Author: The Board

Transgender Day of Visibility

Jeez… not that this day of Transgender Visibility is celebrated for the first time, but still. It all began in 2009 with the blessing from both Obama and Biden, then vice-president. Among the initiators was one Rachel Crandall Crocker, an attractive (see pic) activist of the movement that has invaded the minds of the Western civilization. In 2014, the day was observed around the globe. Then in 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed March 31 as a Transgender Day of Visibility. This – 2024 – year it coincided with Easter Day. What a clash! 

The President’s Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2024, reads, among others, that:

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation [and because] they help America thrive [t]hey deserve, and are entitled to […] the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves. [Sadly] extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families — silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses […]. These bills attack our most basic American values: the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child. It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year. At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives. […] All of these attacks are un-American and must end. No one should have to be brave just to be themselves.

Notice that the said cases of suicide are offhandedly explained as caused by the hostile attitude of Americans with normal sex conduct towards those with sexual deviances, and not a thought is spared for the other explanation, namely that the high suicide rate is caused by the psychological confusion of not knowing which sex you are, but who cares? 

Notice also how the president pontificates from on high and from the bottom of his magnanimous heart that all he wants to protect is the right to be… yourself. Tear-jerking . Yet, we all know what the president and the paymasters of his clique mean by being yourself: you may choose to be transgender, but you must not choose to be an advocate of the interests of white Americans. In this case the rules of self-determination need not apply: the usual selectivity in the omnipresent newspeak of the present day that we have long been accustomed to, but never mind.

The American head of state continues in the same document:

Now, therefore, I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility. I call upon all Americans […] to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

Some ostentatious pomp it is, is it not?! “I call on all Americans to eliminate violence and discrimination” as if attacks on people with abnormal sexual proclivities were part and parcel of American everyday reality rather than rising crime rates and a feeling of insecurity caused by the weakening of the police and open borders policy.

Towards the end of the document, the president says:

Witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

You might know that Joe Biden is not merely a Christian but a Catholic. Catholicism is regarded by some as the strand of Christianity that is strictest in its moral demands. Catholic or no Catholic, the Christian Holy Bible does not beat about the bush when it comes to homosexuality, so Biden as a Christian and a Catholic, while invoking “the year of our Lord” (Jesus Christ is meant… yet?), should have had a moment of reflection, a moment of doubt, a moment of recollection of the following passage (emphasis added):

[Because t]hey exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator,[…] God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.

Romans 1:26–27, New American Bible, Vatican site.

It may be that Joe Biden does not know his Bible; it may also be that he has theologians explaining the whole passage away, shedding a new light on it, as is practised nowadays with almost anything and everything regarding moral values: rather than being abolished or ridiculed, they are reinterpreted, deconstructed and construed to mean whatever pleases the managers of the world.

How could a Catholic president square his Transgender Day of Visibility coinciding with Easter Day this year? We may rest assured that the president’s conscience is not troubled in the least and that his theologians have told him that (i) St Paul did not really mean what he supposedly meant, (ii) that some of the apostles were transgender people (especially St John, who reclined on Jesus’ bosom/breast/next to Jesus – as the many translations have it – as evidenced in John 13:23), and that (iii) transgender people are our neigbours (in the religious sense of the word) and neighbours ought to be loved, which after all is the highest precept of Christian morality (second only to the love for God). Never mind all the other intricacies of the Holy Writ: Americans will not challenge such a theological claim, certainly not publicly, especially in the time when they are full aware that non-compliance with the new normal may cost them dearly in terms of their professional careers. It is not Jesus Christ, nor the pope, nor the Vatican, nor your local church community, nor your (Catholic or Protestant) priest, who are commonly feared nowadays: it is the likes of Rachel Crandall Crocker, whose denunciation will surely land you up in deep trouble and bring upon you the strongest, most severe societal condemnation or worse.

Through such decisions the world finds out what American values are at present. All transgender people in all countries either already know or will soon know that they can flock to the American fold and seek protection there against their oppressive governments that have not yet recognized this basic human right – a right to be yourself.

Look forward to the April issue of Gefira. We deal with the role of transgender people worldwide in American politics.

FED is not playing fair – can it go bankrupt?

