CBDC: follow a clown, get a circus

the deeply unserious people playing with deeply serious fire

much has been said about CBDC’s (central bank digital currencies). the fed loves them, the ECB loves them; it’s clearly the coming thing on the febrile fever dream wish list of the cool kids table at davos.

it will make all your money digital and allow unprecedented and unparalleled levels of control down to the most granular of gradation. they can add money to your account, take it, and control whether, when, and on what you can spend it.

economy overheating? limit the nation’s spending by making money unspendable.

recession got you down? force spending by putting a timer on money where is disappears if you fail to put it in motion.

people making “wrong” choices like buying internal combustion engines or eating steak instead of bugs? well, you get the picture…

citizen gets stroppy? no travel for you. no buying guns or gasoline or being allowed to buy things in certain geographies.

it’s the technocratic tyrant cum central planners all signing all dancing christmas every day control mechanism. they can finally make the whole world work like sim city.

and these people think it would actually work and not be the single worst “5 year plan” calamity in the blood and penury soaked history of that benighted delusion.

and that should scare you more than any other idea in human history.

because these people are idiots.

look, it’s obviously no surprise to see the current crop of leaders covet such power or learn that they have plans to get it.

but it’s HILARIOUS to see european central bank president and aggressive self tanning enthusiast christine lagarde admit it on video because she got pranked.

it’s pure pratfall.

you can watch the whole thing HERE.

but this is the fun bit: (posted by watcher guru, not embeddable right now)

this is just dazzling. seriously, PLEASE listen to it and try not to laugh.

the accent is so over the top one wonders how the president of one of the most powerful central banks on earth basically just spilled the beans to borat.

the pranksters kept her talking for over 20 minutes by pretending to be zelensky (itself an interesting and telling choice).

and she not only fell for it, she fawned.

so, we have some good news/bad news here.

the bad news is that yes, they do want CBDC, yes, they see it as a way to control you, and yup, sure as eggs is eggs it’s coming (apparently in october) and when it does it will be run by folks like christine whose delusions of adequacy are exceeded only by their dunning kreuger effect and the deep, abiding entitlement they feel about their right and obligation to rule.

the good news is that these people are abject clowns. scary ones, to be sure, but clowns just the same.

and it’s just not that hard to see them coming.

possibly not the banker you want…

they are about as subtle as a mardi gras parade in the vatican and about as smart as a soup sandwich.

these are not cunning james bond villains playing 8D chess, they’re the detritus of an imploding clown college that have been failing ever upward in the shortsighted pursuit of ways to kick the can of the last crisis a bit further down the road so that this whole thing catches fire, falls over, and sinks into the swamp on someone else’s watch.

yeah, there are a few smart ones, but most of them would lose to a pigeon at tic tac toe.

they sure do “monologue” though…

i have postulated in the past about how the combination of ESG/DEI and powerful governments able to direct spending leads to rule by rube:

gato's postulate

well, this is what that looks like.

and there is nothing subtle about where it’s leading us as 70 years of reckless ponzi driven welfare state liability starts coming due in amounts that cannot possibly be paid.

we’re entering the realm of deeply unserious plans from deeply unserious people.

and that’s a very serious situation.

the land of “pennywise clown foolish” is just not a place you want to go.

the project of the present will be to take control of the public square for the public and turn it into something owned and controlled by no one.

a large scale peer to peer and/or protocol driven network of encrypted traffic will then provide a sort of steganographic substrate in which user and trusted non-governmental counterparty defined currencies, transactions, commerce, and markets may be hidden.

this is the path to freedom, agency and flourishing and away from the corrupt clownworld calamity the central planners have planned.

how about we do that instead?

#JumpTheFence

until there is no fence.