SMOKES AND MIRRORS

A few years ago, I sat on a bench in a clinic waiting. I was bored and tired of waiting since one of my most fatal flaws was a lack of patience. While I sat trying not to lose my mind or get angry at the person who kept me waiting, I counted the ceiling tiles and square floor tiles, multiplied and summed them up by their digits and trying to infer ridiculous statistics as to why the tiles don’t follow a particular pattern – straight or horizontal. I found a child staring weirdly at him, his mum sitting close to him, obviously lost in her phone. The young child, about five years of age, walked to me, asking me what I was doing. I didn’t exactly know how to explain to him. So I explained to him that it was “magic.” I saw his face light up at the sound of magic. He was a child. Kids don’t want anything but magic. They enjoy mystery and the vagueness that comes with it all. I was distracted, the child was disturbing my permutations, and I just wanted him to go back to his mother in the most excellent way possible. So I grumbled a ‘yes.’ He was interested. He said in the tiniest voice, “Uncle, show me” I sighed. Kids are very persuasive in a sweet kind of way.

I sighed, pointed at the tiles told him to watch me. Pointing at the tiles, I started counting from behind. At the end of the whole charade, I could see he was silent. He probably wondered how I performed the ”magic”, his eyes gleaming. He was eventually pulled out of the trance by his mother. Who dragged him away with so much force. I just sat down and wondered if it was a good thing I had done to the kid. I had just deceived him with my pseudo-magic. It was just a counting trick. There was no magic or genius about it. I had learned the tile trick in the bathroom, trying to purge myself of food several years ago. It’s nothing. It’s just Smokes and

Mirrors.

A few years ago, I had a lecturer who told me that the entire financial market is one giant Ponzi scheme. It wasn’t easy to believe. I wasn’t convinced. How could the cradle of civilisation – money be a lie. Then I began doing my research. What I found out was incredible. The dollar backs all currencies globally, while since the 70s, the dollar has been backed by nothing, which was an astonishing discovery because many people still believe that the dollar is backed by gold, which is false since the 70s gold has been removed as the standard. Two questions; what sets the value for the dollar then? And where/what happened to all the gold in the world? It’s almost similar to the sham or pseudo-magic matching, what I performed for the child. Only in this case, this magic is/was completed by the most innovative financial experts in the world. The dollar gets its value from debts and IOU bonds, answering the first question as vaguely as possible. All the gold in the world owned by countries is supposed to be kept safely in two places (Two major central banks in the world – not mentioning their names), but not until recently did we realise that this gold is being sold to the highest bidders (Private organisations) and the profits used to service the IOU bonds. It gets more tricky because these IOU bonds are even sold. Meaning, countries are buying dollar debts to fund their economies. I wish it were all fiction. It’s not. It’s incredibly genius. Pseudo-magic but still genius. All that complex magic won’t be happening if we’ve just continued with the gold standard.

Money is any object the politicians call it – the government can turn around and make a piece of rock into a legal tender, set its value, and that’s what it is; no questions asked. Money is just a figment of man’s imagination. It was created so that we don’t kill each other in the quest for food. There’s nothing natural about it, except the paper we print them on. The financial crisis of 2008 made us understand how worthless money has become, regardless of currency. One moment your money can buy you a luxury home, and the next moment the entire money isn’t worth the paper, it was printed on. It’s all smokes and mirrors. The game is rigged from the beginning. The whole financial market is only going to remain vague to you because they want you to see it that way. Your questions will jeopardise the entire system. That’s why the advent of cryptocurrency doesn’t sit well with them. But even for cryptocurrencies, the idea has been defeated. Cryptocurrencies serve as an escape from fiat currencies, so in case of another economic meltdown which is inevitable, people wouldn’t suffer. The alarm bells have been ringing for years now, with no one paying any attention. Inflation formulas and metrics changing every day to suit the narrative that the one currency every other currencies are backed on is healthy. It’s not. It’s just an intelligent sham. The day countries request their gold back from these banks, what now happens? Well, I’ll keep the answer vague.