Why is Covid better than Southwest?
Because it’s airborne.
*.*
What do you call a paper airplane that can’t fly?
Stationary.
*.*
Tragedy struck Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky Friday as he shot himself in the eye with a rocket launcher he had received only days before as a gift from the United States.
Zelensky was eager to try out his new gift in the backyard of his home. Unfortunately, the target of Russian President Vladimir Putin he set up was too close to his garage, causing the rocket to ricochet back and hit him in the eye. A source on the scene reported that Zelensky yelled out "Oh, fudge!" before falling to the ground in pain.
Zelensky had appeared before Congress earlier in the week asking for additional funds to support his country's war with Russia. He also made an impassioned plea for his own gift: an official, carbine action, 200 shot, range model rocket launcher with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.
Congress initially denied the request, with Nancy Pelosi saying that rocket launchers are dangerous and "you'll shoot your eye out." But Mitch McConnell ultimately came through, telling Zelensky that he had a similar rocket launcher when he was just eight years old.
Fortunately for the Ukrainian president, he was wearing his glasses at the time which protected his eye from any permanent damage. In the aftermath of the accident, Zelensky was able to work up some fake tears and persuade Congress to give him another $47 billion for a new pair of glasses.
*.*
A woman goes to the Doctor, worried about her husband's temper.
The Doctor asks: "What's the problem?"
The woman says: "Doctor, I don't know what to do. Every day my husband seems to lose his temper for no reason. It scares me."
The Doctor says: "I have a cure for that. When it seems that your husband is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don't swallow it until he either leaves the room or calms down."
Two weeks later the woman comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.
The woman says: "Doctor that was a brilliant idea! Every time my husband started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and he calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?"
The Doctor says: "The water itself does nothing. It's keeping your mouth shut that does the trick".
*.*
The secret to a pizza joke...
...is in the delivery.
Quote of the Times;
American speech is brash, brutally honest, blunt, direct, and yes - “offensive.” Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. This is who we are. It’s who we have always been and who we always will be. We will tell the world uncomfortable truths even when they don’t want to hear it. So take your “hate speech” and “disinformation” and go pound sand. - Torba
Link of the Times;
Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buttigieg-knew-state-ags-warned-transportation-agency-airline-debacle-months-ago
Issue of the Times;
In 2023 The Lazy Analyst Won't Keep Up With Geopolitics by Tom Luongo
Before I took on my current persona as either a “Putin Stooge,” a “shill for the Fed,” or a naïve apologist for neoliberalism, I used to be a chemist specializing in process efficiency and root cause analysis.
While I learned many things during those twenty-plus years, the most startling conclusion I came to was that laziness has a real place in process improvement.
If you really want some industrial or bureaucratic process streamlined, give that job to the guy who most hates having his time wasted. He will invariably find a way to make that ‘work’ into something he only has to do sparingly.
It led to one of my first rules of organization, if you want something done right give it to the “lazy” guy.
That “lazy” guy isn’t really lazy.
What he is, is unmotivated, because all he sees is waste and waste offends his narcissism. Nothing is worse than wasting his time doing unnecessary tasks. So, give him some tedious thing to improve and he will find not only the fastest way to do it, but also very likely the best way because while he doesn’t want his time wasted, he also doesn’t want to be yelled at by someone he sees as inferior.
Only then will you get an honest day of work out of someone like him.
It’s not like I wouldn’t know this from personal experience or anything.
When I was a chemist, I was obsessed with doing everything I could to optimize internal processes, be it shaving a few seconds here or there off a temperature program to analyze heavy metals by atomic spectroscopy or optimizing the deposition rate of a plating bath.
For me, the goal was always the same, work hard now to generate free time later to devote myself to something more valuable.
I benefited from having a less stressful work environment, the company benefits from lower COGS and the goodwill you generate leaves you far less vulnerable to middle-management scrutiny.
It was this ‘laziness’ that afforded me hundreds of hours over the years to pursue my hobbies while at work. Those were, in short, board gaming, monetary theory and politics.
One could say y’all are now the ‘beneficiaries’ of all that ‘laziness.’ (sic)
While podcasts are all the rage now, and with good reason, during my last ‘corporate’ job (which is really stretching that definition) I consumed every internet radio show I could on gold, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Buffalo Sabres.
But simultaneously I also produced reams of data in service of putting strict process controls on a novel nickel-boron coating whose lack of such had the company hemorrhaging capital.
Respect the Order
What you learn in all of this is that “order of operations” matters.
Coders understand this explicitly. So do engineers. It’s especially true in chemistry, where for one reaction to take place another reaction has to happen before it. Do it in the wrong order and you get a mess at best, or blow up the building or poison yourself at worst.
Switching metaphors, in your typical “euro-style” board game, the order in which you take the actions necessary to fulfill your strategy matters greatly. In these games, where luck is minimized or removed completely, players fight for access to a limited number of places to ‘do a thing,’ be it play a card, place a worker, build a city or whatever.
The goal is to collect more of what you need to win while subtly denying your opponent what he needs.
Sometimes you have to make a sub-optimal move for yourself in order to block someone else getting to that thing that would benefit them more. It’s incredibly passive-aggressive, but it’s also instructive, because it is so unabashedly human.
Math has it’s order of operations as well, PEMDAS for short — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. We’ve all seen the quizzes on social media testing our knowledge of this.
It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.
One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.
In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed.
By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.
While this is an important first step in waking people up, it’s also absolutely why, as a political force, ‘libertarians’ are spent. Ron Paul broke through into the popular zeitgeist in 2008 and 2012 with “End the Fed” and his critiques of foreign policy.
The problem was, however, the movement never grew up. It never engaged with the world that was versus still selling the world we’ll never get.
And rightly, people wandered away looking for those with real answers to today’s problems.
I’ve been there and made many a decision based on the equation I solved only to be frustrated like many others by the future not working out like the model I’d constructed.
The typical cope then is to scream, “Corruption!” and bitch about them rigging the gold price or trashing Bitcoin or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, I’m with y’all on that. They are rigging the markets, intervening at every turn, if not turning them into completely fake markets.
But that should have been expected. Because in the proper ‘order of operations’ those with power and money will always react to defend themselves against the growing realization that they are fucking us over.
Remember, they’re trying to ‘win’ this game as well.
And so, if they can get to that richer spot on the board before you do, they will. Don’t bitch about the game board being tilted against you, accept that it is part of that mini-game and widen your perspective on the larger game afoot.
And that’s the real problem. We have too many ‘lazy’ analysts who got red-pilled, saw the game for what it was and stopped at “anger” rather than doing the hard work of reaching ‘acceptance.’
This is where we are today and why, for many, the world is so hard to make sense of.
The Larger Bowl
When you realize that everyone’s incentives map to their own particular definitions of winning that’s when real headway can be made in understanding.
Because here’s the thing. Our insights into the world aren’t novel or unique. In fact, more often than not they are just our finally understanding the reality that’s always been in front of us. We’re latecomers to a geopolitical party that’s been going on for decades.
I know I feel like that on more days than I care to admit.
They’ve finally told us what their end game looks like. It speaks to a confidence of their making that’s real. If we ignore the order of operations of how we get to our preferred outcome — a decentralized world with private property and sound money that should maximize human dignity — the irony is we’ll have a lower probability of it occurring on any time line that matters to us or even our children.
This is why I’m willing to see The Fed and the NY Boys as our temporary allies in that fight for human dignity. They have their definitions of winning the game they’re playing and should act accordingly.
So, while we should all long for the day that these assholes are dead and buried by the natural forces of decentralization and entropy, there are a thousand interstitial steps that have to happen first.
And it won’t matter if bitcoin eventually wins if the world goes through a sixty year Dark Age in the meantime. That’s not leadership, that’s cowardice.
So, yes. Davos has their definitions of winning. The Russians have theirs. China theirs.
And we need to have ours.
It is this curious admixture of incentives, this coincidence of wants, that is the interesting part. It’s where the game actually lives.
And while we don’t have a crystal ball as to how well everyone in the game will respond to these pressures and counter-pressures, with an accurate map of their incentives we can, at least make some observations.
The problem for many is they checked out long before they’d even identified the players at the table, so the game seems incomprehensible and the players wiser and more powerful than they actually are.
That’s why I think this year is going to be one of the most interesting to analyze in real time and why we all have to up our game.
Laziness only gets you so far, it may get you to the root cause of the situation, but that’s when the real work begins.
News of the Times;
Every social media firm censors for US government – Musk:
https://www.rt.com/news/569016-musk-social-media-censorship/
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate:
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Zelenskyy Hires Globalist BlackRock CEO Larry Fink To Oversee Ukraine’s Money Laundering Scam:
https://newspunch.com/zelenskyy-hires-globalist-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-to-oversee-ukraines-money-laundering-scam/
NYC crime spiked 44% in first months of 2022:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-crime-data-recidivists-arrests-soar-nypd-20220406-3p7m5l2avrbffigozefy6gzvuq-story.html
Migrant Surge at Border Strains El Paso:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/migrant-surge-at-border-strains-el-paso-11671122056
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide:
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Culture/homeless.html
Funny what even a flimsy border fence can do...
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/funny_what_even_a_flimsy_border_fence_can_do.html
GOP Sellouts Gave Biden Regime $11 MILLION to Target Gun Owners in Repulsive Omnibus Bill:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/another-nasty-surprise-gop-sellouts-gave-biden-regime-11-million-target-gun-owners-repulsive-omnibus-bill/
The $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill Is Being Flown to Biden's Caribbean Retreat for Signing:
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/1-7-trillion-omnibus-spending-bill-flown-bidens-caribbean-retreat-signing-report
2022 Man of the Year: The Ghost:
https://freebeacon.com/culture/2022-man-of-the-year-the-ghost/
Vandals attack 4 power substations on Christmas – 17,000 without electricity:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/vandals-attack-4-power-substations-on-christmas-17000-without-electricity
3 dead in Kurdish center shooting in Paris; suspect arrested:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/paris-shooting-leaves-multiple-people-wounded-1-arrested-95744486
Social Worker Secretly Begins Transitioning Young Girl Without Parental Consent, School Faces No Repercussions:
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2022/12/24/social-worker-secretly-begins-transitioning-young-girl-without-parental-consent-school-faces-no-repercussions/
San Francisco unveils taxpayer-funded open-air Christmas market that's become dystopian hellhole:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11572629/San-Francisco-unveils-taxpayer-funded-open-air-Christmas-market-thats-dystopian-hellhole.html
Chip Roy Completely Explodes At Democrats On House Floor Over Omnibus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtKo9EEalwI&t=213s
Begins?
Share?
My wife told me to get out of the house because I can’t stop singing Christmas songs.
I said, “But Baby, it’s cold outside.”
*.*
Be careful driving on the holidays.
The roads will be crazy.
A lot of guys get drunk so their wives will be driving.
*.*
Oneliners:
They say money can't buy happiness, but I just brought home a bunch of discount Halloween candy.
If I went to hell, it would take me a week to realize I wasn't at work.
The inventor of the wind chill factor died recently. He was 82, but felt like he was 64.
I'm glad we're the kind of people who aren't above pairing wine with nachos.
