Ever since I was old enough to remember, my relationship with my mother has been problematic. For most of my life, it seemed as though my Dad was raising three kids: me, my brother and her. She and her four siblings were taken from their mother when she was twelve for reasons of neglect, after their father died, and raised in the Children’s Home.
These were hard times, as they were very poor. Regardless, they all grew up to have successful lives and families. I, however, chose not to have kids, primarily due to allergies, but also because of this. If you’ve known me more than fifteen minutes, you realize something is wrong with me, emotionally.
Unencumbered with these concerns, I’ve enjoyed a gloriously happy life and still do. I’ve done a lot of cool things and hope to continue. However, due to my mother’s behavior, I was never encouraged to pursue my love and talent for writing, lest I spill the beans about her.
She is in a rest home and my brother gets regular reports about her. She has chosen to ignore his children and so they have no relationship – a condition I support.
Mother’s Day was a normal thing for us, until we entered elementary school and she chose to cuckold my father, whom I adored. He also adored her and suffered horribly at her expense until succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 52. His death hit me like a ton of bricks and took me about ten years to recover from. But I got married and we’ve had a good life since. Fortunately, I kept my old house and live in it, visiting her on weekends as we prepare to retire.
Therapy and reading lead me to understand that sociopaths are made and psychopaths are born. Mom is blameless for the circumstances she was born into, but at some point we must bear the cost of our behavior. I am glad that pop no longer suffers from his love for her, but I finally learned to stay away from toxic people.
She’d apparently built quite a playhouse for herself at the beach, after her boyfriend died, and we suspect the women had a camera placed in her home, to keep an eye on their husbands, because although nuts, she was a beautiful woman.
And that goes a long way toward explaining my problematic relationship with women. I trust none of them and have often found good reason. But because of my mom, I am psychologically incapable of being unfaithful, lest harm be done to others.
I still run across people in the grocery store whom I’ve known all my life and tell me horrible things mom said about dad and did to him. I like to think he got time off for good behavior.
During the bargaining stage of grief, I made a deal with God to see my dad again, someday. Even now, I regularly feel his presence in my life. I have no desire to see mom, as my presence causes a psychotic episode where I am elevated to the hero of every story.
It took decades before I learned from Dostoevsky that we tend to demonize those we’ve harmed, which explains the vitriol coming from our mom. Of course, by now the Brunswick County law enforcement and mental health professionals know the score. Thankfully, we live four hours away.
I am happy for those of you who are able to enjoy and remember your mothers. It just so happens that is not the case for us. Most of all, I regret the sense of neglect her grandchildren feel, for which they are blameless.
My Wife of what will be 27 years in a couple of weeks, is scheduled for breast cancer surgery within days of our wedding anniversary.
She successfully went through it with her Grandmother, Sister and Mother.
The Wife was scheduled to close her dress store, after 22 years, on Labor Day, when her lease is finally up in that Shit Hole, otherwise known as Lawndale Shopping Center. Despite pending surgery, radiation and chemo, she sees no reason to divert from the schedule.
The Wife and I have not lived together, off and on for years. It is entirely my fault, as I am clinically insane. We’ll get into that later, but I’ve shopped, cooked, done laundry and kept up the lawn all these years, as I could.
I’m gonna need a separate effort to describe my life with her cats. Currently, Sullivan and Duncan are rescue cats deemed unadoptable by the SPCA, They were traumatized by two weeks in the kennel, before she adopted them. The Wife contacted the previous owners and understands their nature.
The Wife also understands my nature, but doesn’t require me to eat canned tuna, every evening.
Before them, I spent seventeen years with a cat named after GWB, who was my intimate companion, regrettably.
So, the fact that Sully and Dunk are glad to see me, after an awful year of enduring a new HVAC system, Florida room and 6 big trees taken out, means a lot.
In the months since last Halloween, when I headbutted the manager of Hop’s at 8:30 am, because I insisted he pick up the trash, as I approached the Wife’s dress store next door, with keys in one hand and a bag of victuals in the other, not to mention the considerable pack upon my back, I’d not been back in the store.
