Monday, October 14, 2024

The Daily "Near You?"

Huddersfield, Kirklees, United Kingdom
Thanks for stopping by!

Gregory Mannarino, "Very High Consumer Inflation Risk, Expect Stocks To Skyrocket"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/14/24
"Very High Consumer Inflation Risk, 
Expect Stocks To Skyrocket"
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"National Fire Sale: The Economic Cycles Of Countries"

"National Fire Sale: 
The Economic Cycles Of Countries"
by Jeff Thomas

"Like waves on the ocean, countries tend to go through economic cycles. First, we have the micro cycles, which tend to rise and fall every few years, but may last a decade or more. Then we have the macro cycles, which tend to take hundreds of years.

In a macro cycle, a nation begins to thrive economically, when the people of that country adhere to a strong work ethic. They invest their money and toil into the economy, make a profit, then either save, purchase goods, reinvest, or a combination of the three. When the great majority of the people do this, the country thrives economically. The greater the economic freedom (i.e., the less governmental oversight and regulation), the more the country thrives.

But this never lasts forever. The eternal fly in the ointment is that governments seek continually to increase their control over others. First, they focus on the increased control of their own people through regulations, but invariably, they see the opportunity for broader control, through the domination of other nations. They then invade those nations.

Warfare is the costliest venture that nations enter into, and as such, it’s almost always a mistake. But the zeal to have greater power often brushes that fact aside, and leaders choose to invade other nations. In almost every instance, they fail to underestimate the resistance from the invaded nation, and very quickly, the cost of the warfare doubles and redoubles, over and over again.

Invariably, the leaders then borrow money to keep the war going. Sometimes, they achieve victory in this manner, but more often than not, they fail. They find that the day comes when they must either sell off major assets to pay their debt, or face economic collapse.

Case in point: In 1800, Spain was the dominant empire of the world, having successfully colonized South and Central America and stripped them of a fortune in gold and silver over the course of three centuries – from 1500 to 1800. But despite this, decades of war with other European powers left Spain broke. Charles III did what leaders always do – he borrowed heavily and debased the currency. He issued fiat currency in the form of paper pesos and used this currency to fund the Spanish colony of Louisiana.

This was meant to be a temporary measure, but as time dragged on, the peso steadily lost value, then became utterly worthless. Charles, with no economic wiggle-room left, sent the ship El Cazador to the Louisiana colony to pay off debts. Unfortunately, El Cazador sank in 1784 in a storm, taking 450,000 pesos in silver coins down with her.

When Carlos IV became king of Spain, there were few good options. Rather than give up his throne, he offered to sell Louisiana to France’s Napoleon. Napoleon took advantage of Spain’s national fire sale and bought Louisiana for a song. But as stated above, countries tend to rise and fall in cycles. In 1803, Napoleon found himself in similar straights, as his own warfare/debt condition was also reaching a desperate level. Napoleon offered Louisiana to US President Thomas Jefferson, and like Napoleon, Mister Jefferson was able to pick up the one million square miles of prime real estate for a song – about three cents an acre.

So, to re-cap, the last-straw event that cost Carlos IV his empire was a simple shipwreck. The final event was minor. What really condemned Spain was warfare and debt. The last-straw event that cost Napoleon his empire was the Battle of Waterloo. The final event was not the largest of battles. What really condemned France was warfare and debt.

Mister Jefferson was a far wiser man. Since the founding of the United States, he had continually warned against both warfare and debt. Although he twice dealt with war with Britain, he avoided military adventures – the invasion of other countries. Similarly, he borrowed, but always judiciously and only with the ability for repayment. Under his leadership, the US thrived and the American people reaped the benefits.

But of course, that was many micro cycles ago. The US is now at the end of its macro cycle, which can be evidenced by its involvement in what has become continual warfare. The US now invades several other countries in each presidential cycle, ensuring that, if any war winds down, there are others still steaming ahead. In recent years, the US has invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Somalia and has "assisted", or invaded by proxy, in a host of other invasions. In addition, threats have been issued to North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela and others that, "Military action is not off the table," as regards future military adventures.

