Sep 022024
 
 September 2, 2024  Posted by at 7:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


René Magritte Memory of a voyage 1952

 

French Party Leader Warns Pavel Durov’s Life May Be in Danger (Sp.)
Kremlin Blasts Arrest In France Of Telegram Founder Pavel Durov (RT)
How Telegram Is Geopolitics (Pepe Escobar)
Durov Arrest First Salvo of Final Battle in the 30-Year War on Privacy (Sp.)
West Brands All Inconvenient Facts As ‘Kremlin Propaganda’ – Putin (RT)
Putin’s Remarks About Biden True for VP Harris – Kremlin (Sp.)
Kamunism Is the Perfect Recipe For Economic Collapse (RCM)
“Not The Type Of Character You Want” In High Office – Tim Walz’s Brother (ZH)
Walzin Out a Fake War Hero (Spears)
‘Heinous, Vile, Disgusting’: Gold Star Families Slam Kamala Harris (ZH)
Debate Desperation Time For Democrats (QTR)
Elon Musk Warns Censorship Of X “Is A Certainty” If Kamala Harris Wins (MN)
Harris Admits The Economy-Crushing ‘Green New Deal’ Is Her Real Agenda (ZH)
US In ‘Fast Lane’ To Bankruptcy – Musk (RT)
Protests Sweep Israel After Hostage Deaths (RT)

 

 


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“Let’s not forget that Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’… Pavel Durov should really be careful, his life may be in danger!”

French Party Leader Warns Pavel Durov’s Life May Be in Danger (Sp.)

The life of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was released on bail this week as he faces a potential trial in France, might be in danger, Florian Philippot, the leader of The Patriots party, said on Saturday. The politician referred to reports by French media, which claimed that the billionaire tech entrepreneur had been approached by French intelligence agents while in Dubai and that he had refused to share classified information.”Day after day, the puzzle of [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s delirious persistence against Pavel Durov, after having coaxed him, takes shape … Let’s not forget that Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’… Pavel Durov should really be careful, his life may be in danger!” Philippot said on X.

The Russian-born was detained at a Paris airport on August 24 on charges related to criminal uses of his messaging app, including terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud. He was released on Wednesday on a 5-million-euro ($5.5 million) bail and is barred from leaving France. French media reported that Durov had agreed to cooperate with the French investigators and provided access to his phone. Macron is also said to have discussed the detention of Durov, who holds a UAE passport in addition to French citizenship, with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan a day after he was nabbed at the airport.

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“..Paris could use the same grounds to arrest the CEOs of Renault or Citroën, as terrorists use cars.”

Kremlin Blasts Arrest In France Of Telegram Founder Pavel Durov (RT)

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has questioned the French authorities’ rationale for arresting Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, pointing to the absurdity of holding him accountable for crimes committed using his network. The Russian tech entrepreneur was detained at Paris-Le Bourget Airport last week and has since been charged with with multiple offenses, including complicity in “administering an online platform” used by criminal gangs to conduct illicit activities, and refusing to cooperate with investigators. Speaking to Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin on Saturday, Peskov acknowledged that Russian authorities previously had “questions” for the tech billionaire, but stressed that Moscow never tried to arrest him.

“Terrorists do indeed use the Telegram network. But terrorists also use cars. Why don’t they arrest the CEOs of Renault or Citroën?” the Kremlin spokesman said when asked to comment on Durov’s arrest and whether he had a message for his “European colleagues.” Pavel Durov, a St. Petersburg native who holds the citizenships of Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, formally left his homeland in 2014 after law enforcement accused him of refusing to grant investigators access to terrorism suspects’ communications. The dispute was settled in 2020 when the Russian telecoms regulator announced that it had no further issues with Telegram.

In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in April, Durov claimed that he had consistently refused to provide user data to any authorities, including US intelligence services, or to install a surveillance “backdoor” in the app, which has almost a billion monthly users. The Russian billionaire’s arrest has sparked outrage worldwide, with public leaders such as X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks accusing French authorities of attacking free speech. Durov was released on bail on Wednesday and ordered to remain in France until the case against him concludes. If convicted, he could face up to ten years in prison. Telegram maintains that the company complies with EU laws and that its content moderation policies are “within industry standards.”

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“It’s a near certainty that Pavel does not have Telegram’s fabled encryption keys; yet his math genius brother Nikolai does.”

How Telegram Is Geopolitics (Pepe Escobar)

Pavel Durov is now essentially a high-level hostage in one of NATOstan’s key nodes, France.NATO’s military intel/surveillance/economic matrix finally got the leverage they actively sought for so long. For the moment there’s no answer to the key question: what did Durov offer his captors to be “rewarded” with a temporary semi-freedom regime after posting bail that for his standards amounts to pocket money? Durov is essentially accused of not “collaborating” or “cooperating” with Western intel. Their single-minded obsession is to control Telegram’s content moderation set up; have total back door access; and eventually ban all Russian channels – which have been instrumental to carry the real stories on the ground developing from Ukraine to sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Telegram is the social network of choice of the Global Majority. Telegram is at the heart of geopolitics. So this is yet another chapter of the no holds barred Hybrid War by the Collective West against the Global Majority. Telegram also happens to be extensively used in Russia by public and military bodies. It’s a near certainty that Pavel does not have Telegram’s fabled encryption keys; yet his math genius brother Nikolai does. As it stands, no one knows the terms of the deal leading to Pavel’s semi-freedom. What is clear is that some sort of concessions were made – Durov has not been turned into Assange 2.0. These concessions might include handing over selected information in a classic “judiciary” mode that would not compromise Russian state secrets.

The Durov brothers are certainly aware that any information leading Western intel to harass bloggers and channels for their political stance would fatally compromise the credibility of Telegram.Depending on how the French mega-bureaucracy “investigation” proceeds, and whether the system decides to take Durov to trial or even to block Telegram in the EU, that will only benefit Telegram globally.The saga is just beginning. As it stands, the world is waiting for a word by Pavel Durov himself. On Telegram.

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A history of (the war on) “privacy”.

Durov Arrest First Salvo of Final Battle in the 30-Year War on Privacy (Sp.)

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, massive spying operations were launched, both in public and in secret. Slowly, either due to fear of terrorism or apathy, the American people started to lose their appreciation for privacy, which started to be portrayed as the exclusive domain of criminals and the paranoid. In 2014, in the wake of the Snowden leaks, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who also served as acting director for just over two months in 2004, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post to assure the American public that the US National Security Agency (NSA) wasn’t really spying on Americans (they were) and even if they were, it wasn’t a big deal.

“Although our society lauds, in almost ‘Stepford Wives’-like fashion, the merits of ‘transparency,’ it lacks a collective, mature understanding of how intelligence works, how it integrates with foreign policy and how it contributes to the national welfare. Meanwhile, prurient interest in the details of leaked intelligence skyrockets, and people devour material that is not evidence of abuse but merely fascinating — and even more fascinating to US adversaries.” According to McLaughlin’s upside-down perspective, those who want to know what our government is doing are “Stepford Wives” blindly following “society” and giving aid to our enemies. Those who remain willfully ignorant, according to McLaughlin, are the realists who know the NSA is “not perfect,” but the real problem is “the broad distrust of government that has taken root in the United States in recent decades.”

The Snowden leaks did not lead to any real reforms. The government claimed they took measures to protect the privacy of citizens, but those were internal changes around the margins and the new rules are routinely ignored anyway. No one was fired. No one was arrested. No mass protests hit the streets. The public had been conditioned to expect the government was watching them. This year, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was renewed for another two years, a massive blow for privacy and civil rights advocates. “The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier,” Zimmermann prophetically said nearly 30 years ago. The only vestige of privacy left online is through encryption. For years that was a fairly complicated process, public key cryptography made it far easier than it was before, but few in the mainstream were using tools like PGP.

Yes, email had become secure from spoofing, but most of the encryption was handled by email providers. Google may use encryption to keep users safe from man-in-the-middle attacks, but if they have access to your decrypted emails (and they do if you use Gmail), then there is nothing preventing them from handing that information over. That changed with apps like Telegram and Signal, which have true end-to-end encryption that not even the owners can crack. Now, more than ever, normal people are using apps that enable their privacy by default. It’s not perfect, devices themselves are still vulnerable to government intrusion, but it is far more difficult to gain access to than simply sending a subpoena to a service provider. The government could tolerate encryption when it was limited to a few hundred thousand geeks posting on message boards, 950 million Telegram users is a much bigger issue.

On Wednesday, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was charged with a litany of crimes accusing him of not doing enough to prevent abuse of his platform. The critical charge however, the one that all the others rest on because without it he couldn’t be blamed for their actions is once again – as it was with Zimmermann in the US decades ago – with providing tools that enable encryption, which is the only vestige of privacy left on the internet in a post-Snowden world. Durov is out on €5 million bond and is barred from leaving France because, according to the indictment, he was “providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration,” as well as “providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.” And, thirdly, because he was “importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.”

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“Moscow has managed to strike a balance between the freedom of the press and national security, the Russian leader has argued..”

West Brands All Inconvenient Facts As ‘Kremlin Propaganda’ – Putin (RT)

Russian media are trying to convey Moscow’s point of view on global issues and processes, but Western states are hiding from the “truth” by dismissing every inconvenient fact as “propaganda,” President Vladimir Putin has said. President Putin gave a written interview to the Mongolian Onoodor newspaper ahead of his visit to the country on Monday. Among other things, he was asked about the freedom of the press and how the West can champion it while banning and suppressing Russian media. “Almost all Western countries where our journalists try to work are creating obstacles for them, banning Russian television channels and directly censoring our media and online resources,” Putin said, noting that this obviously “runs counter to the democratic principles of freedom of speech and the free flow of information.”

So the West, which claims to be a model of freedom, has opted to hide from inconvenient facts and the truth by launching a blatant bullying campaign against Russian journalists and indiscriminately labeling them as ‘Kremlin propagandists.’ The Russian leader went on to say that pluralism and openness in the information space are vital for society and that in Russia, the mass media are free, as guaranteed by the constitution.“Our authorities cooperate constructively with television channels, news agencies, newspapers, online media, and other media outlets, regardless of their editorial policy,” he said. The only thing they are required to do is comply with Russian laws. This should be understood by foreign journalists accredited in Russia.

That way, Moscow has managed to strike a balance between the freedom of the press and national security, the Russian leader has argued. Putin is scheduled to visit Mongolia on Monday for a World War II commemoration. He is expected to attend a ceremony commemorating the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol. The decisive victory of the Red Army and its Mongolian allies over the Imperial Japanese Army secured the Soviet Union’s eastern flank until 1945.The visit would theoretically put the Russian leader at risk of arrest on the ICC’s “war crimes” warrant, as Ulaanbaatar recognizes the court’s jurisdiction, and the court insisted that Mongolia has an “obligation to cooperate.” However, Moscow “has no concerns” about the ICC warrant, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, noting that all possible issues concerning Putin’s visit have been “worked out separately” in advance.

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Russia likes them predictable.

