Epstein Pedophiles Will Never Be Punished Because They're More Valuable Unpunished

Jeffrey Epstein was a fake billionaire set up by intelligence services. His private island functioned as a massive child sex trafficking ring that was used to collect blackmail on the global elite (billionaires, celebrities and politicians, etc) pic.twitter.com/P4YjQF7Kzb

— illuminatibot (@iluminatibot) February 10, 2024

warhistoryonline |  Survivorship bias

With the war claiming many U.S. aircraft, the military wanted to increase the armor protection of their bombers to increase their survivability, but they were unsure of the best places to put this armor and were frankly unqualified to find out themselves.

Illustration of hypothetical damage pattern on a WW2 bomber. (Photo Credit: Martin Grandjean [vector], McGeddon [picture], Cameron Moll [concept] CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where do you go with such a specific issue? The Statistical Research Group, of course!

The group was given the task of analyzing the damage received by Allied aircraft from enemy fire, and recommending the best way to increase their chances of survival. It was here that Wald made massive bounds in “survivorship bias.”

When bombers returned from missions, they’d often come home covered with bullet holes. However, these bullet holes were not evenly distributed around the aircraft, but were actually concentrated on the wings and fuselage, almost twice as much as places like the engines.

Why were bullets concentrating on the fuselage and wings? Were German pilots trained to aim there? Were they firing futuristic homing bullets? Military officers came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that the armor should be added in these areas, as after all, they were taking the most fire, right?

Not quite. Wald quickly realized what was happening, and the solution was simple.

Bullets holes weren’t found on areas like the engines because aircraft that had been shot here didn’t come home! Wald believed bullets were actually hitting the aircraft equally all over, but because the ones hit in the most vulnerable areas didn’t come home, the data incorrectly suggested that these areas weren’t being hit at all.

Section of Wald’s memorandum on aircraft vulnerability. (Photo Credit: Abraham Wald, Defense Technical Information Center)

The only aircraft that could be examined were those that came home — the survivors. The aircraft that were being brought down weren’t available for inspection, thus creating the survivorship bias.

The massive amount of damage on bombers’ fuselages and wings was actually evidence that these areas did not need reinforcing, as they were clearly able to take a large amount of punishment. Therefore, as Wald concluded, the armor should be placed on the areas that seemingly received the least damage.

When The "People In Charge" Have To Answer To THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE

leefang  |  As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.

Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.

Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”

Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”

“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.

Wix terminated Carey the following day.

Moshe was apparently aware of Carey’s LinkedIn comments, which also included a denunciation of the “Zionist ideology which promotes an exclusivist state,” before Ozer flagged them in the WhatsApp group. 

The interaction nonetheless reflects the heightened coordination among pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.

Following Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7, a loose network of pro-Israel investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials have stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script.

The WhatsApp group where Carey’s case came up serves as a kind of switchboard where the various independent players in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the business world. 

We have obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October, and an intricate spreadsheet where group participants request and claim tasks ranging from social media responses to IDF support shipments. Separately, we have viewed a number of video meetings charting best practices for “hasbara” – an Israeli term of art for “public diplomacy” whose detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window into Israel’s public-relations war that is not limited to the tech sector.

In addition to Moshe, the WhatsApp group includes prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.

The WhatsApp group, officially named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures, a U.S.-Israeli investment fund that calls itself a “capitalist kibbutz” -- a reference to Israel’s historically collectivist farming communities. Hermoni, the WhatsApp group’s founder, is a managing director of J-Ventures, and David, the foreign ministry official, is internally listed by J-Ventures as a member of the "PR/Political Team" that makes decisions on messaging and lobbying.

The Establishment vs. The American Liberation Movement

Newsweek  |   Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether "terrorism" is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.

"The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be," says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world's leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

In a statement to Newsweek, the FBI said: "The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI's goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI's top threat priorities." The FBI further said, "We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person's political beliefs or affiliations."

The White House declined to comment. The Trump campaign was given an opportunity to comment but did not do so.

What the FBI Data Shows

From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country," President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. "MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future," Biden said.

Biden's Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said: "The use of violence to pursue political ends is a profound threat to our public safety and national security...it is a threat to our national identity, our values, our norms, our rule of law—our democracy."