The most important central bank in the world, the US Federal Reserve (FED), recently presented its financial report, which shows that it had a substantial loss of USD 114 billion last year. Why such a large loss for the FED? To explain this, one should first distinguish between two aspects of the central bank’s activities.

Firstly, the FED holds large quantities of US bonds, which in turn yield interest. Of course, in this case, this interest is income for the central bank. It is worth noting that since the FED began buying bonds on a large scale in 2008, interest rates have also risen considerably
Secondly, the Federal Reserve allows commercial banks and various types of funds to hold money in an account at the central bank. At the same time, it pays a certain amount of interest on these funds, which depends primarily on the level of interest rates.

Well, between 2022 and 2023, there was a series of interest rate hikes in the US. Eventually, a level of 5.5% was reached. This meant that the FED had to pay 5.5% interest to banks and funds (and there were a lot of them) that wanted to keep their money in a central bank account.

So on the one hand, the Fed still held a similar amount of bonds in 2023, for which it received interest rates close to the 2022 level (i.e. much lower than this 5.5%). On the other hand, it had to pay much higher interest rates to commercial banks or money market funds. This resulted in the loss.

You may ask: What happens when a central bank suffers a loss? From a purely financial point of view: Nothing significant happens. It is assumed that this loss will be covered by future profits. In the context of a central bank, it is difficult to talk about bankruptcy, especially as central banks can create gigantic amounts of money under the current system.
Gefira is critical of the monetary policy of central banks, but for completely different reasons. No one from the central bankers is commenting on the following questions:

1) Is it fair that the central bank only rescued and wants to rescue selected financial institutions simply because they operate on a large scale?

2) Is it normal for these institutions (especially banks) to hold their reserves at the central bank and safely receive a few percent interest in return?

3) What’s more – is it fair that unprofitable companies are kept alive by the central bank printing money, which in turn makes it more difficult for new companies to enter the market?

4) Is it good for the economy that unprofitable zombie companies are kept afloat in this way, which otherwise – in the real free economy – should have gone bankrupt long ago?

God and Satan or the Bipolar World

Some say the world in between 1991 and 2022 was a unipolar world, while prior to that time it had been a two-polar world, and after 2022 it has again become a two- if not or multi-polar world. Wrong. We have always had a bi-polar world and this bipolarity has always been viewed religiously. Surprised?

The world has always been divided – politically speaking – into us and them, into the in-group and the out-group, and – religiously speaking – the world has always been arranged along the axis of heaven and hell, Olympus and Hades, God and Satan. In the antiquity it was Greece and the rest of the world – the barbarians. Then it was the Roman Empire and the rest of the world – the barbarians. Then it was Christianity and the rest of the world – the pagans, the heathens. Starting with the the Enlightenment it was civilization against savages and cannibals. Today it is democracy against autocracy, despotism, fascism – you name it.

It has always been arranged along this religious axis: Mount Olympus, seat of the gods, the seat of those who are always right; at the foot of Olympus flocks of divine servants (quasi saints), demigods or heroes. And then, vertically opposite Olympus we have Hades or Hell, with Satan and his helpers – lesser devils or demons. In between we have the earth’s nations that are torn between the two.

Yes, you guessed it right. From the West’s perspective Washington is Olympus while the successive presidents are incarnations of Zeus, God himself, holding up a torch of all virtues with which they try to illuminate the world. Zeus is accompanied by helpmates – assistants – smaller gods and demigods or – to use Christian terminology – (patron) saints who are assigned diverse tasks. These are all the countries that make up the collective West: Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Smaller gods, demigods or saints are not by any means equal in their clout and leverage: unquestionably France or the United Kingdom are higher up in the celestial hierarchy than Poland or Bulgaria. And there are – mind you! – individual nations that spend time in purgatory, individuals – nations – countries – that aspire to be admitted in the celestial circles but need yet to be cleansed of their sins. Serbia might be regarded as such an entity or Georgia.

Then we have hell, hades, the underworld of evil, wickedness and what not. Russia is present-day Satan while China impersonates Mephistopheles, with Belarus, North Korea, Iran and some others being assigned the roles of smaller princes of darkness, demons or moral counterparts of demigods or saints. The world is really arranged along the lines of this simple axial design of plus and minus, of good and evil, of the good ones and the bad ones, of saints and demons.

