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Remaining Anonymous: Which Crypto Privacy Solution Works Best?

Remaining Anonymous: Which Crypto Privacy Solution Works Best?

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Is Bitcoin anonymous, and can mixing services make it more private? Here are the weaknesses and strengths of popular crypto privacy solutions.

The cryptocurrency industry was initially headlined as anonymous digital cash. While experts were keen to point out that this was not exactly the case, Bitcoin (BTC) found initial popularity in darknet markets such as Silk Road, where merchants sold illegal goods ranging from light drugs to, allegedly, hitman services. Founded in 2011, Silk Road thrived for the next two years until the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut it down in 2013. Authorities later revealed that completely free blockchain explorers aided their investigative efforts.

Bitcoin’s transaction ledger is completely open for the public to view. What the blockchain does lack is openly available identity data, as all transactions are conducted between wallet addresses, which can be considered pseudonyms. However, each wallet address is unique and can be tied to specific people or entities. 

Mapping an address to its holder can be as simple as making a transaction. A buyer and seller can potentially reveal their entire transaction history to each other. Though they may not know with whom they’ve transacted previously, they can know the balance and spending amounts through a simple check on a blockchain explorer. In technical terms, this is called linkability: how easy it is to reconstruct a particular chain of transactions. 

Bitcoin’s chain of transactions is theoretically easy to link. In practice though, this is not a trivial task, as it can be complicated to determine which part of a Bitcoin transaction is the change and which is the actual money that was spent. 

Bitcoin-based privacy solutions

Given the explicit privacy weakness of Bitcoin and other open ledgers, various remedy solutions have been developed over the years. The first was proposed in early 2013 by Gregory Maxwell, a core Bitcoin developer. Later dubbed CoinJoin, the technology utilized an already existing principle of Bitcoin that single transactions can contain many “outputs” and “inputs” that flow to and from multiple wallets. 

Each transaction takes a certain amount of Bitcoin in the form of inputs and reshapes it, like clay, into different chunks of outputs. With CoinJoin, multiple participants offer their Bitcoin into a single transaction, which then reshapes them into different outputs that are sent to the wallets specified by each user.

The result is that the chain of transactions is scrambled: an external viewer tracking wallet A doesn’t know to which exact wallet B the Bitcoin was sent to. Wallet B may contain Bitcoin pieced together from dozens of input wallets. The amount of participants, called the anonymity set, is important for the overall strength of mixing. It’s much more difficult to track one wallet out of 10,000 than one out of 10.

Related: Cryptocurrency Mixers and Why Governments May Want to Shut Them Down

Another solution was given by Bitcoin mixers. Though they utilized a similar approach, they were centralized services that held custody of the Bitcoin during the scrambling process. Nevertheless, mixers initially proved popular for users as they were much simpler to implement than the peer-to-peer CoinJoin.

Their security flaws were soon made evident by researchers. A December 2017 paper by Felix Maduakor demonstrated a fairly simple heuristic process to deanonymize mixer transactions. The algorithm relied on factors such as timing, Bitcoin transaction amounts and their corresponding fees to filter the destination wallet. In addition, one service had a simple web-based vulnerability that could leak all mixed transaction data by exploiting internal record keeping. A different 2017 paper also concluded that even the most popular mixers utilized poor security practices that made it easy to trace their operations. 

Despite the significant security flaws, mixers continued to be popular well into 2018. However, police seizures and voluntary closures pressured the sector and may have finally helped to curb their use. As Chainalysis noted in a July 2019 webinar, CoinJoin-based wallets offered by Wasabi and Samourai steadily gained popularity during 2019, processing over $250 million in Bitcoin.

Wasabi wallet BTC volume for 2019

As a largely decentralized process, CoinJoin doesn’t rely on the security skills of mixer operators, thus removing unnecessary failure points. Despite this, the system is far from perfect. Maxwell later distanced himself from pure CoinJoin implementations, noting in a presentation that “if all the users are putting in and taking out different amounts, you can easily unravel the CoinJoin.”

