A Manual on Mass Manipulation — The following excerpts are taken from psychologist and Nazi torture survivor Joost Meerloo, from his 1956 book, Rape of the Mind. We shall use it as the backbone of our manual. Step 1: Isolation Pavlov formulated his findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning is positively correlated with quiet…

Can the BTC Vol Problem Be Overcome? — Bitcoin is easily one of the most significant economic experiments in history. It represents hope for a world led by fiscally reckless politicians. But there are several logical hurdles that Bitcoin will have to jump through in order to become anything close to a practical money. …

Today we learned that Iran will no longer be abiding by the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal Framework, and will enrich its uranium supply “without limits.” …

The Complicated Process of Federal Reserve Open Market Operations Made Simple — Since the invention of banking, banks and governments alike have been in the constant pursuit of loaning out money they do not have, or of paying off debts without actual responsibility. These problems spawned the art of printing money. In modern times, one such method is called fractional reserve banking…

I once read about the story of investor Jim Rogers, who for 3 years in the early 2000s, traveled the world in a custom Mercedes. He stumbled upon the country of Botswana and immediately fell in love with it. The government was very efficient and tended to take a more…

Methods for Analyzing and Making Sound Predictive Hypotheses in Commodity Markets — In these turbulent financial times, I have had a considerable number of friends and family ask for my advice on speculating, investing and general financial tactics. I have intensely studied the field of economics for nearly a decade, since I was 14, and through the power of social media, (and…

One of the greatest errors in human action is the misapplication of rules. There are many people in this world who believe all problems can be solved if only a rule were installed to prevent that problem. There is an all too common misconception that in order to have security…

I’m more worried about an artificial imbecile than I am an artificial intelligence. Although, compared to a calculator we are hopelessly outmatched in basic computation, we seem to be unrivaled in our ability to evaluate decisions and their impacts over the long run. The human brain is still the most…

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” — George Orwell For those uninformed about the Syrian Conflict: The Middle East is a total disaster; very little makes sense out there. For the understandably ignorant, here’s a post I wrote up about two years ago…