Just when you thought the headlines couldn’t seem more absurd, Swiss banking giant UBS has issued a warning that in the global battle against inflation, the worst enemy of central banks could be none other than pop star Taylor Swift.
The report could be seen as one part genuine economic analysis, one part marketing schtick for the UBS Arena.
This is the chosen venue for many huge events including Taylor Swift concerts and the MTV Music Video Awards.
However, the underlying point is that sudden spikes in demand make it harder for central bankers to use monetary policy tools to cool inflation.
UBS economist Paul Donovan describes in his report how huge events that draw attendees from all over the world — such as Taylor Swift shows, which draw masses of screaming Swifties who flood cities around the world to see their favorite star — create demand shocks.
These are especially noticeable in industries like travel and hospitality when a sudden influx drives up prices at hotels, restaurants, airlines, taxis, and similar services. Donovan says:
“Hotel prices will often rise for accommodation near a mega event venue. Transport costs (in particular air fares) may also increase. The measurement method for these prices is more likely to capture the unusual and transitory pattern of demand, and it is here that the increase in consumer price inflation takes place.”
It isn’t so much that UBS is wrong. Sudden increases in demand drive up prices.
But the large point is how the notion itself lays bare the total absurdity of the global economy, and the nonsensical notion that a handful of central planners is able to micromanage global inflationary pressures.
Are Taylor Swift concerts really enough to move the needle on global inflation and derail monetary policy efforts?
Eurozone inflation and PMI got a boost this month, but it was entirely artificial — caused by the fact that France hosted this year’s Olympic Games. The surge in economic activity created a massive but entirely transitory increase in demand, dragging up Eurozone economic data points. Meanwhile, fundamentals remain weaker, and major Eurozone economies outside of France continue to contract, fueling motivation for the ECB to return to cutting interest rates again next month.
However, with interest rates already too low to properly get inflation under control (with or without Taylor Swift and the Olympics), a rate cut will only push high prices even higher for Europeans.
Even in countries like Germany where debt-to-GDP ratios are lower this year, contracting economies keep signaling trouble.
For better or worse, none of this is Taylor Swift’s fault, so Swifites are off the hook — but the same can’t be said for central banks.
All the ECB, the Fed, and other central banks know how to do is print money, locking countries into boom and bust cycles as they tinker with the money supply and set interest rates that the free market would never have settled on naturally. Central banks don’t create real or sustainable growth.
The bankers would love to be able to blame Taylor Swift or the Olympics for economic crises. But these busts arise from, and are made even worse, by their own monetary tinkering and government intervention.
Death Of Woke: Queer Activist Video Game Funded By The EU Can’t Find Players
If the new punk rock is to be politically correct, then it’s not punk rock. The woke activist invasion of popular media since 2015 continues to ignore the reality that they are not “rebels”, they are villains, and their delusions are becoming more embarrassing for them with each passing year.
Woke tropes have become poison for any brand seeking a wider audience or greater profits, to the point that activist media projects must now be funded by governments and NGOs through DEI initiatives just to pay developer salaries. The goal? To saturate the market with multicultural ideology and LGBT propaganda until the public was forced to accept it and consume it as “normal.” The agenda has failed.
Every new woke product seems to bomb harder than the last these days and that’s a good sign for the future. Video game players, a market which now dwarfs movies and TV streaming, are rejecting woke material en masse. Case in point: Dustborn.
The aggressively advertised game features a cast of queer activist “punk rock” characters that set out on a road trip across an America controlled by “conservative oppressors” that are really uncool. Set in North America in 2030, The American Republic is under the iron fist of “Justice” and The Puritans, a fascist police force presided over by President Samuel Ward. California has gained independence and is now Pacifica, a corporatocracy ruled by the wealthy few. Texas has seceded, rebranding itself as the libertarian Columbia.
Hilariously, players fight the fascist government by using the “power of words” to gain allies and divide their enemies. Characters can also build up their “trigger meter” to really punch the patriarchy.
