Category: Uncategorized

You have the power

 But you have to actually use it to accomplish anything:

Amid a boycott in response to its politically motivated decision to drop Mike Lindell’s MyPillow products, shares of Bed Bath & Beyond plunged 36.4{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} at the close of trading Thursday. The retail chain suffered its biggest one-day loss since going public in June 1992.

The consumer organization Media Action Network launched the boycott of Bed, Bath & Beyond after the retail chain stopped selling Lindell’s products due to his support of President Trump’s claim that fraud affected the outcome of the 2020 election.

Americans could break enemies like the Devil Mouse within a month if they would simply stop justifying their continued support of those who hate them.

Il Cane Grande’s on it

If you wrote a negative review of Robinhood, and you were truly one of their customers, file an arbitration against them. If they had 100,000 filed in one day, they’d tank. They require arbitration. They wont allow group actions. So, let them get consumed by piranhas!

– Marc Randazza

SSH goes mainstream

Or perhaps viral would be a more accurate description. Regardless, the SSH has made its initial appearance in the mainstream media. It won’t be the last one. 

People are mocking a resurfaced classification of men known as the ‘sigma male’ — a ‘lone wolf’ type that is equal to the alpha in the oppressive male hierarchy. 
Twitter user @LilySimpson1312 thrust the lesser-known term into the spotlight this week when they shared photos of socio-sexual hierarchy charts, a video about how ‘to become’ a sigma male, and the self-help book ‘The Sigma Male.’
‘What the f**k is going on with men,’ they captioned the viral post, which has been retweeted more than 25,000 times, prompting critics to tear apart the term and the alpha/beta mythology as a whole. 
The characterization of men into two groups, the dominant alpha and the submissive beta, has been around for decades. The idea was derived from the now-debunked theory that wolf packs are ruled by aggressive leaders know as alphas. 
The socio-sexual hierarchy categorizing men as either alphas, sigmas, betas, deltas, gammas, or omegas was coined by Alt-right writer Theodore Robert Beale, who uses the pseudonym Vox Day. 
The limiting system ranks men based on their social position with other males and their ability to attract women. The alphas and sigmas are considered equal as top dogs, with the latter being seen as someone who sits outside the hierarchy by choice. 

I’m amused by how they’re not only doing the real name thing, but the seldom-seen real FULL name thing. This is a media technique that is utilized to convey distrust in the individual named. You’ll notice that they don’t say anything about my being a publisher, a game designer, or having 8 million pageviews per month on my personal blog. But it is interesting that they would choose to actually identify me for once, although I suspect that is because, unlike the Religion Doesn’t Cause War, Atheism is Autism, and the Magic Dirt memes, they don’t understand how legitimate and useful the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy actually is.

Since the theme is mockery, I suppose it was deemed acceptable to identify me for once, although the author seems a bit confused as to whether the concept discredits the creator or the creator discredits the concept. Of course, what everyone seems to be missing is that the concepts are not derived from biologists playing wolf-watcher, that’s merely where the labels originated. No doubt the next criticism will be that the Greek letters aren’t in alphabetical order.

The SSH is actually a predictive analytical model based on observable male behavioral patterns. Its applicability to intersexual relations is actually a minor subset of its utility, even though that aspect gets all of the attention for the obvious reasons. It’s extremely useful for everything from team sports to business management. One reason that our projects have a much higher rate of success than normal is that we go to great lengths to ensure that SSH conflicts are minimized when we put teams together.

No more than one Alpha per team, find a reliable Bravo or two to back him up, target and guide the Deltas, focus the Omegas on their areas of expert autism, minimize the Gammas, and leave the Sigmas alone to freestyle without interrupting the team.

Office Space beautifully explicated the Sigma’s attitude to the social hierarchy.

Breaking Robinhood

The GameStop investors will be able to go all Sheriff of Nottingham and easily bury Robinhood in arbitration if they wish, as it has the same insanely stupid ban on class arbitration incorporated into its terms of use that many tech firms do. Note that JAMS used to wisely mandate a class arbitration clause in its rules, but removed it in 2005 because the idiot tech corporations didn’t want to risk losing in arbitration to all their users if they did something shady. Instead, the technocracy forced a system on everyone that can quite literally bankrupt them in order to save a little on potential litigation fees. The stupidity is epic-class.

