Debt Rattle July 20 2023
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Andy Warhol Grace Kelly 1984 • RFK Jr’s Racist, Antisemitic And Xenophobic Views Go Back Decades (G.) • Anything Anything Anything To Avoid Deb
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 20 2023]Remarkable times we live in. I remember seeing a video during covid. A white woman in a mostly empty football stadium watching local game without a mask on. A black security guard came along and, literally, dragged her out of the place. All I could think was: America has come a long way from Emmett Till.
These days I can begin to understand the reconstruction South after the Civil War. The days of the Carpetbaggers when there was very little rule of law. Suddenly it makes sense how some would see the KKK as a movement to restore law and order. Unfortunately it enforced the racist Jim Crow South.
That’s what happens when you destroy a society. Bad things follow.
“In-N-Out Bans Employee Masking In Five States
The irony will be in the upcoming pandemic where they’ll have to wear masks outside, but can’t wear them at work.
This goes with the totalitarian observation that everything must be either illegal or compulsory. #LifeGoals“Canadian Wildfire Smoke Pours Into North Florida
Okay, now you REALLY have to be kidding me. Since that smoke never crossed the border into New York before, and now it’s in FLORIDA? So 2,500 miles? And on the smoke map it seems to be flowing into and appearing only in major CITIES, while ignoring the surrounding countryside?
“Taiwan Says It Detected A Record 16 Chinese Warships Around Island”What are these Chinese ships doing in the China Sea???
“Scandal-Plagued Stanford President Resigns After Review Finds ‘Significant Flaws’ In Studies He Ran”
Well, it’s Stanford. So of course 1) they didn’t do any work and 2) it’s a lie. However, it’s also Science™ “The Place Where No Data Is Real” so I guess I should have seen that coming.
Science is just lying now. Get your B.S. and Pre-Reqs are Lying 101 and Lying 201 with a side of “Data Manipulation” and “Baffling the Public Using False Statistics”
“Watch: National Security Head Says UFOs Having ‘Real Impact’ On USAF Pilots”
That can’t be right: I’ve been told all my life they’re not real. So they WEREN’T real for 30 years but suddenly and coincidentally are real now? No: NOW, they’re both real AND not-real AT THE SAME TIME. #AntiLogos.
“Rep. @ByronDonalds Just Leveled the Biden Crime Family Syndicate”
And yet nothing happened. Boy these guys sure like words. They think words are the same as doing something.
“U.S. Interest Payments”“We should spend most on children!
We should spend most on patients!
Hear me out: why don’t we spend it all on interest payments” – Remy“Russia showed miracles of patience, constantly extending the grain deal;”
What I’m surprised by is the West broke their side of the agreement in SECONDS. Like, it’s cute and clever when you Anglos wait a few years, conditions change, and THEN you break the treaty for candy? But doing it right away because you’re glue-sniffing toddlers with the attention span of a goldfish is just “not having a treaty.” #NotAgreementCapable.
So this means what in terms of the war? Oh, sorry: Not-War. The War that’s Not-War.
“when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted”
Falsely? Ah, the Guardian, proving a negative again. Logic!
“and publicly defended musician Roger Waters,”
Oh no! Not Roger Waters! The guy who has one of the most famous anti-fascist albums in world history! What next, he’ll support ending cancer and Mother Theresa? Well, I say good sir, this is beyond the pale!
“Kennedy has often allied himself with the National of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan,”Well, that does it. Now they need to ban the entire Democratic Party. So, my work here is done…
“In it, he reiterates that scientific studies show Caucasians and Blacks to be most vulnerable to Covid–19”
Ah! The real objection: he quotes actual Science. Now I understand.
P.S. I’m also immune to sickle-cell anemia. Therefore I hate Jews. QED man, QED.
“• RFK Jr. Floats Plan to Back Dollar With Bitcoin, Gold (Tweedie) “
This is more than it seems. There was a Fed head who put this in and they had to fight hard to erase him and the plan. It seems small but it’s the thin edge of the wedge. First you add some gold-deliverable clause at the end of a 30-year T-Bond, just a little salting. Then depending on how hard it is to sell bonds, you adjust the term and amount so bonds remain in currency. As it’s universally acknowledged that the U.S. debt will collapse, what you end up with later is a gold-backed U.S. dollar system. Maybe not worldwide, or maybe is worldwide. But that all puts the Banks back in the box, unable to print and bribe infinity.
Bitcoin is just the same thing, and he includes other assets like oil, platinum — just like the BRICS trade currency, for convergence. It has also been rumored that White Hats are the ones who floated BTC to keep a cap on the bad guys, and therefore own Satoshi’s wallet, which I find plausible or even likely. But to do that, it would be profitable to up the gold/BTC price to say $20k/$1M. Then those bonds are easy to pay.
Downside? The U.S. doesn’t collapse. Under Biden’s debt. Therefore the EU/WEF can’t erase their sole rival and install totalitarian world government. Wall Street still exists. And if so, the WEF/World Government is what collapses instead, going “Multipolar” and “America First.” Awwwww.
“In recent decades, [NATOs] chief glue has been US military power.”
This is a nice way of saying Europe ain’t paying nothing so they can afford month-long holidays and universal health care while America collapses and all our boys are killed. Then look down their snooty noses at us. ..But don’t worry: it’s really AMERICA who most wanted and most installed this plan. You see, really, we didn’t WANT drinking water in Flint and bridges over the Mississippi that don’t collapse.
“imminent Soviet attack on Western Europe was little more than a figment of the very hysterical US imagination”
This turned out to be true a dozen times, last when Cheney and the boyz (from Halliburton, etc) said the USSR was about to attack with great might when they barely had a working Nuke. They collapsed entirely 2 years later, still unseen and unsuspected by anyone. Like 912, they took no credibility hit, and nothing changed. They are government after all, and accountable to no one.
“• How Much Of The $185 Billion Given By The West To Ukraine Was Stolen? (Trenin)
Is this a trick question? All of it, I thought.
• West Not Prepared For Conflict With China – FT (RT)
83 missiles the year before”83 Missiles? For all China? How about 83 a day? Enough said, my point is made.
““The defense industry is so consolidated that it can’t very quickly expand to support a greater demand,”
Huh. Monopoly and lack of competition are bad? Go on, please expand your point. And isn’t this illegal? I seem to remember a “Sherman” thingie or something-something.
“In July 1991, Clarence Thomas, a relatively unknown D.C. Circuit judge, was nominated by President George H.W. Bush”
You should have seen Biden’s attacks on all the black judges back then. Epic. Ones for the history books. Well, he didn’t want to bus them, you see. Superpredators.
“• Trump Could Face ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ Charge in Jan. 6 Probe (ET)”
Trump was President. He was overthrowing his own government? That’s just the first of fun here, I always add “overthrowing government with no plan and zero guns.” …You know, as one does.
“especially since we again expect a record harvest this year…”
Thank God for Global Warming. More food than ever out of Russia and Canada, which are far larger than the tiny acres down on the latitudes of Mexico.
Now if only I can burn enough coal to get the CO2 up to levels where plants can actually thrive… That’s my new life goal.
“SNP Felling Trees”
Two parts: one, they wanted to make all the money selling those trees but couldn’t figure out how to make idiot environmentalists approve it. Two, cutting trees in Scotland? Should be a crime. They need all the trees they can get.
