Tag: media

A 40-year Wall Street veteran imparts the most important lessons he has learned from swimming in the swamp of fake capitalist corruption:

The same players who were bailed out then went back to what they do best. Too big to fail is now bigger, but with one crucial difference – the concentration of toxic risk remains in fewer hands and is enabled by Washington’s pay-to-play swamp. As corporate debt hits new all-time highs, balance sheets remain riddled with accounting fraud and enforcement hits all-time lows; we will soon see who is naked and it won’t be pretty.

Last autumn, I warned investors that Germany’s economy was falling off a cliff and was either in a recession or would be very soon. I cautioned that Italy’s debt is a huge problem and other member states and the rest of the world are not far behind Germany. Now in March, you can expect and will need to prepare for a full-blown economic depression.

Banks, politicians and governments will scapegoat Covid-19 to shift the blame for over 30 years of fiscal profligacy, loose monetary policies, fraud, and the lack of any proper regulatory enforcement away from themselves and onto anything or anyone else. Eventually, taxes will skyrocket to pay for these opaque bailouts, reckless spending policies, and record low interest rates during the past three decades.

Covid-19 presents an easy way to assign blame while forcing through “emergency legislation” allowing big government to implement 1984-style draconian social controls that will impinge and dismantle personal freedoms, liberties and democratic principles as they fleece taxpayers – again. If you think the 2008 recession and bailouts were bad, wait until you see how the greatest economic depression in history plays out.

This bubble has only begun to pop, and there are many more shoes to drop from this centipede before prices hit bottom. The downside will be significantly worse than the upside. Until leverage, valuations and corporate debt return to reasonable levels, stay clear. When these events do happen, we will see once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to create wealth. 

The two most important lessons I learned from my 40 years in international financial markets, lessons that can also be applied to politics and to life in general, are to never make any decision based on emotion or ideology and to never, ever trust the news. Today’s media are exponentially worse than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. They no longer provide news. What they provide are stories that are around 80 percent ideology and opinion,10 percent lies and spin, and 10 percent fact.

Keep your powder dry. Exploit the opportunities as they present themselves. And always, Always, ALWAYS critically examine every piece of so-called “news” with a highly skeptical eye.

The Roger Stone trial demonstrates how the Prometheans pervert the U.S. justice system:

Juror 1261, we now know, was Tomeka Hart. Her identity would have remained publicly unknown except for a public statement she made after the Department of Justice (DOJ) rescinded its initial sentencing recommendation for Trump confidant Roger Stone. In the midst of the firestorm of allegations of political interference, Hart disclosed that she was the foreperson on the Stone jury and gave a full-throated defense of the trial prosecutors: “It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors.”

That statement led many people to Google her name, and what they found was a litany of postings not only hostile to President Trump and his administration but also specifically commenting on Stone and his arrest — before she ever appeared for jury duty…. Hart is a Democratic activist and critic of the Trump administration. She was the Memphis City Schools board president. Not surprisingly, given her political background (including a run for Congress), Hart has been vocal in public on her views of Trump and his associates.

She referred to the President with a hashtag of “klanpresident” and spoke out against “Trump and the white supremacist racists.” She posted about how she and others protested outside a Trump hotel and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame!” When profanities were projected on the Trump hotel, she exclaimed on Jan. 13, 2018, “Gotta love it.” On March 24, 2019, she shared a Facebook post — no longer public — while calling attention to “the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle.”

More worrisome are her direct references to Stone, including a retweeted post, in January 2019, from Bakari Sellers, again raising racist associations and stating that “Roger Stone has y’all talking about reviewing use of force guidelines.” She also described Trump supporters such as Stone as racists and Putin cronies.

In addition to her prior statements about Trump, his associates and this case, Hart is a lawyer. That only magnifies concerns that any bias on her part may have had a more pronounced influence on her fellow jurors.

In fact, except for a jury pool composed entirely of House impeachment managers, Hart would appear to be a standout for a peremptory challenge by the defense team over bias. That is why the most surprising aspect of this story is not the review of her public statements but the review of her examination before trial. The brief examination in the voir dire hearing shows that Hart did disclose her ties to the Democratic Party. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson asked if Hart’s political history would prevent her from being fair, and Hart assured her it would not.

While Hart’s answers on the jury questionnaire remain sealed, Judge Jackson noted, “You’ve also indicated a fair amount of paying attention to news and social media, including about political things?” Hart does not volunteer that she did far more than “pay attention to news and social media” and was, in fact, an anti-Trump protester and social media critic.

The exposure of a jury plant demonstrates the same technique used in the media narrative, in town meetings, in political caucuses, in science propaganda, and every other type of collective activity in which the illusion of a majority consensus is required or deemed desirable.

As expected, YouTube followed up its demonetization of Nick Fuentes with a banning of his channel:

My Youtube channel has been wrongly terminated today for an alleged violation of “hate speech” policy. This is the end result of a concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers, and silicon valley censors to silence my show and the movement it has inspired.