For Attorney General Merrick Garland: "Attacks by domestic terrorists are attacks on all of us collectively, aimed at rending the fabric of our democratic society and driving us apart."

Though the FBI's data shows a dip in the number of investigations since the slew of January 6 cases ended, FBI Director Christopher Wray still says that the breach of the Capitol building was "not an isolated event" and the threat is "not going away anytime soon." In a joint report to Congress this June, the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security say that "Threats from...DVEs [domestic violent extremists] have increased in the last two years, and any further increases in threats likely will correspond to potential flashpoints, such as high-profile elections and campaigns or contentious current events."

The FBI and DHS report concludes: "Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence."

The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America's right and in particular with Trump's MAGA supporters. Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report ("Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond") in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE ("anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism") from "furtherance of ideological agendas" to "furtherance of political and/or social agendas." For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

It was a subtle change, little noticed, but a gigantic departure for the Bureau. Trump and his army of supporters were acknowledged as a distinct category of domestic violent extremists, even as the FBI was saying publicly that political views were never part of its criteria to investigate or prevent domestic terrorism. Where the FBI sees threats is also plain from the way it categorizes them—a system which on the surface is designed to appear nonpartisan. This shifted subtly days after the events of January 6 when it comes to what the Bureau calls AGAAVE.

"We cannot and do not investigate ideology," a senior FBI official reassured the press after January 6. "We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security."

Country Music Industry Confused By Man Actually From Country Making Actual Music

facebook  | People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers. I don't want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don't want to play stadium shows, I don't want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they're being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.

Since going viral nine days ago, he has received over 50,000 messages from people reacting to the song. He said some messages include stories about "Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety and depression, hopelessness and the list goes on." 

Lunsford provided more details about who he exactly is... 

My legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. My grandfather was Oliver Anthony, and "Oliver Anthony Music" is a dedication not only to him, but 1930's Appalachia where he was born and raised. Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times. At this point, I'll gladly go by Oliver because everyone knows me as such. But my friends and family still call me Chris. You can decide for yourself, either is fine.

In 2010, I dropped out of high school at age 17. I have a GED from Spruce Pine, NC. I worked multiple plant jobs in Western NC, my last being at the paper mill in McDowell county. I worked 3rd shift, 6 days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell. In 2013, I had a bad fall at work and fractured my skull. It forced me to move back home to Virginia. Due to complications from the injury, it took me 6 months or so before I could work again.

From 2014 until just a few days ago, I've worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing world. My job has taken me all over Virginia and into the Carolinas, getting to know tens of thousands of other blue collar workers on job sites and in factories. Ive spent all day, everyday, for the last 10 years hearing the same story. People are SO damn tired of being neglected, divided and manipulated.

In 2019, I paid $97,500 for the property and still owe about $60,000 on it. I am living in a 27' camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off of craigslist for $750.

There's nothing special about me. I'm not a good musician, I'm not a very good person. I've spent the last 5 years struggling with mental health and using alcohol to drown it. I am sad to see the world in the state it's in, with everyone fighting with each other. I have spent many nights feeling hopeless, that the greatest country on Earth is quickly fading away.

He concludes with: 

That being said, I HATE the way the Internet has divided all of us. The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.

When is enough, enough? When are we going to fight for what is right again? MILLIONS have died protecting the liberties we have. Freedom of speech is such a precious gift. Never in world history has the world had the freedom it currently does. Don't let them take it away from you. 

Just like those once wandering in the desert, we have lost our way from God and have let false idols distract us and divide us. It's a damn shame.

Meanwhile, the political left is triggered by this song for speaking the truth. And the country music industry is "confused by man actually from the country making actual music."

Pinkertons Making A 21st Century Comeback With Impunity

 

counterpunch  |  During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

Dirty Cop Gideon Cody Raids Newspaper Causing Death Of 98 Year Old Owner...,

boing boing  |  The Marion County Record was raided by local police, who took all of its equipment and even confiscated the personal cellphones of workers there, they claim. The newspaper's co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, died within hours of the smash-and-grab, and journalistic organizations are sounding the alarm about a shocking attack on the press.

The Marion County Record's co-owner and publisher, Eric Meyer, believes Friday's raid was prompted by a story published Wednesday about a local business owner. Authorities countered they are investigating what they called "identity theft" and "unlawful acts concerning computers," according to a search warrant.

