Life Among the Ruins - VDH

 Life Among the Ruins - VDH

Life Among the Ruins

 

American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, Byzantine, empires.

Premodern Barbarism

Postmodern Abyss

Them   (Our Enemies)

What You Need to Know about the Colossal Mess of FTX.

 NEWS YOU CAN USE:  

What You Need to Know about the Colossal Mess of FTX.

Every currency is maintained by a sufficiently widespread belief that the currency is currently worth something and will continue to be worth something in the foreseeable future. A currency’s value crashes when people no longer believe it is worth much, or worth anything at all.

FTX grew spectacularly fast. By March 2021, FTX had bought the rights to rename the home of the NBA’s Miami Heat as the “FTX Arena.” You may recall the Super Bowl commercial from this past February featuring Larry David, with the joke being that David didn’t understand cryptocurrency and thus was passing on investing in the next big thing — a pretty funny irony in light of recent events.

In August, Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of Fortune magazine, with a headline asking if he was the next Warren Buffett. He was touted like the other tech-industry boy-wonder geniuses, the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg — a disheveled and casual wunderkind who had apparently discovered some key business secret or truth that had eluded the rest of us.

Sam Bankman-Fried does not look like the most powerful man in crypto. Friendly and rumpled, with an unruly halo of curly hair, the 30-year-old widely known as SBF has an affinity for League of Legends, fidget spinners, and other trappings of nerd culture. But underneath the goofy facade is a trading wunderkind whose ambition knows no limits.

An MIT physics grad, SBF honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research. In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built.

As recently as September, FTX was believed to be worth $32 billion. In addition to running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried continued to run Alameda Research. This is like having the same person running the New York Stock Exchange and Bridgewater Associates, to pick a market and a hedge fund that are familiar to most people.

If you’re like me, you’ve felt like you didn’t really understand what the heck cryptocurrency was and didn’t bother investing in it. Well, our inability to understand these things really paid off in this case.

Heh. As for the rest: ‘Everyone’s learning crypto bankruptcy right now.’ The FTX crash is set to be a ‘gold rush’ for lawyers.

72Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll   

T

 August 23, 2022

So where do NEA teachers' union dues end up?

By Monica Showalter

 

Joe Biden has proudly touted a new tax break for teachers through his beefed-up IRS, allowing them to deduct the cost of $300 in classroom materials instead of $250, as his means of helping them beat the inflation monster he created.

Please clap.

The beleaguered teachers, a huge number of whom are leaving the profession in growing shortages of teachers, though, really do have bigger problems on their plates than that $300 chump change dangled by Biden can supposedly fix.

According to the New York Post:

The head of the most prominent teachers’ union in the United States raked in more than $500,000 in pay as the group showered liberal causes with money and fought to keep schools closed during the pandemic, tax forms provided to Fox News Digital show.

 

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers’ union, pocketed $534,243 in compensation from the NEA and its related organizations between September 2020 and August 2021, an increase of $25,000 from the previous calendar year, newest tax forms show.

“Becky Pringle lined her pockets with over half a million dollars and peddled politics at the expense of returning to in-person learning,” said Caitland Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, who provided the tax forms to Fox News Digital.

 So while teachers were getting their $300 in Bidenbucks and supposed to bow down to him in gratitude for it, this well-larded whale was taking home a salary bigger than what the president of the United States makes.

It's not as if this person's money went to anything like performance. Teachers, after all, are leaving the profession, meaning fewer union dues payers. Worse still, this is the creature who was the hardest advocate of closed schools in the hysteria over COVID, doing humongous damage to the development of children, who were either forced to stay home and never see their friends, or else mask up for eight hours a day, and like prisoners, eat their breakfast on the ground in frozen winter conditions.

This was her doing. Worse still, with a big salary like that, one that tops that of probably everyone in the CDC, she was throwing her weight around at that agency, with her union literally giving it its marching orders on COVID shutdowns and lockdowns in schools. That was a bona fide scandal.

 

But big money can do that, and not just this below-mediocre functionary's salary, but in all the other stuff her union doled out their money on.

According to the Post:

The tax documents further reveal that the NEA gave millions to liberal groups in addition to cash to teachers’ associations.

