Yesterday, I watched The Anarchists on HBOMax.

For as long as I can remember, people around me either visited or lived part of the year in Mexico. Somehow, during the last couple of years that I’ve been playing with crypto, I’d not been aware of the Anarchists and their community in Acapulco. And the series indicates they were drawn there by crypto millionaire, Jeff Berwick, of whom I was also blissfully unaware.

The series starts with a family burning books on the beach and the kids saying fuck alot. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the attitudes behind these ex-pats. Without telling too much, as the series progresses, we come to understand how terribly damaged most of them actually were, and why bugging out made sense for them. Unfortunately, these misfits chose to bug out to the same place.

That Anarchapulco followed the fall of crypto, only to have FTX come along later and put nails in the coffin, makes the series compelling, and further cements the prevailing view that most of these people were simply con artists running Ponzi schemes.

As we’ve seen before, there probably wasn’t enough material in this story for a series, so they had to hype the personal problems of the subjects, which included a lot of threats from one guy on Facebook. When they introduced Acapulco as the home of Anarchists, I thought it odd, having seen all three seasons of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico. It’s also incredibly hot and expecting a bunch of whackjobs to get along in order to survive is definitely asking too much.

I never had much money to invest, but I bought near the recent top, took a little profit and watched the rest take the ride down. OTOH, we know people who moved all their investments to crypto and lost everything.

Last year, the Wife had a HVAC sales rep give us a quote. He happened to be on one of the local school boards and had a brother-in-law who quit his job and went all in on crypto. I spent an hour telling him what I knew about it.

Fortunately, rather than going head over heels for crypto, I hung back, listening to Tom Luongo, who preaches the beauty of the decentralized blockchain, but is not a Bitcoin maximalist. He actually predicted the rise in Fed interest rates six month beforehand and buttressed his notions with a desire to attract USD liquidity as quickly as possible, in order to rid us of LIBOR and the influence of the ECB. Since then, he recently chronicled how BlackRock attempted a run on the Bank of England and Credit Suisse, only to be backed up with loans from the Fed, now flush with cash.

Just as anarchists must at some point rely on things like law enforcement and medical assistance, so must we trust that our government will refrain from getting us into unnecessary wars. Even with nearly $1T going to the MIC each year, we have no military to speak of. The Pentagon is simply a much bigger version of Ukraine, in their ability to move funds to corporations and thereby, politicians.

The front end of our spears are insane neocon psychopaths with no reverse gear, who have been roundly criticized by Russia as being non-agreement capable. Nevertheless, Russia has managed to carve four Oblasts from Ukraine, with a minimum of civiliation casualties. And still, Ukraine shells the Donbass, as it has every night since 2014, but now with the help of US HIMARS missiles.

Experts indicate Russia will end up with Kiev and everything to the East of their Dnieper. The rest will probably end up as Poland. But people like Scott Ritter are rightly terrified we may never get there, and unfortunately, he knows what he’s talking about.

Just as the legal constraints of North Carolina’s Unemployment benefits program prevent me from participating, I understand what it must be like to have children in our school system: even if you wanted to comply, there is simply no way forward. However, I think the real lesson from The Anarchists is there is nowhere to run, for most of us. And even if there were, it might not be any better, because we tend to bring a lot of our problems with us.