Being funny at work is a delicate balance between being funny enough to entertain your co-workers but not so funny and get sent to HR.
I may look fine, but deep down inside, I don't remember any of my passwords.
I remember when a "new hip joint" meant someplace I wanted to go on a Friday night.
Shin: a device used to find furniture in the dark.
My goal is no longer to get more done, but to have less to do.
I'd admire the rich if they weren't so miserable.
*.*
Upon being caught in a lie, my boss ask me, "Who's stupid, me or you?".
I told him he doesn't hire stupid people.
*.*
I’m not saying it’s cold outside, but…
I had to take a chisel along when I walked the dog to free him from a fire hydrant.
Quote of the Times;
"We simply have no other choice but to protect our citizens. But we are ready to negotiate with all the participants in this process about acceptable solutions, but that's their business - it's not us who refuse to negotiate, but they." – Russian President Vladimir Putin
Link of the Times;
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/12/24/white-house-covid-czar-no-study-shows-that-masks-are-effective-against-the-virus-n678591
Issue of the Times;
Your Government Hates You by MN Gorden
Capital Consuming Gluttony
Did you know that in fiscal year 2022, federal tax receipts as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) hit a near record high of 19.6 percent?
According to the U.S. Treasury, in FY 2022, total federal tax receipts and additional federal government revenue topped $4.90 trillion. Yet, over this time, Congress spent $6.27 trillion. The difference, the 2022 deficit, was $1.37 trillion.
The difference, of course, was made up with debt. And year after year, decade after decade, these deficits have stacked up into a mega pile of debt. Presently, the U.S. national debt is over $31.4 trillion. As a reference point, in December 2000, the national debt was $5.6 trillion.
In other words, over the last 22 years the U.S. national debt has increased 460 percent. U.S. GDP over this same time, however, has increased just 157 percent, from about $10 trillion to 25.7 trillion.
You’d think with all that cash coming in from near record tax receipts as a percent of GDP Washington could balance the budget. Maybe it could even run a surplus and pay down some of the national debt.
President Andrew Jackson, for example, paid off the entire national debt in 1835 after just six years in office. He then took the federal government surplus and divided it among indebted states.
Alas, that’s not how the U.S. government works in the 21st century, where near record tax receipts will never be enough. Washington’s capital consuming gluttony is well beyond the reach of a human solution. Nature will have to take its course.
Skyrocketing Fiscal Year 2023 Deficit
It doesn’t take big brains or a sharp intellect to understand that spending more than you make for decades on end is a terrible way to build wealth. Many great nations have tried it. None have been able to sustain it, indefinitely. They’ve all failed. The U.S. is no different.
We believe 2023 will further the divergence between the national debt and GDP. Specifically, the national debt will continue to grow much faster than GDP. In fact, it’s already happening.
The first two months of FY 2023, which commenced in October, are off to a slow start. Federal revenue rose just 1 percent. At that rate, federal revenues would increase by 6 percent in FY 2023, as compared to a 21 percent increase in all of FY 2022.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal, individual taxes rose 4 percent while corporate tax revenue fell 6 percent. Other revenue, which includes Federal Reserve payments from interest on its bond holdings, dropped 21 percent. These Fed payments will turn to deficits in 2023 as the central bank shrinks its bond portfolio.
So, unless the federal government dramatically cuts it’s spending to be inline with slowing revenue the FY 2023 deficit will skyrocket. Perhaps the debt market will apply some constraints…
The federal government, after decades of mass money printing, now has rampant consumer price inflation to contend with. For this reason, the Treasury can no longer count on the Fed to create credit out of thin air to buy Treasury notes. To do so would be counter productive to the Fed’s inflation containment program.
Now, for the first time since quantitative easing was hatched in late 2008, if Washington wants to borrow money to finance its ridiculous spending programs it will have to do so with loans from honest Treasury investors. Some may find today’s yields worthy. Others may not.
Mayors for Guaranteed Income
The point is the federal government will have to exclusively rely on a class of discerning lenders to finance its deficits for the first time since Lehman Brothers vanished from the face of the earth. And while the federal government may have some unfamiliar constraints to deal with, the real pain will be felt by state and local governments.
During the coronavirus fiasco many state and local governments took a ride on the federal government’s gravy train, which was powered by mega amounts of printing press money. State and local politicians, who are generally much dumber than they look, took this one time, event driven largesse from Washington and used it to establish new, and everlasting structural spending programs.
This week, for example, we discovered there are at least 82 municipalities across 29 states that are promoting guaranteed income programs. And more than 70 of these municipalities have pilot programs created in the past year. There’s even a coalition of over 100 mayors, aptly titled Mayors for Guaranteed Income, that are advocating for them.
How do these forward-thinking mayors intend to pay for these guaranteed income programs?
They intend to raid federal pandemic assistance money from a $350 billion fund for state and local governments within the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, adopted in March 2021. Remember where this money comes from; that is, it comes from you…the American taxpayer.
Adding to the army of dependents reliant on government for their daily bread is beyond foolish. People who receive ongoing handouts slip into apathy. They become unwilling and unable to provide for themselves. They become dependents for life. And what happens when the guaranteed income can no longer be guaranteed?
Without question, these guaranteed income programs are epic disasters in the making.
Your Government Hates You
Lastly, we’d be remiss if we did not mention the federal government’s bipartisan $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that’s making its way through Congress at the time of this writing. This 4,155-page whopper is a Christmas tree bill in the truest sense. Special gifts to various interest groups are hung on every branch.
But what’s actually in it?
The headline accounts are vague. There’s the amorphous $858 billion for defense. There’s also the nebulous $772.5 billion for domestic priorities. What could these be?
If you’re unclear about just how absolutely screwed we all are, here we turn to the Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-vice-president-condemns-lame-duck-spending-disaster-omnibus-deal-complete-betrayal for lucidity:
“[The Omnibus bill] contains billions in wasteful spending on ridiculous political pet projects, including the following:
• $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers” and another $1.2 million for “support services for DACA recipients” (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College.
• $477,000 for the Equity Institute in Rhode Island to indoctrinate teachers with “antiracism virtual labs.”
• $1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a “coworking and community space” for “women and gender-expansive people of color.”
• $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.
• $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.
• $750,000 for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing” in Albany, N.Y.
• $2 million for the “Great Blacks in Wax” museum in Baltimore.
• $856,000 for an “LGBT Center” in New York.
• $750,000 for the “TransLatin@ Coalition” to provide “workforce development programs and supportive services for Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex (TGI) immigrant women in Los Angeles.”
This, my friends, is your tax dollars at work. This is also an ear-piercing siren signaling the end is nigh.
The fact of the matter is that if you work hard, pay your own way, believe in free speech and traditional values, and fear God, your government – the dirty cadre of elites and insiders – hates you.
There’s no other way to explain it.
News of the Times;
7,000 more Americans than usual have died every WEEK from the knock-on effect of pandemic restrictions:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11539541/7k-Americans-usual-dying-WEEK-knock-effect-pandemic-restrictions.html
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal arrested for child porn:
https://vancouvertimes.org/former-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-arrested-for-child-porn/
Holiday Classic Takes On New Meaning As Jimmy Stewart’s Post-War Struggles Bleed Into Film:
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/24/its-a-wonderful-life-new-meaning-as-jimmy-stewart-post-war-struggles/
Biden Says He Threatened Congress With “Holy War” If They Didn’t Do What He Wanted:
https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/biden-says-he-threatened-congress-with-holy-war-if-they-didnt-do-what-he-wanted/
Report: Attacks on Christian Churches Nearly Triple in Four Years:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/21/report-attacks-on-christian-churches-nearly-triple-in-four-years/
Elon Musk Received Perfect Response from Most Unique Twitter Account:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/elon-musk-received-perfect-response-unique-twitter-account-regarding-serial-liar-adam-schiff/
Doctor Euthanizes Woman With Dementia, Her Family Held Her Down When She Resisted:
https://www.lifenews.com/2020/06/16/doctors-euthanizes-woman-with-dementia-her-family-held-her-down-when-she-resisted/
Editorial calls out Twitter for 'unreported' political contributions to Biden:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/editorial-calls-twitter-unreported-political-contributions-biden/
Man accused of starving dog twice gets 6 to 12 months in jail:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/man-sentenced-jail-animal-cruelty-starving-dog/
Florida subpoenas medical groups defending child mutilation in transgender Medicaid lawsuit:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/florida-subpoenas-medical-groups-defending-child-mutilation-in-transgender-medicaid-lawsuit/
Elementary School Teacher ARRESTED After Filming Sex Act In Front OF Class:
https://dailyheadlines.com/elementary-school-teacher-arrested-after-filming-sex-act-in-front-of-class/
Half-Naked Drag Queen Teaches Kid to Twerk in NYC as Parents Watch Calmly:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2022/12/12/half-naked-drag-queen-teaches-kid-to-twerk-in-nyc-as-parents-watch-calmly-n1652899
Emails reveal Nancy Pelosi’s office was directly involved in security failures on Jan 6:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-12-23-emails-reveal-pelosis-office-directly-involved-jan6.html
Church changes Christmas carol lyrics to recognize 'queer and questioning':
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/church-changes-christmas-carol-lyric-recognize-queer-questioning/
Major leftist news site doesn't want people to have kids:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/major-leftist-news-site-doesnt-want-people-kids/
I said, “But Baby, it’s cold outside.”
*.*
Be careful driving on the holidays.
The roads will be crazy.
A lot of guys get drunk so their wives will be driving.
*.*
Oneliners:
They say money can't buy happiness, but I just brought home a bunch of discount Halloween candy.
If I went to hell, it would take me a week to realize I wasn't at work.
The inventor of the wind chill factor died recently. He was 82, but felt like he was 64.
I'm glad we're the kind of people who aren't above pairing wine with nachos.
Being funny at work is a delicate balance between being funny enough to entertain your co-workers but not so funny and get sent to HR.
I may look fine, but deep down inside, I don't remember any of my passwords.
I remember when a "new hip joint" meant someplace I wanted to go on a Friday night.
Shin: a device used to find furniture in the dark.
My goal is no longer to get more done, but to have less to do.
I'd admire the rich if they weren't so miserable.
*.*
Upon being caught in a lie, my boss ask me, "Who's stupid, me or you?".
I told him he doesn't hire stupid people.
*.*
I’m not saying it’s cold outside, but…
I had to take a chisel along when I walked the dog to free him from a fire hydrant.
Quote of the Times;
"We simply have no other choice but to protect our citizens. But we are ready to negotiate with all the participants in this process about acceptable solutions, but that's their business - it's not us who refuse to negotiate, but they." – Russian President Vladimir Putin
Link of the Times;
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/12/24/white-house-covid-czar-no-study-shows-that-masks-are-effective-against-the-virus-n678591
Issue of the Times;
Your Government Hates You by MN Gorden
Capital Consuming Gluttony
Did you know that in fiscal year 2022, federal tax receipts as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) hit a near record high of 19.6 percent?
According to the U.S. Treasury, in FY 2022, total federal tax receipts and additional federal government revenue topped $4.90 trillion. Yet, over this time, Congress spent $6.27 trillion. The difference, the 2022 deficit, was $1.37 trillion.