38. Arbitration.

A. This Agreement contains a pre-dispute arbitration clause. By signing an arbitration agreement, the parties agree as follows: (1) All parties to this Agreement are giving up the right to sue each other in court, including the right to a trial by jury, except as provided by the rules of the arbitration forum in which a claim is filed. (2) Arbitration awards are generally final and binding; a party’s ability to have a court reverse or modify an arbitration award is very limited. (3) The ability of the parties to obtain documents, witness statements and other discovery is generally more limited in arbitration than in court proceedings. (4) The arbitrators do not have to explain the reason(s) for their award unless, in an eligible case, a joint request for an explained decision has been submitted by all parties to the panel at least 20 days prior to the first scheduled hearing date. (5) The panel of arbitrators will typically include a minority of arbitrators who were or are affiliated with the securities industry. (6) The rules of some arbitration forums may impose time limits for bringing a claim in arbitration. In some cases, a claim that is ineligible for arbitration may be brought in court. (7) The rules of the arbitration forum in which the claim is filed, and any amendments thereto, shall be incorporated into this Agreement. B. Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this Agreement, any other agreement between Me and Robinhood, any Account(s) established hereunder, any transaction therein, shall be settled by arbitration in accordance with the rules of FINRA Dispute Resolution, Inc. (“FINRA DR”). I agree to arbitrate any controversy or claim before FINRA DR in the State of California. C. This agreement to arbitrate constitutes a waiver of the right to seek a judicial forum unless such a waiver would be void under the federal securities laws. If I am a foreign national, non-resident alien, or if I do not reside in the United States, I agree to waive My right to file an action against Robinhood in any foreign venue. D. No person shall bring a putative or certified class action to arbitration, nor seek to enforce any pre-dispute arbitration agreement against any person who has initiated in court a putative class action; or who is a member of a putative class who has not opted out of the class with respect to any claims encompassed by the putative class action until: (1) the class certification is denied; or (2) the class is decertified; or (3) the customer is excluded from the class by the court. Such forbearance to enforce an agreement to arbitrate shall not constitute a waiver of any rights under this Agreement except to the extent stated herein.

Two observations:

  • Unlike AAA, FINRA has no rule allowing an arbitrator to declare an arbitration to be “frivolous”, and furthermore, the right to file even frivolous arbitrations is protected by the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court rulings Steelworkers and Schein.
  • Robinhood’s terms of use specify California law. CCP Section 1284.3 prevents any consumer from being charged anything for an arbitration proceeding beyond the initial filing fee. “No neutral arbitrator or private arbitration company shall administer a consumer arbitration under any agreement or rule requiring that a consumer who is a party to the arbitration pay the fees and costs incurred by an opposing party if the consumer does not prevail in the arbitration, including, but not limited to, the fees and costs of the arbitrator, provider organization, attorney, or witnesses.”
If this sounds like a foreign language to you, I strongly suggest reading Corporate Cancer, particularly chapters 8-10.

The Ride Never Ends.

Burning Wall Street

Thanks to the GameStop defense, hedge fund short sellers have lost nearly 27x more in the last month alone than all short sellers combined did in the average month last year.

Wall Street investors are sitting on estimated year-to-date losses of $70.87 billion on their bets against U.S. companies following massive surges in some of the heavily shorted shares, data from analytics firm Ortex showed on Thursday.

Some shares such as in video game retailer GameStop have jumped more than 1,000{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in the past week, driven primarily by retail investors trading on online apps and sharing tips on social media messaging boards

Such gains have forced short-sellers to buy back stock to cover potential losses in what is dubbed a short-squeeze. Moves were exacerbated by more retail investors piling into the stock.

Ortex data showed that as of Wednesday, there were loss-making short positions on more than 5,000 U.S. firms.

Shorting GameStop may have cost $1.03 billion year-to-date, Ortex estimates, while those shorting Bed, Bath & Beyond were looking at a $600 million loss.

Its short interest data, sourced from submissions by agent lenders, prime brokers, and broker-dealers, showed that around 62 million GameStop shares with a value of $2.2 billion were out on loan as of Wednesday.

To put this in perspective, the average monthly profit/loss for short sellers in 2020 was $2.7 billion. Now you know why Wall Street is shrieking like little girls for the government to stop the public from being able to do what they do.

One thing is clear from all of this. The America public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They’d rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.

Never trust a ticket-taker

An insider explains why Robinhood is selling out its users:

I work for Robinhood. Don’t kill me.

Low-level, technical shit, comp sciences major, not finance side. Guess what we overhead today?