Putin’s Remarks About Biden True for VP Harris – Kremlin (Sp.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent remark about the predictability of US President Joe Biden also applies to his vice president turned presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday. Asked whether Russia would prefer to see Joe Biden or Donald Trump as the next US president, Putin described Biden as more preferable because he was more experienced and predictable. “We do not have a favorite candidate, but the Democrats are certainly more predictable. What Putin said about Biden’s predictability applies to almost all Democrats, including Mrs. Harris,” Peskov said in a recorded interview published on social media. Peskov lamented the state of US-Russian relations, saying tensions between the two were at their highest, having reached a breaking point under the Biden administration. “They have reached the breaking point… The last drop fell,” he said.

When asked about the future of Democrats’ policy on Russia and the European Union, Peskov said it was also easy to predict. “It is all predictable. They will stick to the same policy toward us, they will predictably continue to put pressure on EU member states, and they will continue to enslave those countries politically and economically,” he said. The United States is directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict, despite numerous statements to the contrary, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added. “The United States, despite many statements to the contrary, is directly involved in the conflict around Ukraine. It is demonstrating a tendency toward increasing the level of involvement in this conflict,” Peskov said in a recorded interview published on Telegram on Sunday. The spokesman accused Washington of “an undisguised hostile attitude” toward Russia. He said the US had spent decades piling pressure on Russia and trampling on its interests. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will not be able to resolve all problems overnight if elected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday.

Trump has repeatedly promised during the presidential campaign to settle the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours after coming into the White House. “I do not think he has a magic wand or that anything can be done overnight,” Peskov said in a recorded interview published on social media, commenting on Trump’s campaign promises. The Kremlin spokesman rejected as impossible speculations that a new US president could announce an end to US military support for Ukraine and call on the parties to sit down at the negotiating table in their inaugural speech in January 2025. Peskov said relations between Russia and the United States had hit rock bottom under Biden and looked unsalvageable for the time being. “Mr Biden’s presidency has become the culmination of all processes in our bilateral relations. They are probably at their historic low at the moment,” Peskov said, adding that so far, he had seen no prospects for them “entering a growth trajectory.”

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2 weeks old, but you can see why ZeroHedge brought it back.

Kamunism Is the Perfect Recipe For Economic Collapse (RCM)

Last Friday, Kamala Harris opened her mouth and almost magically raised the price of housing and food at grocery stores. She’s on record stating that high gas prices are the result of retail price gouging, and that patents should be yanked from medical industry providers. What many don’t comprehend is that businesses react immediately when politicians suggest interfering with the normal operations of the free market. Look around you. Every building, every business, every house, every car and so on is a result of private enterprise. More specifically, all these things are the result of capital organically flowing to where it can be most productive. The supply of capital fuels all growth. Policies that favor capital formation create lower prices and more innovation. There would be no government without its access to the wealth generated from private enterprise, as there would be nothing to tax and no purchasers to buy federal bonds.

I’m no Warren Buffett. I’m just a lowly history major. I don’t have an economics PhD, but unlike those breathing the Ivory Tower air, I’ve had real world experiences in all the industries Kamala wants to tinker with. I’ve built subdivisions and houses. I’ve been a specialty food supplier to grocery stores. I’ve owned a chain of restaurants. I’ve owned gas stations, and I’ve been involved in securing intellectual property rights within the medical industry. I can tell you firsthand that as soon as a business owner hears “commie nonsense,” he pulls “the throttle back.” Capital formation slows. Often his business is devalued as soon as there is a political threat that will rob it of profitability. With such uncertainty and less capital at his disposal, the economy is deprived of productive investment.

Giving $25,000 to first time homeowners is just going to cause higher home prices. Assuredly, it will come with so many rules and regulations as to tie the housing industry in knots. Price controls on food create scarcity and ultimately bread riots and civil unrest, perhaps starvation and another Holodomor. There could not be a dumber or more dangerous policy proposal in our Republic’s history. Gas stations. When I dropped my prices to out compete my competition, every other operator withing 30 miles matched my price. When an operator loses $.25/gallon due to competition, state and federal governments still make $.50/gallon in taxes. It is an incredibly competitive business. Patents are property, yanking them away from businesses is Leninist confiscation of property, and of course a sure-fire way to destroy all innovation.

Those of us who have created and produced in the private sector absolutely loathe with red hot fury government apparatchiks and their simple minded, demagogic economic proposals. I’m sympathetic to the business owner. All those 100-hour work weeks, sweat and investment destroyed over night by “know nothing nutjobs.” “Kamunism” is akin to a North Korean style command and control economy. It is the perfect recipe for utter misery and societal collapse. Just ask any history major!

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“The stories I could tell. Not the type of character you want making decisions about your future.”

“Not The Type Of Character You Want” In High Office – Tim Walz’s Brother (ZH)

The eldest brother of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz threw his sibling under the bus in a series of Friday night Facebook posts, saying he isn’t “the type of character” Americans would want in high office, and cryptically referring to “stories [he] could tell” that would hammer home the point. Sixty-seven-year-old Jeff Walz also declared he has major political differences with his brother, who’s been the governor of Minnesota since 2019 following a dozen years in the US House of Representatives. “I’m 100% opposed to all his ideology,” wrote Jeff Walz, the New York Post was first to report on Saturday.Before the Post exclusive, conservative podcaster Laura Loomer publicized a March 2023 Facebook post in which Jeff Walz expressed his disgust over Donald Trump being indicted in Manhattan over his handling of hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. “We’ve just become a third world banana republic,” he wrote.

Unless and until Jeff Walz gets specific about where he differs with Kamala Harris’ running mate, we can only speculate. There’s lots of hard-left nuttiness and tyranny on Tim’s record, including:
• Putting tampons in boys’ school bathrooms
• Keeping the National Guard in the sidelines while Minneapolis burned during the 2020 George Floyd riots
• Seizing emergency powers during the Covid-19 pandemic and going all-out with business closures, mask mandates and declaring church worship “non-essential”
• Funding free college for illegal immigrants
• Declaring Minnesota a “trans refuge”

Policy differences with relatives are one thing, but the Harris-Walz campaign is probably particularly anxious about Jeff Walz’s strong suggestion that his brother is morally flawed, and that he has an inventory of anecdotes that underscore that accusation: “The stories I could tell. Not the type of character you want making decisions about your future.” From the sound of it, Jeff Walz might just tell some of those stories under a big spotlight: When another Facebook user encouraged Walz to “get on stage with President Trump and endorse him,” Jeff Walz replied, “I’ve thought long and hard about doing something like that! I’m torn between that and just keeping my family out of it.” Even before Jeff Walz’s mini-rant, there were already character clouds swirling over the would-be vice president’s head. For example, while making a case for gutting the Second Amendment’s safeguarding of the individual human right of armed self-defense, Tim Walz falsely told an audience that he’d carried a weapon in war:

Jeff Walz said he hasn’t talked to his famous brother in eight years. So far, the reason for their apparent estrangement isn’t in the public domain, and the elder Walz declined to be interviewed by the Post. He lives in the Florida panhandle town of Freeport with this wife. The two previously owned a musical instrument and gear story in Inverness, in the west-central part of the state. While they’re split now, the Post notes that the brothers are united in having criminal rap sheets. Tim Walz was famously arrested for drunk driving, while Jeff Walz engaged in petty thievery while he was himself in a position of public trust: While he was an assistant principal at Crystal River Middle School, Jeff Walz allegedly stole a bicycle tube, handlebar grips and a three-way outlet adapter totaling $13 from an Inverness Walmart, according to the Tampa Bay Times and a letter of reprimand from Florida’s Education Practices Commission. — New York Post Sounds like there’s some great genes in that Walz family tree. Should we expect CNN and the New York Times to roll with the familial anti-endorsement story?

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“..one rule remains intact for generations of veterans: lie about your military service record at your own risk.”

Walzin Out a Fake War Hero (Spears)

There is a saying among veterans that we’re hard on one another, but that we’ll circle the wagons when civilian outsiders attack. Perhaps in another time that was truly the rule. If so, such a tradition expired long before my enlistment in the fall of 2003. Regardless, one rule remains intact for generations of veterans: lie about your military service record at your own risk. Governor of Minnesota and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is learning that lesson. It’s one he should have known long ago as a retired senior noncommissioned officer. In the Army, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) leads troops directly. Officers command, plan, and make policy. NCOs make it happen. Good NCOs are the repository of common sense in the ranks, the ones who know their troops well. Having worn the rank of Sergeant, and then becoming an officer myself, I often spoke of the importance of officers having NCO supervision.

There’s a reason most U.S. Army officers have an enlisted counterpart, wisdom that was baked into the system long ago. They are integral to a healthy balance of leadership in the military setting. It is against this backdrop that Tim Walz’s behavior stands out in such stark relief to the Creed of the Noncommissioned Officer, which states, “I will not use my grade or position to attain pleasure, profit, or personal safety.” The problem is not Master Sergeant Walz moving on to a political career as a civilian. He is following in the wake of many who have come before him—all the way back to the nation’s early years. In the U.S., doing time in the military is frequently a catalyst for one’s political ambitions given the favorable view the public has toward the troops. Consider John Glenn: he was recruited to run for senate specifically for being a Marine and an astronaut. The same can be said of Senator Mark Kelly. Though Americans do not often elect veterans as presidents, they routinely elect them to Congress.

Had Walz retired, gone back to civilian life, and been honest about his military record, this discussion would not be happening. Had he spoken of himself as a “retired Master Sergeant, and former Command Sergeant Major of the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery,” that would have been fine. I retired last year having been selected for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. But I chose to depart as a Major rather than waiting months for the date of promotion and completing an additional three years to maintain the higher rank in retirement. Walz himself made a deliberate choice not to complete the requirements to remain a Command Sergeant Major and was returned to the rank of Master Sergeant in retirement.

Everyone in the military leaves eventually, one way or another. Originally planning for a 30-year career, I chose to leave at 20 years for reasons of conscience and a desire to be more present with my family, after having served tours in combat zones. It seems Walz timed his retirement out of a desire to avoid combat deployment altogether, despite claims of reenlisting specifically to fight in the Global War on Terrorism. There were plenty of reasons why one would dislike the idea of deploying to Iraq, a war the Bush Administration never should have started. Having completed the initial requirements that he signed up for, Walz had every legal right to drop out of the Sergeant Majors academy and retire, instead of continuing to lead his battalion. It is fair to debate the associated honor or dishonor of Walz stepping away as a senior leader when his unit needed him and going behind the back of his immediate supervisors to do so. But the fact remains, it was his choice to make as a free citizen. Many others have made the same choice.

But choosing to step down and then create a false war hero identity for political benefit is deserving of the loudest contempt. Walz attempted to cast himself in the likeness of Rambo, but proves to be more of an emasculated, dancing retired Master Sergeant on the political stage. Once freed of the shackles associated with his military status, Walz falsely branded himself a combat veteran, a claim debunked by the same left-leaning press that’s doing all it can to ensure he and Harris win in November. Every bit as lacking in ethical prowess, the acolytes running Walz’s public relations effort claim that he merely “misspoke.” That is a lie. Veterans know if they served in a designated combat theater and if they carried a weapon in a war zone. These are not distinctions taken lightly. Suggestions otherwise spit in the faces of those who have been on the ground in dangerous places, putting their lives on the line in America’s defense.