Next they’ll figure out how to pave what small fertile land they have to put in a parking lot. Too late! That’s what solar farms are.
Dr.D
So that’s where the smoke went to. I’m in southern Ontario, staring at the sky everyday because I have nothing better to do than look for the smoke. But I couldn’t see any. Now I know why – it’s all in Florida! Summer Snowbirds!
We really should apply for government or media jobs so we can get paid to follow the smoke.
Club Members (Not You!) https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/club-members-da2
“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club” , Michel Chossudovsky
For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2022 Covid crisis.
Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”.
Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.
In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”.
Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more.
In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that
“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”
The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.The context of global financial capitalism is not a context of wealth creation, as is the case of industrial capitalism. Rather, financial capitalism uses finance to extract value from industry, the environment, governments, societies, families and people, which value is then deployed to extract more value from real-world ecosystems, economies and people.
Once that value is extracted it must be defended from people and entities which have competing claims upon the value. There are many more future claims than there is current real wealth, which is manageable if the real economy keeps growing, but it is contracting in most places, certainly in the US and EU. This contraction comes from the very debt-service which has been layered upon productive economies, as well as the rising real price of energy like oil, gas and coal, and the increased cost of all resource extraction, as the easy ores and cheap forests have been used.
This means that the billionaires must protect their extracted wealth in the period we have entered. If people die younger, there will be fewer retirement plans with competing claims, for instance. If the human growth engine has hit the Limits To Growth in most places, these financial capitalists are accustomed to identifying trends and “front-running” them.
They are also accustomed to convincing people to commit to long term contracts, which would be good for the people, if current trends would continue, but which will extract wealth from the people if the identified-trends of the financiers actually emerge. People may be desperate for a highly extractive “payday loan”, as are countries which go to the IMF for debt management. IMF loans aim to extract natural resources and public property from the country at very low cost, leaving them just as indebted, but asset-stripped for the future.
Please keep this approach of the wealthy in mind. They do control the political, military and economic directions of the western world, but they are bleeding the nations of the west and of the “global south” to death.CEO of Worldcoin Says “Something Like (iris-reading) World ID Will Eventually Exist…Whether You Like It Or Not”
CEO of Worldcoin Says “Something Like World ID Will Eventually Exist…Whether You Like It Or Not”
Dollar Diplomacy Down is a presentation (with transcript) by Professor Michael Hudson and Professor Radhika Desai, about the transition of the $US from a gold backed global trade currency, replacing the Imperial Pound Sterling system, to an imperial fiat-currency, backed by the need to buy oil in dollars, and by being able to get paid good (value-extractive) returns on $US investments. The maintenance of the $US value by paying higher interest on investments became more extractive of existing value as industrial production declined in the US. This hollowed-out the US industrial economy, by making it higher-cost, so not competitive, and not worth building new factories, which were built in low-production-cost countries, instead. The globalization of finance, by removing controls on the movement of money across borders, made this profitable for international investors.
Western finance is in a late stage of hollowing out the home economies of the US and UK, while the new factories in other countries continue to send profits to New York and London. This creates a vulnerability for global financiers over the horizon, especially as interest rates rise, because the benefit of defaulting on these loans may exceed the benefit of servicing them, at such time as a parallel financial system may arise to compete with the $US system. The Euro has internal conflicts, as does the $US system. These are explored from several perspectives, as is the dynamic of competition between financial systems of Europe and the US. I have excerpted this for brevity. Thanks Christine.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the United States aimed to not lose any more of its gold, because gold is how it had bolstered its control over international finance since the 1920s.
The US also wanted to keep its veto power in the IMF and the World Bank. And it’s continued to be led —the World Bank certainly — by US military strategists, and the IMF has in fact just continued American foreign policy.
So the story is that what was new is that the United States was able to pay in IOUs — Treasury securities — and which now we all know really are never going to be paid because they can’t be repaid…
…It enabled the United States to get so much revenue from its foreign investments, from its foreign lending, and from its control of the foreign trade system and the tariff system, that it was able to deindustrialize and actually become dependent on other countries for essentials. Just the opposite of what it had tried to make other countries do.
And this was a kind of poison chalice. It left the United States in what we now know is an untenable position.
How can it live off the surplus exports and payments of others while it itself is being deindustrialized? What is the basis for its power if not ultimately military? …
..So it needs to have an international financial system that actually works as a kind of neo-colonialism, a neo-imperialism. You can call it financial colonialism and financial imperialism…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..If you want to run a system like the dollar system, what you’re going to do is exact a price from your productive economy. You’re going to deindustrialize it. You’re going to make it weaker… But the important point is that, as soon as the UK started essentially running the sterling system, it also set the stage for the deindustrialization of the UK. And you are seeing a repeat of that process a century later in the case of the United States. This is really quite a serious point… In reality it is the maturation of the contradictions of the dollar system… since 1971, essentially the United States has sought to make the dollar system function by counteracting the “Triffin dilemma” effect. By expanding purely financial demand for the dollar. Not economic demand, not investment demand, not trade demand, but purely financial speculative demand for the dollar. And this system essentially is now unraveling…
MICHAEL HuDSON: ..Soon we were going to deindustrialize and not really be an export economy in the way that we were before, because we were becoming a very high-cost economy. A high-cost economy because of our military spending, because of the increasing financialization, by the fact that more and more of the income in the American economy wasn’t going to the export sector of products at all. It was going to real estate and finance and was becoming the kind of economic overhead that has undercut America’s ability to export…
RADHIKA DESAI:…I should say here that this was a very complex moment — the quadrupling of oil prices — for the US because in part of course the US itself had big oil companies which were of course happy to benefit from it…And the other thing that this did of course, is that by raising prices of oil and ensuring of course that and still dominating it in dollars, meant that the rest of the world now acquired four times as many reasons to hold dollars. So again this in itself played a role in stabilizing, temporarily at least, the value of the dollar…Americans basically persuaded the OPEC countries to deposit their money in Western financial institutions, US financial institutions, particularly those based in London but elsewhere as well. And they of course had to go on a lending spree… Third World countries were also using this money to industrialize. And in the end, this is not something that the United States wanted to see, because from the start the United States has always wanted to have its relative power unquestioned, not just its absolute power… So once the Committee of 20 negotiations were essentially scuttled by these means, the Europeans were essentially quite mad, and they said, “Ok, we are going to start our process of monetary integration” … But they now took the first steps in European monetary integration which would eventually lead, almost thirty years later, into the creation of the euro. So this is also very important, because people fail to see this, but the euro itself constitutes the first example of exit — a planned exit from the dollar system. Because by creating the euro, the European countries essentially ejected the dollar from their mutual transactions…
MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to say what was happening in the banking sector.The government wanted the banks to find it profitable to accept the oil OPEC deposits. When I was working at Chase in the 1960s, my job was to analyze whether countries could pay or not. But by the 1970s, I had a meeting at the Federal Reserve and they said, “You don’t need to analyze the ability to pay anymore. Because if a country can’t pay its debt to the United States, we will lend that country the money.”
And I said, “I don’t see how” — and I named some Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile. “How are they going to be able to pay?”
And the Federal Reserve officer said, “Well according to your analysis, Professor Hudson, England is insolvent. It can’t pay.”
