USE CASH – or Become A Slave to The System

Babylon's Bankers

PROGRAMMABLE CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL “CURRENCY”

For some time now, people like former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts and many others – including yours truly – have been warning about the dangers of crypto-currencies, and more especially, of Central Bank Digital Currencies or CBDCs. Our warnings have consistently centered around three basic dangers they carry with them: (1) they are not energy efficient, and as electronically based systems can be subject to outages such as electro-magnetic pulse and so on, and additionally as cyber-systems, suffer from the lack of integrity in such systems. Indeed, when I first heard about them, one of my own personal warnings was that in spite of claims to the contrary, they could be hacked. Stories have finally appeared to this effect. (2) Contrary to claims of privacy and to the early claims that crypto-currencies spelled the end of central bank private money monopolies, such technologies in the hands of central banks, with the power to mandate their use and to outlaw others, would spell the end of privacy.  Finally and most importantly (3) such currencies in the hands of central banks, coupled with social credit scoring systems, would effectively not be a currency at all, but more like corporate coupons whose value (or lack thereof) could be adjusted on a case-to-case basis, depending on your behaviour and your thinking.

These may seem like outlandish ideas, but the following article shared by V.T. provides confirmation of these basic theses:

Let us be clear about the developments outlined in this article: while these “currencies” may be new, they are not normal nor are they currencies. Note the following statements:

For those who have never heard of them, “Central Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) are exactly what they sound like, digitized versions of the pound/dollar/euro etc. issued by central banks.

Like bitcoin (and other crypto), the CBDC would be entirely digital, thus furthering the ongoing war on cash. However, unlike crypto, it would not have any encryption preserving anonymity. In fact, it would be totally the reverse, potentially ending the very idea of financial privacy.

Now, you may not have heard much about the CBDC plans, lost as they are in the tangle of the ongoing “pandemic”, but the campaign is there, chugging along on the back pages for months now. There are stories about it from both Reuters and the Financial Times just today. It’s a long, slow con, but a con nonetheless.

The countries where the idea progressed the furthest are China and the UK. The Chinese Digital Yuan has been in development since 2014, and is subject to ongoing and widespread testing. The UK is nowhere near that stage yet, but Chancellor Rishi Sunak is keenly pushing forward a digital pound that the press are calling “Britcoin”.

Other countries, including New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Malaysia, are not far behind.

The US is also researching the idea, with Jerome Powell, head of Federal Reserve, announcing the release of a detailed report on the “digital dollar” in the near future.

And here’s the rub, and it directly confirms the warnings of Catherine Fitts and others regarding the true nature of CBDC’s: they are not money nor currency in any sense:

The proposals for how these CBDCs might work should be enough to raise red flags in even the most trusting of minds.

Most people wouldn’t like the idea of the government monitoring “all spending in real-time”, but that’s not the worst it.

By far the most dangerous idea is that any future digital currency should be “programmable”. Meaning the people issuing the money would have the power to control how it is spent.

The article then links a video of Agustin Carstens, head of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and in case one missed it, actually cites him a little later in the article:

Here’s that quote again, with some emphasis added:

The key difference [with a CBDC] is that the central bank would have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and the have the technology to enforce that.”

…which tells you not only that they want and are seeking this power, but how they justify it to themselves. They transform other people’s money into an “expression of their liability”, and so consider it’s only right that they control it.

An article in the Telegraph, back in June, was just as candid [our emphasis]:

Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or Government deems to be sensible

The article goes on to quote Tom Mutton, a director at the BoE:

You could introduce programmability […] There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way.

It does not take a particle physicist to understand that if central banks can program their digital “currency” on a case-by-case individual basis to be spent only on certain things, the same capability also gives them the ability to determine the value of that “currency” on a case-by-case individual basis. In short, the same technology enables both the end of financial privacy and makes the “currency” into a corporate coupon. This is a one way mirror behind which the banksters can operate with impunity, and is tailor-made for even more financial fraud.

Q.E.D.

So how does one combat this? There are two simple solutions: do not bank with the big banks, use cash as much as possible in transactions, and start building networks with the realization that sooner or later, those networks might have to create currencies of their own.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/10/programmable-central-bank-digital-currency/

Robotics & Learning

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EXESKELETONS AND TEACHING ROBOTS

October 21, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

This story was spotted by M.G. who passed it along, with our thanks. It’s one of those stories that may not seem all that significant, until one connects a few dots, and connects a few technologies not referred to in the article. So without further ado, the article:

Note what’s going on here:

Wearable technology takes on a different meaning in the world of automobiles. As employees get older and younger and avoid the idea of ​​working on a factory production line, auto companies are looking for ways to lighten the load.

High tech exoskeletons are being studied by companies like Hyundai Motor Co., Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. The technology originally developed to help people who can no longer walk or stand alone, relieves fatigue and prevents injuries. It’s especially useful for repetitive processes that can’t be automated, even when robotics is making great strides in the industry.

