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Who exactly is pulling the strings?


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2021 May 15, 8:29pm   81,233 views  870 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

OK, as soon as it starts to become apparent to everyone that Fauci is responsible for creating the CCP/Wuhan virus then suddenly the whole world is dropping mask mandates.

WTF?

How can global policy and media across the world be so coordinated?

Kind of makes one tempted to believe in "conspiracy theories".

I really do think there is a cabal of billionaires who own the media and the government and which shifts course when things start to get hot, like right now. They are not "the Jews" but a collection of billionaires from many countries. Many of them are Jewish, but many are not.

Can we identify them by name? Bezos and Gates for sure, but what are the other names? I would especially like to know the names of the ones that desperately want to remain hidden. Klaus Schwab? Top leaders in China like Xi Jinping?






https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf?source=patrick.net


Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no
independent influence.

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251   NuttBoxer   2022 Dec 2, 5:04pm  

Patrick says

BlackRock v Blackstone


BlackRock was spun off by the founders of BlackStone, and intentionally named to confuse people.
254   Patrick   2022 Dec 11, 11:35pm  

Seems to me like they've been practicing for this for a while:

https://www.fromdusktildawn.org.uk/News/2009/Dec09/ireland_get_flu_jab_or_be_jailed.html


1/12/09

The Irish government plans to introduce compulsory "swine flu" vaccinations and is preparing to jail people if they refuse the jab.

The Irish Daily Sunday Star reports that the Irish health department is planning to activate provisions in the 1947 Health Act to enforce mandatory "swine flu" vaccinations.


256   Patrick   2022 Dec 12, 7:35pm  

https://www.thehebrewconservative.com/2022/12/12/the-malicious-fungus-on-the-american-elite/


THE MALICIOUS FUNGUS – ON THE AMERICAN ELITE
by Romo1979
Posted onDecember 12, 2022

With the latest batch of the Twitter Files released today, we get a front-row seat into the sentiment of America’s elite towards ordinary Americans and their leaders – complete contempt.

But what is the elite? We sense that these are members of the elite, but what do we really mean? Who are the members of the ruling class? What do they want? To what extent are they coordinated?

Elite theory and its contemporary applications are hot topics among thinkers, commentators, and “Twitter enjoyers” on the Right. Some of the questions above have settled themselves into a sort of consensus while others remain hot topics.

I will try to summarize leading opinions and provide my own take.

Let’s begin with topics that seem to enjoy a wide consensus.

In What Kind of System Do We Live?

During John Adams’s lifetime, he was often accused of promoting “aristocracy” merely for daring to recognize the perennial existence of elites. We have now vindicated John Adams. The consensus on the Right is that a powerful ruling class does indeed exist and that we now live in an oligarchy.

I wrote about this before.

No, Mitch McConnell doesn’t write any laws. Nor does Nancy Pelosi. They don’t even debate their suggested bills. Clearly, they make no attempts to persuade one another of anything. In the glory days of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, a congressman would commit hours of oratory to memory and then dazzle an eager House with supreme eloquence. Not anymore! The croakings of AOC and Adam Schiff are not meant to persuade anybody, only to signal ideological zeal and loyalty.

Our elective bodies, the ones we learn about in civics classes, are mostly vestigial by now, including the mighty presidency. Remember, Trump couldn’t even fire Fauci. Effective power is mostly held by the vast apparatus of the administrative state, too large to reform, too opaque to control.

What Do They Want?

Here as well there is a wide consensus: The ruling class wishes for more power. As students of Machiavelli and his modern heirs, we recognize that power seeks more power. Some of us, perhaps, are Frodo types with whom power is safe or never even sought; but most people, especially in the aggregate, are not like that at all.

The American ruling class at this point can be reduced into two recursive command lines: 1) Increase your own power; 2) Humiliate traditional Americans.

Test it. These two command lines suffice to explain everything the ruling class does – from supporting BLM to promoting mass immigration – and are very useful in predicting future moves.

#1 specifically means an ever-increase in the power of bureaucrats, “experts,” prestige universities, compliance officers, controlled media, and aligned multinationals. #2 means a continued assault on America’s traditional values and features – the family, our Anglo-Western culture, our borders, our faith, our small towns.

