“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Those of us who believed the idiocy ended in November were shocked to learn it was only getting started. The pandemic hid the end of the cycle, so upon reaching their false dawn the euphoric masses went ALL IN the modern lifestyle - competitive self-destruction.
We regained our sanity back in November, until we realized Circus Donny was only a symptom of the problem. Self-destructionism is now a way of life. Squalor the path of least resistance. Throughout this time, there has been only one choice - to capitulate to widely embraced madness under the belief that if enough fools believe the same lie, it must be true OR to repudiate the modern way of life and its competitive debasement of humanity. Those who doubled down on this two dimensional virtual reality have no idea how to survive the reality that's coming.
They are spoiled assholes.
This era represents the Pyrrhic victory of opinionated bullshit over reality. The first coming of Trump should have been a stark warning as to the extreme denial of truth that this society is capable of fabricating.
Those who embrace this patriotic self-destruction are blissfully unaware as to the extent that American life has been eroded by corporations over the past several decades. From the GMO-riddled food supply, to the junk jobs, junk culture, and junk higher education that the hordes are bankrupting themselves to obtain. The Millennials are an embodiment of a generation attempting to maintain a social media fabricated lifestyle while at the same time keeping the underlying reality from imploding. They are busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest and it's taking a drastic toll on their mental health. The chasmic gap between fantasy and reality keeps getting wider and wider while their Google-enabled wisdom gap leads them down a blind alley. Most of them can't get out of their own neighbourhood without GPS.
Millennials may well embody the problem, but they are far from responsible for creating it. They were handed a Potemkin economy by the older generations which are incapable of accepting the fact that anything has changed when in fact everything has been drastically eroded. Kurt Anderson calls it "Fantasyland":
"America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy...In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled"
Those seeking reprieve from vodka, cannabis, opioids, and reality will find their salvation in psychedelics. The new bull market:
The premise of this post is to say that we are reaching the rapturous endgame for this Fantasyland vacation from reality which has gained force steadily since the jarring nadir of 2008.
We are staring at a margin call on rampant stupidity. One that for obvious reasons the vast majority of people can't see coming.
"Few things evoke fear in equity markets like a margin call. On Wednesday that fear turned into panic in Taiwan, offering another warning for the world on what can happen when leverage unwinds."
For months, bull market skeptics around the world have warned that surging leverage is making equity markets riskier -- and the blowup of Archegos Capital Management in March served as a reminder of that.
In the U.S., margin debt topped $822 billion by the end of March -- the latest available data. That’s up 72% year on year."
On a smaller scale, the same happened in Taiwan"
What we are witnessing in the U.S. is the compression of volatility by using ever-increasing leverage. It's a circle jerk of morons who believe there is strength in numbers.
A turn down in the Rydex ratio has coincided and/or preceded every volatility event in the past three years:
This vacation from reality is an exorbitant delusion that is coming apart at the seams.
Either this delusion explodes, or every moron you ever met is right.
Suffice to say, they can't afford to be wrong.
Again.
In summary, those assholes who are proponents of cutting ancillary benefits to the unemployed, will soon be finding out THEY are the ones who need them.
Because this time the used car salesmen conned themselves.
