I Left My Legs in Frisco...
Plus the SVB Fulcrum, Jan 6th & Other Randoms
Fellow Sovereigns! Back for a relatively light one as I was just discharged from the hospital after a week of monitoring and recuperation. A physical, mental and spiritual challenge that I flew into Frisco, TX for derailed a bit on the physical side.
The question I’m tossing over as I enjoy 3 hots and a cot is, “How do you square the personal credo, ‘Do Hard Things’ with the more practical advice of, “Don’t end up in the hospital or dead.”
There’s no one size fits all answer, but I think Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry was on the right track when he said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
After all, how can you push past physical or mental limits if you don’t even know where the line begins and ends?
Now that I am out of here with my legs and kidneys mostly functioning (google rhabdomyolysis if you want to know what I was enjoying), a few of the obvious in retrospect lessons I hopefully learned are:
Preparation is critical (sweat in practice so we don’t bleed in war).
Consistency is key
Stretch, don’t break.
And taper up.
Push from a 3 to a 5, maybe even 6 when conditions are right. But don’t go run a marathon when you’ve never run more than 2 miles or attempt to summit Everest when you struggle up 4 flights of stairs.
And the older you get the more you have to listen to your body. My mind still thinks I’m 32, my body KNOWS I’m 52.
My legs were cramping and giving out 1/5 of the way in. A combo of pride, ego and sheer willpower forced myself to finish.
Probably not the right move considering my preparation and stage of my life.
However, on the bright side, my CK levels were the highest in this hospital’s history. Normal is 55-170. I clocked in at 134,000. The cartoon below is me getting that news…
The Dems Reichstag Fire Gambit
The Democrats and Deep State Reichstag Fire Gambit of January 6th continues to be one of the more painful and distracting events of recent years.
The long and short of it is the new videos and information released show what most of us knew all along.
Jan 6 was the farthest thing in the world from an insurrection and you should never take seriously again anyone who used that term.
J6 prisoners are political prisoners who have been denied their rights and due process. Many were cheated out of their Brady disclosures and other rights enabling them to see exculpatory evidence by crooked prosecutors and Judges. In any prosecution where this was the case, the defendant’s conviction should be overturned and the prosecutor and FBI agents involved in that prosecution should be summarily fired and stripped of their license to practice law.
Anyone who has rotted in prison without counsel or the right to a trial should be immediately released or brought to trial within 60 days. If convicted, most should be released that day for time served.
The hard part to reconcile is that you clearly had a Reichstag-type event orchestrated by those in power designed to cement their power and castrate their political opponents.
Then, we had the J6 Committee, a Kangaroo Court Struggle Session of political hacks who deliberately concealed evidence to present a one sided view to the American people (90% of which still saw thru this staged farce).
After the public release of additional video evidence by Tucker Carlson, the January 6 committee has effectively admitted that it failed to give the American people a fair and accurate assessment of the Capitol riots.
In a statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) asserted the panel never analyzed the “never-before-seen” J6 footage Fox News aired this week.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Whether or not it is true that the panel members’ staffers merely “kind of went through the video” or they personally knew about the video and chose to hide it from the public, it was the responsibility of the January 6 “investigation” to portray a balanced and accurate assessment of the event.
Every member of the committee, Democrat and anti-Trump Republican, signed off on the final report, which is as partisan, one-sided, and “cherry picked” a report as you are going to find from an alleged “bipartisan” committee. The entire J6 Clown Committee and their staff all put their names on this document as an attestation that it was a fair and accurate summation of the “fact-finding” mission.
Instead, the J6 hearings were a forum for political axe-grinding against Donald Trump and his supporters, rather than a sober and serious-minded attempt to get to the truth. If that were the case, then the footage aired by Tucker Carlson, regardless of your agreement with the Fox News host’s politics, would have been aired in public. This not only would have provided a more nuanced view of the complex event, but it would have raised doubt about the guilt of several of the protesters, such as Jacob Chansley, nicknamed (disingenuously) as the “Q Anon Shaman.”
Chansley’s case is illustrative of the J6 committee’s dishonest characterization of the event. Footage aired on Carlson’s show reveals quite clearly that at least nine Capitol police officers were complicit in leading Chansley to the Senate chamber, where he would iconically grandstand in a speech to fellow “patriots.”
This footage alone threatens to upend the state’s narrative that the Capitol riots was a spontaneous protest that was incited by former President Donald Trump. The Capitol Police’s behavior clearly implies planning and an operation to stage optics in the Senate chamber that would frame the protests in a negative light.
Additional footage has recently come to light that further throws into doubt that the Capitol riots was fueled by Donald Trump’s actions on that day. Chansley himself had pleaded with protesters to remain peaceful and to go home, because that’s what President Trump had urged them to do.
Now, “fact checkers” are throwing away the last remaining shreds of their credibility to desperately support the state’s narrative that people aren’t seeing what they are actually seeing.
Another example of this gross distortion of justice is the prosecution of the Proud Boys case. As ZeroHedge writes:
The feds’ political persecution of the Proud Boys took a wild turn after unintentionally leaked chat logs from FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller revealed she said she was ordered by her boss to “destroy” “338 items of evidence.”