It’s easy to see how #2 really serves #1. The last remaining check on the ruling class’s power is the traditional American nation and its potential to resist, especially regionally, the strength of the ruling class.

Who Are They?

Here we come to a question that is not so easy to answer. At least there hasn’t yet formed a consensus around this on the Right.

The identity of the ruling class is difficult to define because (and most do agree on this) it is distributed, at least to an extent. Meaning, we don’t have a titled oligarchy of dukes and barons that are easy to identify, nor do we have a powerful king. There is a faceless element to the powers ruling us.

There’s a semi-consensus that the ruling class at large consists of the vast government bureaucracy, decision-makers at top NGOs (Such as Tony Blair’s NGO, the ADL, the SPLC, the WEF, etc.), administrators and academics at prestige universities, prestige journalists, and the senior leadership of sprawling multinationals.

A good smell test (not a perfect one) to detect elite membership is adherence to the command lines stated above. Are these entities cementing their own power? Are they continuously humiliating and dismantling traditional America? If the answer is “yes” AND these entities have power, they are members of the ruling class.

The test is not perfect because clearly, a person may simply be a striver. Imagine a low-level HR manager named Paige who totally promotes BLM and “diversity” and attempts to force it on her organization (thus humiliating ordinary Americans while perpetuating herself). Paige, however, does not really have much power. And so she simply aligns with the elite, a striver, but hardly a real member of it.

In any case, the consensus breaks over the level of influence various members of the elite wield. One relevant spectrum of differing opinions is that of centralization.

On one end you have completely top-down cabal theories where the West is ruled by the Jews, the WEF, the revanchist old nobility of Europe headed by the King of England, etc. I’m actually not dismissing this as silly, it may easily appear this way from certain angles.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have something completely diffusive and decentralized, involving no coordination at all beyond spontaneity and ingrained malice. Yarvin’s Cathedral comes close to this.

The spectrum in-between has all sorts of variations. The Hillsdale-Claremont view (Coedevilla, Anton) seems to vastly emphasize the role of elite universities and the prestige they confer upon their spawn. That, in addition to the vast apparatus of bureaucrats – heirs to Burnham’s “Managerial Elite” – and the “megaphone” of the febrile media.

Another interesting in-between view is that of Neema Parvini, aka Academic Agent. His Octopus is an expansion of Yarvin’s Cathedral with a more central role to monied interests and focused players such as NGOs.

My own view is close to Parvini’s. Call it the dummy’s guide to the Octopus. I’ll be Parvini’s epigone. Let’s expand on it in the following section.

How Do They Coordinate?

The question of coordination, to me, is the biggest disqualifier of clandestine top-down cabal theories. Any person in business can tell you that coordinating the management of a company of more than 1000 employees is already very difficult (depending on the variance of that company’s activities). 10,000 employees and above and it’s not even clear that there is any management beyond a kind of very slow inertia and directing. Now, blow that out to 330M people, or the entire (!) West, and then impose secrecy (!!) on the whole thing, and the idea of a centrally managed cabal becomes very improbable.

Remember – to make Twitter manageable the first thing Musk did was to fire 2/3 of the company’s employees.

A diffusive basis is much more probable. A diffusive theory also allows us to avoid a clear line of who’s in the elite and who isn’t. It explains the fuzziness.

See, each person contributes to the best of their malicious ability. From the lowly HR lady to the omnipotent Susan Rice. Call it the Fungus. Each spore senses where the wind is blowing, or where the stench of rot is blowing. They know that status is to be found by dumping on America and by supporting the “right” people, and so they always turn to the side of the rot. Like spores coalescing around a carcass from Hell.

By and large, nobody tells these people what to say, believe, pursue or do. They act ecologically. They blend into a super-fungus where status is to be achieved by humiliating Americans and perpetuating the fungus itself.

Remember – what happened when the editors of the NYT (supposedly the Times’s centralized authority) allowed Tom Cotton to publish an opinion piece? The spore underlings screamed and swirled in Stygian fever until they forced their own bosses to publish an apology. One even had to resign, I think. I can’t remember exactly.