He referred to me to the person on the phone as a faggot.
“Did you just call me a faggot?, ” I asked, incredulously.
Before the large Latino named Edgar, whom I’d known for three years, and liked until my previous altercation with an employee, two years before, had a chance to react, I headbutted him, with the glasses I’m now wearing, only to suffer a really nice blow to my left jaw.
I left that decrepit parking lot, as Edgar called the cops and the ambulance, my Wife’s employ and haven’t returned until this past Saturday, when I spent the day cleaning a couple of area rugs to go in the Florida and dining rooms.
It turns out that if you call a guy who spends every Summer in rugby shorts and Teva sandals a faggot, he gets a free head butt.
The creation of this new generation of Americans yearning for the collapse of America did not emerge over night. With the murder of John F. Kennedy, educational systems were increasingly infused with a doctrine known as Critical Theory which posited that all of history had to be interpreted through a lens of “minority groups suppressed by systemic white males” with no room for nuance, free will, or actual causal ideas…
Slowly, this perverse Marxist-Freudian worldview, sometimes dubbed “The Frankfurt School” took over the institutions of America during the Cold War, finding its loudest expression in something known as “The 1619 Project”.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project which was unveiled in June 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones and attempts to smear the entirety of American history as simply a slave-promoting fraud from the moment the first slave arrived in Jonestown in 1619…
If it were true that the creation of the American republic was just driven by a desire to protect the institution of slavery from the abolition-loving British then it should be asked: why did every American state shut down the African slave trade by 1793??”…
If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery?..
IF it were true that the 1776 revolution were driven by the intent to protect the slave economy from the freedom-loving British Empire, then why did England only ban slavery in 1807 and why did they wait until 1833 to begin extending this ban across their colonies??…
One of the most powerful anti-slavery books printed by Franklin was the influential 1737 ‘All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage’ by Benjamin Lay which argued that any Christian keeping slaves was an offense against God…
When Jefferson took control of the Presidency from 1801-1809, a major victory was won for the pro-slavery oligarchs of America who saw immense profits to be gained…
Sadly, Jefferson’s devout belief in agrarianism, hate for manufacturing, love of slavery, and British enlightenment thinking still made him an instrument for the slave power’s cancerous growth during his terms in office…
By destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century, the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufacturers which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labor. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation, and drugs…
Jackson “paid the debt” by cutting all infrastructure projects and unleashing mass speculation which resulted in a devastating 1837 bank panic that drove the nation into discord and depression. An unrepentant racist, Jackson also gave enormous assistance to the slavocracy by emptying the southern lands of Cherokee in the genocidal “Trail of Tears” and giving the land over to cotton planting oligarchs loyal only to their profits, “way of life” and the British Empire…
Between 1801 to 1840, southern cotton exports exploded from 100,000 bales/year to 1 million bales/year with 80% of the exports going to Britain…
The southern slave states grew to represent the world’s fourth biggest economy through the support of the British Empire…
Cotton exports increased to 4 million bales/year by 1860 and the slave power grew immensely under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that ensured the spread of slavery west of Mississippi…
Frederick Douglass: “If the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.”..
How devastated is Ukraine's army? Out of 12 "combat credible" brigades, or BDEs, available for Ukraine's projected "Spring Counteroffensive," only 1/4 are "generated" by Ukraine itself (3 out of 12)! 75% are "trained and equipped by US, Allied & Partner"!
‘“Why would Ukraine disappear? Because nobody needs it,” Medvedev, who now holds the position of deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, wrote in a post on the VK social network on Saturday.
The EU doesn’t need Ukraine because supporting the country amid the conflict with Russia “on the order of their American mentor, plunged the Europeans into a real financial and political hell,” he insisted. Detrimental anti-Russia sanctions, spiking inflation, high energy prices and the “decay” of businesses have already led to protests in various parts of the continent, the official pointed out.
“The prospect of decisively planting Ukrainian blood-sucking parasites on the neck of the shriveling EU” is real and, if it happens, it’s going to signal the demise of the bloc, Medvedev warned.