Though that can be mitigated by utilizing fixed output amounts, similar to cash bills, it doesn’t appear to be enough to prevent tracking. In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager explained:

“CoinJoins and mixers do achieve a certain level of dissociation between funds. However, in many cases this link can be reestablished through forensics work.”

Further evidence of the vulnerability of CoinJoin was given by Chainalysis’s investigation into the operations of PlusToken. According to a December 2019 report excerpt, the firm was able to track 45,000 Bitcoin out of the 180,000 total collected by the Ponzi scheme, despite complex obfuscation tactics that also included CoinJoin services. Nopara73, a pseudonymous developer behind Wasabi wallet, defended the technology in an “Ask Me Anything” thread on Reddit, saying, “I don't think the technical part of the story is hard to figure out. Hint: they had more coins than the entire market cap of Monero.”

Privacy-based altcoins rising

As the ecosystem matured, dozens of projects arose specifically to provide private transactions to users. The present landscape is divided into several major families of coins based on different protocols. 

Monero (XMR) is currently the largest privacy coin by market capitalization, and it was one of the first to be introduced on the market. It’s based on the CryptoNote protocol pioneered by Bytecoin (BCN) in 2014 and augmented over time by RingCT, a system combining ring signatures and Confidential Transactions cryptography.

Monero makes an effort to hide all parts of a transaction: sender, receiver and amount. 

The sender is hidden via ring signatures. When creating a transaction, Monero aggregates the sender’s true output with other semi-random outputs picked from previous blocks. This creates an effect similar to CoinJoin by giving plausible deniability to the user, as external parties cannot pick the real coins without additional information. 

A technology called Confidential Transactions further improves on this by hiding the amount of coins for each output. Stealth addresses, a part of the original CryptoNote protocol, hide the receiver by creating a one-time wallet address for each transaction.

Monero’s closest competitor is Zcash (ZEC), which uses zero-knowledge cryptography to hide transactions. At a high level, zero-knowledge proofs allow for a “prover” — a user sending the money — to conclusively demonstrate to a “verifier” — or a blockchain node — that they know a certain value, without ever revealing the actual number. Used in a privacy-centric blockchain, this allows the details of a transaction to be completely encrypted and uses zero-knowledge proofs as a guarantee that it is valid. Many variants of zero-knowledge proofs exist. The one currently used by Zcash is called zk-SNARKs.

The latest major addition to privacy coins is the Mimblewimble protocol. Implemented in projects such as Grin and Beam, Mimblewimble primarily uses CoinJoin and Confidential Transactions to ensure privacy. However, its blockchain architecture is significantly different from most other coins. 

For example, Mimblewimble blockchains do not have permanent addresses. Instead, crypto is exchanged in a two-step process: the sender delivers partially filled transaction information through external means, such as emails, and the receiver must then add their own data before retransmitting the completed transaction file.

Several other projects use CoinJoin variants for their privacy features. Dash’s PrivateSend mixes coins through multiple steps of CoinJoin, while Decred’s (DCR) privacy mode uses CoinShuffle++, an updated and improved implementation of the original protocol. Though there are bitter debates between the opposing camps, each protocol comes with their own advantages and disadvantages.

The price of anonymity

Privacy protocols in general suffer from performance and scalability issues. The additional layer of secrecy often has a very measurable cost in terms of transaction size, speed of execution and computing performance.

Monero’s transactions are several times heavier than their equivalent on the Bitcoin network. Though the introduction of “bulletproofs” range proofs was a significant remedy to this problem, Monero transactions tend to be heavier than 1,500 bytes, while simple Bitcoin transactions can be as low as 280 bytes. 

This poses a significant problem for scalability. Though Monero has dynamic block sizes, avoiding true bottlenecks, the entire blockchain still grows significantly faster in size. Eventually, it will become impossible to maintain Monero nodes on simple computers, which its community sees as a major aspect of decentralization.

