Feb 012024
 
 February 1, 2024  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,


Wassily Kandinsky Clear connection 1925

 

Let Me Get This Story Straight (Teslaconomics)
A Cult Whose Demise Should Probably Be Regretted (Karganovic)
White House Staffer Reveals What Biden Aides ‘Can’t Say Publicly’ (RT)
Greg Abbott and the Invasion of the Border Snatchers (Jeffries)
Chinese Defense Chief Promises Support To Russia On ‘Ukrainian Issue’ (RT)
NATO’s Big Hitters Oppose Ukrainian Membership – FP (RT)
Breakthrough On All Fronts Ahead Of Schedule (Helmer)
ICJ Rejects Ukraine’s Terrorism-Related Complaints Against Russia (TASS)
Zaluzhny May Become More Dangerous for Zelensky if Fired (Sp.)
US Troops Told To Prepare For War In Gaza – Media (RT)
No US Threat Will Go Unanswered – Iran (RT)
Will the Hegemon Ever Accept a New Westphalian World Order? (Pepe Escobar)
Monitor’s Report: Factual Inaccuracies, Disingenuous – Trump Attorney (ET)
Trump Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize (RT)
Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data (ET)

 

 

January 23 2018

 

 

 

 

X thread. “..if Elon were to not hit these milestones, he would have been paid essentially nothing..”

Let Me Get This Story Straight (Teslaconomics)

So Elon’s 2018 compensation package was approved by ~80% of Tesla shareholders during a time the company’s valuation was ~$60B ($20 per share). The plan would require him to grow the market cap by $50B increments with the first milestone starting at a $100B valuation with the final milestone being $650B, in addition to aggressive revenue, pretax profit growth targets that many thought would be impossible, especially knowing the company was facing bankruptcy dead in the eyes during this time. If Elon were to hit all the milestones, he would then be granted this full $55B compensation package that gave him stock options to purchase Tesla stock at a heavily discounted price and the stock could not be sold for another 5 yrs after exercising the options to prevent an “exercise & run”.

He hit all the milestones and created real value for the company & its shareholders (today, the valuation of Tesla sits at ~600B, a 10X from the year the comp package was approved, and a world class financial war chest). Also, btw, if Elon were to not hit these milestones, he would have been paid essentially nothing. Then in 2019, a shareholder named Richard Tornetta (who held 9 shares of Tesla) filed a lawsuit claiming that the compensation package was excessive & unfair, claiming the board had not acted in the best interest of its shareholders. Then today, the Delaware judge named Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick voided this compensation package claiming it was excessive and the process for coming up with Elon’s comp plan wasn’t independent bc he controlled the BOD and the directors who approved the plan weren’t truly independent.

Further claiming that the shareholders who approved the comp plan weren’t made aware of this controlled relationship. Wow… you really can’t make this stuff up, this is literally what just happened. Personally, I’m not so concerned about Tesla bc I believe the board & shareholders will approve an even better & more aggressive compensation package for Elon (e.g. include the $55B 2018 comp that he deserves, give him 25% voting share, include milestones for Tesla to become the largest valued company in the world & more, etc.) which will ultimately keep Elon motivated to stay at Tesla and build the future of AI & robotics within the company. However, my main concern here is the fundamental foundation of capitalism that America is built upon.

The CEO of a company was incentivized with a compensation package & it was approved by its shareholders to create value and he did. He hit all the milestones that were laid out, it wasn’t a pump or dump, and he didn’t steal or deceive shareholders. He simply went all in, put his blood, sweat, and tears into building the best products to change the world for the better, which created tremendous value for the ones that believed, invested, and stuck through. And now a judge has retroactively removed the reward for the leader that got the company to where it is today. Why would any CEO/founder in America want to work hard, when the result of his or her hard work can easily be taken away unfairly like this? What happened today, is very wrong and if nothing is done to fix it, it will crush the entrepreneurial spirit & heartbeat that America was originally built upon.

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There appears to be a strong link between this and what’s happening to Elon. A way of thinking, a culture, that’s falling apart.

A Cult Whose Demise Should Probably Be Regretted (Karganovic)

It would be unforgivably simplistic to attribute the implosion of the Soviet Union mainly to unfavourable demographics. That was a complex operation in which a multitude of factors played a role. But the virtue of the diagnostic investigation conducted forty years ago by Emmanuel Todd was that he demonstrated how seemingly minor yet tell-tale signs could point to undercurrents and important processes that unjustifiably may have been overlooked. And indeed, it is in the West now that tell-tale indications of disarray are increasingly emerging, to the consternation of those who have eyes to see and historical perspective to make comparisons. These signs point to a variety of breakdowns, only some of which are purely mechanical. They appear mostly to be cultural in essence, and therein lies the danger. A few recent random examples will serve to make the point.

Exhibit A: Political corruption. Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, who many suspect was cheated out of victory in the race for governor in 2022, is again the subject of political controversy in her state. A few weeks ago, she published the tape recording of a disgraceful bribe offer made to her by the state chairman of her own party. After requesting a confidential tête à tête conversation, that individual visited Lake in her home to inform her that wealthy and powerful “people back East” (in America that is a universally understood metaphor for deep state power centres) were prepared to satisfy Ms. Lake’s financial requirements if she would withdraw from the Senate race, presumably to make way for a controllable Establishment candidate. She only had to name her figure. To her credit, she flatly refused. Readers from “third world” countries will be nonplussed by these revelations. But the matter should be viewed in context. In America political corruption is not unknown, but the brazenness of this particular proposition made in Arizona is a quantum leap in relation to previously recorded outrages of that nature.

Exhibit B: Academic corruption. Harvard University President Claudine Gay was compelled to resign because of multiple plagiarisms discovered in her thin scholarly opus. Harvard was the flagship of the dozen leading Ivy League academic institutions in America. Its reputation for integrity is unimpeachable and sacrosanct. The appointment of the scarcely qualified Ms. Gay, apparently selected for her politically correct external characteristics rather than serious scholarship, was sufficiently problematic. But now her fall from grace, triggered by the embarrassing charge of plagiarism, gravely compromises not just Harvard but inescapably the American academe as a whole. And if that were not enough, also at Harvard another academic scandal is brewing. Credible allegations have been put forward, and are being investigated, that researchers at the Dana-Farber cancer institute affiliated with Harvard Medical School had manipulated images and research data.

One of the papers under review was authored by Dana-Farber CEO Laurie Glimcher. Molecular biologist Sholto David suggested Adobe Photoshop was used to copy and paste images in some of the papers. If correct, it is quite an adolescent way of cobbling together an academic research study. “We are committed to a culture of accountability and integrity. Therefore, every inquiry is examined fully to ensure the soundness of the scientific literature,” and so on and so forth without missing a single platitude, responded Dana-Farber’s research integrity officer Barrett Rollins in a statement issued after the embarrassing allegations were made public. But big words cannot hide the damage that had been inflicted nor suppress questions about the implications. Merely alleging such academically unbecoming trickery would have been unimaginable a very short time ago.

Exhibit C: Mechanical breakdown. Aviation does not seem to be fairing much better either. Boeing is an iconic American corporation. It is to industrial manufacturing roughly what Harvard is to higher education. That is a very important fact to remember when assessing the implications of several unprecedented Delta and Alaska Airlines incidents which occurred recently, involving Boeing commercial airplanes on which inadequately secured exit doors had been blown off in-flight. To make matters worse and disturbingly indicative of the quality of workmanship in the new normal, when these incidents occurred the airplanes (minus the critical plug bolts) were in mint condition, having come off the Boeing assembly lines just weeks before. Providentially, no one was sucked out into the surrounding stratosphere, but there is no guarantee that next time the passengers and crew will be as lucky.

The implications of these failures, that are only on the surface mechanical, may be colossal. They go to the core of Amiel’s observation about the cult of excellence that once upon a time reigned in the West. The question is: what has happened to it, what explains its disappearance?

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“She’s not popular, but you can’t remove the first black lady to be vice president from the g*****n presidential ticket..”

White House Staffer Reveals What Biden Aides ‘Can’t Say Publicly’ (RT)

A White House aide has admitted that his colleagues are worried about US President Joe Biden’s deteriorating cognitive skills and the unpopularity of his vice president, Kamala Harris, but they can’t publicly voice those concerns as the president seeks reelection later this year. Speaking in a hidden-camera interview posted online by undercover journalist James O’Keefe on Wednesday, White House cybersecurity analyst Charlie Kraiger acknowledged that the 81-year-old Biden is “slowing down.” He also said that there had been discussions about removing Harris from the 2024 ticket, given her struggles as vice president, but the Democratic Party’s nominees are set in stone.

“I think they need to get rid of him or get rid of her, but I don’t think they’re gonna do that,” Kraiger told O’Keefe, who disguised himself for the conversation by dyeing his hair and wearing fake glasses. Asked if White House staffers could speak publicly and truthfully regarding the fitness of Biden and Harris to seek another term, he added, “No, no, they’ve got to toe the line.” Kraiger admitted that staffers are “really concerned” about Biden’s mental state, which O’Keefe called “dementia,” but they have to keep those worries private. “They know it; of course, they do. But it’s the optics and, like, the scandal, I think they feel wouldn’t be worth it. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. Does it make sense? No, but that’s what I’ve heard.”

Kraiger works in the White House Executive Office as a cybersecurity analyst and foreign affairs desk officer, according to a now-locked LinkedIn account. He told O’Keefe that he manages security of the computer networks at the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The staffer said White House officials probably understand the severity of Biden’s mental decline, “but no one in modern history has ever said, like, we’re not gonna renominate the president for a second term. That just hasn’t happened.” White House aides are similarly fatalistic about the first female US vice president, who was born of a black father and an Indian mother. “She’s not popular, but you can’t remove the first black lady to be vice president from the g*****n presidential ticket,” he said.