And I said, “Oh I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes.”
And they said, “But is it going to pay? Of course it’s going to pay. We will always lend England the money to pay the money it owes the United States. It’ll just be indebted to us.” And we were going to do the same for Latin America.
So the American Banks were encouraged. They said, “Okay, we don’t have to look at the markets anymore. We don’t have to do an analysis of the ability to pay. The whole system has become political.”
Well, since you bring up the creation of the euro, Radhika — the euro was indeed meant to integrate the European economies, largely by combining the surplus run by the German economy, with the rest of the Eurozone that was running a deficit.
And so in that sense, they were trying to balance and stabilize their own exchange rates. However, the way in which the euro was created was basically the satellite currency of the United States… It was sort of crippled from the very beginning by the rules that made sure the government would not be able to create enough credit to enable European recovery to take place without very very heavy borrowing from the European banks and from the American banks.
So the euro was created in a way to minimize the role of government, maximize the role of banks, and essentially that’s what made it a right-wing Chicago School development from the very beginning, and we’ve now seen how it’s unfolded…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..The fact of the matter is that the euro did — the whole process of European monetary integration and eventually the euro — it did take the mutual transactions of the Europeans out of the dollar system. It made them independent of the dollar system…
..Now, we are still in the 1970s and another thing that I would like to point out and remind people of, is that the mid-1970s is also the period when the G7 meetings begin. Originally the G6 and then the United States brought in Canada as sort of a North American partner. And this made it the G7.
And the G7 meetings, which are annual, were forums where a lot of the extremely fraught politics of the dollar were played out. Where the Europeans, for example, would demand that the United States reduce its deficits, and so on.
And now remember they no longer needed dollars. So they kept saying the United States should reduce these deficits. They also put pressure on the United States to stop the war in Vietnam which was proving very inflationary. They essentially ensured that [Lyndon B.] Johnson would refuse to run for a second [presidential] term because they made it politically impossible, and people even said this was the Europeans dictating to the Americans…
..And so in that sense, you also see the depth of the crisis of the dollar system that you found in the 1970s.
And this crisis appears as though it is resolved by the Volcker shock. And essentially this is the point where in the late 1970s inflation is going out of control in the United States and Paul Volcker, who is regarded as a “sound money” man, is brought in as the new Federal Reserve chairman in order to deal with this problem.
And Volker does the only thing that capitalist country central banks know how to do — which is, the only way they know how to deal with inflation is to restrict money supply, and allow interest rates to rise as high as they want, a particularly rise above the rate of inflation, so that eventually by rising high enough they will create a recession and they will eventually — the recession will kill inflation, rather than any particularly deft monetary policy,
So this is what he did in 1978-79.
Well Volker was my old boss’s boss at Chase Manhattan, and I was the note taker on talks that he would give periodically to the banks. And when you say he was fighting inflation, he defined inflation as “what construction workers are paid.”
And he said, “I’m going to raise interest rates until I don’t see the wages of construction workers rising anymore.”
And they rose to a peak of twenty percent in 1980…
This set the stage for the Reagan decade, for Reaganomics. This set the stage for the largest bond rally in history.
Interest rates went down from twenty percent then to I guess you could say last year’s almost zero rates. There was a steady decline in interest rates, a creation of enormous interest credit and basically the banks were given enough money that all of a sudden the way to make money after Volcker was not by industry anymore.
It was by financial means: by corporate takeovers, by the leveraged buyout — all of that became the legacy under Reagan, combined with tax cuts for the financial sector, tax cuts for the high income people, but most of all the financialization of industry the transformed the whole role of the US economy in international affairs…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..But this sort of Volcker shock created the Third World debt crisis, beginning with the default of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. And this is also very important from our point of view today, because, again, first of all, the fact that the Volcker shock created the debt crisis, the fact that the dollar went up very high in this period — again this is used as grist for the mill by those who are boosting the dollar.
But in fact it is actually — this whole process was creating many contradictions.
As far as the Third World was concerned, it did look as though this was the United States not only bullying the Third World and oppressing the Third World but also getting away with it…
..Third World countries actually experienced a retardation in their growth. They had to work harder and harder to produce more and more of the cheap goods — whether it was coffee or cocoa or cotton goods or cheap manufactures or whatever it was that they were producing — they were producing their guts out in order to export to the rest of the world, particularly to the First World countries, in order to earn the dollars to repay the debt.
So this debt was being repaid. And of course, the fact that they were repaying the debt was also bringing fund flows into the dollar system. But this sort of dollar repayment was really repayment by punishment… And of course the whole process was overseen by the World Bank and the IMF. So when Michael says that these institutions were actually promoting underdevelopment rather than development…
..The Volcker shock basically induced a recession, and the recession was a double-dip, or double-u shaped, recession, so it extended over several years.
and in the first few years there was a manufacturing industry.These people got together, they went and talked to Reagan, they talked to Volcker, they pleaded for a lowering of interest rates so that they could continue industrial expansion and so on. But they eventually failed, and what this also did is, when they failed, they essentially threw in the towel. They said, “If we can’t make money by producing, we are going to try to make money through financialization.”
So this set in process the financialization of many productive American corporations.
This is how — you may read in many places, a company like GM today is probably going to make more money by lending you money to buy their cars, rather than by making their cars…
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve described two parallel forms of deindustrialization.
I want to review just what you said about the Third World countries.
Mexico defaulted in 1982. It could not pay the interest on its Tesobonos. All of a sudden, the high interest rates that were created at that time were not renewed. A lot of Third World debts were falling due, and they couldn’t re-borrow…
..The only way they could balance their payments was to do what the US State Department told the IMF to tell them. “Sell off your industry. Sell off your public ownership of utilities, of basic natural monopolies. Your oil, your minerals.”
So there was a huge selloff, and there was no money at all under the austerity of the 1980s for the Third World countries to really develop.But what happened in the United States was similar! … This was the decade of junk bond takeovers, leveraged buyouts… they could begin to sell off the companies. They could carve them up. Companies were being bought out, broken up — [Henry] Kravis and KKR and all sorts of other companies were doing this.
And in fact it was free money for the investors, because they organized a criminal conspiracy, for which Drexel Burnham people and their clients, such as Ivan Boesky, were sent to jail…
..Wall Street understood exactly what was happening, and they became — ever since the Reagan administration — participants in this industrial suicide of the United States by financializing the company, replacing industrial engineering with financial engineering, and essentially transforming the whole character of capitalism itself — away from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism…
..It was creating financial wealth, not industrial means of production or what people had usually thought of as being tangible, real wealth.
The byproduct of all of this wealth is that it was very heavily concentrated in the wealthiest 1% — maybe 10% — of the economy. This financial wealth was not shared with the participants in the industrial economy of production and consumption. And so the economy was being distorted. Its shape was shifting. It was polarizing.
The wealth of the 1% really found its counterpart — on the opposite side of the balance sheet — in the debts of the 99%…
RADHIKA DESAI: And you know Michael, as you say, so much of the wealth in the United States over the past so many decades has become financial wealth.
And this underlines a point that our friend Jacob Assa has made in his concept of the financialization of GDP, which is that this vastly exaggerates the the wealth — because US method of counting GDP turns all this financial activity and makes it look as though it’s productive…
..So the whole point we’re trying to make is that these features of a neoliberal United States, based on financialization, have been on the one hand necessary to support the dollar system, and on the other hand they have strangulated productive activity and made the United States into a less productive and more and more unequal system.