“Dustborn’s story is a story about being different, about being an outcast and outsider, about having to hide who and what you are from the authorities, from society — even from your family…
Last but certainly not least, it’s a story about the power of disinformation, propaganda, and language, and about how powerful words can alter our perception of reality, hack minds, and change the world…”
Dustborn embraces the the leftist ideological fallacy that words are magical weapons that need to be controlled and policed at all times by the woke devout; the only people apparently enlightened enough to dictate language. The game was released this week to the deafening sound of crickets. On gaming service Steam, the project garnered a maximum of 83 players on launch day. A total flop of epic proportions.
One might find it ironic that a game about rebel queers fighting the government was actually co-funded by government through the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union (at least $168,000). ESG strikes again.
The notion that popular games dealing with America need to be adjusted for “modern audiences” and the cast needs forced diversity to be “authentic” is based on a popular leftist fallacy that all of America is the same as or should be the same as New York and LA.
The collapse of Dustborn comes not long after the uproar over the impending release of Ubisoft’s ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’, another highly marketed woke game set in feudal Japan. Leftist developers claim that the game is based on “true historical figures”, yet the primary protagonist is a gay black samurai (there was never a black samurai in feudal Japan, let alone a gay black samurai. The idea is based on faulty evidence provided by a fraudulent historian who worked with Ubisoft and who is now under investigation by the Japanese government). The game is expected to suffer dismal sales upon its launch in November.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”
– Ronald Reagan
When I grew up, Great Britain was exotic. There were the red telephone booths, Buckingham Palace, black cabs, and, of course, the Bobbies (police) and the Beefeaters. England was the land of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry IV. For me, Britain was history incarnate.
Obviously, part of that comes from the fact that, as Americans, we share a great deal of history with the British. Not only did we split from Britain in 1776, but our history continued to stay close until modern times…from the US joining Britain in the fight to end slavery to fighting two world wars together to the British Invasion in the 1960s that brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.
Image by Vince Coyner
Modern England largely dates back to 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put the finishing touches on a unification that had been evolving since the Romans abandoned the island in 410 AD. (For clarity, as the terms are often used interchangeably, the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign nation comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “Great Britain” is the largest island in the British Isles, containing England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland.)
The 1,000-year span since has seen Britain, like the rest of the world, evolve—always, however haltingly, in the direction of freedom. This journey began with the Magna Carta, agreed to by King John in 1215. A watershed event in Western culture, it limited the King’s powers and declared he was subject to the law, guaranteed church rights, access to an impartial system of justice, and limited taxes.
Although the Magna Carta would have a rough beginning, it was an enormous step in the drive towards liberty. The document would set the stage for Parliament to evolve from councils that advised the King into a representative body that began taking a more active and powerful role in governing.
It was just the first in a line of steps that would make Britain the freest nation on the planet for centuries. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 would guarantee the right to trial and demand the state show cause for holding someone. A decade later, the English Bill of Rights would set out Parliamentary rights, the right to petition the king, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Over subsequent centuries, the British commitment to freedom would expand, eventually including all her citizens, not just the barons who first held King John’s feet to the fire.
Over that march to freedom, England would produce an extraordinary array of freedom advocates, some of whom inspired our Founding Fathers. Men such as John Locke, Edmund Burke and, later, William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the slave trade.
It is this incessant march towards freedom that has always given England an aura of consequence that few other nations share. And that’s what makes today’s Britain so sad.
The genesis of today’s dystopia began almost three decades ago when immigration took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The number of non-EU immigrants averaged over 200,000 per year for a decade and then skyrocketed after 2020. A nation of 55 million in 2000 is today over 65 million, with almost all of that growth coming from immigration, a majority from non-EU nations, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, countries that don’t share British culture or, importantly, religion. (It’s also likely that many of the ostensibly EU immigrants originated in non-EU countries.)
The result of this transformation of Britain from a largely British nation to something else has been monstrous. Possibly the single most despicable example is the 20-plus-year Rotherham child rape scandal that saw hundreds of Pakistani Muslims rape over a thousand British girls right under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being called racists. As if that wasn’t bad enough, those who dared report on the various trials—see, e.g., here and here—found themselves jailed for doing so.