“Like, what kind of message are you going to send to, like, African-American voters?” He added that Harris was unable to retain black staffers, who “quit on her en masse,” but administration officials “sadly” decided to keep her as Biden’s running mate after an internal debate. Kraiger described himself as “fairly high up” in the Biden administration and, ironically, he claimed to be “good at keeping secrets.” O’Keefe outed himself at the end of the interview, asking Kraiger how a White House security official wound up meeting with a famous hidden-camera journalist. “We’re running a good cybersecurity operation,” the staffer insisted. O’Keefe replied, “Obviously not, because you’re meeting with me. Did you not do your research? What is this clown show you guys are running over at the White House?”

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“The Founding Fathers (sorry, there were no Founding Mothers, and certainly no Founding Transgenders)..”

Greg Abbott and the Invasion of the Border Snatchers (Jeffries)

We’ve come a long way from the Boston Tea Party. What would happen to “extremists” throwing tea into a harbor today? Independence Hall. Lexington and Concord. The Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry declaring, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to my dying day your right to say it.” The Founding Fathers (sorry, there were no Founding Mothers, and certainly no Founding Transgenders) would all be marginalized if they were living and breathing in the Orwellian mess that is America 2.0. They’d be relegated to writing on Substack. Maybe some of them would be subscribers of mine. No mainstream media outlet would give them even a momentary platform. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Keep your “insurrectionist” thoughts to yourself. That little line should be confined to Ben Franklin’s womanizing. Yes, Ben actually used “would you like to join me in the pursuit of happiness?” as an eighteenth century pickup line. When he wasn’t consorting with prostitutes dressed as nuns in his demonic Hellfire Club.

Aside from Franklin, and certainly the bankers’ stooge Alexander Hamilton, the Founders were a legendary lot. The “greatest generation” if such a thing ever existed. As recently as 1963, Thomas Jefferson was thought so highly of that President Kennedy would tell a state dinner comprised of some of the leading cultural figures of the time, “The is the greatest assemblage of talent ever gathered together in the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” That kind of comment would get any Democrat, and probably any American, “cancelled” today. Sally Hemings was the real talent behind Jefferson. She wrote the Declaration of Independence. Designed Monticello. Ask any court historian. He was a racist rapist.

One of the few responsibilities ceded to the central government under the Constitution is defending the border. Article 4, section 4, states clearly that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion…” Our southern border has been under an invasion of illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented migrants, whatever you want to call them, for over forty years now. More significantly, the federal government has gone beyond enabling this invasion. They have assisted it. Made it possible. Probably financed much of it. Greg Abbott has been governor of Texas since 2015. He epitomizes the Stupid Party’s tradition of issuing lukewarm rhetoric about “border security,” but ultimately doing nothing to stop the invasion. For unclear reasons, he has now stepped up the rhetoric decisively. After the Supreme Court- Trump’s supposed court, with his lovely nominee Amy Coney Barrett voting with the Left as usual- made one of its trademark disastrous decisions, Abbott threw down the gauntlet.

The Court ruled that Texas can not try to stop the Feds from cutting down the barbed wire fencing they’ve put up in places, in a laughable attempt to stop the flow of immigrants. Think about that; the highest court in the land- the Supreme Court- has ruled that a state cannot defend its borders. True, the Feds are constitutionally delegated with that power, but they quite blatantly have neglected to do this for several decades now. Under the Biden administration, the numbers coming across the border with literally no resistance from U.S. authorities, have reached such a critical mass that it has finally caught the attention of even the sleeping Republicucks. When you have one of the three branches in government- the Executive- aiding and abetting a foreign invasion, another- the Legislative- encouraging it as well, and now the Judicial branch giving the invasion a legal imprimatur, then you understand the situation.

Abbott’s fiery statements brought to mind visions of Sons of Liberty dancing in our heads. He has sounded remarkably like the Confederates did back in 1860, when he charged that the federal government has broken their “compact” with the states. This was the central premise behind the decision of the southern states to secede. Our fast food culture insists it was all about slavery. The dastardly, tobacco spitting whiter than White secessionists wanted their slaves, and that was that. Abraham Lincoln, the secular saint of our crumbling civilization, responded by declaring, “The Union of these States is perpetual.” That contradicted, of course, the guiding principle of our War for Independence, which was that all people have a right to consent to those who govern them. In 1860, the Confederate states no longer consented.

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“Russia and China are not “creating military blocs,” and their military cooperation is not “directed against third countries.”

Chinese Defense Chief Promises Support To Russia On ‘Ukrainian Issue’ (RT)

Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun has told his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoigu, that strategic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is a pillar of maintaining peace around the globe, in his first public appearance since his appointment at the end of last year. As two great powers, Russia and China should deepen their cooperation and decisively respond to global challenges, the defense chiefs said during a video call on Wednesday. “We have supported you on the Ukrainian issue despite the fact that the US and the EU continue to put pressure on the Chinese side,” Dong stated, promising that Beijing “will not change or abandon our established policy course over this,” even under the threat of more sanctions.

At the same time, China feels “strong support from the Russian side on the Taiwan issue as well as on other topics of our key interests,” Dong added. “As the two most important and key forces in the world, we should decisively respond to global challenges.” Beijing’s newly-appointed defense chief claimed that “the US is always targeting Russia and China, seeking to retain its hegemony around the globe,” but added that “history and the reality prove that hegemony is doomed to failure.” Shoigu agreed that unlike Western states, Russia and China are not “creating military blocs,” and their military cooperation is not “directed against third countries.” The defense chief noted that “Russian-Chinese relations in the military sphere are developing steadily in all areas,” and said he was looking forward to “close, productive cooperation” with his Chinese counterpart.

China’s position on the Ukraine crisis has put it at odds with the US, with some American officials accusing Beijing of actively supporting Moscow rather than maintaining neutrality. Beijing has blamed NATO’s expansion in Europe for the crisis in Ukraine and has denounced the use of unilateral sanctions by the US and its allies as a tool of geopolitical pressure. Moscow perceives the Ukraine conflict as part of a Western proxy war against Russia, which is being waged in an attempt to preserve US hegemony on the world stage. Chinese officials have said that Washington is stuck in a “Cold War mentality.”

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US and Germany.

NATO’s Big Hitters Oppose Ukrainian Membership – FP (RT)

The US and Germany are resisting calls by NATO allies to invite Ukraine into the bloc at a major summit later this year, fearing that the move could trigger a full-scale clash with Russia, Foreign Policy magazine reported on Tuesday. Citing a dozen current and former officials, the American magazine wrote that both Kiev and some of its most ardent backers, including Poland and the Baltic states, are pushing for Ukraine to be accepted into the US-led bloc at a key summit in Washington, DC in July. Proponents of fast-tracking Ukraine’s NATO bid argue that only full-fledged membership for Kiev could force Russia to end the conflict, while claiming that the move would be cheaper in the long run than arms shipments in perpetuity.

However, according to the article, the US and Germany, the two top supporters of Ukraine in terms of military aid, disagree. Officials in these countries reportedly believe that while Kiev should eventually join NATO, now is not the right time, adding that the West should instead focus on supplying Ukraine with weapons. FP added that admitting Ukraine into the bloc while it is locked in a conflict with Russia could trigger a full-scale clash between NATO and Moscow, stemming from Article 5 of the alliance’s treaty which stipulates that an attack on one member of the bloc is an attack on all members.

According to FP, the stand-off is exacerbated by the stance of several EU members, including Hungary and Slovakia, who have opposed sending arms to Ukraine. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has warned that Kiev’s membership in the bloc could draw NATO into the conflict. His Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, has said the move could spark World War III. The US has reportedly urged EU members not to raise the issue at the summit, arguing that it could expose behind-the-scenes divisions. Moscow has repeatedly warned the West against providing military aid to Ukraine, saying it will only prolong the conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also said that Kiev’s push to join NATO, which was enshrined in its constitution as a strategic objective in 2019, was one of the key reasons for the current conflict.

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“I imagine we’ll start seeing Russian tanks with fuel tanks fitted for extended range appearing and Russian airborne troops making air assaults in the Ukrainian rear within weeks.”

Breakthrough On All Fronts Ahead Of Schedule (Helmer)

When the General Staff have been discussing with President Vladimir Putin the timing of the Russian offensive to force the Kiev regime into capitulation, it has been agreed, understood, and repeated that the strategic reserves of the Ukrainian forces should be destroyed first, together with the supply lines for the weapons and ammunition crossing the border from the US and the NATO allies. This process, they also agreed, should take as long as required with least casualties on the Russian side, as determined by military intelligence. Also agreed and pre-conditional, there should be no repeat of the political intelligence failures of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) which precipitated the failed special forces operation known as the Battle of Antonov (Hostomel) Airport from February 24 to April 2, 2022.

Taking account of the mistakes made then by the SVR director, Sergei Naryshkin, and the subsequent mistakes of military officers around Yevgeny Prigozhin, the General Staff has also accepted that their tactical operations must run least risk of Russian casualties through March 17, the final day of the presidential election. Reinforcing these preconditions for the timing of the Russian offensive, General Winter and General Patience, have joined the Stavka meetings. This week military sources believe there has been a turning point – on the Ukrainian battlefield, and on the Russian clock. The daily Defense Ministry briefing and bulletin from Moscow reported last Thursday, before the Friday weekly summary, that the Ukrainian KIA (killed in action) for the previous twenty-four hours totaled 795, with the ratio of offensive tactics to defence, 3 to 3. On Monday, the KIA total was 680, the ratio 4 to 3. On Tuesday, KIA came to 885, the ratio 5 to 1. The casualty rate is unusually high; the shift to offence is recognizably new, if not announced.