The difference, of course, was made up with debt. And year after year, decade after decade, these deficits have stacked up into a mega pile of debt. Presently, the U.S. national debt is over $31.4 trillion. As a reference point, in December 2000, the national debt was $5.6 trillion.
In other words, over the last 22 years the U.S. national debt has increased 460 percent. U.S. GDP over this same time, however, has increased just 157 percent, from about $10 trillion to 25.7 trillion.
You’d think with all that cash coming in from near record tax receipts as a percent of GDP Washington could balance the budget. Maybe it could even run a surplus and pay down some of the national debt.
President Andrew Jackson, for example, paid off the entire national debt in 1835 after just six years in office. He then took the federal government surplus and divided it among indebted states.
Alas, that’s not how the U.S. government works in the 21st century, where near record tax receipts will never be enough. Washington’s capital consuming gluttony is well beyond the reach of a human solution. Nature will have to take its course.
Skyrocketing Fiscal Year 2023 Deficit
It doesn’t take big brains or a sharp intellect to understand that spending more than you make for decades on end is a terrible way to build wealth. Many great nations have tried it. None have been able to sustain it, indefinitely. They’ve all failed. The U.S. is no different.
We believe 2023 will further the divergence between the national debt and GDP. Specifically, the national debt will continue to grow much faster than GDP. In fact, it’s already happening.
The first two months of FY 2023, which commenced in October, are off to a slow start. Federal revenue rose just 1 percent. At that rate, federal revenues would increase by 6 percent in FY 2023, as compared to a 21 percent increase in all of FY 2022.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal, individual taxes rose 4 percent while corporate tax revenue fell 6 percent. Other revenue, which includes Federal Reserve payments from interest on its bond holdings, dropped 21 percent. These Fed payments will turn to deficits in 2023 as the central bank shrinks its bond portfolio.
So, unless the federal government dramatically cuts it’s spending to be inline with slowing revenue the FY 2023 deficit will skyrocket. Perhaps the debt market will apply some constraints…
The federal government, after decades of mass money printing, now has rampant consumer price inflation to contend with. For this reason, the Treasury can no longer count on the Fed to create credit out of thin air to buy Treasury notes. To do so would be counter productive to the Fed’s inflation containment program.
Now, for the first time since quantitative easing was hatched in late 2008, if Washington wants to borrow money to finance its ridiculous spending programs it will have to do so with loans from honest Treasury investors. Some may find today’s yields worthy. Others may not.
Mayors for Guaranteed Income
The point is the federal government will have to exclusively rely on a class of discerning lenders to finance its deficits for the first time since Lehman Brothers vanished from the face of the earth. And while the federal government may have some unfamiliar constraints to deal with, the real pain will be felt by state and local governments.
During the coronavirus fiasco many state and local governments took a ride on the federal government’s gravy train, which was powered by mega amounts of printing press money. State and local politicians, who are generally much dumber than they look, took this one time, event driven largesse from Washington and used it to establish new, and everlasting structural spending programs.
This week, for example, we discovered there are at least 82 municipalities across 29 states that are promoting guaranteed income programs. And more than 70 of these municipalities have pilot programs created in the past year. There’s even a coalition of over 100 mayors, aptly titled Mayors for Guaranteed Income, that are advocating for them.
How do these forward-thinking mayors intend to pay for these guaranteed income programs?
They intend to raid federal pandemic assistance money from a $350 billion fund for state and local governments within the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, adopted in March 2021. Remember where this money comes from; that is, it comes from you…the American taxpayer.
Adding to the army of dependents reliant on government for their daily bread is beyond foolish. People who receive ongoing handouts slip into apathy. They become unwilling and unable to provide for themselves. They become dependents for life. And what happens when the guaranteed income can no longer be guaranteed?
Without question, these guaranteed income programs are epic disasters in the making.
Your Government Hates You
Lastly, we’d be remiss if we did not mention the federal government’s bipartisan $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that’s making its way through Congress at the time of this writing. This 4,155-page whopper is a Christmas tree bill in the truest sense. Special gifts to various interest groups are hung on every branch.
But what’s actually in it?
The headline accounts are vague. There’s the amorphous $858 billion for defense. There’s also the nebulous $772.5 billion for domestic priorities. What could these be?
If you’re unclear about just how absolutely screwed we all are, here we turn to the Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-vice-president-condemns-lame-duck-spending-disaster-omnibus-deal-complete-betrayal for lucidity:
“[The Omnibus bill] contains billions in wasteful spending on ridiculous political pet projects, including the following:
• $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers” and another $1.2 million for “support services for DACA recipients” (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College.
• $477,000 for the Equity Institute in Rhode Island to indoctrinate teachers with “antiracism virtual labs.”
• $1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a “coworking and community space” for “women and gender-expansive people of color.”
• $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.
• $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.
• $750,000 for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing” in Albany, N.Y.
• $2 million for the “Great Blacks in Wax” museum in Baltimore.
• $856,000 for an “LGBT Center” in New York.
• $750,000 for the “TransLatin@ Coalition” to provide “workforce development programs and supportive services for Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex (TGI) immigrant women in Los Angeles.”
This, my friends, is your tax dollars at work. This is also an ear-piercing siren signaling the end is nigh.
The fact of the matter is that if you work hard, pay your own way, believe in free speech and traditional values, and fear God, your government – the dirty cadre of elites and insiders – hates you.
There’s no other way to explain it.
News of the Times;
7,000 more Americans than usual have died every WEEK from the knock-on effect of pandemic restrictions:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11539541/7k-Americans-usual-dying-WEEK-knock-effect-pandemic-restrictions.html
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal arrested for child porn:
https://vancouvertimes.org/former-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-arrested-for-child-porn/
Holiday Classic Takes On New Meaning As Jimmy Stewart’s Post-War Struggles Bleed Into Film:
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/24/its-a-wonderful-life-new-meaning-as-jimmy-stewart-post-war-struggles/
Biden Says He Threatened Congress With “Holy War” If They Didn’t Do What He Wanted:
https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/biden-says-he-threatened-congress-with-holy-war-if-they-didnt-do-what-he-wanted/
Report: Attacks on Christian Churches Nearly Triple in Four Years:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/21/report-attacks-on-christian-churches-nearly-triple-in-four-years/
Elon Musk Received Perfect Response from Most Unique Twitter Account:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/elon-musk-received-perfect-response-unique-twitter-account-regarding-serial-liar-adam-schiff/
Doctor Euthanizes Woman With Dementia, Her Family Held Her Down When She Resisted:
https://www.lifenews.com/2020/06/16/doctors-euthanizes-woman-with-dementia-her-family-held-her-down-when-she-resisted/
Editorial calls out Twitter for 'unreported' political contributions to Biden:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/editorial-calls-twitter-unreported-political-contributions-biden/
Man accused of starving dog twice gets 6 to 12 months in jail:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/man-sentenced-jail-animal-cruelty-starving-dog/
Florida subpoenas medical groups defending child mutilation in transgender Medicaid lawsuit:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/florida-subpoenas-medical-groups-defending-child-mutilation-in-transgender-medicaid-lawsuit/
Elementary School Teacher ARRESTED After Filming Sex Act In Front OF Class:
https://dailyheadlines.com/elementary-school-teacher-arrested-after-filming-sex-act-in-front-of-class/
Half-Naked Drag Queen Teaches Kid to Twerk in NYC as Parents Watch Calmly:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2022/12/12/half-naked-drag-queen-teaches-kid-to-twerk-in-nyc-as-parents-watch-calmly-n1652899
Emails reveal Nancy Pelosi’s office was directly involved in security failures on Jan 6:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-12-23-emails-reveal-pelosis-office-directly-involved-jan6.html
Church changes Christmas carol lyrics to recognize 'queer and questioning':
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/church-changes-christmas-carol-lyric-recognize-queer-questioning/
Major leftist news site doesn't want people to have kids:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/major-leftist-news-site-doesnt-want-people-kids/
PayPal?
I always say, "Morning" instead of "Good morning".
If it was really a good morning, I'd be fishing.
*.*
I thought my new girlfriend might be the one.
But when I went through her drawers and found a nurse's uniform, a French maid's outfit and a police woman's uniform, I figure if she can't hold on to a job, she's not the on for me.
*.*
Oneliners:
Never make snow angels in a dog park.
There aren't very many vitamins in beer, which is why you need a lot of it.
Only a dog could show up at a Christmas party, empty-handed, not speak to anyone and still be the most popular guest there.
They need to change the phrase, "vacation request" to "vacation awareness" because I'm not requesting anything, I'm making you aware you won't see me.
The only time I passionately knocked everything off a table, I was making room for a pizza.
I noticed yesterday that the hardest thing about a Monday morning is when people asked what you did over the weekend, and you have to remember.
All bad things must come to an end, too.
Askhole: a person who often asks for your advice but does the opposite of what you recommended.
Whisky may not be the answer, but it's always worth a shot.
People want the front of the bus, the back of the church and the center of attention.
*.*
Top 5 Jokes the Elves are sick of hearing:
Who sang "Blue Christmas?" Elfis
What's an elf's favorite sport? Miniature golf.
What pictures do elves take with their phones? Elfies
What kind of cars do elves drive? Toy-otas
If athletes get athlete's foot, what do elves get? Mistle-toe.
*.*
Jessie is a friend.
He has a pet squirrel that brings him tacos.
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel.
Quote of the Times;
To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions. – Aurelius
Link of the Times;
http://younggospelminister.blogspot.com/
Issue of the Times;
What the Hell Happened to PayPal? by Rupa Subramanya
In 1998, the payments app was created to empower individuals. Today, it’s a cornerstone of our emerging social-credit system.
One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”
There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.
They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”
In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”
Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”
If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)
These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists—the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services,” was meant to empower.
PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.
“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.”
When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users.
“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”
Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion.
But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.
Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.
One of the people who apparently posed an unacceptable threat was Eric Finman.
On July 18, 2021, Finman, 24, a Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur, woke up to learn that PayPal had declared war on the startup he’d launched four days before.
The idea of Finman’s startup, Freedom Phone—basically a rejiggered Android with an American flag on it—was to give individuals access to whatever app they wanted.
Apple’s App Store frequently bans apps—like Metadata+, which notifies users every time the United States conducts a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. By contrast, Freedom Phone’s app store lets anyone download anything. That includes Parler, the far-right social-media platform the App Store temporarily suspended, and Twitter, which the App Store recently threatened to kick out.
Apparently, that didn’t sit right with PayPal, which banned Freedom Phone permanently from the app. (This came days after Shopify and Amazon Pay did the same.) “I just felt my stomach completely and utterly *drop*,” Finman messaged me.
To add insult to injury, PayPal held up $1.2 million in payments to Finman’s company. Eventually, Finman got his money, but the delay, he said, “killed all the momentum.”
Or consider Colin Wright.
The evolutionary biologist received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara in 2018 and writes critically about gender ideology.
In June, he was kicked off PayPal—and, soon after, Etsy, where he sold t-shirts and mugs promoting his newsletter. PayPal told Wright that, if he wanted to know why he’d been ejected, “an attorney or law enforcement officer must submit a legal subpoena.”