The leaked chats also suggest Miller failed to reveal relevant communications to the defense, potentially spied on privileged attorney-client communications and was asked by another agent to “edit out that I was present” during a meeting with a Confidential Human Source Informant.
Chansley was sentenced to almost 4 years in prison for essentially taking a glorified tour through the Capitol. At best, it should have been a trespassing charge with credit given for time served. The Proud Boys were likely facing over a decade in prison.
Not availing a defendant exculpatory evidence is a disgustingly gross violation of the Constitution and those responsible should lose their jobs at a minimum.
Though they have made fools out of themselves, whether that even matters in this DC Kangaroo Court still remains to be seen.
In a just country, corrupt Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray would be the ones on trial for their seditious conspiracy against the January 6th defendants and the American people as a whole.
And here’s where people get black pilled. Now that the J6 Committee has been caught red handed, what will happen? Absolutely nothing. Congressmen and women under oath tried to frame an ex-President and his supporters as seditious, domestic terrorists and would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for citizen journalists and Tucker Carlson.
In the old days if you try to kill someone and destroy their livelihood and liberty under false pretenses, there’s no, ‘Sorry my bad’ (not that these criminals would even apologize). It’s an eye for an eye. Until real Americans start pushing back for real on these Struggle Sessions and other forms of authoritarianism run amok, we’re destined to remain in this corrupt timeline.
Silicon Valley Bank-ruptcy
In a world of never ending crises, it’s sometimes hard to choose which is the most pertinent. The Biden and Obama administrations flippant and careless policy in Ukraine has put us closer to Nuclear War than we’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A nuclear conflict is potentially an ELE - extinction level event, so that has to rank high.
Meanwhile, the rollout of Chat GPT3 (and hopefully this letter) has woken many up to the lack of Ai Alignment overall - and the prospect of a rogue or self-aware sentient intelligence snuffing out its creator as many Hollywood movies have predicted. That’s another ELE for mankind and these are real probabilistic ELEs, as opposed to the climate change hoax, which even if real, would be decades away (and we’d likely be living in a very different world by that time with very different technologies & societies).
Both Ukraine idiocy and Ai may have a much greater impact; however, their timelines are unclear. On the other hand, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday and the lack of a plan to handle uninsured depositors (those with funds over $250K) means that the starter pistol just went off in what may be the next leg of a banking and financial crisis.
Wait a second Mike, how can the failure of a bank almost no one has ever heard of start a full scale financial panic? I’m glad you asked.
SVB was the 20th largest bank and a key pillar of the Silicon Valley/Tech ecosystem. Here’s a brief primer from Caitlin Long on who SVB was if you want details. I’ll let you know further down why it’s important.
Matt Levine at Bloomberg also writes a good article on the background but here’s the TLDR version in this one paragraph:
In the end, it was a good old fashioned depositor run that put SVB out of business.
We’ll likely find out over the weekend which bank is going to assume SVB and the receivership entity. It’ll be a private entity although I’m sure it will be ‘paired’ by the Fed. Nevertheless, it’s still a large political grenade. There’s not a lot of sentiment out there to ‘bailout’ wealthy investors. But these are “Friends of the Administration (California VCs), so I expect the Feds to be generous, but maybe not generous enough.
If the uninsured depositors (the FDIC covers those accounts under $250K) are not made whole, we could see bank runs beginning throughout the system Monday morning. Logical depositors would pull money over $250K and put in a Too Big To Fail bank or US Treasuries. That could potentially destroy a lot of small, regional banks.
I think it’s likely that by Monday a JPM like bank just takes the whole thing and holds the ‘held-to maturity’ (HTM) securities until maturation removing much of the hole at SVB. But wouldn’t be surprised if theres a side deal with the Fed under the table who buys those HTM securities from the acquiring bank if they need/want the liquidity (that’s what happened with JPM and Bear Stearns).
That way the depositors probably get half their money next week and maybe the rest of it shortly thereafter.
The bigger issue is how many other banks made this same interest rate directional mistake? The short answer? Close to all of them. That’s why they all have those assets hiding in HTM buckets so they don't have to mark to market. That works unless depositors start wanting their money back and they have to sell those bonds marked at 100 cents on the dollar for 75 cents.
From my ex-Wall Street contacts, as of Saturday morning I’m hearing that SVB will be ‘acquired’. Now, that word can mean lots of things, but I would assume 99.9% chance the equity and bondholders of SVB will be wiped out - which they should. What it will likely mean is a successor entity will assume the assets and liabilities but the big question is whether the uninsured depositors will get made whole. The whispers I’ve heard is that somewhere between 50-66% of the funds of those uninsured depositors will be ‘advanced’ next week with any remaining funds to come from a liquidation of assets.
Also hearing a lot of other rumors regarding Chinese money at SVB, and serious trouble at First Republic Bank as well as several other banks. This is obviously a very fluid situation so stay nimble.