The “Stavka Project”, a military briefing which is broadcast by Vladimir Soloviev, confirms the positional breakthroughs this week on several of the fronts or “directions”, as the Defense Ministry calls them, along the Donbass line; click to watch (in Russian). In Boris Rozhin’s summary of the Defense Ministry briefing materials, published before dawn on Wednesday morning, the leading Russian military blogger (Colonel Cassad) identifies “small advances”, “slight movements”, some positional “successes”, other positional “counter-fighting”, and “no significant progress yet”. The adverb is military talk for timing. According to a military source outside Russia, “the Russian breakthrough is beginning to happen now. It’s being coordinated with strikes and raids along the northern border. The commitment of the ‘crack’ Ukrainian brigades at the expense of other sectors shows how desperate [General Valery] Zaluzhny is to plug the holes.

He knows that the target is the isolation of Kharkov, the establishment of a demilitarized ‘buffer zone’, as well as the development of a situation whereby all Ukrainian forces east of the Dnieper are threatened with being cut off… and he’s quickly running out of ammunition, not to mention cannon fodder.” “By the end of the winter,” the source has added overnight, “the Ukrainians will barely be able to move along the roads they use to feed the front due to the Russian drone, missile, conventional air, and artillery strikes. Once they can no longer plug the gaps with mechanized units acting as fire-fighting brigades, it’s just a matter of time before the big breakthroughs and encirclements begin. At the current burn rate of Ukrainian forces, I imagine we’ll start seeing Russian tanks with fuel tanks fitted for extended range appearing and Russian airborne troops making air assaults in the Ukrainian rear within weeks.”

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“Ukraine sought to prove that the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic are terrorist organizations..”

ICJ Rejects Ukraine’s Terrorism-Related Complaints Against Russia (TASS)

The UN International Court of Justice has found most of Ukraine’s complaints against Russia in a lawsuit over potential violations of the convention that fights the financing of terrorism to be groundless, court President Joan Donoghue said as she read out the verdict. She said Russia failed to conduct investigations into people who could allegedly finance terrorism in Ukraine. The court rejected Ukraine’s accusations that Russia violated the other clauses of the convention, which were listed in the Ukrainian lawsuit. On 16 January 2017, Ukraine filed a lawsuit with the court accusing Russia of violating the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. As part of the case, where it concerns the convention on stopping the financing of terrorism, Ukraine sought to prove that the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic are terrorist organizations, and Russia gave them funding and weapons.

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“London is more interested in the continuation of the conflict and in waging a “terrorist war.” But Washington is much more keen to freeze the conflict, given the forthcoming presidential elections..”

Zaluzhny May Become More Dangerous for Zelensky if Fired (Sp.)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is still seeking to replace Zaluzhny despite dismissing the rumors of the general’s sacking earlier, the Financial Times reported. The newspaper’s sources claimed that Zaluzhny was offered a position as a defense adviser, but that he turned it down. Possible candidates for Zaluzhny’s replacement are said to be Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, and Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the country’s military intelligence directorate. But the Economist and the Times report that both have refused to fill Zaluzhny’s shoes. The British press drew attention to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s opposition to Zelensky’s apparent move: “Firing Zaluzhny, if true, would hit at the heart of national unity,” wrote Poroshenko.

“The fact is that there was an attempt to replace Zaluzhny; it was an impromptu attempt that failed, because Zelensky hoped to remove a political competitor, not so much a military one,” Alexander Dudchak, leading researcher at the Institute of CIS Countries, and expert on the ‘Another Ukraine’ movement, told Sputnik. “And the fact that he offered [Zaluzhny] the position of adviser [speaks volumes]. By assuming that role he would have moved away from military affairs while not becoming a political competitor,” Dudchak said. “But in Ukraine, two different Western groups are trying to solve their problems: one from Washington, the other from London, with slightly different visions of the future of Ukraine, how to use it and what to do with it now, and in general — there are forces through which they accomplish their tasks.”

It is these forces who are playing the Zaluzhny card right now, the researcher argued. According to Dudchak, the so-called pro-US faction includes Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and some figures in the President’s Office. The other grouping is pro-British and includes the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (GUR), its chief Budanov and Syrsky.”So far the replacement has been cancelled. This does not mean that Budanov changed his mind or that Syrsky did not want to [assume the position]. Who’s asking them? Syrsky has no opinion of his own. He even changed the language he speaks. Because listening to him speaking Ukrainian is weird. And will he show some kind of opinion? No way,” Dudchak explained.

“So for now, the operation to replace Zaluzhny has simply been postponed. This does not mean that he will not be removed. Therefore, these figures which look suitable for replacing Zaluzhny have remained in a standby mode for now.” The decision to replace Zaluzhny could stem from the West’s changing goals in Ukraine. The researcher outlined two scenarios, apparently sought by Washington and London: London is more interested in the continuation of the conflict and in waging a “terrorist war.” But Washington is much more keen to freeze the conflict, given the forthcoming presidential elections in November 2024.

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“..on standby to forward deploy to support troops in the case of on ground US involvement in the Israel Hamas war..”

US Troops Told To Prepare For War In Gaza – Media (RT)

US Air Force personnel in Iraq have been ordered to remain on standby in case of “on ground US involvement in the Israel Hamas war,” The Intercept reported on Tuesday, citing a Pentagon memo. Circulated earlier this month, the memo instructs an unknown number of troops to be placed “on standby to forward deploy to support troops in the case of on ground US involvement in the Israel Hamas war,” the news site reported. The standby order applies to troops stationed in Iraq since last year, according to a separate Pentagon document seen by The Intercept. The White House has stated on several occasions since October that its support for the Jewish state would not involve American soldiers fighting alongside their Israeli counterparts.

The US responded to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel by immediately dispatching two aircraft carriers to the region and preparing 2,000 additional troops for deployment to the Middle East, but White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on October 10 that “there is no intention to put US boots on the ground” in Israel or Gaza. However, US special forces have been active in Israel since October, with senior official Christopher Maier telling reporters at the time that American commandos were “actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things.” The Pentagon has also admitted to flying spy drones over Gaza “in support of hostage recovery efforts.” Since the conflict began, US troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan have come under fire more than 150 times, with Iran-aligned Shi’ite militias subjecting their bases to regular drone and rocket barrages.

One such attack on an outpost in Jordan on Sunday killed three US soldiers and injured several dozen others. American ships and warplanes have also launched several strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen, in a bid to break the Houthi blockade on “Israel-linked” merchant shipping passing through the Red Sea. The Houthis have responded by targeting US commercial and military vessels in the area. On Wednesday, the militants announced that they had fired multiple missiles at the destroyer USS Gravely. US Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said that the Graveley shot down one incoming missile, and suffered no damage or casualties.

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“These groups decide and act based on their own principles and priorities as well as the interests of their country and people..”

No US Threat Will Go Unanswered – Iran (RT)

Iran will not let any threat from the US go “unanswered,” the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Wednesday. The statement came after US President Joe Biden said he had drawn up a response to an attack on American troops in Jordan. Biden told reporters on Tuesday that he had decided how to respond to the drone attack, which left three US soldiers dead and dozens more injured on Sunday. The White House blamed the assault on Iranian-aligned militants operating in Iraq and Syria, while Biden said he holds Iran responsible for the deaths, “in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.” The US president did not reveal what kind of response he had planned.

“We hear threats coming from American officials, [and] we tell them that they have already tested us and we now know one another, no threat will be left unanswered,” Major General Hossein Salami said at an event in Tehran, according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency. “We are not looking for a war, but are not afraid of war either,” the IRGC commander added. Iran’s envoy to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, issued a similar warning on Tuesday night. “The Islamic Republic will decisively respond to any attack on the county, its interests and nationals under any pretexts,” Iravani said, according to Iran’s state news agency, IRNA.

Tehran has denied orchestrating the fatal attack on US troops. While Iran arms and trains numerous Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Monday that these fighters “do not take orders from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” “These groups decide and act based on their own principles and priorities as well as the interests of their country and people,” a ministry spokesman said. Militant groups have launched more than 150 attacks on US bases in the Middle East in recent months, but Sunday’s incident marked the first time American troops in the region were confirmed killed by enemy fire since the Israel-Hamas war began in October.

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“..the permanent NATO obsession in preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means necessary..”

Will the Hegemon Ever Accept a New Westphalian World Order? (Pepe Escobar)

A new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order, out in mid-February, asks the make-or-break question of the young 21st century: will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go Captain Ahab on Moby Dick and drag us all to the depths of a – nuclear – abyss?

[..] Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here. He starts to make the case harking back to the Silk Roads: “The Silk Road was an early model of globalization, although it did not result in a common world order as the civilizations of the world were primarily connected to nomadic intermediaries.” The demise of the Heartland-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the rise of the thalassocratic European powers reconnecting the world in a different way. Yet the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia. We did not in fact had “five centuries of western dominance”, according to Diesen: it was more like three, or even two (see, for instance, the work of Andre Gunder Frank). In a historical Long View that barely registers.

