Triathlon? Try-poke-along!

A pause in my customary geo-political rant today, just long enough to keep a promise made to friends and family when I set out to make drastic changes in my physical behaviour after retirement.

The first two installments in this saga are available at: Part One and Part Two.

As of August 1, 2011, I can report that I am in the water every day now and have a full body tan for the first time since 1984 in San Diego. And Aldous Huxley wasn't even there.

This progress report can be summed up by saying that I took five months to learn how to crawl (freestyle) properly, something other enthusiasts likely accomplish in mere weeks. I should add that this leisurely pace was wholely deliberate and utterly delicious. I've gone at it obsessed only with relishing every little nuance, not wanting to skip anything. After five months, I've only just this week begun to add continuous breathing.

No kidding!

It is so tempting, and fatal to success to skip Terry Laughlin's admonition to let your belly-button learn and lead the way to air, not your fool head or neck.

So as fate would have it, this past weekend, in my euphoria at discovering that freestyle breathing can indeed be as effortless as dead-man's-float when done properly, that I decided to risk a whole new chapter in my life.

The dreaded backstroke.

Could I possibly roll faceup, with mouth and nose in the air occasionally, watching the clouds slip by like a good terrestrial mammal should?

Aha! So this is the payoff for all those months of patient 'relaxing into gravity'! Stunning. On my very first attempt I felt the water slipping past my skin like silk. Absolutely effortless. I suspect I bettered my own record for both speed and fewest stokes when freestyling for 25 yards, on my very first attempt. "This can't be" says I to myself, until I realized I was talking out loud while still swimming!

Enough! Back to making my belly-button lead the way to air in the crawl... and discovering how hard it is to manage sneaky breaths with a compulsive grin on your face.

So this particular personal narrative ends with both an intent and an assumption.

Friends should assume that my progress will continue ever so gently and steadily until, perhaps by mid-to-late 2012 I'll dare ask Terry to consider me for Mentor accreditation. Not as a business venture. That's why I retired. Just enough to acknowlege the myriad questions from seniors and kids at the lake who, on seeing me wearing goggles during endless hours of two to five-stroke drills, respectively ask either, "what the heck are you doing?" or "what are you looking for?"

Some elders are so wobbly on their feet they don't even get in the water anymore. Some get in, but feel too unsure to do more than just stand and cool off. Others get in and actually float comfortably, but only until they attempt what they think is swimming, which causes them to sink like stone.

There is nothing sweeter in this mentoring experience than the look of bemused astonishment in someone's eyes when, after superman gliding for fifteen minutes with nary a thought in their head but to relax their neck, they suddenly begin skating just as effortlessly, even competing with themselves to see how far they can coast on a single breath.

The rest is nearly self-perpetuating because the whole sensation of immersion swimming at an advanced age is that it's supposed to seem effortless compared to the way we were taught as kids. Each swimmer ambles along at their own pace with relaxed efficient comfort as the only measurement to be trusted.

Take a sunny, warm, quiet weekday with few people around. Ask for help and take an hour just getting into the water if you have to. Stand still and enjoy the weightless feeling. Watch the ducks's doing their hilarious bum-upside-down antics for a while. Gawk at the trees swaying in the breeze.

Enjoy.

Then realize there is not a single stage along the gradual path to this new way of swimming that requires you to abandon one iota of that feeling. I can still ride a bicycle a few minutes at a time. I can even walk a hundred yeards or so.

Not quite a Triathlon. But I'm beginning to relish my daily little Try-poke-along.

Mum is 22 years older than I. She has great trouble standing.

Yesterday she resumed swimming.

Bitcoin and the Ledger Elites

I'm old enough to remember when Bitcoin transaction fees crossed the threshold into being impractical for micro transactions.

We early adopters gratefully pocketed a few pennies from the BCH fork (Bitcoin Cash) and used BCH for a while as the transaction ledger of choice. But that didn't last and we soon resigned ourselves to letting Bitcoin remain the heavyweight pseudo-gold, a deep reserve environment with all the cumbersome characteristics required for a trusted reserve. We hoped, and even predicted something would eventually emerge from the XRP-like community (Ripple) to provide a closed and independent system throughout the global trade-space with a nimble, ultra high speed and practical transactional environment.

We naively supposed that well crafted and trusted gateways would appear on its circumference providing highly liquid unobstructed portals in and out of XRP to both BTC and the fiat (national currencies) Forex network.

Somewhere between 2011 and 2013, however, the intransigent fiat cartel dug in its heels and hired the Warren / Schiff / Rickards / Dimon lobby to do its lying for it. That's when I stopped busting my brain trying to keep up with the David and Goliath skirmishes in that space and retreated to just hodling a little BTC and a little Gold as a mere hobby while the liars pulled each others wires.