"Based on public reporting, the search warrant that has been published online, and your public statements to the press, there appears to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search —particularly when other investigative steps may have been available — and we are concerned that it may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal, state, and local law enforcement's ability to conduct newsroom searches," the letter said.

Turns out the police chief, Gideon Cody, thought that the paper was about to publish a story about him leaving his last job after allegations of sexual misconduct.

Meyer said that, before the raid, his newspaper had investigated Cody's background and his time at the Kansas City Police Department before he came to Marion. He declined to provide details of the newspaper's investigation of Cody. "I really don't think it would be advisable for me to say what it was we were investigating, other than to characterize the charges as serious….," Meyer said. He told The Star the newspaper didn't publish a story about the allegations. "We didn't publish it because we couldn't nail it down to the point that we thought it was ready for publication," he said. "He (Cody) didn't know who our sources were. He does now." Meyer said the newspaper told city leaders they had received information about Cody but could not confirm it.

Another factor in the raid appears to be the anger of a local politically-involved restauranteur:

He and his reporter Phyllis Zorn were kicked out of an August 2nd meeting at a local establishment with US Congressman Jake LaTurner (R-KS) by the City of Marion Police Chief after restaurant owner Kari Newell demanded they leave. Meyer and Zorn published a subsequent story about the hostile encounter, which infuriated Newell and prompted angry Facebook posts. 

The paper then received a tip about Newell having her license suspended in 2008 after a DUI, checked it out, decided not to publish it, and ultimately shared it with the local police because they believed it might've been shared with them as part of Newell's ongoing divorce battle. The police then told Newell what the newspaper shared, and she attended Monday's City Council meeting to make outrageous claims about the newspaper and one of the council members (who had also obtained the letter) violating her rights. She also called Meyer later that evening and erroneously accused him of identity theft. Not even four days later, police arrived at the newspaper office, Meyer's home and the council member's home with search warrants signed by a judge

 Lots of things about to be tried in this small town.

Cop City: A Timeline Of The Atlanta Way

scalawag  |  Cop City is the Atlanta ruling class' chosen solution to a set of interrelated crises produced by decades of organized abandonment in the city. As Gilmore explains, crisis means "instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists." These crises included the threat and reality of mass uprisings against police violence, extreme and racialized income inequality and displacement, corporate media narratives in the wake of the 2020 uprisings that threatened the image of the city as a safe place for capital investment and development, and a municipal secession movement that threatened to rob the city of nearly half of its tax revenue following the uprisings.

Designed and propelled by a mix of state, corporate, and nonprofit actors, Cop City would address the overlapping crises facing Atlanta in three ways. First, it would provide a material investment in police capacity on the heels of the uprisings, a project to prepare for and prevent future rebellion. Second, it would represent an ideological investment in the image of Atlanta, signaling to corporations and those attracted by the influx of tech and other high-paying jobs that Atlanta is a stable, securitized city that will protect their interests. And third, Cop City would constitute a geographical investment—one that refashions publicly-owned land in a disinvested area into something new while opening up new opportunities for development. In other words, to borrow from Gilmore, Cop City is a partially geographical solution to a set of crises facing and generated by the city—a means through which a coalition of state and corporate actors have chosen to address years of organized abandonment and its outcomes. 

When thousands of Atlantans took to the streets during the nationwide uprisings of 2020, they were responding to more than the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks. They were responding to decades of social disinvestment, displacement, and police expansion—and calling for a reversal of these dynamics.

Twenty-first-century Atlanta has featured rapid, publicly-subsidized development and gentrification, the further disintegration of the social safety net, the expansion of surveillance and policing, and rising inequality. Since 1990, the share of the city's Black population has decreased from 67 percent to 48 percent, while the median family income and the share of adults with a college degree in the city doubled. Investment firms have gobbled up the housing stock, with bulk buyers accumulating over 65,000 single-family homes throughout the Atlanta metro area in the past decade. As the city has attracted major tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Honeywell—and along with them, more middle and upper-class white people—the city has pushed its Black and working class further out of the city. Choices by policymakers have made Atlanta a lucrative place for big business, but a difficult place to live for the rest of residents. In 2022, for example, Atlanta was named by Money as the best place to live and was identified by Realtor Magazine as the top real estate market in the country. The same year, Atlanta was proclaimed the most unequal city in the country; relatedly, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the U.S.