What is indeed The Big Picture now is that “the unique world order” produced by controlling “the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end”. Diesen hits the nail on the head when it comes to the Russia-China strategic partnership – on which the overwhelmingly majority of European intellectuals is clueless (a crucial exception is French historian, demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, whose latest book I analyzed here.) With a lovely on the road formulation, Diesen shows how “Russia can be considered the successor of the Mongolian nomads as the last custodian of the Eurasian land corridor”, while China revives the Ancient Silk Roads “with economic connectivity”. In consequence, “a powerful Eurasian gravitational pull is thus reorganizing the supercontinent and the wider world.”

Poviding context, Diesen needs to engage in an obligatory detour to the basics of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is how Moscow already was pivoting to Asia all the way to the late 19th century, when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte started to develop a groundbreaking road map for a Eurasia political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List.” Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe as it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises’”. And that implies going back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.” Dostoyevsky meets Putin-Xi. Diesen also needs to go through the obligatory references to Mackinder’s “heartland” obsession – which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics for the past hundred and twenty years.

Mackinder was spooked by railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by the Russians – as it enabled Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the Scythians, Huns and Mongols” that were essential to control most of Eurasia. Mackinder was particularly focused on railways acting “chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce”. Ergo, being a thalassocratic power was not enough: “The heartland is the region to which under modern conditions, sea power can be refused access.” And that’s what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: to “prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power.” That explains everything from WWI and WWII to the permanent NATO obsession in preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means necessary.

Read more …

“..fees paid by the Trump Organization. Ms. Jones has been paid $2.6 million in her 14-month period as an independent monitor..”

Monitor’s Report: Factual Inaccuracies, Disingenuous – Trump Attorney (ET)

Attorneys for former President Donald Trump on Monday responded to a recent report issued by a court-appointed independent monitor regarding Trump Organization finances, disputing former judge Barbara Jones’s characterization of the financial statements as incomplete and inconsistent. Ms. Jones recommended that third party monitoring of Trump Organization continue, and concluded that “misstatements and errors may continue to occur,” which defense attorneys said was an effort to continue the monitor’s “exorbitant” fees paid by the Trump Organization. Ms. Jones has been paid $2.6 million in her 14-month period as an independent monitor on the case. Ms. Jones’s team has received Trump Organization financial disclosures to third parties, including lenders and insurers; agreements and documents related to transactions; documents related to Trump Organization entities and dissolutions; bank statements; and documents provided to tax authorities.

Attorney Clifford Robert claimed that the Jan. 26 report, submitted at the request of the court, was also meant to “fill the gaping hole in the Attorney General’s case” and was issued “in bad faith.” “The January 26 Report also contains numerous factual inaccuracies (casting serious doubt on the Monitor’s competency), fails to reference governing standards of any kind, and is otherwise misleading and disingenuous,” the letter reads. The report pointed out errors on seven disclosure items, three inconsistencies, and five clerical errors, which the defense argues are immaterial amid the thousands of pages of financial data related to the 400 entities Ms. Jones is monitoring.

“The Monitor was appointed to report any financial reporting misconduct, suspicious activity or any suspected or actual fraudulent activity,“ the letter reads. ”The Monitor was not appointed to identify math errors or otherwise sensationalize minor and inconsequential accounting discrepancies scattered throughout the financial reports of the over 400 companies comprising the Defendants’ global enterprise.” Mr. Robert pointed out that the biggest discrepancy Ms. Jones identified was a difference of $1 million in an “internal trial balance presentation,” and had no actual impact. Mentions of delays in implementing transactions had provided “no evidence of any inappropriate or untoward conduct,” he added, claiming this representation as an effort to “malign such disclosures.”

Mr. Robert noted that the words “misconduct,” “suspicious activity,” “suspected fraud,” or “actual fraud” do not appear in Ms. Jones’s report at all, and argued the errors she cites have been blown out of proportion. “Moreover, as the Reports and the January 26 Report make clear, every item identified has been resolved to the full satisfaction of the Monitor,” he added. “She has not and cannot point to even a single instance of controversy or complaint between any of the Defendants and outside third parties.”

Read more …

Abraham Accords.

Trump Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has been put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the signing of a treaty that helped normalize relations between Israel and several Arab states. The proposal was made by Republican congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who told Fox News on Tuesday that Trump was “instrumental” in facilitating the “historic” Abraham Accords, which she said were “the first peace agreements in the Middle East in almost 30 years.” The lawmaker praised the former president and GOP frontrunner, saying Trump had proven many foreign policy pundits wrong who argued for decades that additional Middle East peace agreements were impossible without a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

”The valiant efforts by President Trump in creating the Abraham Accords were unprecedented and continue to go unrecognized by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, underscoring the need for his nomination today,” Tenney stated, adding that the move comes at a time when President Joe Biden’s “weak leadership” on the global stage has put national security at risk. Over the weekend, three US service members were killed and dozens were injured in a drone attack on a military outpost in Jordan. Biden has pledged to respond, blaming the incident on Iranian-backed militias. Tehran has denied any involvement in the attack. The Abraham Accords were a series of US-mediated bilateral agreements signed in late 2020 between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. They helped bring the Jewish state and the Arab nations closer, with the UAE and Bahrain also recognizing Israel’s sovereignty.

However, the treaty has been criticized for emboldening Israel to ignore the rights of Palestinians, as it resulted in Arab states dropping the demand to recognize the state of Palestine. Some experts have argued that the move paved the way for the recent surge in violence. Trump had already been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. In 2020, he was put up for the award by Norwegian MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who praised the former president for what he described as his peace-making efforts in the Middle East. That same year, Trump was nominated by Swedish MP Magnus Jacobsson, who cited his role in brokering a deal between Serbia and its breakaway region of Kosovo. Trump’s nomination is considered valid as it was submitted by a member of a national assembly or national government. The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo, Norway in October and awarded in December.

Read more …

“..the methods that NOAA employs to try to reduce this don’t work because the bias is so overwhelming..”

Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data (ET)

To preserve a “livable planet,” the Earth can’t warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the United Nations warns.Failure to maintain that level could lead to several catastrophes, including increased droughts and weather-related disasters, more heat-related illnesses and deaths, and less food and more poverty, according to NASA. To avert the looming tribulations and limit global temperature increases, 194 member states and the European Union in 2016 signed the U.N. Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty with a goal to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.” After the agreement, global spending on climate-related projects increased exponentially. In 2021 and 2022, the world’s taxpayers spent, on average, $1.3 trillion on such projects each year, according to the nonprofit advisory group Climate Policy Initiative.

That’s more than double the spending rate in 2019 and 2020, which came in at $653 billion per year, and it’s significantly up from the $364 billion per year in 2011 and 2012, the report found. Despite the money pouring in, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record. NOAA’s climate monitoring stations found that the Earth’s average land and ocean surface temperature in 2023 was 1.35 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record—it was the warmest by far,” said Sarah Kapnick, NOAA’s chief scientist. “A warming planet means we need to be prepared for the impacts of climate change that are happening here and now, like extreme weather events that become both more frequent and severe.”

But a growing chorus of climate scientists are saying the temperature readings are faulty and that the trillions of dollars pouring in are based on a problem that doesn’t exist. More than 90 percent of NOAA’s temperature monitoring stations have a heat bias, according to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, author of climate website Watts Up With That, and director of a study that examined NOAA’s climate stations. “And with that large of a number, over 90 percent, the methods that NOAA employs to try to reduce this don’t work because the bias is so overwhelming,” Mr. Watts told The Epoch Times.“The few stations that are left that are not biased because they are, for example, outside of town in a field and are an agricultural research station that’s been around for 100 years … their data gets completely swamped by the much larger set of biased data. There’s no way you can adjust that out.”

Read more …

 

 

 

Marmot
https://twitter.com/i/status/1752682125252297138

 

 

Chase
https://twitter.com/i/status/1752376130449895755

 

 

Boops

 

 

Cat Fox

 

 

Bamboo
https://twitter.com/i/status/1752374246402044238

 

 

Sponge cake

 

 

Texas long horn

 

 

Wind
https://twitter.com/i/status/1752576215293038884

 

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle February 1 2024

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 76 total)
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  • #151653

    Wassily Kandinsky Clear connection 1925   • Let Me Get This Story Straight (Teslaconomics) • A Cult Whose Demise Should Probably Be Regretted (Ka
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle February 1 2024]

    #151654
    ram
    Participant

    I have two Kandinsky paintings hanging on my walls. I’ve studied his works extensively, yet I’ve never seen the Kandinsky you are displaying. Yet I am sure it is genuine. Can you say where it is?

    #151655
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    The implications of these failures, that are only on the surface mechanical, may be colossal. They go to the core of Amiel’s observation about the cult of excellence that once upon a time reigned in the West. The question is: what has happened to it, what explains its disappearance?

    In a word: Greed!
    As a master machinist for more than 30 years; I witnessed the destruction of standards of excellence destroyed by poor; no, rotten/corrupt management over that period of time.
    What caused this? Look no further that your overloards of that time…
    The U.S. is dying by thousands of cuts; bail while you can…there are no viable alternatives in the view askew as far as I can see…………..

    #151656

    ram: Can you say where it is?

    https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/work-478.php

    #151657
    boilingfrog
    Participant

    “If a tree falls in the forest and no editor will print the story, does it make a sound?”

    #151658
    oxymoron
    Participant

    Sponge cake the cat sure is racking up those carbon offset obligations. Is that Greta Thunberg carrying her?