Vladimir, yes founder Vladimir, and the C-Suite, received calls from Sequoia Capital and the White House that pressured into closing trading on GME etc. I guarantee you the same took place at E-Trade and the others who closed trading.

File reports on the SEC page. If I wasn’t scared to be out of work in a pandemic I’d quit. I’m disgusted. We all need to rise up, this is as bad as it gets when we talk about how the rich get one set of rules, and the rest of us get screwed over, and over, and over again left to bail them out and pick up the tab for their trillion dollar tax breaks. We need to pile pressure on every government and financial institution involved in this travesty of justice.

I’m taking a massive career risk even posting here but fuck these motherfuckers.

So much for the “rule of law”. It’s not communistic in the slightest to observe that the corporations are now obviously a significant part of the problem.

The tiger approaches

The elections are fake. The stock markets are fake. The money is fake. The courts are fake. The police are frauds. The military is gay, trans, and fabulous. It appears that Tiger Time is rapidly approaching the once-great United States empire.

The Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50 trillion from the middle and working classes. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor and the lower 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the workforce to the New Nobility and their technocrat lackeys who own the vast majority of the capital: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

Why has the Great American Middle Class meekly accepted their new role as debt-serfs and powerless peasants in a Neofeudal Economy ruled by the New Nobility of Big Tech / monopolies / cartels / financiers? The basic answer is the New Nobility’s PR has been so persuasive and ubiquitous: soaring inequality and Neofeudalism has nothing to do with us, it’s just the natural result of technology and globalization–forces nobody can resist. Sorry about your debt-serfdom, but hey, your student loan payment is overdue, so it’s the rack for you.

The recent Foreign Affairs article referenced here last week Monopoly Versus Democracy describes the net result of the economic propaganda that the stripmining of the working and middle classes was ordained and irresistible: Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. That’s how far we’ve fallen:

“As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, the robber barons shared with today’s high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society.”

The bottom 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized: debt has been substituted for capital. Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits from the rising tide of debt that’s been keeping the bottom 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} afloat for the past 20 years.

Not only that, but the robber barons were, for the most part, Americans themselves. They felt some sense of obligation to their fellow Americans, and knew that an amount of restraint and noblesse oblige was required. The lawless and mostly foreign elite that presently rules the USA feels no sense of obligation to the American people and therefore knows no restraints. The situation somehow calls to mind a little Chinese poem written by Zhang Xianzhong, who lived in similarly evil times. Consider the history of the man known as the Yellow Tiger.

Towards the end the Ming dynasty, drought, famines and epidemics broke out in various part of China. In the late 1620s, peasants revolted in Shaanxi, resisting attempts by the Ming government to collect grains and taxes. They coalesced into rebel armies called “roving bandits” (liúkòu 流寇) because of their highly mobile nature, and spread into other parts of China. Chang escaped from the army, joined the rebel forces in Mizhi County in 1630, and established himself as a rebel leader, styling himself Bada Wang (八大王, Eighth Great King). His mobile forces would conduct raids along the western edge of Shaanxi, plundering swiftly and hiding out in the hills. Later he moved into other provinces, moving from place to place raiding towns and cities. He was defeated at various times by the Ming forces; Chang would also surrender when it was expedient for him to do so, for example in 1631 and 1638, but would then later regroup and resume rebellion.

In 1635 he joined a larger confederation of bandits that included another rebel leader, Li Zicheng (Li would later capture Beijing and end the Ming rule there). They devastated Henan and pushed into Anhui. After they had burnt the Ming ancestral temple at Zhongdu (Fengyang) in Anhui and ravaged the area, the rebel armies broke up and Chang headed to Hubei. In 1637, joined by other rebels and with an army now reaching a size of 300,000 men, he again pushed into Anhui, then to Jiangsu, and almost down to Nanjing. But he was defeated there and he retreated back to Hubei. In 1638, he surrendered to Ming supreme commander Xiong Wencan (熊文燦) and was allowed to serve as a regional Ming commander. However, he reneged on the agreement in 1639 and rebelled, and later defeated the Ming forces led by the Ming general Zuo Liangyu (左良玉). In 1640, he suffered defeats at the hand of Zuo and had to flee with few followers into the mountains of Eastern Sichuan. In 1641 he emerged from Sichuan and attacked Xiangyang, capturing and executing the imperial prince there.