Zcash is a mixed blockchain containing both transparent and “shielded” transactions. Private transactions suffer from a similar size problem to Monero, weighing on average 2,000 bytes.

Before the introduction of Sapling, sending money privately also required about 4 GB of available RAM, which made shielded transactions highly impractical.

Similar problems exist for Mimblewimble-based coins. Its raw transactions are over 5,000 bytes due to the presence of heavy-range proofs. The primary scalability benefit for Mimblewimble-based coins is the ability to “prune” a blockchain: removing past transaction data without impacting its validity. Grin estimated a reduction of roughly 98% for a sample case of 10 million transactions, from around 130 GB to just under 2 GB. That is less than half the size of the Bitcoin blockchain when it had the same amount of transactions in December 2012, according to data from Blockchain.com. 

The ability to prune a blockchain is a major factor for some researchers. While Monero was considered unable to scale through pruning, the team released a limited implementation of it at the start of 2019. Critics described it as “more like sharding than pruning” due to its failure to completely remove transactions. Monero developers explained on Twitter that removing outputs is impossible with current technology, adding, “Our implementation definitely prunes certain transaction data.”

Zcash was also unable to prune its data, but the team at Electric Coin Company — the company behind Zcash — chose to further leverage zero-knowledge proofs to introduce a similar concept of scaling. Its proposed Halo technique would use a “proofs of proofs” system that would confirm the validity of the blockchain’s past states. This would allow nodes to only hold data on recent transactions, together with a proof of correctness for everything that occurred earlier.

Compromises on privacy

Practicality, decentralization and anonymity issues often pose a trilemma for any single privacy technology. Though Monero scores relatively well on practicality and decentralization, its anonymity has been put into question in the past.

A former Monero core member known as fireice_uk identified several weaknesses in the ring signature approach, noting that churning immediately exposes the true origin of the funds by creating a loop of transactions. They also demonstrated a way to break normal ring signatures based on leakage of metadata: the transaction’s time of creation can be compared with internet service provider records to identify the true output.

Leading Monero community members responded on Reddit, acknowledging some of these concerns while downplaying their relevance. When asked by Cointelegraph whether the team acted upon these concerns, fireice_uk said that the efforts have been insufficient:

“Over the past year, the volume of research into metadata leaks increased and they only fixed the very lowest hanging fruit. The current state of affairs leaves me uncertain if the whole ring signature based family of coins is viable — and I'm saying that as a dev of one of them.”

Sarang Noether, a pseudonymous member of the Monero Research Lab, responded to this criticism in a conversation with Cointelegraph. While noting that this is a “subtle issue” that depends on the implied threat model — who wants to deanonymize the transactions — they added:

“There's network-level metadata floating around, which may or may not affect a particular user depending on their threat model — and is tricky to reduce. There's on-chain metadata floating around, including things like timing, input/output structure, non-standard transaction data, etc. Reducing exploitable metadata is important, but eliminating it entirely is impossible.”

Addressing churning, Noether noted that it is a subject of ongoing research, while revealing that there are proper and improper ways of doing it: “Similar to how to choosing decoy inputs poorly can lead to heuristics about what is more likely to be the true signer, churning ‘badly’ could lead to heuristics trying to identify the process.” 

Though the cryptography powering Zcash shielded transactions is often described as fundamentally better than that of Monero’s, the dominance of transparent addresses places strong restrictions. Researchers from University College London, now officially known as UCL, were able to de-anonymize several transfers by tackling the conversion step between shielded and unshielded coins. When asked whether Zcash sees value in increasing the amount of shielded transactions and thus the anonymity set, Electric Coin Company’s vice president of marketing, Josh Swihart, told Cointelegraph:

“A large anonymity set is important, and we don’t believe there is a point of diminishing returns. We share the world with billions of people, each driving dozens of transactions per month, and hundreds of millions of businesses and institutions driving many multiples more. The anonymity set should be large enough to safely protect all of those people, companies and institutions on a per-transaction basis.”