And this policy paradigm has been continued from Reagan to Bush Senior to Clinton to Bush Junior to Obama, Trump, and today Biden…
..And in this context, it’s also important to see that part of the reason why the Third World got so badly punished by the system — essentially by having to repay their debts — is that their elites, their ruling classes, did not have the courage and the political will to default…
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the 1990s really were the turning point in this financialization. And what happened in America was very much like what had happened in England.
You could think of Clinton as the American Tony Blair. In England there were certain things that even the Thatcherite government couldn’t do to privatize. Tony Blair went much further than Thatcher in privatizing the railroads and just driving the nail into what had been Britain’s industrial economy…[He] ended the Glass-Steagall act, which led commercial banks to become brokerage houses. That diverted credit creation away from the industrial economy into the purchase of stocks and bonds and speculative investments and real estate. And then it deregulated the commodity markets, essentially…And that was sort of the Rubinomics that was turned over to the Fed under Alan Greenspan to essentially let the financial system run wild while basically ending — winding down — the American tradition of social protection of labor and consumers and the poor and welfare…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..People call this 2008 crisis the “global” financial crisis. But you see why in this instance it’s actually more accurate to call it the “North Atlantic” financial crisis.
Because the overwhelming majority of international funds that went into the toxic securities being generated by the United States were coming from Britain and from the Eurozone financial institutions, because these were the guys who gorged themselves on the toxic securities being generated.
And that is why the bulk of the financial distress was concentrated in Europe…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..I should say that now we’ve gone for more than an hour… But for now let me bring this discussion to a conclusion by saying a couple of things.
So what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to show that what’s seen as this period of easy dollar dominance after 1971, has been a heavily managed process, but also a process in which American attempts to try to manage the system in order to keep the dollar going have been full of contradictions…
And now we are moving into a period of serious reckoning. Because on the one hand, the Federal Reserve’s capacity to generate asset bubbles and to keep money flowing into the United States is being exhausted.
Moreover, and this is the first thing I want to say, and that is that the fact that these asset bubbles now exist, and that the bulk of the wealth of rich people in the United States depends on these asset bubbles, means that the Federal Reserve is now caught in a bind.
Because on the one hand, these asset bubbles are necessary for keeping the dollar’s value high, etc. But on the other hand, dealing with inflation will require increasing interest rates to an extent where this will burst these asset bubbles… If inflation goes high, the dollar’s value will suffer. If the asset bubbles are burst, the dollar’s value will suffer. So the Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place…
..Since the 1960s the rest of the world has complained that the United States has been living beyond its means. So as early as 1961, as gold was flowing out and a gold pool had been necessary — we discussed this in the previous episode — it had been necessary to back the dollar with adequate gold, this is when you first hear the first denial that the United States was living beyond its means… “At the end of the 1960s the US government owned foreign assets totalling twenty-one billion dollars, in addition to gold holdings of eighteen billion dollars.” Of course they had been much bigger before.
To quote further, “And US citizens owned fifty billion in assets abroad. These US claims on foreigners,” the Economic Report claimed, “gave a ‘basic long-run strength to the dollar’ even though some of these claims were private and long-term and could not be quickly mobilized.
Now by 2001 you have a very different scenario. The US international investment position has turned negative. It has moved from an accumulated surplus of less than ten percent of GDP in the late 1970s, to a deficit of nearly twenty percent of GDP in 2001. (These are statistics from the Economic Report of the President from 2003.) ….
MICHAEL HUDSON: This is the plan already in the 1960s and 1970s. That America would buy the highest profit European and Third World sectors and they would recycle the money by buying Treasury Securities. So America would owe low interest on Treasury Securities, make a killing on what it had bought from their privatization of infrastructure, and buying out their commanding heights, their leading companies.
That was very explicitly said in the 1960s and 1970s…
RADHIKA DESAI: In fact in 2005 Paul Volcker actually said, “As a nation we are consuming and investing about six percent more than we are producing, and this cannot continue.” Already by this time the United States was absorbing about eighty percent of the net worth of the world’s capital …So this is the way in which the dollar’s very contradictory problematic world role has been naturalized or has been sought to be naturalized. But we are now increasingly looking at the end of that system.Countries Wage War Over Clean Energy Subsidies
The United States and Europe are locked in a subsidy race for the energy transition.
Economists are warning that huge subsidies could trigger a new wave of inflation.
Poorer EU member states are crying unfair-game on the part of the wealthy ones.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Countries-Wage-War-Over-Clean-Energy-Subsidies.htmlRFK Jr Vows To Back US Dollar With Bitcoin Or Gold If Elected President (Complicated, but gold would be better now.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/rfk-jr-vows-back-us-dollar-bitcoin-or-gold-if-elected-president Simplicuis Updates on the Ukraine war are extensive. My excerpts are not in order.:
Let’s talk about Ukraine’s new terrorist attack on the Kerch Bridge before diving into other updates.
Why does Putin specifically call it a terrorist attack? Because, as he states, the Kerch Bridge is actually no longer used for military supplies and has not been for many months, and is therefore exclusively a civilian corridor. This is an interesting admission on his behalf because it appears to possibly point to a secret agreement with the West/Kiev, perhaps as part of the Grain Deal and other such backdoor handshakes that go on all the time, both explicit and implicit… I’d be more inclined to believe it was done by simple fast-traveling surface drones of a similar variety to the ones used on Sevastopol repeatedly. The satellite photos I posted earlier which claimed to have picked them up appear to confirm this…
..The most important thing to note, though, is that the timing of this attack happened on exactly July 17th, which was the long awaited grain deal expiration date, if you’ll recall. That is not by coincidence. It means this attack was specifically done to try to stymy Russia as much as possible in terms of putting it between rock and hard place in making its decisions. In essence, it’s designed to erode Russia’s stature with its allies, particularly Turkey… This appears to imply that not attacking the bridge was part of the grain deal, and that Kiev attacked it on the exact day of the deal’s expiration as a ‘message’ to Moscow…
..Where does that leave us then? Likely, Russia will await the West to ‘crawl back on its knees’ with some concessions in hand. Putin had already made the statement last week, if you’ll recall, in light of the upcoming grain deal’s expiration, that Russia will no longer make the initiative themselves but will wait for the West to ‘come bearing gifts’ in the form of their own concessions first...
..I did another report that highlighted major new findings in Russian Lancets—that they in fact had autonomous capabilities and were already tested and used in the SMO in autonomous mode. In the manufacturer video above, they actually confirm this fact… Now, this new generation variant they have already developed does the same, however it does it in swarms. The Lancets are fired in large batches from batched containers rather than slingshot-launched one by one...None of this is confirmed so it’s difficult to make a true analysis until we get further information. But if this is the case, then it clearly points to an ongoing Russian MOD purge of anyone showing even the slightest insubordination in the wake of the Wagner rebellion. The MOD clearly wants to build a strong military hierarchy based on a foundation of loyalty, all the old guards who are used to the corrupt ways of the 2000-2010 era, where feuding warlord Generals carved out their own fiefdoms and could do or say anything they want because they had major leverage against the MOD command simply from the fact that they aligned their soldiers to themselves, and not to the then-weak MOD—those days are gone. The MOD is now designing a professional, futuristic force with a strong central command, and anyone of the corrupt old guard who doesn’t like it is getting the boot.