According to the filings, the NEA sent $200,000 to the Democracy Alliance, a left-wing donor club co-founded by George Soros that helps set the Democratic agenda, while adding $100,000 to the Strategic Victory Fund, a nonprofit created by the donor network that has boosted progressive campaign infrastructure in battleground states.

In other words, those big union dues teachers must pay not only go to the inflated, bloated, positively sybaritic, salaries of the losers running the teachers' unions, they go to rabid Democrat causes, making them very, very influential among ruling Democrats and their agenda. Don't jump to their tune? No money for you.

It's frankly, a scandal. These parasites draw money on one end from many federal sources as well as the dues of the little guy, and then turn around and finance far-left Democrat organizations -- to call the shots to government. It works like a washing machine. All the while, huge chunks of these union dues also go to ever-fatter salaries for ever worse union leaders. If there's one thing that needs hosing out when the next Republican Congress takes office, it's these teachers' unions and their vast, unaccountable, octopus of money machines. 

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

The Great Reset - Is What It Is!

 DAVID SOLWAY: 

The Great Reset: Testing, Testing…

It is disturbing to note that the greater portion of the public do not seem to be aware of the vast ideological movement for social transformation called the Great Reset. Those who are at least partially informed consider it merely another conspiracy theory. Some among the so-called elite—the media, the academy, the political stratum—consider the Great Reset as a rational and benevolent response to the specter of overpopulation and the threat of populist uprisings. Others among the patrician class, doubtless a majority, are engaged in promoting what they know to be a concerted attempt to destabilize and supplant the long-established order of ideally democratic governance that has slowly and incrementally characterized the liberal societies of the West, dating from the Magna Carta (1215) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the approximate present.

We should make no mistake about this. The revolutionary project, whether denominated as the New World Order, the U.N.’s Agenda 2030, or the Davos-centered Great Reset—different terms for essentially the same impetus—under the influential leadership of Klaus Schwab is apocalyptic in its aims. It envisages a world in which the middle-class will have been expunged, the global census markedly winnowed, and a China-like social credit system introduced in which citizens will be under constant digital surveillance determining what they are allowed to possess, rent, use or spend.

Read the whole thing.

80Posted at 4:40 pm by Ed Driscoll   

W

Oh, Canada - Now a Fascist Country (USA is Next)

 OH, CANADA: 

Requiem for a Nation.

Justin Trudeau’s ineffable Justice Minister David Lametti is on record threatening those who hold the wrong political views that they are liable to have their bank accounts seized. “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing,” he said, “then you ought to be worried.” The assumption that Trump has something to do with Canadian trucker donations seems particularly unhinged.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who sits on the board of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum—an obvious conflict of interest—has moved to freeze the bank accounts and other financial instruments of the “protesters” and private citizens who have donated to the trucker fund. Hacked documents revealed the names of these offenders, some of whom have been “interviewed” by news media like the CBC and The Washington Post. Others have been doxed and menaced.

No less distressing, a substantial majority of the Canadian public have approved of the government’s jackbooted and manifestly illegal handling of the situation, taken in by the prime minister’s bought-and-paid-for media’s slanted and mendacious coverage. They are, to adapt a phrase from Daniel Goldhagen, Canada’s willing executioners, a compliant and unthinking populace presiding over the extinction of a once-democratic country. It couldn’t get any worse—though it probably will, with the assistance of the people’s sodden parliamentary representatives and a morally bankrupt media fifth column.

Read the whole thing.

To repeat: The silence coming from the other Western capitals is deafening. They must be watching Canada as a test case for just how hard they can push their own people.

98Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green   

#RESIST:

 JOEL KOTKIN: AMERICANS ARE MOVING TO WHERE THE PLANNERS AND WALL STREET, NOT TO MENTION THE GREENS, DON’T WANT THEM.

34Posted at 9:05 am by Glenn Reynolds   

AND IT WILL HAPPEN AS SOON AS OUR POLITICAL CLASS CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN:

 When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada.

Related:

99Posted at 8:41 am by Glenn Reynolds   

F

CCA II: The Great Reset? (Hillsdale - Imprimus)

What's theGreat Reset 

CCA II: The Great Reset?