Meaning, power clearly didn’t come from above. But it didn’t exactly come from below, either. It came from the ecological system. The spores act each to the extent of their own abilities.

However, there are spores and there are spores. There are obviously bigger spores, or clusters of spores, that are more active players. These are not necessarily, by the way, the richest spores, who simply follow the poisonous cloud while dragging entire companies behind them. But you do have people like Soros, Schwab, and Blair who are very openly active in their promotion of a “New Order” or whatever. It’s not even hidden. You do have very powerful organizations, say, the FBI and the DOJ. Even a few Jewish organizations.

Do such powerful elements direct the whole fungal system? No, but they are more active than some of the other elements. Are they effective? Who knows. It’s difficult to judge who is more effective – the corpse-like Schwab and Soros or the legions of brainwashed spores acting spontaneously.

How to Test the Above?

So who is right? This requires more political science lore than I’m in possession of. But let me suggest that the Fungus theory allows us not to decide. Since each blasphemous spore contributes to the extent of its own malice – some extending slimy tentacles, others threatening with the full power of their fang-ringed jaws – we shouldn’t really care much. In one way or another, the ruling class encompasses them all.

They are all harmful, and each contains the seed of more harm if given the opportunity.
257   Patrick   2022 Dec 18, 1:51pm  

https://jessicar.substack.com/p/a-real-vax-lot-anomaly


The covid "vaccination" program (Operation Warp Speed) is actually being run under the National Security Council, with the DOD serving as Operating Officer and the HHS only serving in an advisory (more like propaganda) role. Roughly sixty military officials are in leadership and decision-making roles, making it look more like a military operation than a science-based effort. The pharma companies are restricted to mostly providing R&D, prototypes, and demonstrations. The DOD's own long-established suppliers are actually manufacturing and distributing the products.

For playing their role the pharma companies, which are being micro-managed by the DOD, have received billions of taxpayer dollars while the government purchases millions of doses in advance and then stockpiles them or throws them out for lack of arms to put them in as demand wanes.

Three key pieces of legislation are being used to pull it all off non-transparently and without much fear of liability or annoying regulation:

1. Emergency Use Authorization (1997 under Clinton). EUA declarations are at the sole discretion of one person, the HHS Secretary. He/she does not need any supporting scientific evidence and need only voice a belief that the product MAY be effective. EUA declarations bypass the FDA's safety and efficacy regulations by redefining pharma products military style as "medical countermeasures" rather than pharmaceuticals. Countermeasures do not legally require clinical investigation in order to be approved, so the kind of sham investigations we are seeing are clearly meant for show. The FDA is fully aware of all this, but continues to deceptively pretend the products are pharmaceuticals under their regulation.

2. Other Transaction Authority (amended in 2015 under Obama). Congress has authorized eleven federal agencies, including the DOD, to enter into “other transaction agreements” that do not need to contain the standard terms and conditions for scrutiny and regulation the way normal contracts, research grants, and procurements would for example. This can be done even if the counterparty is normally subject to regulation. The DOD used such agreements with pharma to order the R&D of "military prototype” covid vaccines. Legally speaking, no regulation needed, even for manufacturing standards. Again, the appearance of regulation is a sham (and in my opinion constitutes fraud).

3. PREP Act and "Public Health Emergency" declaration (made bulletproof in 2020 under Trump). This is what activates the two pieces of legislation above. Liability protections extend to employees, their families, and all down the supply chain. For obvious reasons, the emergency declaration is very likely to be extended into the foreseeable future.

NOTE: Some of the above information is based on in-depth legal research done by paralegal Katherine Watt1 of Bailiwick News (available on Substack). All of the above information was presented by Sasha Lapytova during a Children's Health Defense Symposium titled "In the Midst of Darkness Light Prevails". The symposium was held on December 10, 2022. Sasha's presentation begins about 3hr 20min into the 6 hour video, which is available for viewing in full on their web site.2 Wording of the various laws is shown along with the official org charts for vaccine development. I simply represented what Sasha presented as faithfully as I could, figuring this information needs to get out to as many as possible.