The problem is, many of these generals had gotten lax and comfortable with the status quo of the ‘good ol’ days’. Remember those days? The RuAF of the Serdyukov era where weekly reports about soldier ‘hazing’ played on CNN, showing Russian troops brutally abusing and sometimes even killing each other in dungeon-like conditions. Shoigu has reversed all that and is designing a modern armed force based on respect, leadership, and proper chain of command. Many of the ‘old guard’ generals were so used to having their little sinecures and acting like mafia bosses that they take this as an affront. You see, in the old days, threats and violence was how you got things done and the armed forces were run more like a mafia, with each general controlling his own private little ‘brotherhood’ cell. Like I said, the ones who can’t handle being reformed into a modern force can go off to the pastures. Some people may not like to hear it but an effective armed force is built on a strict system of loyalty and subordination.
The jury is still out on the Surovikin case, however there is a new report that Putin will be meeting with him personally next week, so we’ll see what happens…
..Russian Duma Defense Committee chair hints that the true role of Wagner in Belarus is to recapture the Suwalki Gap: Given that he’s a high ranking defense insider one can only assume this means that Russia is anticipating the type of future Polish-Lithuanian military actions we’ve discussed here before. This follows a French LCI TV channel report which re-iterates the growing threat of Poland itching to enter the war. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/kerch-bridge-deja-vu-breakdown The Suwalki Gap is the Polish-Lithuanian border, which is about 36-60 miles long, lightly populated, and forms the shortest distance between the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, with its Baltic Sea port and Russian ally Belarus. It is shorter, but more mountainous and forested on the Polish side, but mostly farmland with some decent roads on the Lithuanian side. A railway crosses Lithuania, which has been politically contentious during the current war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap#Military_considerationsRussia announces blockade of the (currently) Ukrainian port of Odessa:
Russian jets challenge illegal US presence over Syria
US officials are expressing new worries over Russian, Syrian, and Iranian pressure to end Washington’s illegal occupation
US officials said a Russian fighter jet flew close to a US reconnaissance plane over Syria, forcing it to fly erratically and endangering the lives of the four American crew members, Politico reported on 18 July.
The US-based news outlet quoted US officials as saying that the latest incident, which occurred on 16 July was “a significant escalation in a series of confrontations between US and Russian aircraft in Syria in recent weeks,” adding that “the interception of the Russian Su-35 aircraft impeded the ability of the American crew to safely operate their MC-12 aircraft.”
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/russian-jets-challenge-illegal-us-presence-over-syria Juan Cole, Israel Moves toward “Dictatorship” and Polarization, as one Likud Activist lauds the Targeting of Ashkenazi Jews in the Holocaust
On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.
Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”
He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.
https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/dictatorship-polarization-holocaust.html Israeli Fighter Pilots, Commandos Threaten To Resign If Judicial Reform Proceeds
More than a thousand Israeli military reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty — or resign altogether — if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proceeds with a plan to overhaul the country’s judicial system this month. Among those threatening to withhold their service are hundreds of elite fighter pilots and commandos.
Given reservists are an essential part of Israel’s military, and especially its air force, the country’s military leaders say such a mass walkout could have a significant impact on the country’s military operational capacity. They also fear a scenario where activism by reservists could inspire absenteeism among the country’s full-time service members. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-fighter-pilots-commandos-threaten-resign-if-judicial-reform-proceeds(Russian) Sasha Latypova, Ethnically Targeted Bioweapons?
Robert Kennedy Jr recently caused quite a tempest in the “progressive” media goo (his sister Kerry stated to NBC that she “strongly condemned his deplorable and untruthful remarks”). His crime – he publicly mentioned that ethnic targeting was studied with respect to whatever was the covid-19 poisoning agent.
Of course, the woke tantrum about this subject is a politically motivated slander. To them an ideological opponent is a racist when he mentions anything that has to do with race or ethnicity. Or mentions anything at all. Or exists.
However, if you are wondering whether ethnically targeted bioweapons are a thing, let’s look into this. This topic is definitely studied and discussed in many press, science, government and military reports. RFK Jr. is perfectly correct to state this. He did not suggest the covid-19 poisoning agent was preferentially designed to protect Ashkenazi population. This is also correct. It wasn’t…
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/ethnically-targeted-bioweaponsWhy do all these graphs of COVID-vaccine side effects all have the same big spikes, right away and about 2 weeks out from the injection?
Is the CDC totally blind to all the adverse events from the COVID vaccines?
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/is-the-cdc-totally-blind-to-all-theVAERS data shows that vaccines cause autism
If autism is not caused by vaccines, the reported rates of autism should be proportional to the number of doses of the vaccine since these are all coincidences. But they aren’t.
(But this one “goes to eleven.”)
So since the COVID vaccines rolled out, a relatively stable rate of autism has increased DRAMATICALLY in the UK. A Z-score of 15 means something caused it. It coincides with the COVID vaccine rollout in the UK.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/vaers-data-shows-that-vaccines-causeWEATHER MAKERS (Thanks Christine. Thanks especially, Anastasia.)
Forests supply the world with rain. A controversial Russian theory claims they also make wind.
Every summer, as the days get long, Anastassia Makarieva leaves her lab in St. Petersburg for a vacation in the vast forests of northern Russia. The nuclear physicist camps on the shores of the White Sea, amid spruce and pine, and kayaks along the region’s wide rivers, taking notes on nature and the weather. “The forests are a big part of my inner life,” she says. In the 25 years she has made her annual pilgrimage north, they have become a big part of her professional life, too.
For more than a decade, Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia’s boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.
With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Makarieva and Gorshkov, who died last year, say they are its beating heart, too. “Forests are complex self-sustaining rainmaking systems, and the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth,” Makarieva says. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea—forests as rainmakers—originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial...
..Yet, if correct, the idea could help explain why, despite their distance from the oceans, the remote interiors of forested continents receive as much rain as the coasts—and why the interiors of unforested continents tend to be arid. It also implies that forests from the Russian taiga to the Amazon rainforest don’t just grow where the weather is right. They also make the weather. “All I have learned so far suggests to me that the biotic pump is correct,” says Douglas Sheil, a forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-russian-theory-claims-forests-don-t-just-make-rain-they-make-windThe Guardian carrying a heavy load now – gotta hurt to be turned into a spook shop.
“Kennedy embraces virtually every
-
conspiracy theory
in existence,” the report states. “His
-
horrific
-
antisemitic
and
-
xenophobic
views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted
-
antisemitic conspiracy theorists
. Kennedy’s
-
anti-vaccine conspiracies
go back decades and have had
-
deadly
real world consequences.”
One paragraph. Why not scream ‘HE IS A POO POO BUM! DONT LISTEN TO HIM HE IS YUKKY’!