“A lot of activists have tried to cancel me, and that’s just because I talk a lot about the sex and gender debate,” Wright told me. Since these activists, Wright said, ”don’t really have a good response, they just try to make it so that everyone who has good arguments isn’t able to make a living by talking about it.”
Then there’s British journalist Toby Young.
Young is the founder of the Free Speech Union, an advocacy group, and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Skeptic, which has questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines.
On September 15, 2022, PayPal informed Young that his personal account had been suspended. A few minutes later, he learned the Daily Skeptic’s account had also been shut down. A few minutes after that, he learned the Free Speech Union’s account was defunct.
In under a half-hour, he’d been cut off from the financial-services world.
“I was appalled when I discovered PayPal had suspended my accounts,” Young told me. “The authoritarian, social-credit system developed in China was now being implemented in the West, except instead of ideological compliance being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party, it was being policed by a woke capitalist corporation.”
Other recently suspended PayPal accounts include Gays Against Groomers, which opposes “the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization” of children; and UsForThem, and Law or Fiction—both U.K.-based groups that opposed the British government’s response to Covid, including school closures and mandatory masking. PayPal has also suspended the accounts of the anti-establishment site ConsortiumNews, which has criticized U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war; and several alt-right and Stop the Steal activists.
Nor do you just bounce back from being shut out. Wright said it takes years to build a core audience—the people who click on the recurring-payment box on your PayPal account. “When PayPal cancels that, it’s not like I can just bring those 200 people to another payment processor,” he messaged me. “Those are cut off permanently. Maybe I can send them all an email and ask people to sign up elsewhere, but there’s gonna be a major, major major drop off because people have to whip out their credit cards again on a whole new system.”
Nobody outside PayPal really knows how this process works. There is no clear cause and effect. The likeliest scenario involves a user posting something deemed problematic on a social-media platform, and an activist or PayPal employee flagging this, and then, without warning, PayPal shutting down the account.
When I asked a PayPal spokesperson about the company’s suspension policy, she emailed me: “PayPal has and will continue to enable free speech and expression, while appropriately protecting our customers and platform from fraud, counterfeiting and other illicit activities.”
To make sure none of the haters fall through the cracks, PayPal has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center—which has labeled as “extreme” the Family Research Council, a conservative activist group; Charles Murray, a political scientist best known for co-authoring the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born critic of Islam and supporter of women’s rights, among many others.
The collaboration features a research initiative that examines how extremists in the United States use financial platforms to fund their activities; the results are to be disseminated throughout the financial-services industry and shared with policymakers and law enforcement.
Civil-liberties groups decry the lack of transparency. “This lack of due process has a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, including people of color and religious minorities,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation letter, addressed to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman and other PayPal executives, stated.
Making matters worse is PayPal’s recently updated Acceptable Use Policy—which clears the way for even more suspensions, bans and fines. The policy, released in October, prohibits all “objectionable” activity, warning that violators face a $2,500 penalty. As with PayPal and the ADL’s war on “hate,” there’s very little clarity. Anyone whose politics, language or tone offends the powers that be could be labeled “objectionable.”
David Marcus, a former PayPal president, tweeted that the new policy “goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity.” Elon Musk replied, “Agreed.”
Finally, there’s Dan Schulman—poster child for stakeholder capitalism, who has been CEO since 2014. In January of this year, Schulman, while speaking at the World Economic Forum, was fuzzy when it came to defining the boundaries of free expression. “The difficult part there is identifying what is hatred and what is freedom of speech,” Schulman said. “Nobody teaches you that.”
Schulman, as one Silicon Valley insider put it, was a member of the “professional management class”—impeccable credentials (Middlebury, Harvard MBA), years of experience in publicly traded companies (American Express, Sprint, AT&T), and tons of accolades (the New York Urban League’s Frederick Douglass Award, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ Ripple of Hope Award, the Fortune list of World’s Greatest Leaders and Fast Company’s Top 100 Creative People, among others).
“The CEO has got like every woke award you can win,” David Sacks, the company’s first chief operating officer, told me, referring to Schulman. “It’s a symbiotic relationship—he implements their agenda, and, in exchange, they give him awards, and that furthers advancement up the corporate totem pole of woke capitalism.”
The question was: How had this happened?
How had PayPal—birthed in the fertile crescent of innovation, the old Silicon Valley of web 1.0—become . . . this? How had this company, which had been all about liberating the individual, become a pillar of our emerging social-credit system?
Eric Jackson, who was interim vice president of U.S. marketing in the early days, said: "PayPal's founding vision was to empower people and give them more control and freedom. The company today is so far afield from that founding vision. It's clear that it views its role as moderating what people can think, say and do. It is completely at odds with the vision that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin created for the company. As a part of the old PayPal team, it makes me really sad. Because we were trying to build something that enhanced freedom and protected people. Now, we're seeing people act in a diametrically opposed manner to that."
Jimmy Soni, the author of The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, emailed me that yes, PayPal’s vision was “informed by libertarianism,” but in the early 2000’s, amidst the collapse of the dot-com bubble, “the goal was simply to keep it alive, especially as so many other start-ups were going under in ‘00 and ‘01.”
The first inflection point, the old guard agreed, was September 11, 2001 and the federal government’s response to the terrorist attacks—including adoption of the Patriot Act.
Among other things, the Patriot Act imposed tight controls on money flowing in and out of the United States. “It would obviously make sense to ensure that Osama bin Laden shouldn't be allowed to open a PayPal account,” Jackson said.
Then came Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal, in 2002, for $1.5 billion.
On the day of the acquisition, July 8, PayPal announced it would stop processing payments for sports-betting sites. The company also chose not to retain any of the founders. The message was clear: We’re breaking from the past. We’re going to be a different company moving forward.
The next flashpoint came in December 2010: WikiLeaks.
After being pressured by U.S. officials, PayPal suspended the account of the activist group that released millions of classified documents—with information about, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, CIA surveillance, and the Democratic National Committee. Thom Bradford, a former engineer at PayPal’s Berlin office, said: “I was naive enough when I worked there to believe that the Wikileaks thing was just a bizarre, isolated incident that they did because they were being pressured by the government, and they didn't want to be subjected to heavy-handed regulation. But now it seems as though they take pleasure in it.”
But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020—the summer of Covid lockdowns, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the burning cities, the presidential election—that the contours of the new controlling authority came into focus.
It was not a conspiracy. Democratic officials were not colluding with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and owners of legacy newspapers and cable networks and studio chiefs and university presidents. It’s that, in a matter of a few months, maybe a year, they had all embraced the same leftwing identitarianism, the same slogans, the same hashtags and pronouns, the same statistics, the same talking points, and they reinforced each other, and they made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to challenge the new orthodoxy.
The social-credit system, which was not a formal system or network but a loosely fitted together constellation of influential brands and organizations and institutions, punished those who did not hew to the unofficial party line and rewarded those who clapped the loudest. It bore a familial resemblance to the much more established social-credit system in China, which was an extension of the country’s financial credit system and was meant to assess businesses’ and individuals’ “trustworthiness,” which sounded reasonable when you were talking about facts versus misinformation, but less so when it came to opinions—politics.
Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, Kara Frederick, who previously led Facebook’s Global Counterterrorism Analysis Program, said: “I started noticing discomfiting similarities in what the consolidated centralized power of the CCP was visiting on its internal population, and what this combination and symbiosis of corporate power in the form of big tech and the federal government is, frankly, seeking to turn on specific American citizens.”
Frederick recalled, for example, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., applauding the new PayPal-ADL partnership. Or Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s then-press secretary, announcing, on July 15, 2021, that the White House had identified “problematic” Facebook posts that spread “misinformation” and that it expected the social-media site to take down.
If you protested the status quo—if you were a trucker in Ottawa in early 2022 angry about the country’s vaccine mandates, if you were against defunding the police, if you were against critical race theory seeping into your six-year-old’s classroom, if you questioned the wisdom of exposing children to drag shows, if you believed in everyone’s right to argue openly about all of the above—you were, oddly enough, in a suspect class. You were, increasingly, at risk of being deplatformed, debanked.
"What happens is these companies create the machinery of account deplatforming, suspensions, moderation, and it starts being used for legitimate reasons, but then what happens is it gets hijacked for political reasons," David Sacks told me.
This was certainly Eric Finman’s experience.
He got that Freedom Phone’s brand didn’t jibe with the new corporate consensus. Its laissez-faire approach, its embrace of “freedom”—that was out of step with the canceling ethic, the pro-equity-pro-lockdown-pro-Ukraine politics. But still. He called himself a “moderate Democrat.” He was against telling people what they could say or read or download. “If you ban the Chapo Trap House people on the left, they end up moving into their own group chats,” he said. “If you ban the Q people on the right, they end up moving into their group chats. Both go unchallenged. We need to be able to talk to each other and go up against each other.”
Matt Kibbe, the president of Free the People, which produces documentaries and podcasts that promote libertarianism, added: “The way these social-credit systems work, they don’t happen overnight—they happen drip by drip.”
The revolt against the machine has started, but it’s mostly a bottom-up, grass-roots affair.
After he was shut down, Toby Young, in London, called PayPal’s Customer Support to appeal his suspension. When his appeal was denied, he wrote a letter to British officials calling on them to adopt legislation preventing banks and payment platforms from discriminating against users with opinions they disapprove of. The letter attracted the support of 42 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
“Why is it that these large corporations based overseas think they can effectively intervene in public debates in the United Kingdom?” Young said.
Shortly after the letter was released, all three of Young’s PayPal accounts were restored.
But the real revolt, if there is to be one, is likelier to come from within the technocracy—the people with the money and power to force a major overhaul of a system that seems designed to keep the great undulating mass of users distracted and divided.
A few days ago, I emailed Elon Musk.
“Are you worried that a company you helped found—PayPal—is now part of an emerging private social credit system?” I wrote. “And is buying Twitter, in part, an effort to fulfill the mission that PayPal seems to have abandoned?”
It seemed unlikely that he’d reply. He was busy reimagining his new social-media company, shooting rockets into space, upending the electric-vehicle industry, trolling AOC.
But one hour later, at 6:55 p.m., eastern time, an email popped up in my inbox. From the new owner of Twitter.
It was just one word:
“Definitely!”