Swihart also pointed out that the amount of fully shielded transactions grows over time, which increases its anonymity set. Nevertheless, data shows that the ratio of shielded to transparent transaction volume has been oscillating between 10% and 20% for most of Zcash’s history, with little recent growth:

  Volume of shielded transactions on Zcash

Centralization is also a major concern for Zcash, as zk-SNARKs require a “trusted setup” to properly function: specific parameters set by the developers. Any security or trust compromise during each generation event would be catastrophic, as attackers would be able to create new coins virtually undetected. Nevertheless, the introduction of Halo-based technology would remove the need for a trusted setup. 

Discussing the importance of anonymity sets, fireice_uk emphasized, “It is life-or-death critical. It is impossible to hide in a crowd of 1. Anything that can be done to whittle down the crowd will impact privacy.” They added, “We can see that very well with the Mimblewimble break,” referring to the breakthrough by Ivan Bogatyy — a researcher at Dragonfly Capital — who de-anonymized up to 96% of real-time Grin transactions.

Grin developers responded by dismissing the importance of the breakthrough. However, they acknowledged that “Grin’s privacy is far from perfect,” noting that “transaction linkability is a limitation that we’re looking to mitigate.”

Is there a clear leader?

Though each system has its own strengths and weaknesses, it ultimately comes down to each user to make the best of available tools. Even Zcash, which has arguably the most resilient anti-linkability system, can still be misused through careless transitions between transparent and shielded addresses. Monero is in this sense somewhat easier to use. As Chainalysis reported in its webinar, it is the preferred privacy coin in darknet markets.

Yet, Bitcoin remains the most popular payment method. Furthermore, its users tend to not place emphasis on privacy, with the majority of funds to darknet markets sent directly from centralized exchanges.

Privacy-enhancing technology appears to be uninteresting to darknet market users, the segment that arguably would need it most. Until privacy coins are widely adopted in high-stakes environments like these, debates on their anonymity will remain highly theoretical.

Non-criminal case for privacy

It’s important to note that privacy should not be strictly associated with illicit use. Chainalysis highlighted that only a little more than 10% of funds sent to mixers come from criminal activities.

A similar proportion can be expected in privacy coin use. Though regulators are increasingly scrutinizing cryptocurrency-enabled crime, maintaining some privacy for legitimate use is critical, according to Chainalysis’s CEO:

“Complete anonymity opens the door to illicit activity that by definition cannot be investigated. That's not a world you want to live in. On the other hand, complete transparency means no privacy at all. That's also not a world you want to live in. We believe that the market decides, and currently the non-privacy coins see the most momentum.”

Speaking on behalf of the company, Swihart’s stance on transaction privacy understandably went even further. Electric Coin Company believes that a person’s ability to transact with others is a fundamental right, while “businesses have a right to transact securely without exposing information to competitors or others that might wish them harm.”

Answering a question on whether facilitating criminal use is an acceptable compromise for privacy, Swihart added, “The compromise argument is a red herring. People with bad intent will use whatever tools they can to do illegal things. Today, that mostly involves the US dollar.”

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Copper Soars, Iron Ore Tumbles As Goldman Says “Copper’s Time Is Now”

Copper Soars, Iron Ore Tumbles As Goldman Says "Copper’s Time Is Now"

After languishing for the past two years in a tight range despite recurring…

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Copper Soars, Iron Ore Tumbles As Goldman Says "Copper's Time Is Now"

After languishing for the past two years in a tight range despite recurring speculation about declining global supply, copper has finally broken out, surging to the highest price in the past year, just shy of $9,000 a ton as supply cuts hit the market; At the same time the price of the world's "other" most important mined commodity has diverged, as iron ore has tumbled amid growing demand headwinds out of China's comatose housing sector where not even ghost cities are being built any more.

Copper surged almost 5% this week, ending a months-long spell of inertia, as investors focused on risks to supply at various global mines and smelters. As Bloomberg adds, traders also warmed to the idea that the worst of a global downturn is in the past, particularly for metals like copper that are increasingly used in electric vehicles and renewables.

