ClaytonB
Member

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To be fair, Mondrain's style did have a point, and has been influential on art. Rothko is pretty abstract, but there's still something there in some of his work. I'm OK with abstraction. Where I think we lost track of the narrative is absurdism and anti-art. The point of art is, obviously, to be artistic, to make something that people actually want to look at because it's beautiful or genuinely interesting. I might not like your style, and I might not understand the point your work is trying to make, but at least have a style and some kind of objective or purpose to your art, particularly in respect to the intended viewer/audience. Slicing up a human-shaped, skin-color-frosted velvet cake is not "art", it's disturbing, performative, group psychopathy. Installing a common toilet in an art display is not a work of art... it's just an insult to the viewers. Taping a banana to a wall is not deep, it's "I'm 14 and this is deep". I can even track with a certain amount of absurdism, where it is leaning toward the satirical or comical, but self-eating absurdism is pointless. If everything is absurd, what's the point of being absurd? Why should it matter that everything is absurd, if it is absurd? If you were trapped in a lucid dream, what would be the point of protesting it? It's a dream, who cares.

But how would you really know? That's the real question. Dispositionally, ChatGPT is the ultimate bureaucrat, and it comes perfectly natural. One is tempted to wonder if bureaucrats were always AI...

:up:

... and put Musk in charge of executive budget cuts per department. Just because Congress allocated it doesn't mean POTUS is obligated to spend it. Just sayin'... pic-tax (careful, this meme is known to cause involuntary convulsive epileptic seizure in blue-haired lefties...):

Damn ants on my screen. Gonna have to get some ant-bait...

It just got real... :tears:

Not even close. Here is a photo of Jennifer Lopez performing in 1999, which is 19 years before the release of the iPhone XR (used to take the "selfie" above): Not to mention, the photo you posted looks doctored by an IG filter (or equivalent).

It's double-plus ungood crimethink. Put it out of your mind immediately. Let's hope that no Party officials have noticed this thread...

It's really not complicated, I don't know why people make it complicated. Let's say you have $5,000 of "bug-out money". That might be a bit high for some people, but it's just for purposes of illustration. One way you could divide it is as follows: $1000 USD $1000 Silver coins $1000 Gold coin (1/2 oz or whatever) $1000 BTC $1000 Gift cards (prepaid Visa/whatever) That last one is for urban preppers who might be stuck in a situation where the grid is "mostly" down, and urban shops refuse to accept physical cash but still have operating Visa-card terminals. For urban preppers, I think this is an under-prepared scenario. Banks down, cash refused, but Visa-payments system still operating I consider to be a highly probable scenario.

"It's time we put a bullseye on Trump" - Joseph R. Biden, 46th President of the United States (allegedly)

While everything you mention here is true, it's still the "long way around" the issue. The fact is that Putin and his supporters in Russia are anti-globalist, anti-COMINTERN and they will never allow the globalists who raped, pillaged and burned Russia for 7 decades under abject communist tyranny to come anywhere near the levers of power in that country ever again. This means that Russia is no longer marching along with the Beast System, and that means that all available resources must be devoted to destroying Russia while, of course, making it look like Russia is somehow "the bad guy". So, you advance NATO to their doorstep and you have Ukrainian mercs or US/NATO black-op assets taking potshots across the border with Russia to goad them into a full-scale invasion. Which is the entire reason that Russia has said that NATO in Ukraine is a bright-red-line and a hard-no. The West is a professional instigator, it's what we do better than anything else. There are many other particular, tactical reasons why Russia is making the specific decisions it is making but the broad strategic conflict is fairly simple. US/NATO want into Ukraine (officially) so they can use it as a staging ground for coups and assassination operations in Russia itself, not to mention first-strike nuclear capability (this is equivalent of Russia installing its own government in Mexico). Because this is an existential threat to Russia as a country, this is a nuclear strategic issue. Therefore, Russia has long sought to establish a formal nuclear agreement in order to prevent the current situation. But the US/NATO regime is suicidal and absolutely insane and they think that Russia is bluffing. I doubt very much that they are bluffing. Why bluff? There's no benefit to it. So, Russia's warnings are 100% sincere and the traitorous pirates who have infiltrated and hijacked the national government in DC are running this train full-speed downhill to a collapsed trestle across a cliff ravine...