Kiev’s prime backer, the US, doesn’t need Ukraine either, because most ordinary Americans have no idea where it’s located and consider it “some abstract part of Russia,” the post read. They wonder “why the establishment in the US isn’t trying to deal with inflation and [the lack of] jobs or emergencies in their home states, but is instead occupied with this 404 country,” the former president wrote, referring to the “404 error” protocol in network communications.’
“Netflix lost 700,000 subscribers after pulling out of Russia last April. The first customer decline in more than a decade saw the streaming platform’s shares plummeting by 37%, which led to a massive loss of $40 billion in market capitalization.
Disney estimated in May that it lost $195 million just from shutting down its Disney Channel in Russia.”
‘A senior Ukrainian official told the Post that the leak had caused anger in Kiev, as the files provided insight into information it wanted to keep secret from Russia – namely “vulnerabilities related to ammunition shortages and other battlefield data.”
Meanwhile, a European intelligence official reportedly expressed concerns that due to the disclosures, the US could cut back on intelligence sharing with allies. While some of the documents made public were supposed to be shielded from foreign nationals, others had been cleared for transfer to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, composed of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The wide-ranging batch of sensitive documents, which made media headlines this week, provides an assessment on Russian and Ukrainian battle readiness and casualties, timetables for training and equipment deliveries, as well as tactical information on the conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
However, the true scale of the leak remains unclear, as on Friday the New York Times reported that a new trove of secretive American documents had appeared online, this time covering not only the Ukraine conflict, but also China, the Middle East and terrorism.’
‘The new trove of documents was spotted on Twitter and other platforms on Friday afternoon, in what one senior US intelligence official described as a “nightmare” for Western security services, according to the NYT. While the full scope of the leak has yet to be determined and the authenticity of the files remains unverified, the outlet suggested the latest breach could include “more than 100 documents” in total.
Similar to another classified disclosure first reported on Thursday, some of the files detail intelligence related to the conflict in Ukraine. One “top secret” document shows a US assessment of the situation in the city of Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine), which has largely come under Moscow’s control after months of bitter fighting.’
IF only FVEY documents were released, we’d have a much wider net. But, the Noforn marking limits it to a U.S. person. TS focuses the universe down even further. Taking photographs of the documents may eliminate the ability to determine the specific printer. The printer code is embedded in the paper. I am inclined to believe that the leaker is military associated vice IC. Most IC personnel wouldn’t give these documents the time of day. Too power pointy! Also the PPT is very, very busy, so I would opine it was probably produced at a higher level staff instead of a maneuver element. (I know – DUH.) Probably not DIA. It doesn’t talk about enemy plans, capabilities etc. That leaves us with the Joint Staff and EUCOM. My guess is EUCOM. Just a guess. Someone who is closer to the slaughter would be more motivated to do something about it…
The key issue is who had access? The evidence points at someone in the U.S. military or intelligence community. It is important to understand that SECRET documents are not posted on TOP SECRET systems. TS material is on a separate platform. The most likely scenario (but not the only one) is that a person or persons printed these documents in one of the U.S. classified facilities and removed them surreptitiously.
The American financial and economic system is at risk of failing catastrophically. And Ukraine is losing the fight with Russia. Unless Americans demand new directions in foreign policy now, as they did in 1968, they will surrender control over their lives and incomes to the Washington elite’s orgy of spending on a dangerous proxy war against Russia and the arbitrary exercise of state power against American citizens at home…
Washington’s ruling class has ignored the top priority in all matters of national strategy: first and foremost, the enduring imperative to preserve American national power…
American workers lost ground as U.S. multinational corporations cut their workforces and sent jobs to China and other parts of Asia. Virtually all the material benefits associated with economic growth in the last fifty years went to Americans in the upper half of the income distribution…
Is the new, budding Cold War paradigm simply a clever way to guarantee a steady stream of funding for Defense and lucrative donations for the Hill? Are the new threats abroad also designed to silence dissident voices at home and command domestic obedience from the American People?