Along the way, warfare’s ugly twin – debt – has joined in. The US, once the world’s foremost creditor nation, is now both the world’s foremost aggressor nation and the world’s foremost debtor nation at the same time. But the US has a problem that neither Spain nor France had in the nineteenth century. It has no colonies to peddle. The US certainly can’t offer up the Louisiana territory to other nations, to pay its unmanageable debt.

In one sense, the American people can rest easy that the US will not be selling off bits of real estate in a fire sale, when the notes come due. But unfortunately, that very fact means that the only other possible outcome – economic collapse – will occur. At some point in the near future, America Inc. will almost certainly go bust.

But as always, the world will not come to an end. The assets and wealth of the world will simply change hands, as they have done since time immemorial. The grand experiment that began in 1776 will come to an end, as all once-great nations do. The US will continue to exist, but as a shadow of its former self, in the manner of the failed empires before it. When we look back, we may find that the final event that triggers collapse was in fact minor, but was the perennial 'last straw.'"

Judge Napolitano, "Ray McGovern: How Close is the US to War With Iran?"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 10/14/24
"Ray McGovern: How Close is the US to War With Iran?"
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"Extermination Works. At First."

"Extermination Works. At First."
Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals, 
but in the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.
by Mr. Fish

"Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped - and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon - it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon - 2,255 people have been killed and over one million Lebanese have been displaced - in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House - Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan - are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery - we call it terrorism - what was done to those slain in the previous generation.

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.

Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”

Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s alleged attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen - Israel’s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war - to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?

I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.

Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.”

Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.

These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of this month.

Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation of hospitals - Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon - deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,” it notes. The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine.

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.

Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, “even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath - much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs - decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.

The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth - Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth - in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation. Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers.

We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.

Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq - what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar” - defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.

We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children. The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”

Many of the Vietnamese - like Palestinians - who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” 

Turse found - again like Israel - that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”

“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for - and thus blot out - all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over 5 million live in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs, and ultimately they have signed their own death warrants."

"How It Really Is

  

John Wilder, "Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg"

"Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg"
by John Wilder

Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C. This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process: hemlock. To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”

But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks. The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife. They have a goose. Each day, the goose lays a golden egg. I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me. 11 year old me thought that was amazing!

Current day me? I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home. We could call it Manhattans With Musk®. Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.

Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot. I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch. Blendersnout Clumberbake? Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.

But back to Aesop. In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day. Nope. An aside: How much would a golden goose egg be worth? The answer, as of October 14, at $2,651.06 per ounce, gold is $421,416.96. (For those of you playing our home game: remember to convert to troy ounces.) So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $421,416.96 a day show up out of the goose’s butt. So? They killed it.

Yes. They killed it. And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold? They found nothing but Greek goose guts. Oops! Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose. Pâté de foie gras? It’s okay if you want your goose...de-livered.

I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization. I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed. And it really is happening. Right now.

The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind. Heck, North Korea loves western rock: Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs. They love the Guns, but said we can keep the Roses. Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been. Ever.

Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization. Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization. So, we all win, right? Well, no.

I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid. This is, of course, a Big Lie®. I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®. Certainly not! If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras? That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it. Nah, I don’t – just kitten. But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.

But in 2024, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating? Sure! Let’s call it a right. They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too? As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism. Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal. That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.

Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code. I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.

But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement. Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.

This is the reality of Leftism in the West: Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck. Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved. Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.

This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: People are the property of the state. Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences. Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right? According to Leftists, yes.

As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country. The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious: that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.

This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2024 is that cultures exist on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.

For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth. It’s beyond this post to describe why that is. I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random. Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator? Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth. But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock. Right?"

"We're so frickin' doomed!" - The Mogambo Guru

"Could Be Worse..."

"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Jim Butcher
Dig your way out, they said...

Familiar? If not it will be...