SIDE NOTE: Remember when the government unintentionally, incompetently or deliberately destroyed hundreds or thousands of small businesses and drove big box retailers like Target and Walmart to all time highs with their Covid response?
We could be seeing a similar, selective ‘mistake’ here with small banks and the ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks.
Depending on whether uninsured depositors of SVB are offered some relief, we could see a widespread systemic bank run in nearly all non-systematically important banks.
The contagion effects would be economically devastating, but it would accomplish at least one benefit for the US Security State.
By funneling most domestic deposits into a handful of TBTF banks, it makes the rollout of CBDCs a lot easier to orchestrate.
Coordinating the CBDC logisitics for a dozen or so large, centralized banking franchises is much more palpable than trying to do it with thousands of small, regional banks, credit unions and other commercial banking outposts.
I’m not saying this is going to happen or whats’s happening (or even that the depositors don’t deserve some type of haircut for practicing poor risk mgmt), just that we’ve seen too many ‘coincidences’ and conspiracies in the last 3 years come true to ever trust the system and disregard asking the tough questions.
Curious to hear my readers view on whether the firms and individuals with more than $250K should be made whole.
While there certainly is a moral hazard to helping these people, the alternative is a potential system wide run that destroys small banks but leaves the Fed’s favorite children, the ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks in an even bigger, more concentrated position.
In the end, fractional banking is a system set up to fail. Banks should be closer to utilities if they are taking customer deposits and prohibited from speculating with customer money or holding insufficient cash or liquidity to redeem.
KEY POINT: Whether depositors of SVB get made whole or not, plan accordingly. If they don’t, and you have over $250K in deposits, you need to spread that risk among multiple banks or use one of the Systematically Important Banks (SIBs) that the Fed would never let fail. Here’s a list of those banks.
Be on your toes and play close attention to the announcements Sunday evening and Monday morning. This is Big Game time for the financial sector which unfortunately, affects everything we do.
SVB’s management was primarily responsible for this collapse and they will be deservedly wiped out. But the big picture puts the blame squarely back on the Biden Administration for their reckless spending of trillions and Covid mismanagement and the Federal Reserve for their incompetence during the Great Financial Crisis and then again, for their failing to recognize the inflationary pressures in the system in a timely fashion (remember 'Transitory’?).
The backdrop of all this is a system where a single entity (the Fed) controls the price of money and changed it from 0 to +500 in a matter of months setting up this collapse. These kind of failures do not occur in free banking settings where rates float freely.
Black Rifle Coffee Bozos
The Black Rifle Coffee brouhaha is a perfect example of, ‘Go Woke Go Broke’ and ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
For the past 7 years, the brand grew into a $300M in revenue coffee powerhouse on the backs of conservatives and military veterans. Rather than thank and show appreciation for its customers, CEO Evan Hafer and the Black Rifle team decided to shoot them in the back by openly disparaging many of their supporters and core tenets.
In November 2020, Black Rifle publicly disavowed any support or sponsorship of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Illinois resident who traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he shot and killed two people in self-defense during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Then in 2021, Hafer did a NY Times interview where he once again blasted conservatives and threw them under the bus. When right-wing social media rightfully reacted with anger and rationally hundreds of individuals decided to dump Black Rifle as their coffee of choice, Hafer tried to backpedal and blamed the Times for twisting his words and taking them out of context.
“The New York Times, as we know, the chances of them being objective were fairly slim, but we gave them the opportunity,” he added. He went on to mention veterans issues he hoped to bring attention to. But, unfortunately, the New York Times chose to go with “the salacious headline” about the company instead. I really need you guys to get the facts straight on this, which is: There’s no chance in hell I’m gonna talk s–t about conservatives to the New York Times. It’s just not gonna happen.”
Most people saw through this attempt to spin his way out of it and the brand has suffered ever since. The cherry on top was Hafer’s recent accusal of sexual harassment by a fellow employee.
And recently an activist investor wrote a devastating letter to Black Rifle accusing it of numerous fraudulent actions. If I had to guess, Black Rifle is a zero.
Hopefully this is a big lesson for other conservative leaning brands. There’s nothing you can do to win over your liberal fans, so you might as well dance with the girl that brought you.
If only conservatives would be this principled when it comes to other brands that despise them, we’d start seeing some additional fiscal discipline imposed on the Woke Crowd.
Articles I’m Reading…
Some practical advice for life in the Police State we live in. How to prevent customs agents from copying your phone’s content.
GPT3 has causes widespread amazement and alarm at the lack of alignment between human needs/values and those of the AI. Now, GPT4 is here and much more powerful.
Decent summary from Anthony Pompliano on the Silicon Valley Bank mess and how the Fed got us here.
Best of the Twitter Octagon
Look what a difference a year makes…
Looks like an undercover Fed pepper spraying Capitol Police.
Memetic Warfare
Parting Words
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
That’s it for this week fellas. Good to be back in the saddle. See you next week!
Nailed it again Mike. My best read each week. Thanks!
You continue to have an amazing ability to cover the current events peeling away the mask that the media often applies. I think you're a bit like Joe Rogan sans the Jujitsu overtones.