One can criticize Walz for his myriad of insane policy choices, a short list of which includes: tampons in boys’ bathrooms, setting up COVID snitch hotlines, letting Minneapolis burn in 2020, joining Minnesota to a list of states that aim to disregard the electoral college, enthusiastic homosexual grooming of children in public schools, and signing legislation that stripped the rights of children who survive an abortion attempt. He deserves condemnation for playing the “military defender of the nation” card while also saying that there is no right to free speech in that pesky Constitution he pledged allegiance to as a soldier. Walz’s record as an elected official is reprehensible. Even without bringing his time in the National Guard into the conversation, he is unqualified for leadership at any level. But since he lied about his military service for personal gain repeatedly over the years, it is right to add that to Walz’s long list of actions that render him unfit for political office.

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“Why did we want Trump there? It wasn’t to help his political campaign,” said Mark Schmitz. “We wanted a leader. That explains why you and Joe didn’t get a call.”

‘Heinous, Vile, Disgusting’: Gold Star Families Slam Kamala Harris (ZH)

Gold Star families whose loved ones died in the Biden-Harris administration’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal have slammed Vice President Kamala Harris over her attack on former President Trump for paying his respects at Arlington National Cemetary last week. Harris slammed Trump’s visit as ‘playing politics,’ however in a series of short videos, eight Gold Star families said they had invited Trump – each of them recording videos which were released in the wake of a statement published by Harris on Saturday, in which she criticized Trump for taking photographs at a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday.

“As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times,” said Harris. “It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff.” Not so fast, Kamala… In one video response, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz called Harris’ post “heinous, vile and disgusting.” “Why did we want Trump there? It wasn’t to help his political campaign,” said Mark Schmitz. “We wanted a leader. That explains why you and Joe didn’t get a call.”

Darren Hoover, father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, said Harris lacks “empathy and understanding” about Monday’s ceremony. “In keeping with the reverence and respect that is given to all members of our military that are buried there, we invited President Trump,” he said. “We are the ones that asked for the video and the pictures to be taken at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” Hoover added that Trump has “been there for us from the very beginning,” and slammed Harris for “playing politics.” “You should be ashamed and embarrassed [about] your lack of empathy and decency as a human being,” said Hoover. “You are only in this for the power and prestige. You don’t care for our military or the citizens of this country.”

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“..her training wheels, bumper bowling, CNN-sponsored softball-lobbing Fischer-Price™ My First Political Interview lovefest..”

Debate Desperation Time For Democrats (QTR)

You’ll have to believe me that I’m not trying to make a partisan statement when I say that everything the Democrats have done leading up to this election has been inauthentic, phony, and panic-stricken—from swapping out their candidate at the very last minute to flip-flopping on major issues like banning fracking, taxing tips, and EV mandates. In some ways, I think the party would be doing better if they just took a breath and let Kamala Harris’s campaign unwind like any other normal campaign. But if Democrats are experts at one thing, it’s micromanaging things to death out of narcissistic adoration for their own faux intellect—hence we get genius ideas like price-fixing the economy, defunding the police, minting a trillion dollar coin, segregating college campuses to fight racism or trying to tell you what type of stove you can use at home.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the lack of finesse that comes with managing anything like an overly obsessive girlfriend sometimes starts to work against you. For example, Harris’s campaign strategy to keep her out of the media for the first 40 days of being a candidate put abnormal scrutiny on her first television appearance, which turned out to have the intellectual horsepower of a Whoopie Cushion. The whole world watched Harris take pre-scripted and probably pre-approved questions from a Democrat-friendly anchor, on a Democrat-friendly network, and put on a masterclass of how not to effectively articulate herself, her policies, her position changes, or generally anything of substance. For Donald Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden, the Democratic Party went full “control freak” and made innumerable requests for rule changes like the debate was being hosted at some Eastern European Ritz-Carlton and they were Hunter Biden on a coke bender ordering room service.

They requested chairs, notepads, water, excessive TV breaks, and muted microphones, ostensibly fearing Donald Trump’s razor-sharp tongue and uncanny ability to talk shit on the fly. When they got their request, and Trump and Biden faced off with muted mics, Biden was left to his own devices and promptly self-immolated on national television, while Donald Trump stood by, watched, and shrugged his shoulders as if to say in a Sopranos-style New Jersey Italian accent, “Can you believe this fucking guy?” Now, after watching their precious Kamala Harris nearly implode during her training wheels, bumper bowling, CNN-sponsored softball-lobbing Fischer-Price™ My First Political Interview lovefest last week (which was rumored to have been edited down to 18 minutes from 41), Democrats are once again nervous that their candidate is unable to articulate themselves and their policies well enough to win a cordial debate on the merits.

So, the Democratic Party is now requesting another flip-flop (surprise!) and asking that microphones for the debate between Trump and Harris on September 10th remain live for the entire event. And in hilarious fashion, they’re accusing Trump of being scared to change the rules. The mic mute was a Democrat request a month ago and, as a reminder, Trump has been deftly maneuvering near-daily press conferences where he is assaulted by hostile reporters whose sole intention is to humiliate him, while at the same time Kamala Harris has still avoided any solo unscripted, consequential press conferences or interviews. The notion that Trump is rattled by the request, like the media has been parroting, is insulting to the intelligence of anyone with an IQ higher than AstroTurf™.

The Democratic strategy seems to be clear: they want Harris to have a hot mic so she can go “brat” on Trump and run her mouth in the absence of having any policy prescriptions that can drive the interest of voters. It’s the epitome of inauthenticity and phoniness. Much like when Hillary Clinton revealed the term “Trumped-up trickle-down economics” during a 2016 debate, the Democrats are going full cringe and trying to script an “unscripted” moment for her to be remembered by. They want her talking to Trump in the same condescending way she speaks to everyone, despite being devoid of substance in her words.

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“Freedom of speech is under massive attack around the world..”

Elon Musk Warns Censorship Of X “Is A Certainty” If Kamala Harris Wins (MN)

X owner Elon Musk has warned Americans that if the Democrats win the election in November, censorship of the platform is a “certainty.” Musk was responding to a post that posited X could be suspended in America as it has just been in Brazil by a leftist judge acting to censor his political opponents. “When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the post from X Global Government Affairs notes.

It adds that “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.” Musk urged that this situation could easily unfold in the U.S. should Trump not be elected. Musk followed up with a post highlighting previous footage of Kamala Harris demanding that Trump be suspended from the old Twitter. “Freedom of speech is under massive attack around the world,” Musk declared. Harris has a track record of censoring social media for political clout.

Read more …

“..that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

Harris Admits The Economy-Crushing ‘Green New Deal’ Is Her Real Agenda (ZH)

Democrats (and Neo-Cons) never actually abandon an agenda, even if the majority of the population is against it. Instead, they look for the backdoor and pass legislation subversively by hiding it within other measures. The Green New Deal was a wildly unpopular concept rooted in UN-related climate directives on carbon emissions that would, if fully enforced, destroy the US economy in a decade or less. The EU in particular has been aggressive in expediting similar programs which now threaten the agricultural base of half the Europe. This has led to rising farmer protests and given momentum to “far-right” movements, a prospect that the social engineers at the EU Commission seem to fear more than anything else. Their solution? They are attempting to bribe farmers with subsidies and have offered to lessen the number of visits farms would receive from bureaucratic agents armed with fines and red tape. How nice of them…

As Jeremy Clarkson has cleverly proven in his show ‘Clarkson’s Farm’, trying to operate an agricultural business almost anywhere in Europe or the UK is a regulatory nightmare that would put most farmers in the US out of business immediately (America is headed in this direction). And that’s without the benefit of carbon emissions rules. Subsidies are the only thing keeping them alive, but the real trick is that the strict regulations force farmers into a position where they need subsidies. It’s a government enforced racket. Europeans suffered supply chain collapse and true famine during and after WWII and the experience is still burned into their collective cultural memory. It’s hard to say if the bribery scheme will work out the way the EU elites hope. Once carbon rules are passed and accepted as the norm, though, there’s no chance that they will be rescinded. They will continue to be enforced even when food inflation skyrockets again and mass starvation becomes a reality.

In the US, staunch opposition from conservatives prevented the direct passage of the Green New Deal. Biden denied his administration had any intention of pursuing GND policies in 2020 during a debate with Donald Trump. Biden was asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he supported the Green New Deal: “No, I don’t support the Green New Deal,” Biden said. “Oh you don’t? Oh, well, that’s a big statement,” Trump interrupted. “I support the Biden plan that I put forward,” Biden said, “which is different than what (Trump) calls the ‘radical’ Green New Deal.”

Of course, Biden would later covertly embed carbon policies into his “Inflation Reduction Act” – A piece of legislation that utterly failed to accomplish its name (CPI measurements have gone down, but inflation has not), but succeeded in launching the first stage of climate controls outlined in the GND. Biden has continued to deny that the GND is a goal of his administration, but Kamala Harris seems to have spilled the beans in her first major media interview since she became the Democratic candidate. “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed…You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

Read more …

“..national debt surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in history, increasing by a trillion since January..”

US In ‘Fast Lane’ To Bankruptcy – Musk (RT)

The US is rapidly moving towards bankruptcy because the government in Washington is spending too much money, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned. On Thursday, Musk shared a post on his X (formerly Twitter) platform by another user, who cited a forecast from the US government budget for fiscal year 2025 that said that the budget deficit could increase from the current $1.8 billion to almost $16.3 billion by 2035. “At current rates of government spending, America is in the fast lane to bankruptcy,” Musk wrote. The tech billionaire also suggested that “government overspending is what causes inflation” in the country.

The US annual inflation rate dipped below 3% in July for the first time since 2021, according to a Labor Department report, issued two weeks ago. The prices for goods and services went up by 2.9%, while core inflation, which excludes food and energy industries, rose by 3.2% over the previous 12 months. In late July, the US Treasury Department announced that the country’s national debt surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in history, increasing by a trillion since January. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that by 2034 the debt will exceed $50 trillion, amounting to more than 122% of America’s GDP.

The CBO also said that it expects the country’s average annual GDP growth rate to be at around 1.8% from 2029 to 2034. In June, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) think tank claimed that the national debt grew by $4.3 billion under incumbent US President Joe Biden, compared to $8.4 billion during Donald Trump’s term in office. In August, Trump gave a lengthy interview to Musk on X. Shortly after that, the Republican presidential candidate said that he would consider the tech billionaire, whom he described as a “brilliant guy,” for a role in his administration if he wins the election in November. Musk replied to the offer in a post, stressing that he is “willing to serve.”

Read more …

“..Hamas claimed that the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF. In a video addressed to the Israeli army following the recovery of the bodies, the Qassam Brigade reiterated that “they were alive and were supposed to be released in the first phase of the deal.”