In July, the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants knifed ten little girls, killing three of them. With the government withholding information on the killer, online posts asserted he was an immigrant. Tensions rose, and, across the UK, Brits protested the unfettered invasion of immigrants, the violence being perpetrated by immigrants and Muslims, and the system’s seeming duplicitous, two-tiered approach to justice when it came to immigrants and Muslims vs. white Brits, all of whom the government and the state-run media invariably characterize as “far right.”
These protests drew the new Labour government’s ire, and it launched a wave of arrests and a propaganda campaign against the “far right” anti-immigration “racists.” People were sentenced to prison for chanting “who the f*** is Allah” (although they were neither violent nor making threats), shouting “You’re not English anymore” at the police, or selling stickers that say “It’s OK to be white.”
Seeking to curtail what it claims is misinformation and incitement, the government warned the British citizenry, “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred.” They also warned potential anti-immigration protesters, “We’re watching you.”
So basically, the government decides what’s false, threatening, or hate speech, and if you post anything about it online, you could end up in jail.
And if threatening Brits’ freedom of speech wasn’t enough, the government threatened online platforms (and Musk) if they allowed prohibited speech.
Nor did the government stop there. It promised to extradite citizens of other countries if they engage in such prohibited online speech, even if not in Britain at the time. And because there’s not enough room in British jails to hold all of these anti-immigration “racists,” the government plans to release 5,000 criminals from jail to make room for those guilty of “wrongthink.”
While the Tories are responsible for the unfettered immigration over the last one-and-a-half decades, July’s election, which put Labour in power, represented a leap in transforming Britain into a tyranny. A free Britain, which took over 1,000 years to evolve, essentially became a Stalinist police state in less than two months.
While Britain is not the United States, our shared history, language, and similar cultural and political trajectory over the last 20 years suggests that what is happening there could easily happen here. Contrast the kid glove treatment given the 2020 BLM / Antifa rioters with the draconian treatment J6ers received, recall Democrats’ ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, and look at what’s been done to Donald Trump and you see the writing on the wall as we head down that dark authoritarian path.
Like Turkey and Venezuela before it, Britain demonstrates that a single election can make the difference between freedom and tyranny. As we approach November 5th, we just might want to take note…
The Rutgers University professor who was under an internal review after posts she made on Facebook following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others” will teach this coming fall.
A source provided Campus Reform with screenshots of the Facebook posts, which were made by Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd in the hours after someone tried to assassinate Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
”Let’s hope today’s events inspire others,” Budd said in one post.
”They shot his wig. Sad,” Budd wrote in another.
Rutgers spokeswoman Megan Schumann told NJ.com that Budd is scheduled to teach in the upcoming fall semester.
Previously, a Rutgers spokesperson told the New York Post that Budd was the subject of an internal review.
“Rutgers University-New Brunswick condemns calls for violence in the strongest possible terms and remains committed to upholding the principles of civil discourse,” the university said.
“The university is reviewing this matter and assures that any appropriate actions will be taken based on our policies.”
“As students, faculty and staff return to campus next month, the university will be communicating the importance of civility in these challenging times,” the school added.
According to the New York Post, Budd makes over $72,000 at Rutgers.
Budd’s Facebook is now deleted, but her cover picture contained a poster at a protest that read: “Capitalism will kill us all. Gender is fake. Eat garbage. Be free.”
Budd is also the editor of Dialogues@RU, an undergraduate research journal, “which teaches students the crucial skills of critical reading and thinking, scholarly research, synthesis, and analytic writing across the disciplines.”
It serves as the cover for once again hosting anti-Indian separatists, which could in turn provoke the implied threats from India that the post-coup authorities initially hoped to generate via mob violence against the Hindu minority and thus create the pretext for giving a base to the US.
