Category: Uncategorized

Predator complains about imitator

It’s jaw-droppingly astonishing to see a US diplomat complain about anyone else debt-trapping less-developed countries:

A senior US diplomat launched a verbal barrage at Beijing’s economic presence in Pakistan, claiming the massive investment brought nothing but corruption and a legacy of debt. China hit back saying IMF loans were a worse burden.

A senior American diplomat in South and Central Asia mounted harsh criticism of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, an ambitious plan to turn Pakistan into a major trade route connecting China directly with the Arabian Sea. Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Assistant Secretary of State Alice Wells said the multibillion-dollar project, which China touts as a model of cooperation with other nations in its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, was riddled with corruption and only hurt the Pakistani people.

“Together with non-CPEC Chinese debt payment, China is going to take a growing toll on Pakistan’s economy, especially when the bulk of payment starts to come due in the next four to six years,” the US diplomat said. She added that a “lack of transparency” would boost the cost of the projects and result in an even heavier debt burden.

All China is doing is precisely what the USA, through the IMF, has been doing since 1945. Apparently it is bad to be in debt to Chinese bankers, but good to be in debt to US bankers.

A nonexistent invitation

Thomas Howard leaped to a completely erroneous conclusion subsequent to my invitation to Mr. Fuentes to debate a specific historical event of particular interest to him:

This must mean Nick the knife has finally and definitively turned down the “come join us at unauthorized tv” overtures. Considering his live viewership, nightly superchat support, and the fact he is taken as a serious threat by conservative Inc, this must be quite a blow to the ego. To the gamma, the sting of rejection is like the slow knife, the one that takes its time, which slips quietly between the bones, that’s the knife that cuts the deepest.

Let me be perfectly clear about the relevant facts. Nick Fuentes was never invited to join Unauthorized.TV. Never. Out of about 85 established creators who have expressed varying degrees of interest in joining us at one time or another, precisely three have been invited to join UATV: Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, Zammy the Giant Sheepadoodle, and Wranglerstar. All three accepted the invitation without hesitation.

I have spoken once to Mr. Fuentes, on May 8th, 2019, for about 20 minutes. We had a good and mutually respectful discussion, in which it soon became apparent to both of us that it did not make any sense for him to join Unauthorized, which is why he never asked to join it and I never invited him to do so. I further note that America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes has 68.9k YouTube subscribers, which is excellent considering that he had around 30k back in May when we spoke. That being said, by way of comparison, UATV’s newest contributor, Wranglerstar, has 1.33M subscribers.

In summary, no one at Unauthorized cares even a fraction of an iota whether Mr. Fuentes wants to be on Unauthorized or not. We certainly wish Mr. Fuentes great success in his campaign against Conservatism Inc., but we neither need nor want him on our channel. Our egos, such as they are, remain intact and unaffected.

4GW in the USA

A military genius warns of what will happen if the Deep State gets its way:

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is at root a contest for legitimacy.  On one side is the state. On the other is a vast array of alternate primary loyalties: religion, race, tribe, gang, and locality, among others.  Around the world, the contest is going poorly for the state as a growing number of people shift their primary loyalty to one of the many alternatives, for which they are willing to fight.

Washington does not perceive it, absorbed as it is in its own struggles for power and money, but the same contest is going on in this country.  So far, to our great benefit, it has remained on the peripheries. Urban police know they are confronting it in the form of ethnically-based gangs, which are illegal business enterprises that fight.  But the mass of the American people appear still loyal to the state.

The appearance is, I think, deceptive.  On both the Left and the Right, doubts about the legitimacy of the federal government are growing.  Mostly, the doubts are about the legitimacy of the current President, although polls show public perception of Congress is also strongly negative.  There is no question many on the Left regard President Trump as illegitimate. Should a hard-Left figure such as Warren win in 2020, the Right will doubt her legitimacy.  But considering the current President illegitimate is different from thinking the state itself has lost its legitimacy.

Impeachment could change that.  President Trump’s supporters regard his election as proof their voices can be heard, that their interests will be considered in Washington.  They know that to virtually all Democrats and some Republicans, they are “unpersons”. Why? Because they are White, male, or non-feminist female, straight, and mostly Christian.  They are also struggling economically, which means they are not contributors to politicians’ campaigns. The coastal elites dismiss them as rubes and hicks inhabiting “flyover land”.  The Democratic Party, which has embraced the ideology of cultural Marxism, considers them all inherently evil “oppressors” fit only to kiss the feet of blacks, immigrants, gays, feminists, etc., PC’s sainted “victims” groups.