Later, after selling even those final trace hodlings, I declared the whole mess in exquisite detail to the Canadian capital gains police and payed full bore taxes on the whole thing. I withdrew. I preferred the peace of mind. It was time to get on with life and retire to gardening and a little hobby-trading using more traditional instruments for interest and pleasure.

Nowadays, so many years later, as I read more and more horrendous tales of financial fibs, and how governments who haven't the guts to levy taxes honestly use debt and inflation instead to water the dollar down, I can't help but wonder . . . are there any young whipersnappers out there to whom my old fogie narratives sound familiar? Can any of you catch me up on what honest crypto wizards have been up to in the meantime?

As for watering down the dollar, do any of you see through the Trudeau/Polièvre/Biden/Trump charades?

It's actually so damn simple.

Banks print money (inflation) and call it Monetary Policy; Governments borrow that money (debt) and call it Fiscal Policy. Meanwhile the gap between haves and have-nots pursues its relentless recurring cycle from Gaza to Mar-a-Lackey and back again.

The Financial Jargon Industry

When resuming more regular postings to this eclectic site a few weeks ago, I mentioned my extended absence had been due to pretty intense contributions to a trading and investement forum.

I'm certainly not about to duplicate it here, but several people have asked where they can find that more specialized financial feed and hence the following links.

The overall thread, now known as The Bigger Lie and the M-33 Trading series, consists of a rather fierce, down-to-earth exposé of the deception and obfuscation in the mainstream, financial Press. What we call the Financial Jargon Industry.

The commercial web platform on which the discussion first arose suspended operations recently, so participants have moved to an independent and more stable venue using Telegram. Those of you who appreciate investigative journalism will recognize Telegram as a solid generic messaging tool, but also as the saving grace that allows people living under autocratic and repressive regimes to communicate with the rest of the world.

Anyone interested in exploring the finance related topics that have fascinated us for the last couple of years are welcome to visit the totally free sites where they now live.

I look forward to meeting you there.

M-33 Video Repository

 

NY Attorney General Letitia James Sues World’s Largest Beef Producer

NY AG Letitia James deserves tremendous credit for intent and a severe scolding for her concurrent sin of omission.

She correctly states that current beef production emits the bulk of New York's environmental methane. Then she concurrently and shamefully omits the fact the ruminants are not responsible for its accumulation. The crime of methane accumulation accrues to New York's soil industry and the vested interests in the pharmaceutics and heavy equipment industries that have corrupted those soil managers.

The methano-phagic organisms that naturally return environmental methane to the soil by default, die in soils with less than 4% carbon. Healthy NY soil contains 7% carbon. Most contemporary NY soil barely maintains 1%. Those essential methano-phagic organisms have been destroyed by three multi-billion dollar predatory and biocidal industries:

• machinery that breaks and inverts soil to a depth greater than 4 inches;

• chemical pesticides that finish killing any soil organisms that survive the ploughing; and

• chemical fertilizers re-administered every year.

I sincerely admire AG James' courage in taking on the powerful beef industry.

I cringe at the cowardice, or perhaps the intellectual laziness, that criminalizes the ruminants rather than the predatory conditions under which they are raised.

That omission is all the more scandalous, nay criminal itself, when those innocent ruminants actually represent the solution to, not the cause of environmental methane accumulation. Ruminants freed from feed lots, returned to pasture under regimes of skilfully managed grazing, both till with their hooves to the ideal depth of four inches and, along with other restored organisms, fertilize and replenish soil to the requisite 7% carbon.

When Ms James re-allocates her quota of legislative and enforcement courage to banning or severely restricting petroleum based heavy equipment tillage, banning or severely restricting big-pharma pesticides, and banning or severely restricting big-pharma fertilizers, she will have graduated from difficult, but still cliché logical fallacy, to the truly heroïc.

 Peter7  M-33  The Bigger Lie

Greetings all.  

It's good to be back.

I've been distracted by my finance related writing, much of which has consisted of volunteer contributions to a discussion group called The Arena.  Unfortunately, the sponsors suspended operations a few weeks ago, leaving hundreds of followers high and dry with no warning or opportunity to backup the data. 

A tough lesson!

At the instigation of those orphaned Arena subscribers (who met me as Peter7), I've opened a thread using Telegram primarily as an index and repository for the instructional videos people had come to appreciate.  

Others pushed for a YouTube channel instead, so I've done that as well, though I personally attend more faithfully to the Telegram group now, because it has already spawned several sub-topics in just its first few weeks.

For those of you who follow my eclectic postings here in Nunaview, I apologize profusely for neglecting it for so long and would like to make up for it both by resuming its currency and also by providing links to the new Telegram  and  YouTube  channels in case you are interested. 

Those series concern M-33, a personal financial trading process, and a broader historical theme titled  The Bigger Lie, which is more along the nonconformist lines you'd expect from me. 😉

I'll leave it at that for now and return here in the coming days to resume the essays that constitute Nunaview proper and renew your good company, something I've missed through the turbulent goings-on of the last few of years.

Best Regards,

pb