An advisor to the interim Bangladeshi government that took power after early August’s US-backed regime change against former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accused India of being responsible for the latest floods due to it allegedly opening up a dam amid heavy rains in the region. This followed some student protests in support of what they described as a fairer water-sharing deal with India and coincided with the interim Environment Minister declaring readiness to “forcefully” advocate for this.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs denied Bangladesh’s claim that the latest floods were due to anything that it did, but it’s clear that this won’t make any difference since Dhaka’s new political setup has already made up its mind to once again politicize this issue. It’s highly emotive in this riparian country of an estimated 170 million people, the eighth most populous in the world, and can thus be leveraged to mobilize continued support for the post-coup authorities.
The narrative was already spun by US Government-funded pundit Derek Grossman, who’s a senior defense analyst on the Indo-Pacific at the RAND Corporation, that India might have opened the dam without telling Bangladesh “in political retaliation” against the new government. The US has an interest in dividing-and-ruling India and Bangladesh because the resultant perception among the latter of newfound security threats from its much larger neighbor can lead to it finally giving a base to the US.
Hasina claimed after her ouster that she wouldn’t have been overthrown had she surrendered her country’s sovereignty by handing over St. Martin Island to it in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh’s ties with neighboring Myanmar have been very difficult ever since the Rohingya issue emerged in 2015 and then severelyworsened in 2017, but that wasn’t enough to get her to comply with these demands at the expense of regional stability, nor were Myanmar’s claims to that same island.
The precedent set by her defiance and then exposure of this US plot impedes her successors’ efforts to give it a base, ergo the need to artificially manufacture a regional security crisis in order to justify this in the court of domestic and international opinion. The initial means to that end was mob violence against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority in the immediate aftermath of the coup, but when that failed to provoke even implied threats from India, the decision was made to politicize their water dispute yet again.
Hasina handled this sensitive issue very diplomatically during her time in office, but her opponents from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have a history of exploiting it for domestic and regional purposes, the first with regards to mobilizing support and the second as a pretext for hosting separatist groups. About that, the Pakistani-friendly BNP shares Islamabad’s vision of “Balkanizing” India’s Northeast States, but they can’t openly admit their ideologically driven geopolitical agenda.
For that reason, it was hinted during the time that they were in power that one of the reasons why they host such anti-Indian groups is because of continued disagreements with India. Although Hasina’s trade and military ties with China were much closer than with India, she nevertheless shared her Indian counterpart’s vision of regional peace and integration. She therefore reversed her predecessors’ policy of harboring anti-Indian groups and mercilessly cracked down on them during her administration.
They’ll now likely soon return though in parallel with the BNP-backed interim government once again politicizing the water-sharing issue, thus explaining their lie about India being responsible for the latest floods. This false claim serves as the cover for once again hosting anti-Indian separatists, which could in turn provoke the implied threats from India that the post-coup authorities initially hoped to generate via mob violence against the Hindu minority and thus create the pretext for giving a base to the US.
This is Part 2 of Paul’s “Fascism 2.0” series, part one can be read HERE.
In this second article in a series of three, I’m going to set the developments we have seen regarding Social Media censorship in the context of globalist power structures and suggest there is growing evidence the narrative manipulation we information consumers have been witnessing is in service to a globalist cause.
It’s important, I think, when having this kind of a discussion, to avoid falling into the trap of talking about a conspiratorial nebulous “they” without adequately defining who “they” are because such thinking leads to imprecise and ill justified reasoning and can, quite rightly, lead to the accusation of conspiracy theory style thinking. So I will define exactly what I mean by globalism and globalists. Your own definition may differ, but this is what I mean.
Globalists possess extreme wealth, typically in the billions, and can live anywhere in the world they choose. They have diversified international business interests, often shared with other globalists, and frequently receive invitations to events like Davos from the WEF.
The people we are speaking of inhabit a rarified and incestuously small community. Additionally with the arrival of the Internet, Globalism has been transformed, with the opportunity for ad-hoc co-opting of the powerful greatly enhanced. As the world has shrunk, the most influential power brokers have drawn closer together, breaking down barriers of geography and physical location.
Globalists are in the enviable position that they, unlike the common citizen, are able to leverage tax and legislative competition between countries. So for example Ireland’s GDP leapt after Ireland in 2003 quite deliberately introduced the EUs most competitive corporation tax rate (12.5%). The influx of tech businesses to Dublin brought an immense boost to the Irish economy and boosted Irish GDP to enviable levels. Globalists can pick and choose where they do business.