Dan, I Allegedly, "Next Year Will Be Much Worse"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 10/14/24
"Next Year Will Be Much Worse"
"Today we're diving deep into the harsh reality of McDonald's downfall in 2025. Brace yourselves, folks, because things are going to get much worse than 2024. Fast food prices are skyrocketing, with Big Macs hitting an unbelievable $18 in some places. McDonald's, a symbol of Americana, is struggling with declining sales and store closures looming on the horizon. And it's not just McDonald's, 7-Eleven is shutting down 444 stores amid economic turmoil."
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Full screen recommended.
Metal Leo, 10/13/24
"Stores Vandalized In San Francisco"
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Gregory Mannarino, "It's Your Move... Here Comes A New Phase Of Hyper-Debt Unlike Anything Before"



Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/14/24
"It's Your Move... Here Comes A New Phase 
Of Hyper-Debt Unlike Anything Before"
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Jim Kunstler, "Lawfare is Jihad Against Our Country"

"Lawfare is Jihad Against Our Country"
Old Joke: what do you call a hundred thousand 
lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Answer: A good start.
by Jim Kunstler

“The first thing we do is, let's kill all the lawyers.”
- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI," Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2.

"You think the bankers are up to no good? No band of scoundrels has brought more chaos and grief to the life of this republic than the claque that gathers darkly under the banner of “Lawfare.” Its public face is Lawfaremedia.org, run by Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings senior fellow, but that gang functions only to lend a false-front of decorum to the operations of its Democratic Party activist lawyer-army led by Field Marshal Marc Elias, architect of the ballot fraud that has caused Americans to lose faith in their elections.

Marc Elias was the original expeditor of the RussiaGate hoax in 2016 from his perch at Perkins Coie, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign law firm, which laundered payments to Christopher Steele, front-man for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political PR shop, which concocted the fraudulent “dossier,” and set in motion a train of DC intel blob legal shenanigans aimed at defenestrating Donald Trump from the White House - the Mueller Investigation, impeachment, etc.

While all that was going on through the Trump term, and with the Covid-19 Op providing cover, Mr. Elias engineered the 2020 changes in many states’ election laws and bylaws to permit large-scale mail-in voting, organized ballot-harvesting activities, and the use of drop-boxes for receiving bundled votes. He and his George Soros-financed staff lawyers sued states that attempted to require voter-identification, and provided legal protection for Mark Zuckerberg’s $419-million-dollar assault on election precinct staffing in swing states. When the 2020 election concluded suspiciously, Mr. Elias and his gang joined lawsuits in every case where the balloting was contested and got more than sixty of them dismissed on the basis of “standing,” without the merits of the cases being heard. This is Lawfare.

This time around, 2024, Mr. Elias has done everything possible to ensure that millions of illegal aliens stuffed into swing states will have their putative identities attached to harvested mail-in ballots from addresses such as Walmart parking lots and storage units, and has filed lawsuits wherever a state threatens to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has also filed sixty peremptory lawsuits to obstruct attempts to audit any election count after November 5 - as if it is an affront to democracy to even ask questions about official misconduct.

A parallel Lawfare scam underway is the Democratic Party-sponsored 65 Project that seeks to disbar Trump-adjacent lawyers who attempt to challenge any voting irregularities in this year’s election. It’s mission statement reads: "The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections."

Notice the term “Big Lie” to foreclose any inquiry at all into election fraud. That half the people in this country accept such an Orwellian con tells you the vital role played by the perversion of language in the Democratic Party’s war against the citizens of this land. Exactly who is to say, in advance of the event, that any objection to a vote count is fraudulent and malicious? Answer: the people who have maliciously committed fraud. The Democrats have been grooming the public for years with that phrase, the Big Lie, in exactly the same way that pedos groom innocent pubescents who accept the authority of any grown-up, no matter what debauchery they are subjected to.

It’s a tragic turn of fate for our country that the law, and language with it, have been turned into weapons for national suicide. The net result is a nation that can’t think straight anymore and cannot construct any coherent set of rules to live by. So we find ourselves in a society where stealing is no longer a crime, where border-jumping has been downgraded to a clerical error (“undocumented”), where little children are allowed to decide whether they are male or female, where speech that disagrees with the authorities agenda is “misinformation” subject to censorship and prosecution, where candidates for the highest office get selected “democratically” without any votes cast, and where you can be run-over and ruined financially in court by the bottomless legal resources of the Deep State for just speaking your mind.