November 7-10, 2021

In 2020, members of the world’s elite met at the World Economic Forum and launched the Great Reset initiative to transform the world economy. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the Forum, wrote, “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” This second CCA of the 2021-2022 academic year will consider the idea of the Great Reset, its ramifications for America, and pro-freedom alternatives.

 

Three Foreign Billionaires Finance the Dem Dark Money Machine

A Swiss human experimenter, a Hungarian Nazi collaborator, and an Iranian tech tycoon walk into Washington D.C.

Tue Nov 23, 2021 

Daniel Greenfield

 35 comments

   Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

A Swiss human experimenter, a Hungarian Nazi collaborator, and an Iranian tech tycoon walk into Washington D.C. What do you call them? The absentee owners of the Democrat Party.

It’s not a joke. Unfortunately it’s grimly serious.

Politico recently reported that the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the leading dark money machine of the Left, had pumped $410 million into Dem 2020 efforts to defeat Trump and Republicans.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund had raised a record $390 million that year and half the money came from just 4 donors. While the names of the donors are secret, the article did note the names of three major known STF backers: Pierre Omidyar, Hansjörg Wyss, and George Soros.

Aside from their support for leftist causes, the three billionaires have another thing in common.

Hansjörg Wyss, the richest man in Switzerland, may not even be a United States citizen. The article notes that his $135 million in STF dark money donations were "earmarked for non-electoral purposes".

George Soros illegally immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Aside from his history of Nazi collaboration which should have barred his entry and made him deportable, an account states that his visa was based on a false affidavit filed on his behalf.

His Open Society Foundations have invested an estimated $17 million into STF in 2020.

Pierre Omidyar, an Iranian immigrant, currently the richest man in Hawaii, is a Big Tech billionaire born to wealthy foreign students in Paris, who brought him here as a child. His mother, a Berkeley academic, heads a pro-Iran group financed by her son’s fortune.

Omidyar injected an estimated $45 million into an STF fund.

There is something remarkably striking about three foreign billionaires, two of whom have been accused of immoral atrocities, funding the dark money machine behind leftist politics.

Together the three men account for nearly $200 million in outlay just to STF.

The three men, two of them European and one Middle Eastern, are a study in contrasts and similarities. Wyss was born Christian, Soros was born Jewish, and Omidyar was born Muslim, only for them to have shed their past histories and adopted the generic identities of globalist megalomaniacs convinced that the fate of the planet and of humanity is in their hands.

The three immigrant billionaires inhabit estates in the ultra-luxurious Kahala neighborhood of Honolulu, in Wilson, Wyoming, and Bedford, New York and employ former Secret Service agents to guard them.

The three leftist billionaires made their money in transnational industries, finance, the internet, and medical technology that welcomed talented immigrants. Their allegiance to the country whose territories host their wealth and mansions varies from non-existent to outright antipathy.

Their true allegiance is to overriding social and technological philosophies, partly of their own devising, and they use their massive wealth to impose them on Americans. While their open advocacy has a fairly poor track record (how many people actually read Soros’ books, Omidyar’s thoughts on capitalism, or Wyss’ thoughts on environmentalism), they have learned that they can covertly buy influence by building their own manipulative political networks.

Dark money machines are unsurprising investments for men who avoid basic transparency and treat the American political system like a game of shadows that they can rig with their money.

Omidyar finances both Black Lives Matter and Never Trumpers. The eBay billionaire is the hidden hand behind the fake “Facebook whistleblower” advocating censoring conservatives. He has a project to “reimagine capitalism” while funding The Intercept which openly touts Marxism.

Soros is equally devious, having secretly funded J Street so that the anti-Israel group could pretend to be moderate opponents without being associated with a noted enemy of the Jewish State. Publicly, he bashes Xi and China, while his Quincy Institute defends the People’s Republic of China and advocates alongside the “Squad” against any anti-China measures.

Wyss has plowed a fortune into American politics without ever even going on the record as to whether he holds American citizenship. Meanwhile Wyss' Hub Project, operating out of STF, set up fronts like Floridians for a Fair Shake, Keep Iowa Healthy, and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy that went after Republicans. This isn’t politics: it’s a hostile foreign takeover.

Soros and Omidyar both benefited from economic disruption, technological and financial, that enabled them to get rich while inflicting heavy costs on existing industries and businesses. Like much of the Big Tech sector, they’re convinced that they’re geniuses and that their Nietzschean superiority gives them the right to destroy what exists in favor of their egotistical ideologies.