1 A portion of Watt's legal research can be found at her substack in a document titled "Legal Walls of the Covid-19 Kill Box". It confirms in no uncertain terms that she knows the legal framework.

2 https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/events/in-the-midst-of-darkness-light-prevails-an-interdisciplinary-symposium
261   richwicks   2022 Dec 19, 5:15am  

Booger says




Confirmed to be true - IF I can trust this copy of the book is authentic anyhow.

263   AmericanKulak   2022 Dec 21, 3:30pm  

The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:


264   Patrick   2022 Dec 21, 3:30pm  

@Booger Please keep the overt antisemitism to the political incorrectness thread.

https://patrick.net/post/1285044/2015-09-19-national-political-incorrectness-day?start=-1#last
265   HeadSet   2022 Dec 21, 4:44pm  

AmericanKulak says

The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:

The Catholic Church is an ancient institution that thrives best in a world of Rulers and Priests with the masses being ignorant and poor. That institution would love to destroy the middle class of Europe and the US by flooding those places with the world's destitute people.
266   richwicks   2022 Dec 21, 8:59pm  

HeadSet says

AmericanKulak says


The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:

The Catholic Church is an ancient institution that thrives best in a world of Rulers and Priests with the masses being ignorant and poor. That institution would love to destroy the middle class of Europe and the US by flooding those places with the world's destitute people.


The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

I'm suspicious of religion, but the evangelicals I think are the most rapacious and exploitative.

I see value in religious belief, it's a sort of bedrock, and I'm pretty much an atheist, however, I can see it as a benefit and a bedrock against the insanity of society. I know they exploit, I know they deceive, but they are consistent - and our government is not, it changes rapidly to exploit. Government is more dangerous.
267   Patrick   2022 Dec 21, 9:01pm  

I believe that the majority of the wealth of the Catholic Church is from wills. People donated land and other things of great value upon their death, because that made sense to them.

Good business model really.
268   HeadSet   2022 Dec 22, 11:58am  

Patrick says

I believe

I see what you did there...
269   HeadSet   2022 Dec 22, 12:00pm  

richwicks says

The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

Wanna buy an indulgence?
270   richwicks   2022 Dec 22, 12:09pm  

HeadSet says

richwicks says


The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

Wanna buy an indulgence?

No thank you.

Purgatory no longer exists anyhow. Pope John Paul II decreed it!
271   stereotomy   2022 Dec 22, 1:02pm  

richwicks says


The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

I'm suspicious of religion, but the evangelicals I think are the most rapacious and exploitative.

I see value in religious belief, it's a sort of bedrock, and I'm pretty much an atheist, however, I can see it as a benefit and a bedrock against the insanity of society. I know they exploit, I know they deceive, but they are consistent - and our government is not, it changes rapidly to exploit. Government is more dangerous.

In the 14th-18th centuries, they didn't have airplanes. Instead, they built cathedrals and basilicas. Luther's 95 theses were a rebellion against the worldliness of the church, specifically that Tetzel was selling advance indulgences (if you're planning on raping someone, then pay in advance for a "get out of hell" pass for the future commission of that sin). Tetzels efforts at collecting funds from these indulgences were used to pay the loans from the Fuggers off which were borrowed to construct St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

It took nearly 400 years of barbaric and bloody wars to curb the worst of the rapacious and exploitive tendencies by the psychopaths who ran (and probably continue to run) the catholic church.

Acton said it best, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
273   Patrick   2022 Dec 24, 11:39am  

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rebuild-sovereignty-rule-of-law-united-states/


How to Rebuild Sovereignty: ‘Stop Financing the Enemy and Start Financing our Friends’
Observing the unraveling of sovereignty and the rule of law in the U.S., citizens are pondering an array of tactics that could help rebuild sovereignty.

National sovereignty — in the sense of “the power of a country to control its own government” and “freedom from external control” — is a concept that has resonated strongly with “We the People” in the U.S. since the time of the American Revolution.

However, as law school professor Jeremy Rabkin warned in 2009, “It is possible to lose sovereignty rather quickly.”

