“By noon, the submarines Ranger and Potemkin will have reached their designated firing positions. Within minutes, New York City and Moscow will cease to exist. Global devastation will follow, and a new era will begin.” – The Spy Who Loved Me
What do you call a reality show about people with lobotomies? Mindless entertainment.
Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski is famous mostly for what he didn’t do, but more about that in a minute. What Potemkin did do, starting in 1774, was conquer most of what is southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, and Catherine the Great a bunch of times. The land he mostly took from the Ottoman Empire, but Catherine seems to have invited the conquest. And apparently, Grigory didn’t do it right, because she made him do it again. And again.
I mean a bunch of times. Catherine had a succession of lovers that would put Kamala’s body count in 1992 to shame. Okay, the summer of 1992. Okay. August of 1992. Okay, August 11, 1992. By noon
But when Potemkin wasn’t kicking Ottoman butt or . . . well, the other thing, what he did do was found city after city along the Black Sea coast. You just might have heard of Kherson? Yup. Potemkin founded and named that city. He was even buried there until Putin dug him up and took him back to Russia recently. It’s certain he wasn’t the last Russian to retreat.
But mostly, we remember Potemkin for the phrase Potemkin Village. Where did that phrase come from?
Why did the old lady fall in that well? She didn’t see that well.
Catherine the Great, somewhere between lovers, decided to have a Lord of the Rings-type trip to go see what Potemkin was up to down south, and maybe have Potemkin put something in Mount Doom, if you know what I mean.
That was based on the idea that Potemkin had a lot of the Novorossiyan (approximately the southern area that Putin held before the Russians began advancing to the rear last month) villages built and rebuilt so that he could fool Catherine about how prosperous the area was.
Well, not really. First of all, Potemkin didn’t have to impress Catherine, they’d known each other forever by this point, and she really liked him even though whenever they weren’t together they were boffing enough other people to make Paris Hilton blush. What everyone does agree on is that Potemkin had folks paint some of the village buildings, and they did build a few fake ones, but those were mainly to show Catherine what the area would look like.
So, despite personal bravery, solid administration, building an entire fleet, and being a diplomat worthy of any of today’s age, we remember Potemkin for something he really didn’t do. To be fair Potemkin was the guy that conquered most of the area that Russia and Ukraine are fighting for right now, so there’s a good argument that they should just give it all back to Turkey and be done with it.
Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.
But it came to my mind when I started thinking about the economy we find ourselves in today – in many ways, it’s a Potemkin economy. FTX®, that wonderful stealer of money and funder of Democrats? It was a financial Potemkin Village. There was nothing really there, ever. A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5 and the rest of the crew literally printed their own virtual currency, and then grifted their way through piles of cash from nations and celebrities and even their own employees.
A Potemkin Village? Sure.
And now Elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud. First, there are fraudulent users. We don’t have the full number of bots that Tweeted™, but it wasn’t a small number.
Second, there was an algorithm that was built to push the Leftist agenda by artificially drawing people’s attention to things they weren’t organically interested in. As soon as Musk stopped the algorithm in Japan, for instance, politics stopped trending and anime and Godzilla© and sushi topped the list of things that Japanese people were actually interested in.
Third, the advertisers weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Rather than being advertisers that were interested in, oh, say, advertising to customers, they’re fleeing the platform. Why? Because they weren’t interested in selling products, they were really interested in social posturing. They’re leaving in droves – the economic engine of Twitter® appears to have been built on corporate virtue signaling.
Burgers. Right. That’s what they’re selling.
Fourth, the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement. How bad are these people? They’re upset that they won’t have free food from in-house chefs. They’ll have to pay for lunch. Maybe they’ll have burgers?
As Potemkin himself might have said, “North Crimean Canal”. Oh, sorry. Potemkin might have told those disappointed Twitterites©, “Crimea River.”
There are more examples out there. By definition, these Potemkin Companies look fine to casual observation until something breaks down. Facebook© started as the darling of the Internet. Then Zuckerberg decided that he’d spend the rest of his life staring out of the world through virtual reality, and spent $36 billion dollars on “the Internet, but with stupid goggles”.
Facebook® discovered a man was building a bomb. The dilemma: inform the FBI, or send him ads for digital timers?
Sure it makes sense to Mark who took the movie The Matrix as a how-to manual, but pretty much everyone else thinks it is . . . stupid. But the scary thing for Mark is it’s making people look at what he really owns. Some folks think it’s just the next version of MySpace©, because the teens have abandoned it and it now consists of businesses trying to sell stuff, mothers trading recipes for what to do with their children’s Adderall© for a quick buzz, and the NSA desperately trying to track everyone.
I guess Facebook© has a lot of servers and stuff, but is their model a Potemkin Company?
And how many other Potemkin Companies are sitting out there, in plain sight, but just not yet recognized? My bet is that there are a lot, especially in the financial sector and tech sectors. One principle that I’ve seen apply again and again is Wilder’s Rule #32: what can be built really quickly can collapse a lot quicker. If Zuck can make $100 billion in four years, he can lose it in four weeks.