The two old men of the group, Soros and Wyss, have been accused of paving their path to wealth through horrifying crimes, whether it was Soros’ participation in the seizure of Jewish properties in Hungary, or the illegal medical experimentation on patients that sent multiple executives of the company that serves as the source of Wyss’ wealth to prison.

Wyss was reportedly “deliriously happy” when he learned that he would not be indicted over the experiments that had been tested on pigs, before killing the pigs, only to then be injected into human beings. “They do not have enough on me. They don’t have enough emails on me,” he reportedly boasted.

Their vast wealth and megalomania cannot be separated from the images of elderly patients dying on operating tables while representatives of Wyss’ company looked on and watched them suffer, or Tivadar Soros, the billionaire's father, writing that he sent George off to participate in antisemitic war crimes with a Nazi collaborator "to cheer the unhappy lad up" where "surrounded by good company, he quickly regained his spirits.”

“It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out,” George Soros once quipped.

Omidyar and Wyss seem to know better than to announce their megalomania quite as nakedly, and even Soros scaled back his more outrageous boasts after increasing public scrutiny.

The three foreign billionaires named in the Politico article shared a common megalomania, filtered through the lenses of their own ideologies, and little attachment to the United States. American industries and companies made them fabulously rich, but their horizons have always been international, and they view America as little more than just another tool for their visions.

When Americans, the ordinary sort of people, don’t go all along, they manipulate them. Despite their official fealty to democracy, to open societies, and public discourse, their dark money investments reflect their determination to sideline the public and impose their will on America.

Democrats often complain about money in politics, but they are the worst offenders. Some of the richest men and the wealthiest zip codes buy up elections for them across the country. And they seem uninterested whether the billionaires buying them even have American citizenship.

Three foreign billionaires are engaged in a hostile foreign takeover of the Republic. The Democrats call this democracy. The rest of us call it ideological imperialism and colonial tyranny.

Therefore: Concerning Great Reset-Build Back Better-Big Pharma

 Using the word therefore to make a point can be very confusing.  And often taken totally out of context.

Huh?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “therefore” as “for that reason; consequently.”

It’s intended to tie thoughts from a current statement to a previous statement…so you can see what it’s there for.

However, Wall Street, Big Pharma, and the Globalists – demanding we comply with their Build Back Better agenda – often use the word “Therefore” as a way of controlling deceiving you.

Example:  There is no conclusive evidence that Covid Vaccines work. 

But, the boyz will publish false data extolling the virtues of “Taking the Jab” and conclude by saying: “Therefore it’s imperative that the whole world gets vaccinated.”

Do the math.

Who stands to make TRILLIONS from this nonsense?

And we’re already seeing how they’re establishing the need for multiple/ongoing vaccines to keep you safe.

Safe from what?  A virus that has a death rate of 0.028%?

And that’s assuming you actually get it?

And even if you do get it, the CDC says you have anywhere from a 97-99% of beating it with your own immune system.

Therefore…

 

The Globalist cretins pushing the Great Reset/Build Back Better agenda know that our emotions and attitudes follow what we think on.   

So, when you focus your attention on your problems, they get magnified out of proportion.   

Whatever you think upon is going to dominate you.

Therefore, if you think on depressing things, you’ll be depressed. If you think on uplifting things, you’ll be uplifted.

Did you catch the use of “Therefore?”

This isn’t rocket science, folks.

And the truth about this whole charade is how the battle is for your mind.

The Big Tech Presstitutes are being paid to keep you in a constant state of agitation. 

And they do it by bombarding you with Doom and Gloom and fear of death unless you do what you’re told to do.

Don’t take the bait.

Instead, learn how to see the world with a different set of eyes (HERE).

That way you won’t fall victim to the lies from Banksters on Wall Street, Big Pharma, and the Globalist’s Great Reset agenda.

Upgrade now to our premium content and share this with a friend. 

They’ll thank YOU later.

But be sure to tell them:  We’re Not Just About Finance.

https://www.financialsmatter.com/do-you-make-these-mistakes-when-investing/

P.S. Check out a great use of the word Therefore:

 ^“Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

~2 Corinthians 5:17~