Try that in a small town
We know that in large cities — San Francisco, in particular — many crimes, such as those listed in the song, are not being prosecuted. The song suggests that these crimes will not be tolerated by small town communities. Nothing in the lyrics posted on TAE suggests anything about the color of the skin of the person committing the crimes. So why is it that the Woke folks assumed that the song was about lynching, which was historically pointed towards blacks? Why are the Woke so quick to presume that the person committing the crime is black? It seems that, here, the Woke are stoking the flames of racism, while the song is talking about behavior — something which *can* be controlled — not skin color, which is intrinsic.That Guardian hit piece on Kennedy is the last Guardian I shall ever look at. F*ck their cookies, doubtlessly baked by Victoria Nutland.
You did warn it was the Guardian, make the warning bigger & better please.I wrote a careful and long post as follow up to that weird thing I just tried unsuccessfully to put up.
It got lost.
Bummed. I will sum it up by saying it was a total breakdown of that Guardian piece in the style of Dr D.I think it was the best internet comment post of all time by anyone, and now I am sad that people will not get to bow down before my total awesomeness.
It was gunna be great.
When Ya’ll die one day check it out in the Akashic records – it’s super cool, for real. Trust me. I am from the Guardian
Guardian article about RFKJ…
The plea at the end of the article:
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
Not!Ian Plimer also has an agenda
He says that CO2 from fossil fuel burning, from human application is taken up by trees, and already is “net zero”…so the “extra” CO2 is from animal exhalations and releases from the ocean.
This is illogical.
I don’t know much about Plimer; I don’t know his agenda. However, instead of speaking truth, he is taking generalized data and framing it in a way to fit his own narrative. This is no different than what the Davis crowd is doing — he just has a different agenda.Oxymoron
The one that got away was:
|<=…………………………………………That…………………………………………=>| (x3) BigA story oft heard among fisher folk too
MSM ignored the whole investigation. Therefore, it didn’t happen.
Without TAE and the blogger sphere you would be ignorant and happy..
————-
From last night. A must read
https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-spectacle-of-covidA collage of fake covid19 pictures
_______________The Team in Charge of Investigating the Biden Family for Tax Crimes Never Received the Document That Alleged They Were Part of a Bribery Scheme
“Were you all ever given access to the form, FD-1023, that alleged Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were a part of a bribery scheme with Ukraine? asked
@RepJamesComer
.“In my original transcript, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I knew anything about a 1023,” answered IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley.
———–
“Corruption there, (Ukraine), is beyond belief. It always has been. And that doesn’t change. That’s all I was writing about,” Hersh said.https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/how-much-of-the-more-than-185-billion-given-by-the-west-to-ukraine-has-been-stolen/
How much of the more than $185 billion given by the West to Ukraine has been stolen?One of the reasons for this is corruption in Ukraine, which – despite some lofty promises – seems to be as bad now as it was before the Western-backed 2014 ‘Maidan’ coup. If not worse.
———-
Press freedom
The press has moved to the blogsphere.Julian Assange Is ‘Dangerously Close’ to Extradition for Revealing US War Crimes
” …. the press may no longer be able to play its vital role as “public watchdog” and the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information may be adversely affected.
———
Did you see, (depopulation), the following report on MSM?
“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club”
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 18, 2023
———–
John Day has been putting overtime to enlighten the blogsphere
Think about the implication
The wealth of the 1% really found its counterpart — on the opposite side of the balance sheet — in the debts of the 99%…
———-As a call center monkey, having worked for for a ginormous corporation that spends money on all kinds of garbage but won’t make stable customer care interfaces, I learned long ago to type up anything I don’t want to lose in Notepad, then Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-P when ready to save my epic words. Notepad is like a tin can and a string. Bombproof.
Try That in a Small Town
When the Marxists reviewed their failures of the 19th and 20th centuries, they DID come to some new conclusions.
1.) The working class of the West, particularly the US, are getting the things they want out of the current system (that’s HORRIBLE!)
2.) There is no revolutionary energy in the working class, because they are more or less happy enough (That’s HORRIBLE!!!)
3.) The revolutionary energy lies with the people on the margins who do not/cannot fit in with the suite of cultural and institutional structures that are giving the working class what they want.
4.) If we weld together all the margins-people into a new power bloc, then take everything away from the content thus energy-less working class, we can have a successful revolution in the US
So what you’re saying, Marxists, is that you plan to set up a 2-tier society, and then extract everything from the working class.
Golf clap.
Part of setting up the 2-tier society is Anarcho-Tyranny. Tyrannize through top-down centrally-selected anarchy.
The working class are NOT to be protected by the law. The working class cannot be allowed to protect themselves. The working class are to be oppressed by selectively NOT enforcing laws whenever crimes affect the working class.
So here’s this song saying the working class will enforce a civil society. – sling every kind of mud at them, use repetition to imprint the imprintable with its association with The Basket Of Deplorable Attributes.
Not only did the Marxist plan turn into – create a 2 tier society and extract everything from the Working Class, they ALSO made, integral to their plan, build up a TREMENDOUS amount of revolutionary energy in the working class. Keep going and going, storing it up for years and years, never stop, increase if anything!
…working class revolutionary energy against…. whom this time, exactly? Golf clap.
The U.S. Defense Department has a budget of $816,700,000,000
The current hot topic investigations into influence peddling alledge $17,300,000
The 17.3 is 0.000021 percent of the Department of Defense Budget
The US Department of State 2023 budget is $60.4 billion
The US Department of Agriculture 2023 budget is $31.1 billion
The 17.3 is 000019 percent of the total budgets of the above listed agencies. ($908.2 billion)The entire “Lap Top Adventure” inferring $17.3 million dollars of skim is the destruction of The Republic is perhaps the most cynical of the political deceipt run amok within The United States of America at this time. One party is crucifying Mr. Trump in an attempt to cover their wickedness and the other party is crucifying the Truth to cover their wickedness.
Not a single US citizen outside of the Beltway hierarchy has any idea of the intent, purpose or prosecution of the corporate written laws and regulations and lobby money paid for actions of the US federal agencies. Those who view the debacle from outside the borders of the United States are even less informed.
Amazing as it is, the humans who have no idea at all what is actually being done know exactly the solution to the dilemna. Even more dumbfounding is the realization that among these humans some know of another human who has the same amount of knowledge of the inside as they and have convinced themself That person is the ONE to solve the problems at hand.
and even more nauseating are those that write tomes decrying the rape of the social contract and then offer a means to profit from the wholesale prostitution involved
“What a piece of work is man….” decorum demands i leave it there
what exactly is plausibly being denied in all of the disasters at hand? The little bastard from Independence relinquished foreign and domestic policy to a non Article III federal (no checks, no tricameral balance) agency with the signing of the 1947 National Security Act? have you read about President Allen Dulles?
Video: Rand Paul Warns “We’re Out Of Ammo, We’re Out Of Money”
WORLD AT WAR Video: Rand Paul Warns “We’re Out Of Ammo, We’re Out Of Money”
“It makes no sense to borrow money from China to send it to Ukraine”A ginormous telecommunications company fired me for not taking an injection which does not vax in April 2022.
