[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
Even if we can survive the manichean devils (interpersonal and intergroup trickery of other peoples), our survival will ultimately depend upon our capacity to solve Augustinian devils (natural challenges and affliction) - e.g., the ability to track asteroids and devise a way to intervene with them when they would otherwise crash into the earth and cause mass extinction as in the case of the dinosaurs.
No, an Asteroid Won’t Hit Earth on Sept. 9 and Here’s Why
Astronomers ruled out the asteroid’s chance of impact with Earth after they were not able to spot it within the area of its predicted collision course, making it the first time an asteroid impact was ruled out based on “non-detection.”
The asteroid, named 2006 QV89, was discovered on Aug. 29, 2006 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona. It measures between 70 to 160 feet (20 to 50 meters) in diameter, or somewhere between the length of a bowling alley and the width of a football field. Observations suggested that it had a one-in-7,000 chance of impacting Earth on Sept. 9, 2019.
After its discovery in 20016, the asteroid was observed for 10 days before disappearing from the astronomers’ sight, according to a statement by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). As the date for the potential collision approached, astronomers could only predict the location of the asteroid with very low accuracy, which made it difficult to locate with a telescope.
In order to confirm whether or not the asteroid was still headed for collision with Earth, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) and ESO took a different approach. Rather than trying to observe the asteroid itself, astronomers observed where it should have been if it were, in fact, heading toward Earth.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they captured deep images of the area where it would have been if it were on track to collide with our planet, ESO officials said in the statement. Following observations of the area on July 4-5, astronomers could not find the asteroid and therefore concluded that it would not be impacting Earth.
Even if the asteroid is smaller than initially believed, it would have been spotted by the telescope, ESO said in the statement. And if it were any smaller than that — too small for the telescope to detect — it would pose no threat to Earth, as it would burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.
I don’t even like throwing a bone to the Jewish ass-kisser Trump, or candidates from either party (Democrats either, of course) of America’s utterly baked-in and controlled liberal system - wherein “conservatives” only conserve liberalism. However, even if Trump was forced to address this issue to push back against (((Social Media Bias))) in favor of the Democrats in the coming election, and even if the examples of censorship are not those with platforms that I agree with (for example, a pro-life platform excluded from Twitter), the issue and the fact of censorship and “popularity” being manipulated, brought out into open awareness and discussion from underneath the gaslighting by (((social media))) is helpful.
As ethnonationalists, you may not like the examples of people and issues censored.
On the other hand, just as raising the issue of censorship itself provides some daylight for our concerns, so too the intersectionality that a David Horowitz experiences in his example of social media censorship provides some grounds for us to seize upon. Yes, Horowitz has concerns for intersectionality against (((his interests))) in mind, ultimately (no small matter, he’s not “one of us and on our side”); nevertheless, he’s the one who spilled significant beans on the who, what, how of Cultural Marxism/Political Correctness that allowed William Lind to articulate the matter so well for purposes of our ethnonationalist critique and increased freedom from its voodoo.
Trump hosts conservative social media personalities at White House
Fox News
President Trump’s White House summit aims to air our grievances over political bias on social media platforms. Invitees are mostly comprised of prominent, and sometimes controversial, online right-wing pundits. #FoxNewsLive #FoxNews
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 10 July 2019 13:19.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
Posted on July 10, 2019 by Ellen Brown
How to Pay for It All: An Option the Candidates Missed
The Democratic Party has clearly swung to the progressive left, with candidates in the first round of presidential debates coming up with one program after another to help the poor, the disadvantaged and the struggling middle class. Proposals ranged from a Universal Basic Income to Medicare for All to a Green New Deal to student debt forgiveness and free college tuition. The problem, as Stuart Varney observed on FOX Business, was that no one had a viable way to pay for it all without raising taxes or taking from other programs, a hard sell to voters. If robbing Peter to pay Paul is the only alternative, the proposals will go the way of Trump’s trillion dollar infrastructure bill for lack of funding.
Fortunately there is another alternative, one that no one seems to be talking about – at least no one on the presidential candidates’ stage. In Japan, it is a hot topic; and in China, it is evidently taken for granted: the government can generate the money it needs simply by creating it on the books of its own banks. Leaders in China and Japan recognize that stimulating the economy is not a zero-sum game in which funds are just shuffled from one pot to another. To grow the economy and increase GDP, demand (money) must go up along with supply. New money needs to be added to the system; and that is what China and Japan have been doing, very successfully.
Before the 2008-09 global banking crisis, China’s GDP increased by an average of 10% per year for 30 years. The money supply increased right along with it, created on the books of its state-owned banks. Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been following suit, with massive economic stimulus funded by correspondingly massive purchases of the government’s debt by its central bank, using money simply created with computer keystrokes.