No need to add those who are viewed through the Western lens as demons and devils have an entirely opposite perspective in which the positive and the negative poles are reversed, in which the alleged Satan is God and the alleged God is Satan. There can be no reconciliation between the two. It is a struggle for life and death, a conflict of cosmic dimensions, with no compromise possible, no give-and-take attitude, with no middle ground. The feud is as cosmic as cosmic can be. There can be no rapprochement between God and Satan.

Gefira 82: A dying bird spreads out its wings

The moneyed elites are after the betterment of the world. How otherwise? That’s at least what they claim and want to make us believe. As it is, the moment you peel back the surface of the reality surrounding us, you can see that the world – the Western world – is going down the slippery slope – and fast – though the powers that be do not seem to be losing any sleep over this fact. They are not coming up with a solution how to stave off the debacle, they are not looking for an off-ramp from the situation that they have brought the world into. The moneyed elites keep kissing up to people of colour (as they say), people of the rainbow and other groups whose mention is dangerous. The conflicts that are playing out are spiraling out of control, but the moneyed elites couldn’t care less. The presidents, prime ministers and ministers produce strange mumbles to the tune of bringing about a better world and resisting the “far right”. Gefira 82 lays bare the dystopia that we are living it and is calling the elites’ bluff, analyzing the current plight of Italy, one of the major Western economies.

Judging by Italy (and extending the picture the the rest of Europe along with the United States) one cannot rid oneself of the impression that the Western world is a dead man walking, that the West has reached a tipping point (an optimist’s view) or a point of no return (a pessimist’s view); that it has become a shell of its former self and has lost its philosophical bearings. Navigating in troubled waters, the moneyed elites keep floating the ideas of transhumanism, climate change, or trans- or supranationalism. All these ideas fly it face of common sense and the wishes of the man in the street. The individuals of all political stripes who run the show and posture all the time, while flexing their muscles, are neither physically fit, nor mentally capable let alone morally willing to see reality for what it factually is in order to reverse course before it is too late. They have embroiled themselves in conflicts that never needed to happen. Though their mouths are full of peace and love for all humanity, they spew out visceral hatred towards selected “dictators” and “autocrats”.
With no-sugar coating, Gefira 82 showcases the Italian (read: Western) sanctimonious interest groups that love oh so much to pontificate about virtues and vices while bombing foreign nations into democracy or gagging their own citizens’ mouths. This Western tower of Babel is incapable of discerning the incremental losses that it is suffering; rather, the particular interest groups are deliriously putting their necks on the chopping block of history without realizing it. And – what an irony! – no parallels with the fate of ancient Rome are evocative enough for those who claim to be woke to wake up! They are hopelessly impervious to reason.

Rather than deescalating the conflicts that they have been (to put it mildly) ancillary to, they prefer to continue this ride on a wobbly track, being headed into the ravine, without pausing for a while and realizing that maybe Armageddon is just over the horizon. The historic screw-up that they pulled off in Ukraine, the social decay in their own countries that they are accessory to, the forever wars that they are engaged in, the weakening of a few powerhouse economies due to the green deal craze – all these and many more are the signs of the beginning of the end. In order to survive, the interest groups seek to sedate the millions by exuberant consumerism and especially moral license, which up the a point will help them to stay in this otherwise barely tenable position of power. That’s their only ticket to survival.

How do we see this ending with all those elites preening themselves on their moral superiority (while they have none), with all those jokes of presidents (Biden, Macron), prime ministers (Rishi Sunak, Scholz, Meloni) and ministers (Baerbock), with all their dismal failures, with their moral turpitude and the free-fall of Western nations, with the diplomacy sinking to an all-time low level? Sure enough, there is no stopping them. The interest groups, the moneyed elites, the powers that be, the managers of the world – or whatever other name they may go by – will continue to act as mouthpieces of the same obnoxious ideologies, they will continue on their path of replacing class warfare with race warfare and the warfare between hetero- and homosexuals. All those presidents, prime ministers and ministers will for sure do things straight out of their play books or scripts, and continue to bless us with their blockbuster ideas of the green deal (no meat consumption, no use of automobiles, no travel by plane), the myriad of sexes and ethnic replacement. They will continue with threat mongering, they will push bogey-man stories and throw around billions of dollars to finance regime-change operations around the globe, they will slaughter the pre-born (that’s what the word pre-g-nant – prae-natus means) and born innocents and control the narrative in the mass media by means of anti-hate-speech laws. Sadly, this huge stink must run its course to its bitter end. There is no silver-bullet solution. The age and health of President Biden is the reflection of the age and health of the West and a harbinger of the latter’s nearest future. If you don’t believe it, then recall the senile Leonid Brezhnev and count the years separating his demise from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

