics before. I am referring to the orchestrated global shutdown, which had never happened before in history.
During the entire “year of Covid”, mainstream media had been scaring the bejesus out of us with daily bombardment of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about our physical health. But virtually nothing had been reported about the impact of the unprecedented global shutdown on our financial health. …
(Think carefully)
Written Apr 15, 2021
Spring has sprung and the stock market continues to make record highs. Life is good!
Most investors mistake the spectacular gains they’ve enjoyed as the result of other investors buying stocks. They are wrong, and probably unfamiliar with Exter’s Pyramid. The following diagram is outdated but gets the point across. Top of this inverted pyramid, which ranks global financial asset classes by size and risk, is the biggest and riskiest “asset” class — Derivatives. These are financially engineered paper products (essentially “betting contracts” with huge leverage but no collateral) bearing no direct relationship to the physical…
