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Interview: Soft Mind Control: More than 100 Years of Propaganda with Michelle Stiles

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99 Comments

  1. I was surprised to hear Metamask mentioned in your story on “The Western Sanctions Against Russia and US CBDC”. The reason is that Metamask is billed as a self custodial wallet. I don’t personally use it, but I was considering doing so.

    Check this story out:

    https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/03/04/opensea-metamask-block-users-sanctions/

    Digging deeper though, I find the post from Metamask:

    https://support.metamask.io/hc/en-us/articles/360059386712-Why-Infura-cannot-serve-certain-areas

    It’s not that Metamask is compromised per se. That is you won’t lose access to your crypto keys, but it’s the on ramps and off ramps like Infura that are still subject to KYC, sanctions, etc.

    What does this mean? The way Metamask gets around KYC rules is they aren’t actually managing or monitoring any of your data. They’re just putting a tool in your hands. It’s self custodial.

    But if you want to sell BTC for USD, you need to find a buyer who has USD and wants BTC. This would be really inconvenient if you had to wait for someone in your friends circle to want to trade with you. You could be waiting a long time. So what these exchanges are doing is essentially holding the inputs on both sides in escrow until the trade completes. They take out the need to trust the other person, or meet with them in person, know where they live, etc.

    It’s hard to imagine how you could do this at scale without an intermediary like this. You could decentralize the buy/sell orders easily. But for the transaction itself to occur in a trusted, reliable context, you need an entity capable of handling both USD in all its variety of forms (cash, check, credit card, venmo, paypal…) as well as the various crypto assets.

    Let’s say you did want to approach this without an intermediary. If you have a contract signed by both parties cryptographically, and you trust that the person with USD or other off-chain asset lives in a jurisdiction that will enforce the contract, you could then fulfill your end of the trade, and if the other party fails to do so you could take legal action against them.

    It’s reasonable to imagine that such trades could happen, especially amongst friends, but it’s definitely wild west compared to the current transactional systems.

    If this sort of approach were to become easier and more convenient for a user these steps would pave the way:

    • Development of a decentralized buy/sell listing
    • Development of a standard for the contract (existing solutions are likely adequate)
    • Integration of these features into the UI of the self custodial wallet
    • Guarantees at the jurisdiction level that cryptographic contracts can be presented in court and will be enforceable
    • Binding arbitration by experts competent in both law and crypto (to make the court determination more straightforward and reliable)
    • Potentially an insuring agent, which could be a government or for profit entity. The insurer would take responsibility for completing the trade, and would then be responsible for pursuing the party that failed to pay.

    I don’t know enough about KYC and sanctions to say if an insuring agent would be subject to the same kinds of restrictions. But I hope it’s clear where I’m going with this – decentralized transparency efforts and state level action (in USA) could be combined to result in jurisdictions where free unmediated exchange reaches a similar level of convenience as the “trust the bankers” approach. And I think you could take this in such a way as it dodges “facilitating the transaction” and instead “insuring the transaction”.

    Anyway, I hope that adds some clarity and maybe plants some seeds for further development. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know. I’ll repost this on Solari Connect as well.

  2. Re: John’s questions about the Sundance article – new rules were imposed on cryptocurrency transactions. The cellphone comment means: (a) EU phone number is a known-weak proxy for sanctions-compliant digital identity, until eIDAS 2023 provisional agreement is formally adopted by EU, (b) the “loophole” is likely a white-collar data-collecting speed trap for profiling future targets.

    https://resources.fenergo.com/blogs/5-things-in-2022-that-changed-how-we-do-kyc-in-banking

    For a country of Russia’s size to become the subject of such sweeping, rapidly introduced sanctions … is unprecedented … banks had to adapt to a new regulatory landscape … immense pressure on financial crime risk and compliance teams … KYC and risk management were the key to withstanding regulatory scrutiny and safeguarding banks’ reputations from association with oligarchy. 