This is why we build our own platforms. But never forget that it’s not our job to provide a home for everyone outside the mainstream. We will always help our friends and allies, but the enemies of our enemies are not necessarily either.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Fuentes actually has the mettle his followers believe he does or if he will simply accept his banishment as meekly as the average conservative. I would tend to assume the latter, but perhaps he will exceed our expectations.

No matter how outlandish the conspiracy theory, it is almost always more accurate than the mainstream news reporting of the official story:

The real owners of Crypto installed ‘backdoor vulnerabilities’ in its products which allowed the US and West Germany to eavesdrop on communications — from enemies and allies alike — which the senders believed had been successfully encrypted. We’re talking here about  top secret communications between leading government officials, spies, diplomats and military figures.

Just imagine that back in the 1970s or 80s you had claimed that the Crypto was a CIA front. You’d have been dismissed as a ‘crank conspiracy theorist, ’and/or ‘totally paranoid‘ by the gatekeepers of that time. But the rumours were true. Once again a ‘conspiracy theory’ has turned out  to be not as barmy as once depicted. Truth again proved to be stranger than fiction.

How much intelligence was gathered via Crypto is quite staggering. As RT has reported: “Throughout the 1980s — around 40{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of all government transmissions analysed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) ran through Crypto‘s devices.”

As I have previously observed, the one and only version of events you can be absolutely certain is not true is whatever the official story happens to be.

It’s not as if anyone will shed any tears for the McClatchy media empire. But it is worth noting that the process that is now all-but-complete with regards to the media is now taking place in the real estate market:

McClatchy Co. filed for bankruptcy Thursday, a move that will end family control of America’s second largest local news company and hand it to creditors who have expressed support for independent journalism.

The Chapter 11 filing will allow McClatchy to restructure its debts and, it hopes, shed much of its pension obligations. Under a plan outlined in its filing to a federal bankruptcy court, about 60 percent of its debt would be eliminated as the news organization tries to reposition for a digital future.

The likely new owners, if the court accepts the plan, would be led by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC. They would operate McClatchy as a privately held company. More than 7 million shares of both publicly available and protected family-owned stock would be canceled.

The point that all the conservative and proudly “responsible” debtors have stubbornly failed to understand is that without a periodic debt jubilee, either a) the creditors will eventually own everything or b) the entire economic system will collapse. It is a mathematical certainty, given the way that debt pushes the demand curve up.

Cry all you want about how some irresponsible people may have gotten a better deal than you. Of course they will. That’s not the point. The point is whether you want to be doomed to life in a) the ashes or b) as a slave in your own lands or not.

Because those are the options.

The annoying thing is that no matter how many times people with experience like Stefan Molyneux, Mike Cernovich, Scott Adams and I point this out, almost everyone contacted by the media for one reason or another will excitedly take the bait, then complain that they were – surprise surprise – misrepresented, taken out of context, and attacked.

Whoever could have seen this ratings collapse coming?

Doctor Who is the need of a defibrillator as the show continues to have one foot in the grave as its latest episode is the worst viewed in 31 years of its 57-year history.

Sunday’s episode, “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror,” was only watched by 4.04 million viewers in the UK.

We have to go way back to Season 23 of September, 1986 to see a lesser amount of viewers as “The Mysterious Planet” Part Four only had 3.7 million viewers tuning in.

Sunday’s episode of Doctor Who is also the eighth least-watched episode of the entire run which kicked off in 1963, and the lowest watched of the new series.

The numbers for Doctor Who have gone down consistently with each new episode as the series has lost near one million viewers since the debut episode for Season 12 on New Year’s Day.

As usual, everyone and everything will be blamed except the true culprit: the corporate cancer of convergence. Note that the usual drop of 20 percent in the first year has been achieved.

The media is already reeling. There is no reason not to pile on and add to their financial struggles when they attack, either directly or indirectly through weaponized defamation.

At the end of 2019, McClatchy, the media conglomerate that owns the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, announced it would stop printing Saturday editions of the newspaper and run extended “weekend editions” instead.

As it turns out, beginning April 26, those newspapers will also no longer be printed in Miami-Dade County or by Miami Herald employees. Herald publisher and executive editor Aminda “Mindy” Marqués González last night announced in a companywide memo that the Herald is closing its Doral-based production plant and will instead print six days’ worth of newspapers at the Sun Sentinel’s press in Deerfield Beach. The Herald built its Doral printing plant eight years ago after McClatchy sold the daily’s longtime headquarters overlooking Biscayne Bay to the Malaysian gambling company Genting, which then demolished the building.

Yesterday’s decision also means the Herald will cut a staggering 70 jobs — 34 full-time and 36 part-time printing press and packaging employees.

With a very few exceptions, such as the Jeff Bezos blog aka Washington Post, the media cannot afford to fight. This is the perfect time to counterattack.