How did we get here? Atlanta has long been home to what is known as "the Atlanta Way"—the strategic partnership between Black political leadership and white economic elites that work in service of corporations and upper-class white communities and to the detriment of lower-income Black and working-class communities. While historians such as Maurice Hobson, Adira Drake Rodriguez, and Dan Immergluck have documented the long history of the Atlanta Way throughout the 1900s, we can begin with the leadup to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as a key accelerant of the Atlanta Way. As Immergluck notes, the decisions made in preparation for the Games "effectively set the stage for long-term gentrification and exclusion in the city, focusing primarily on making the city more attractive to a more affluent set of prospective citizens."

"Surplus Humanity" Means That NiggaHertz Bout To Go Off The Charts

therealnews  |  Well actually, there’s three new books because I published The Global Police State in 2020, and this year, there are two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure? But what happened was I was writing and thinking about and speaking about this crisis from 2008 and on, and then the pandemic hit. And it became clear to me as I started researching that and engaging with other people that the pandemic has accelerated in warp speed the crisis itself, and it’s introduced a whole new set of concerns as we face this crisis of humanity. And that book also goes into considerable detail on digitalization, because the digital transformations underway are absolutely tremendous. They’re linked to everything else.

But then the companion to Global Civil War – And both of these came out in 2022 – Is Can Global Capitalism Endure?, which is really the big summation of the crisis and what we can expect in the following years and the following decades. So if it’s possible, I would love to put out a summary here of where we’re at with this crisis.

This is a crisis like never before. This is an existential crisis. It’s multidimensional. Of course, we can talk about the economic or the structural dimension, deep economic, social crisis. We’re on the verge of a world recession, but I think it’s going to be much more than that. It’s going to be another big collapse which might even exceed what we saw in 2008. But it’s also a political crisis of state legitimacy, of capitalist hegemony, of the crack up of political systems around the world. And it’s also a social crisis of what technically we can call a crisis of social reproduction. The social fabric is disintegrating everywhere. Billions of people face crises for survival and very uncertain futures. And of course, it’s also an ecological crisis, and this is what makes it existential.

I am suggesting that the 21st century is the final century for world capitalism. This system cannot reach the 22nd century. And the key question for us is, can we overthrow global capitalism before it drags down and destroys all of humanity and much of life on the planet along with it?

So let me step back and say that we can speak about three types of crises. Of course, there are periodic receptions, the mainstream goals of the business cycle that take place about once every 10 years, but we’re in something much more serious. We’re in what we can call a structural crisis, meaning that the only way out of the system is to fund it. The only way out of the crisis is to really restructure the whole system. The last big structural crisis we had was the 1970s. The system got out of that by launching capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. Prior to that, we had the big structural crisis of the 1930s, the Great Depression. System got out of that by introducing a new type of capitalism, New Deal capitalism, social democratic capitalism, what I call redistributive nation state capitalism. And before that, just to take it back once more – Because these are recurrent, they happen, these structural crises about every 40 to 50 years – Was from the late 1870s to the early 1890s. And the system got out of that by launching a new round of colonialism and imperialism.

So now, from 2008 and on, we’re in another deep structural crisis. And I know later in the interview we’ll get into that dimension, that economic structural dimension. Technically, we call it an overaccumulation crisis. But I want to say that there’s a third type of crisis, and that actually is where we’re at: a systemic crisis, which means the only way out of the crisis is to literally move beyond the system. That is, to move beyond capitalism. So when I say that we are in a systemic crisis, this can be drawn out for years, for decades. But we are in uncharted territory. This is a crisis like no other. If we want to put this in technical terms, we’re seeing the historic exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. And the system, again, won’t make it to the [22nd] century.

As you pointed out in the introduction, the ruling groups, at this point, are in a situation of permanent crisis management, permanent state of emergency. But the ruling groups are rudderless. They’re clueless. They don’t know how to resolve this crisis. And quite frankly, they cannot. They can’t. What we’ve seen is that over the past 40 years, world capitalism has been driven forward by this trickle process that I lay out in these two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?, of globalization, digitalization, and financialization. And these three processes have aggravated the crisis, really created and aggravated the crisis many times over. And just to summarize a couple other things here, what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the buildup of this structural crisis and the problem of surplus capital, meaning that corporate profits in 2021 were a record high even in the midst of us all moving down and suffering. Record high profits. So the transnational capitalist class has accumulated enormous amounts of wealth beyond what it can reinvest, hence stagnation, beyond what it can even spend.