News of the Times;
GOP Rep. Dan Bishop reveals ‘some of the most egregious provisions’ in Dems’ massive omnibus bill:
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2022/12/20/gop-rep-dan-bishop-reveals-some-of-the-most-egregious-provisions-in-dems-massive-omnibus-bill/
DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/20/fentanyl-seizures-2022-dea/
Immuno-Lymphoma Can Spread FAST After mRNA Injection:
https://www.stewpeters.com/2022/12/jab-caused-turbo-cancer-immuno-lymphoma-can-spread-fast-after-mrna-injection/
Transgender Teen Charged With Violently Assaulting Two Female Students in Oklahoma High School Bathroom:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/transgender-teen-charged-violently-assaulting-two-female-students-oklahoma-high-school-bathroom/
Toward A Harmonious Racial Disengagement:
https://barelyablog.com/fred-reed-toward-a-harmonious-racial-disengagement/
To dislike certain ethnicities is racist; to see Jews as equal is antisemitic:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-dislike-certain-ethnicities-is-racist-to-see-jews-as-equal-is-antisemitic/
Arizona Election Judge Michele Swinick Calls November Midterms the Most Fraudulent, Corrupt and Rigged Election in American History:
https://noqreport.com/2022/12/15/arizona-election-judge-michele-swinick-calls-november-midterms-the-most-fraudulent-corrupt-and-rigged-election-in-american-history/
Democrat Jailed After Affair With Teen He Then Married Seeks Open House Seat:
https://resistthemainstream.com/democrat-jailed-after-affair-with-teen-he-then-married-seeks-open-house-seat/
Elon Musk Retweets Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Tweet Predicting Fauci’s Life Is About to be Turned Upside Down:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/elon-musk-retweets-robert-kennedy-jr-s-tweet-predicting-code-silence-surrounding-fauci-unravel/
Passports Were a “Temporary” War Measure:
https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-measure/
Government, Media Blame Climate Change for Skyrocketing Vegetable Prices:
https://basedunderground.com/2022/12/16/government-media-blame-climate-change-for-skyrocketing-vegetable-prices/
CDC Scrubbed Defensive Gun Use Figures After Pressure from Gun Control Proponents:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/15/claim-cdc-scrubbed-defensive-gun-use-figures-after-pressure-gun-control-proponents/
Noted Transhumanist Now Targeting Our Children: What’s inside Yuval Noah Harari’s New Book?:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/noted-transhumanist-now-targeting-children-inside-yuval-noah-hararis-new-book/
Twitter Files Show How Dangerous “The Indian CEO Virus”:
https://vdare.com/posts/twitter-files-show-how-dangerous-the-indian-ceo-virus-is-indian-immigrant-blocked-hunter-biden-laptop-story
Comparing Zelensky to Churchill is Braindead Warhawking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-B4kaqSx4I
If it was really a good morning, I'd be fishing.
*.*
I thought my new girlfriend might be the one.
But when I went through her drawers and found a nurse's uniform, a French maid's outfit and a police woman's uniform, I figure if she can't hold on to a job, she's not the on for me.
*.*
Oneliners:
Never make snow angels in a dog park.
There aren't very many vitamins in beer, which is why you need a lot of it.
Only a dog could show up at a Christmas party, empty-handed, not speak to anyone and still be the most popular guest there.
They need to change the phrase, "vacation request" to "vacation awareness" because I'm not requesting anything, I'm making you aware you won't see me.
The only time I passionately knocked everything off a table, I was making room for a pizza.
I noticed yesterday that the hardest thing about a Monday morning is when people asked what you did over the weekend, and you have to remember.
All bad things must come to an end, too.
Askhole: a person who often asks for your advice but does the opposite of what you recommended.
Whisky may not be the answer, but it's always worth a shot.
People want the front of the bus, the back of the church and the center of attention.
*.*
Top 5 Jokes the Elves are sick of hearing:
Who sang "Blue Christmas?" Elfis
What's an elf's favorite sport? Miniature golf.
What pictures do elves take with their phones? Elfies
What kind of cars do elves drive? Toy-otas
If athletes get athlete's foot, what do elves get? Mistle-toe.
*.*
Jessie is a friend.
He has a pet squirrel that brings him tacos.
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel.
Quote of the Times;
To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions. – Aurelius
Link of the Times;
http://younggospelminister.blogspot.com/
Issue of the Times;
What the Hell Happened to PayPal? by Rupa Subramanya
In 1998, the payments app was created to empower individuals. Today, it’s a cornerstone of our emerging social-credit system.
One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”
There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.
They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”
In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”
Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”
If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)
These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists—the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services,” was meant to empower.
PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.
“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.”
When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users.
“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”
Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion.
But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.
Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.
One of the people who apparently posed an unacceptable threat was Eric Finman.
On July 18, 2021, Finman, 24, a Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur, woke up to learn that PayPal had declared war on the startup he’d launched four days before.
The idea of Finman’s startup, Freedom Phone—basically a rejiggered Android with an American flag on it—was to give individuals access to whatever app they wanted.
Apple’s App Store frequently bans apps—like Metadata+, which notifies users every time the United States conducts a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. By contrast, Freedom Phone’s app store lets anyone download anything. That includes Parler, the far-right social-media platform the App Store temporarily suspended, and Twitter, which the App Store recently threatened to kick out.
Apparently, that didn’t sit right with PayPal, which banned Freedom Phone permanently from the app. (This came days after Shopify and Amazon Pay did the same.) “I just felt my stomach completely and utterly *drop*,” Finman messaged me.
To add insult to injury, PayPal held up $1.2 million in payments to Finman’s company. Eventually, Finman got his money, but the delay, he said, “killed all the momentum.”
Or consider Colin Wright.
The evolutionary biologist received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara in 2018 and writes critically about gender ideology.
In June, he was kicked off PayPal—and, soon after, Etsy, where he sold t-shirts and mugs promoting his newsletter. PayPal told Wright that, if he wanted to know why he’d been ejected, “an attorney or law enforcement officer must submit a legal subpoena.”
“A lot of activists have tried to cancel me, and that’s just because I talk a lot about the sex and gender debate,” Wright told me. Since these activists, Wright said, ”don’t really have a good response, they just try to make it so that everyone who has good arguments isn’t able to make a living by talking about it.”
Then there’s British journalist Toby Young.
Young is the founder of the Free Speech Union, an advocacy group, and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Skeptic, which has questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines.
On September 15, 2022, PayPal informed Young that his personal account had been suspended. A few minutes later, he learned the Daily Skeptic’s account had also been shut down. A few minutes after that, he learned the Free Speech Union’s account was defunct.
In under a half-hour, he’d been cut off from the financial-services world.
“I was appalled when I discovered PayPal had suspended my accounts,” Young told me. “The authoritarian, social-credit system developed in China was now being implemented in the West, except instead of ideological compliance being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party, it was being policed by a woke capitalist corporation.”
Other recently suspended PayPal accounts include Gays Against Groomers, which opposes “the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization” of children; and UsForThem, and Law or Fiction—both U.K.-based groups that opposed the British government’s response to Covid, including school closures and mandatory masking. PayPal has also suspended the accounts of the anti-establishment site ConsortiumNews, which has criticized U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war; and several alt-right and Stop the Steal activists.
Nor do you just bounce back from being shut out. Wright said it takes years to build a core audience—the people who click on the recurring-payment box on your PayPal account. “When PayPal cancels that, it’s not like I can just bring those 200 people to another payment processor,” he messaged me. “Those are cut off permanently. Maybe I can send them all an email and ask people to sign up elsewhere, but there’s gonna be a major, major major drop off because people have to whip out their credit cards again on a whole new system.”
Nobody outside PayPal really knows how this process works. There is no clear cause and effect. The likeliest scenario involves a user posting something deemed problematic on a social-media platform, and an activist or PayPal employee flagging this, and then, without warning, PayPal shutting down the account.
When I asked a PayPal spokesperson about the company’s suspension policy, she emailed me: “PayPal has and will continue to enable free speech and expression, while appropriately protecting our customers and platform from fraud, counterfeiting and other illicit activities.”
To make sure none of the haters fall through the cracks, PayPal has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center—which has labeled as “extreme” the Family Research Council, a conservative activist group; Charles Murray, a political scientist best known for co-authoring the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born critic of Islam and supporter of women’s rights, among many others.
The collaboration features a research initiative that examines how extremists in the United States use financial platforms to fund their activities; the results are to be disseminated throughout the financial-services industry and shared with policymakers and law enforcement.
Civil-liberties groups decry the lack of transparency. “This lack of due process has a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, including people of color and religious minorities,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation letter, addressed to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman and other PayPal executives, stated.
Making matters worse is PayPal’s recently updated Acceptable Use Policy—which clears the way for even more suspensions, bans and fines. The policy, released in October, prohibits all “objectionable” activity, warning that violators face a $2,500 penalty. As with PayPal and the ADL’s war on “hate,” there’s very little clarity. Anyone whose politics, language or tone offends the powers that be could be labeled “objectionable.”
David Marcus, a former PayPal president, tweeted that the new policy “goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity.” Elon Musk replied, “Agreed.”
Finally, there’s Dan Schulman—poster child for stakeholder capitalism, who has been CEO since 2014. In January of this year, Schulman, while speaking at the World Economic Forum, was fuzzy when it came to defining the boundaries of free expression. “The difficult part there is identifying what is hatred and what is freedom of speech,” Schulman said. “Nobody teaches you that.”
Schulman, as one Silicon Valley insider put it, was a member of the “professional management class”—impeccable credentials (Middlebury, Harvard MBA), years of experience in publicly traded companies (American Express, Sprint, AT&T), and tons of accolades (the New York Urban League’s Frederick Douglass Award, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ Ripple of Hope Award, the Fortune list of World’s Greatest Leaders and Fast Company’s Top 100 Creative People, among others).
“The CEO has got like every woke award you can win,” David Sacks, the company’s first chief operating officer, told me, referring to Schulman. “It’s a symbiotic relationship—he implements their agenda, and, in exchange, they give him awards, and that furthers advancement up the corporate totem pole of woke capitalism.”
The question was: How had this happened?
How had PayPal—birthed in the fertile crescent of innovation, the old Silicon Valley of web 1.0—become . . . this? How had this company, which had been all about liberating the individual, become a pillar of our emerging social-credit system?
Eric Jackson, who was interim vice president of U.S. marketing in the early days, said: "PayPal's founding vision was to empower people and give them more control and freedom. The company today is so far afield from that founding vision. It's clear that it views its role as moderating what people can think, say and do. It is completely at odds with the vision that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin created for the company. As a part of the old PayPal team, it makes me really sad. Because we were trying to build something that enhanced freedom and protected people. Now, we're seeing people act in a diametrically opposed manner to that."
Jimmy Soni, the author of The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, emailed me that yes, PayPal’s vision was “informed by libertarianism,” but in the early 2000’s, amidst the collapse of the dot-com bubble, “the goal was simply to keep it alive, especially as so many other start-ups were going under in ‘00 and ‘01.”
The first inflection point, the old guard agreed, was September 11, 2001 and the federal government’s response to the terrorist attacks—including adoption of the Patriot Act.
Among other things, the Patriot Act imposed tight controls on money flowing in and out of the United States. “It would obviously make sense to ensure that Osama bin Laden shouldn't be allowed to open a PayPal account,” Jackson said.
Then came Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal, in 2002, for $1.5 billion.
On the day of the acquisition, July 8, PayPal announced it would stop processing payments for sports-betting sites. The company also chose not to retain any of the founders. The message was clear: We’re breaking from the past. We’re going to be a different company moving forward.
The next flashpoint came in December 2010: WikiLeaks.
After being pressured by U.S. officials, PayPal suspended the account of the activist group that released millions of classified documents—with information about, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, CIA surveillance, and the Democratic National Committee. Thom Bradford, a former engineer at PayPal’s Berlin office, said: “I was naive enough when I worked there to believe that the Wikileaks thing was just a bizarre, isolated incident that they did because they were being pressured by the government, and they didn't want to be subjected to heavy-handed regulation. But now it seems as though they take pleasure in it.”