The Q phenomenon is going mainstream:

Who is Q? What is Q? And, perhaps most importantly, why is Q?  Q and the ever-growing worldwide movement it’s inspired have been the objects of fascination, mockery and hatred, but of surprisingly little serious analysis.

Q first appeared in October 2017 on an anonymous online forum called 4Chan, posting messages that implied top-clearance knowledge of upcoming events. More than 3,000 messages later, Q has created a disturbing, multi-faceted portrait of a global crime syndicate that operates with impunity. Q’s followers in the QAnon community faithfully analyze every detail of Q’s drops, which are compiled here and here.

The mainstream media has published hundreds of articles attacking Q as an insane rightwing conspiracy, particularly after President Trump seemed to publicly confirm his connection to it.  At a North Carolina rally in 2019, Trump made a point of drawing attention to a baby wearing a onesie with a big Q.

In recent weeks, the tempo of Trump’s spotlighting of Q has accelerated, with the President retweeting Q followers twenty times in one day. Trump has featured Q fans in his ads and deployed one of Q’s signature phrases (“These people are sick”) at his rallies. The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has also retweeted Q followers.

Q has noted that the media never asks Trump the obvious question: What do you think of Q? To Q followers, the reason they don’t ask is obvious. They’re afraid of the answer.

In the meantime, Q’s influence continues to spread.

If you’re still blackpilling Q at this point, you might as well start wearing an “I’m with Her” Clinton 2016 shirt.

Only a complete bowtie tries to run the “I’m JUST concerned that it could be a TRAP! What if someone makes us look FOOLISH?”

Just shut up already.

People often ask me to work with, or publish, or link to, or otherwise support various individuals who are more or less on the ideological Right. And, of course, that has been something that we’ve tried repeatedly to do since we founded Castalia House. The problem, as we have learned over time, is that most people are simply too stupid, too short-sighted, too narcissistic, too independent, or too dishonest to be worth assisting.

The Z-man is not entirely devoid of ideas, and I have occasionally linked to his more insightful posts, but the following comment should suffice to demonstrate why he’s simply not someone that anyone can take seriously as an intellectual or even a commentator. Keep in mind that this is a comment on a post dedicated to declaring that he is the one pure soul worthy of support in a dissident swamp of grifters.

thezman
There was never a lawsuit against Indiegogo. Court filings are public records. For starters, in such a dispute the attorney will look at the contract you signed. He will see there is a dispute resolution process and ask you if you initiated that process. If not, then you will need to do that first. Once that is done and you are not satisfied, he will tell you that the next step is arbitration. Getting a judge to set aside an arbitration clause in a contract is extremely difficult and mostly pointless.

The bottom line is Indiegogo canceled the project, gave the people their money back and that was it. There was no lawsuit. No class action. No arbitration. Nothing.

The combination of ignorance, stupidity, envy, and gamma posturing would be difficult to top without resorting to the visual medium of YouTube. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a clueless mainstream political reporter. Nevertheless, don’t correct him. Don’t set the record straight. Don’t provide him with any proof of what actually happened at all – and I know that literally hundreds of you have it in your possession. Just let his statement stand for the record.

And keep it in mind the next time you ask me why I regard right-wing mediocrities like the Z-man with undisguised contempt and refuse to have anything to do with his kind. Many, if not most, of the so-called “grifters” he decries are not only smarter and harder-working than he is, they are more accomplished and far more worthy of your trust.

Meanwhile, it’s good to see that others on the Right are discovering lawfare can be an effective way to strike back at the weaponized media:

Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist who hosts a website that has published the writings of white supremacists, is suing The New York Times for $5 million for labeling him an “open white nationalist” in an article last year.

The characterization of Brimelow that triggered the libel lawsuit appeared in a Jan. 15, 2019 article by Times political reporter Trip Gabriel that offered a chronology of racist and inflammatory comments by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)….

“We stand by the story and will vigorously defend,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said.

One of these days, we’re going to have to put together a class action against Wikipedia and other media sites used to seed the never-ending slander and libel. This is a good time to go after the media because they no longer have the resources to defend themselves as both their circulations and their revenues are declining.

UPDATE: This response by a Z-maniac is more than a little amusing, considering our complete lack of interest in what any of them happen to think about me or anything else:

This is how a cult leader reassures the faithful: Denigrate the faithless to instill self-righteous superiority within the cult so that they dismiss any counterclaims without thought. Real evidence is no longer necessary. A measured response is to link to evidence or acknowledge that a sealed arbitration leaves room for skepticism.

Notice how the gammas always love to theorize and posture in the complete absence of information. They project their own lack of knowledge as well as their inability to not blurt out everything they know to everyone else. The idea that someone who genuinely possesses the conclusive evidence might not care what they believe is simply beyond their imagination. Sometimes the cult’s superiority is real. And as cults go, it’s quite affordable.

I just thought this was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to everyone who is in the know that an occasional anklebiter is both a fool and a liar. There is no need to prove it to those who are dumb enough to take him seriously; they will simply move the goalposts anyhow. If they mattered, we’d prove it to them. But they don’t.