As you may be aware, I am unsuspended (for now) on the Twitter.
Since Substack has been good to me so far, I will continue to mainly focus here, saving Twitter for bashing the Fed, the warmongers and others in my pinned tweet, and for short, funny stuff (Notes isn’t quite the same yet).
You’ll see here that there is a paid subscriber option, which is nice because it’s a little beer money after all these years, but I still have plenty of free stuff too, so don’t get all Che Guevara on me.
Substack and Twitter are different, but I’m not.
“…the press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors, and publishers of the papers they read.”
Bernard Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy, 1963
We know without a doubt that the Federal government actively - and illegally - tries to get individuals censored or removed from social media sites.
The Biden administration is using Big Tech as its private censorship arm, and that violates what the Supreme Court, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), called an “axiomatic” principle: The government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
This should scare the hell out of you, Left and Right:
I am non-violent, so apparently I am just a Domestic Extremist (DE), for things like my "opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies," as well as "perceived government overreach."
Plus I'm not a fan of "corporate globalization." And I even support the First and Second Amendments. Really nutty stuff.
(They don’t mention that the thing they really hate is anyone who is anti-war.)
Missouri v. Biden
CISA is working with Department of Treasury to address misinformation that undermines “public confidence” in “financial services” and “financial systems.”
(CISA is the federal government's censorship hub within the DHS)
Now the U.S. Treasury Department is involved in censorship.
I wonder if making fun of Janet Yellen or Jay Powell qualifies as a threat to “public confidence” in “financial services” and “financial systems.”
Pot, meet kettle:
“Zoom executives knew about key elements of plan to censor Chinese activists”
Zoom rolled over for Chinese officials and promised to comply with Beijing’s demands to suppress speech on the platform, according to court documents…
An updated criminal complaint unsealed last month detailed the company’s efforts to comply with Beijing’s censorship demands.
Twitter and Facebook do the same thing, under pressure from U.S. officials.
Big Tech is fascist.
People on the Left should be just as angered as “conservatives” by what the FBI and the White House and National Security State in general are doing, because if you think this is only going to be used against people you disagree with, you're dangerously naïve.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
Cicero
American Officials Erase US Role in Empowering Their New Number One Enemy China
As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.
Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.
One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.
The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process.
"Whether you're Fink or Schwarzman, or Adelson or Wynn, or Ray Dalio, they're evangelical about the greatness of China because all they see is their pocketbook growing bigger because they have a special access deal with China."
Kyle Bass, 2020
Take it away, Ross Perot (9 years before China joined the WTO):
Q: Yes, I'd like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided I was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out.
Shrinkflation of the Day
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