Now I will tell you something that deeply troubles me and might trouble you. Forgive me if I throw the Overton Window wide open here. Readers may know that I am an American Jew. We have entered a new era of antisemitism. Many might say it is due to the conduct of Israel warring against its enemies. I would say it is as much due to the adoption of Jihad politics by the Marxist-Woke campaign as an instrument to promote political and social chaos in America. Lawfare is essentially jihad waged via the courts against our own disintegrating common culture and national interests.

The lineup of the leading Lawfare attorneys are Jews: Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Weissmann, Michael Bromwich, Michael Sussmann, Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Paul Rosenzweig, the exceptionally profligate serial liar Rep. Adam Schiff, and many others. I can’t say I understand exactly what motivates them to engage these antics. (Possibly to defend their Deep State clients against many previous crimes committed since 2016, especially within the FBI and DOJ.) But it’s a really bad look on top of being a nefarious agenda. They are disgracing the rest of us American Jews and putting us in danger. Shame on them. They must be defeated, and their defeat must come within the arena of the very law they work so hard to pervert."

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/14/24"

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/14/24"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
o
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Comprehensive, essential truth.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...
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Sunday, October 13, 2024

"Millions Are Losing Their Jobs Right Now, This Is The End"

Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 10/13/24
"Millions Are Losing Their Jobs Right Now, 
This Is The End"

"The current state of the US job market is sending shockwaves throughout the nation, unlike anything witnessed in recent memory. Reports as recent as early March highlight the unprecedented nature of the situation. Layoffs have reached levels not seen since 2009's financial crisis, painting a disturbing picture of the employment situation in 2024.

The rise of AI and automation is deepening job losses, with companies like Dropbox, Google, and IBM already announcing layoffs related to technological advancements. Business leaders are bracing for the likelihood of further layoffs in the coming year, driven by concerns about economic recession and the adoption of AI.

The economic situation is further complicated by factors such as rising interest rates and corporate debt obligations. Companies with significant debts are facing the huge task of refinancing loans at higher rates, potentially leading to more layoffs as they streamline operations to weather the financial storm."
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"The Truth! 76% Of Americans Say They Can't Pay Their Bills!"

Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 10/13/24
"The Truth! 76% Of Americans
 Say They Can't Pay Their Bills!"
"Lending Tree's latest survey of Americans shows that 76% of Americans say they can't pay their bills. The reason? They simply don't have enough money. Are people living beyond their means or has inflation and the cost of living outpaced wages tremendously, leaving everyone scrambling to catch up? None of this is a sign of a strong economy."
Comments here:

Jeremiah Babe, "Possible Assassination Attempt On Trump? Modern Day Train Robbery In Chicago"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/13/24
"Possible Assassination Attempt On Trump?
Modern Day Train Robbery In Chicago"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Endless Horizon"

Deuter, "Endless Horizon"
About Deutur

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. 
Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."

"For This Is What We Do..."

“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

"Why Israel Can't Win"

"Why Israel Can't Win"
Endgame: Masada 2.0
by Kevin Barrett

“Israel is quite proficient at killing people. In less than a year they have killed 42,000 civilians in Gaza, including 17,000 CHILDREN, and last week killed 2,000 more in Lebanon. Unofficial estimates of the real death toll in Gaza, as opposed to the officially recovered, counted, and identified bodies, exceed 200,000.

As they slaughter vast numbers of women and children under the flimsiest excuses, the Zionists also kill the political and diplomatic leaders with whom wiser leaders would be negotiating. They apparently have not considered that for each civilian they kill, dozens of furious survivors and onlookers become long-term anti-Zionist combatants-in-waiting. And they don’t seem to realize that martyring political and diplomatic leaders gives fighters added incentive to up their game, and leaves them no option but to do so. That’s why, in the wake of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s attempted invasion of Lebanon has been shockingly (to the Zionists) unsuccessful.