Protests Sweep Israel After Hostage Deaths (RT)

Tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Israel on Sunday, demanding an immediate ceasefire deal from the government after the bodies of six hostages were discovered in Gaza tunnels the day before. Israel’s largest trade union has called for a nationwide strike on Monday to shut down the “entire Israeli economy,” with rights organizations urging a halt to pressure the government into signing a hostage-ceasefire deal. The Sunday demonstrations are said to be the largest since Israel launched its war on Hamas in response to the October 7 attack, which left around 1,200 Israelis dead and 200 taken hostage. Organizers described the rally as an “endless sea of protesters,” estimating a crowd of 300,000 people in Tel Aviv and an additional 200,000 in other cities across the country.

In Tel Aviv, protesters marched to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters, carrying six “symbolic coffins” and chanting, “We won’t abandon them” and “Now! Now!” Many blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to secure a deal to bring the hostages home safely. Frustration intensified when it was alleged that three of the six hostages killed were slated for release during the first phase of a ceasefire proposal discussed in July. A group of protesters erected a mock cemetery and held signs “named after Benjamin Netanyahu.” “Nothing is worse than knowing they could have been saved,” one demonstrator told reporters, adding, “Sometimes it takes something so awful to shake people up and get them out into the streets.” Later that night, the protests turned violent as demonstrators blocked roads and burned tires. Police deployed water cannons and stun grenades to disperse the crowds. One policewoman was reportedly injured in the confrontation, and dozens were arrested.

“During the illegal demonstration, police forces in Tel Aviv arrested 29 suspects who violated orders, attacked officers, and engaged in brutal vandalism,” law enforcement stated on X (formerly Twitter). Israeli political commentator Sri Goldberg asserted that Netanyahu should be “worried” about the widespread protests, explaining that the deaths of the hostages made it clear to many that “the policy of Israel’s government is profoundly detrimental to Israelis—and perhaps, in the case of the hostages, even lethal.” Meanwhile, Hamas claimed that the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF. In a video addressed to the Israeli army following the recovery of the bodies, the Qassam Brigade reiterated that “they were alive and were supposed to be released in the first phase of the deal.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

RFKIVM

 

 

Wood

 

 

Groomer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830169064158712146

 

 

Count dogs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830209655823388980

 

 

Ducklings
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830208695986200702

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle September 2 2024

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 54 total)
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  • #168049

    René Magritte Memory of a voyage 1952   • French Party Leader Warns Pavel Durov’s Life May Be in Danger (Sp.) • Kremlin Blasts Arrest In France O
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle September 2 2024]

    #168052
    Dr. D
    Participant

    I guess what I’m saying about Russia is, I don’t like that we’re headed for a nuclear war but somebody I can’t see is preventing it using actions and powers I can’t see. It’s like the sword of Damocles, but I can’t see what hand is stopping it? No, obviously no one likes that.

    And on the other hand, Armstrong says these guys are probably going to church and lighting candles, praying to God for war.

    RFK on the circuit, it’s good. He’s a much better speaker, he sounds like a human, says obvious, Statesmanlike things. I think this is, planned or not, a synergy. Trump HAS to talk at a 6th grade level, although quite clearly he’s capable of NY Lawyer speak. That’s the electorate, or the part he chose to take. Everyone says that, as in “America will one day meet her heart’s desire and elect a complete moron.” H L Menchin, like 100 years ago. Clearly the Democrats speak as if to complete gibbering morons on the Left, why is this any different? But he can’t then just start talking like a Fag n’ stuff from Idiocracy. He’d lose the base if he does one, yet is capped to who he can reach with the other.

    Enter RFK who can talk that next level up, which-ain’t-exactly-genius-level-either, Sunshine! But that reaches the tiny minority of rational people who traffic in ideas and facts and solutions. In an American, calm, practical way. Then as it’s RFK, and neither Trump nor Vance, they don’t HAVE to then do it all, as a campaign promise. Yet it’s said.

    That will matter as although sure they may WANT to get all American ended from being deathly ill and poisoned, they may not be able to take that on overnight, and need to pick the battles one by one, in order, to remove them, just as they were added one by one over decades. Each decision, like Dobbs, then has secondary consequences that can be capitalized on for evil. They can’t just jump in and break everything, or the White Hats become just more revolutionaries, burning it down.

    Tulsi is grabbing a different level and a different circuit. I don’t know what Demo, and maybe she’s still creating one, but it’s a different, third audience. Vance probably has a 4th, the “Forgotten America” group, CLEARLY from what I’m reading, the minions have been STRONGLY informed that Vance is Hitler squared, times 10 evangelicals, although he’s a Yale guy who isn’t religious and has a Left Coast, Indian Wife. …Just like Orange Hitler has a Jewish family and immigrant wife, black cabinet, and no one notices.

    So who cares what’s real when you have a Vance to hate? “Hate: It. Feels. So. GOOD!!!”™ Try Hate today and see if it’s right for you.™

    Kamala: “I’m Speaking”.

    Interesting. Shows the origin of her action. Any normal person would just, SAY SOMETHING, because they actually ARE speaking. The THING is what’s important, the word, idea, etc. Look at how much time doing this wastes, for her and for us. You can’t get anything done like this because you’re in meetings all day and if 15% of them are spend doing this, 15% less gets done. Most of the time she’s doing this, Pence is doing nothing, perfectly quiet. She can speak all she wants, sure HE wasn’t stopping her, so who was?

    So what IS she doing, if neither trafficking in words, ideas, nor solutions? A: Ego. That’s it. Her EGO was mildly annoyed, so EVERYTHING has to stop, with EVERY body, EVERY time. All day long. To boost it and chase it or something I dunno. F—k off! Ain’t nobody got time for that, even if they wanted, which we don’t, and even if it worked, which it doesn’t. And then she has to work with OTHER egos, like Pence, another politician, who ALSO are badly behaved. So then we know for a fact she can’t work with anyone else, NOR get anything done, NOR does she care at all.

    Look at her record: Oh yeah! I’m totally right! She can’t get anything done, and everyone hates her guts, even her own party and staff. Now normally that might be good as it prevents the government from doing literally anything, but just at the moment the country is collapsing and for a change I actually NEED someone doing something. And knowing what that “something” is.

    “Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’…

    Ah, now THAT makes sense. Finally. Tiny, tiny Jupiter invites Durov for dinner, picks him up. Because MACRON is on for IMPEACHMENT, then Prison. And WHERE are the texts that will put him there, be hung in the streets, with all France cheering forever? In Telegram. Like a moron.

    WHO is the only person that can erase them? Well, he’s sitting right there in France now, isn’t he? Going into the evidence locker, burning the evidence.

    Okay, WHO is Macron sh——g his pants over? Well not normal politics, nah. Not the Roths, he’s dey boi! He does gay sex for them all the time bc he doesn’t even have to get on his knees! Very convenient. So … somebody else?

    “..Paris could use the same grounds to arrest the CEOs of Renault or Citroën, as terrorists use cars.”

    And I expect they will if they haven’t already. They literally did that here to every gun company, years ago back before things even got spicy at all.

    Owning this will also give tiny, tiny Jupiter leverage and allies. But I expect like almost everything he touches, it’ll fail and laughably. No completely mind you, he’s still leader, but with national embarrassment at how dismal a player he is.

    Telegram: not talked about: They can and are making a Telegram encrypted on blockchain. That is, NO ONE runs it. It starts and runs itself. As blockchain, cannot either be blocked as there are no servers, it’s distributed. Waiting.

    West Brands All Inconvenient Facts As ‘Kremlin Propaganda’ – Putin (RT)

    Yeah, boy Russia sure is busy! They are doing ALL things, in ALL nations, and ALL elections, worldwide, and boy are my arms tired! They have no time to even run Russia itself! And now the place is falling apart! All you see on Russian TV is “What is the West doing?” “Which election should we topple next?” blah blah blah.

    Oh wait: the OPPOSITE of that. Russia doesn’t even mention the West, not even the war.

    But narcissistic sociopaths like us can not understand or believe that. We are obviously the center of the universe and everyone has to and must be thinking of us always too. There’s no other explanation.

    “• Walzin Out a Fake War Hero (Spears)

    More election. Democrats who declared martial law, locked up everybody at the point of a gun, had forced medical experiments done on them WHILE letting the whole state burn might be bad? Who knew? But he said some things n’ stuff. That’s Bad M’kay.

    A politician! He lied! Right there!!! (points while crowd keeps walking.)

    ““We wanted a leader. That explains why you and Joe didn’t get a call.” Ouch.

    I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times,” said Harris. “It is not a place for politics.”

    Which is why I’m making politics out of it. Like her EGO, above, there’s a way to do this cleverly, to bring-it-up-but-not-bring-it up, aw shucks, why you the press making me comment on this…? This is just being political. End. While saying it’s not political, end, which is ALSO LYING. Right to my face. End.

    Why are they doing this army, rah-rah thing? For that matter, if they are running Biden, then own the Harris campaign staffers to right from their thousands of pedo-nights off Epstein’s server trove Trump had access to, then why’d they choose Walz to smash – an easy target – and not PA Shapiro to smash instead?

    A: They need the loyalty of the Army well-locked, as we collapse 48 hours after Britain and Europe does. This is doing that wonderfully, thanks, Cackles.

    “everything the Democrats have done leading up to this election has been inauthentic, phony, and panic-stricken”

    Reading agreement on this from all over. No one can figure out what they’re doing or why they suck so bad. Like Zero normal, political ideas coming through. If I’m right and they’re being run hands-off by the White Hats, then this makes sense. It’s not that there aren’t party faithful, but before a level or two run into someone they have compriomat on, and boom, stops.

    Now WHYYYYY, is that? Because What If the White Hats just said, “We got this. We’re cleaning this up and fixing it, don’t shoot.”? YOU’D ALL SIT ON THE COUCH AND JERK OFF. Both sides. And not as a criticism, but like, LITERALLY why would you? If you do anything, you could get arrested for EXISTING in 10 miles of D.C. or Chicago on a certain day, while the FBI plants pipe bombs openly on camera. F- no, I’m not getting involved!

    …Aaaaaaaand then? And then the U.S. remains a nation of shiftless simps who won’t lift a finger, have no discernment, no activity, no initiative, no defense. No passion fro their rights, Daddy will save me. A minute later, the capture flips, the U.S. is rolled again because we’re a nation of passive weaklings.

    YOU need to think and believe YOU did it. YOU took action, got involved. YOU won your country back. With hard work and sacrifice. “We won! We Won!” — Hamilton, Yorktown. That We the PEOPLE fought this battle and WE THE PEOPLE own this country and we’re not just handing it back to you a minute from now. And that’s so important, if a handful take a few years in prison, or someone gets shot, oh well! Still the cheapest, lowest-death war ever. (Actually this was true of the 1st American Revolution as well. Masons and others set up a back-end winning, financing of it, running interference so Britain couldn’t focus on them. …And then the Founding Fathers double crossed them and got off the leash. But the leash then was slightly different bc no one had run this “Color Revolution” scam before. The goal was to win AT ALL, and not to win to hand it to Masons, Bankers, or families. Yet. Revolution Beta 0.50)

    That’s my take on it, and why Mr. 17 was put on 7 years ago, to essentially hint and say so to the base who WOULD shoot: “Give us a minute here. Don’t shoot unless you have to. We, someone up top, DOES know what’s going on. We have a Plan.”