Yet the commodity crash of recent years is hardly over, as signs of the headwinds in traditional industrial sectors are still all too obvious in the iron ore market, where futures fell below $100 a ton for the first time in seven months on Friday as investors bet that China’s years-long property crisis will run through 2024, keeping a lid on demand.

Indeed, while the mood surrounding copper has turned almost euphoric, sentiment on iron ore has soured since the conclusion of the latest National People’s Congress in Beijing, where the CCP set a 5% goal for economic growth, but offered few new measures that would boost infrastructure or other construction-intensive sectors.

As a result, the main steelmaking ingredient has shed more than 30% since early January as hopes of a meaningful revival in construction activity faded. Loss-making steel mills are buying less ore, and stockpiles are piling up at Chinese ports. The latest drop will embolden those who believe that the effects of President Xi Jinping’s property crackdown still have significant room to run, and that last year’s rally in iron ore may have been a false dawn.

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg notes, on Friday there were fresh signs that weakness in China’s industrial economy is hitting the copper market too, with stockpiles tracked by the Shanghai Futures Exchange surging to the highest level since the early days of the pandemic. The hope is that headwinds in traditional industrial areas will be offset by an ongoing surge in usage in electric vehicles and renewables.

And while industrial conditions in Europe and the US also look soft, there’s growing optimism about copper usage in India, where rising investment has helped fuel blowout growth rates of more than 8% — making it the fastest-growing major economy.

In any case, with the demand side of the equation still questionable, the main catalyst behind copper’s powerful rally is an unexpected tightening in global mine supplies, driven mainly by last year’s closure of a giant mine in Panama (discussed here), but there are also growing worries about output in Zambia, which is facing an El Niño-induced power crisis.

On Wednesday, copper prices jumped on huge volumes after smelters in China held a crisis meeting on how to cope with a sharp drop in processing fees following disruptions to supplies of mined ore. The group stopped short of coordinated production cuts, but pledged to re-arrange maintenance work, reduce runs and delay the startup of new projects. In the coming weeks investors will be watching Shanghai exchange inventories closely to gauge both the strength of demand and the extent of any capacity curtailments.

“The increase in SHFE stockpiles has been bigger than we’d anticipated, but we expect to see them coming down over the next few weeks,” Colin Hamilton, managing director for commodities research at BMO Capital Markets, said by phone. “If the pace of the inventory builds doesn’t start to slow, investors will start to question whether smelters are actually cutting and whether the impact of weak construction activity is starting to weigh more heavily on the market.”

* * *

Few have been as happy with the recent surge in copper prices as Goldman's commodity team, where copper has long been a preferred trade (even if it may have cost the former team head Jeff Currie his job due to his unbridled enthusiasm for copper in the past two years which saw many hedge fund clients suffer major losses).

As Goldman's Nicholas Snowdon writes in a note titled "Copper's time is now" (available to pro subscribers in the usual place)...

... there has been a "turn in the industrial cycle." Specifically according to the Goldman analyst, after a prolonged downturn, "incremental evidence now points to a bottoming out in the industrial cycle, with the global manufacturing PMI in expansion for the first time since September 2022." As a result, Goldman now expects copper to rise to $10,000/t by year-end and then $12,000/t by end of Q1-25.’

Here are the details:

Previous inflexions in global manufacturing cycles have been associated with subsequent sustained industrial metals upside, with copper and aluminium rising on average 25% and 9% over the next 12 months. Whilst seasonal surpluses have so far limited a tightening alignment at a micro level, we expect deficit inflexions to play out from quarter end, particularly for metals with severe supply binds. Supplemented by the influence of anticipated Fed easing ahead in a non-recessionary growth setting, another historically positive performance factor for metals, this should support further upside ahead with copper the headline act in this regard.

