From the "It's a big club and you ain't in it" file

They of course forget entirely that .gov policy comprehensively punishes saving and capital formation, while encouraging profligacy. Then they of course demand gibs as the solution. Look, this is entirely driven by Women, who spend 80% of the money in the economy despite earning ~40% of it. The globalization of the sexual marketplace has driven their expectations to the moon, and men won't tell their wives the magic word 'no', as this is commonly grounds for divorce to not keep up with her delusional wants. The savings rate will not recover so long as inflation & buying female votes is the 2 step .gov solution to perpetual reelection.

The pentagram "not asking no questions" RE the ownership of defense contractors is so that the same mobbed up names don't show up in every single transaction. This is actually striking the root of the real problems in US politics. I suppose the Intel aristocracy has finally decided it's time for hot war against the organized crime faction that achieved apotheosis in the 80s. I suppose this is to be expected, as the parties have gone from being heavily infiltrated by both sides to increasingly polarized. I suppose some of it is well meaning, as the rapacious looting of our criminal oligarchy certainly fails to deliver concrete results beyond financial irregularity.

Screaming recession indicator

As anyone who read WJ Sidis' 100 year old book knew already. The difference is now the cosmologists have data screaming at them to look at the wide open holes in their theories they have neglected up to date.

VVP pinkie swears he won't tax those creeps if they de-offshore their operations. Any of the oligarchs with brains will scurry back to Israel and cut their losses, but it appears for now their greed is getting the best of them, as he's offering the carrot of seized western assets. The "stick" of a subsequent oligarch dinner where they are all taken out and shot if they don't pay taxes comes later (if at all, as RU patriots suspect).

As we've mentioned here before multiple times, the feds are "on borrowed time". If they can't get spending under control (spoiler alert) the end comes much sooner than 2050.

How very lincolnesque of this yank. If he actually pulls a nazbol attack off against the USSA's bioleninist regime, he'll be our man of steel(ing things). Stalinist purges but with "your fired!" BLAM! on national TV. Ha! as if. More likely, the ship of state will simply continue to list for the next 20 years until we default.

SEC's tip line: we only listen to former SEC people and their buddies. Like all financial regs, it's just making the scams worse.

Two aspects are important to consider here. First is that the law is necessarily arbitrary; in this sense knowledge or ignorance of the law is irrelevant - the knowledge of the Judicial apparatus and its personnel is what is actually important.

The second aspect is necessarily a corollary of the first. Namely, that anyone with sufficient knowledge can structure their behavior to make otherwise unlawful behavior entirely legal. In fact, the entire economy and political apparatus is dependent on this mechanism to function, because without it there would be no effective heuristic for identifying opposition to the state (the actual purpose of all judiciary and enforcement apparatuses).

For example, it is highly unlawful in 99.99% of the country to pay a stripper to fuck you. It's 100% legal everywhere in the country to fuck a stripper, and then make it rain on them when they go onstage at some time before or after. While this looks a hell of a lot like money laundering, good luck proving that without written or recorded conversations attesting to that. The only thing that is truly unlawful is good record-keeping and poor operational security. The state wants only smart "criminals" operating; like knows like.

If it weren't for this fact, pretty much every marginal business (read: 80% of business) would go bankrupt. Unprovable accounting control fraud, while resulting in the occasional Enron, is also the only reason that taqueria down the street has a profit margin after sales and other taxes. Taxation is the primary motivating force behind fraud and various other distortions in the economy.

Rampant control fraud is also why tons of people who are otherwise useless have jobs rather than are yet another SNAP/SSI recipient. Corporate Managers looking for more direct reports to fuel their promotions who are willing to fudge performance reviews to protect dead wood likely take off a good 10-20% of the unemployment rate all by themselves. This also allows them to protect the actually productive people when layoffs finally come due to economic conditions entirely out of the manager's control.

Of course this naturally comes with corrosive effects. If your business relies on control fraud to be viable this implies the optimal amount of shrinkage is nonzero; preferably some fraction of the taxation otherwise avoided. This is because any mechanism you can use to identify sources of shrinkage can also be used as a means of assessing your "true" tax burden. As such, those mechanisms are routinely omitted as "cost saving measures".

This is what is behind most complaints of being unable to staff businesses. Untrustworthy people cannot be allowed anywhere near decision making. Even if they don't steal directly they'll do other stupid shit that's liable to get them to turn stoolie in desperation.