    … it was feared crypto could enable sanctioned oligarchs to move their assets and wealth outside of the traditional financial system and regulatory frameworks … EU sanctioned “all crypto-asset wallets, accounts, or custody services,” no matter the value, the US issued numerous sanctions and bans against crypto and ‘mixers’, and the UK made it a criminal offence for exchanges to not report sanctions breaches. 

    eIDAS: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2021)698772

  3. hi! you really have to at least mark the sections in the podcast- what story is discusses when, or what part is news and what is charts, as they do often on youtube podcasts. it’s so long and there is a lot of lengthy and disorganized discussion, often some stories I don’t want to hear a whole 10 minutes on and with no way known when the stuff I’m interested in will be talked about. I want to hear what you have to say but just a 2 hour blob of uneven discussion is a lot for me! I’m sorry to be blunt but this has a been a pain point for me in the new format of Money & Markets,and I imagine for others too.

    1. As far as sub titles to search out nuggets, I need to take it all in, and look forward to and am sometimes surprised for what they talk about next..
      It would not bother me a bit if they went beyond the two hour mark by an hour or more. It’s all meat and potatoes to me.
      Even though, sometimes I may not understand everything, over time it all “Fitts” together…many aha moments sometimes months later. So, for me…?…I enjoy every moment and look forward to Money and Markets every week. Best Wishes, Steven .

      1. I second that, Steven. I am glad there is still one episode left before the end of the month.

    2. I generally avoid the video format especially the indulgent format with one talking head. I download, and transcribe that if I need the gist.
      Money and Markets though, is exceptional. The interplay adds a lot to the discussions.

  5. Responding to your question “Why did the media allow that forum take place” (the one with Rishi Sunak), i think i can offer an insight.

    That forum was put on by GB News, home of Neil Oliver. Like many other new alternative media, GB News appeared post Covid, and they seem to present a “rebel” mindset.

    However, if you look closely, GB News, like Rogan and the rest, are gatekeepers and narrative builders.

    My guess is that specific forum, like Tuckers recent speech in Canada on his “Sworn Enemy Tour”, is designed to push average citizens, who are stressed and angry, into the streets, or at least engaging in a form of civil unrest where the state can intervene. (aka online dissent etc)

    It’s February. As you pointed out, folks are running out of savings. In Canada, we are in the most brutal part of winter. People are ready to snap. Hence, the nudge team will be hard at work.

    Whether it is calling “patriots to the border”, goading farmers to block traffic, or encouraging angry lynch mobs into the streets, the same thing is happening everywhere, and as tempting as it might be, I would tell people do not engage.

  6. How about considering Denis Rancourt as hero of the week?

    In a recent interview with Kirsh, Rancourt said that there is no scientific evidence that there is a covid virus, and the identification of “variants” is junk science.

    Rancourt recently said that he intends to analyze the scientific validity of using pcr tests to diagnose da covid, another part of the psyop. Can’t wait for his scathing comments on that.

    Before the covid psyop, the cdc commented on the falsely identified pertussis outbreaks at Darmouth-Hitchcock, Boston Children’s and in Tennessee in the early 2000s. Using pcr tests, there appeared to be outbreaks, but the gold standard bacterial culture test showed that there was a nearly 100% false positive rate on the pcr test. Sort of like da covid, except there’s no gold standard test for da covid. (MDs should have known this, not hard to figure out.) Here’s a link.

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5633a1.htm

    Note that they also say the antibody test for pertussis is also pretty much worthless (not in so many words, of course). It seems that the much heralded biotech revolution is more like a biotech nightmare.

    Catherine, Rancourt’s comments on geopolitics were great, too. Maybe you would agree with him.

    1. We need to follow up on the “virus” thing and I suggest funding research into R R Rife’s experiments.
      In regard to the debate with Terrain Theory, those believers have a mental block from considering whether, for example, Omicron was a lab built inhaleable “vaccine”.

  7. Nobody has been silenced like the vaccine injured.
    Universally silenced.
    It can’t be contained forever.

    Sad that a lot of people still can’t draw the dots between their turbo cancer, heart attack or stroke and their covid shot a few months earlier.

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