All of this has occurred without driving up prices, the dire result predicted by US economists who subscribe to classical monetarist theory. In the 20 years from 1998 to 2018, China’s M2 money supply grew from just over 10 trillion yuan to 180 trillion yuan ($11.6T), an 18-fold increase. Yet it closed 2018 with a consumer inflation rate that was under 2%. Price stability has been maintained because China’s Gross Domestic Product has grown at nearly the same fast clip, by a factor of 13 over 20 years.
In Japan, the massive stimulus programs called “Abenomics” have been funded through its central bank. The Bank of Japan has now “monetized” nearly 50% of the government’s debt, turning it into new money by purchasing it with yen created on the bank’s books. If the US Fed did that, it would own $11 trillion in US government bonds, four times what it holds now. Yet Japan’s M2 money supply has not even doubled in 20 years, while the US money supply has grown by 300%; and Japan’s inflation rate remains stubbornly below the BOJ’s 2% target. Abe’s stimulus programs have not driven up prices. In fact deflation remains a greater concern than inflation in Japan, despite unprecedented debt monetization by its central bank.
China’s Economy: A Giant Ponzi Scheme or a New Economic Model?
Critics have long called China’s economy a Ponzi scheme, doomed to collapse in the end; and for 40 years China has continued to prove the critics wrong. According to a June 2019 report by the Congressional Research Service:
Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” Such growth has enabled China, on average, to double its GDP every eight years and helped raise an estimated 800 million people out of poverty. China has become the world’s largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), manufacturer, merchandise trader, and holder of foreign exchange reserves.
Xi urged Trump to ease North Korea sanctions in ‘timely’ fashion
Chinese President Xi Jinping urged US President Donald Trump to “show flexibility” towards North Korea, including the “timely” easing of sanctions, at the G20 summit last week, China’s foreign minister said Tuesday.
Xi visited North Korea prior to meeting Trump at the G20 in Japan on Saturday, and analysts had said the Chinese leader could use the trip as leverage in his trade war talks with the US leader.
Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the next day at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on Tuesday that Xi “pushed for the US to show flexibility and meet the DPRK (North Korea) halfway, including the timely easing of sanctions against the DPRK and finding a solution to each other’s concerns through dialogue”.
China and North Korea have worked to improve relations in the past year after they deteriorated as Beijing backed a series of UN sanctions against its Cold War-era ally over its nuclear activities. But Beijing has sought to keep Pyongyang within its sphere of influence and Kim met Xi four times in China in the past four years.
A week before the G20 summit in Osaka, Xi became the first Chinese leader to visit North Korea in 14 years in a trip analysts said was meant to showcase China’s influence over the North prior to trade talks with the US.
- ‘Astounding imagination’ -
Trump became the first US president to step on North Korean soil after he and Kim shook hands during their impromptu meeting over the weekend.
Wang said China welcomes the meeting and said the situation on the peninsula now has a “rare opportunity for peace”.
“We hope that the political will of the leaders of the two countries can be translated into substantive progress in dialogue and negotiation as soon as possible,” he said.
In Seoul, South Korean President Moon Jae-in hailed as the result of “astounding imagination”.
It was a “de-facto declaration of an end to hostile relations and the beginning of a full-fledged era of peace”, said Moon, who has long promoted engagement with Pyongyang.
The South Korean leader was instrumental in brokering the landmark summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore last year which produced only a vaguely worded pledge about denuclearisation.
After their latest meeting, Trump said he and Kim agreed to start working-level talks on a denuclearisation deal, ending a standstill in place since the two leaders’ second summit, in Hanoi in late February, ended without an agreement.
Talks in Vietnam had collapsed after the pair failed to reach an accord over sanctions relief and what the North was willing to give in return.
Since then, contact between the two sides had been minimal—with Pyongyang issuing frequent criticisms of the US position—but the two leaders exchanged a series of letters before Trump issued his offer to meet at the DMZ.
Upon his return from the Korean Peninsula, Trump has faced attacked from critics in the US, who said the US leader was normalising a nuclear-armed Pyongyang.
While the eternal Kraut snubs Majorityrights for not promoting Hitler, while it tries to gaslight and smear me with anything it can for that, it can’t help itself with its mechanistic rule following ad absurdem, whether Hitler or Merkel, whether the final solution to the J.Q. that somehow includes wiping-out half of Europe, including Germany as well, or raising a million Euro with its Jewish friends for a sister ship of its NGO’s to haul genetic replacement into Europe….
Cooperation with the DNA Nations to preserve our species? No, we wouldn’t do that. You don’t love Hitler and Jesus. You are not some scientistic rule following dolt.