    Or can you explain the sudden, inexplicable loss of talent and order, EVEN WHILE they own EVERY institution top-to-bottom, every media, every police, every D.A., and … this? C’mon. Rly? These are the SAME PEOPLE who had a real TALENT for oppression, murder, and fascism, complete control just a year or two ago. But now these SAME PEOPLE can’t get Joe Biden ice cream without breaking? Uh, no.

    Ask yourself why. That’s not rhetorical.

    …That doesn’t mean there won’t be a Civil War, or we’ll get out of this. But you can see, they abused and mentally engineered the population for THIS WINDOW, this Cult, this ONE TIME. If you can’t use that window, it starts to come apart and fly away like herding cats. Millennials are no longer one abused, raped block, easy to steer. Some are pissed about work, some about school, some about trying to homestead tiny houses. That’s your death squad, your cultural revolution, and they’re all retired, clocking out one by one. The tiny few K-Pop engineers with the keys to this magic trick can’t just make another generation of death-murder. Murder Hornets! They’ve never TRIED to back up one Mao cultural purging with another generation right behind it and there’s no talent on the fly to get this done because they’re inbred drooling morons. Gen Z is clearly NOT going to take up the Woke Cultural Revolution, Burn-it-All mantle for black rights when all their friends are half-black. And they are too. WTF would they be burning FOR or AGAINST when it’s just US, who are white and black both? Should I burn my right hand or my left hand?

    So now that’s gone over the hill – literally – they can’t HAVE a 2nd American revolution of Hamilton shooting red policemen in the face. Doesn’t matter WHAT you do, it won’t be that. So OUR Social Engineers, with far less power, outsmarted and outplayed them. Their process requires A WINDOW, and all you need to do to win in f—k up their TIME. Like EASTERN fighting, what Russia and China just monkey-hammered Europe on for the exact same thing. Duuuuuuh. Which is why they were so apoplectic about Trump. At that TIME, already a few years on the late side, Cheeto just SAT on the Revolution 2.0, Letting NO Revolution happen, until the window just…closed.

    Too bad, so sad!

    DEI and Twitter:

    Kamala sounds completely sensible here. That’s far worse because it’s overwhelmingly evil as f—k, and is installing the Dolores Umbrige of the Potamic. Boy I’d sure love her as my Mom and my boss, calling all the time, stomping on my face, forever!

    “• Protests Sweep Israel After Hostage Deaths (RT)
    the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF.

    Yes, these are the people that Israel set up and targeted, knowing Hamas was attacking and they were ordered to stand down so Nutsy could avoid jail…ironically only by committing more murders each hour. So they can’t come home 1) they would talk and 2) the war would end and Nutsy would be hung. That’s all you need to know.

    ….That, and that Nutsy will kill us all too, for his ego. But they all would. No secret there.

    #168053
    tboc
    Participant

    whoever scripted the 2016 presidential election is scripting this one. We know it is not Bannon, and now, it was not Bannon. Whoever it is, they are the best in the history of modern humanoids.

    The theme song for September and October in the United States should be the McCartney tune made famous by Badfinger:
    the refrain –
    Did I hear you say that there must be a catch?
    Will you walk away from a fool and his money?

    ease on over to the U tube and watch the final scene of The Magic Christian and you can sing along:
    If you want it, here it is, come and get it
    But you better hurry ’cause it’s going fast

    maybe Hemingway was wrong: The Sun Also Rises

    #168054
    tboc
    Participant

    hello, i’m Dr. D and i’m here to help

    #168055
    Dr. D
    Participant

    (H2 x 10E) + P25 = V

    Hitler squared x 10 Evangelicals + Project 25 = Vance.

    They’d say Vance-Hitler but they’ve run out of Hitlers, and don’t want to use Uncle Stalin, as he’s their goal, not their enemy.

    #168056
    Celticbiker
    Participant

    Might as well chow down at the library. The jewants took over centuries ago. All it took was antmoney and compound %..

    #168058
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #168059
    Oroboros
    Participant

    A little known component in the history of Project De-population©

    .

    #168060
    those darned kids
    Participant

    the view, looking through the bars, from celtic’s personalized prison:

    jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew. jew.

    #168061
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    .

    #168062
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #168063
    Oroboros
    Participant

    One of the finer nuanced points of Law

    .

    #168064
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Comic relief

    But so true you can actually base a business on it.

    .

    #168065
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Speaking of clever shifts in business strategy……

    I wonder if the waitresses have to declare tips

    .

    #168066
    Oroboros
    Participant

    The name of the restaurant is probably called Office Supplies

    #168067

    Kamala wants to go “brat”? So she’s wants to admit that she’s wurst?

    #168068
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Contrasting Styles

    .

    .

    #168069
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Just a little theology for breakfast

    Hawking finally gets in the Last Word

    .

    #168070
    Oroboros
    Participant

    What goes around comes around

    .

    #168071
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #168072
    Oroboros
    Participant

    If been trying the solve the “heat up two pizzas at the same time” problem for decades

    .

    #168073
    Oroboros
    Participant

    77% of younger people can’t pass the bare minimum physical to join the Empire of Lies military services

    Wow, like 77% can’t “Be All That They Can Be”

    I wonder how many can pass the “Mental-physical Test”

    .

    #168074
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #168075
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    Symbolism is like an inside joke known only to the joker. Instead of simply stating a fact or a truth in plain English they substitute symbolic imagery that could possibly be interpreted to imply the same fact, but only to those who correctly interpret and understand the symbolism. But because the symbol could also be interpreted any number of other quite different ways there is plausible deniability that it means exactly what the joker knows it to represent.

    #168076
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    Notice that the Satanic Cabal and its sycophantic minions are REALLY into symbolism. There’s nothing they love more than being able to say an AMBIGUOUS confession of crime right to your face. For example the pedophile symbols printed onto pizza parlor signs where Washington, DC elites liked to gather. Even the word “pizza” is a pedophile call sign. Symbols will be the death of them.

    #168077
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Liberal Woke Demonrat encounters armed illegal migrant about to rob him:

    .

    #168078
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Liberal Woke Demonrat Barbecues

    .

    #168079
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Liberal Woke Demonrat feedback loop reasoning process

    .

    #168080
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Duh’mericans sense of the wider world out there and geography, which only one in ten of them can actually spell

    .

    #168081
    John Day
    Participant

    Start writing & saying “Killemall Harris” … Pass is on!

    @Dr.D: I’m gonna post some more Hudson in a little while, including this part about the purpose (“what a thing does”) of European “democracies”.
    You might not to look at the rest, but this part is not overtly socialist:

    Michael Hudson: Debt, Economic Collapse and the Ancient World

    “Rome and its papacy seemed to be merely vestigial holdovers of early Christianity, having sunk so low a level by the 10th century that even Catholic historians refer to the papacy as the Pornocracy (Rule of the Harlots)…
    ..The effect was to legitimize the growth of great banking families that steadily became richer by lending to kings to wage war. After the Crusades ended in 1291 the papacy’s power began its long decline. But it had brought into being a financial class, whose growth in time came to overshadow that of Rome. The main long-term effect of the papal reform movement and its Crusades thus was to reverse Christianity’s core moral teaching opposing usury in the process of creating a new imperial and intolerant Christianity…
    ..Modern fiscal states have the power to levy national taxes, far beyond the fiscal power of kings to pledge their own property. The modern state was created above all as a fiscal organization to which creditors would be willing to lend the money to defend itself. That is how the northern Protestant states of Europe obtained the money to fight to become independent of Europe’s Catholic monarchies. Their political structures for achieving collective liability for debts evolved into democracies. The result was more than just a new kind of state; a supra-national financial system emerged, standing above nation-states that were obliged to enact pro-creditor fiscal and legal systems in order to obtain the loans that they needed to survive or fight their wars of conquest…
    ,,Creditors want states to be strong enough to enforce payment to them; strong enough to put the interest of domestic and foreign creditor alliances above that of the domestic economy’s growth.”

    #168082
    Oroboros
    Participant

    From Larry Johnson.
    :

    “The carnage Russia is inflicting on Ukraine is growing with each passing day.

    A year ago, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported an average of 700 Ukrainian casualties a day.

    Now, that number exceeds 2,000 a day — killed and wounded.

    10 days = 20,000 men gone

    The problem confronting Ukrainian commanders is the lack of trained reserves that could be plugged into failing battle lines.

    Ukraine has no viable system or plan in place to recruit and train 30,000 new soldiers every month.

    The reality is that Ukraine is throwing an untrained, unprepared cadre of men and women — many who were “press-ganged” into service — into combat, where they face well-trained and equipped Russian forces.”

    “The Ukrainian “offensive” in Kursk also has run out of gas and the units that are still on Russian territory are being hunted down and eliminated – killed or captured.

    The situation in Kursk will only worsen for Ukrainian forces remaining there in the coming two weeks.”

    TWO Russian Iskander cruise missiles double tap mercenary distribution point in Kharkov

    Ouch, a Zombieland hit on the Merc Maggots. Kaboom, all gone!

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/848tFX1bNn0K

    #168083
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    Those who read what I comment here have probably noticed that I have a habit of sharing what I see around me, hoping that it benefits others. Here is some more of that.

    A week and a half ago my daughter had a nasty sore throat, so I took her to an urgent care to see if it made sense to get her antibiotics. In AZ, the law says that if a patient’s health data is entered into a Health Information Exchange, then the patient (or patient’s representative) may opt-out of the HIE, and this is to be done by notifying the provider. I don’t know fully whether or not these HIEs are a good idea or not (I suspect not), however, I have made it a habit to exercise my right to opt-out of them for myself and the children. Perhaps it is simply a way for me to thumb my nose at the system, or a way to educate people who work the front office of medical offices about what is going on.

    I skimmed through the long, boring pages of notices that I was signing that I had received. I noticed a paragraph about an HIE, but saw nothing about the ability nor method to opt-out of the HIE. So I went up and asked the front office staff. They were completely clueless, and looked at me as if I were a crazy person. I went back to my seat, did a little searching on the internet, and found the opt-out form provided by the HIE named by the documentation, and asked the front office staff to print the document so that I could fill it out and sign it. The young woman seemed to agree — and subsequently my daughter was called back for the visit with the provider.

    When it was time to leave, I requested that printed form, and discovered that the front office woman seemed to have hoped that I would have forgotten my request — it had not been printed, and now she was refusing to print it. I pointed out that they were in violation of Arizona law. The second front office woman addressed me with a strong attitude, her behavior suggesting that I was crazy and that my requests were inappropriate. Both woman refused to give me the name or contact information for a manager/supervisor. I was angered by this exchange, but decided that I would bide my time and deal with it later. Once home, I found the relevant AZ government website and made a formal complaint about the urgent care office.

