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Presidents Day: Carter’s Prescient Farewell Address in 1981

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 15, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Regardless of our opinions about President Carter and his legacy, his Farewell Address is worthy of our attention and study. On Presidents Day 2021, I invite you to read/watch President Carter’s Farewell Address from 40 years ago. As a Washington outsider, Carter was relentlessly mocked and undermined by the Establishment, as insiders’ loathing of outsiders knows no bounds.

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Facebook vs Politics and Twitter vs India

By Jesse Hirsh | February 12, 2021 | 0 Comments
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If the medium is the message than social media platforms wield a tremendous amount of political power. Unfortunately most people focus on the content of the medium, rather than the transformative effect of the media itself.

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Gains Are Unreal, Losses Are Real

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 11, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Why would anyone sell when further gains are guaranteed? Because the gains are unreal but the losses are real. When markets are soaring and your portfolio is rocketing higher, the gains seem unreal. Did I really make that much in one day, week, month? Wow!

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The harms associated with the loss of privacy

By Jesse Hirsh | February 11, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Digital technology has not only transformed our relationship with privacy, it also changes our understanding of the concept as a whole. While some may lament this as a slippery slope where our definition of privacy is being eroded, there’s reason to believe that our privacy is actually being renewed, and strengthened.

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What Collapsed the Middle Class?

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 10, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The middle class has already collapsed, but thanks to debt and bubbles, this reality has been temporarily cloaked. What collapsed the middle class? In many ways the answer echoes an Agatha Christie mystery: rather than there being one guilty party, a number of suspects participated in the collapse of the middle class.

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#AxisOfEasy 182: Hackers Modify Chemical Levels In Town’s Drinking Water Supply

By Mark E. Jeftovic | February 9, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Hackers modify chemical levels in town’s drinking water supply,
German Ex-con’s brain wallet stumps cops from seizing his bitcoin,
DC Riot aftermath: tracked by smartphones, snitched on by banks while Youtube removes raw footage and more in Axis of Easy #182

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Debt and the Demise of the Middle Class

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 8, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Unfortunately for those at the top who’ve benefited immensely from speculative bubbles, speculative bubbles don’t create a vibrant middle class–they push what’s left of the middle class off a cliff. What exactly is the Middle Class and what unique role does it serve in the economy?

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Canadian Space Policy and Programmable Organisms

By Jesse Hirsh | February 8, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The rapid rate of technological change is usually experienced with regard to the Internet or the devices we use to connect with it. Think smart phones, AI, mobile connectivity, or self-driving cars.

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The Top 10% Is Doing Just Fine, The Middle Class Is Dying on the Vine

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 5, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Please study these charts as a means of understanding the inevitability of economic stagnation and a revolt of the decapitalized middle class. I’ve been covering the decline of America’s middle class for over a decade with charts, data and commentary on the social depression that has accompanied the decline.

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Puppet Entrepreneurship

By Jesse Hirsh | February 4, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Our friends over at Data & Society have published a new report that not only provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the business of franchising, but also a potent metaphor to describe business and entrepreneurship in the era of Big Tech.

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#AxisOfEasy 181: Stop What You’re Doing: Patch Sudo Now Edition

By Mark E. Jeftovic | February 2, 2021 | 4 Comments
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Sudo’s Baron Samedit flaw allows local privilege escalation,
Data breach impacts nearly entire population of Brazil,
Netwalker ransomware dark web seized, charges laid and more in Axis of Easy #181

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Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market

By Charles Hugh Smith | February 2, 2021 | 0 Comments
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This heavily managed ‘market structure’ is far from equilibrium and extremely prone to instability. The relentless melt-up in stocks offers ample evidence that the market is rock-solid and that any decline is an enormous opportunity to buy the dip. That this has worked splendidly for the past 13 years cannot be denied.

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Silver Swans, Maginot Lines and the Unforeseen Risks of Collapse

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 31, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Our Nobility’s assessment of risk and their war-gaming of vulnerabilities are fatally deficient. Many people have heard of Nassim Taleb’s black swan but fewer understand how few events qualify as black swan. Per Wikipedia, a black swan is an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences, an event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

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The Stock Market, Fatally Wounded by the Truth, Will Stumble and Crash

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 30, 2021 | 0 Comments
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It didn’t have to be this way, but this is the reality we must now face: truth is fatal to fraud, and our entire financial-political system is a fraud. The stock market has just been punctured by the thin blades of truth. It is fatally wounded but nobody dares notice. The wounds are barely visible, but the internal damage is mortal. The stock market is already stumbling and will soon crash.