This was despite, for example:
–The shot they wanted me to take was designed to fight a long-extinct strain of the feared virus
–I’m not 80 years old, obese, nor do I have 3 comorbidities
–People taking the shot became MORE likely to catch and spread the feared virus
–Charts for countries most-adopting the shot showed both shots AND cases going up together (inoculations form an X pattern – as inoculations go up, cases go down. Real vaccines inoculate)
–More injuries and deaths than any other vaccine that was pulled from the market for injuries and deaths in history
–I was a remote worker. No contact with coworkers nor with the public in the capacity of my job
–My ginormous employer WAIVED their shot requirement for all their thousands of retail workers in continual contact with the public. (So who is protected by this shot? They didn’t even say it was for safety, the HR director announced it was: “For Clarity”)I explained that taking the shot was against my values and beliefs.
They required that I submit an explanation of my values and beliefs vis a vis the shot so THEY could evaluate the validity of my beliefs.
They required that I provide documentation that I was following SOMEONE ELSE’S ORDERS in my belief based objections. NO belief based objection WITHOUT an authority documented as giving me belief based orders would be accepted.
NO simple statement of it being against my beliefs would suffice – my beliefs in detail must be submitted for THEIR evaluation.
They would not answer my question on why a ginormous telecommunications company would be any kind of authority on, have the capacity to, judge beliefs.
I inquired as to their specific MEANS for determining validity of beliefs. Did they, for instance have a conclave of religious leaders, philosophers, and secular ethicists providing expert belief-judgement? HOW were they determining belief-validity?
No answers. Well, other than the firing.
Anyway, I just got hired by a self avowedly Christian company that provides non-GMO products across north america – particularly homesteaders.
Since I don’t like GMO and am a wannabe homesteader, I think I will like this job. I think my not taking the injection which does not vaccinate was a plus for them if anything. Certainly, an anti GMO company that was PRO reverse-DNA transcription RNA injection would be a little weird.
Over a year. Approximately 200+ applications. Company after company with woke HR ladies seeing that I refused the purification ritual, failed the purity test. The only real interviews I ever got were with small companies that had no HR ladies to be Wokist.
What can I conclude from this Time Of Unemployment? Biden kept talking about making a List Of The Unvaccinated (EVERYONE is not vaccinated for coronavirus….) Like with many lists and tyrannical initiatives, they talk about it, it seems to have been stopped or given up on, then they do it.
So I suspect a blacklist is a high likelihood. Or, considering the military grade brainwashing that occurred and the susceptibility of HR ladies to it, it may have been a kind of grassroots religious-based blacklisting.
Anyway, the sanest people in the 2020’s seem to be Christians, Stoics, even SCIENTOLOGISTS. (Tom Cruise is the only person sane person left in Hollywood capable of making a decent popcorn-blockbuster?!!?!?) I guess because they weren’t blithely walking around with a gaping hole in their head the denied the existence of waiting for something to fill it – there’s something there already.
Oh yeah, and by the way — my new employer’s headquarters/food processing center burnt down mysteriously April last year. They’ve been rebuilding.
‘Why the Ukraine Conflict Will Unravel NATO’
On a BBC comedy panel show called QI one question was ‘can chickens hatch a nuclear bomb’. This referred to a UK plan in the 1960s. The idea was that if Russia invaded several nuclear bombs would be buried in Germany timed to explode after the Russians had arrived. They thought the electronics would be too cold to function properly but calculated that the body heat of a chicken would be sufficient to provide enough warmth. So these buried bombs would each contain a chicken with a ten day food supply!
My point is that there was no regard for the German population, or Germany, which would be covered in radiaoctive debris. It shows that Europe and its’ people were always regarded as expendable, and still are.
NATO is purely a shield for the US, although the UK may feel it has a special status. European countries are simply ‘useful idiots’. In any post WWIII science fiction story there may be survivors in the US and Russia but Europe ceases to exist! It is a killing ground, a buffer between Russia and the US.
‘the US ‘aided’ Europe during the two World Wars on a more or less commercial basis’ : Almost ALL the gold the US owns was British payment for WW1 and WW2.
It is truly remarkable how many actions which are universally considered to be serious crimes everywhere else in the world, are literally the POLICY of the present regime of the United States of America and it’s myriad of agencies, institutions and NGO’s.
Why, it’s almost as if that whole rat’s nest were the kingdom of the devil himself.
They required that I provide documentation that I was following SOMEONE ELSE’S ORDERS in my belief based objections. NO belief based objection WITHOUT an authority documented as giving me belief based orders would be accepted.”
Wow. That pretty much says it all about their mindset and, by extension, their intentions. Their revealed belief is that nothing can be true unless an authority has determined it to be true. Therefore anything proclaimed by that authority to be untrue is, indeed, untrue and subject to being nullified to whatever extent that the authority chooses to enforce. Whatever that happens to be, it is automatically true and correct . . . because the authority says it is.
Nice tight package of psychosis. Sane reasoning is unlikely to put much of a dent in THAT kind of mental armor. Those poor bastards are “locked in” , in the neurologically medical sense of the term. That’s awful.
On Marjorie Taylor Green brandishing a poster w. sex pix of Hunter B. (> top post)
The US is descending, nationally, into a overt, visible, Mafia-like internal strife.
Factions are fighting for Gov-Corp-Local control and profits, and they all have their paid-off Reps, good to go, or dodgy, not so reliable, with some contribs. spread (coalitions, )
Those in the fight, imho, from far off (idk too much..), MIC, very important, Big Pharma-Med, other Corp, such as Energy, and Local Potentates (Pols) who control the vote by ensuring monies are sent to their State, heh, the real ‘trickle-down’ – > e.g. Prison Industry, there are others, Agri subsidies, guessing off the cuff, others will know more..
The arms used at present are law-fare (e.g. those against Trump, see one article at top post) and actioning the MSM to crush any opponents to the corrupt Centre, they must be denigrated, cancelled, mocked, pushed away, demonised.
Hunter Biden is an easy target, MTG gets right into it: Sex, ugly, disgusting, with whores or whatever, State Lines! Mann Act! Even: Porn Platform!
No proposals for anything that concerns US citizens and might make their lives better.
Don’t play in the Big Leagues if you can’t deal with hardball.
Belarus is massing troops on the border with loud mouth trash talking Poland. [ link https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/belarus-hold-exercises-wagner-near-nato-member-polands-border ]
Poland has three choices, all of them bad:
1) Reveal itself as a weakling loud mouthed cowardly pussy to the entire world by just doing nothing about a potential invader massing troops on the Polish Border.
2) Mass troops of it’s own on that border in self defense of the country . . . and thereby REMOVING them from any possibility of those troops EVER fucking with Russian interests in Ukraine.
3) Invade Belarus in any way whatsoever (a potshot from some idiot Polish soldier would do the trick) . . . and thereby give Belarus the very very legal right to protect itself by repelling the invader WITHOUT TRIGGERING INFAMOUS “ARTICLE 5” section of the NATO Treaty. Poland would promptly get its head AND its ass promptly handed to it on a platter, and the rest of NATO would just have to sit back and watch.
Like I said, three choices, all bad. That’s what I call hardball geopolitics. No land for old men.
Nice tight package of psychosis
I failed to reply with:
“My beliefs and values derive specifically from a core belief in individual reasoning and action. Everything else follows from that. Following any authority figure vis a vis belief is antithetical to my belief.
Please explain specifically on what basis you are rejecting my statement of belief”
I really thought a refusal to give details of my beliefs and why would be responded to rationally:
“Oh yeah, that’s right, ginormous corporations AREN’T the all-powerful all-judging medieval Catholic Church, speaking with the ultimate authority on all issues of belief and morality, so how CAN we demand you submit your beliefs to us for our approval? Huh.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. How CAN we require that you obey an irrational authority figure just because we do?”