    Six days later I returned with my spouse (I invited him along, suggesting that it would be “fun,”) bringing the HIE opt-out forms filled out and a copy of the relevant AZ law. A different woman was manning the front office. This woman was equally ignorant of how to opt-out of the HIE, but she put forth a genuine effort to find out, finally scanning the forms, adding them to my daughter’s chart, forwarding the chart to someone that she believed would be able to act on the forms, and when asked for supervisor contact information she provided me the name and contact information for the business’s compliance officer. She provided quality customer service.

    In both instances, the front office staff was completely flummoxed by my request, the third one stating that in all of her time of employment with this company no one had ever made this request before. Of course not — the populace has been lulled by EULAs since the 1990s to ignore long pages of legalese, and to simply check a box or sign their acquiescence, completely ignorant of the rights that they are granted under law.

    #168084
    Oroboros
    Participant

    @ D Benton Smith and Symbolism

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    #168085
    John Day
    Participant

    @Phoenixvoice: Thank You for your Service, Sister.

    #168086
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    I see you’re back to understanding again and so soon too.
    What a relief!

    #168088
    John Day
    Participant

    Democracies Created To Fund Bigger Wars https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/democracies-created-to-fund-bigger

    Michael Hudson, Debt, Economic Collapse and the Ancient World (much condensed. Note that European “democracies” were devised to pay for Bigger War Loans.)
    ​ In 1964, I joined Chase Manhattan, and my first assignment was to analyze how much Latin American countries could afford to borrow. I was told to focus on Argentina, Brazil and Chile. To calculate their debt-carrying capacity, I had to calculate how much they could afford to pay in interest out of their export earnings. I found that they already had reached their limit to pay creditors in dollars. So there was little way that they could afford to take on more debt.
    ​ That did not make the officers in the international department very happy because they wanted to increase their loans, just as the real estate and oil departments wanted to do. It seemed to me that international lending was close to the risk limit of default for many countries.
    ​ On a later occasion I had a meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss my analysis. The Federal Reserve officer said that according to my calculations, Britain couldn’t afford to borrow any more money. I agreed. It had to keep borrowing just to maintain the exchange rate of the British pound.
    ​ The Federal Reserve man pointed out that the British had been maintaining their balance – mainly by raising interest rates to attract loans to stabilize their exchange rate. I agreed that this was what had enabled them to keep paying their debts. He pointed out that this was because U.S. creditors were lending them the money. And of course that was exactly what was keeping them afloat. He said that the same thing was true with Latin American countries. The United States was supporting them, at least as long as they were “friendly.” U.S. bankers therefore could lend them the money because U.S policy was to keep them solvent. The World Bank was showing them how to carry their debt service by privatizing their property, and the IMF giving them advice as to how to make their labor more competitive by paying it less and blocking attempts at unionization, while cutting back public social spending to “free” income to pay their creditors.
    ​ Under these terms it was clear that Latin America could continue to pay U.S. banks for new loans, at least for the immediate future. That was the financial sector’s time frame. But I could see that the only way that banks could keep expanding their loans to Latin America and England was to arrange for them to borrow the money to make their interest and principal repayments.​ That’s called a Ponzi scheme.​..
    ​..I became a balance-of-payments advisor to Canada in the late 1970s and an advisor to UNITAR, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, which published my papers on why Latin America could not afford to pay its debts. I presented these findings at a large UNITAR meeting in Mexico City.
    ​ The U.S. rapporteur deliberately misrepresented my talk, saying that I had explained how Third World countries could pay their debts with U.S. aid. I stood up and said that this was a falsification of what I and other members of my U.S. delegation (including Bob Fitch and Loren Goldner) believed. I demanded an apology from Luis Echeverria, who had convened the meeting. There was pandemonium and I walked out in protest. The Russian delegate came outside and said that I had taken over the conference by saying the unspeakable.
    ​ The “unspeakable” happened pretty quickly. The Italian funders of the UNITAR group insisted that it stop publishing my warnings about Third World debt. I realized that the idea that countries could not pay their debt was really important. It was not unthinkable at all, but it was unspeakable in polite company. In 1982, Mexico defaulted on its bonds, triggering the Latin American “debt bomb.”​…
    ​..I thought that people would be more willing to accept the idea that cancelling debts was needed to avoid economic polarization and impoverishment if they could see how societies through the ages had dealt with the problem of debts exceeding the ability of large parts of the economy to pay. Around 1980-1981, I began to draft this history. I thought that if this logic were accepted for the past, the implications for today would become less unthinkable.
    ​ I looked for examples of early recognition that if debts couldn’t be paid on a widespread basis, some authority was needed to write them down, or else a creditor oligarchy would emerge to polarize and ultimately impoverish the economy. Such polarization and impoverishment is clear enough in the modern world. If governments don’t write down Latin America’s debts, for example, the continent’s debtor countries will be obliged to go to the IMF, World Bank and the U.S. State Department. These institutions will insist that the debtor economy would have to “stabilize” its exchange rate by selling off its land, mineral rights and public infrastructure to foreign investors, using the sales proceeds to pay foreign creditors. That will strip away the assets and patrimony of debtor countries.
    ​ It was fairly easy to go back to the 19th century and see the financial ruin of Persia and Egypt as a result of debts owed to European bankers. I began taking notes going back to the medieval times and the Crusades with its revival of war debts, and to Rome and Greece such as Solon’s seisachtheia of 594 BC, and to the Biblical Jubilee year. In looking through this literature I found scattered references to earlier Near Eastern debt cancellations.
    ​ To trace down these references I began to read about Mesopotamia. Most of the writing was in French and German. I had studied linguistics at the University of Chicago for my BA, but I didn’t read cuneiform. So I began to read translations of the laws of Hammurabi and even more important, the debt cancellations or “clean slates” of Hammurabi and all the other members of his Babylonian dynasty, as well as those of neighboring lands, and earlier in Sumer.
    ​ I found that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t studied Assyriology. Having to read Bronze Age royal proclamations in translation actually turned out to be an advantage, because the translation of the royal inscriptions and proclamations was quite different in German, French, English and American. It seemed that each translator used their own preconceptions of what exactly rulers were doing when they “proclaimed order.”…
    ​..Andurarum meant literally a free-flowing, meaning that bond servants held by their creditors had the liberaty to go back to their original homes. House slaves (often “mountain girls” that debtors had pledged to creditors were returned to their former masters who owned them. And land that had been forfeited to creditors was restored to debtors. (The Babylonian word was cognate to Hebrew deror, the word used in Leviticus 25 for the kindred Jubilee Year.)
    ​ The Germans had just what I was focusing on: a debt cancellation. F. R. Krauss wrote a detailed study of this. But then the French assyriologist Dominique Charpin had the least anachronistic translation of all. He called it a “restoration of order,” a return to the “mother condition” ending the disorder. The root of the Sumerian term for such proclamations, amargi was ama, “mother.” For instance, when the Iraqi President Hussein said that his war against the American invasion by George W. Bush was going to be “the mother of all wars,” he meant the paradigmatic war. Amargi was the paradigmatic social balance that Bronze age society thought should be the norm.
    ​ My Association with Harvard to Create a Scholarly Group to Analyze Near Eastern Economies
    ​ I wrote a draft of what I’d found, and my friend Alexander Marshack, the leading Ice Age archaeologist and on the Harvard faculty, sent what I’d written to the head of the Peabody Museum, Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky. He invited me up to Harvard, and suggested that I become a research fellow on the faculty in “Babylonian archaeology” and go into my academic research in depth.
    ​ It soon became apparent that I couldn’t simply write this history by myself. What was at issue was the broad context that shaped the Mesopotamian economic takeoff in which interest, money and “taxes” first arose and took shape. In order to get credibility for our study, we drew up a plan to invite the leading Assyriologist and Egyptologist scholars who could read the Bronze Age proclamations, letters and legal cases. We would hold a series of colloquia as a basis for creating a financial and economic history of the ancient Near East.
    ​ I had tried to write the original version of what became my volume, “… and Forgive Them Their Debts” to a number of publishers like the University of California. Every publisher rejected it, sending it to referees who thought that it was impossible for society to cancel the debts, because if that were the case, creditors wouldn’t have made loans anymore. One Assyriologist repeated Rabbi Hillel’s pro-creditor argument against the Jubilee Year to this effect. To counter the threat of debt cancellation, Hillel created the prosbul clause waiving the debtor’s right to have his debts cancelled in the Jubilee Year. That was the political context in which Jesus led the fight to revive the Jubilee Year practice.
    ​ What this argument missed was that most Bronze Age cultivators and other non-commercial individuals didn’t run up debts by borrowing money. They incurred tax arrears and other obligations that accrued during the crop year and were due at harvest time.
    ​ For instance, right now we’re having this conversation in a bar. It has long been typical for workers to run up a tab, to be paid on the next payday. Something similar happened in Mesopotamia. The ale women providing beer were part of a palatial or temple “public utility,” as the British word “pub” recognizes. Customers would run up tabs that were owed at the end of the harvest. Their payday was harvest time, the time that money actually was used – grain-money, weighed out on the threshing floor and paid to creditors, headed by the palace and temples.
    ​ But if the harvest was bad, the cultivators wouldn’t have the grain money to pay the debts that they had run up during the crop year. How were rulers going to deal with this situation when debtors couldn’t pay? Hammurabi and his contemporaries recognized that it was against their interest to let debtors fall into bondage to the palace for agricultural advances, to temple officials who were owed money for officiating at weddings or funerals, or to private creditors or “big men” who had advanced food or products to cultivators. If rulers permitted citizens on the land to fall into bondage to work off their debts to the large institutions or other creditors, debtors couldn’t serve in the army or work on civic infrastructure building the city walls, temples and other public construction.
    ​ Instead of a “sanctity of debt” there was a sanctity in its cancellation, at least for personal consumer debts. (Business commercial debts were left intact.) Instead of allowing the labor force to be reduced to bondage or having them forfeit their land tenure rights to creditors, rulers maintained economic balance by proclaiming a Clean Slate. That was the opposite of what the International Monetary Fund has done to Latin American debtor economies…
    ..Economic liberty on the land meant being able to produce your own means of support. Hammurabi’s laws sought to preserve this condition – or restore it, if disturbed – by stipulating that if the storm god Adad the storm god floods the land, grain-debts wouldn’t have to be paid. Wartime was another occasion for such debt cancellations. And even without such problems, it was recognized that debts mounted up in the normal course of life. To clear this backlog of obligations hanging over agrarian individuals, every new ruler started his reign by proclaiming a Clean Slate – every ruler of Hammurabi’s dynasty, and those of earlier Lagash and other neighboring lands…
    ..What made Western civilization different at the outset was that the Mediterranean lands didn’t have kings. You said before that there was a collapse of the Mycenaeans. It wasn’t really a collapse. There was really bad weather around 1200 BC. There was a drought that set whole populations in motion. They couldn’t survive where they were. The same thing happened in India about 600 years earlier. The largest Bronze Age civilization, the Indus civilization, dried up…
    ​..The Middle Eastern merchants introduced the practice of charging interest to the West. Local Greek and Italian chieftains adopted it in their transactions with the rest of society. But the West had no palace rulers to cancel debts, so the dynamics of interest-bearing debt ended up leading to an aristocracy owning the land and holding the population in debt. That problem was only solved by the tyrants that we discussed earlier, who overthrew the predator aristocratic families, cancelled the debts and redistributed the land that had been monopolized.