But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020—the summer of Covid lockdowns, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the burning cities, the presidential election—that the contours of the new controlling authority came into focus.
It was not a conspiracy. Democratic officials were not colluding with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and owners of legacy newspapers and cable networks and studio chiefs and university presidents. It’s that, in a matter of a few months, maybe a year, they had all embraced the same leftwing identitarianism, the same slogans, the same hashtags and pronouns, the same statistics, the same talking points, and they reinforced each other, and they made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to challenge the new orthodoxy.
The social-credit system, which was not a formal system or network but a loosely fitted together constellation of influential brands and organizations and institutions, punished those who did not hew to the unofficial party line and rewarded those who clapped the loudest. It bore a familial resemblance to the much more established social-credit system in China, which was an extension of the country’s financial credit system and was meant to assess businesses’ and individuals’ “trustworthiness,” which sounded reasonable when you were talking about facts versus misinformation, but less so when it came to opinions—politics.
Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, Kara Frederick, who previously led Facebook’s Global Counterterrorism Analysis Program, said: “I started noticing discomfiting similarities in what the consolidated centralized power of the CCP was visiting on its internal population, and what this combination and symbiosis of corporate power in the form of big tech and the federal government is, frankly, seeking to turn on specific American citizens.”
Frederick recalled, for example, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., applauding the new PayPal-ADL partnership. Or Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s then-press secretary, announcing, on July 15, 2021, that the White House had identified “problematic” Facebook posts that spread “misinformation” and that it expected the social-media site to take down.
If you protested the status quo—if you were a trucker in Ottawa in early 2022 angry about the country’s vaccine mandates, if you were against defunding the police, if you were against critical race theory seeping into your six-year-old’s classroom, if you questioned the wisdom of exposing children to drag shows, if you believed in everyone’s right to argue openly about all of the above—you were, oddly enough, in a suspect class. You were, increasingly, at risk of being deplatformed, debanked.
"What happens is these companies create the machinery of account deplatforming, suspensions, moderation, and it starts being used for legitimate reasons, but then what happens is it gets hijacked for political reasons," David Sacks told me.
This was certainly Eric Finman’s experience.
He got that Freedom Phone’s brand didn’t jibe with the new corporate consensus. Its laissez-faire approach, its embrace of “freedom”—that was out of step with the canceling ethic, the pro-equity-pro-lockdown-pro-Ukraine politics. But still. He called himself a “moderate Democrat.” He was against telling people what they could say or read or download. “If you ban the Chapo Trap House people on the left, they end up moving into their own group chats,” he said. “If you ban the Q people on the right, they end up moving into their group chats. Both go unchallenged. We need to be able to talk to each other and go up against each other.”
Matt Kibbe, the president of Free the People, which produces documentaries and podcasts that promote libertarianism, added: “The way these social-credit systems work, they don’t happen overnight—they happen drip by drip.”
The revolt against the machine has started, but it’s mostly a bottom-up, grass-roots affair.
After he was shut down, Toby Young, in London, called PayPal’s Customer Support to appeal his suspension. When his appeal was denied, he wrote a letter to British officials calling on them to adopt legislation preventing banks and payment platforms from discriminating against users with opinions they disapprove of. The letter attracted the support of 42 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
“Why is it that these large corporations based overseas think they can effectively intervene in public debates in the United Kingdom?” Young said.
Shortly after the letter was released, all three of Young’s PayPal accounts were restored.
But the real revolt, if there is to be one, is likelier to come from within the technocracy—the people with the money and power to force a major overhaul of a system that seems designed to keep the great undulating mass of users distracted and divided.
A few days ago, I emailed Elon Musk.
“Are you worried that a company you helped found—PayPal—is now part of an emerging private social credit system?” I wrote. “And is buying Twitter, in part, an effort to fulfill the mission that PayPal seems to have abandoned?”
It seemed unlikely that he’d reply. He was busy reimagining his new social-media company, shooting rockets into space, upending the electric-vehicle industry, trolling AOC.
But one hour later, at 6:55 p.m., eastern time, an email popped up in my inbox. From the new owner of Twitter.
It was just one word:
“Definitely!”
News of the Times;
GOP Rep. Dan Bishop reveals ‘some of the most egregious provisions’ in Dems’ massive omnibus bill:
https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2022/12/20/gop-rep-dan-bishop-reveals-some-of-the-most-egregious-provisions-in-dems-massive-omnibus-bill/
DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/20/fentanyl-seizures-2022-dea/
Immuno-Lymphoma Can Spread FAST After mRNA Injection:
https://www.stewpeters.com/2022/12/jab-caused-turbo-cancer-immuno-lymphoma-can-spread-fast-after-mrna-injection/
Transgender Teen Charged With Violently Assaulting Two Female Students in Oklahoma High School Bathroom:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/transgender-teen-charged-violently-assaulting-two-female-students-oklahoma-high-school-bathroom/
Toward A Harmonious Racial Disengagement:
https://barelyablog.com/fred-reed-toward-a-harmonious-racial-disengagement/
To dislike certain ethnicities is racist; to see Jews as equal is antisemitic:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-dislike-certain-ethnicities-is-racist-to-see-jews-as-equal-is-antisemitic/
Arizona Election Judge Michele Swinick Calls November Midterms the Most Fraudulent, Corrupt and Rigged Election in American History:
https://noqreport.com/2022/12/15/arizona-election-judge-michele-swinick-calls-november-midterms-the-most-fraudulent-corrupt-and-rigged-election-in-american-history/
Democrat Jailed After Affair With Teen He Then Married Seeks Open House Seat:
https://resistthemainstream.com/democrat-jailed-after-affair-with-teen-he-then-married-seeks-open-house-seat/
Elon Musk Retweets Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Tweet Predicting Fauci’s Life Is About to be Turned Upside Down:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/elon-musk-retweets-robert-kennedy-jr-s-tweet-predicting-code-silence-surrounding-fauci-unravel/
Passports Were a “Temporary” War Measure:
https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-measure/
Government, Media Blame Climate Change for Skyrocketing Vegetable Prices:
https://basedunderground.com/2022/12/16/government-media-blame-climate-change-for-skyrocketing-vegetable-prices/
CDC Scrubbed Defensive Gun Use Figures After Pressure from Gun Control Proponents:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/15/claim-cdc-scrubbed-defensive-gun-use-figures-after-pressure-gun-control-proponents/
Noted Transhumanist Now Targeting Our Children: What’s inside Yuval Noah Harari’s New Book?:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/noted-transhumanist-now-targeting-children-inside-yuval-noah-hararis-new-book/
Twitter Files Show How Dangerous “The Indian CEO Virus”:
https://vdare.com/posts/twitter-files-show-how-dangerous-the-indian-ceo-virus-is-indian-immigrant-blocked-hunter-biden-laptop-story
Comparing Zelensky to Churchill is Braindead Warhawking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-B4kaqSx4I
Truckers?
The lesson Harry and Meghan are trying to teach us?
There is no better way to ask for more privacy than by doing a 6-part documentary series on Netflix.
*.*
Elon Musk says he's going to relaunch the premium "Twitter Blue" service, with Apple users having to pay more.
Then again, they're used to paying more.
*.*
Top 5 Things on my Christmas To Do List:
Start shopping! Tomorrow.
Try once again to start a new trend by wrapping presents in garbage bags.
Cut Christmas card list down to just people I can see.
Go over to neighbor's house and get some replacement bulbs.
Spray some green paint on last year's tree.
*.*
King Charles has unveiled his first Christmas card as king.
If I had a staff of 491, I'd probably get mine out on time, too.
*.*
The guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, with a hammer says that he also planned to attack Hunter Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom and actor Tom Hanks.
Some people never completely got over "Turner and Hooch."
Quote of the Times;
Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.
Link of the Times;
https://themostimportantnews.com/archives/marauding-bands-of-looters-are-stealing-billions-of-dollars-worth-of-merchandise-as-america-descends-into-lawlessness
Issue of the Times;
Turns out Joe Biden was the shadowy hand behind Justin Trudeau's tyrannical acts against Canadian Truckers by Monica Showalter
When Justin Trudeau shut down Canada's spectacular 3,000-strong convoy of "freedom" truckers opposed to Canada's COVID vaccine mandates, most were appalled at the tyrannical steps taken to stop it. After all, the country was Canada, not Cuba.
Son-of-Castro invoked Canada's "Emergencies Act," on "Freedom Convoy 2022," on February 14, freezing trucker bank accounts, imprisoning their leaders, shutting down a GoFundMe account for truckers, banning travel to the protests, which had attracted 15,000 people, hauling off and termininating parental rights of truckers to their own children, and expropriating their trucks.
All that, over a peaceful trucker protest over a vaccine mandate.
We know it was outrageous. We know it was something Castro would do. But now as Trudeau is called to Canada's parliament to testify about what the heck he thought it was doing, word has gotten out about who was really calling the shots on this lunacy:
According to the New York Post:
Top Biden administration officials pressed their Canadian counterparts to clear truckers blockading parts of the United States’s northern border during protests in January.
A public inquiry into the Canadian government’s decision to use emergency powers to clear the “Freedom Convoy” protesters revealed on Thursday that frantic phone calls were placed by Washington to Ottawa in an effort to open up choked-off supply lines.
“They are very, very, very worried,” Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote in an email to her staff after a Feb. 10 phone call from White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, according to Politico.
“If this is not sorted out in the next 12 hours, all of their northeastern car plants will shut down,” Freeland continued in her email.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg phoned his Canadian counterpart, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, the same day Deese called Freeland, according to the report, and Buttigieg pressed Alghabra about Canada’s “plan to resolve” the protests.
Alghabra told the commission that Buttigieg initiated the call and that the interaction was “unusual.”
So when we ask what Pete Buttigieg actually does for a job, we learn that it's this sort of meddling in another country's internal affairs, which frankly, must be illegal. The Biden White House was the shadowy hand behind the scenes pressuring the weak and ineffectual Trudeau to stop this truck protest by any means necessary ... or else. And this wasn't just the doing of conniving White House aides with malice on their minds. Joe Biden himself was directly involved in muscling Trudeau on the truckers, too, making a phone call to Trudeau three days before Trudeau invoked his "Emergencies Act." Guess we know what that conversation was about. The Post's account cites characters who say that Joe threatened protectionist measures. So what we saw from this was Joe snaps his fingers and Trudeau comes running.
Should it surprise anyone that Joe Biden was behind these outrageous abuses of power? We already know that he abuses power in the states. Now it appears he has taken his act on the road, too. What's scary here is that if Joe would be the man to ensure that Canada takes draconian action against the peaceful truckers, what is Joe capable of against us here in the states? Joe gets used to these things and is comfortable with them happening. What is he capable of doing to us? And what other foreign and domestic muscling has he done -- the very thing that his minions impeached President Trump for -- that we don't know about? Biden's phone call and his aides' threats led to tremendous human rights violations in Canada.
Maybe Joe should be called to testify before Canadian parliament - and the incoming U.S. Congress, too.