    #151659
    tboc
    Participant

    V. Arnold how would you consider the thought that prediction has replaced measurement in management? The immediacy of Rent seeking and the narrowing of the planning window to hours from years is plain to see and even applauded. Looking at western culture from business to physics prediction appears to have replaced measurement and the outcome is visible across the board. The observation problem, The Uncertainty Principle, and entropy are completely ignored, and as you observe, have been replaced with greed driven by prediction. A connection to The Bloomberg High Speed Terminal is all that is needed in the most sophisticated Rent seeking. The ability to skim from every transaction at the small broker level. The ability to see a transaction and respond before the transaction reaches the trading desk. Greed.

    Copernicus as part of his observation of helio centricity maintained the “stars are fixed in the heavens”. The mindset of western thought remains at that state as the verse and information expands away at a frightening speed. The astrophyisicists used to maintain “there is no center to the Universe” i see this is not accurate, almost everyone i know is the center of the verse.

    I still have faith in the deplorables, the under educated, and my heart will not allow me to throw in the towel. A little styptic pencil and a wipe of vaseline and back into the ring.
    Take care V. Arnold

    #151660
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial Performance” — New York Times

    You’re kidding right? How’s their “financial performance” doing when everyone cancels their planes for the next 20 years? Was bribing OSHA worth it now? Making people not want to run away from you screaming is the Opposite of “Tricky”. That’s just “normal humans”. Not to the Columbia, Brown, and NYU graduates at the NYT: not having planes fall out of the sky by doing what you did the last 80 years is difficult and confusing. You know, like “Spelling” and “Grammar”. Who can understand their mysterious ways?

    “A 339-page Department of Labor rule – you can always count on the federal government to keep it pithy – would make it much harder to be an independent contractor or freelance worker in America. Created to replace a simpler Trump-era rule, it’s modeled on AB5, a disastrous 2019 California law that made independent contracting and freelance work so hard to do that it effectively outlawed it in the Golden State. 

    That law was so calamitous, despite its advertised intent of ensuring more employment benefits for more workers, even California had to admit it, scrambling to make fixes and hand out hundreds of exemptions to the law. Those exemptions are, of course, based on lobbying and political clout, leaving smaller, unconnected people to languish or leave the state. The list of exemptions is now more than 20 times longer than the original law.

    So, why export it to the rest of the American work force”??

    “ hand out hundreds of exemptions to the law. Those exemptions are, of course, based on lobbying and political clout, leaving smaller, unconnected people to languish or leave”

    Speaks for itself. Why is Walmart open, with 300 people meeting there during Covid, but Pa’s Harware store exposing only four people is closed? Cause: Reasons. “I followed the Science that followed the money.”

    “ Those exemptions are, of course, based on lobbying and political clout, leaving smaller, unconnected people to languish or leave”

    That is the PURPOSE of laws. That is WHY we regulate. It brings da money. IT’S AN EXTORTION RACKET.

    “California Becomes First State to Ban Heterosexual Marriage” — BBee

    “• Let Me Get This Story Straight (Teslaconomics)

    That’s really interesting, you’re right. So according to the contract, the risk is 100% Elon’s: if he misses, he gets nothing. 80% vote for this. He did not miss, for whatever reason, that’s not the point. So now that the risk has passed, and they know the outcome, they want backsies. That’s just not paying up. If I say you bet $1M if I make this bull’s eye Robin Hood shot from 100 yards, and if I miss you can shoot me, then I make it and you say, “No I actually meant $50.” How does that work?

    A: “We Make S—t Up!!!” I made it up just now! That’s the Purpose of Power™. To get More Power. Always take, never pay, never voluntary.

    Not keeping your word, aka “Contracts” is the #Opposite of “Capitalism.”

    “The Founding Fathers (sorry, there were no Founding Mothers,”

    Actually there were several. Abigail Adams was one, not reaching too deep into the non-board room side of history. Dolley Madison was another, although she was young and her heroism wasn’t apparent until later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolley_Madison

    ““I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to my dying day your right to say it.”

    America is made up of a lot of these people. Maybe most. They’re just not in D.C. because they’d be blackmailed (Haskert) or shot (Seth Rich, Anthony Bordain).

    They are the kinds you clutch your pearls and don’t invite to dinner.
    “Thirty-two thousand troops in New York harbor
    (Half a million in one place in today’s scale)
    “But the elephant is in the room
    The truth is in ya face when ya hear the British cannons go…BOOM
    Goes the cannon, watch the blood and the shit spray and…
    Hamilton won’t abandon ship
    — Yo, let’s steal their cannons —

    That is, their “Assault Weapons” “Of war”.

    “strategic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is a pillar of maintaining peace around the globe,

    Haven’t we had enough of this sort of thing? I don’t want to replace the new boss same as the old boss.

    “The US and Germany are resisting calls by NATO allies to invite Ukraine into the bloc at a major summit later this year,”

    Because NPR writers at RT, this is a lie. Okay, WHO? WHO is “calling” to add them? And the US and Germany are not also calling for it? Because they are, all over, and always have been. So what you’re saying is, “Some people are calling for Ukraine-NATO now, some Later, and some for never.” “Some of those people are in the US, some in Germany, and Some in other countries worldwide.”

    Yeah, we know: Because that sentence says nothing but “People have opinions” and those opinions vary. Each of those opinions are present in each country. Your words mean nothing to me. Hand wavy-wavy. Feely-feelz.

    “Kiev’s push to join NATO, which was enshrined in its constitution as a strategic objective in 2019,”

    They paid RAND corporation a million dollars to write a paper on what would make Russia start a war. It was this. So when they got the paper back, they then pushed every line item listed in the “Go to war with Russia” paper. It also isn’t JUST a move in a free-zone. To do this, the West had to break all three treaties (or four) governing the very existence of Ukraine as a free state. Oops! NPR writers “forgot”. “I FORGOT to mention the Treaty of Versailles when I wrote about WWII” Oops!

    ““I imagine we’ll start seeing Russian tanks with fuel tanks fitted for extended range appearing and Russian airborne troops making air assaults in the Ukrainian rear within weeks.”

    It is a problem that they’re carefully breaking everywhere, as then you don’t know which hole to plug. Military Summary had a bit of an ominous question: Russia is making arms, right? Bunch of new jets, very proud. So why does Russia need 1,500 helicopters they seem to have newly built? Those guys are expensive and they are NOT used in this type of war. AND not for us dorks, but for military people, they each need 20-50 trained people surrounding them? Not just pilot, crew, but mechanics, logistics, trucks, etc?

    What’s all THAT for? Czech? Denmark? Or just Lviv?

    ““Ukraine sought to prove that the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic are terrorist organizations..”

    This is an interesting case, because they were clearly rebels and separatists. But “Terrorism” is a tactic, as we’ve forgotten as words have no meaning except whatever I made up a minute ago. Are they firebombing kindergartens in Kiev to make their point? No. It never got to that. Relatively surprising, actually, as they were shelling markets and schools in Donbass for 8 years. Imagine if they had fought back like that, and how it would look different for PR and the West. …But as we see, they didn’t really care. It would have made it worse, but not doing it didn’t make it better, an Anglo PR special.

    “• US Troops Told to Prepare For War in Gaza – Media (RT)

    They don’t have an army, they use ours. Since there’s a 20:1 advantage in Gaza and there are 100,000 fighters, they need 1-2 Million Americans from Arkansas to die defending racism.

    “Iran will not let any threat from the US go “unanswered,” the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said”

    That’s weird because you seem to have let all of them go unanswered for 50 years til now.

    “will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go Captain Ahab on [us]?”

    Half or 90% of America is very CLEARLY not Captain Ahab and is fighting these guys tooth and nail everywhere. Problem is, Ahab is locked in the nuclear control room with a Praetorian guard shooting anything that moves.

    “Homer, if you could shoot some people on the way out – that’d be a big help to me.”

    The CIA is self-funding by running oil from Syria to Turkey, and $10k a pop to import African mercenaries to Cleveland, and they WANT us all to point, accuse them, and start shooting to cause a U.S. Civil war. Got it?

    Honest, babe: It’s not Me, it’s YOU. It’s not 90% of Americans, not even the Blue ones. It’s like 3,000 specific people who have home addresses and we know your name. Amy Pope. Mary McCord. James Boasberg. These are the real dangers, since they shove the puppet-dummies like Bolton out in front to get shot at, like scarecrows with no brains, and keep these ACTUAL worker bees safe and private.

    “Ms. Jones has been paid $2.6 million in her 14-month period as an independent monitor..”

    Yeah, I’ll BET she recommended to keep monitoring him every year forever while posting both factual and mathematical inaccuracies without asking for clarification like an actual accountant. I would too. That’s $200,000 a month or $10,000 a day.

    Buddy, guy…I can make up stuff at HALF that price. And I’m not even an accountant. Neither is she from those mistake made.

    “Trump’s nomination is considered valid as it was submitted by a member of a national assembly or national government.”

    However, the Peace Prize for 2024 is going to Benjamin Netanyahu, as Obama is killing some folks but isn’t in office right now.

    ““..the methods that NOAA employs to try to reduce this don’t work because the bias is so overwhelming..”

    Which we told them in writing 100,000 times for 30 years in a row. But they didn’t notice and can’t change. When the satellite data conflicted with the stations parked on hot tar roofs in downtown Manhattan, and proved the non AGW case, they then erased and hid the satellite data and we haven’t seen it since. That’s “Science”: no data, no discussion. It’s settled.

    V. Arnold: Like I said, if only it were greed, you could reason with it. You know as a machinist it’s cheaper to do things correctly. So they were NOT doing things “cheaper” and “saving money,” they were losing money by the fistfuls. Why?