Goldman then turns to what it calls China's "green policy put":

Much of the recent focus on the “Two Sessions” event centred on the lack of significant broad stimulus, and in particular the limited property support. In our view it would be wrong – just as in 2022 and 2023 – to assume that this will result in weak onshore metals demand. Beijing’s emphasis on rapid growth in the metals intensive green economy, as an offset to property declines, continues to act as a policy put for green metals demand. After last year’s strong trends, evidence year-to-date is again supportive with aluminium and copper apparent demand rising 17% and 12% y/y respectively. Moreover, the potential for a ‘cash for clunkers’ initiative could provide meaningful right tail risk to that healthy demand base case. Yet there are also clear metal losers in this divergent policy setting, with ongoing pressure on property related steel demand generating recent sharp iron ore downside.

Meanwhile, Snowdon believes that the driver behind Goldman's long-running bullish view on copper - a global supply shock - continues:

Copper’s supply shock progresses. The metal with most significant upside potential is copper, in our view. The supply shock which began with aggressive concentrate destocking and then sharp mine supply downgrades last year, has now advanced to an increasing bind on metal production, as reflected in this week's China smelter supply rationing signal. With continued positive momentum in China's copper demand, a healthy refined import trend should generate a substantial ex-China refined deficit this year. With LME stocks having halved from Q4 peak, China’s imminent seasonal demand inflection should accelerate a path into extreme tightness by H2. Structural supply underinvestment, best reflected in peak mine supply we expect next year, implies that demand destruction will need to be the persistent solver on scarcity, an effect requiring substantially higher pricing than current, in our view. In this context, we maintain our view that the copper price will surge into next year (GSe 2025 $15,000/t average), expecting copper to rise to $10,000/t by year-end and then $12,000/t by end of Q1-25’

Another reason why Goldman is doubling down on its bullish copper outlook: gold.

The sharp rally in gold price since the beginning of March has ended the period of consolidation that had been present since late December. Whilst the initial catalyst for the break higher came from a (gold) supportive turn in US data and real rates, the move has been significantly amplified by short term systematic buying, which suggests less sticky upside. In this context, we expect gold to consolidate for now, with our economists near term view on rates and the dollar suggesting limited near-term catalysts for further upside momentum. Yet, a substantive retracement lower will also likely be limited by resilience in physical buying channels. Nonetheless, in the midterm we continue to hold a constructive view on gold underpinned by persistent strength in EM demand as well as eventual Fed easing, which should crucially reactivate the largely for now dormant ETF buying channel. In this context, we increase our average gold price forecast for 2024 from $2,090/toz to $2,180/toz, targeting a move to $2,300/toz by year-end.

Much more in the full Goldman note available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 14:25

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Government

Moderna turns the spotlight on long Covid with new initiatives

Moderna’s latest Covid effort addresses the often-overlooked chronic condition of long Covid — and encourages vaccination to reduce risks. A digital…

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Moderna’s latest Covid effort addresses the often-overlooked chronic condition of long Covid — and encourages vaccination to reduce risks. A digital campaign debuted Friday along with a co-sponsored event in Detroit offering free CT scans, which will also be used in ongoing long Covid research.

In a new video, a young woman describes her three-year battle with long Covid, which includes losing her job, coping with multiple debilitating symptoms and dealing with the negative effects on her family. She ends by saying, “The only way to prevent long Covid is to not get Covid” along with an on-screen message about where to find Covid-19 vaccines through the vaccines.gov website.

Kate Cronin

“Last season we saw people would get a flu shot, but they didn’t always get a Covid shot,” said Moderna’s Chief Brand Officer Kate Cronin. “People should get their flu shot, but they should also get their Covid shot. There’s no risk of long flu, but there is the risk of long-term effects of Covid.”

It’s Moderna’s “first effort to really sound the alarm,” she said, and the debut coincides with the second annual Long Covid Awareness Day.

An estimated 17.6 million Americans are living with long Covid, according to the latest CDC data. About four million of them are out of work because of the condition, resulting in an estimated $170 billion in lost wages.

While HHS anted up $45 million in grants last year to expand long Covid support initiatives along with public health campaigns, the condition is still often ignored and underfunded.