Now we know who Globalists are, I’m going to provide a particular definition of Globalism distinct from the old-world brochure-wear version: The old version runs something like this: Globalism is the activity of engaging in Economic Integration, Cultural Exchange, Multilateral Cooperation, Migration and Mobility policy making and Technology and Information exchange. And it is true it does involve these things, but in my opinion, the more revealing way to view globalism is by looking at the subjects and policy areas in which Globalists show greatest interest. And those are:
Environment: Man-Made Global warming
Global Health Security (World Health)
Banking and International Finance
Central Banking Digital Currency and Digital Identity
Regional economic development
Defence (arms manufacture and supply)
Population and migration
We know these interests because the WEF website and agenda over the years, has revealed them to us, over and over. Look carefully at this list. Do you notice a common thread?
One consequence of the pandemic period was that people began to wake-up to the fact government policy can be implemented at the drop of a hat that will hand billions trillions of dollars to corporations owned by those who are already the wealthiest in the world. Through pandemic policy, the extent of the handover was so fast, so brazen, so deeply affecting of our lives, it could hardly be missed.
According to a report by Oxfam, during the pandemic, the world’s wealthiest individuals saw their fortunes rise dramatically, with the ten richest men doubling their wealth from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. This surge highlights a broader trend where the wealthiest 1% gained $1.4 trillion.
Meanwhile, the world’s poor and middle classes, including small and medium-sized businesses, collectively lost around $1.3 trillion due to economic disruptions.
Just consider the local shops people were no longer visiting during lockdown. Instead, of course, they were buying from Amazon.
And pharmaceutical firm revenues were also a part of the redistribution. The revenues, all mandated by government, were mind boggling (even where there were no government mandates and private healthcare, the vaccines were purchased with tax money). Pfizer alone saw revenues of over $150 billion through government vaccine and other mandated pharmaceuticals purchase. And now people are increasingly aware this was off the back of the products that were always unsafe, ineffective and rushed to market.
Text messages between EU Commission President, Ursula Von Der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, reveal in secret Von Der Leyen agreed to purchase 4.6 billion doses of the Pfizer, vaccine, or ten shots shots per man woman and child living in the EU. Ten!
To some it has become clear, at best, it can be said that for Pfizer, safety took a second seat to a money grab of epic scale. To others, they are corporate psychopaths of the highest order. And Pfizer, we should not forget, have been subject to the second largest corporate fine – $2.3 billion – for criminal malfeasance ever paid in the pharmaceutical industry. Further during Covid, together with the CDC, Pfizer attempted to use the courts, to hide the vaccine trial data for 75 years. Re-analysis of their own trial data (only possible because they failed in their attempt to hide it) has since shown the vaccines were never safe.
Through these recent events (and helpfully nudged along by podcasters like Joe Rogan and Russel Brand), many have begun to wake-up to how the globalist money-grab works and how it has been operating similarly, if less obviously, across a number of sectors for years.
The common thread in these globalist topics is that each represents a vast, policy-driven market worth billions or trillions.
In the brochure-ware version of the list, each of these subject areas involves moral imperatives. The moral imperatives dictate that the actions and policies implemented by governments around the world, are important to ease fulfilment of virtuous objectives (like preventing global warming).
In practice, like with the vaccines during the pandemic, the value of these policy endowments to global business is so vast that the likelihood of avarice and self-interest cannot be ignored – indeed, I would argue, it becomes inevitable.
The scale of these policy-driven markets is so vast, it’s difficult to fully grasp in a single article. The many ways in which they take money from you and me without the policies first having been produced through a clear democratic process are legion. When you start to break it down, the “scam” is so vast, it’s difficult to grasp it all. So I won’t try to do that in a single article.
Instead I will point to one company which also ties-up an important point I want to make about the nature of globalist finance. Globalists cross-invest. When people become that wealthy, though they usually made the bulk of their money from one sector, they quickly start to diversify.