    Look at it this way: as we came UP through the golden era of the machine age, some blacksmith would have told you to hand-hammer it into being as the “best” way. But we, America, picked the “Cheaper” way, so we didn’t have to blacksmith a Model A one by one with a hammer. BUT THAT WAS BETTER. The cheaper way WAS the better way. Both in making more, letting more people own them, selling more and making more money for the worker, AND a better end product, things made and invented that could never be smithed with a hammer. Win-win-win-win-win-win. Win for the company, win for the customer, win for the worker, win for the profits too. That’s Capitalism. You did it better, you should get paid. That’s only just.

    …But they’re doing the #Opposite of all that and calling it the same thing. Whatever “it” is, and I’ll let you decide, it’s not “greed”. Greed would do the opposite and there was plenty of greed in 1910 – 1970.

    “FDA Makes It Official: Informed Consent Not Required for ‘Minimal Risk’ Studies”

    They finally “passed a law,” or the FDA equivalent (which is not a law, and the people who pass it are not elected.) But still. Finally they half-passed a half-law that they were already meting out widespread punishments for, with every board enthusiastic to disbar everyone they could find, and insure far fewer doctors. Disbarring for the non-law they never wrote down. Now that’s what I call #Winning.

    “makes it legal for clinical researchers to conduct research on human subjects without obtaining informed consent”

    Ah, the final dream is realized: human experiments with no knowledge or consent. Yes, “Consent” means they have to ask and tell you. If they don’t have to ask, they don’t have to tell you. So now they can put the medical experiment in corn flakes. Why not? Everything here encourages it.

    Emo: As Tim Pool, similar, actual post punk, actual skater boi has to say every day, they are now “Rage in Service of the Machine”. The Offspring Drummer, FIRED FROM HIS OWN BAND, so they could lick Pfizer’s butthole. Oh wait, FIRED FROM HIS OWN BAND because he HAS A DISEASE, and his DOCTOR SAID SO. #TrusttheScience. So his band – Core Post-Punk, like TOP name (although a bit poppy, granted) were such rebels they tried to KILL THEIR OWN FRIEND, against his long term doctor’s express orders, for a know, long-term disease he had, in order to adore and profit multi-billionaire international corporations? Well nothing says “Punk” more than that, my dude.

    Meanwhile, who is actually Punk? Um, like, the Sex Pistols? Sid Vicious? Johnny Rotten? In a way considered the inventors of it? Yeah, Johnny Rotten is wearing a MAGA hat. That’s Punk. And maybe not even as earnest support. But the POINT OF PUNK is to piss people off, DGAF, and shake them hard enough to make them THINK for a second, by FORCE. Even as that’s a useless task, as they never will, as per maybe “Daria” points out. That’s why they put safety pins as earrings. They’re making you THINK: what’s the difference? It’s metal in your ears, so? Is it because you didn’t pay a corporation profits that makes safety pins weird and wrong? They’re scaring and offending you. That’s why they wore Nazi things: not that they were Nazis, they were anti-Nazis, the wanted YOU to cry, flap around, scream, run in circles, be scared, and they could say: “This is a PIECE OF CLOTH, you sheepless dolts. And I’m not even a Nazi. Duh. Why does your corporate programming trigger you?” Because it’s not me with the problem: it’s you.

    Rage in Service of the Machine. So anyway, where’s the REAL post-punk gone now? Into bluegrass? Tyler Childers Oliver Anthony or something? Being a hard-core rebel now is just being a man who can lift more than ten pounds? Weak sauce out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-us7CI-RQ

    Anyone who goes to a gym and is healthy is an insurrectionist.

    #151661
    Dr. D
    Participant

    John Cleese seems to be doing the same thing. Like Punk who stays punk, he’s comedy that stays comedy. The loveless lemon-sucking nags and scolds of our present #StateReligion wag their fingers and do not approve. “That’s not Funny!”

    As in, “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” A: “That’s not funny!” Blue-haired nags, and tattooed fingers.

    “Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.” — Mencken.

    These guys are Puritans that would put Cromwell to shame. I’m not saying I’m punk, but I’m way more punk than these guys.

    #151662
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Wassily Kandinsky Clear connection 1925 is evocative of the newly invented electronic schematic symbols

    .

    .

    #151663
    Red
    Participant

    [Translation by Dr. William Makis]

    “Ladies and gentlemen of Progressive Slovakia and the Opposition parties, have you seen the statistics on how our deaths have risen from various cardiovascular events due to vaccination?

    But you reject it, of course you reject it, while you claim that (COVID-19) Vaccination was the best thing in the world.

    What do you know about how many vaccines we have left over that expired and how much money was thrown away into the air? What do you know about purchases of medical equipment and tests? You know that we demonstrated very clearly the connection of one company from Trnava (Slovakia) to the chairman of one of the opposition political parties.

    Hundreds of thousands, millions worth of purchases, completely useless. What do you know about management? What do you know about what was going on in terms of taking various measures which, in our view,significantly increased the morbidity than was perhaps the case in other countries?

    And you all laughed at the other states, other countries. You laughed at Russia, where they stood on the principle of individual visits of patients by doctors, and they managed it significantly better than we managed it here in Slovakia.

    We have 21,000 deaths, which we connect with the fact that the governments that were here since 2020 were not capable of managing (the pandemic) and cared only about economic gains and of course made sure they were bowing to pharmaceutical companies from which they bought huge quantities of useless medical equipment and often also vaccines.

    I don’t even want to talk about the European level, you know that I have been very open and I said it to Madam President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen) openly that the suspicions that are connected with her and to the purchase, the largest purchase in the history of the European Commission, of vaccines, when she literally exchanged secret SMS text messages with CEO of Pfizer (Albert Bourla), and when, to the ridicule of Members of the European Parliament a report was issued that was completely blacked out, we will simply never be able to find out the truth of what role pharmaceutical companies played and who actually organized this whole circus around COVID-19.

    Under these conditions, ladies and gentlemen, the government of Slovak Republic has decided that it will include into the Government’s Program Statement, a commitment that it will settle this issue. The Slovak public simply needs an answer, needs an answer in regards to vaccination, what it actually was. Why were people vaccinated with various experimental Vaccines without any trials? Why were all sorts of drugs forced into people? Why was there state wide testing? Who was buying? Why were they buying? What quantities were being bought? How much money did it cost?

    And we’ll end up at billions, at billions, you can grin all you want because you don’t even know anything other than showing disrespect for another opinion. You know democracy is about sometimes respecting another opinion. When you are here discussing for the third week talking about the Criminal Code, nobody is swearing at you, we are listening to you, you are talking, so please be kind enough if we have a different opinion, then please respect it even if you disagree with it.

    Under these conditions, we have decided that we will create an Office of the Government Plenipotentiary which will be dealing with these questions. Today, we have not only appointed the Director of Plenipotentiary, but we’ve also empowered him when it comes to obtaining information from various Institutions, in particular we will be obtaining information from the Chief Hygienist, we will be asking questions at the National Health Information Center. We still want to know, based on what we currently have available to us, what actually happened.

    I think that Dr.Kotlar, Member of the National Assembly, is sufficiently equipped in terms of information. I see that he is also prepared in terms of assembling a team. I have requested from him that before we make any public statements, that we have first gone through everything at the government, and I am absolutely convinced that his work will lead to results that we will make public and we will tell the Slovak public what in God’s name happened during COVID.

    We know today one thing for sure: previous governments completely failed to manage COVID properly and have around their necks 21,000 dead people and apparently they made a huge amount of money on the unnecessary purchases of various medical equipment and vaccines.

    Thank you very much.”

    ***

    My Take…
    A few weeks ago, newly elected Slovakia Prime Minister Robert Fico clearly outlined his governing party’s position on rejecting the WHO Pandemic Treaty. I translated his speech here.

    Slovakia Prime Minister Robert Fico Orders Investigation into COVID-19 Pandemic Management and Vaccines After 21,000 Excess Deaths Announced in Slovakia Since 2020

    #151664
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #151665
    Dora
    Participant

    Gordon Gekko’s America.

    #151666
    Red
    Participant
    #151667
    John Day
    Participant

    “Entirely Counterfeit”: Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized At Least 40 Times According To Complaint
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/entirely-counterfeit-harvards-chief-diversity-officer-plagiarized-least-40-times
    diverse

    #151668
    tboc
    Participant

    all of the negative talk about “managed economies” as the brilliant capitalists whistle past the Federal Reserve Bank. The entire western global economy managed by central banks. The elite SDWBs gorging on the starving, poisoning, maiming and murder of children and the “educated wannabe” clamoring at the gate for a place at the table.

    D league softball players with a carbon fiber bat believing they are bound for The Majors. Please completely disregard the fact that the carbon fiber bat made existing fields obsolete. The infield became so dangerous no one wanted to be there. Stand 45 feet away from a microwaved RED DOT launched from a carbon fiber bat. Human reflexes are inadequate to the moment. The total and callous indifference to one’s fellow man is that microwaved RED DOT and you are not ready to respond.

    if we can just murder another 500 thousand victory is within reach, please remind me again how stupid I am. The axiom “Man Know Thyself” predates Delphi, who cudda knowed.

    Biden has a plan, not too far in the distant past The Republicans had a plan. Did you listen the other day when Larry Johnson stated The Islamic Republic of Iran used Stinger missles supplied to them by Oliver North in one of their earlier military operations? Do you remember the School of the Americas? Now THAT was a plan, teach terrorism to an entire continent directly south of your nation. WINNING!!!!!

    Ignorance comes with many attendants, quite frequently a diploma among them. What did the Wizard give the Straw Man?