All types of businesses have an “emphasis on corporate social responsibility and occupational safety” and strive to prevent workplace injuries, said Xu Zhenhua, founder of ULS Robotics, a Shanghai-based company that provides exoskeletons to automakers, airport operators, and other industrial manufacturers.

ULS Robotics is developing three exoskeletons that workers can wear to hold and lift heavy equipment. One is for the upper body, another goes around the waist, and the third focuses on the lower limbs. The first two weigh about seven kilograms each and allow the wearer to lift another 20 kilograms. They are powered by a lithium battery with a lifespan of around six to eight hours. (Emphasis added)

Many people have blogged about the rise of robotics, including this author, and more importantly, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, who has offered the hypothesis that moves are afoot to robotize everything, including to the extent to make robots “legal persons” for taxation purposes.

With that in mind, I want to focus on this line in the above quotation: “It’s especially useful for repetitive processes that can’t be automated, even when robotics is making great strides in the industry.” It’s that line that forms the core of today’s high octane speculation. Suppose for a moment that you had some manufacturing process that could not be automated, and you needed to learn how to automate it. Solution? Have the humans wear exoskeletons with computer memory that recorded every step of the manufacturing process, including such things as retrieving needed supplies for certain steps, or deciding when one process needed to be suspended in order to work on another. Over time, a database is accumulated allowing one to dispense with the exoskeleton – and the human worker wearing it – and replace it, and him or her, with a robot.

And with that possibility, we’re in Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy territory, as more and more is robotized and run by technocrats behind computer screens, until the inevitable breakdowns occur, and no one remembers how to actually make things…

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/10/exeskeletons-and-teaching-robots/

Use Cash – Defy the System

THE BIS AND DIGITAL “CURRENCY”

THE BIS AND DIGITAL “CURRENCY”

July 13, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

G.B. spotted this article, and offered a few tangential but important comments. Essentially, it’s an “update” to the Bank of International Settlements’ plans to roll out digital currency, ultimately to replace cash:

BIS Innovation Hub: The Gradual March To Central Bank Digital Currency Continues To Advance

Essentially, there are two important points to note. Firstly, various central banks are already engaged in a limited roll-out of digital currencies:

The initial phase of the project saw Hub’s opened up in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore. An operational agreement was signed with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in September 2019, followed by an agreement with the Swiss National Bank in October. The Hub in Singapore began operations in November.

With phase one completed, the BIS have now moved into the second phase which they warned was going to happen when the Hub first launched. Accompanying the release of this year’s Annual Economic Report, the institution announced that the Hub is expanding to new locations in both Europe and North America.

Over the next two years, the Bank of England will be opening a centre, along with the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank and four Nordic central banks (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland). A ‘strategic partnership‘ will also be formed with the Federal Reserve System.

East and West may appear divided in the geopolitical sphere, but in the world of central banking they are very much united behind the common goal of the Hub.

As the BIS outlined in a press release, the expansion will ‘allow Innovation Hub to spur central bank work across multiple fintech pillars‘. General Manager Agustin Carstens confirmed that the ‘new centres will expand our reach significantly and help create a global force for fintech innovation‘.

The second, and much more important point to note, is that the goal is both to digitize liquid assets and cash and essentially free this digitized currency from any connection to tangible and real assets, and to incorporate the “unbanked” or “underbanked” population of the world, some billion and a half people, into this system:

What central banks (in line with state legislatures) are not going to do is simply outlaw cash when CBDC’s become available. I believe what they want is for banknotes to dwindle to a level where they can make the argument that the servicing costs of maintaining the cash infrastructure outweigh the amount of cash still in circulation and being used for payment.

An Access to Cash report published in the UK last year warned that because of bank branch closures and the decline of ATM’s, Britain’s cash network was at real risk of collapsing. Introduce a CBDC into the equation and you can see how cash will soon be deemed nonviable. Those who might opt to use cash over a digital currency would eventually have no other option than to transfer their money into a CBDC.

One of the main goals of global planners is to target what they call the ‘unbanked‘ or the ‘underbanked‘. In other words, those who exist largely outside of the financial system and trade anonymously. The BIS Annual Report declared that 1.7 billion adults and hundreds of millions of firms ‘are tied to cash as their only means of payment‘. That is one fifth of the world’s population that central banks are seeking to bring into their world – a digital only construct in which the only alternative is a life of destitution.

Essentially, the central banking fraternity will want to be able to pinpoint the abolition of cash on the advancement of technology and the changing payment habits of the consumer, thereby taking the emphasis off themselves.

With regards to changing consumer behaviour, the unproven fear perpetuated throughout the media that cash could transmit Covid-19 has successfully managed to undermine cash to the point where a large swathe of people have stopped using it. The latest statistics from Link show that in the UK transaction volume is down 47% on this time last year.

Over time, central banks will be able to use a sustained reduction in demand for cash to their advantage. As Yves Mersch of the European Central Bank mentioned in May, ‘if our customers, the people of Europe signalled a change in payments behaviour, we would want to preserve their direct link to the ultimate owner of our currency by maintaining their access to central bank liabilities‘.