The valuation of almost everything in our economy is subjective – it has value because we give it value. Amazon™ was worth $180 last year at this time. It was worth $99 yesterday. It has gone down by half. Amazon© has also announced that they’re going to lay off 10,000 employees in the next month.
Oops. And what else might be a sign of a Potemkin Economy?
I’m sure it’s all legit, right? Thankfully for the Ukraine, Russia sucks at war.
Valuations are built on emotion, and emotion is defined on how pretty something is. Well, at least if we lose the Potemkin Companies and the Potemkin Dollar, we still have our relationship with Catherine the Great Kamala.
Oh, crap. We’re in even worse condition than I thought.
John – – In almost every bureaucracy (places having three levels of supervisors) this Potemkin phenomena is constantly present.
It is known by various names:
“Form over substance” & “Optics instead of reality”.
It is demonstrable proof of a human frailty, namely looking good to your boss and their boss so that you can move up within the organization.
This bane of bureaucracies will always be with us but may become harder to employ as monitoring programs increase.
Keep in mind, that elections are Potemkin Villages, too.
They’re called zombie companies.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/huge-number-zombie-companies-drowning-120000776.html
There’s a lot of them.
https://finbox.com/blog/zombie-companies/
They’re dead, Jim.
Ohh, I’m an engineer, Ricky, not a doctor.
We’ve had a zombie economy since 2001, when the 1st tech die-off occurred and the Fed’s PPT “saved the day”. In 2008 it’s a become a zombie on steroids, thanks to the 0.25% fed funds rate.
One thing I’ve learned from 56 years either being an Office Mgr., a GM or owning several businesses is that 20% carries the 80%. By that deduction I’ll hazard the guess that a similar percentage of the tech companies will be gone within a year.
BTW, Clif High says 12/13-15 is when the 1st big SHTF starts. Martin Armstrong is forecasting that April will be the month from hell.
“20% carries the 80%”
Pareto principle.
And Price’s law (50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people involved) also applies.
Clif, is he still on YT? I’d bet on Armstrong. Me? I’m sticking that it all falls apart in 2026. The big idea is that the inertia of an economy as large as ours will take time to implode.
Clif’s on Bitchute, as is Celente. Bix Weir is serving a 7 day suspension on YT.
Thanks, I’ll look ’em up.
Can hardly wait to see what happens once the railroad workers go on strike later this month. With the instant rise in gas prices being seen around the country now that the 2022 selection is complete it should finally get the ball rolling on exposing our Potemkin economy into a SHTF experience.
We gather intel from Cliff High’s video’s too, and it has amazed us how right he has been on a lot of his predictions/observations from the metadata he compiles. Trying to get everything squared away before mid-December as we are in for a bumpy ride.
Clif’s latest w/ Bix Weir is long (60 min.) but worth itstarts w/ the 12/13-15 forecast. Get out of big cities NOW. Stockpile Pb, Au & Ag. Ag to $600-2000 in his opinion. And buy lotsa canned goods.
Links?
That would bring it down in six days. Can’t imagine how Biden wouldn’t nationalize it.
It is startling when you realize how many people make so much money by not actually providing a real good or service.
Right???? And the recent FTX scam was mainly people literally printing cash. (shakes head)
Financial Times published an excellent recent article that sums up our main problem in keeping this Potemkin charade going. Cue their two key charts that cut to the chase:
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net%2Fprod%2F62349c20-6436-11ed-ac20-997e58f8e677-standard.png?dpr=2&fit=scale-down&quality=medium&source=next&width=700
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net%2Fprod%2F384ad7f0-6425-11ed-91e4-076a48a0f1e2-standard.png?dpr=1&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&source=next&width=700
What conclusions to draw: There is suppposed to be (much) more reward for risking your money in a bond purchase for ten years than for two years. When the interest rate (reward for taking on the risk of a bond) is the same for a 2 year bond (risk) as a 10 year bond (risk), then Houston we have a problem- the jig is up and everybody knows a crash (or even money printing to kick the can down the road) is upon us. The last times this happened was around the 2008 housing crash (a crash) and again in 2018 during the “taper tantrum” when Wall Street objected to the Fed trying to dump the US Treasuries they had bought back into the general economy (and the printing presses cranked back up).
Oops, here we go again: 2 YR = 10YR at the previous peak danger level of 5% interest rates. Only THIS time the total Treasury debt is 5X higher than back in 2008 (25 trillion now vs. 5 trillion then) and there is a lot less appetite among people without a money printing press to buy those bonds at all (100 million total bond market liquidity today vs 5X or so higher in the middle of the COVID scare when the stimmie money was flowing in a waterfall at around 600 million total bond market liquidity).
Folks, we ain’t gonna fund short-term rollover 5% interest costs of 25 billion dollars in total US Treasury debt with a bank/pension fund/hedge fund appetite for US Treasury paper of “only” 100 million.
Hemmingway: How did you go bankrupt? Gradually, then suddenly….
https://www.ft.com/content/632411eb-c3fa-4351-a3b6-b0e30bdc0ef7
So, buy the two year treasury?
“Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.”
Spicy!
That one took a while to bake. I hope you think it’s baste.
Even Janet is worried. And when Janet is worried, it’s time for everybody else to panic.
It’s really pretty simple: when you see the word “liquidity”, substitute the words “nobody-without-a-printing-press–wants-to-buy-this-crap”.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/stocks-market-outlook-treasury-liquidity-crisis-spillover-yellen-federal-reserve-2022-10
I think I need to do her as my next Halloween costume.
The great thing about teaching your employees to put up a fraudulent appearance of success to the public is that, once they see how easy it is, they’ll assume that everyone else is doing it, too, and they won’t be so tempted to go where the grass appears to be greener. The terrible thing about it is that they’ll start doing it internally, and you won’t know where the problems are until they’re too big to hide (or recover from).
And that is what happens when people are too afraid to tell the emperor he’s nekked.
I have a hypothesis about “the great resignation”. A few years ago, I read a commentary about how some Boomers had so much money saved up for their retirements that The Investment Management class would busy itself finding new and creative ways to transfer said funds to their own accounts. There are certainly enough examples of that. But when the pandemic shutdowns knocked the children of these Boomers off of the regular career track, they also got a whiff of the old money, and realized that their kindly old parents might be willing to support them with it “just until they get back on track.”
Don’t ask me how I know… 😉
Ha! Thank you!
Fake it till you make it is more than just a saying in the steaming third world turd Chiquitastan.
An entire Potemkin society of smoke and mirrors fraud and I agree with earlier commenters, now that the (s)election kayfabe kabuki is over, it is SHTF time.
End of the line for the muh democracy sham and millions of replacements won’t be able to keep the Ponzi going after BRICS+ expands and the petro dollar ends.
Luckily the Patriot pages have been prepping for this time long before the Stig Beal and a tip of the hat to you.
“won’t be able to keep the Ponzi going”?
PONZI. Same as it EVER was.
Serendipitous, FortuitousTimely.BOUND to get IT
Rightcorrect. THIS time.https://www.charismanews.com/culture/83320-how-the-pilgrims-tried-socialism-and-it-almost-destroyed-them
https://schiffgold.com/commentaries/the-pilgrims-did-socialism-and-died-trying/
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2018/11/grateful-for-not-starving-why-the-pilgrims-at-plymouth-switched-from-socialism-to-capitalism/
https://illinoisfamily.org/marriage/the-pilgrims-and-socialism/
And ya might be able to find 1, possibly 2 others. Bored with copy/paste.
ONLY subtle variations on the Theme since. There were some bright spots, when the MASTERS were ‘long’ the most popular route, early immigration. Indentured Servitude. Once a large portion of that group were’Free’ and started accumulating generational wealth?
CAN NOT have THAT. So…..
“There are several phrases associated with the Statue of Liberty, but the most recognizable is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Fairly certain that the denizens, after much blood, sweat, and tears, Viewed them as the ORIGINAL ‘Illegal Aliens’. Too.
Happy Turkey Day, Pilgrim(s)!
I actually give it to 2026 . . . but it’s coming. Math is funny that way.
Potemkin-Tauricheski? Musta been blessed, Equus ferus caballus-like, and catherine never got
underover it, and died of a brokenscaffoldheart.“As God as my Witness…”
http://citizennewswire.com/2020/11/19/a-thanksgiving-tradition-true-story-behind-wkrp-turkey-drop/
“And now (F)elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud, and the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement.”
The one or two alleged terminations?
Caught on video, hanging a Yuuge banner immediately preceding (F)elon’s arrival….
“Welcome Home Daddy”
” these Potemkin Companies” ? Unless You happen to be old what’s her name?
Substitute ‘Cattle’ in place of
STOCKMarket. For an impending inkling.Nothing new to ad to the ‘mystique’ of ‘FAKEbook’ other than the well trodden…
https://newspunch.com/pentagon-online-surveillance-facebook/
And if EVERYTHING goes South for marky, he may soon be frolicking in the Mediterranean surf, along with jeffy & kenny (enron). AND they will have company! “A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5”
His ‘Wife’, mrs. z ? (NOT that little stiletto prancer from the land of bioweaponslabs)
Well. She will probably team up with Addison ‘Glitch’ McConnell the III’s wife for a return to the outskirts of https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/henan/kaifeng/…In Skirts. GUARANTEED to be a 1st for both.
Well. Speaking of that? purty deep.
Ha! The Turkey Drop is a real story. A Thanksgiving miracle!
John, the FTX saga just continues to fascinate me as every day new “how really, really wrong things were” come to the fore. $15 Billion to nothing. Poof. It actually scared me enough to cash out and close my very small crypto account (I made money – not as much money as I could of say, in March, but I at least did not lose money).
The issue will come when companies that are underfunded go to raise money on the market, money that likely will not be there due to other calls, evaporations, or keeping powder dry. That is when things start to go sideways in a hurry.
Rumors from another reader is that this is the tip of the crypto abyss.