“It’s not just about the initial infection of Covid, but also if you get it multiple times, your risks goes up significantly,” Cronin said. “It’s important that people understand that.”

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Consequences Minus Truth

Consequences Minus Truth

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“People crave trust in others, because God is found there.”

-…

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Consequences Minus Truth

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“People crave trust in others, because God is found there.”

- Dom de Bailleul

The rewards of civilization have come to seem rather trashy in these bleak days of late empire; so, why even bother pretending to be civilized? This appears to be the ethos driving our politics and culture now. But driving us where? Why, to a spectacular sort of crack-up, and at warp speed, compared to the more leisurely breakdown of past societies that arrived at a similar inflection point where Murphy’s Law replaced the rule of law.

The US Military Academy at West point decided to “upgrade” its mission statement this week by deleting the phrase Duty, Honor, Country that summarized its essential moral orientation. They replaced it with an oblique reference to “Army Values,” without spelling out what these values are, exactly, which could range from “embrace the suck” to “charlie foxtrot” to “FUBAR” — all neatly applicable to our country’s current state of perplexity and dread.

Are you feeling more confident that the US military can competently defend our country? Probably more like the opposite, because the manipulation of language is being used deliberately to turn our country inside-out and upside-down. At this point we probably could not successfully pacify a Caribbean island if we had to, and you’ve got to wonder what might happen if we have to contend with countless hostile subversive cadres who have slipped across the border with the estimated nine-million others ushered in by the government’s welcome wagon.

Momentous events await. This Monday, the Supreme Court will entertain oral arguments on the case Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The integrity of the First Amendment hinges on the decision. Do we have freedom of speech as set forth in the Constitution? Or is it conditional on how government officials feel about some set of circumstances? At issue specifically is the government’s conduct in coercing social media companies to censor opinion in order to suppress so-called “vaccine hesitancy” and to manipulate public debate in the 2020 election. Government lawyers have argued that they were merely “communicating” with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others about “public health disinformation and election conspiracies.”

You can reasonably suppose that this was our government’s effort to disable the truth, especially as it conflicted with its own policy and activities — from supporting BLM riots to enabling election fraud to mandating dubious vaccines. Former employees of the FBI and the CIA were directly implanted in social media companies to oversee the carrying-out of censorship orders from their old headquarters. The former general counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI, James Baker, slid unnoticed into the general counsel seat at Twitter until Elon Musk bought the company late in 2022 and flushed him out. The so-called Twitter Files uncovered by indy reporters Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, produced reams of emails from FBI officials nagging Twitter execs to de-platform people and bury their dissent. You can be sure these were threats, not mere suggestions.

One of the plaintiffs joined to Missouri v. Biden is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor at the Harvard Medical School, who opposed Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was one of the authors of the open letter called The Great Barrington Declaration (October, 2020) that articulated informed medical dissent for a bamboozled public. He was fired from his job at Harvard just this past week for continuing his refusal to take the vaccine. Harvard remains among a handful of institutions that still require it, despite massive evidence that it is ineffective and hazardous. Like West Point, maybe Harvard should ditch its motto, Veritas, Latin for “truth.”

A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.

Next up for us will be “Joe Biden’s” attempt to complete the bankruptcy of our country with $7.3-trillion proposed budget, 20 percent over the previous years spending, based on a $5-billion tax increase. Good luck making that work. New York City alone is faced with paying $387 a day for food and shelter for each of an estimated 64,800 illegal immigrants, which amounts to $9.15-billion a year. The money doesn’t exist, of course. New York can thank “Joe Biden’s” executive agencies for sticking them with this unbearable burden. It will be the end of New York City. There will be no money left for public services or cultural institutions. That’s the reality and that’s the truth.

A financial crack-up is probably the only thing short of all-out war that will get the public’s attention at this point. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happened next week. Historians of the future, stir-frying crickets and fiddleheads over their campfires will marvel at America’s terminal act of gluttony: managing to eat itself alive.

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 14:05

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