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The Democratization / Demonization of Speculation

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 29, 2021 | 0 Comments
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How do you unrig a speculative rigged market? You don’t. It simply crashes into a putrid sinkhole. Gamed speculation using knowledge of how markets can be pushed to profit those doing the pushing–has long been decried. Declaring that the unproductive profiteering of greedy speculators will be the death of the Republic goes back to Rome, and in American history, to Alexander Hamilton’s battle in 1791 to pay the speculators who had bought up the new nation’s war bonds for pennies on the dollar full value plus interest.

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Is Substack about to be subsumed by big tech?!

By Jesse Hirsh | January 28, 2021 | 1 Comment
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One of the many contradictions you’ll find on YouTube are videos from people who claim to be living off-grid. And yet their videos are on YouTube! This may reflect a strict definition, but if you’re living off-grid, that means you don’t have access to YouTube (which is the grid).

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The Coming Revolt of the Middle Class

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 27, 2021 | 0 Comments
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That’s how Neofeudal systems collapse: the tax donkeys and debt-serfs finally rebel and start demanding the $50 trillion river of capital take a new course. The Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50 trill…

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#AxisOfEasy 180: US Intelligence Bypasses Warrants Through Buying Data

By Mark E. Jeftovic | January 26, 2021 | 2 Comments
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DDoS-Guard forfeits IP space, including Parler’s,
DNSPooq: New DNS Cache poisoning kit,
Study “finds” that Canadians would trade free speech to purge hate speech and much more in Axis of Easy # 180

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Gamestop and manic capital markets

By Jesse Hirsh | January 26, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Have you noticed a general increase in the level of current craziness? Granted this sort of thing happens this time of year around these parts as the cold weather and short days foster increased levels of stress and depression. However a pandemic obviously compounds issues, in a myriad of ways.

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Everything Is Broken

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 25, 2021 | 0 Comments
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I’d say more about Big Tech but since they’ve ‘privatized totalitarianism’, I fear being ‘digitally disappeared’ if I dare criticize Big Tech. Mr. Bob Dylan was once again prescient: Everything Is Broken. You may think I’m referring to the political system or Big Tech or the Corporate Media, and certainly all those are very broken indeed, but I’m actually referring to everyday life systems that once worked fairly well.

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How the Fed Fails

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 22, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The Fed has a binary choice: preserve America’s global hegemony or further enrich the billionaires. You can’t have both. The Fed will fail as a result of two dynamics: diminishing returns and the U.S. dollar’s role as a global reserve currency. The Fed’s reign as the godhead of financier-banker supremacy has been fun and games for the past 12 years of stock market euphoria, but that’s about to change.

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Artificial Intelligence and children’s rights

By Jesse Hirsh | January 21, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The industrial revolution would not have been possible without child labour. Is this current industrial revolution, driven by automation and data, also dependent upon child labour (at least conceptually)?

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The Dangerously Diminishing Returns on Monetary and Fiscal Stimulus

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
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Allow me to translate the risible claims of Jay Powell and Janet Yellen that their stimulus policies haven’t boosted wealth inequality to the moon: “Let them eat cake.” The euphoria of ever greater monetary and fiscal stimulus overlooks the diminishing returns and higher risks generated by near-exponential increases in stimulus.

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#AxisOfEasy 179: Coalition Of Cancelholics Sues Apple To Deplatform Telegram

By Mark E. Jeftovic | January 19, 2021 | 3 Comments
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World’s largest Dark Market shut down by German police,
Pop-up dark market selling Solar Winds source code,
Mimecast trust cert hacked in Microsoft supply chain hack and more in Axis of Easy 179

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A Few Notes on Deflation/Inflation

By Charles Hugh Smith | January 18, 2021 | 0 Comments
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The consensus is that asset inflation is unstoppable and forever. History begs to differ. Not unsurprisingly, people want a binary option: do we get deflation or inflation? Unfortunately, reality is messy. Broadly speaking, globalization is deflationary as capital seeks the lowest cost labor, parts and materials, the least stringent environmental standards and the most corrupt governance to maximize profits by any means available (in this case, exploitation and corruption).

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Contributors

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark is the co-founder of easyDNS and the editor-in-chief of #AxisOfEasy. He is the author of Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS (Packt UK, 2018) and Unassailable: Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks & Cancel Culture. 

The Canadian Bitcoiners

The Canadian Bitcoiners

Joey Tweets and Len the Lengend are the hosts of The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast, and you may recognize them as the voices (and faces) behing the AxisOfEasy Podcast. CanadianBitcoiners.com

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith is the author of numerous books and writes from OfTwoMinds.com.