News of the Times;
Staggering number of Americans say trans agenda has 'gone too far':
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/staggering-number-americans-say-trans-agenda-gone-far/
British general admits UK deployed troops to Ukraine:
https://www.rt.com/russia/568189-uk-troops-ukraine-operations/
French Social Media Erupts as Store Clerk on Avenue Montaigne Reports Zelenskyy’s Wife Having €40,000 Christmas Shopping Spree in Paris:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/12/14/french-social-media-erupts-as-store-clerk-on-avenue-montaigne-reports-zelenskyys-wife-having-e40000-christmas-shopping-spree-in-paris/
FBI Refuses Again to Share the Whole Truth About Seth Rich’s Murder:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/fbi-refuses-share-whole-truth-seth-richs-murder-experts-wonder-deep-state-trying-protect-use-domestic-spying-database/
Serbia slams German ‘absurdity’:
https://www.rt.com/news/568073-serbia-germany-kosovo-absurdity/
PA school board member refuses to vote for ‘cis white male’ for president: ‘wrong message’:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/11/pa-school-board-member-refuses-to-vote-for-cis-white-male-for-president/
Haiti's Story Is Appalling And Depressing:
https://vdare.com/posts/haiti-s-story-is-appalling-and-depressing-and-there-are-people-who-blame-this-on-whites
Who Is Purposely Sabotaging Power Plants All Over America?:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/who-is-purposely-sabotaging-power-plants-all-over-america/
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning’s Regular Press Conference on December 9, 2022:
http://belfast.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/wjbfyrth_3/202212/t20221209_10988054.htm
West ignores evidence of Ukrainian torture and use of prohibited weapons:
https://www.rt.com/russia/567697-tortures-prohibited-weapons-concentration-camps/
U.S. Household Wealth Sees Second-Fastest Decline Since 1959:
https://nationalfile.com/u-s-household-wealth-sees-second-fastest-decline-since-1959/
The Cambridge Dictionary has redefined “man” and “woman.”:
https://www.outkick.com/cambridge-dictionary-redefines-what-man-and-woman-means/
Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates Another 50 Basis Points to Fight Bidenflation:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/just-federal-reserve-raises-interest-rates-another-50-basis-points-fight-bidenflation/
Kentucky Abortions Drop to 0, Abortion Ban Saves Hundreds of Babies:
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/12/14/kentucky-abortions-drop-to-0-abortion-ban-saves-hundreds-of-babies/
Analysis of RNC Spending Since 2017 Shows Millions Were Spent on Private Jets, Limousines, Luxury Retreats, Broadway Shows:
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2022/12/14/exclusive-analysis-of-rnc-spending-since-2017-shows-millions-were-spent-on-private-jets-limousines-luxury-retreats-broadway-shows-and-more-n673852
There is no better way to ask for more privacy than by doing a 6-part documentary series on Netflix.
*.*
Elon Musk says he's going to relaunch the premium "Twitter Blue" service, with Apple users having to pay more.
Then again, they're used to paying more.
*.*
Top 5 Things on my Christmas To Do List:
Start shopping! Tomorrow.
Try once again to start a new trend by wrapping presents in garbage bags.
Cut Christmas card list down to just people I can see.
Go over to neighbor's house and get some replacement bulbs.
Spray some green paint on last year's tree.
*.*
King Charles has unveiled his first Christmas card as king.
If I had a staff of 491, I'd probably get mine out on time, too.
*.*
The guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, with a hammer says that he also planned to attack Hunter Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom and actor Tom Hanks.
Some people never completely got over "Turner and Hooch."
Quote of the Times;
Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.
Link of the Times;
https://themostimportantnews.com/archives/marauding-bands-of-looters-are-stealing-billions-of-dollars-worth-of-merchandise-as-america-descends-into-lawlessness
Issue of the Times;
Turns out Joe Biden was the shadowy hand behind Justin Trudeau's tyrannical acts against Canadian Truckers by Monica Showalter
When Justin Trudeau shut down Canada's spectacular 3,000-strong convoy of "freedom" truckers opposed to Canada's COVID vaccine mandates, most were appalled at the tyrannical steps taken to stop it. After all, the country was Canada, not Cuba.
Son-of-Castro invoked Canada's "Emergencies Act," on "Freedom Convoy 2022," on February 14, freezing trucker bank accounts, imprisoning their leaders, shutting down a GoFundMe account for truckers, banning travel to the protests, which had attracted 15,000 people, hauling off and termininating parental rights of truckers to their own children, and expropriating their trucks.
All that, over a peaceful trucker protest over a vaccine mandate.
We know it was outrageous. We know it was something Castro would do. But now as Trudeau is called to Canada's parliament to testify about what the heck he thought it was doing, word has gotten out about who was really calling the shots on this lunacy:
According to the New York Post:
Top Biden administration officials pressed their Canadian counterparts to clear truckers blockading parts of the United States’s northern border during protests in January.
A public inquiry into the Canadian government’s decision to use emergency powers to clear the “Freedom Convoy” protesters revealed on Thursday that frantic phone calls were placed by Washington to Ottawa in an effort to open up choked-off supply lines.
“They are very, very, very worried,” Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote in an email to her staff after a Feb. 10 phone call from White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, according to Politico.
“If this is not sorted out in the next 12 hours, all of their northeastern car plants will shut down,” Freeland continued in her email.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg phoned his Canadian counterpart, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, the same day Deese called Freeland, according to the report, and Buttigieg pressed Alghabra about Canada’s “plan to resolve” the protests.
Alghabra told the commission that Buttigieg initiated the call and that the interaction was “unusual.”
So when we ask what Pete Buttigieg actually does for a job, we learn that it's this sort of meddling in another country's internal affairs, which frankly, must be illegal. The Biden White House was the shadowy hand behind the scenes pressuring the weak and ineffectual Trudeau to stop this truck protest by any means necessary ... or else. And this wasn't just the doing of conniving White House aides with malice on their minds. Joe Biden himself was directly involved in muscling Trudeau on the truckers, too, making a phone call to Trudeau three days before Trudeau invoked his "Emergencies Act." Guess we know what that conversation was about. The Post's account cites characters who say that Joe threatened protectionist measures. So what we saw from this was Joe snaps his fingers and Trudeau comes running.
Should it surprise anyone that Joe Biden was behind these outrageous abuses of power? We already know that he abuses power in the states. Now it appears he has taken his act on the road, too. What's scary here is that if Joe would be the man to ensure that Canada takes draconian action against the peaceful truckers, what is Joe capable of against us here in the states? Joe gets used to these things and is comfortable with them happening. What is he capable of doing to us? And what other foreign and domestic muscling has he done -- the very thing that his minions impeached President Trump for -- that we don't know about? Biden's phone call and his aides' threats led to tremendous human rights violations in Canada.
Maybe Joe should be called to testify before Canadian parliament - and the incoming U.S. Congress, too.
News of the Times;
Staggering number of Americans say trans agenda has 'gone too far':
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/staggering-number-americans-say-trans-agenda-gone-far/
British general admits UK deployed troops to Ukraine:
https://www.rt.com/russia/568189-uk-troops-ukraine-operations/
French Social Media Erupts as Store Clerk on Avenue Montaigne Reports Zelenskyy’s Wife Having €40,000 Christmas Shopping Spree in Paris:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/12/14/french-social-media-erupts-as-store-clerk-on-avenue-montaigne-reports-zelenskyys-wife-having-e40000-christmas-shopping-spree-in-paris/
FBI Refuses Again to Share the Whole Truth About Seth Rich’s Murder:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/fbi-refuses-share-whole-truth-seth-richs-murder-experts-wonder-deep-state-trying-protect-use-domestic-spying-database/
Serbia slams German ‘absurdity’:
https://www.rt.com/news/568073-serbia-germany-kosovo-absurdity/
PA school board member refuses to vote for ‘cis white male’ for president: ‘wrong message’:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/11/pa-school-board-member-refuses-to-vote-for-cis-white-male-for-president/
Haiti's Story Is Appalling And Depressing:
https://vdare.com/posts/haiti-s-story-is-appalling-and-depressing-and-there-are-people-who-blame-this-on-whites
Who Is Purposely Sabotaging Power Plants All Over America?:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/who-is-purposely-sabotaging-power-plants-all-over-america/
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning’s Regular Press Conference on December 9, 2022:
http://belfast.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/wjbfyrth_3/202212/t20221209_10988054.htm
West ignores evidence of Ukrainian torture and use of prohibited weapons:
https://www.rt.com/russia/567697-tortures-prohibited-weapons-concentration-camps/
U.S. Household Wealth Sees Second-Fastest Decline Since 1959:
https://nationalfile.com/u-s-household-wealth-sees-second-fastest-decline-since-1959/
The Cambridge Dictionary has redefined “man” and “woman.”:
https://www.outkick.com/cambridge-dictionary-redefines-what-man-and-woman-means/
Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates Another 50 Basis Points to Fight Bidenflation:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/just-federal-reserve-raises-interest-rates-another-50-basis-points-fight-bidenflation/
Kentucky Abortions Drop to 0, Abortion Ban Saves Hundreds of Babies:
https://www.lifenews.com/2022/12/14/kentucky-abortions-drop-to-0-abortion-ban-saves-hundreds-of-babies/
Analysis of RNC Spending Since 2017 Shows Millions Were Spent on Private Jets, Limousines, Luxury Retreats, Broadway Shows:
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2022/12/14/exclusive-analysis-of-rnc-spending-since-2017-shows-millions-were-spent-on-private-jets-limousines-luxury-retreats-broadway-shows-and-more-n673852
Sell?
According to a new study, the average person tells 3 lies a day.
Sorry, I lied. It's actually 4.
*.*
When I was young, I was a terrible golfer.
Now, after years of playing and practice, I am no longer young.
*.*
Oneliners:
Don't forget that this is the weekend we set our bathroom scales back 15 pounds.
I'm tired of being single, I'm dressing up tomorrow and going down to divorce court tomorrow to see who's becoming available.
If anyone is shopping for me, I wear a size 7-day Caribbean cruise.
When I was a kid, when I heard "This little pig went to market", I thought they meant it went shopping.
Nobody is more stubborn than an Android person who refuses to switch to an iPhone.
My phone just filmed a 3-hour documentary on life inside my pocket.
Billion dollar idea: a smoke alarm that turns off when you yell, "I'm just cooking!"
If some people said what they thought, they'd be speechless.
Drive carefully; it's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
I can handle pain, until it hurts.
*.*
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Philosophy is wondering if a Bloody Mary counts as a smoothie.
*.*
I often wonder how certain things get their names. It can be fascinating.
Take umbrella. I researched and found out the inventor was going to call it Brella.
But then he hesitated.
Quote of the Times;
“Evil is not good. And because evil has rival factions, not everything that opposes one evil faction is good.” - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507875/America-afraid-Canada-euthanizing-10-000-citizens-year-TOM-LEONARD.html
Issue of the Times;
Leaders Seem to Be Using These Disturbing Quotes From Vladimir Lenin as a How-To Manual by Aden Tate
I find it odd that nobody out there sells books on Vladimir Lenin. I challenge you to look at your town’s libraries and bookstores. If you’re like me, you won’t see a dang thing on Lenin (or Samuel Adams).