There are three problems here.

Firstly, notice where the earliest trials of digital currency were held: Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Singapore. As G.B. noted in the comments of the email accompanying the article, each place has been a hub of massive financial scandal and fraud in recent years. And as I and Catherine Austin Fitts have repeatedly warned, a move to a digital currency is a move to something which, in effect, is not a currency at all, simply because of the implied ability of central banks, at the push of a button, to modify the value of that currency at will. Say you leave your place of work with 15,000 digibooboos being deposited in your account. On your way home, you decide to stop and get some groceries. But Mr. Central Banskter needed some extra digibooboos to cover his margin calls, which amount to just a few quadrillions of digibooboos, so he decides simply to create more digibooboos at the push of a button. By the time you arrive at the checkout lane in the grocery store, the robocashier informs you that your grocery bill, which just a few seconds ago might have cost a mere 200 digibooboos, now comes to 14,000 digibooboos, leaving you to ponder whether or  not to buy your groceries and figure out  how to pay your mortgage (which, incidentally, is also digitized along with the title to your house), or abandon your purchase of mystery 3d-printed meat and GMO potatoes, and pay your mortgage (pronto!) before it too becomes too expensive to pay. You decide to do the latter, and rush to the nearest morgautpaycen (mortgage automated payment center), which informs you that, woops, your mortgage payment is now 15,500 digibooboos. Frantic, you try transferring money from your savings account to your transactions account, only to be told that Microsh*t corporation is interrupting the transaction to update the morgautpaycen system (and your “vaccine tatoos”) with the latest updates; please standby, this will take just a few minutes, and do not cancel the transaction. By the time this has ended, a line has formed, and you make the transfer and rush home, only to find the robosheriff has arrived and repossessed your home. In fact, it’s already been sold and people are already moving into it.

Think I’m exaggerating? Well, don’t forget the roll of currency speculators and banksters in driving the German hyper-inflation of the 1920s so they could make huge amounts of money.  In short, a digital currency frees the central banksters and speculators from the necessity of having to use far slower and clumsier methods of the manipulation of stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies in order to manipulate currency and other types of value. They will be able to do all of that at the push of a button; it’s a convenient way for the banksters to walk away from all their frauds and crimes, probably of an intergenerational nature. It’s Venice all over again, on steroids.

You might as well paint a big target on yourself and all you own, and say, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”

There’s a second problem: the U.S. constitution, which has that curiously worded phrase that only Congress has the power to “make” and “coin” money. Clearly, a digital “currency’s” fulfillment of this provision is at least debatable on a number of grounds.

And finally, the third problem: What happens to all those wonderful digital “assets” if, say, the Socialist Peoples’ Parasite and Piracy Party of Zhi Ping Pong, Woe Phat (thank you Hawaii Five-O) and Wahn Beeg Rhat (thank you Uncle Scrooge and Karl Barks) decides to zap it all with an electro-magnetic pulse because they’re unhappy with the balance of payments  (they were the ones paid off by Mr. Central Bankster with the suddenly-created digibooboos that are now worth far less). Please take all disputes to accounting; issues are typically resolved in 10-30 business days.

I suppose then were back to old fashioned analogue things like cuneiform tablets and paper records.

In short, use cash folks, as much as you can.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/07/the-bis-and-digital-currency/

And Now (drum roll) The Plague in China

Suspected case of BUBONIC PLAGUE registered in China, days after Mongolian outbreak

Suspected case of BUBONIC PLAGUE registered in China, days after Mongolian outbreak
A suspected case of bubonic plague has been registered in China’s north, according to local health authorities. The news comes after two similar cases were detected in neighboring Mongolia.

The case was registered at a hospital in China’s Inner Mongolia region, its health commission said in a statement on Sunday.

This prompted a third-level warning of a potential epidemic in the region. The alert comes into force immediately and will be in place until the end of this year. It’s believed the patient in question is suffering from the bubonic form, which causes swollen lymph nodes, and is considered to be the most easily treated variant of the disease.

The plague also has a pneumonic and an extra-deadly septicemic form that can kill a victim within a day.

Earlier this week, two people also tested positive for the bubonic plague in neighboring Mongolia.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage, the potential return of the dreaded plague is definitely the last thing the world needs. So far, Covid-19 has infected nearly 11.5 million people, killing more than 530,000 of them.

Yet the toll from coronavirus is dwarfed by that of the plague, which has caused pandemics at least three times in the course of history. It has an extremely high mortality rate, at around 95 percent, and caused the deaths of tens of millions before healthcare evolved enough to treat it. The last such pandemic was in the 19th century, and it hit China and India particularly hard.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 cases of the plague are still registered worldwide each year, with many of them originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

from:    https://www.rt.com/news/493871-china-suspected-bubonic-plague/

And Check out  Dr. Joseph Farrell’s News and Views From the Nefarium for July 8, 2020 where he discusses this article: