Sinema Goes Independent

 Arizona Senator Sinema leaves Democratic Party, registers as independent. She is left, but has often served as a brake on the far-left elements of the Democratic party. Maybe if all members of the legislative branch were independents, they could represent their constituents and not a party HQ'd in DC and funded by global, not even American, money. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tired-partisanship-senator-kyrsten-sinema-abandons-dems-goes-independent

Better to Hurt Your Own Tribe than Help the Other

 If you have any doubt that Americans have been polarized and tribalized out of rational thinking see this study. Most participants would not give their tribe two dollars if it meant the other tribe got one dollar. 

Opening up ballot access so that more choices are available is the best way to lower the emotional costs of switching brands so that people can start evaluating choices based on reason rather than tribal identidy. 

Greater Idaho? Oregon Counties Want OUT

 Counties in Oregon who feel that Eugene isn't listening want a referendum to leave Oregon and join Idaho. And why shouldn't they be allowed to? I've been writing about this since 2012, particularly in the blue book below. Political decentralization will continue to gain importance as an issue. 

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A Fraudulent System Requires An Occasional Patsy Like Sam Bankman-Fried

 Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried is not less moral than those who run our financial system, only less clever. I would even argue that the system requires the occasional "rogue actor" that causes large amounts of supposed assets to be exposed as worthless in order to conceal the larger reality of how over-leveraged the entire system is. 

"if one mouths the right empty shibboleths, one can do whatever one wants"- SBF

 We live in a fraudulent financial system built on fiat government money (chits with no intrinsic value backed only by government force) and leverage. Thus, those with access to cheap credit can buy up the real assets of the world on leverage. Success isn't won by merit so much as knowing how to play the game. The game of pleasing those who run the system enough to give you the easy credit (financial as well as PR) you need to start leveraging. Do you work hard providing good service to others but question the narratives that the ruling class wants you to parrot? No easy money for you!

The first step, after saying all the "right" things and getting access to larger amounts of easy credit, is to use it to create an "asset". You could work hard and provide real useful products and services to others so that what you have created has actual value. This however, is hard and is completely unnecessary to get rich quickly in today's fraudulent economy. The perceived value of the asset means more than the actual value, because you can entice people to buy a piece of what you are selling if the perceived value is high. Getting the mainstream media to talk about your product in a favorable manner is worth more than being good to your customers. 

You then use that perceived increase in value to obtain more credit and buy or "create" another "asset", whose value you also have every reason to inflate. At each step, you use the perceived increase in value to obtain another asset, which you use to make your portfolio worth even more. It isn't even about making a real, working, profitable business. If you can sell the possibility of future profits (and the establishment media can make you or break you on this, so repeat all the things they tell you to believe), you can borrow more money and buy even more stuff. 

The trouble is that at some point some of those assets lose value. Maybe a shell game is exposed, or maybe there is a general malaise in the sector with the asset in it. It becomes known that the true value of that asset is not as great as the money that it was used to gather up, be it in stock price, corporate debt, or both. If I can convince someone to loan me ten billion dollars at 2% then I only need the assets I acquire with that money to increase in perceived value at a rate of four percent to be "worth 200 million dollars" at the end of the first year. But if they don't get me any more value, or worse, lose value, then I am hundreds of millions in the hole. This is going on all over the economy and so many who got on top this way have to keep the plates spinning or the whole thing crashes. 

For the 2008 bank bailouts, the system literally just created all of the currency out of thin air that they needed to keep the plates spinning. If favored players had assets that were underwater, the Fed Discount window either bought them at above market prices or loaned money with them as collateral at better-than-market terms.

But this had a cost. The debt created to supposedly back this currency will have to be paid for by sacrificing future consumption. But in a system built on this kind of gas, there is no point at which you can say "ok we are going to tighten our belts now" without crashing the entire system. Also, the shear amount of debt needed to sustain it is going to raise red flags. Eventually the world will figure out that all of this "genius financial investing" is simply the result of the government writing trillions in hot checks to sustain the illusion of solvency a little bit longer. So they can't just borrow their way out. 