And what this has led to is this mass of what we call – I know we’re going to get into this later in the interview – This mass of fictitious capital, meaning all of this capital around the world which is not backed by the real economy of goods and services. It’s what technically we call fiat money, this unprecedented flow of money. And it’s led to this situation where in the world today we have this mass of predatory finance capital which is simply without precedent, and it’s destabilizing the whole system.

But let me conclude this introductory summary by saying the problem of surplus capital has its flip side in surplus people, surplus humanity. The more the surplus capital, the more hundreds of millions, even billions of people become surplus humanity.

And what that means is that the ruling groups have a double challenge. Their first challenge is what do they do with all the surplus capital? How do they keep investing in making profit? Where can they unload this surplus capital and continue to accumulate? But the second big challenge, because the flip side is surplus humanity, is how do you control the mass of humanity? Because there is a global class revolt underway. That’s the title of the book, Global Civil War. After the late 20th century worldwide defeat of proletarian forces, now the mass of humanity is on the move again. There are these rebellions from below breaking out all over the world. And the ruling groups have the challenge of how to contain this actual rebellion underway and the potential for it to bring down the system from, oh, no.

Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits

levernews  |  A looming Supreme Court decision could end up making it easier for the railroad giant whose train derailed in Ohio this month to block lawsuits, including from victims of the disaster.

In the case against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former rail worker. A high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against corporations.

The lawsuit in question, filed initially in a Pennsylvania county court in 2017, deals with a state law that permits plaintiffs to file suit against any corporation registered to do business there, even if the actions that gave rise to the case occurred elsewhere.

In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent.

Oral arguments in the case were held last fall, and a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court in the coming months.

If the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws make it harder to hold companies accountable.

Limiting lawsuits is exactly what the American Association of Railroads (AAR), the industry’s primary lobbying group, wants. The organization filed a brief on the side of Norfolk Southern in the case, arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open up railroads to more litigation.

It is also apparently what the Biden administration wants — the Justice Department filed its own brief in favor of Norfolk Southern.

Should Norfolk Southern prevail, the company could use the ruling to challenge other lawsuits on the grounds that they’re filed in the wrong venue, said Scott Nelson, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which filed a brief backing the plaintiff in the Pennsylvania case.

Such a decision could affect lawsuits filed by residents exposed to hazardous chemicals as the result of accidents in other states — such as the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment disaster, which occurred five miles west of the Pennsylvania state line.

 

Precision Scheduled Railroading: A Capitalist Disaster With Consequent Mass Niggerization

NC  |  In this post, I will not cover what has been well-covered elsewhere: The derailment itself (50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those vinyl chloride), the subsquent fire, which burned for three days, the ultimate “controlled release” of the poisonous gas, the toxicity of vinyl chloride, the effects of the poison on locals, their pets, and their streams, or the arrest of the reporter who asked questions at Governor DeWine‘s presser. On the bright side, Norfolk Southern donated $25,000 to community shelters. NS is also funding a hotline to a toxicologist at an environmental consulting firm. The EPA has a timeline.

Rather, I shall begin from the very concrete (“for want of a nail…”) and move to the very abstract: From the wheel, to the truck, the cars, the firm (Norfolk Southern), and the owners.

Steel Wheels on Steel Rails

Steel wheels on steel rails inherently produce 85-99% less friction than rubber truck tires on roads; the contact point of a wheel to the rail is about the size of a dime. Hence the inherent advantage of rail over trucks for moving goods:

Compared to truck – its main competitor – train is cheaper (in the US it’s 4 cents vs 20 cents per ton-mile), more efficient (the record-breaking train was 682 cars and 4.5 miles long carrying 82,000 metric tons of ore), and more sustainable (one ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on just a single gallon of diesel fuel).