    ​ The Syrian and Phoenician merchants also introduced Middle Eastern weights and measures as a necessary element of charging interest. But the arithmetic fractions and denomination were different in the West, and varied widely. Those of Mesopotamia (minas for weight and gur-bushels for volume) were based on 60ths because that system had been developed in the temples to distribute food to their dependent labor force of war widows and orphans on a monthly basis. The administrative year was divided into 30-day months, so each day two 60ths of the monthly ration (a “bushel”) would be consumed – two cups a day. Next month, another bushel would be given.
    ​ Interest charges were based initially on ease of calculation: one shekel per mina per month in Mesopotamia’s sexagesimal system of fractional divisions. Greece had a different system. It had been in the orbit of Crete and Egypt, which used the decimal system based on 10. So their rate would be 1 percent per month (12 percent for a year), or sometimes 10 percent. Rome used a fractional measuring system based on a year’s normal division into 12 months. So Roman weights measured 12 ounces in a pound. Its interest rate was set at an annual 1/12 (8 1/3 percent). This comparison shows that interest rates were not set by the rate of profit or productivity as modern theory assumes, but simply to make it easier to calculate in the local system of fractional accounting…​
    ..When I first submitted my explanation to the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, its editors questioned whether it really could be so simple. It took them six years to agree to publish my article in 2000. My discoveries as an outsider have now been accepted by Assyriologists. But they are ignored outside of that field.
    ​ This experience helps explain why I was able to get assent from the Assyriologists and other prehistorians who were part of my 20-year Harvard colloquia. Assyriologists had refused ever since the 1920s to deal with economists or non-Assyriologists because there was so much ideological preconception about how civilization began…​
    ..I was an outsider to Assyriology, but also to mainstream economics. I knew that I didn’t know how archaic societies were organized. But I knew that what was important for me to find out was how different societies treated money and debt relations. I was looking for the laws of financial motion, the dynamics that you and I have been talking about.
    ​ The Assyriologists were willing to work with me and become part of my research because I simply asked what they could tell me about the documentation from their period on debt, land tenure, accounting and its weights and measures, and money, including the interest rates on contracts and in royal inscriptions. How did the earliest documented societies organize the building of their pyramids, palaces and city walls?​…
    ..The greatest resistance to the discoveries resulting from my research came from the ideological prejudice against the idea that Bronze Age rulers needed to prevent the emergence of financial oligarchies. All history from the ancient Middle East through classical Greece and Rome is offensive to the modern economic and political ideology..
    ​..It was pretty easy for me to forecast interest rates and foreign exchange rates. I went around the world doing that. But what turned out to be much more difficult was trying to understand why antiquity and Western civilization followed the course that it did. That was much more difficult than being a futurist, because archaic societies and antiquity were so different from today, with different social values. The West’s polarization into creditor oligarchies was hard for me to understand, because I could not imagine how different the late Stone Age was, the Bronze Age and even classical antiquity. Their social and political systems were so fundamentally different, not just moving forward but transforming, largely as a result of the financial tensions that increased between private wealth and society’s administrative traditional governing values and authority.
    ​ And yet despite this transformation there was a common denominator, the choice between letting a financial oligarchy emerge or having a governing power strong enough to prevent that, such as the Near Eastern “divine kingship” or the so-called Greek tyrants who cancelled the personal debts and redistributed the land to lead the Greek takeoff, or modern socialist governments. It’s as if this transformation evolved from one species or genus of an economic system to another.
    ​ The mainstream Western view thinks of the past as being like today’s world, depicting us as the heirs of Greece and Rome. If that really remains our genetic political and social heritage, the West will retain the same dynamic that led to Rome’s decline and fall. What happened was that Greece and Rome – that is, Western civilization – took the Near Eastern financial innovations out of context, without having rulers empowered to cancel personal debts, and prevent oligarchies from taking over the land and monopolizing it to bring on the Dark Age.
    ​ Most people think the Greeks and Romans were democracies. But they only had short moves toward some transitory democratic voting forms. When Aristotle led a study of the various Greek constitutions, he said that they all called themselves democracies but were really oligarchies…
    ​..Today’s challenge is not simply to move forward along our present trajectory, but to realize a need for self-transformation into a new trajectory of social and economic evolution.​ The alternative is self-destruction. What kind of world are we going to create? This is not a future that can be predicted with certainty. Will the West let itself be polarized and end up like the Roman Empire did? Or will Europe realize that it has made a mistake and rejoin the rest of Eurasia? And will Asia indeed free itself from the Western-sponsored neoliberalism that has deindustrialized the NATO world? Will the BRICS and Global majority progress with socialism, or regress with the West’s libertarian free-market characteristics?​ …
    ​..Once you privatize public infrastructure or the supply of basic needs, you vastly increase the cost of living. In the 19th century, Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed that health, public health, was the essence of his party’s reforms. It was the Conservatives that wanted that policy. And in the United States it was Simon Patten, the first economics professor at the first business school, the Wharton School, who described public infrastructure as a distinct factor of production. The landlord’s ownership claim for rent is not a factor of production but an extractive rentier claim. And unlike labor’s wages or industrial capital, public infrastructure investment and the provision of essential social services is not aimed at making a profit. The role of public infrastructure and social welfare is like that of the Erie Canal and other American infrastructure. The aim is to lower the cost of living and doing business.
    ​ So if we can have the public infrastructure providing basic needs – healthcare, education, communications and transportation services, if we can have the post office, water and sewer systems as public functions provided freely or at subsidized prices, the economy can function at a much lower cost than if these services are privatized, monopolized as opportunities for rent extraction and duly financialized. The government’s business isn’t to make a profit. It is supposed to provide basic needs as a economic right.
    ​ Patten described the aim of public infrastructure as being to lower the economy’s overall cost of living and doing business so that industrialists would not have to pay their employees high enough wages to, for example, enable them to afford to pay for their own education – at $50,000 a year today – or their own healthcare at 18 percent of GDP. They would have subsidized transportation instead of letting it be monopolized and financialized as occurred in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
    ​ Privatizing these hitherto public services has led them to be run for profit (largely by making monopoly rents), and even more, for capital gains for their stocks and for management fees. All this pushes up the cost of living and doing business.​.. Everybody back in the 19th century considered called this public infrastructure to be socialism, not only the Marxists. You had Christian socialists, you had Henry George’s libertarian socialists, you had all sorts of socialists. What they had in common was that they saw the future of industrial capitalism to be an increasingly public economy with active public investment subsidizing the ability of the nation’s industrialists and labor to compete with that of other countries by lowering the cost overhead.​..
    ​..So if you have an economy of privatized healthcare, education, water and other basic needs with operators charging as much as an unregulated market can bear (euphemizing this as “the magic of the marketplace”), how can the Americans or Western Europeans that have become neoliberal expect to compete with countries that are calling themselves socialist and reinventing the policy wheel by rediscovering on pragmatic lines exactly what American and German industrial capitalists did in the 19th century​…
    ..Governments in antiquity were creditors, not debtors. Royal indebtedness occurred only with the Roman Church’s attempt to bring fellow Christian realms under control of the papacy. That required armed force, and armies required financing. The Crusades and the numerous other wars waged by the papacy were directed mainly against fellow Christians in Germany, France (the Cathars), Sicily, the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. Arranging financing for Rome’s warlord fiefs to fight these wars initiated the financialization of the West. These loans were at interest, bringing an international merchant-banking class into being – as well as reversing Christian opposition to usury/interest.
    ​ From the start of the Crusades in 1095 through the 16th century, the Roman Church was the unipolar organizing power over Western Europe. Popes treated secular kings as their vassals and set out to gain control of Christendom’s four other patriarchates: Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, collectively known as the Eastern Orthodox Church.
    ​ At the end of the 1st millennium Constantinople was by far the dominant power, the New Rome and hence its emperor was the “real” Roman Emperor. The old Rome and its papacy seemed to be merely vestigial holdovers of early Christianity, having sunk so low a level by the 10th century that even Catholic historians refer to the papacy as the Pornocracy (Rule of the Harlots)…
    ..The effect was to legitimize the growth of great banking families that steadily became richer by lending to kings to wage war. After the Crusades ended in 1291 the papacy’s power began its long decline. But it had brought into being a financial class, whose growth in time came to overshadow that of Rome. The main long-term effect of the papal reform movement and its Crusades thus was to reverse Christianity’s core moral teaching opposing usury in the process of creating a new imperial and intolerant Christianity…
    ..Modern fiscal states have the power to levy national taxes, far beyond the fiscal power of kings to pledge their own property. The modern state was created above all as a fiscal organization to which creditors would be willing to lend the money to defend itself. That is how the northern Protestant states of Europe obtained the money to fight to become independent of Europe’s Catholic monarchies. Their political structures for achieving collective liability for debts evolved into democracies. The result was more than just a new kind of state; a supra-national financial system emerged, standing above nation-states that were obliged to enact pro-creditor fiscal and legal systems in order to obtain the loans that they needed to survive or fight their wars of conquest…
    ,,Creditors want states to be strong enough to enforce payment to them; strong enough to put the interest of domestic and foreign creditor alliances above that of the domestic economy’s growth. So you still have the same eternal fight over what will get priority: Will the economy grow and be free, or will creditors have the “right” or power to reduce it to debt dependency? …
    ​..I think that the addictive drive for economic power to dominate others subject to dependency relationships as debtors, renters or trade customers, dominating and impoverishing society around them, should be the center of modern economics. We’re seeing the One Percent doing what similar elites have always tried to do. We can see​ why creditors like the freedom to deny liberty to their debtors, and treat this as part of the natural order. The financial sector controls most monetary wealth, and is horrified at the thought that debtors might be freed from having to pay their loans. There is almost an abhorrence at viewing Bronze Age economic history and that of early antiquity as a success story in restraining the emergence of an oligarchy to use debt leverage to impoverish the population and appropriate its self-support lands for themselves, putting house to house and plot to plot together so that no more room in the land is left for people, as the Biblical prophet Isaiah put it.
    ​ Where is the economic discussion today about how to make a mixed and balanced public-private economy? Students are indoctrinated about how to let the free market, dominated by the wealthy financial sector, operate so that let the wealthy can do whatever they want. The Romans did not need a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan to advise them about economic freedom. To Rome’s oligarchy, freedom was their right to do anything they wanted to the rest of the population.
    ​ That’s what an economically and politically privatized free market leads to. Its freedom is for the creditors and landowners to charge rent, and for monopolies to take as much as they can from their victims. This is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the other classical economists meant by a free market. They meant a market free from landlords, free from monopoly rent and free from privatized creditor power.
    ​ That basic fight to free societies from “economic rent” and its associated oligarchic rentier power has been going on ever since antiquity​…
    ​..That should be the context in which one looks at every epoch’s economic view of the world, above all its perspective concerning how “free” a market should be, and just whose freedom is being endorsed. That has been the great question throughout the history of civilization, from the Bronze Age Near East when rulers regularly proclaimed Clean Slates to restore economic order to check incipient oligarchies, through the five centuries of civil war in the Roman Republic and Jesus’s fight against the emerging Jewish oligarchy, to today’s civilizational fight between the NATO West dominated by U.S.-oriented rentier oligarchies and the global majority centered now on the BRICS. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/michael-hudson-debt-economic-collapse-and-the-ancient-world.html