As a way to put off the inevitable, the system needs fall-guys. That is, it has to find a way to allow some of the underwater assets to get liquidated at a loss. They can't keep all the plates spinning at once, so they are trying to blame the individual plates that drop instead of the entire system. 

Bear Sterns was a "bad actor".  MF Global was a "bad actor" (yet the very connected John Corzine never went to jail). Most of the Big Banks were caught being "bad actors" in the sense that they recklessly overleveraged in 2008. Like I said, the government kept the plates spinning by moving their bad bets to the taxpayer's books. But that outlet has exhausted itself because they have stolen all they can steal via those means without collapsing the economy. They have to wait until it recovers from their past skimming before they skim again at that magnitude. The parasites risk killing the host. 

Now FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried was a "bad actor". He was playing the game, with these connected people selling paper assets to one another at more and more hyped up prices. But he got took. Instead of dumping their bad assets on the government's books, they played him for a chump and got him to take it. That wasn't all that happened of course. He got desperate when the true value of this stuff asserted itself and used money he wasn't supposed to in order to try and keep those plates spinning. But ultimately, he leveraged to the moon on hyped-up assets just like the rest of them- his assets were just worse. 

Look for there to be more such cases in the future, not fewer. The system won't correct this because it can't. It has to have a way to bleed off some of the toxic assets without taking down the whole system. If they can't have no damage (because 2008 style taxpayer bailouts are off the table for a while) then they will try to find some patsy to take the fall. They will find some guy who isn't really that sharp, build up his reputation, then sell their trash to him on borrowed money. When it goes bad, he is exposed as a fraud, and the system goes on- not exposed as a fraud. 

End fiat currency and limit leverage. There is no way to save this system anyway, and even if there was, it does not deserve saving. 

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Lockdown and Vaxx Authoritarians Now Selectively Appeal to Single Christian Virtue- Forgiveness (for Them)

  "The Atlantic" has come under harsh criticism for suggesting that people should let bygones be bygones concerning the vast harm caused by authoritarian lock-down and vaccination policies. Zerohhedge has an article citing numerous responses from angry people who lost loves ones, who have been disabled, or whose mothers had to die alone, due to useless authoritarian measures and under-tested vaccines that have been increasingly shown to be unsafe. Those who implemented these measures are now suggesting that "forgiveness" and an "amnesty" is in order. 

These are in large part the same people who reject God and take pains to expunge Christian values from all of society in exchange for the shifting sands of their own opinions. Yet when caught in monstrous crimes against their neighbors, they selectively appeal to the primary Christian virtue of forgiveness. Not for your sins against them, mind you. You are still to be held to full account for each and every perceived micro-aggression. They mean that you are to forgive them. Not due to their heart-felt repentance, they still want to be authoritarians,  but rather their desire to evade justice and accountability.

Well, scripture is something that I know a little bit about. I've a Youtube channel that is primarily devoted to the study of Genesis for example. And I've noticed that the same bible that says "love your enemies" and forgive them also says that government is supposed to be a minister of God to honor those who do good AND bring wrath on evil doers.

So yes, the Christian ideal is that we should forgive those who sin against us, and that civil government should punish them. It is a tension. There are two things that are true at once that seem in conflict in this world but the conflict is resolved in Christ.

So in practical terms, if you were to write an encouraging letter to a penitent Anthony Fauci as he serves his life sentence, you would be doing well. If you were to feed a hungry former doctor or bureaucrat who has been stripped of all of their possessions as partial compensation to their victims, then you would be doing a good thing. Unlike the woke mob, Christians do have mercy and do forgive. But this does not mean that we do not also pursue justice.

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Confidence in Institutions Declining

 Recent polls show that confidence in Media and Government (two heads of the same beast these days) is at an all time low and is going down fast. "Collapsing" is the way the Epoch Times put it. I guess when the media goes into overdrive to push clearly false narratives and squash relevant stories that's going to happen. It is an inevitable consequence of over-centralization of media. They all repeat the same narrative, there is no healthy debate within them. Naturally those who distrust the monolithic narrative they put forth are going to distrust them.

The same thing with political parties. When the two dominant parties put barriers to entry to other choices, with the collusion of said media, naturally those who don't buy into the six-inch wide band of policy they represent, with no mention of other important issues like ending the "Federal Reserve", are going to distrust those two brands. Our choice should have never been shunted into those two brands anyway. We have all kinds of choices on almost any other product or service. Why should we have to choose between two terminally corrupt political parties that are clearly enriching their own elites at the expense of the rest of us?

 We have a very obvious two-tiered justice system where the insiders and their kin openly commit multiple felonies and are not even prosecuted, while the rest of us have our stuff seized and then have to "prove our innocence" to get it back or face long prison sentences for breaking arcane laws that are so numerous and ever-changing that we can't even keep up with them. That of course is the consequence of the two problems described above. The majority of Americans have no confidence in our institutions, except for "small business" and "the military". Nor should they. Our institutions face a crisis of legitimacy which they are choosing to ignore or worse, re-direct blame unto those noticing they are corrupt and unjust rather than reforming themselves from within. 

If there is a systemic solution, its localism. It is a political philosophy of radical decentralization in order to counter the radical centralization we see all around us. 

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The Chinese Have a Detailed Plan to Control the United State's Congress

 I don't think it is a workable plan right now as it will only work in swing districts, but they have a plan. And they will get better at figuring out how to do it as they go. The size of our economy has helped protect us for a while, but as China rises and super corporations collude, that protection is eroding. Erecting barriers, multiple barriers in a layered defense, to such capture like the ones discussed in "Localism a philosophy of government" is the only way to stop it. 

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The Plan for Total Control of Buying and Selling Revealed in One Minute

 Does it make anyone else nervous that what these people are talking about sounds just like something from the Book of Revelation? 

Mis-Education and Mental Illness

Mis-education may be a larger problem in America today than ignorance. As the government-controlled education establishment continues to indoctrinate people with misinformation and logically incompatible premises we run into an intractable problem: People who believe that they are educated are actually further from moral and physical reality than the uneducated.

It is all too easy for such mis-educated people to dismiss all disagreement with their views as ignorance and all dissension from their moral perspective as bigotry.

Thus the formally recognized status of their mis-education can actually serve to wall them off from learning anything. It protects their fragile world-view, for a time, from having to compete in the marketplace of ideas. What matter if their positions are logically indefensible? Who needs logic when one has credentials?

Mis-education is not, in theory, limited to any part of the political spectrum. But because the government backs the statist left, it manifests in the United States most often from those who consider themselves liberals (but are actually leftists rather than classical liberals.) Being distant enough from moral and physical reality so that it seriously interferes with functioning in everyday life is a pretty good definition of insanity. Indeed one veteran psychiatrist has determined that today's 'liberals' are "mentally ill." Personally I am not comfortable with the idea of labeling disagreement with my political views as a psychiatrist disorder, but the left does it all the time (see "homophobia") so I suppose whats' sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Here is how Dr. Rossiter frames it from the above link..

“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”
I am not a trained mental health professional, but I can testify that my attempts to engage leftists in rational dialogue reveal some very important truths; namely that they are not interested in rational dialogue. Reason is treated as an alien enemy, not an indispensable tool for determining truth. What they want is an echo chamber where their delusions are supported by others who share them. The right isn't immune to this either, but they don't have control of the education system.