Randomly murdering tens of thousands of civilians, or assassinating a handful of leaders, superficially looks like tactical success. Richie Allen seemed to think that Israel’s terrorist attack on non-combatants associated with Hezbollah via exploding pagers was an impressive achievement.* As I told him, just about anybody who really wants to randomly murder that number of people, or more, can do so if they so choose. The fact that Israeli leaders employed such an elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme to mass murder noncombatants- to counterproductive strategic effect- reveals the Israelis as psychopathic idiots and shameless war criminals, not geniuses.

The appearance of tactical success achieved by Israel’s pointless murders conceals a colossal strategic failure. The root of that failure is simple: Netanyahu has no idea what he is trying to achieve, other than keep the war going so he can stay in office and out of prison. His extremist coalition parters, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, do have a vision- “exterminate Amalek”- but since this is 2024, not the Bronze Age, that isn’t going to happen. Israel can kill a small fraction of today’s “Amalek” but for every Amalek they kill, ten or a hundred more will spring up. Long before Israel killed even 5% of its current Amalek enemies it would have transformed most of the world’s 8 billion non-Jews into a new, even more angry and determined Amalek.

Netanyahu’s official war aims in Gaza are (1) eliminate Hamas, and (2) use military force to bring back the Israeli hostages alive. Both are obviously impossible, as Israel’s military and intelligence leaders have reiterated. Hamas is just a current name for Islamic resistance to Zionist genocide, and that resistance is an idea that can’t be eliminated by military means. And military attempts to snatch back hostages will almost always lead to the deaths of those hostages.

Since he has set impossible war aims, and has no realistic ones, Netanyahu is bogged down in a war on Gaza that he, and Israel, will inevitably lose. And now he is making an even worse mistake by invading Lebanon and stepping into an even bigger quagmire. Once again, Netanyahu has declared goals that cannot be realized: (1) Defeat Hezbollah, which like Hamas is simply the local form of Islamic resistance to genocide, an idea that cannot be defeated militarily, and (2) Change the military equation so that Zionist settlers can return to the occupied northern territories. But unlike in 2006, when Hezbollah defeated Israel with only a tiny fraction of the arsenal and army it now possesses, the Lebanese anti-terror group now has long-range rockets that can hit those northern territories from anywhere in Lebanon (and from parts of Syria and Iraq for that matter). Obviously there is no evident military path to enabling the northern settlers to return.

Endgame: Masada 2.0

Since the officially-declared vision of what Israeli “victory” would look like is impossible, while a conventional military defeat of “Israel” also seems unlikely due to the Zionists’ advantage in heavy weapons, how can this war possibly end? The most likely ending will involve some form of Masada 2.0. The original Masada, which of course is a myth, not a historical reality, involved a civil war in which fanatical Jews were slaughtered by even more fanatical Jews, who then committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

Masada 2.0 will similarly pit Jewish fanatics (the remnants of Labor Zionists) against even loonier ultra-fanatics (Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the rest of the messianic-millenarian maniacs). The moment of truth will come when Israelis collectively wake up and realize that Israel is bogged down in two hopeless quagmires, and that Netanyahu’s stated war aims are a pipe dream: The Israeli captives will never be brought back alive by military means, Hamas is still around and will remain so, Hezbollah can keep raining missiles on “Israel” indefinitely, and the settlers won’t return to the north without a peace agreement that would amount to an Israeli surrender (given the impossible declared war aims).

At this point the Zionists capable of rational strategic thinking will come into conflict with those who are not so capable- the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs who imagine that if they only commit enough abominations their messiah will magically appear to save them. The strategic Zionists will see and accept the inevitability of a strategic retreat, while the messianic-millenarian lunatics will see that as a betrayal of all that is holy. The “sane Zionists” (I know that’s an oxymoron) will recognize that Israel’s only path to long-term existence as a “Jewish state” would be to somehow revive the two-state solution involving withdrawal from 1967-occupied territories. But the messianic-millenarian fanatics and the half-million settlers on those territories, like the ultras in the Masada legend, would rather die than compromise. When push comes to shove, and Netanyahu is finally scapegoated and sacrificed for his war failures, open fighting is likely to break out between the two factions. It may involve targeted assassinations, as happened to Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Mob violence, possibly on a grand scale, is another possibility.