But help like this? Sure: The NGO Racket…
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
More than €1m raised for rescue ship captain detained in Italy
Two online campaigns to help the German captain of a rescue ship under house arrest in Italy have between them raised more than €1m.
Carola Rackete’s arrest on Saturday, after she forced her way into port in Lampedusa carrying migrants and refugees she had rescued off Libya, prompted a fundraising appeal by two prominent German TV stars that by Tuesday morning had raised €917,195 from more than 33,000 donors.
A second campaign, started by an Italian anti-fascist group on Facebook, had raised a further €433,993 by Tuesday, well over the page’s stated goal of €349,000, bringing the total raised in support of Rackete to more than €1.3m.
“The wave of solidarity is wonderful,” Ruben Neugebauer, a spokesman for Rackete’s migrant rescue NGO Sea-Watch, told Spiegel Online. “We certainly also need the money.”
The funds will go towards paying Rackete’s legal fees if charges are brought against her. Otherwise, Neugebauer said, the NGO would need about €1m to buy and equip a new ship if Rackete’s vessel, Sea-Watch-3, remained out of action.
The German and French governments have ramped up their criticism of Italy over its handling of the case. France accused Italy on Tuesday of acting hysterically over immigration and failing to live up to its duties.
“I think that basically the Italian government has not been up to the task,” a government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, told France’s BFM-TV. “Mr Matteo Salvini’s behaviour has not been acceptable as far as I am concerned. This is a painful subject, a complex subject which the EU and France have previously been in solidarity with Italy over.”
Salvini, who heads the ... League party, Italy’s largest political force, responded: “My behaviour regarding immigration is unacceptable? The French government should stop with these insults and open its ports.”
German politicians have also criticised Italy’s treatment of Rackete, in the first signs of a public pushback against Italy’s criminalisation of migrant rescue vessels in the Mediterranean.
“Italy isn’t any old nation,” said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in an unusually candid interview with the broadcaster ZDF aired on Sunday evening. “Italy is in the middle of the European Union, a founding state of the European Union. And therefore we should be able to expect a nation such as Italy to deal with a case like this in a different way.”
The foreign minister, Heiko Maas, went a step further, demanding that the Italian authorities set Rackete free. “From our perspective, only the release of Carola Rackete can come at the end of a procedure based on the rule of law,” Maas tweeted on Monday. “I will make that clear to Italy once again.”
Germany has said it will keep up diplomatic pressure on Italy over the case.
Facebook May Pose a Greater Danger Than Wall Street
Payments can happen cheaply and easily without banks or credit card companies, as has already been demonstrated—not in the United States but in China. Unlike in the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments, in China most money flows through mobile phones nearly for free. In 2018 these cashless payments totaled a whopping $41.5 trillion; and 90% were through Alipay and WeChat Pay, a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking. According to a 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:
The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.
That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.
But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger) in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.
Nouriel Roubini
✔
@Nouriel
It will start as a private, permissioned, not-trustless, centralized oligopolistic members-only club. So much for calling it “blockchain”. Like all “enterprise DLT” it is blockchain in name only and an monopoly to extract massive seignorage from billions of users. A monopoly scam https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/1140620454262124545 …
CoinDesk
✔
@coindesk
Noted economist Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) has said Facebook’s soon-to-be unveiled cryptocurrency is not really crypto or blockchain. http://ow.ly/Srmc50uG7Yk
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12:36 AM - Jun 18, 2019
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Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”
From Frying Pan to Fire?
To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:
This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …
The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …
What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.
Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.
Pros and Cons
Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.
But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.
United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.
Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?
Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?
Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.
“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.
Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”
The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:
In the upper echelons of the Trump administration, hawkish voices on Iran predominate—most notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton. But as tensions between the U.S. and Iran have escalated over the last few weeks, there’s been another, far different voice in the president’s ear: that of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
A source familiar with the conversations told The Daily Beast that, in recent weeks, the Fox News host has privately advised Trump against taking military action against Iran. And a senior administration official said that during the president’s recent conversations with the Fox primetime host, Carlson has bashed the more “hawkish members” of his administration.
While some Fox News hosts have argued that a conflict with Iran would be justified, Carlson has consistently criticized U.S. military intervention abroad, particularly in the Middle East. In recent weeks, he has questioned whether war with Iran would be “in anyone’s interest.” Last month, he publicly chided Bolton, saying he was intentionally escalating tensions, and that a potential conflict would “be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday wrapped into one.”
The area in the sky where astronomers would have spotted the asteroid 2006 QV89 if it was on a collision course with Earth, with the three crosses marking the specific locations. (Image: © ESO)
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski)
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mike Deeroski/Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)