Dr. Rossiter focuses on a desire to evade responsibilities as the seminal issue in their neuroses, or psychosis depending on degree of detachment. He's the doctor, but I would zoom out a bit. Many leftists meet their daily responsibilities quite well, especially those propped up with paychecks from the government and government supported academia. I suspect the larger issue is a desire to put short term emotional satisfaction over truth.

I will never forget what an old black Pentecostal preacher said to us at a revival I was attending; "Emotions make a good caboose, but a bad engine." Our minds, renewed by and connected to the Holy Spirit of God, ought to be the Engine. If we do that then our lives will be guided by reason, justice, principle, and truth. The cars of the train should be our actions which follow along where the engine of our mind takes us.

Lastly, the caboose should be the emotions. We will have positive emotions if our minds are right, and our right actions follow our right minds. People who put emotions first fall into a trap. They want to feel good now regardless of what the righteous mind might think of it and regardless of what the actions will lead to in the long run. People who put feeling good first often wind up miserable. People who put right thinking first wind up with the most satisfying emotions as a side-effect.

What I believe is happening here is that leftists want to put emotions over reason. That is the core of their psychosis. Feeling right matters more than thinking right. When this desire to indulge short-term emotions over logic, reason, and truth leads to painful consequences, rather than re-examine the propriety of their priorities they simply call for the government to "fix it". I see it all as an attempt to keep living with their emotions first instead of putting reason first.

This mal-adjustment leads them to support unsustainable policy answers in which "the government" somehow has the resources to insure that we are all taken care of regardless of the quality of our personal decisions. Rush Limbaugh once noted that being a 'liberal' was the most gutless decision a person could make because they can just say "yes" to everyone. "Yes, you deserve free health care and a college education. Yes you deserve affordable housing. Yes you deserve a living wage." Anyone who is in any pain, you can just say "yes" they can have what they want, even if they have not earned it.

Again, it feels good to be able to tell people "yes", but sane people don't tell other people "yes" just to feel good. They only tell people "yes" when it is a reasonable request that can be realistically paid for. Leftists do tell people "yes" in order to feel good about themselves. They then blame the delivery failure not on the impossibility of their promises, but rather "the rich." Those awful rich who greedily want to keep what they earn rather than surrendering it in order to validate the leftist's emotional desire to feel good by promising what is not theirs.

In truth, if we looted the rich even more than we do, we would find they don't have enough to satisfy the promises already made. Not that the rich would consent to hang around and be looted. They would of course flee the country rather than have their fortunes confiscated in a hopeless attempt to sate the appetite of insane people. That's why leftist demagogues always wind up turning their guns on the middle class. They are the only group with enough resources to loot but not enough to be able to defend themselves or escape the government looting.

The government has basically bought education in this country. And because they have, the spirit of free inquiry has been stamped out. It has been replaced by indoctrination posing as education. No ideas that are a threat to the statist status-quo will be tolerated- and this will even be done in the name of "tolerance!" And of course the ideas they push are ideas that government is good, and that it is right and just. They teach that it is realistic to think the wise rulers in Washington can solve all our ills if only given more power and money. That's what "education" will devolve to every time it is funded by the central government, as far as I can tell without exception.

I recently chimed in on a FB discussion where the instigator posted a George McGovern quote about how bigotry against women was the only acceptable bigotry left. I mentioned that he said that before bigotry against Christians became so popular. His friends jumped all over me demanding to know where this bigotry was. I showed them. They then said basically the victim in my example had it coming because bigoted Christians should stay out of politics. I calmly showed conclusive evidence demonstrating this view did not square with the position taken by either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. At that point, they said that I was a white male, and as such had no business highjacking a thread about bigotry against women, and that they would no longer respond. Ah, the sex and race card. So, who is supposed to be the bigot again?

The above is but one example of something I have begun to experience more and more often. Leftists claim the mantle of intellect and reason, but they are not interested in having to use either to defend their positions. They don't want logic and reason. They don't want dialog. Thomas Paine (a real liberal) once said, " 'To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.'" Most of them have not formally renounced the use of reason yet, but they are getting close to making that break with the last link in their mind. The are close to casting off the last tow line they might use to begin the long, painful, but ultimately rewarding journey back to moral and physical reality.