    #151669
    John Day
    Participant

    @Oroboros: It’s nice to see vacuum tube heiroglyphics on TAE. I can read tube schematics for relatively simple applications, like audio. I used to design and build them for fun before the world changed so much.

    #151670
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Top White House Cyber Official tells O’Keefe in Disguise “they can’t say it publicly” the White House wants to replace Kamala Harris and Confirms President @JoeBiden mental decline: “Biden is definitely slowing down.”

    Harris was unable to retain black staffers, who “quit on her en masse”


    Hair Sniffing Degenerate Freak Passing the Torch

    .

    #151671
    Oroboros
    Participant

    @johnday

    Arduino

    Kits

    I friend gave me one for a birthday present. They have many different kits, lots of fun and affordable

    Modular connections

    .

    #151672
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Arduino Braccio

    All programable

    Make your own Robot

    Maybe a Terminator

    Or a Predator Drone with thermal imaging

    Or an Autonomous Self Learning Vacuum Cleaner that can also bring drinks and snacks from the kitchen!

    .

    .

    #151673
    Oroboros
    Participant

    There are cool sites that features abandon places.

    just one:

    https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2015-11-18/the-most-stunning-abandoned-places-on-earth

    Give a good understanding that “All Things Pass”

    Shelley’s:

    My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

    Abandoned and forsaken amusement park ride

    .

    #151674
    John Day
    Participant

    @Oroboros: I use 1920s-1960s vacuum tubes, and special military and NASA components from a surplus store that is no more. I packed it all up in boxes almost 20 years ago, and am schlepping it to the place I made in Yoakum, looking into boxes. Speaker parts, too.

    #151675
    John Day
    Participant

    @V.Arnold: My union machinist college friend paints the same picture. Extraction of value killed good engineering and manufacturing by competent Americans, and the culture was crushed and bled out of existence, like with Boeing…

    #151676
    Dora
    Participant

    Greed. Gordon Gekko’s speech recreated the 1980’s “thinking” the best way to revive great American companies’ fortunes was by aligning management interests with shareholder interests. Put stock price valuation ahead of product development and manufacture. The way to align management with shareholder value was to pay managers by stock market options in addition to regular salary. And thus the looting began.
    Congress’s ability to regulate was anesthetized by their ability to do stock trading while in office. Oddly enough (or not) Congressmens and womens stock trading gains were and are so far ahead of regular peoples’ it looks like they could have some kind of inside information.
    If that’s not enough to keep Congress quiet there’s always campaign “contributions”, including from FTX (which illegal campaing contributions Friedman will not be charged with). And so the banks are bailed out, Wall St. is bailed out, and the destruction of once great enterprises continues.

    #151677
    zerosum
    Participant

    Prepare. Its failing.
    A way of thinking, a culture, a system..

    Its falling apart.
    Everything is bad and getting worst.

    Not my fault.
    Don’t blame me.

    Its interference.
    Its war.

    Incentivized with a compensation package.
    He hit all the milestones.
    ———–

    A Cult Whose Demise Should Probably Be Regretted


    • A Cult Whose Demise Should Probably Be Regretted (Karganovic)

    Exhibit A: Political corruption.
    Exhibit B: Academic corruption.
    Exhibit C: Mechanical breakdown.

    It may be premature based on these random examples, to which many more could of course be added, to draw bold conclusions about an imminent chute finale. But a compelling prima facie case for decadence can certainly be made. The cultural matrix is severely damaged, whether or not irreversibly we shall soon see. Previously inconceivable departures from long established cultural canons, in this case of efficiency and professional integrity, are now becoming increasingly common. Their impact is felt from Ivy League academy to manufacturing plants, and presumably encompasses much that lies in between.

    ——–

    #151678
    Dora
    Participant

    @ John Day

    Harvard’s logo VE RI TAS can be rewritten CH AT GPT.

    #151679
    Oroboros
    Participant

    During the Cold War the Soviets still had tube radios in their tanks because they wouldn’t be affected by an EMP from a nuclear detonation. It was getting harder in the late sixties were I lived to get tubes for old radios and amplifiers.

    The old hardware stores uses to have a tube tester vending unit with dozens of different tube sizes to fit your tube in and test and spares for sale stored underneath. They were pretty much gone by the 70’s

    I had a pair of beautiful Macintosh amplifiers, best audio sound you’ve ever heard but they were tube amps and tubes were getting hard to find.

    So someone said you could still get new ‘contraband’ tubes from behind the Iron Curtain, like Cuban cigars.

    They were called “Virgin Commies” and they were very well made but it was like buying pot in the 60’s, you had to know a guy who knows a guy…..

    .

    .

    #151680
    jb-hb
    Participant

    Competence? The fish has been rotting from the head for decades now.

    For the first time in my life, I quit a job effective immediately just recently.

    I figured, working for a small business, I would be working in/with competence because a small business simply doesn’t have resources to spare for anything else. Boy was I wrong.

    I’ve seen EVERY bad thing that can be done in call center operations several times each, so I recognize it when I see it. I have never ever seen so MANY bad things stacked simultaneously nor with such vehemence from leadership to never ever change – There Will Be No Discussion.

    I’ve never seen such poor service levels, in terms of abandoned calls, turnaround times for working or even answering requests, etc. Well, actually I have, but typically with a 3-6 month lag before the manager responsible sends out an email that they choosing to spend more time with their families, goodbye.

    And seemingly all their processes are to keep as many dishes spinning in the air as possible. Processes with as many back and forths and transition points as possible – each time is a potential failure point, like putting a bunch of unnecessary o-rings in your booster.

    Documents covering what or how to do things are either entirely absent or conversational, how you’d explain your job to an unusually interested person next to you at a dinner party but no A to B for a customer or the rep serving them. The worst sup/lead combo I ever worked under never took 4-5 hours to answer a basic question in chat.

    They would say words like “first call resolution” but clearly be doing everything they could to prevent first call resolution. For no gain. I think because it just sounds business-y to say the words??? Total grind, total boiler room stuff, 3-10x the work that you can do at all times, like a neverending hotdog eating contest with more hotdogs always on your plate forever. Couldn’t get them to understand that if they can’t hire more people, they at least need to start bootstrapping themselves into a better situation by streamlining each of their processes, one by one, to actually reach first call resolution so unresolved problems, requests, etc don’t keep stacking up. Like they would occasionally say the WORDS
    first call resolution” but didn’t seem to understand what it actually meant or why it was important, what benefits could be drawn from it.

    Training that didn’t speak to actual, practical A-B activities helping customers followed by almost no practical support/instruction after the fact. No documents that you could use to just train yourself.

    Because they functioned on a purely oral tradition and the manager had a memory like a swiss cheese – or maybe an inverted swiss cheese with only the holes present – she would tell you to do one thing, then the opposite, month to month, week to week, with a strong implication you were being lax, defective. Moreover, she would fail to remember things, conflate several different interactions into a single event with a different meaning, remember the opposite of what actually happened, or “remember” things happening that never, ever happened. And you could be written up or given a bad review solely based on her memory.

    Not to mention she invariably would coach whatever you said or did as bad. You could not talk shop with her nor even make idle chitchat because literally anything would be wrong. I made a list of like 12 nuts and bolts customer care priorities, did a call, made sure to tick each one off, reported back on her, listing off the things I did and she coached every single one as wrong

    It got absurd by the end of that coaching session because I described determining the purpose of the customer’s call, proposing a specific path to resolution, and then getting their buy-in. She said no, you should not be asking the customer what their goal is. WE will review the situation and then tell THEM. What!?!?

    When I pointed out the fractally fucked nature of the job- as politely and professionally as I could possibly muster – she asked what I wanted. I asked for the most basic bare-bones thing – that our interactions be congruent with reality. After that, the magical thinking and memory of things happening that never happening went up a few notches, so I guess she was at least listening I guess, calibrating on my request? Just in the wrong direction?

    So just EVERY possible facet of call center operations was absolutely fucked. For this small business that needed everyone pulling the maximum weight they could. And the one thing that they started repeating was “NOTHING WILL CHANGE”

    A bunch of different awful snafus affecting customers happened in my 5 months there. They cheerfully said things like “this happens every year” or ‘this happens all the time” Just totally fucked, working hard as I can, bringing as much professionalism as I could, trying to avoid complaining, and getting written up on incredibly petty and somewhat imagined offenses.

    I realized the write-ups were probably trumped up because they were for employee retention purposes – you can say an employee is not eligible for rehire if they are on a writeup. Therefore you can say that to prospective employers contacting you for job verification. I realized they would never let me go in peace, that it would be either not rehirable while working for them or not rehirable while not working for them. Last straw. Fuckem.

    I come away bewildered. Didn’t they need me? Didn’t they need someone? Didn’t they need the work done? Every aspect of the work was suffering for… something. Something that had nothing to do with competence. wtf was it??? Why would they create an environment that drives off their workers, forcing them to go through the hiring and training process over and over? (VERY high turnover) Why wouldn’t they want the customer experience to be smooth, efficient, and problem free???

    SOMETHING else was more important than basic competence god knows what. Being the bestast evar girlboss possibly but it is really difficult to say. A mole essentially engaged in worse sabatoge than burning down a food processing facility? Dunno.

    #151681
    Oroboros
    Participant

    These headlines are intertwined and not just ‘talking to the hand’…

    • Chinese Defense Chief Promises Support To Russia On ‘Ukrainian Issue’

    • NATO’s Big Hitters Oppose Ukrainian Membership

    • Breakthrough On All Fronts Ahead Of Schedule

    The dam is showing signs of bursting

    That’s why the Empire of Lies desperately needs a diversion.