Rabkin highlighted as a cautionary tale the European Union — where regulations crafted by Brussels-based bureaucrats “supersede both parliamentary statutes and national constitutions” — but he dismissed as “fantastical” the idea that the “trend away from the sovereignty of national constitutions” could ever lead to “world tyranny.”

By 2020, that idea could no longer be considered far-fetched.

In fact, loss of sovereignty and its replacement by “world tyranny” have emerged as pressing challenges, as citizens in country after country have seen leaders parrot identical Orwellian talking points and abuse endlessly extended emergency powers in order to impose draconian policy agendas.

The iron-fist policies — including masking, lockdowns, not-fit-for-purpose tests, social distancing and contact tracing — were demonstrated to be useless long before and then again during the pandemic.

And yet, as perplexed scientists and citizens discovered to their dismay, “no amount of evidence … had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures.”

The dangerous experimental COVID-19 injections — reportedly administered to two-thirds of the planet — proved equally impervious to rational critique.

For many, these events have led to an unpalatable but ineluctable conclusion, namely, that entities operating largely outside the law have launched a “crime against humanity” that is “supranational” in scope — using the faux pandemic and unconstitutional emergency powers as a battering ram against national and personal sovereignty, including against the sacred principles of bodily autonomy and personal integrity enshrined in human rights law.

And now, with discussions underway to craft a legally binding global pandemic treaty nominally led by the World Health Organization (WHO) — and calls to implement global “WHO-standardized” vaccine passports — the supranational plan seems to be accelerating.

As the Brownstone Institute’s David Bell recently wrote, while the WHO may operate “in the spotlight,” it is likely a “bit player” in a much wider network of unaccountable, behind-the-scenes players — including central banks, international organizations, Big Pharma, large corporations, nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, serving as front groups and bought political leaders.

These players and their conflicts of interest, Bell pointed out, tend to elude transparency.

Operating above — or outside — the law

The bedrock of sovereignty is the rule of law, characterized by accountability, transparent government, evenly applied and just laws, and justice that is “accessible and impartial.” ...

In his sovereignty essay, and in an interview with Children’s Health Defense Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and elsewhere, Titus zeroes in on a central problem: “any entity that can commit crimes with impunity” — a growing list that includes Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Chemical and others — has, by definition, “risen above a nation’s sovereign law.”

Also above the law — or in fact operating “entirely outside of the law” — are entities like the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the “central bank of central banks,” which has enjoyed “complete secrecy and immunity from the laws of sovereign nations” for nearly its entire existence.

Some of the BIS immunities also extend to a wider “syndicate” of “systemically important” banks, financial institutions and payment systems, with “trillions of taxpayer dollars and printed money [moving] through these organizations and banks with no transparency or accountability.”

As described in “Laundering with Immunity,” a comprehensive article by Corey Lynn about this shadowy control network, many organizations also benefit from “immunities, privileges, and tax exemptions” conferred through vehicles such as executive orders and “sneaky” international treaties.

The weaponization of international treaties and their use to circumvent domestic political process and law, according to legal scholar Amy Benjamin, constitutes a globalist legal war that diminishes the ability of nations to have a say in international lawmaking while protecting sovereignty.

As another writer put it, “International Law is by definition authority higher than the State.”

At the domestic level, the abuse of emergency powers during the pandemic did not pass unnoticed.

A Scottish legal inquiry concluded that the “range of new laws introduced … have not been subject to adequate parliamentary scrutiny, with government guidance and ministerial statements often failing to set out the law clearly, misstating the law or laying claim to legal requirements that did not exist.”

The chair of the committee issuing the Scottish report warned:

“When scrutiny is limited through the fast-tracking of legislation, or the extensive use of secondary legislation [that is, legislation created by ministers or parties other than parliament], essential checks on executive power are lost, and the quality of the law suffers.”

The decline, everywhere, of the rule of law

Following the sweep of developments in finance and governance over the past several decades, Fitts and Titus agree that the trillions that went “missing” from the U.S. government beginning in the late 1990s, “followed by the financial bailouts of 2008, and now the pandemic fraud, represent the takedown of ‘We the People’ and the reinstallation of rule by a self-styled ‘elite’ — led by central banks — that is unanswerable to law and admittedly criminal.”