 

Gefira Financial Bulletin #82 is available now

  • Italy – a starting point for reflections on sociological and demographic developments in the world
  • Migrants and young, carefree sun worshippers
  • US banks’ problems return
  • Macau – a pearl in Asia, USA on the brink of recession

Make your own evaluation and tick off √

Rather than being presented with the data or an opinion of an expert or a pundit, we invite you to make your own evaluation of the state of the affairs. Drawing on your knowledge, tick off the boxes wherever you see fit and arrive at your own conclusions.

– What would you say about the entity that has gathered the largest number of ticks?

– What would you say about the entity that has gathered the smallest number of ticks?

Let us know.

Legal trap

In case you were wondering, a political entity may be ill-served by the international law once it becomes a signatory to it. In the power struggle that has always taken place and continues to take place, also the most noble ideas – like the introduction of international law – are wielded in the hands of politicians as weapons. You need to be on your guard also – or especially – when you are asked to agree to a piece of legal text to be later bound by it. Take the provision that makes culpable the party which begins a military aggression. Is that an irreproachable provision? At the face of it, we tend to answer approvingly. Yes, aggressors need to be condemned and need to be prevented from acting. Consequently, signatories to such a provision tend to think that this piece of legislations will serve them right. Not by any means!

One of the signatories may figure out the following: we can carry out attack after attack and so long as it is no physical – military attack – we are not going to be labelled as aggressor, while the other party is going to sustain political and economic or social losses. Thus, such attacks are carried out by one party to the detriment of the other party. Party A begins poking Party B in the eye, in the stomach, in the arm, Party A launches verbal attacks and only waits for Party B to either patiently accept such blows and sustain further losses or punch back. In either case Party A is holding the winning hand. It either continues tormenting its opponent, or provokes the opponent into pouncing back, in which case the opponent is internationally recognized as an aggressor. A nice legal trap.

Picture to yourself an ordinary circumstance: you intend to behave in a peaceful manner but someone keeps verbally abusing you, keeps ridiculing you and poking you now and again. We all understand: even if your patience and self-control equals that of an angel, sooner or later (some sooner, some later) you will punch back, and that’s it: you become an aggressor!

A wise man said: war ought not to be blamed on the one who began it, but on the one who made it unavoidable.

Pathetically piteous sight

A few days ago, Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, gave a speech in the EU parliament. This is what she had to say:

Allegedly voters of the EU deputies ask them how they could help Yulia in her fight and the deputies relay those questions to her. Before answering the question how, Yulia said that Putin (she repeated this name more times than one can stomach, just as Victoria Nuland did in one of her latest speeches), who had begun the murderous war, had gone nowhere, and that everything had already been used – weapons, money, sanctions – with nothing working. Stop. It is hard to believe that Yulia Navalnaya wrote the speech on her own or, granting she wrote it on her own, that no one had a look at it before her address. Did they not notice the contradiction between “Putin had gone nowhere” and “weapons, money, sanctions (i.e. the support for Ukraine) did not work”? Obviously, she was nervous, but still she read the short text from paper. Never mind, let us scan the rest of her speech.

She said that that the worst had happened (again, so Putin has achieved something after all) in that people were getting used to the war (read: they became indifferent) and then, she said sort of disconnectedly, Putin killed her husband. Worse, she said. On Putin’s orders her husband had been “tortured for three years and had been starved in a tiny stone cell, cut off from the outside world and denied visits, phone calls and then even letters. And then they killed him,” she repeated, as if not sure that the EU deputies had understood her the first time she said Putin had killed her husband. Then, said Yulia Navalnaya “they abused his body(?) and abused his mother(?),” which only goes to show that “Putin is capable of anything and that you cannot negotiate with him,” at which point something weird happened (have a listen from this moment for a few seconds). Barely had the audience begun to clap as she said “thank you” – just as if she had it written in her speech text: applauds here, make a stop.