However, if you want that advantage to be real and not just theoretical, you’ve got to maintain all that steel in good working order; after all, when things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles long, they can go very, very wrong. Norfolk Southern adopted Precision Scheduled Railroading (see NC here, and alert reader Upstater, here) in 2019 (“average train speed increasing by 10%”), achieving a record operating ratio of 60.4% in 2022[3]. In so doing, it threw away the inherent advantage of rail. Specifically, in the East Palestine disaster, it did not maintain its steel wheels.

Due to NS intimidating (or corrupting) the regulators, train 32N was not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its obviously hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have affected both its speed and its route (possibly not through East Palestine). From Lever News:

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

I don’t have a documented connection to 32N’s classification and PSR, but it seems pretty obvious. Here from 49 CFR § 174.310 – “Requirements for the operation of high-hazard flammable trains”:

(2) Speed restrictions. All trains are limited to a maximum speed of 50 mph. The train is further limited to a maximum speed of 40 mph while that train travels within the limits of high-threat urban areas (HTUAs) as defined in § 1580.3 of this title, unless all tank cars containing a Class 3 flammable liquid meet or exceed the DOT Specification 117 standards, the DOT Specification 117P performance standards, or the DOT Specification 117R retrofit standards provided in part 179, subpart D of this subchapter.

No railroad company dedicated to increasing average train speed by 10% through PSR would ever want to comply with that statute (which also imposes restrictions on the routes to be followed and allowable cars).

Railroad Owners

Here are the owners of the NS:

No doubt they are very happy with the Operating Ratio that NSR achieved through NSR. 

Superbowl Pre-Game Featured Dancing Robotic Hunter-Killer Police Drones

newsweek  |  Viewers were left "creeped out" by Jason Derulo's robotic backup dancers during a pre-Super Bowl performance.

Derulo performed at the NFL's TikTok Tailgate event to get fans excited for Super Bowl LVII, but one aspect of his performance didn't have the desired effect.

Derulo was joined on stage by a number of human backup dancers, who in turn, were also joined by a collection of choreographed robotic dogs. Social media users shared their concern at the technological advancement, as some likened it to an episode of Black Mirror.

Oh god they’re normalizing robot dogs in the super bowl pre-show thing pic.twitter.com/BwqVJoefoK

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) February 12, 2023

"Okay I don't know if anyone else is watching the pre-show performance from Jason Derulo but these little dancing dog robot things are kind of creeping me out," wrote South Dakota-based TV anchor Lauren Soulek. Her sentiments were echoed far and wide across Twitter by other viewers who watched Derulo perform his song "Saturday/Sunday."

"I can't be only one little creeped out by the robot dogs in [Jason Derulo's] pregame performance," wrote user @kingmeup21. "Anyone else creeped out by the robots on the pregame stage?" asked @GinQueenRunner.

TV reporter Devo Brown was also unimpressed. "Umm Jason Derulo pre game performance...ya it was ok. However, I could do without the creepy robot dogs as backup dancers."

Some Twitter users like @JakeMGrumbach likened the animals to the "Black Mirror robot attack dogs." The Season 4 episode "Metalhead" featured faceless four-legged robots hunting down humans.

One user, however, replied that their 9-year-old loved the performance. "What [...] noo they're so cute lol," wrote @CosmicBunnyBabe responding to all of the hate aimed at the robots.

The specific designers of the robots are unconfirmed, but they look similar to the Boston Dynamics robotics that often go viral for their technological advancements. The four-legged designs were similar to their product Spot, though they normally come in yellow, and Derulo's backup dancers were sporting the color gray.

There is often a debate about these humanoid robotics. Recently, social media users debated whether a robot trained to open a door was "cool or creepy."

Briahna Joy Gray, national press secretary for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the inclusion of the dogs were an effort to help bring the technology into the mainstream. "I see the deep state is using Jason Derulo's Super Bowl performance to normalize the Boston Dynamics dogs," she wrote with a crying laughing emoji. Not buying into the hype, Twitter user @hominigritz replied with a deadpan, "Robot assassin dogs will never feel normal to me."

Derulo refers to himself as the "King of TikTok" in a number of pre-performance videos, and while the inclusion of the robotic dogs may have "creeped out" some viewers, it ensured his performance trended and was discussed across social media.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

 

The Secret Sauce Of Neoliberal Capitalism Is Public Debt Backing Private Wealth

Fin d’siecle American imperial capitalism in a nutshell: At what point do we realize that the only function of our psychopathic elites is the creation of the debt that the banks need to back all of their  notational value? The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. 