The World Justice Project confirms that the rule of law is declining both in the U.S. and worldwide.

The organization publishes an annual 140-country “Rule of Law Index,” which, in country after country, has documented the steady deterioration of lawful government behavior over the past five years.

The U.S. emerges in a particularly unflattering light, however.

The index shows that as of 2022, the U.S. ranked No. 26 (below countries like Latvia, Korea and Uruguay), having fallen seven places from the No. 19 ranking it held from 2015 to 2018.

For specific dimensions of the index like “constraints on government powers” (“the extent to which those who govern are bound by law”), “civil justice” (“whether ordinary people can resolve their grievances peacefully and effectively through the civil justice system”) and “fundamental rights” (“the “menu of rights … firmly established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights”), the 2022 rankings for the U.S. were even lower than its overall ranking — Nos. 28, 36 and 37, respectively.

In the pandemic year of 2021, the index revealed that the rule of law in the U.S. “declined more than any country in the European and North American region,” with the decline cutting across all but one factor measured.

Was it a coincidence that during the same increasingly lawless pandemic time period, the already sizable gap between life expectancy in the U.S. and life expectancy in peer nations widened further, with the premature death rate increasing in the U.S. “by more than it did in most peer countries?”

Invest in friends, not enemies

Observing the unraveling of sovereignty and the rule of law — and also the alarming signs of a depopulation agenda — citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere have pondered the tactics needed to rebuild sovereignty.

Some individuals have tried to reestablish sovereignty by various atypical means, such as tax protesting. However, the U.S. Constitution is the instrument that historically has afforded U.S. citizens the most protection, so trying to resign from it leaves a person exposed, particularly at a time when the government is weaponizing the term “domestic terrorism” to go after anyone who questions government policies.

Another challenge is that, in a complex and interdependent world, it is essentially impossible for lone individuals to make a dent in areas such as taxation.

There is one area where individual actions do make a major difference, however — as Fitts noted at the October 2022 Children’s Health Defense conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, we “get the world we build, and the world we invest in.”

As she told attendees, each of us must “stop financing the enemy and start financing our friends. You cannot get from here to there if you finance your enemy,” she said.

At the individual level, this means withdrawing financial support from the entities that are building the global “digital gulag,” using cash as much as possible and doing business only with — and being employed only by — high-integrity individuals and institutions.

For example, we can choose to bank with well-managed local banks or credit unions instead of New York Fed member banks. We can invest in real assets — young people, land, organic farmers — instead of building investment portfolios populated by the companies of pandemic profiteers who just spent the past two years destroying the small business economy.

We can bypass Big Tech companies that surveil and spy on our families. And we can shun and boycott the individuals and companies that are poisoning our children.

Financial Rebellion offers many other examples of positive actions each week.

At a broader level, we can work to restore government sovereignty at the local and state levels, while also supporting the U.S. Constitution and the constitutional rights that underpin health freedom and financial freedom.

Fitts does address the topic of taxation in another Solari report, “Taxation: With or Without Representation,” voicing the central question on the minds of so many frustrated citizens: “Can we take action to stop our taxes from being used in an unlawful, illegal, or criminal manner?”

The report’s main essay highlights 16 examples of “illegal uses of taxpayer funds by the U.S. government carried out with the help of banks, contractors, and a variety of private parties” and then lists an extensive series of collective actions people can take to shift taxes back to lawful use.
274   Patrick   2023 Jan 6, 10:29am  

https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/is-the-usa-no-longer-a-constitutional


For the last 49 years of the Roman Republic, the fate of the citizenry was determined not by laws and institutions, but by the decisions and actions of competing, ambitious men. First Julius Caesar challenged the authority of the Senate by leading his army across the Rubicon River and into the Italian peninsula, which inaugurated twenty years of civil war. This period of strife ended when Octavian—the nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar—defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. Three years later, the Senate gave Octavian the titles Augustus and Princeps, along with greatly augmented powers, thereby ending the Republic and inaugurating rule by Emperors with direct authority over the army (the final instrument of power over unruly human beings).