Cash is for ad-hoc spending and is only ever a tiny fraction of asset value. Cash loses out on interest payments. Investment asset value in multi-billions is almost always represented by shares in business interests or funds, essentially less liquid financial instruments than cash.
So almost by definition when you have billions, you have investments in many things. And what you have invested in will overlap with the investments of other globalist billionaires. Through hedging, you end up owning a little bit of pretty much everything out there that is significantly profitable, and there will be a special focus on business in those preferred policy driven sectors I listed above because, as I have indicated, the revenues there can be assured; the playing field tilted.
The important point to understand is that as well as spreading the risk, the number of areas in which you have an interest is multiplied and, just as importantly, the number of globalist billionaires with whom you share an interest is also increased. The result is a highly diversified, ultra powerful financial unit (a cabal if you like) who hold in common to a massive degree, interest in lobbying for broadly the same policies and ensuring they are applied in the broadly the same policy-driven markets.
And if you want a good example of kind just how diverse these investments get, you only need to look at the worlds largest fund management company, Blackrock.
Fortunately for us, a Blackrock executive recently committed to video insight into how the system works. He didn’t mean to. It was a sting. But the video is fascinating. Additionally presidential candidate RFK Jr has also given some great video summary overviews of how the system works.
So first, let’s examine the video of Blackrock executive Serge Varlay.
In it we are informed, “Blackrock manages $20 trillion in asset value, it’s incomprehensible numbers. […] All of this is beyond an normal persons understanding.”
Well I have news for Mr Varlay. No it isn’t. For many of us it stands out like a flashing red-light. But I accept it may be the case that most people are not aware of what Varlay has to say.
“How do they run the world?” The undercover interviewer asks (who Serge seems to be under the impression is a date).
“You acquire stuff. You diversify. You acquire, you keep acquiring. You spend whatever you make in acquiring more. And at a certain point your risk level is super low. Imagine you’ve invested in 10 different industries from food to drinks to technology. If one of them fails it doesn’t matter, you have nine others to back you up. The risk money is inherently in just about everything.
You own a little bit of everything, and that little bit of everything gives you so much money on a yearly basis, that you can take this big f**k-ton of money, and then you can start to buy people.”
“It’s not the president,” he says, presumably referring to who they own, though on this point weather he is talking literally or illustratively on this point is unfortunately not made clear, “it’s who is controlling the wallet of the President.”
And on campaign financing we are told, “Yes you can buy your candidates. First there’s the Senators. These guys are f**king cheap. For $10 grand you can buy a Senator. I could give you [meaning a senator] like $500k right now, no questions asked. Are you gonna do what needs to be done?”
The interviewer asks “Does everybody do that? Does Blackrock do that?”
“Everybody does that. […] The hedge funds, Blackrock, the banks. These guys run the world.”
“It doesn’t matter who wins. They are in my pocket at this point.”
The (presumably hot) date then asks, “Do you have any thoughts on the Ukraine Russia War?”
“Ukraine is good for business. You know that right. I’ll give an example. Russia blows up Ukraine’s grain silos. The price of wheat is going to go mad up. The Ukrainian economy is tied very largely to the global Wheat market; price of bread, you know, literally everything, goes up and down. This is fantastic if you’re trading. The volatility creates opportunity to make profit. War is real f**king good for business.”
This last point, we should note, applies equally to all the wars waged by the West for the last 23 years (and more) and backs up the claims by presidential candidate RFK Jr that elements of the US establishment are incentivised to commit the West to a policy of assured “forever-wars” for financial gain. Remember the thread connecting the list of Globalist interests above. The revenues are policy driven. This is not a free market.
In another online video presidential candidate RFK Jr sums up how effectively Blackrock “launder” money.
“The entire budget for EPA is $12 billion. That’s all we have for the environment in this country. We are giving 12 times that to Ukraine in one year and that’s just the beginning because even if the Ukraine war ended today we’re still going to spend half a trillion there rebuilding the country. The contracts to rebuild the country are even bigger than the war contracts.