For decades by a concerted effort, financial capitalists have been undermining the security of this country, undermining democracy, dimming the light of freedom, capturing our politicians and perverting the constitution to the benefit of themselves, creating a free market (free for the rentiers instead of free from the rentiers). 

For example, our elites have created brittle companies while saying they were making companies more resilient. Leveraging profits into the service of debt to create ‘shareholder value’. Creating Just in Time supply chains that are also brittle and ripe for exploitation and manipulation in the cause of efficiency. Imposing an unjust tax revenue system that raised the cost of living and the cost of doing business for most people – relative to their income - and - which decreased taxes for exploitive financial rentierism. We have Bernie Sanders saying that there should be no billionaires…as if the legislation and tax favoritism that enables the extraction of these billions did not come from his own votes for legislation and tax laws.

Instead of America leading the world and promoting democracy and freedom by example, we have a ruling elite (yes, we elected most of these sell-outs via the heavily moneyed election process – even politicians who want others to not buy their elected office complain and beg for cash but never mention the corruption evident in our campaign finance laws or the necessity of raising so much bribe money) — this elite that feels the only way to defend and secure democracy is through financial coercion and brute force that, in fact makes us less secure and less a democracy.

Those who would give up essential liberty and embedding the desire for the basic human rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” the ideal that no one is to be ruled by another without their consent…to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.  

Deeply Offended That A 3rd World Cheese Dick Controls The POTUS

kanekoa  |   The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”

Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.

A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.

The study, which was funded to dig up the corruption of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”

Burisma Holdings changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.

Oleh Kanivets, who worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya, confirmed Kolomoysky as the owner of Burisma Holding in the 2012 report saying, “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group.”

In other words, Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings is the same Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch who also claimed the position of boss and benefactor over Volodymyr Zelensky before he became Ukraine’s president.

Kolomoysky Owns 1+1 Media Group

Kolmoysky, who currently holds a net worth of $1.8 billion, making him the 1750th richest person in the world, owns holdings in metal, petroleum, and the media sector, where he has had a long history with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

For years, Zelensky’s company produced shows for Kolmoysky’s TV network, 1+1 Media Group, one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine. Zelensky achieved national fame, portraying a president on a hit television sitcom called Servant of the People, which was broadcasted on a channel owned by Kolmoysky.

In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.

The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.

Zelensky’s political rival, President Petro Poroshenko, commented on their connection during the campaign trail, “Fate intended to put me together with Kolomoyskiy’s puppet in the second round of the elections.”

After Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoysky, who had spent the last few years living between Israel and Switzerland, returned to Ukraine to keep up his relationship with the new president, nominating over 30-lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.

The Plan To Takedown Russia Via A Zombie Ukraine Was Hatched 30 Years Ago...,

thepostil  |  “We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, January 24, 2023.

(For an unauthorised biography of Baerbock, see here).

On July 27, 1993, the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation on Defense and Military Relations, establishing a programme of defence cooperation at the Department-Ministry-level, with “substantive activities” between those offices being launched in July 1994 (Cf. Lt. Col. Frank Morgese, US-Ukraine Security Cooperation 1993-2001: A Case History). Since that date, the Ukraine has teemed with US military advisors of every stripe.

The Morgese case study is a blow-by-blow review of the US military activity in the Ukraine between 1993 and 2001, designed to set up the Ukraine for her destruction. So detailed a review, that it would swamp the layman. Accordingly, we propose another document dating from 1994, readable by the laymen amongst us, and which spells out thirty years in advance, the full-blown War Plan for a zombie Ukraine.

Its author, Barry R. Posen (Rand, CFR, MIT, Woodrow Wilson Foundation), belongs to the leather-armchair school of strategy the US so excels in: arranging for others to die for the US living standard.

For obvious reasons, only Posen’s assessment of Russian military strength is dated. The remainder of his study predicts with such ghastly exactitude both events in the Ukraine over the last 20 years and the expected, indeed hoped for, Russian response, that one readily perceives that this is no prediction, but rather a fully-formed proposal for War—complete with Posen’s dismay, very faintly-veiled, at Operation Barbarossa’s failure, and his pleasure at the “high cost” Barbarossa exacted on Russia.

