The Modern-Day Baroque - The Nicest Window-Dressing Ever

Do you remember in your college humanities class learning about the Baroque period, that time around the 1600s when everything belonging to the rich and powerful became garishly ornate? All the art, design, architecture, and music just got so much more decoratively entrancing.

If you remember the details about why that all happened at that time, it was really all just part of the Counter Reformation, a way for the Roman Catholic Church to augment its performance art duties in the most attractive way it could. For if you remember the Reformation Reformation, Rome noticed a lot of people reading the Bible and seeing God's Kingdom was nothing like what Rome told them it was.

So, to rein them back in, Rome had to do something to make things more appealing, more dazzling, more compelling to keep them in the club and paying good money to keep the religious racket thriving. 

All the spectacle of all that Rome has promoted through the centuries is no different than what happens in the financial markets, and I bring it up because of what is happening in the crypto markets right now. Bitcoin in particular has gone from something well over $100,000 a coin to now freefalling to $60,000 in just a week or so, and its total collapse is still imminent...

Unless the Catholicist performance artists can keep erecting all the modern-day Baroque window-dressing to deceive however many World System devotees they can to believe it is something any better than the bupkis it really is.

But yeah, this is the way the World works. If you aren't seeing reality with the mind of Christ, you're going to succumb to the pleasures of the ravishing performance art -- religious, political, cultural... all of it designed, arranged, and bilged into the mainstream so the rich and powerful may better perform their standard practice exploitation.

And it is all propelled by the authorized World Operatives -- in a very sobering sense permitted by God in order to keep them embracing their delusion. That's what they want, so, what of it?

Crypto is one of the most wicked of delusions.

Some people I see have been recognizing this truth. For years some very observant individuals have shared the truth about crypto, getting published a bit either in print or social media, even going the distance to call out those who hawk it as nothing more than petty scammers. Once again for the ill-informed:

Crypto, all crypto, including Bitcoin, is just computer numbers. It is a glop of computer numbers that some people typed into a database and to sell them using all kinds of financialese and technolese to cover for the fact that they were nothing but computer numbers that they have bleated could be used as a medium of exchange. The idea was because the Federal Reserve jerks the dollar around, crypto could get value exchange units out of the hands of the corrupt banks and voila! Financial interaction utopia.

The problem is there is no meaningful user base. No one uses crypto, ever (well, with that one exception, really). It is all still denominated in dollars. 

"How much is a crypto thing?" 

"Well today it is trading at $___, but yeah, sorry, it may not be that tomorrow." 

"Well okay then. See ya."

While it is true the Fed jerks our monetary unit values all about, they only do so because people want them to. This is because enough people vote to put Congress persons in power to get the Fed to do that, to gorge those who keep them politically viable with "printed up" money. The gold bugs are no better, gold is just shiny yellow rocks only having value because there is this idea that historically they've had value and they're scarce and a real store of value and -- ::iggh:: -- none of that means squat if the only thing that makes shiny yellow rocks valuable is because some people with something of a megaphone say they do.

Look at what's happening with silver. Silver is actually a meaningful commodity that has important industrial uses. Recently its prices went skyward, but now it is dropping back down like a rock, back to something of a reasonable price considering its legitimate supply and demand realities. All of those gyrations happen because some people somewhere are jerking them around for their exploitive benefit.

And that happens because people are living by the World and not the Kingdom.

And that happens because people are beholden to Rome and its baroque-style performance-art virtue-signaling boffo-extravaganza of entrenched club membership of being somebody so you won't get reamed somehow somewhere down the line even though they really don't give the tiniest shit about you and you're liable to be just as ruthlessly exploited...

...And you are not living by Christ through His word in His embrace.

One word that is making the rounds is related to the idea that crypto has only been a thing, ever, because it facilitates criminal activity. What we've been hearing from some now is that crypto isn't just the preferred exchange unit for racketeers, but for sexual predators -- those who are vibrantly engaged in human trafficking to acquire subjects for their pleasure, and this is perpetrated among the very rich and very powerful. The "Epstein Files" are much less about Jeffrey Epstein and his sex island than it is about the concerns people have that these people anywhere holding positions making critically important decisions about our livelihoods are into the most wretchedly evil things, and yes...

Are using crypto to facilitate it all.

I was listening to a podcast from fine apologist and one-time police investigator J. Warner Wallace, and he mentioned a pretty obvious truth in relation to why people do anything, including commit crimes. When trying to divine a motive in order to understand who committed a crime, it is an ironclad truth that people will do anything for one of three reasons and only those reasons: money, power, or sex. 

Wow. If one is not living by Christ and Kingdom, they're doing those things. However, wherever, that's all they do. You know it. It's not hard. Any religious activity done for appearances is just to make sure those three things are protected at all costs. Right now the smart, dedicated System Factualists (often derided as dumb, lunatic "Conspiracy Theorists") are seeing what is happening and watching the chickens coming home to roost.

What Wallace did add was, what were the motives of the disciples who gave their lives for the gospel? What were their motives if it wasn't money, power, or sex? It isn't hard to know if you too have a desire to live by the Kingdom. 

And the Truth. And Reality. And Love and Joy and Peace and all the amazing things God blesses us with in the Kingdom.

Asking Christ to think with His mind so you can truly understand what's really going on? Look at the first and second chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians. You'll see. You'll get it.

Oh, and one more thing. The very first building to be given the baroque treatment back centuries ago? It was the Church of the Gesu in the middle of Rome, the worship center of the Jesuits, the very best World Operatives doing what they must to keep people living richly by those precepts of the World.

___

The first image was clipped from the phenomenal film series Chernobyl, with the center orb in the mural representing an energy unit -- which adds another element of the idiocy about Bitcoin: that the energy required to "mine" them costs the miner far more than the value of the coin. The second image is a rendition of stickers I saw on the back of a vehicle I was behind the other day -- it made me laugh. I can't add this note enough: Read this book. It will tell you so much about the World System Operatives and how they do their jobs - and why. My most recent webzine home page piece also speaks a bit about the routine financial gyrations that destroy hearts and minds. And of course, the best thing to get deep into is this.

___