In 1643, he took Macheng in Hubei, and his army swelled to some 57,000 after incorporating the city’s rebels.[12] He then captured the provincial capital of Wuchang, killed the imperial prince there, and proclaimed himself “Xi Wang” (King of the West).

Zhang was apparently a man of literary gifts as well as martial ones. He left words engraved on a stele that are among the most haunting ever written.

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture Man.

Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Lawyers are stupid

Not all of them, of course. But as a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that even highly successful lawyers are considerably less intelligent than successful entrepreneurs and even modestly accomplished computer programmers. What compounds their mediocrity is the fact that they are trained to not think, but rather, to do the legal equivalent of “skim until offended”. As one lawyer explained it to me, in law school they are trained to look for “the magic sentence” in the case law upon which the argument depends, then regurgitate it for gold stars and favorable decisions. At no point is any contextual thinking or holistic understanding taught, required, or encouraged.

This is why Patrick Byrne’s account of encountering Rudy Giuliani and his team rings absolutely true, as well as why we were correct to have no faith whatsoever in Team Giuliani’s legal approach to attacking the 2020 election fraud.

 I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math PhD Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories of porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. Given that he sat grunting stoically as I spoke, it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. Yet after only 10 minutes I saw Rudy checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat talking. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention to me, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.

Eventually I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for, well, one’s 76 year old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts and typing some people back…. Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office…. Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to decide, someone rushed in with something unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.

Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up desks in bankers’ boxes.  I was perplexed, and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall, when I heard Rudy’s familiar voice saying, “…don’t understand a fucking thing this guy’s telling me…” drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.

Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani  is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.

Another added, but with graphs and data.  

Another piped up, And bulletpoints. The Mayor likes bulletpoints!

But no more than one page! Repeated the first.

Insulted at Mediocrity and the 20-something staffers who were telling me how to write, and giving such asinine advice in the process, I promised I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I asked them for one favor: any requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my cyber-team, and that way we would have some structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs, so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.

Then I left and drove back to DC. By late that evening, I had learned that there were three different open requests from three people on Rudy’s team to various of my colleagues within the Bad News Bears. One was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type… And the shit-show began.

I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in and out).  But the atmosphere was one of despair, there was zero leadership shown, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.

From occasional contacts with several of those solid staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had had happened that day just before I arrived. Rudy had declaimed that, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had declared it was not going to be the strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates due process and Equal Protection of the 14 Amendment.” So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a huge blow-up between Rudy and Sidney in front of everyone, with Rudy ending by shouting at Sidney Powell and sending her away, in front of an office of dozens of people. Declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his lawyers to work on their procedural filings.

I don’t think Giuliani was taking a dive. I don’t think he ever had the ability to do any better. My impression is that his legal campaign was little more than a feint to keep the media distracted. Only time will tell. 

Based Deutschland

From SB on SocialGalactic: A German company stands firmly against the poison shots:

The management of a German construction company sent out a message to employees as follows:

“If an employee of our company is vaccinated, then his dismissal will be announced immediately! Whoever introduces unreliable vaccines, condemned by many experts around the world, jeopardizes the stability of our work processes at the enterprise! We are responsible for all employees, as well as reliable sales, timely wages and so on! We refuse to experiment with the effectiveness of our company in favor of the pharmaceutical industry! Our employees will be instructed and warned about it!

We are one team!

We have a task, the task of our company is to sustainably support the family, including our employees, and lead them through the economic crisis! Anyone who does not understand this should look for work elsewhere!

Thanks for attention!

As with the GameStop uprising, economic pressure is finally beginning to work against the Fake Elite. People are finally beginning to see that all that “free speech” and “open borders” and “free trade” and “equal opportunity” and “financial capitalism” nonsense was nothing but a Promethean attack on the foundations of the Christian West.

The secret of the elites

“The secret of the elites is that they’re not all that smart so they need the deck stacked to continue the illusion that they are elite at all.”

– Rob Peffer

He’s absolutely right. That’s why the fake elite devotes 100 percent of their collective effort to trying to maintain the illusion and keep the deck stacked. It’s also why nationalism and populism terrify them. They know their power and influence could be broken literally overnight by a sufficiently angry populace.

This is no longer about ideology. All the idearrhea about “liberal” and “conservative” and “communism” and “objectivism” is a veil to obscure the realities of the stacked deck. It’s about lawless rule by a small, mostly foreign and self-appointed fake elite. They all have imposter syndrome because they are all imposters.