In September of last year, Dimon not only came out swinging against bitcoin, but he threatened to fire all bank employees who dared to trade in bitcoin — for being “stupid.” If a JPMorgan trader began trading in bitcoin, he said, “I’d fire them in a second. For two reasons: It’s against our rules, and they’re stupid. And both are dangerous.” The cryptocurrency “won’t end well,” he told an investor conference in New York, as Bloomberg noted, predicting it will eventually blow up. “It’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs.”

In the interview on Tuesday, however, the megabank mogul expressed his change of heart. As FOX Business reported, Dimon regrets past comments in which he called Bitcoin a fraud at that September banking conference. “The blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that. ICO’s you have to look at individually,” Dimon said in an exclusive interview with FOX Business.

The tweet came in the form of a video, which starts out with a clip of then-President Bill Clinton announcing a 1994 deal with the North Korean regime that was meant to halt their nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid from the United States. “This is a good deal for the United States,” Clinton says in the clip. “North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.”

The former president added that South Korea and other allies of the US would be better protected because of the deal, and that “the entire world will be safer” as the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons is decreased.

Next is a clip of Donald Trump from 18 years ago, where he says during an interview on Meet the Press, “The biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation. And we have a country out there, North Korea, which is sort of whacko… and they are going out and they are developing nuclear weapons.”

Trump then posed the following question regarding taking military action against North Korea: “Do you want to do it in five years when they have warheads all over the place, every one of them pointing to New York City, to Washington… ?” He concludes by stating that it’s “better to do it now” rather than to wait for the North Korean regime to grow stronger.

If you fast-forward to today, then it becomes obvious that the warning Trump issued in that interview on Meet the Press was almost prophetic. We haven’t dealt with North Korea properly, and as a result, the regime now has nuclear missiles that they can use against the United States and our allies.

If people didn’t listen to Donald Trump 18 years ago, then perhaps now, with North Korea developing ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, they will start to do just that. Indeed, when it comes to Kim Jong-Un and his regime, military action is starting to become not just a possibility, but a necessity.

Iran, he said, is dangerous because it is “trying to establish an empire, a territorial empire from Tehran to Tartus in the Mediterranean, enveloping the Middle East also from the south through Yemen, eventually conquering the Middle East. This is what Iran is about.” He continued: “We are absolutely committed to preventing Iran from forming such a base, a military base in Syria, and we back our words with action.”

Israel has no interest in a direct confrontation with Iranian forces in Iran, but has shown that it is willing to take action against efforts by Iran to either transfer game-changing weapons to Hezbollah or building the infrastructure in Syria or Lebanon to build that type of weaponry there.

A smattering of Iranian soldiers and advisors in Syria, along with tens of thousands of members of Shiite militias, is a considerable security challenge for Jerusalem, but pales in comparison with the introduction of precision-guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah. Iranian tanks, and even planes in Syria, is something that Israel could deal with easier than weaponry defined as tipping the strategic balance. 

According to the Left, “hate” is any criticism of gays, lesbians, transgenders, black people, abortion clinics, Muslims and so on. No thoughtful criticism of such “protected” subjects is allowed, since it’s all deemed to be “hate.”

Left-wing truthism: White people are “dangerous” to everyone:

This targeted hatred of the Left is openly repeated across the left-wing news media, Hollywood movies, universities and other outlets. As just one example, an MSNBC panelist recently declared that white men “pose the biggest threat to Americans,” insisting that merely being white makes a person a danger to society. (She apparently has no familiarity with the work of MLK Jr. who correctly declared that judging people by the color of their skin is shallow and stupid.)

Yet at the same time, the Left openly encourages and practices its own hatred against a wide range of targets which are automatically deemed to be “okay to hate.” These targets include:

White people (“white privilege”)

Men (“toxic masculinity”)

Christians

Soldiers and veterans

Police officers

President Trump, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and other conservatives

Heterosexuals

America’s founders

Thus, the Left isn’t actually opposed to hate. They fully support hate as long as it’s directed to specific political enemies.

The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It’s there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.

They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.

Now, some of the early executives of these tech firms look on their success as tainted. “I feel tremendous guilt,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth at Facebook, in a public talk in November. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds… something bad could happen. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he went on gravely, before a hushed audience at Stanford business school. “It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave.”

Here is a partial transcript of Klein’s remarks:

“If we continue every year to give $600 million to the Palestinian Authority … why would they stop supporting terror if they keep getting their money? Why would we continue to perpetuate a deal with the Iranians when openly they support terror around the world and openly they are trying to destabilize the world at the expense of American national security. Why would they stop if we don’t do anything about sanctions or if we further this deal?”

“So Donald Trump, even if he does eventually give money to the Palestinian Authority, I think they have been put on notice right now – they have to be – that we are at least looking at this. Also by Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem after decades of the United States not doing that – and by the way, many presidents, when they ran, promised that they would and then they delayed – this also puts the Palestinian Authority on notice. If you continue to bolt peace negotiations than you are actually going to lose ground. You’re going to lose momentum. And also just think about it. How are they a peace partner if they need to be blackmailed into making peace? That makes absolutely no sense.”

The US provides about $600 million per year in assistance to the Palestinians. This includes direct aid to the PA, assistance through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UN’s Palestinian “refugee” agency UNRWA.

"In fact, it is possible for us to begin a process of working the land and improving agriculture – making it a very successful factor in our country," Ramaphosa said, addressing King Goodwill Zwelithini at Osuthu Palace – explaining the ANC’s decision to implement a policy of land expropriation.  Ramaphosa emphasised that the implementation of the ANC's policy must not harm the economy, the agriculture sector or food security.  

"We can make this country the garden of Eden," the new ruling party head said at a meeting to introduce the ANC’s new top six leaders to the Zulu king. Ramaphosa said redistributed land must be used productively. He estimated that increased food production could grow the economy by two million jobs. 

The week's haul at Christie's and Sotheby's topped $US1.5 billion, with Asian buyers snapping up Monets. Fernand Leger's abstract Contrastes de Formes fetched $US62 million. It screams late-cycle liquidity, recalling Japan's impressionist fever in the late Eighties before the Nikkei collapsed and the bottom fell out of the art market.

Bitcoin clinches the argument. It has risen 1200 per cent over the past year to $US7800 - five times an ounce of gold - on a "greater fool" presumption. This is not a criticism of blockchain technology. It will flourish. But you cannot yet buy and sell things in any meaningful way with cryptocurrencies worth $US180 billion.

Bitcoin will end badly, either when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launches its futures contracts in two weeks and allows traders to short it, or when the global cycle turns. A runaway asset boom can last a long time when the G4 central banks are holding real interest at minus 1.5 per cent and spending $US2 trillion a year soaking up "safe assets".

This global expansion is the second longest since the mid 19th century. It has been stretched because the recovery was so weak and because it was slowed by the eurozone banking crisis and the Chinese fiscal slump. Above all, it has been stretched by debt creation.