    ​ US in ‘fast lane’ to bankruptcy – Musk​ [So the question is, who should “we” cut out in this debt default. Let’s cut out global finance for wars. Starve ’em to death.]
    The US is rapidly moving towards bankruptcy because the government in Washington is spending too much money, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned.
    ​ On Thursday, Musk shared a post on his X (formerly Twitter) platform by another user, who cited a forecast from the US government budget for fiscal year 2025 that said that the budget deficit could increase from the current $1.8 trillion to almost $16.3 trillion by 2035.​ “At current rates of government spending, America is in the fast lane to bankruptcy,” Musk wrote.​ The tech billionaire also suggested that “government overspending is what causes inflation” in the country.​ https://swentr.site/news/603366-us-musk-bankruptcy-inflation/

    ​ Renowned Surgeon and Lead Author of New Lancet Study Tortured by Israeli Military
    Dr. Khaled Alser was held for at least three months at notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and remains “forcibly disappeared,” according to colleagues
    ​ Dr. Khaled Alser, a highly respected Palestinian surgeon, is the lead author of The Lancet’s first medical paper to detail cases of trauma among Gazan patients and medical professionals. But he has had little opportunity to mark the occasion: On March 25, the Israel Defense Forces abducted him during a raid on his hospital and he remains in captivity, his whereabouts unconfirmed. Since his abduction, he has been held at Ofer Detention Center. He has also spent at least three months at Sde Teiman, a notorious IDF-run torture camp in the Negev Desert. A Physicians for Human Rights Israel report provided to his colleagues recently includes testimony detailing Dr. Alser’s torture and abuse at the camp, though Alser has been accused of no wrongdoing.​ https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-doctor-tortured-lancet

    ​ ‘There was no mercy, even on children’: trauma in the West Bank after Israeli raids​ Little girls as human shields​ in illegal forced entry…​ Israel denies it.
    ​ When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.
    They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
    The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head…
    ..“Mowing the grass” it is called, by certain Israeli generals and pundits, and the cynical phrase is repeated on the West Bank by Palestinians with added irony as they are well aware they are the “grass”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/31/trauma-in-the-west-bank-after-israeli-raids-palestinian-territory

    #168089
    John Day
    Participant

    Over 70% of roads destroyed by Israeli forces in Jenin: Municipality​ Water supply has reportedly been disrupted for 80% of Jenin and the entire refugee camp.​ https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/over-70–of-roads-destroyed-by-israeli-forces-in-jenin–muni

    ​ Palestinians Seek US Appeals Court Review of Biden Genocide Complicity Case
    “The U.S. is providing the bombs for this genocide,” said one plaintiff. “I have lost countless friends and neighbors… When will the courts uphold the law and stop the horror?”​ https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-genocide-case

    ​ Protests sweep Israel after hostage deaths
    ​ Israeli political commentator Sri Goldberg has said Netanyahu should be “worried” about the unrest, explaining that the deaths of the hostages made it clear to many that “the policy of Israel’s government is profoundly detrimental to Israelis – and perhaps, in the case of the hostages, even lethal.”
    ​ Meanwhile, Hamas claimed that the hostages were “deliberately” killed by the IDF. In a video addressed to the Israeli army following the recovery of the bodies, the Qassam Brigade insisted that “they were alive and were supposed to be released in the first phase of the deal.”​ https://swentr.site/news/603371-israel-protests-hamas-hostages/

    ​ US to give Zelensky ‘free hand’ on strikes deep inside Russia – Moscow
    Washington has effectively become a party to the Ukraine conflict, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova has said​ https://swentr.site/news/603285-ukraine-us-weapons-zakharova/

    New York Police Planning Mass ‘Sick Leave’ On Trump Sentencing Day? MAGA Claim Viral​ https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/new-york-police-unions-planning-mass-sick-leave-on-donald-trump-sentencing-day-maga-claim-viral-article-112938167

    #168090
    John Day
    Participant

    ​ UPDATED: NOT STATE GUARD, FEDERAL TROOPS ! ! ! ! Reports: New York Deploying National Guard for Trump Sentencing on Sept 18 – CLAIM Trump to be IMPRISONED that day – Fear Riots to ensue
    ​ Numerous reports have begun coming-in saying large numbers of New York National Guard Troops are being brought into hotels around the Courthouse in Manhattan, in preparation for the IMPRISONMENT of President Trump on Sept. 18 at his Sentencing.
    ​ Word came from a federal law enforcement source saying New York State Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter collected hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in political consulting work from Democrats during the Trump Trial, will order Trump taken to jail at the Sentencing on September 18. Trump will reportedly be taken to Riker’s Island jail at that time.
    ​ Additional claims from that same federal law enforcement source say New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, fear that New York Police will engage in a “Sick Out” on that date, because all the police officers KNOW the trial was a complete sham, they want no part in persecuting Trump.​ https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/news-selections/national-news/reports-new-york-deploying-national-guard-for-trump-sentencing-on-sept-18-claim-trump-to-be-imprisoned-that-day-fear-riots-to-ensue

    ​ Is The Military Buildup in NYC There to Assist Throwing President Trump in Prison?
    Jason Goodman found the army had taken over a public New York City hotel, and he was not allowed to tape.​..
    ​ Laura Loomer reported last night that NYC is preparing to imprison President Trump in a kangaroo, unconstitutional, criminal, corrupted, NY Court on felonies that are not crimes in any county in the nation (i.e. you cannot be charged with a felony for receiving a letter in the mail and yet President Trump is charged with 11 felonies for saying he did this – he never did and these are not crimes).​ https://joehoft.com/is-the-military-buildup-in-nyc-there-to-assist-throwing-president-trump-in-prison/

    “Not The Type Of Character You Want” In High Office – Tim Walz’s Brother Slams VP Candidate​ https://www.zerohedge.com/political/not-type-character-you-want-high-office-tim-walzs-brother-slams-vp-candidate

    ​ France stoops to hostage-taking of Telegram’s Pavel Durov
    At a time when the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has entered a disastrous phase of defeat, the Western elite must shut down all and every critical media.​ https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/30/france-stoops-hostage-taking-telegram-pavel-durov/

    ​ French Party Leader Warns Telegram CEO’s Life May Be in Danger​ [His brother, safe in Dubai, is the actual tech-wizard who knows stuff.]
    ​ The life of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was released on bail this week as he faces a potential trial in France, might be in danger, Florian Philippot, the leader of The Patriots party, said on Saturday.
    ​ The politician referred to reports by French media, which claimed that the billionaire tech entrepreneur had been approached by French intelligence agents while in Dubai and that he had refused to share classified information.
    ​ “Day after day, the puzzle of [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s delirious persistence against Pavel Durov, after having coaxed him, takes shape … Let’s not forget that Macron has been using Telegram extensively with his teams for a long time, and that he feared ‘leaks’… Pavel Durov should really be careful, his life may be in danger!” Philippot said on X.​ https://sputnikglobe.com/20240831/french-party-leader-warns-telegram-ceos-life-may-be-in-danger-1119973143.html

    #168091
    John Day
    Participant

    ​Drank the Kool-Aid, Hillary? Vaxxed and boosted? Clinton Drops Out Of Harris Fundraiser In The Hamptons After Getting Covid https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/clinton-drops-out-of-kamala-harris-fundraiser-in-the-hamptons-after-getting-covid/

    From 3/22/2022, Hillary Clinton Tests Positive For Covid, Says She’s “More Grateful Than Ever” For Vaccines https://deadline.com/2022/03/hillary-clinton-positive-covid-1234984613/

    A devastated father has issued a statement expressing his deep regret at forcing his young daughter to take the Covid mRNA shot that killed her.
    The father, Yi Geun-jae from the town of Pyeongtaek, South Korea, has issued a video statement with a warning for others about the dangers of blindly trusting government advice.
    Ye-won, a healthy young girl, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage caused by the Covid mRNA injection she received.​ https://slaynews.com/news/father-expresses-deep-regret-forcing-daughter-take-covid-shot-killed-her/

    ​ COVID never killed healthy kids. It takes a “vaccine” to do that. $3,000 and a Toy: Novavax Dangles Incentives to Fill Clinical Trials on COVID Shots for Babies, Kids
    The “Hummingbird” trial is testing two primary shots and a booster shot of Novavax’s adjuvanted recombinant spike protein nanoparticle vaccine in children. The trial is enrolling 3,600 children from the U.S. and other countries.​ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/novavax-covid-vaccine-trial-infants-children/

    ​ It’s Been 10 Years Since a Whistleblower Exposed the CDC’s Cover-up of the Link Between Vaccines and Autism. The Agency Has Done Nothing.
    Ten years after a whistleblower at the CDC leaked data showing the agency identified a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in African American boys, the agency has done nothing to address the issue.​ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-whistleblower-mmr-vaccine-autism-link/

    #168092
    John Day
    Participant

    ​ Steve Kirsch, Legal updates: US and New Zealand
    Kansas is the first of 5 states to file suit against Pfizer. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, they’ve spent $2M to prosecute whistleblower Barry Young and $0 to analyze their own data for safety signals.​ https://kirschsubstack.com/p/legal-updates-us-and-new-zealand

    ​ Steve Kirsch, The New Zealand COVID vaccine data shows that the shots make you more likely to die
    Have you seen any analysis of the NZ data posted by any prominent epidemiologist showing it is safe? I haven’t and it’s been almost 1 year since I set the data free.​ https://kirschsubstack.com/p/the-new-zealand-covid-vaccine-data

    ​ FDA ‘Unquestionably’ Overstepped Authority With War on Ivermectin, DOJ Attorney Admits
    The DOJ attorney who defended the FDA when doctors sued the agency over its anti-ivermectin social media posts during the COVID-19 pandemic admitted the FDA’s war against ivermectin was an abuse of governmental authority, according to an investigation by Project Veritas.​ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-war-on-ivermectin-doj-attorney-project-veritas/

    ​William Makis MD, IVERMECTIN should be given to all advanced Breast Cancer patients – outperforms chemo Paclitaxel and kills Cancer Stem Cells! https://makismd.substack.com/p/ivermectin-should-be-given-to-all

    Nothing is perfect, but helping is good: Cancer researcher: IVERMECTIN can overcome chemotherapy resistance of TURBO CANCERS caused by mRNA vaccines https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-30-ivermectin-overcome-chemo-resistant-mrna-caused-cancers.html

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