Again, should a Warren win in 2020, President Trump’s supporters will not consider her (or him) a legitimate President.  But if the unholy alliance between Democrats and the Deep State succeeds in driving President Trump from office through impeachment or some other means, that will be a very different story.  At that point, the message to President Trump’s supporters will be, “Your votes don’t matter, because even if you elect a President, we will drive him from office and reduce you to a silent serfdom.  You and your views are entitled to no representation. You are and will remain ‘unpersons.’”

At that point, in the vast electoral sea that is red America, the legitimacy of the system itself, i.e., the state, will be brought into serious question.  And when that happens, the chance of Fourth Generation war here on a large scale will rise dramatically. When you tell people they cannot achieve representation through ballots, they start to think about doing it with bullets.

The Deep State is playing an incredibly dangerous game here and has been for some time. The thing is, no matter how it turns out, they are not going to win. Messrs. Van Creveld and Lind seldom see eye to eye politically, so when they are both seeing the same danger on the horizon, it behooves one to pay very close attention.

All the flavors of oppression

The Greatest “Science Fiction” Writer Ever explains why her work is such a joy to read:

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

And yes, reading her work is EXACTLY as painful as this little vignette suggests.

…

Only more ellipses. A LOT more. The only thing Jemisin enjoys more than oppression is ellipses.

When the personal should be political

The Christian church is now almost entirely bereft of leadership:

Calling it “pronoun hospitality,” Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear revealed on an “Ask Me Anything” episode of his podcast that he prefers to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns.

Greear said that while there is room for disagreement and Christians should disagree charitably, he sees it as a hospitable courtesy to refer to transgender people by their chosen pronouns, despite knowing that their sex does not match their descriptors.

Actually, I have no problem with this at all on the personal level. It is simply polite to address people as they prefer to be addressed, especially when they are crazy. But to take this position as a leader is simply wrong and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the leader’s duty to put himself and his personal preferences last, after the interests of the organization and his members.

Christianity has been betrayed by the Cult of Nice. And while niceties are an important aspect of civilization and correct etiquette is generally preferable to its absence, manners do not trump math, science, history, or DNA when it comes to speaking the truth about reality. The personal is not the political, which is why sometimes the latter should trump the former.

Chick-fil-A convergence confirmed

There is no longer any room for doubt. The cucking on the anti-LBGTPQ front is real and so is the first stage of the convergence of Chick-fil-A:

Chick-fil-A’s announcement that it was dumping the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which have come under attack by gay activist groups, caught Christian fans of the fast food chain by surprise. It shouldn’t have if they had been paying attention to CFA’s corporate structure.

The donations were coming out of the Chick-fil-A Foundation. The Executive Director of the CFA Foundation is Rodney D. Bullard, a former White House fellow and Assistant US Attorney. Some may have mistaken him for a conservative because he was a fellow in the Bush Administration, but he was an Obama donor, and, more recently, had donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign while at Chick-fil-A.

Like many corporations, Chick-fil-A branded its charitable giving as a form of social responsibility. Bullard became its Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility is a leftist endeavor to transform corporations into the political arms of radical causes. Like other formerly conservative corporations, Chick-fil-A had made the fundamental error of adopting the language and the infrastructure of its leftist peers. And that made what happened entirely inevitable.

In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, Bullard emphasized that the Chick-fil-A Foundation had a “higher calling than any political or cultural war.” The foundation boss was preparing the way for the shakeup that was coming in the fall. Even while he claimed that the CFA Foundation had a higher calling than a political or cultural war, he was preparing to accommodate the Left’s cultural war.

Bullard would have been seen as a safe bet. The CFA Foundation and the Christian groups it supported were so entangled that Bullard serves on the Salvation Army’s National Advisory Board and was on the National Board of Trustees of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But Bullard’s vision was not that of charity, but of corporate social responsibility. And the two things are fundamentally different.

Charity helps people. Corporate social responsibility is virtue signaling by capitalists to anti-capitalists. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility isn’t about helping people, but ticking off ideological and identity politics boxes like diversity and the environment. If people accidentally get helped in the process of helping a corporation signal its membership in the politically correct creed, that can’t be helped.

The Chick-fil-A Foundation will go on funding leftist groups like Atlanta’s Westside Future Fund. The Westside Future Fund is a project of the Atlanta Committee for Progress together with former Mayor Kasim Reed. It will just opt out of funding Christian groups whose views offend anyone on the Left…. There was also a $10,000 donation to Saris to Suits whose mission is to “advance women’s empowerment, education, gender equality, and social justice.”