So [Senator] Mitch McConnell was asked in March, because the Republicans are supposed to be concerned about budget deficit, ‘can we really afford 113 billion’ he was asked, he said ‘Don’t worry. It’s not really going to Ukraine. It’s going to US military contractors so it’s good for our country.’
He just admitted exactly what we’ve all been saying. It’s all just a money laundering scheme by Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed. Who do you think owns every one of those companies?
Blackrock.”
These videos offer critical insights and are essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the depth of globalist influence.
There is so much to talk about in relation to policy driven markets and we haven’t even begun to look at climate change and the 2030 agenda which involves yet more astronomical sums (just a little on that later), but I have presented enough to establish the principle these markets afford very substantial special forms of protected revenue – and those revenues are most usually at the expense of the taxpayers and middle classes.
Net Migration: Which Regions Are Gaining Or Losing People?
This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, shows the flow of people globally by visualizing net migration by region, from 1950 to 2023 (in 10-year intervals).
Net migration refers to the difference between the number of people entering and leaving a country or region.
The data we used to create this graphic is listed in the table below. Numbers represent net migration (# of people gained or lost) for that specific year.
*Northern America includes the U.S., Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, and St. Pierre and Miquelon. Mexico is included in Latin America & Caribbean.
From this data we can see that Northern America, Europe, and Oceania have regularly gained people from immigration. In other words, more people immigrated to these regions than emigrated.
Note that Europe saw negative values in 1950, 1960, and 1970, likely due to post-war reconstruction and political instability.
On the other hand, Latin America & Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have regularly lost people to other regions. People often leave developing regions to seek out better job opportunities and to escape political instability or war.
For example, the number of refugees entering the U.S. has historically spiked during conflicts, with the most recent example being the Russo-Ukrainian War.
To learn more about this topic from a U.S.-perspective, check out this map graphic that shows where America’s 46.2 million immigrants have come from.
Peace advocates on Friday voiced alarm over the Biden administration’s selection of a senior official who has worked to speed the shipment of U.S. arms to Israel as the State Department’s point person on Israel-Palestine policy.
HuffPost reported that Mira Resnick, the deputy assistant secretary of state for regional security in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, has been tapped to oversee Washington’s handling of issues related to Israel and Palestine. In her current role, Resnick’s office supervises around $40 billion in annual U.S. arms transfers.
Using a critical nickname for U.S. President Joe Biden, journalist and podcast host Emma Vigeland said on social media Friday, “Genocide Joe’s swan song is to institutionally entrench our support for Israel and make it as difficult as possible to disentangle it, which the old fool views as romantic and righteous.”
Over the past 10-plus months, the Biden administration has approved more than 100 arms sales to Israel worth billions of dollars. Earlier this month, the administration greenlighted a new $20 billion arms package for Israel.
The announcement of the package—which includes dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tens of thousands of 120mm mortar shells, over 32,700 tank shells, and 30 advanced missiles—came just days after Israeli forces used at least one U.S. bomb in an airstrike on a Gaza school where forcibly displaced Palestinians were sheltering, killing more than 100 people including women and children.
As criticism mounted over Israel’s assault and siege on Gaza—which has left a reported more than 144,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and has flattened most of the coastal enclave while stoking deadly famine and the spread of preventable diseases including polio—Resnick helped expedite the flow of U.S. arms to the key Middle Eastern ally.
She also worked with the hardline government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan wants to arrest for alleged war crimes including “extermination,” to allow private citizens to donate equipment to the Israel Defense Forces.
Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned earlier this year over Biden’s support for Israel amid a war for which the key ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, told HuffPost that Resnick’s appointment “reflects a doubling down on the administration’s determination to continue to provide unconditional material support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against civilians in Gaza.”
American University of Beirut history professor Zeead Yaghi decried the Biden administration’s appointment of “a literal arms dealer.”
Last month, the Biden administration ended a two-month pause on the shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel despite the frequent use of U.S.-supplied weapons by Israeli forces to commit alleged war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Biden has suspendedtransfers of 500- and 2,000-pound bombs manufactured by aerospace giant Boeing over fears the devastating munitions would be used in airstrikes on Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than a million Palestinians had sought refuge.