    Anything will do to catch the teeny tiny attention span deficit of Duh’mericans

    Look, Squirrels!

    Duh’mericans have absolutely zero idea of how the global power arrangement has shifted and they are not ‘number one’ no more.

    The Satanist Cabal is counting on ‘memory-holing’ mediawhore coverage of important world topics and Duh’merican ASD.

    People were completely baffled and confused that the Empire of Lies had troops in Jordan. WTF = mouth breathing

    .

    #151682
    Oroboros
    Participant

    The White House needs a squirrel to be complete

    .

    #151683
    Oroboros
    Participant

    After the O’Keefe piece a change in strategy

    .

    #151684
    zerosum
    Participant

    jb-hb

    Depopulation in action
    You made me happy that I’m not working and that I’m retired.
    You made me sad for my young grandchildren that will be experiencing that future.

    #151685
    zerosum
    Participant

    Priority # 1
    Path to peace and prosperity
    Preventing WWIII
    Detecting launching site, destroying of launching sites, destroying attacking missiles and drones

    Since drones with a strike range of over a thousand kilometers are in usage now this means that the demilitarized zone has to eventually stretch across the whole of Ukraine.

    #151686

    In early November the whole earth will tremble-
    The cracks will reveal what’s below.
    The columns start sprouting;
    The waters rerouting;
    Let’s hope we go on with the show.

    #151687
    John Day
    Participant

    @Oroboros: Yes, I have high performance Russian military tubes in some of my designs
    The Russian 6c45Pi, about $20 when you could get them, was used as a radar tube in fighter jets,
    It is a “supertube”, a copy of the Western Electric 437A, the highest transconductance tubes ever.
    https://store.triodestore.com/6c45pi.html

    Sound Practices Magazine illustrates the genre, within which I participated, modern takes on pre-WW-2 vacuum tube designs, using trick parts and old parts when we could get them. Japanese style 1970s homebrew audio included. https://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/sound_practices/
    It was my buddy Joe’s magazine until the internet put it out of business.

    #151688
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    Swiftonomics

    Special Report: Taylor Swift’s Impact on the Economy in Los Angeles County

    Think about it: … those not fortunate enough to get tickets directly must pay an average resale price of U$1,611 per SeatGeek. U$1,611 just gets you in the doors!

    … more: Call it a gold rush: Taylor Swift is adding billions to the U.S. economy.
    The Economy (Taylor’s Version)
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/13/taylor-swift-eras-tour-money-jobs/

    F.S.

    #151689
    John Day
    Participant

    @jb-hb: Sorry to hear about the problems at the Christian prepper-supply company. Nobody is immune to idiocracy. ;-(

    #151690
    zerosum
    Participant

    Revolt in Europe.
    Food vs Guns

    https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/29/us-foreign-arms-sales-russia-china-00138390
    US weapons exports up 50 percent in 2023 as Washington challenges Russia, China

    #151691
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    Those of you who follow science and technology may have noticed that famed physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has been going off the rails recently, pontificating on subjects that are WAY outside her claimed field of expertise. Most recently she has touted the validity of the Covid-19 “vaccine” pharmacology, attacked challengers to the human caused Climate Change Theory, and sarcastically ridicules the entire academy of non-deterministic physicists (of which there are thousands of highly educated adherents, including numerous winners of the Nobel Prize.)

    I will not subject you to the tooth jarringingly twisted logic of Sabine’s original video disavowing the existence of free will. That would just be too cruel. Instead I will link to a video in which her pathetic attempt is rebutted. That video is here: https://youtu.be/sylX-jd_h9s?si=H8UY11Cwrav-yW8f

    The Scientific Method (and thus all Scientific principles and procedures that derive from that method) ITSELF literally proves the existence of a God from which the Universe and everything in it was created (including science). This proof is quite simple. So simple in fact that when stated it almost sounds like a joke or comedy gag. It is that since Science cannot describe or define or even identify the cause which (per the Scientific Method) MUST precede the first effect then that preceding cause MUST exist before the first effect, and that placement puts it OUTSIDE of the entire body of Science. In other words, that “preceding causative entity” (let’s use the word “God” as a name for it) both MUST exist, and MUST be outside the realm of science. And that logic is valid as per the Scientific Method itself. To word this joke-like truth in yet another way it would be like some uber authoritative big shot scioness of Science (like Sabine Hossenfelder, for example) standing up and solemnly stating as fact, “The very first effect at the origin of the Universe was preceded by a cause that science by its very definition and nature cannot possibly explain, and would thus be outside of the purview of Science which is constrained by having to follow the Laws of Science, which mandates that all effects are preceded by a cause. BUT, despite that absolutely unwaverablly “factual” founding principle of Science, in this special case (i.e. , the origin of the Universe) does NOT exist because such an entity cannot exist in compliance with the Laws of Science, and therefor does not exist, even though our own Laws of Science demand that it does. And so on, and so forth, forever, Amen, oops, I mean ipso facto.”

    Ms. Hossenfelder might as well look straight into the camera and say, “I don’t really understand or believe a single word of the gibbersh that is coming out of my mouth.”

    So what’s the problem here, is Science all just bunk? Well, yes and no. It’s not complete malarkey in so far as one remains strictly and totally WITHIN the realm of PHYSICAL science. In that case (WITHIN that ultra severely limited aspect of reality called “physics”) it seems to make what appears to be good sense. The evidence of this allegedly good sense is the observation that the technology around us does seem to work, usually, and albeit in a janky and extremely limiting fashion, most of the time. BUT don’t forget that most of that allegedly “high” tech was built by MORONS who believe with religious fervor that there is NO FIRST CAUSE (no Creator) OF THE UNIVERSE that they are claiming to be so smart and know so much about. How could one POSSIBLY be so wrong? Easy. They are idiots. Intellectually speaking, they are virtually automatons, mere AI’s posing as thinking beings, who have been programmed with a ludicrously false core datum: that there is no non-material primal cause of reality, and thus reality is exclusively material and subject only to materially energetic processes.

    Like I said, morons. I wouldn’t trust any of them to make a sandwich because it would probably contain poison. Come to think of it, they do.

    There is a consequence for designing and building “science” technology while one’s cognitive functions are being continually crippled by the idiotic notion that reality itself is limited by so-called “laws of physics” which laws themselves violate their own foundational first principles by officially and explicitly forbidding acceptance of the fact that that there exists a First Cause as the creator of the First Effect (and thereby ALL subsequent effects!)

    That is moronicity taken to the level of sheer lunacy. It is akin to someone looking you straight in the face and saying, “Trust me, I’m lying.” Like a tragic inversion of Jim Carry in his character in the film “Liar Liar”, as a lawyer who is condemned to always and only tell the truth.

    Another consequence of such retarded thinking is that any “Science” which precludes and excludes the existence of the only thing that actually does exist (Primal, or “divine” causation), is that such a body of reasoning could not then deign to describe any of the ACTUAL qualities or characteristics of that Primal, or “divine” causation, because that knowledge would be explicitly forbidden from being any part of that body of reasoning.

    In other words, having got the first step so catastrophically wrong, it is unreasonable to expect that the steps deriving from that misstep to be any better.

    The world is a far more interesting and beautiful place than our dingbat “scientists” have (or would) lead us to believe. So much so that anyone who seriously tries to lead people to a saner way of looking at things is going to get smacked down, HARD, by those idiots, because they’ve got a hell of a lot riding on their bet that there ain’t no God. And by the phrase “a lot riding on their bet”, I mean to say that with the great emphasis. Don’t expect many of those silly atheists to see the light or acknowledge the error of their WRONG primary assumption. Most of them are all in on a bad bet.

    #151692
    John Day
    Participant

    Lies Are Best https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/lies-are-best

    ​ Israeli tanks opened fire at Gazans waiting for much-needed aid, killing at least 20 and injuring 150.
    According to the Cradle, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tanks fired in the direction of Gazans lined up to receive humanitarian aid. The incident happened at the Kuwait Roundabout in Gaza City on Jan. 25. Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra confirmed the incident, describing it as a “massacre.”
    ​ Al-Qudra continued that the number of casualties might increase due to the severity of injuries, overwhelming the limited medical capabilities of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, which has been subjected to bombardment and raids by Israeli troops since the start of the conflict.
    https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-01-31-tanks-fired-gazans-at-least-20-killed.html

    ​ New Israeli war crime uncovered: 30 decomposed bodies in Gaza school
    The bodies of 30 Palestinians executed by Israeli occupation forces were found on Wednesday inside a school that had been besieged by the occupation’s tanks.
    ​ The school located in the northernmost town of Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip was being restored to house forcibly displaced Palestinians on Wednesday, when bodies of 30 martyrs were mistakenly found in the facility, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS).
    ​ PPS said the dead bodies had their hands cuffed and their eyes blindfolded, with some being stripped of their clothes before being executed by Israeli occupation forces.
    https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/new-israeli-war-crime-uncovered–30-decomposed-bodies-in-gaz

    ​ By Hurting UN Agency, the West Sides With Genocide
    Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people, writes Jonathan Cook.
    ​ The funding cut — which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland — was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza.​
    ​ The World Court judges quoted at length U.N. officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.
    ​ The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local U.N. staff — out of 13,000 — are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on Oct. 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.

    By Hurting UN Agency, the West Sides With Genocide

    War on Gaza: Netanyahu says U​NRWA mission ‘must be terminated’
    Prime minister’s comments follow Israel’s claim that 12 of U​NRW’s 30,000 staff members were involved in Hamas-led 7 October attack
    https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-on-gaza-unrwa-mission-must-be-terminated-netanyahu

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