This is really a shame because there’s a lot that Lenin said that I think the current world needs to be aware of. Let’s take a look at some of what this man had to say way back in the early 1900s and see if he still has had an impact today.
Pertinent quotes from Vladimir Lenin
“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
Remember this when you see every talking head on your TV saying the exact same thing. Read the headlines of some of the major newspapers and magazines over the course of the last few years. Do you see “othering” being performed? Or do you see peace being advocated for?
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”
This ties in really well with the above quote. Peaceful protests, anyone?
“The goal of socialism is communism.”
Just in case there’s anybody out there stupid enough to tell you the line, “But socialism is different! It doesn’t lead to communism!” you can show them what one of the foremost Marxists in history had to say on the subject.
“Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”
Do you think that freedom of speech – regardless of format – has been protected of late? Or has it been attacked from every angle?
“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”
Mao Zedong’s “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” would be a nice tie-in here. Does this make you a bit suspicious about all of the talk about the disarmament of American citizens?
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
It’s probable that you pay over 50% of all that you earn in taxes. Consider the devaluing of the dollar over the course of the past few years as well.
“One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.”
This is a discussion in and of itself. Laws for thee but not for me.
“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.”
I love this. It really speaks for itself.
“We are not shooting enough professors.”
“But communism is about love, harmony, idealism, and world peace!” you say. *commences heavy eye roll.*
That doesn’t sound like any of those things to me. This sounds like a wicked man advocating for widespread murder.
“The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.”
Could it perhaps have to do with his above quote on inflation?
“Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.”
This goes hand in hand with the whole Mao Zedong discussion.
“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
How long do college students take to get their degrees? Four years, right? Is that enough time to indoctrinate somebody? You betcha.
“How can you make a revolution without executions?”
Should the actual facts of how many millions of people have been murdered by collectivists not be enough to change your mind, perhaps the actual quotes of Lenin will do it? Collectivism is about death.
“I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.”
Are we seeing the death of national sovereignty throughout the world right now? Are we seeing stronger and stronger international “alliances” and groups? Are they talking about international law quite a bit? Are they talking about international police forces? Have you ever heard of Interpol?
“No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.”
Dang, I feel like we just talked about this.
“By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat… Furthermore, famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier… Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.”
So, wait…you’re saying that creating a famine can be beneficial to building a communist state? That makes me want to think about those food processing facilities bursting into flames a little more.
“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”
Like through inflation via a centrally run bank?
Are Vladimir Lenin’s words still impacting today?
News of the Times;
Vote Or Not, Doesn't Matter:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247564
Candace Cameron Bure under fire for saying Great American Family network will focus on 'traditional marriage' instead of gay couples:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11431079/Candace-Cameron-Bure-fire-saying-new-network-not-feature-gay-couples.html
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Moves to Outlaw Orthodox Christianity:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/ukrainian-president-volodymyr-zelensky-moves-to-outlaw-orthodox-christianity/
Machines Declare Democrat Winner in House Race, But Then the Hand Recount Overturns It for Republican:
https://ijr.com/machines-declare-democrat-winner-house-race-hand-recount-overturns-republican
BLM Leader Charged with Fraud Involving Fundraisers Linked to 2020 George Floyd Riots:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/11/blm-leader-charged-fraud-involving-fundraisers-linked-2020-george-floyd-riots/
At least 269 K-12 educators arrested on child sex crimes since January:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/14/nearly-270-k-12-educators-arrested-on-child-sex-crimes-in-first-9-months-of-this-year/
California robbery suspect killed store clerk, not charged with murder; victim didn’t act in self-defense: DA:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-robbery-suspect-killed-store-clerk-not-charged-murder-victim-didnt-act-self-defense
Chief reason for GOP losses: Democrats cheat ... and do it well:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/chief-reason-gop-losses-democrats-cheat/
U.K. Prosecutors: Some Bible Verses “No Longer Appropriate” to Be Quoted in Public:
https://thenewamerican.com/u-k-prosecutors-some-bible-verses-no-longer-appropriate-to-be-quoted-in-public/
“SO WHAT?” say British politicians about the native population becoming a minority in their own capital:
https://barenakedislam.com/2022/12/12/so-what-say-british-politicians-about-the-native-population-becoming-a-minority-in-their-own-capital/
Judge cites 'colonialism' in light sentencing for man who slashed stranger's throat:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/judge-says-colonialis-mustbe-considered
The Harrying of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Harrying_of_the_North
Electric car charging in Italy more expensive than gasoline:
https://www.rt.com/business/565445-electric-car-charging-italy/
An update on "the single worst police shooting of an innocent unarmed man in American history":
https://notthebee.com/article/the-single-worst-police-shooting-of-an-innocent-unarmed-man-in-american-history
Don Lemons Goes Silent As Guest SHUTS DOWN His Grift!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh6Cu3WU5zo
Sorry, I lied. It's actually 4.
*.*
When I was young, I was a terrible golfer.
Now, after years of playing and practice, I am no longer young.
*.*
Oneliners:
Don't forget that this is the weekend we set our bathroom scales back 15 pounds.
I'm tired of being single, I'm dressing up tomorrow and going down to divorce court tomorrow to see who's becoming available.
If anyone is shopping for me, I wear a size 7-day Caribbean cruise.
When I was a kid, when I heard "This little pig went to market", I thought they meant it went shopping.
Nobody is more stubborn than an Android person who refuses to switch to an iPhone.
My phone just filmed a 3-hour documentary on life inside my pocket.
Billion dollar idea: a smoke alarm that turns off when you yell, "I'm just cooking!"
If some people said what they thought, they'd be speechless.
Drive carefully; it's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
I can handle pain, until it hurts.
*.*
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Philosophy is wondering if a Bloody Mary counts as a smoothie.
*.*
I often wonder how certain things get their names. It can be fascinating.
Take umbrella. I researched and found out the inventor was going to call it Brella.
But then he hesitated.
Quote of the Times;
“Evil is not good. And because evil has rival factions, not everything that opposes one evil faction is good.” - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507875/America-afraid-Canada-euthanizing-10-000-citizens-year-TOM-LEONARD.html
Issue of the Times;
Leaders Seem to Be Using These Disturbing Quotes From Vladimir Lenin as a How-To Manual by Aden Tate
I find it odd that nobody out there sells books on Vladimir Lenin. I challenge you to look at your town’s libraries and bookstores. If you’re like me, you won’t see a dang thing on Lenin (or Samuel Adams).
This is really a shame because there’s a lot that Lenin said that I think the current world needs to be aware of. Let’s take a look at some of what this man had to say way back in the early 1900s and see if he still has had an impact today.
Pertinent quotes from Vladimir Lenin
“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
Remember this when you see every talking head on your TV saying the exact same thing. Read the headlines of some of the major newspapers and magazines over the course of the last few years. Do you see “othering” being performed? Or do you see peace being advocated for?
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”
This ties in really well with the above quote. Peaceful protests, anyone?
“The goal of socialism is communism.”
Just in case there’s anybody out there stupid enough to tell you the line, “But socialism is different! It doesn’t lead to communism!” you can show them what one of the foremost Marxists in history had to say on the subject.
“Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”
Do you think that freedom of speech – regardless of format – has been protected of late? Or has it been attacked from every angle?
“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”
Mao Zedong’s “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” would be a nice tie-in here. Does this make you a bit suspicious about all of the talk about the disarmament of American citizens?
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
It’s probable that you pay over 50% of all that you earn in taxes. Consider the devaluing of the dollar over the course of the past few years as well.
“One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.”
This is a discussion in and of itself. Laws for thee but not for me.
“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.”
I love this. It really speaks for itself.
“We are not shooting enough professors.”
“But communism is about love, harmony, idealism, and world peace!” you say. *commences heavy eye roll.*
That doesn’t sound like any of those things to me. This sounds like a wicked man advocating for widespread murder.
“The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.”
Could it perhaps have to do with his above quote on inflation?
“Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.”
This goes hand in hand with the whole Mao Zedong discussion.
“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
How long do college students take to get their degrees? Four years, right? Is that enough time to indoctrinate somebody? You betcha.
“How can you make a revolution without executions?”
Should the actual facts of how many millions of people have been murdered by collectivists not be enough to change your mind, perhaps the actual quotes of Lenin will do it? Collectivism is about death.
“I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.”
Are we seeing the death of national sovereignty throughout the world right now? Are we seeing stronger and stronger international “alliances” and groups? Are they talking about international law quite a bit? Are they talking about international police forces? Have you ever heard of Interpol?
“No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.”
Dang, I feel like we just talked about this.
“By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat… Furthermore, famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier… Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.”
So, wait…you’re saying that creating a famine can be beneficial to building a communist state? That makes me want to think about those food processing facilities bursting into flames a little more.
“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”
Like through inflation via a centrally run bank?
Are Vladimir Lenin’s words still impacting today?
News of the Times;
Vote Or Not, Doesn't Matter:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247564
Candace Cameron Bure under fire for saying Great American Family network will focus on 'traditional marriage' instead of gay couples:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11431079/Candace-Cameron-Bure-fire-saying-new-network-not-feature-gay-couples.html
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Moves to Outlaw Orthodox Christianity:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/ukrainian-president-volodymyr-zelensky-moves-to-outlaw-orthodox-christianity/
Machines Declare Democrat Winner in House Race, But Then the Hand Recount Overturns It for Republican:
https://ijr.com/machines-declare-democrat-winner-house-race-hand-recount-overturns-republican
BLM Leader Charged with Fraud Involving Fundraisers Linked to 2020 George Floyd Riots:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/11/blm-leader-charged-fraud-involving-fundraisers-linked-2020-george-floyd-riots/
At least 269 K-12 educators arrested on child sex crimes since January:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/14/nearly-270-k-12-educators-arrested-on-child-sex-crimes-in-first-9-months-of-this-year/
California robbery suspect killed store clerk, not charged with murder; victim didn’t act in self-defense: DA:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-robbery-suspect-killed-store-clerk-not-charged-murder-victim-didnt-act-self-defense
Chief reason for GOP losses: Democrats cheat ... and do it well:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/chief-reason-gop-losses-democrats-cheat/
U.K. Prosecutors: Some Bible Verses “No Longer Appropriate” to Be Quoted in Public:
https://thenewamerican.com/u-k-prosecutors-some-bible-verses-no-longer-appropriate-to-be-quoted-in-public/
“SO WHAT?” say British politicians about the native population becoming a minority in their own capital:
https://barenakedislam.com/2022/12/12/so-what-say-british-politicians-about-the-native-population-becoming-a-minority-in-their-own-capital/
Judge cites 'colonialism' in light sentencing for man who slashed stranger's throat:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/judge-says-colonialis-mustbe-considered
The Harrying of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Harrying_of_the_North
Electric car charging in Italy more expensive than gasoline:
https://www.rt.com/business/565445-electric-car-charging-italy/
An update on "the single worst police shooting of an innocent unarmed man in American history":
https://notthebee.com/article/the-single-worst-police-shooting-of-an-innocent-unarmed-man-in-american-history
Don Lemons Goes Silent As Guest SHUTS DOWN His Grift!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh6Cu3WU5zo
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.