To assume any less is naivete. In a game of chess, the goal of each player is to checkmate the other. To assume your opponent would show you mercy at the last moment is ridiculous. Obviously, he only aims for victory and nothing else and will play every available move on the board. For these psychopaths, the word "law" is a meaningless sound, something more like a dog's bark. They have no concept of what law even is, nor would they care even if they did. The problem is that there are grave economic consequences for focusing too much official attention on Bitcoin. Suppose they were to go absolute scorched-earth and announce the equivalent of the War on Terror but, this time, make it "War on Crypto". Now, I will grant you that they could stamp it out. But the problem is the same as executing a popular political dissident... you don't actually defeat his movement, you make a martyr of him and he becomes even more powerful in death than he ever was in life. That is the chess-position on the board. If they could just order a Delta black-ops team to kick down some doors in various countries overnight and decapitate the Bitcoin network, they would have done that long ago. But that's just not how Bitcoin works. There is no central head to decapitate. This is by design. It is literally decentralized and that's something that fries the Evil Empire's brain-circuits. They literally do not comprehend "decentralized cooperation" because their world-model is based on the false belief that the only possible form of cooperation is by subjugation. Once I make you my slave, we finally have a "cooperative" relationship ... I make you cooperate, and you cooperate because you have no choice. Since this is their world-model, they literally cannot believe that it is possible for a truly decentralized cooperative network to exist. And so they continue to misunderstand and underestimate Bitcoin, over and over. I watched all the live charts in 2017 as they were doing combined cyber-warfare and economic warfare on the Bitcoin network. They had hundreds of millions or maybe billions of dollars "in-flight" in the Bitcoin network (they were just transferring the money back to themselves), and they were using it to DDoS attack the network. It was astounding to watch. The Bitcoin network definitely felt the blow... to get a transaction through the network within an hour or so was costing as much as $20 during peak demand times. But it survived. I get it, but again, Bitcoin reduces the problem to an "all-or-nothing" bluff. The only way to truly stop the flow of Bitcoin is to do a global shutdown of the entire Internet, shoot down the satellites and then send kill squads out to kill all known major holders, major miners and other major actors in the Bitcoin network. Not saying they wouldn't do that due to any moral limitations on their part... if they could logistically pull it off, I have no doubt that they would gleefully do so. No, the problem is how do you sell to the world this idea that the entire Internet needs to be shut down for several days, and Bitcoin satellites shot out of space, in order to eradicate some kind of weird digital Pokemon trading system?!? The global public won't get it because it just doesn't add up. Bitcoin is simultaneously a pyramid scheme being run by online Magic Card-trading neckbeards... and it is also a global national-security threat?! How do you sell that, politically? Literally nobody is going to understand this. So, they have to find a more effective strategy and they've already started on that for the last 5-ish years or so. Just as with drug busts, they're doing "federal agents pose with seized Bitcoin" photos and publishing those to create this new perception that Bitcoin = criminal-money. They will try to build this up until they have a pretext for the kind of Delta-force assassination operation you have in mind. But failing that, they are still building a case for a "War on Crypto"... so they could...

It is terrifying that, since roughly 2016-ish, we are being walked through the exact phases of the Bolshevik Revolution, step-by-step. Bald-faced propaganda that would have made Soviet party officials in the Politburo blush for shame if they were forced to print them in Pravda are being sold, straight-faced, to the American public. The propagandists themselves do not so much as bat an eyelash as this never-ending stream of verbal sewage comes flowing out of their mouth on national broadcast TV. It's simultaneously amazing and terrifying. The name "Clown World" is an insult to clowns. At least clowns earn an honest living doing what they do. These people seem to have come straight up out of the pit of hell. And the beat goes on...

tl;dw -- some notes on the overall topic: To paraphrase Mises on the matter of the divisibility of the monetary medium (gold, silver, etc.): Any total amount of money is as serviceable for the use of the monetary medium as any other amount. That is, there is never a need for "more money". For coinage, we do want more of the monetary metal as population grows, simply because coins can only become so small before they become too small to handle. However, there are solutions to this, such as using non-precious metals for very small transactions, which is why copper used to be used for pennies, nickel for 5cent coins, and so on. Thus, even if you had just one gold bar for the whole world, it would still be possible through subdivision to give every nation in the world their one small piece of that gold bar, and that small piece would be the gold reserve of the nation. Obviously, that is an exaggerated situation. In reality, as population grows (thus, increased demand for coinage) the demand for precious-metal mining for coinage also grows, and so more resources are invested into that, and the low-dilution mining sources that were formerly unprofitable, become profitable. IIRC, there's vastly more gold dissolved in the water of the ocean than all gold ever mined by humans added together, many times over. Obviously, the cost of recovering that is very high, but if the population really grew to be so enormous that the amount of gold available today would not suffice for coinage, then it would become so precious that mining it directly from the ocean, even at great expense, would become profitable. The assumption that gold is no longer money is not correct. Gold is no longer popular money in the West, that is, it is not used hand-to-hand by most people, most of the time. But this is not actually historically unique, as bimetallism in Britain and Europe caused many gold outflows during the era where those laws were being imposed. Sometimes, gold would disappear from a bimetallic economy and silver would have higher legal value than gold, and vice-versa. So, yes, it is true that people don't use gold very often in hand-to-hand transactions in the US/West but this says nothing about whether gold itself is still money. Go to Dubai and find out whether gold is still used as money. It is commonly-used money there. While less common, it is still used as money in India, among the upper-class. They do transactions in gold. In Russia, it is used as money for large transactions. In Africa, it widely used for all kinds of large transactions. In Switzerland, it is actually used as money in purchase transactions. Gold never completely stopped being money.