I really should have painstakingly walked them through every single step of thinking.
I really should have painstakingly walked them through every single step of thinking.”
That strikes me as a good idea. I, for one, would be very interested in reading what you come up with in a detailed analysis of the steps. In my own experience such a relentless search is often very fruitful. What you’ve written so far about it is just excellent.
Quoth jb-hb:
“I inquired as to their specific MEANS for determining validity of beliefs. Did they, for instance have a conclave of religious leaders, philosophers, and secular ethicists providing expert belief-judgement? HOW were they determining belief-validity?
No answers. Well, other than the firing.
Anyway, I just got hired by a self avowedly Christian company that provides non-GMO products across north america – particularly homesteaders.
Since I don’t like GMO and am a wannabe homesteader, I think I will like this job.”Go jb-hb and Christian pureblood homesteaders!
Little Murders – 1971 – Elliot Gould, Marcia Rodd, Alan Arkin, Donald Sutherland
Where Catch 22 rode the surface of the surreal bubble, Little Murders is the view out from just inside. I thought it did a delicious job of exploring the disharmonies of societies, almost a Carlin-Kafka-Vonnegut vector. This film comes from a period in which, while the actual ‘sharp objects’ still couldn’t be discussed, at least on most other subjects artists were free to roam about.
The first quote in IMDB’s list:
Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won’t put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate, each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don’t be startled, I’m not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society’s way.
The “Censorship and Free Speech” hearing is currently on repeat on CSPAN
A whole lotta feelings are arguing with facts.
RFK,jr is up at about 23.35“….They required that I provide documentation …..”
My life experience says that they wanted an excuse to fire you because ???
Yep! I think you found a place that will like, and appreciate your contribution.
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Can the USGov tell a bank to stop payment on a personal check to an entity the USGov doesn’t like?Yes. Look at what Trudeau did during Freedom convoy
“Nothing in the lyrics posted on TAE suggests anything about the color of the skin of the person committing the crimes. So why is it that the Woke folks assumed that the song was about lynching” and that all crimes are committed exclusively by black people?
A: Because they’re racists. Hard-core, unrepentant, un-self-aware, hateful, plantation racists. This comes up practically daily. Why are they soft on crime? Because to arrest criminals = black people. Why do they deny the best applicants to Harvard? Because black people are stupid and lazy and will never get in on merit. Indeed, why have mail-in voting with no ID? Because Black people are stupid, lazy, illiterate, and can’t find or fill out a form at the DMV (which they already have, as they buy beer). Over and over and over again, proving how racist they are, and it keeps me in a simmer that keeps picking on them. For that, especially, but it makes me less forgiving of the many other, similar oversights.
They. Are. Racists. The rest of America mostly isn’t. Just them.
“He says that CO2 from fossil fuel burning, from human application is taken up by trees, and already is “net zero” etc.
Yeah, that is nuts. There’s more holes in that theory than Mr. Bubbles.
“That Marriage did not work. That man tried.”
Err…I would guess so, since apparently only the MAN tried? This marriage (third person passive tense) that you were not involved in and have no emotion about failed? Whooda thunk? I only bring it up because it’s astonishingly, painfully typical. Well, I guess the man will have to do all the work himself somewhere else without you.
I have no idea if that’s real and if so, why someone would so comment.
Poland and Nato have better sharpen their pencil before attacking Wagner and Belarus
P.S. still promoting Covid vaccines non-stop. Still every variant that’s no longer around, and/or Omicron that never killed anyone.
And now a new flu, now less dangerous than ever! But we gave it a name! Can’t you see my signaling? And we have a vaccine for flu-that-kills-no-one too.
I’m certain sales are brisk. For Brawndo.
“it’s not the end it’s only started, the biggest work in the world will be conducted very soon…and well welcome to hell” Dmitry Utkin aka Wagner.
Evgeny Prigozhin made an appearance in Belarus today, rallying his troops (can’t see how many remain), giving founder Dmitry “Wagner” Utkin a word, talking about a future in Africa and the “disgrace” in Ukraine, and joking about killing LGBTs. Video with subtitles. pic.twitter.com/uvzG7dI7fL
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) July 19, 2023
embedded
(of a journalist) attached to a military unit during a conflict:
“embedded journalists were scrutinized for their ability to report with independence”I always had the wrong impression that independence meant truth.
Now, I prefer drone footage.
The Guardian is reporting on a report written by these people … Congressional Integrity Project. Their “About” page states:
After four years of covering up for Trump, MAGA Republicans in Congress have already made their priorities clear – relentlessly investigating Joe Biden, historic impeachments of Cabinet Secretaries, and likely efforts to impeach Biden himself. These investigations are revenge for the past two years of Biden working every day for all Americans, not the special interests.
The Congressional Integrity Project is changing that dynamic.
We’ll focus on spurious investigations designed to hurt the Biden administration and Democrats and to usher Donald Trump back into power – none of which address the real challenges affecting the daily lives of Americans.
CIP is fighting back against these politically motivated attacks.
So no integrity then, neither in the CIP or the Guardian, just a determination to use the corrupt DOJ to futher their goals and further sabotage the justice system, and they don’t care if you know it. Look at the names providing the money: Eric Kessler, Gene Karpinski … etc etc … Israel’s men in the USA. Yes, more Jews doing their lying. No surprise that the Guardian is running this shite, they are a consistent Jews supporting club, despite their faux-labour history, faux-concern for Palestinians (do they dtill do that?), they are well under the control of the British Jews, the ones we cannot mention in the UK for fear of being prosecuted as a hater. The Jews are determined to completely destroy the USA.
and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.
The Guardian is owned by the Jews and the Giardian is supporting the Jewish claim to own the word “Holocaust”. The Jews have long tried to claim exclusive use of this Greek word, so RFKJr is a criminal for using an english word that has been kidnapped by the Jews.
Taken from Roth, John K. (2010). “Introduction”. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. Oxford University Press. pp. 1–20.
The term Holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning “burnt offering”,[2] has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages.
The Jews are using their corrupt ways to destroy American democracy, every day we see another example, another bunch of money with the same names operating the schemes and scams.
We all know that the word “holocaust” is not owned by the Jews, but they play this victim role in order to divert attention away from their own crimes. When you look at the CIP About page, they blatantly accuse Trump of subverting justice against the current administration, blatantly trying to make themselves out to be the victim of their own crimes so that they can continue to destroy and steal from the USA.
The Jewish holocaust was probably another one of their lies: the Jews tell so many lies that you would be crazy to believe any of their stories. Show me one picture of a dead Jew in a gas chamber, just one …. nothing. All the “proof” pictures are of starving diseased people, some of whom succumbed to their starvation and diseases. Not one of a Jew in a gas chamber, not one, despite the Allies, the Germans and the Red Cross taking millions of photos during WW2, the most photographed war at the time.
After the war, their victimhood gave the British Jews the excuse for taking Palestine from its real owners, handed to them by the British government. They are still in control of that government, they are relentless liars and thieves and they have taken over power in the USA. Why they are destroying the USA is anyones guess, but they obviously have a greater plan, a Davos plan.
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