Nevertheless, if you have to scale a business you just have to swallow that bitter pill and adapt. If you've ever wondered why "mushroom management" (keep them in the dark, and feed them shit) is so common, it's because it's an adaptation to these realities. Managers call these sort of interactions with employees "baby talk", as it's most commonly employed on young and idealistic employees. Anyone who can't see thru it is clearly not suited for anything beyond toiling. Similarly, anyone who "looks like a criminal" (read: non-beta) can't be trusted.

Which brings me to the "heuristic for identifying opposition to the state". Much like corporate, governance has had to scale far beyond its actual ability to employ coercion and maintain some semblance of their preferred order without a hell of a good filter. Viewed through this lens, the reason why some things are "unlawful" and others not becomes immediately clear.

For example, why has every single attempt to roll out a "cashless society" (read: no bearer instruments of any kind) failed so spectacularly? Because if there is no clearly identifiable activity such as "withdraws and deposits large sums of cash routinely" to narrow down your list of potential malefactors, there is no option besides a full index scan to increase revenue or suppress organized "subversive/criminal" activity. This is why bearer instruments such as cash (read: non-refundable) remain allowed in the physical world but ruthlessly suppressed in the digital realm.

The commonly used excuse by the payment processors for their official oppression of things like sex work is the prevalence of chargebacks. This makes sense to a degree, as drunk idiots who don't realize their wife reads the bank statement will always exist. Nevertheless, there is no technical reason even under traditional digital finance systems that nonrefundable transactions can't be supported. The fact that they don't is because the government explicitly prohibits such as it allows anyone to unprovably be an Unlicensed Money Transmitter.

To be fair, it's not exactly smart to engage in a transaction where one fat finger can increase the order of magnitude of a mistake. This is why I'm still astonished that digital transactions (such as with a credit card) aren't by and large subject to escrow. It's also worth noting that one of the important functions lawyers tend to serve is that of escrow. Much like with your taxes, having legally protected client confidentiality allows a great deal of otherwise questionable activity to be beyond proving it isn't entirely above board. This is tolerated because lawyers are almost never threats, but the biggest boosters of the state that exist.

If there's any moral to this story, it's that two wrongs don't make a right. The deadweight loss to the economy due to the impossibility of valuing things correctly thanks to rampant and tolerated control fraud is quite large. All equity you acquire is necessarily a pig in a poke. As such, there's no "free lunch" -- investing in businesses you aren't personally involved in to a degree you can see through the bullshit is simply gambling. That's the real meaning of "ignorance of the law is no excuse".

Caveat Emptor.

The families of the drafted understandably want their sons and fathers to come home. This is likely the beginning of the end, as when these kinds of protests are not listened to, they usually escalate to draft riots the moment a major setback occurs in war.

BONUS: Time Magazine essentially comes out and says it: the war is lost.

Pretty normal stuff. Interesting that wasting hostages is SOP though:

Blumenthal also emphasized the role of Israel’s notorious “Hannibal Directive,” requiring that Israeli captives must either be killed or rescued to avoid allowing them to be used as bargaining chips

Meanwhile the Biden Regime has ceased openly advocating for genocide, so that's something I suppose.

Good chaser to the previous article. Sounds like a full court press against your liberties, as always with the gangsters running the modern state.

UPDATE: EU Commission caught red handed astroturfing for this bill.

As observed, massive discrimination against white men, who form the vast majority of the skilled labor pool. And people are mystified why labor force productivity is going into the toilet.

Good luck with that, lol

Not only can they not find contractors to repair this turkey, I'm sure the readiness reports themselves are fraudulent. Likely 9/10 of these things are boat anchors.

Pretty much the norm in every single city in the USA. Fascinating to see any newspaper dare to say it out loud; I'm guessing the byline is in for a world of hurt soon.

Shoulda looked at having a GAN too, lol

Fierce fighting and further escalation. Outcome remains unclear.

Response is about as expected; what are the Canadians gonna do? Go over there and spank 'em? Please.

"Without risking escalation"

Any excuse to steal

I'm sure they wouldn't dare find anything suspicious about the carlyle group or any other elites. They will however find a way to use it against the punters.

The wages of inflation. Meanwhile, those who can are finally retiring en masse, making our ongoing recession worse.

Very interesting articles on his substack.