Yulia Navalnaya continued that many people believed that Putin could not be defeated at all, and still they kept asking her how they could help. Before answering that question Yulia Navalnaya saw it fit to describe the character of her husband in more detail. She said he was an inventor(?) with new ideas for everything(?), especially in politics. Then she reminded the deputies that soon they would be campaigning to get reelected. Imagine, she said, that all this political campaigning was impossible because no TV station would allow an interview with you, no money in the world would make commercials possible while the voters and the candidates would be arrested once they turned up at a rally. If you could picture that to yourselves, said Yulia Navalnaya, that was precisely Putin’s Russia. Applause.

An aside here. It was also a few days ago that we could witness how British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak publicly went ballistic and freaked out because in ONE British constituency ONE man (George Galloway) outside the establishment was elected by the local people. Rishi Sunak addressing journalists in front of Downing Street 10 repeatedly described the event as an ugly victory of the far right extremists even though George Galloway’s political proclivities are leftist. Most likely Yulia Navalnaya does not know about it at all. Yet, she should know, living for so many years in the West, that people get deplatformed and demonetized in the social media whenever they voice opinions diverging from the political correctness of the West. She should also be familiar with the fate of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden or most recently Gonzalo Lira. Gonzalo Lira was tortured, isolated and killed by Ukrainians because he dared to express opinions diverging from those propagated by the Kiev regime. These three men are not Putin’s victims so they simply don’t matter.

Despite all the hindrances, Yulia Navalnaya continued, Alexei Navalny managed to become the most famous politician in Russia (really?), inspiring millions(you don’t say!) of people with his ideas. How did he do it, she asked herself. Well, if you are not allowed to appear on TV, let’s post YouTube videos for all to watch (surely, Alexei Navalny would not have been deplatformed like thousands of others!); even in Putin’s gulag, she said, Alexei was able to “pass ideas of projects that would make the Kremlin panic” (Wow!). But hang on for a moment! Didn’t she say a minute or so earlier that her husband was “cut off from the outside world and denied visits, phone calls and then even letters”? The audiences would not have noticed that, for sure. So the answer to the question of how to defeat Putin, she continued, is simple: you have to become an innovator, you have to stop being boring(!). Ovation. You cannot harm Putin, she said, with another set of resolutions or sanctions (obviously). “You cannot defeat him by thinking he is a man of principle who has morals and truths.” That’s dehumanization of the opponent or adversary in its purest form, an attitude which the Western ideologues are otherwise so vociferously against. This time the principle did not apply.

“You are not dealing with a politician,” Yulia Navalnaya continued, “but with a bloody monster. Putin is a leader of an organized criminal gang.” Here she was interrupted by an applause after which she went on saying, “it’s good to repeat it again: Putin is a leader of an organized criminal gang.” To which she received more applause. This criminal group includes “poisoners and assassins”. The inference? The West needs to fight organized crime or mafia headed by Putin (Putin’s mafia in Europe itself? Gee…). How? By fighting the mafia’s associates who happen to be operating in the West(!), who help Putin and his friends to hide money (Where? Why can’t he hide his money in Russia?). In this fight the West has, according to Yulia Navalnaya, “tens of millions(?) of Russians on the West’s side, Russians who are against war, against Putin, against the evil he brings.” The West “must not persecute them [Russians], but on the contrary” the West “must work with them [Russians]”. Putin must answer for all that he had done to Russia and Alexei (in the Hague, I guess). “The evil will fall, and the beautiful future will come.” These were the final words of Yulia Navalnaya’s speech delivered in the EU Parliament.

Compare this address with the latest rant by Victoria Nuland. Putin, Putin, Putin said again and again with vilification, insults, vitriolic hate, and you name it. Dehumanization, bad-mouthing and immolation. Poor woman. She most likely believes in everything she said. And poor as she is, she was used in this séance of hatred by those who are beginning to taste a crushing defeat at the hands of the “mafia boss”. A pathetically piteous sight.