Since President George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, the United States of America has increasingly resembled the last twenty years of the Roman Republic. We, the People, seem increasingly at the whim of competing oligarchs and their friends in the Administrative State. The Bushes, Clintons, Trumps, and Bidens resemble the powerful Roman families of the 1st Century BC—sometimes quarreling, sometimes uniting, always primarily serving their own interests and those of their friends. In recent years, the FBI has come to resemble the Roman Praetorian Guard during the waning days of the Republic, whose loyalty to a particular man was more a matter of preference and perceived promise of gain than law.

The success of America’s baleful, competing oligarchs depends on how well they co-opt financial, industrial, media, and institutional actors. Their relationship with the citizenry is mostly a matter of propaganda, manipulation, virtue signaling, and flattery by pretending to endorse the (faddish) ideological preferences of their constituencies.

Thankfully there is one enormous difference between the United States now and the final decades of the Roman Republic—namely, the use of U.S. military units on American soil still seems to be off limits. To be sure, the Department of Defense has played a strong role in developing, manufacturing, and distributing the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. We are now seeing increasing evidence that the DOD holds final authority over the entire program.

The above reflections have been percolating through my mind for some time, causing me to wonder if we are no longer a Republic in which all of us—including our august billionaires, political dynasties, federal police and intelligence agencies—are governed by our United States Constitution. This morning I saw that Victor Davis Hanson—Senior Fellow in Classics at the Hoover Institution—has been having similar thoughts.

His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.


https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/04/the-coup-we-never-knew/
277   NuttBoxer   2023 Jan 24, 9:48am  

Not a Musk fan, but read that last tweet again. The market is rigged. It's not an investment, it's a Ponzi scheme.
278   AmericanKulak   2023 Jan 24, 10:14am  

Patrick says

His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.

Just wait until you drill down into the history of Livia and Julia with Octavian, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

The gaslighting and lies and manipulation...
279   AmericanKulak   2023 Jan 24, 10:18am  

AmericanKulak says


Patrick says


His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.

Just wait until you drill down into the history of Livia and Julia with Octavian, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

The gaslighting and lies and manipulation...


How else could there be more short interest than shares outstanding?

How can you lend more shares than shares existing?

How else could it be that when you own 100% of a share, you notice trading volume in the thousands daily?
282   Patrick   2023 Feb 24, 6:02pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/who-is-pulling-the-strings


I think Vivek Ramaswamy has offered up the clearest explanation to the bigger picture of how things changed and why they changed, at least from the top down. He calls it the Great Reset vs. the Great Uprising. His book, Woke, Inc explains how corporations have evolved since the Wall Street bailout of 2008. The idea is that, in order to take the heat off of themselves they began pivoting toward the identity-focused politics of the Left. Now, all they have to do is virtue signal and that gives them unlimited power. ...

Ramaswamy’s focus is more on “Woke Capitalism,” the massive monopolies are using the new religion of the Left to amass more power by appealing to Generation Z and, in effect, taking us to global totalitarianism.
284   Patrick   2023 Mar 4, 7:54pm  

https://freebeacon.com/california/the-powerful-lgbt-group-behind-californias-most-radical-laws-is-setting-its-sights-on-washington/


The Powerful LGBT Group Behind California's Most Radical Laws Is Setting Its Sights on Washington
Bolstered by corporate cash and Democratic allies, Equality California rose from obscurity to dominate Sacramento

Founded 20 years ago as an LGBT advocacy group, Equality California has since grown to become a major player in California politics. Fueled by millions of dollars in donations from corporations like AT&T and Comcast to advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, the progressive group has emerged as the savviest user of Sacramento’s legislative system. Together with its Democratic allies, Equality California helps set the legislative agenda and has pushed all manner of "woke" policies that help minors get sex changes in secret and let men into women’s prisons.

The group now wants to make its mark on the rest of the country. From its Washington, D.C., office, the group lobbies for federal legislation to legalize abortion, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and ban guns. Donors who give $50,000 or more to the group are given access to Equality California’s highest donor tier, "National Trailblazer." ...