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Facists Despise Choice- Parties on Top Ban Ranked Choice Voting

 Ranked-choice voting, also called "Instant Run-off voting", is a way to provide voters more meaningful choices on the ballot, while avoiding the negatives of traditional run-off elections. 

The "first past the post" method of determining a winner is that whoever gets the most votes in the general election is declared the winner, even if they get less than fifty percent of the vote. In practice, this means that people are afraid to vote for third party candidates or independents out of fear of "splitting the vote" and allowing the party they hate to sneak in with less than a majority of the vote. The two establishement parties don't even have to sell themselves anymore, just demonize the other side so that their base is terrified of what will happen if the "other side" wins. No matter how corrupt they get, their base feels compelled to make excuses for them, because the alterantive is the-end-of-the-world. 

The solution is to have run-offs so that people can vote their conscience without fear. If the dominant party they favor goes corrupt, they don't have to keep voting for them. They can vote for a third party or independent in the general election to send a message that the major party better clean up its act. This would not result in throwing the election to the other party because if no one gets over 50% of the vote, there is a run-off election where the voter can then cast their vote for whoever else is left. 

This kind of freedom is viewed with great alarm by Republicans and Democrats alike. They are "bi-partisan" in their belief that voters should be terrified into voting for them even if another candidate seems like a better choice. 

Sarasota Florida and Memphis Tennessee decided to use ranked-choice voting for their city elections. It should be their business, right? Despite citizen overwhelming citizen support for Ranked Choice Voting in both cities, even against the oppostion of political "leaders", the state legislature off both states have passed laws making the practice illegal.

The two dominant parties want to force Americans into voting for one of them or not at all. That way, it doesn't matter that they don't represent you and you know it. They only have to be slightly less repulsive than the only other choice. 

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Who Did "Federal" Reserve Loan Twenty TRILLION Dollars to at Bargain Rates?

The "Federal" Reserve didn't have to reveal who it loaned money to at below-market rates for two years. So we are just now learning what happened right before COVID hit. Six investment houses got the majority of the privileged loan money to the tune of almost 20 TRILLION dollars. It's an almost incomprehensible amount of money to go to six businesses. Three of those six are banks that control the Federal Reserve Bank of New York!

That's right, they administered the federal program by which they could get overnight loans at rates that were a fraction of what your community bank has to pay. Foreign banks got a massive share too. They gave the big foreign banks (who owed them no doubt) bargain-rate loans before they gave it to your local community bank (if there still is one). Heck, they could borrow money from the Federal Reserve overnight and use the money to loan to a community bank at market rates and make money. It's free money. A chimp could get rich doing it. No wonder small banks are being scooped up by big ones. 

Folks, hard work and merit can't withstand this sort of uneven playing field. America is becoming increasingly unfree each and every decade of her existence since the Federal Reserve was instituted and that won't change until it is ended and we go back to honest money. Money like silver and gold because they couldn't print it at will and so it was impossible to do things like loan themselves 20 trillion dollars at subsidized rates. 

If you had access to twenty trillion worth of virtually free money for two years and could make even 1% profit off that money, you'd have 400 billion dollars. And that's without considering additional compounding from investing gains. It is the equivalent of making four-hundred more bankers into billionaires simply by standing in the middle of the overnight loan business and offering no real goods or services to others. How hard do you work for your paycheck doing some real good? Yet who do you think has more access to "your" congressman? 

The system is broken and people don't get why. Ultimately it is spiritual but to the extent it is systemic, follow the (fake) money. People don't understand the threat because it is a shell game done a bit at a time in secret, and the big media won't tell on their partners. But the threat is real. If they are not stopped, in time they will own everything and you will own nothing. 

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