There’s money for social justice, but not for the Salvation Army.

There was $25,000 for UNICEF and $75,000 for the Andrew Young Foundation. That last one isn’t a surprise. Carter’s radical UN ambassador sits on the CFA Foundation’s advisory board. $20,000 went to the Latino Leaders Network, another $20,000 to the Harvard Debate Diversity Network, $45,000 to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and $5,000 was allotted to Friends of Refugees.

Looks like I had better update Corporate Cancer sooner than planned. There is no excuse for any of this stuff. If Bullard isn’t promptly fired, then the SJW cancer will rapidly metastasize throughout the corporation.

Mister Metokur deplatformed

Patreon just deplatformed Mister Metokur in what can only be described as an epic fuckup of proportions that have seldom hitherto been seen. So much so that Mister Metokur may not even know it yet.

If anyone has his email address, send it to me. And if you are he, get in touch! Because you’re not going to believe this….

Mailvox: Apple and the debt bomb

Forget the good of society and the interests of the employees. The giant corporations aren’t even acting in the interests of their shareholders anymore, if this emailer is to be believed.

I work for a company that was involved in [REDACTED]. It struck me as strange that a company with the cash pile that Apple has – just over $100bn in their last earnings release – would be issuing debt to raise even more cash, so I looked a little deeper and the below may be something relevant to your blog given some of your recent posts on financialisation…

When Steve Jobs died in 2011 Apple didn’t have a single penny of debt, which was unique among Silicon Valley’s tech giants. That lasted not a full 2 years after his death because in April 2013 Apple conducted the largest non-bank bond issuance in history, raising $17bn in debt (as an aside, Goldman Sachs led the bond issue). The justification for this would likely seem counter-intuitive to those outside finance: Jobs’ successor Tim Cook was supposedly under pressure from investors to return some of its cash to shareholders, which meant a program of buying back shares and paying out higher dividends. However, a large portion of Apple’s then $200bn cash pile was held outside the US and if repatriated would face a 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} tax charge, so it made ‘financial sense’ to keep the cash abroad and raise debt in the US at interest rates of c.3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} instead to fund this gigantic shareholder return program. Paying out a 3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} charge on cash instead of 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} sounds good, right? Apple certainly thought so, as they continued to issue debt over the next few years.

As we know, Trump’s signature piece of legislation so far is his tax cuts bill. It slashed the rate of corporation tax payable on foreign-held cash reserves when repatriated. Interestingly, Apple duly began repatriating some of its cash held abroad in 2017. So presumably it then stopped raising more debt? Nope. Throughout 2017 and 2018 Apple issued more and more debt to fund payouts to its equity investors. This brings me back to this month’s ‘Green Bond’ issue – the largest of its kind in Europe. Putting aside the virtue signalling aspect of issuing a ‘Green’ bond (the idea is that it’s used to fund initiatives designed to reduce Apple’s carbon footprint), it appears that Apple has become addicted to debt. In short, just 8 years on from Steve Jobs’ death when they were entirely debt-free, Apple now owes around $106bn in debt and pays out around $3.5bn annually in interest payments alone.

There is literally no business case for Apple to be taking on such debt. It is simply sucking cash out of the company. It does not need to raise cash to invest in R&D, hire new staff or expand its business. If you read through the FT, Forbes etc., the best explanations are that “debt right now is cheap, so they may as well raise cash this way to pay shareholders”. Apple themselves state the reason for issuing debt is for “corporate reasons” according to their Italian CFO, i.e. nothing related to creating productive value for the firm. They now hold slightly more debt than cash – a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once debt-free and held over $200bn in cash at its peak. Even more alarmingly, Apple has issued releases saying that they intend to become a “cash neutral” company, i.e. it will pay out any excess cash to shareholders and debt holders, and given Apple’s ever-increasing debt pile it therefore looks as though the lenders will be milking the firm for years to come. The debt vampires have well and truly sunk their teeth into Apple.

There are plenty of arguments one can make on this, but one wonders whether any of this would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive and running the company.

It’s like reading about Wakanda

They’re just so advanced! Seriously, though, who reads about the convoluted maze that is Israeli politics and then concludes, “you know, the USA would just be so much better if only it had super-smart people like that running the media, the courts, and the financial system?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday, prolonging the country’s political uncertainty as it looks set to head into its third national election in a year.

Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a “witch hunt” and “political coup,” faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of bribery and a maximum 3-year term for fraud and breach of trust, according to legal experts.

The Israeli inability to form a stable government does certainly tend to confirm the DNA studies that indicate their Italian ancestry.