If the strategic Zionists win, and the war ends with at least the illusion of an Israeli return to “normalcy” featuring a promised and apparently viable path to a Palestinian state including all of the 1967-occupied land with East Jerusalem as its capital, more than a few of the millenarian lunatics may very well commit mass suicide, whether by their own hands or in a “suicide by cop” scenario when they are removed from the Occupied Territories by the IDF. And thus Masada 2.0 would take the “mass suicide rather than surrender” motif from myth into history.

If the messianic-millenarian lunatics win again, as they did with their assassination of Rabin in 1995, “Israel” will descend into chaos. Frenzied mobs will go berserk, awaiting their Messiah to lead them to ultimate victory over the gentiles. Almost all competent Israelis will have long since left, while the ten-children-per-family ultra-religious Zionists who don’t know how to do anything except bake unleavened bread and sit around all day chanting the Torah and poring over the Talmud will be all that remains. Economic collapse and political chaos will ensue. Military defense against the world’s two billion Muslims, who will never forgive or forget the Zionist genocide, will become impossible, especially as the US empire’s influence recedes. Ultimately the Holy Land will be absorbed back into the Islamic world.

The above assessment may sound partisan, given my sympathies for the Islamic resistance. But my prognosis is widely shared by well-informed people across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, I have merely spelled out the outspoken parts of what the well-informed segment of the world’s Zionist leadership knows all-too-well. Thomas Friedman, who calls Netanyahu “the worst leader not only in Israeli history, but in Jewish history” has been bemoaning the current Israeli leadership’s colossal strategic failures since last October. And Friedman is not an outlier. He represents the views of Zionist leaders, both in “Israel” and the West, who have thought things through.

So why are the majority of Zionists, including most of the Zionist-dominated media, reflexively supporting Netanyahu’s doomed non-strategy? Mainly because most of them are not as well-informed as Thomas Friedman. Zionists, whose partisanship has infused media and decision-making circles, inhabit a propaganda bubble that bears little relation to reality. High on their own supply, they almost involuntarily cheer for Israel whenever they see it under attack, drooling and growling on command like a pack of Pavlov’s dogs. Like their millenarian-messianic fanatic counterparts, secular Zionists are blinded by tribal loyalty. They are very good at not seeing things they don’t want to see.

When Israel implodes into Masada 2.0, the collective blindness of the larger Jewish tribe, not just its most extreme fanatics, will be the reason.

*Richie Allen: "Hasn’t Hezbollah been severely dented, and maybe that’s putting it mildly, after this daring and brazen series of attacks against its leaders with the booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies?…I mean, that was an incredible coup that by the Israelis, love them or hate them. It’s kind of to be admired really how they pulled that off."

Kevin Barrett: "Well, that’s certainly not the view from Lebanon or anywhere else in the region, including here in Morocco. Israel slaughtered a whole lot of civilians. Those pagers were not used by military people. Those pagers were only used by the civilian wing of Hezbollah. It’s the equivalent of targeting the post office and the welfare department and the hospital bureaucracy in the UK. It’s like if they blew up the pagers of the National Health Service in the UK and the UK post office. It didn’t even touch the military. It didn’t scratch the military wing of Hezbollah. Now, that said, the bombings have. But first, let’s be clear that this pager attack and radio attack was a mass murder of civilians and among the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the world…"

"You’re listening to Kevin Barrett just briefly on the pager. So let’s just say you’re right then. that it had little or no impact on the military wing of Hezbollah. It’s still an incredibly brave, not brave at all, it’s cowardly. It’s an incredibly brazen thing to do, Kevin, and a bit of a coup for Mossad, right?"…" "Richie, that’s ridiculous. “Brazen,” and you’re admiring it! I mean, if I wanted to kill a few thousand Americans, I could do it very, very easily. I know how to poison water supplies if I want to. I mean, it’s not very hard. It’s easy to kill a lot of civilians."

That’s all Israel did, right? I mean, their people have been poisoning people’s wells for thousands of years. And this is just more well poisoning and meaningless, non-strategic slaughter of civilians. It’s moronic. One individual like me or anybody else could kill that many civilians if we were enough of a psychopathic monster to want to, like those Zionists are."