🚨Biden administration has named Mira Resnick, a known advocate of arms transfers to Israel, as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs
➡️ Her appointment raises alarm among critics of Biden’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza
Israel has dropped at least hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs—which the U.S. military avoids using in civilian areas because they can destroy entire city blocks—on Gaza, including in an October 31 attack on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp that killed more than 120 civilians.
The U.S. is by far Israel’s biggest arms supplier, providing around 70% of Israeli arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Divides persist between many Black and white Americans’ views on the ongoing impacts of slavery in the United States.
As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, according to a poll by YouGov conducted in 2023, 52 percent of U.S. respondents believe that the legacy of slavery still influences society today either a fair amount or a great deal. Along racial lines a starker contrast exists, with 78 percent of Black Americans saying the same, versus just 46 of white Americans.
When asked more specifically about who the legacy of slavery currently affects, respondents again answered differently. 75 percent of Black respondents said all Black Americans are affected by the legacy of slavery today, while 13 percent of Black respondents said only Black Americans who are descendants of slaves. No Black respondents selected the option for no Black Americans. Of the white respondents, only 42 percent said all Black Americans are still affected, 16 percent said only Black Americans who are descendants of slaves and 20 percent selected the option for no Black Americans.
65 percent of Black Americans said that America’s wealth as a nation today is tied to slavery, while only 26 percent of white Americans held the same view. Democrats were more likely to agree that current national wealth is significantly tied to the work done in the past by slaves (50 percent) than Independents (32 percent) or Republicans (15 percent).
YouGov then asked respondents about which systems or markets Black Americans face prejudice today. The criminal justice system (58 percent), political system (46 percent), health care system (44 percent) and housing market (44 percent) were among the options to receive the highest shares of all respondents agreeing that discrimination is currently a problem there.
A U.S. military drone strike has killed a senior leader of Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-aligned group in Syria, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in an Aug. 23 statement.
The strike targeted Abu-‘Abd al-Rahman al-Makki, a prominent figure within the group’s Shura Council responsible for overseeing terrorist activities from Syria, per the announcement.
Hurras al-Din is a Syria-based force aligned with al-Quaeda that shares the terror group’s objective of attacking American and Western interests, CENTCOM said.
Al-Makki was riding a motorcycle when the precision strike hit, ending his long-standing role in the region’s jihadist networks,according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The operation highlights the ongoing U.S. commitment to eliminating threats posed by terrorist organizations in the Middle East, particularly those aligned with al-Qaeda.
“CENTCOM remains committed to the enduring defeat of terrorists in the CENTCOM area of responsibility who threaten the United States, its allies and partners, and regional stability,” Commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla said in a statement.
In recent weeks, U.S. forces have also engaged in multiple operations against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. On Aug. 22 and 23, CENTCOM forces successfully destroyed several Houthi-controlled missile systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that posed a direct threat to U.S. and coalition forces, as well as commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea.
These actions underscore the heightened state of alert in the region, particularly in light of growing concerns over potential Iranian attacks.
The Pentagon recently bolstered its military presence in the Middle East, deploying additional forces in response to intelligence suggesting that Iran and its proxies might launch significant attacks on Israel and U.S. interests. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group and the guided-missile submarine USS Georgia are among the reinforcements sent to the region.
“We have to be prepared for what could be a significant set of attacks, which is why, again, we have increased our force posture and capabilities in the region, even in just the last few days,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said earlier this month.
The deployment of additional U.S. military assets aims to deter aggression and boost defense capabilities for Israel amid escalating regional tensions. The potential for a broader conflict has increased following the assassinations of high-profile figures in the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas terrorist groups, fueling fears of a widening confrontation involving Iran.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant on Aug. 22 to discuss the ongoing exchanges of fire on the Israel–Lebanon border and the escalating threat from Iran and its proxies.
Austin emphasized that the United States is closely monitoring attack planning by Iran and its allied groups, ensuring that U.S. forces are well-positioned to defend Israel and protect American personnel and facilities across the region.