To give our readers the flavour of Posen’s text, we have selected a few, notable paragraphs from this Must-Read, one which Russia surely cannot have missed. All quotations are so marked and in italics.

Imperial Storm Troopers Kicking Subjugated Ass Is All That The Empire Has Left....,

theguardian  |  It is no surprise that the pursuit and deadly beating of Tyre Nichols was set in motion by a police traffic stop.

Despite repeated criticism of this practice, and the widespread availability of body-cam and cellphone footage, the number of fatalities from such encounters shows no sign of declining.

Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.

How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?

Beginning in the 1920s, police departments experienced rapid growth because the mass uptake of car ownership called for adequate traffic enforcement. Until then, uniformed officers on wheels had mostly been chasing gangsters and robbers. Would they have the legal right to stop otherwise law-abiding motorists driving in their own private vehicles? Even without a warrant? Yes, the courts decided, because the cars were being operated on public roads.

As Sarah Seo has shown, over the ensuing decades, judges granted more and more powers to the police to stop and search vehicles. In particular, they were given the authority to do so on the mere pretext of suspecting criminal activity – in what is now known as a pretextual traffic stop. But what constitutes a “reasonable” pretext is still a legal gray area. The fourth amendment is supposed to protect us against searches and seizures that are “unreasonable”. The problem is that when fourth amendment cases are brought against police, courts and juries routinely defer to the officer’s testimony.

This judicial tilt in favor of discretionary authority inevitably led to abridgments of civil liberties, and worse.

That it would lead to racial profiling was foreordained. The ability to hit the road is often seen as an American birthright, manifest in the freedom to travel from coast to coast, unrestricted and unsurveilled. Yet the right to enjoy this liberty has never been enjoyed evenly, because of the restrictions historically placed on the movement of Black (and, in many regions, brown) people by vigilantes, police and other government agents.

Today’s warrantless traffic stops are part of the lineage of the many efforts to limit the access of people of color to the heavily mythologized freedom of the open road. So, too, the well-known perils of “driving while Black” or brown are amplified by the paramilitary technology embedded in today’s police cars. Such features include drone-equipped trunks, bumper-mounted GPS dart guns, automatic license plate readers, voice diction technology, facial and biometric recognition, thermal imaging, augmented reality eyewear, smart holsters, ShotSpotter gunfire detectors, and advanced computers and software that allow instant access to government and law enforcement databases. “Hot spot” policing requires hi-tech cars to move in formation, through targeted urban neighborhoods. In 1960, James Baldwin compared an officer “moving through Harlem” to “an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country”. Today’s saturation patrols, like Scorpion, the Memphis unit that hunted down Nichols, bear more of a resemblance to counter-insurgency missions by special operations forces.

 

Whoopi Fitna Catch Another Whooping For Taking The Name Of The Lord YOUR GOD In Vain!!!!

yahoo  |  Whoopi Goldberg is talking again about whether the Holocaust, which involved the murder of 6 million Jewish people, was racially motivated.

In a new interview with The Sunday Times of London, shared during Hanukkah, Goldberg suggested Jews are divided about whether they are a race, religion or both.

"My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race,’ " she recalled.

When The Times journalist Janice Turner mentioned racially divisive laws set by Nazis aimed at Jews, "The View" cohost insisted that the Holocaust "wasn't originally" about "racial" or "physical" attributes.

"They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision," she said.

Goldberg's new comments echo remarks she made about the Holocaust on "The View," which led to a suspension in February.

ABC News president Kim Godwin said that Goldberg would be suspended from "The View" for two weeks effective immediately for "her wrong and hurtful comments," in a statement shared with USA TODAY on Feb. 2.

“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments," Godwin added. "The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities."

Previous: Whoopi Goldberg returns to 'The View' after suspension

Goldberg posted a now-deleted statement expressing her "sincerest apologies" on Twitter on Jan. 31, after the episode aired, also echoing a statement from Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who wrote that the Holocaust "was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race."

"On today's show, I said the Holocaust 'is not about race, but about man's inhumanity to man.' I should have said it is about both," she wrote. "I stand corrected. The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I'm sorry for the hurt I have caused."

On the show the following day, she addressed the controversy again, saying she "misspoke."