“Our form of government has no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith”, Dwight Eisenhower said in 1952…
What took the mainstream’s place was the antagonistic conviction that liberalism “should not need a religious ‘ghost’ in the machine at all: There should just be liberal culture” – alone and on its own…
Woke defies nomenclature by treating politics as a matter of personal moral hygiene: It isn’t something you ‘do’; it is what you ‘are’. You think ‘right thoughts’ and utter ‘right speak’. Persuasion and compromise reflect moral weakness in this vision. Yes, it is cultural revolution…
Once you see these (oppressive) forces in operation, adherents believed, you can’t ‘unsee’ them; you are, well, “awake”, and you should refuse any analysis or explanation that doesn’t acknowledge and condemn how they have permeated western societies…
Despite the odds, the Traditionalists’ moral sensibility survived its initial collapse, and is resuscitating in new form, even as mainline formal religiosity has waned.
In the dead of night last October a Ukrainian special forces team boarded a 40ft armoured patrol boat, taking up positions at its three heavy machineguns and Mk19 automatic grenade launcher.
They were among nearly 600 elite troops scattered along the north bank of the Dnipro River, which carves through Zaporizhzhia region. The teams boarded more than 30 vessels bristling with weapons, formidable gifts from friends in the West.
Their orders: to launch an assault to recapture the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant from the Russians on the opposite bank…
“The idea was that this would be an infantry-only battle. They wouldn’t be able to use artillery against us, as this is a nuclear plant,” the officer said…
“It was impossible for such a large group to penetrate,” the special forces officer said. “With smaller groups, yes, we were advancing, penetrating and fighting them. But with a large group it was impossible, as they were lurking everywhere.”
As Ross Barkin put it in a 2021 New York Magazineprofile: “Few journalists, in polarized 2021, divide the New York-D.C. nexus more. Taibbi is viewed in more liberal quarters with increasing suspicion bordering on outright disdain, a remarkable development for a magazine star once considered Rolling Stone’s successor to Hunter S. Thompson.”..
This Democratic Party response — this hate-Republicans-at-all-costs messaging (while party leaders themselves cut deals with them) — is not going to work. It won’t blast them past their electoral opponents at near the speed it ought to, given their opponent’s obvious and fatal flaws…
Sanders would have beaten Trump soundly, had he had the chance, in the 2016 race. All the momentum was his, and he won almost every head-to-head primary contest in states with open, same-day primary voting.
At least 400 Palestinians were arrested on Wednesday and remain in Israeli custody, according to Palestinian officials. They are being held at a police station in Atarot in occupied East Jerusalem.
“We were conducting itikaf [Muslim religious worship] at Al-Aqsa because it’s Ramadan,” said Bakr Owais, a 24-year-old student who was detained. “The army broke the upper windows of the mosque and began throwing stun grenades at us …They made us lay on the ground and they hand cuffed us one by one and took us all out. They kept swearing at us during this time. It was very barbaric.”
Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, did not respond when we asked what measures it takes to protect data privacy, or how it handles personally identifiable information that may be scraped into its training sets. So we did the next best thing and asked ChatGPT itself. It told us that it is “programmed to follow ethical and legal standards that protect users’ privacy and personal information” and that it doesn’t “have access to personal information unless it is provided to me.”
Cone Health has formed a strategic partnership with a medical software startup that is using AI and behavioral science to tapp into the psyche of patients with chronic conditions, helping them overcome barriers on their health journeys.
Lirio, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, will work with Cone to develop new behavior interventions for the digital health company’s platform, Precision Nudging. Lirio’s goal is to close gaps in care and promote condition management, deploying personalized interventions to each patient.
A few years ago, Cone Health blew $12M on a cell phone app to help people with diabetes. Plane tickets to Knoxville are probably cheaper than those to Austin.
The US Air Force (USAF) has canceled its Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) project, the latest blow to America’s floundering hypersonic weapons program as China and Russia develop a crucial strategic advantage.
Last month, The Warzone reported that the USAF plans to scrap the Lockheed Martin ARRW in favor of Raytheon’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) due to a string of ARRW test failures…
Late last month, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on the failed second flight test of the ARRW. It said that although the ARRW was successfully launched from a B-52H bomber off the coast of southern California, with its warhead successfully separating from its booster and continuing flight, the data link transmitting in-flight telemetry information failed.
The 2024 presidential campaign technically began months ago with the first announced candidates. Yet April 4 will be “Super Tuesday” for America’s first carceral presidential campaign, with the arrest and arraignment of Donald Trump. With the exception of the socialist (and incarcerated) Eugene Debs in 1920, we have not faced the prospect of a president who could be elected with both a term of office and a term of imprisonment.
The New York indictment of Trump has been widely criticized as politically motivated and legally flawed. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg boasted during his 2021 campaign about being best suited to go after Trump, and he is making good on his boast with a highly dubious bootstrapped legal theory.
The New York indictment will face considerable challenges. Those challenges will likely take some time to resolve, and if this case follows the customary schedule of criminal matters, it still may be pending when Americans go to the polls to select the next president in 2024.
In addition, a Georgia grand jury reportedly has finished its work on other charges against Trump. Weeks ago, Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of that special grand jury, gave a series of bizarre giggling interviews about nailing Trump. It is a mystery, given Kohrs’ apparent confirmation of pending charges, why Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has held back on an indictment.
Although stronger than the Manhattan case, the Georgia case has its own problems but could make it to trial because those problems are largely fact questions generally left to jurors. But it too would likely be pending by Election Day 2024.
The most serious threat among the potential cases is being developed by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. His investigation of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot is unlikely to result in charges and, if it does, is unlikely to survive challenges on First Amendment grounds. His investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents controversy presents a far more established — and, frankly, easier — route for prosecution. From its earliest filings, the Justice Department maintained there is evidence of obstruction and false statements — claims that it could use to distinguish any prosecution from the unlawful possession of classified material by President Joe Biden or former Vice President Mike Pence.
Millions could lose access to their current coverage — either because they don’t qualify for Medicaid anymore, or even if they do continue to qualify, because the administrative hurdles to renew their coverage are so high. In particular, people with disabilities, people who are not native English speakers and people who changed addresses during the pandemic may struggle to wade through the red tape
In “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022,” the Chinese government said the United States “has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, including Cuba since 1962, Iran since 1979, Syria since 2011 and Afghanistan in recent years.”
Calling the United States out as the most prolific enforcer of unilateral sanctions in the world, the report said Washington pursues power politics in the international community, frequently uses force, provokes proxy wars, and is a saboteur of world peace.
The report added that under the guise of anti-terrorism activities, the Americans have killed some 929,000 civilians and displaced some 38 million others in 85 countries.
Between 2017 and 2020, the United States launched 23 “proxy wars” in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region, the report stated.
The RESTRICT Act makes no mention of TikTok or ByteDance. The Chinese government is mentioned only once in the bill, when it is designated as a “foreign adversary” along with five other governments. What the bill does do is give the Secretary of Commerce power to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate … any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property” that the Secretary of Commerce determines “poses an undue or unacceptable risk” in a laundry list of areas. Among those areas are “coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary that are designed to undermine democratic processes and institutions or steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States.” So the US could shut down an American social media company based on the Secretary of Commerce’s determination that a website, while not actually doing anything to weaken America, poses an unacceptable risk that it will?
Andrei Martyanov on the murder of Russian blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in St. Petersburg:
Before lamenting “bad optics” and jumping to the conclusions, including knee jerk reaction–how predictable–and calls for “flattening Kiev”, how about letting FSB deal with it first. Secondly, and most important, before anyone starts comparing late Daria Dugina to this “blogger”, they better get acquainted with his biography, including why he ended up in prison for robbery. But for people in the West who sympathize with early LDNR militias it must be understood that apart from heroism and dedication, corruption, money laundering and other unsightly things have been blooming in LDNR too. With the start of SMO, a huge number of military “correspondents” and bloggers, many of them originally from new Russia’s oblasts, started to dominate “narratives”, especially through TG channels.
What many forget that among those “patriots”, many, including Tatarsky, have been involved in large money collection operations “for the front”, and that once Russia started to tighten the noose around those “operations” the “feeding base” for this type of “activists” shrank dramatically. I omit here the fact that most of those “bloggers” and “voenkors” have zero military education and many are what Saker called them a “sixth column”, and many are straight defeatists or, like low lives Sladkov or Podolyaka, are completely off the rails. Tatarsky fits perfectly this very same group, which has some serious issues between them in terms of monetary issues–competition. So, keep this fact in mind and, please, stop idealizing LDNR, where even today the remnants of the “old guard” are being removed due to their corruption and inability to get incorporated into Russia’s administrative structures–a “heritage” of Ukraine. There is a reason why I do not read TG channels and bloggers, unless people ask to react, except for official TGs (e.g. Ministry of Foreign Affairs), or get information from people whom I know as extremely reliable, honest and professional.
In 1999, the Russian government forces started an anti-terrorist campaign in Chechnya, in response to the invasion of Dagestan by Chechen-based Islamic forces.[50] By early 2000 Russia almost completely destroyed the city of Grozny and succeeded in putting Chechnya under direct control of Moscow by late April.[50]
Since the end of the Second Chechen War in May 2000, low-level insurgency has continued, particularly in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. Russian security forces have succeeded in eliminating some of their leaders, such as Shamil Basayev, who was killed on July 10, 2006.[51] After Basayev’s death, Dokka Umarov took the leadership of the rebel forces in North Caucasus until his death, owing to poisoning, in 2013.[52]
I created my first Google Blogger account in 2005. Since then, I’ve gone on to disastrously host a series of WordPress blogs, as I entertained the good citizens of Greensboro by terrorizing its leaders.
In 2010, I was fortunate to be there when the Tea Party was born. the Guilford County chapter was started by two women: the wife of a strip club owner and the wife of a convicted ephebophile. Let’s just say the jokes wrote themselves.
I ended up getting sued and thrown out of the house. I removed said blog from the internet, satisfied the plaintiffs, with the help of a NYC pro bono First Amendment attorney, and they went away.
The settlement got good press, and I was semi-famous for a time. I got particularly good at picking apart the logic of the Christofascists, with the help of books on authoritarianism and Chris Hedges’ American Fascists.
In 2014, Hillary Clinton broke Ukraine and I immediately fell for the Russians, as they offered humanitarian assistance to Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, which would be shelled every night for the next eight years.
In 2016, I attempted to understand the populist appeal of Trump and watched as he drive those on the Left insane. To this day, listening to the man makes my skin crawl. Half the shit he says in his rallies isn’t true. But his appeal is undeniable.
What I wouldn’t give for a legit classic liberal Left, right now. The Russiagate propaganda totally captured the media and Obama stole the 2020 Presidential Election. You will never make me believe otherwise. I was there and I saw it.
To get it done, the media ignored the Hunter Biden laptop, and the FBI policed social media. So, now his father is a mockery of the Presidency, and Obama appointees are a laughing stock on immigration and foreign policy.
Russia finally invaded Ukraine last year, and has wiped the floor with NATO, so far. The Reagan/Gorbachev love affair precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union and brought ten years of oligarchs debauching the Russian econmony, before Putin arrived and began to put things right.
Nearly eighty years of nuclear threat inflation has resulted in Russia having the finest military in the world. Meanwhile, neoliberalism has destroyed the West to the extent NATO can no longer field a military force. The knuckleheads running foreign policy invented rules-based orders to circumvent international law and economic sanctions as a form of warfare.
The pilfering of our schools resulted in an ignorant society, addicted to materialism, hopelessly in debt and powerless to affect change. Woke DEI policies drove the Left insane, such that they are unreachable with appeals to compassion and common sense.
We’ve created a generation of people who will never own a home because they must compete with pension fund managers like BlackRock, which supp at the 0% Fed Discount Window. Worse, landlords took a beating during COVID and renters will never get current.
The media has been co-opted to the point that truth tellers are either banned or shut down. Responsible journalists like Chris Hedges struggle to find a place to share their essential journalism. Whereas there is a market for conservatives like Jordan Peterson, pure liberals like Hedges seem doomed to silence.
Of course, Peterson embraced the insane Zionists. Hedges never will. Neither will I.
Funded by over $173 billion in deposits (of which $151.5 billion are uninsured), has long been viewed as the bank at the heart of the US startup industry due to its singular focus on venture-capital firms. In many ways it echoes the issues we saw at Silvergate, which banked crypto firms almost exclusively…
Several prominent venture capitalists – such as Peter Thiel – advised their tech startups to withdraw money from Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday…
Why are VC icons ganging up and Lehmaning SVB? If your business model relied on QE wouldn’t you try to trigger the next QE too…
*Y COMBINATOR SAID TO ADVISE COMPANIES TO LIMIT SVB EXPOSURE…
JP Morgan Chase & Co sought to convince some SVB customers to move their funds Thursday by touting the safety of their assets…
And while we wait to see if Dimon’s participation in the Epstein scandal will now fade from media coverage, and whether Powell will launch QE, we know one thing for sure: JPM was a clear and immediate benefactor of SIVB’s collapse because in a day when everything crashed, JPM stock was one of the handful that were up.’
Top comment:
“The thing about the internet . . Its instant . . News of Bank runs is EVERYWHERE. It could be a very very black Monday.”
“Moody’s reduced SVB’s credit rating, from A minus to BBB+, which created an influx of customers who wanted to withdraw their money from the bank…
Over 500 Israeli hi-tech companies are the bank’s customers and it is the second most popular bank among Israeli hi-techists after Bank Leumi. Paradoxically, there were Israeli hi-tech companies that transferred funds to SVB following the social protest and now they fear that these funds are at risk.”
Of SIVB’s $173 billion of customer deposits at the end of 2022, $152 billion were uninsured (i.e., over the $250,000 FDIC insurance threshold) and only $4.8 billion were fully insured…
The entire banking system suddenly becomes reduced to a game of chicken as follows: Fed/regulators won’t backstop deposits today and won’t admit a bank crisis is emerging, but if a bank crisis emerges and there is a flight of deposits on Monday morning, they will move.”
As JPM’s Michael Cembalest says “It’s fair to ask about the underwriting discipline of VC firms that put most of their liquidity in a single bank with this kind of risk profile. At the end of 2022, SIVB only offered 0.60% more on deposits than its peers as compensation for the risks illustrated below; in 2021 this premium was 0.04%”.
While Silicon Valley Bank careened toward its spectacular collapse, the bank’s head of risk management for Europe, Africa and the Middle East devoted a chunk of her time to various LGBTQ+ programs.
Meanwhile, SVB went without a chief risk officer (CRO) from April 2022 to January 2023, the Daily Mail reports, as the bank apparently had little urgency to replace Laura Izurieta before finally tapping Kim Olson earlier this year.
SVB had a relatively small, highly committed group of depositors. About 37,000 customers accounted for nearly $157 billion or 74% of the bank’s assets with an average account size of over $4 million….at the end of 2022, 87% of the bank’s $173 billion in deposits were uninsured…
A Silicon Valley Bank branch in Manhattan today called the cops on tech investors trying to pull their cash out as a run on the bank forced regulators to seize its assets…
The CEO of a Boston-based health and wellness company said she has been unable to log into her Silicon Valley Bank account, where she has at least $10 million in deposits…
SVB was incredibly integrated into the lives of many founders. Not just their startup’s bank & lender, but also provided personal mortgages and other financial services.”
From the comments:
“They bought a lot of MBS at the worst possible time…
Signature is one of the main banks to the cryptocurrency industry. As of Dec. 31, Signature had $110.4 billion in total assets and $88.6 billion in total deposits.
This is a regulatory failure of historic proportions by both the Fed and Treasury. Instead of preventing billions in losses, the Fed was worrying about board diversity and Yellen was flying to Ukraine. Everyone should be sacked immediately.
Banks which are sitting on some $620 billion in unrealized losses on all securities (both Available for Sale and Held to Maturity) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
It’s not just the regional US banks which we warned were about to be wiped out: big international banks are also getting crushed with Italian bank giant UniCredit shares halted, while Credit Suisse shares are not only 10% lower to new all time lows, but its Credit Default Swaps just hit a record wide…
2Y TSY yields have plummeted an insane 50bps… suffering the biggest 2-day drop since Black Monday in October 1987!..
The Fed is making it easier for banks to access the Fed’s discount window in order to turn assets that have quickly depreciated due to rising rates into cash without having to take the large losses the Silicon Valley Bank suffered last week. Essentially this would allow banks to obtain liquidity over the next year without selling assets…
SVB’s woes are a combination of one of the largest hiking cycles in history, one of the most inverted curves in history, one of the biggest bubbles in tech in history bursting, and the runaway growth of private capital.
050917-N-5313A-036 Atlantic Ocean (Sept 17, 2005) – The amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) conducts steering manuevers in the Atlantic Ocean. Kearsarge is on a scheduled deployment. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman (Air Warfare) Sarah E. Ard (RELEASED) (Released by USS Kearsarge PAO)
Kiev had nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, the Ukrainian defense minister has said in response to media reports blaming last September’s explosions in the Baltic Sea on a “pro-Ukraine” group.
According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were detonated in late September, rendering the key European energy infrastructure inoperable.
This marks a return to the Baltic Sea for elements of the ARG-MEU team, including Gunston Hall and Kearsarge, as both ships participated in the Estonian-led exercise Siil 22 in May and the annual joint, multinational exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS), the premier maritime-focused exercise in the Baltic region, in June.
The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), flagship of the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), and Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship USS Gunston Hall (LSD 44) arrived in Gdynia and Gdansk, Poland respectively, for scheduled port visits, Sept. 14, 2022.
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.
Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring (MIREM) — all under the direction of U.S. Sixth Fleet Task Force 68.
“On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians…
The bombardment dramatically intensified as the week went on until it reached a peak on February 19, when a total of 2,026 artillery strikes were recorded. Keep in mind, the Ukrainian Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact that were occupied by other Ukrainians.”
Scott Ritter: “Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a ‘special military operation’…. under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed 14,000 people.… Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led ‘special military operation.'”
On December 15, 2021 Russia sent an ultimatum to the US and NATO. Two days later it was published, and the Russian Foreign Office invited the West to sign up and to agree to it, or at least begin discussing it. Not only was it not signed, it wasn’t even properly acknowledged. It was blatantly ignored, as though it were a demand from a teenager to an adult.
The United States of America and the Russian Federation… have agreed as follows:
Article 1
The Parties shall cooperate on the basis of principles of indivisible, equal and undiminished security and to these ends:
shall not undertake actions nor participate in or support activities that affect the security of the other Party;
shall not implement security measures adopted by each Party individually or in the framework of an international organization, military alliance or coalition that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.
Article 2
The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Article 5
The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the Parties.
The Parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other Party.
The Parties shall maintain dialogue and cooperate to improve mechanisms to prevent dangerous military activities on and over the high seas, including agreeing on the maximum approach distance between warships and aircraft.
Article 6
The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.
Article 7
The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories. The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories.
The Parties shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons. The Parties shall not conduct exercises or training for general-purpose forces, that include scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons.
Article 8
The Treaty shall enter into force from the date of receipt of the last written notification on the completion by the Parties of their domestic procedures necessary for its entry into force.
From the cited Mike Whitney:
Zelensky actually agreed to neutrality in negotiations with Moscow in March, but Washington prevented the Ukrainian president from going through with the deal which means that the Biden administration is largely responsible for the ongoing conflict…
Angela Merkel revealed in her interview on December 7, 2022. Merkel said, “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also gave time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014 and 2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
Putin said, “One day Russia will have to reach an agreement with Ukraine, but Germany and France betrayed Russia, and now they are helping Ukraine with weapons.”
Bad Republic 