Still, some Californians are fighting to dismantle Equality California’s legislative record. Mothers are suing school districts whose employees, they say, pressured their children to undergo sex changes. Female inmates have mobilized against a law that lets biological men into women’s prisons, and cops are speaking out against a 2022 law that allows prostitutes to loiter with impunity, which they encourages sex trafficking.
286   Patrick   2023 Mar 5, 12:00pm  

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/yet-another-leak-reveals-that-covid?publication_id=268621&post_id=106612876&isFreemail=true


Isabel Oakeshott is a journalist and critic of pandemic containment policies who was unaccountably hired by disgraced former UK health minister Matt Hancock to write the Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. Hancock hoped that this exercise in autohagiography would rehabilitate his reputation after revelations of an extramarital affair forced him out of office. The joke, it turns out, is on him. Apparently, he gave Oakeshott an archive of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages to assist in her writing. She’s now leaked that archive to the Telegraph, who are gleefully and selectively publishing them in an ongoing series they call The Lockdown Files. ...

Since the very beginnings of this plague chronicle, I’ve said that lockdowns flowed directly from China, through the WHO, to the West, where they rapidly became a self-reinforcing phenomenon in their own right. They were driven by autonomous political and institutional forces rather than nebulous globalist conspirators, and we have now had multiple leaks, from Germany, the United Kingdom and the US, which everywhere paint the same picture:

1) The earliest pressure for lockdowns came from within public health institutions, government-adjacent scientific advisors, and the bureaucracy more broadly – not the political arm.

2) Western governments feared non-compliance with lockdown measures and took very deliberate steps to terrorise their citizenries to ensure their cooperation. In this they enjoyed the wholesale collaboration of the press.

3) Cabinet officials and other politicians channeled bureaucratic pressure and growing popular alarm (in which they were complicit) to seize initiative and power from rival governmental actors. They regarded public panic as a resource and an opportunity to be exploited accordingly.

4) Measures were determined not by Science, or even by educated guesses or coin tosses – but by the limits of what was practically and politically possible at any given moment. Maximum masking, maximum lockdowns, maximum vaccination, everywhere and always.

5) Every slight uptick in infections set off a self-reinforcing cascade of messaging and restrictions. Bureaucrats and politicians struggled to satisfy what they perceived as near-bottomless public appetite for restrictions by issuing new rules, which required still more propaganda to enforce, and radicalised public sentiment still further.

6) The formulators of lockdown policy were increasingly disabused of SARS-2 risk after the first wave, but continued to press for all possible closures, above all because they feared the political consequences of failing to contain infections.

7) This entails that they had some measure of faith in their policies, in part because they were not immune to their own propaganda. Measures like masking, introduced because they were “effectively free” and have “a very visible impact” came to be trusted as genuine infection-controlling interventions.

It always irritates some people when I say this, but it’s just the truth: The people responsible for the last three years of economic destruction, psychological injury and mass pharmaceutical experimentation are callous and evil, but they’re also just really dumb. None of this meant anything, none of this was for anything, and that’s the bitterest pill of all. Every last person in these text messages, from Johnson to Hancock to other ministers to random experts and everyone else, has absolutely no idea what they’re doing or what the purposes of their restrictions even are. Lockdowns were every inch the crazy illogical senseless chaotic policies they appear to be. They are the fruit of shallow low-wattage government functionaries who have a planning horizon extending no more than two weeks, who judge their own success or failure via press coverage, and who regard the public as dimwitted cattle to be herded in expedient directions.


So the real pandemic was the stupidity of officials and the public, according to this analysis.
287   HeadSet   2023 Mar 5, 12:15pm  

Patrick says

So the real pandemic was the stupidity of officials and the public, according to this analysis.

I dunno. Maybe this is a play for the guilty to be called "stupid" for their actions, rather than crooks who betrayed the public while taking bribes.
288   Patrick   2023 Mar 5, 12:15pm  

Good point. Can we find money from Pfizer influencing these idiots?

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