PP NewsBrief: 2021-01-30
We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.
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What the GameStop Bubble Reveals About Our Monstrous Financial System
"Bubbles like this always end in a crash, and those Redditors who haven’t sold their shares will be left holding a very depleted bag. (Surprisingly, news that Melvin closed out its short position late on Tuesday seems not to have dampened the party. A bubble usually goes on far longer than mere rationalists can predict.) In the meanwhile, it’s funny to see some Wall Streeters complain that there’s something unfair about this action, since these are the sorts of games they play with each other and the general public all the time. They talk up stocks or talk them down, depending on their interests, and plot against what they see as weak or vulnerable players all the time. It’s just that the speculators with names like DeepFuckingValue who are savaging them for now are the wrong kind of people. They don’t live in Greenwich in houses with twenty-car garages.
Even more amusing are the earnest sorts who think these games somehow pervert the function of the stock market. As Business Insider columnist Josh Barro declared on Twitter: “I know people think this is fun but — why do we have a stock market? So productive firms can raise capital to do useful things. Detaching stock price from fundamental value (Gamestop is now worth almost as much as Best Buy) makes the markets serve the real economy worse.”
What’s funny about these comments, aside from their earnestness in the midst of low comedy, is that the stock market has almost nothing to do with raising money for productive investment. Almost all the stock that trades on the market, including GameStock, was issued years ago, meaning that companies don’t see a dime of the daily action. Firms do issue stock now and then, in so-called initial public offerings (IPOs), but over the last twenty years, according to finance professor Jay Ritter’s data, IPOs have raised a cumulative total of $657 billion, well under 2 percent of total business investment in things like buildings and equipment over the same period. In the real world, as opposed to Barro’s imagination, firms raise almost all their investment funds internally, through profits. Rather than raising money from shareholders, businesses shovel out vast buckets of money to them. Since 2000, the five hundred large companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index have spent $8.3 trillion buying their own stock to boost its price — over half their profits over the period, and equal to almost 20 percent of business investment over the two decades. Stock buybacks not only make the shareholders happy, but they also fatten CEOs’ paychecks, since bosses these days are paid mainly in stock."
One of the biggest cons Wall St has pulled is implanting the idea in the mind of average, middle-class Americans that the stock market could be used to help secure their retirements.
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‘Your Cock Is Mine Now:’ Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom
"In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage—a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely—had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard.
A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."
"Fortunately I didn’t have this locked on myself while this happened," Robert said in an online chat.
"I wasn’t the owner of the cage anymore so I didn’t have full control over the cage at any given moment," another victim who goes by the name RJ told Motherboard in an online chat. RJ said he got a message from the hacker, who said they had control of the cage and wanted a payment to unlock it."
Now I'm probably showing my ignorance here but...does that final paragraph seem to imply there's a second-hand market for these things? I'm all for second-hand stuff but that seems a bit over the top...
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"This Is For You, Dad": Redditor Shares Heartbreaking Reason For Destroying Short-Sellers In WSB Raids
"This is for you, Dad.
I remember when the housing collapse sent a torpedo through my family. My father's concrete company collapsed almost overnight. My father lost his home. My uncle lost his home. I remember my brother helping my father count pocket change on our kitchen table. That was all the money he had left in the world. While this was happening in my home, I saw hedge funders literally drinking champagne as they looked down on the Occupy Wall Street protestors. I will never forget that.
My Father never recovered from that blow. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and exists now as a shell of his former self, waiting for death.
This is all the money I have and I'd rather lose it all than give them what they need to destroy me. Taking money from me won't hurt me, because i don't value it at all. I'll burn it all down just to spite them.
This is for you, Dad."
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Google DELETES 100,000-plus one-star ratings of Robinhood app after enraged retail traders pile negative reviews over GameStop ban
"Google admitted to actively deleting the reviews, as they violate a policy the company has on reviews that are published specifically to manipulate a company’s overall rating."
OK, who can draw the line for me between inauthentic negative reviews and authentic dislike of the app?
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‘Who cares?’ Cuomo insists it doesn’t matter where 4,000 hidden nursing home deaths took place
"Cuomo even blamed former president Donald Trump for planting the idea in New Yorkers’ minds that the governor was responsible for the sky-high death toll, insisting “everyone did the best they could” and claiming the state had merely followed federal healthcare guidance. To suggest anything else was “cruel,” because the deaths were unpreventable, he claimed.
"To play politics with it the way they did, that was mean. When the Trump admin was trying to divert blame...blame all the Democratic governors for the deaths in nursing homes…that was mean."
The governor returned to the podium on Friday to deliver his ‘who cares’ message after walking out on a presser the previous day, leaving his health commissioner Howard Zucker alone to deal with the recriminations of the thousands of New Yorkers who’d lost loved-ones under Cuomo’s watch."
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Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare
"As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his formidable paper The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming, “what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime?”, keeping in mind that as of June 2020, the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.
Well, the answer is apparently simple and as always for our own good. We have come to a point in time where the enemy is not some radicalized ideology, it is not some foreign despot, it is not even the threat of war (whether it be economic, cyber or nuclear), but rather it is ourselves. We, the people, are the new enemies of the State.
You may protest “Not I! I am a model citizen! I pay my taxes on time, I am never late or call in sick for work, I make sure to be up-to-date with the newest ‘woke’ revelations and I don’t engage with anything outside of the mainstream matrix during my free-time.” People such as yourself think, that when the Biden Administration is calling for tougher laws against domestic terrorism, that it is obviously meant for the ‘other guy,’ those uneducated bigots who are screaming at the top of their lungs “Treason!” and inciting what we are told to be forms of ‘insurrection,’ all in the name of the archaic ideas of ‘patriotism’ and the ‘U.S. Constitution.’
You, unlike so many others, have no problem recognising that the U.S. Constitution is actually part of the problem, that by the standards used today, the U.S. Constitution is itself responsible for ‘inciting violence’ and thus guilty of domestic terrorism, and thus needs to be revoked.
But you see… that’s just not good enough.
Though you are well on your way to becoming a model citizen in the 21st century, you still have a little ways to go. It is for this reason that a guide to 21st century Newspeak has been recently released to make sure that well-intentioned citizens like yourself are fully informed of what is required of you in terms of appropriate behaviour, as well as appropriate thoughts, and though this will take a little more time, appropriate instincts."
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Larry Johnson: The Democrat Gaslight Express
"Yes, the Presidency was stolen from Donald Trump primarily from phony mail-in ballots introduced into a few key urban centers in pivotal swing states and counted with rigged machines. But that was only part of the plan. The people behind this silent coup also embarked on a massive propaganda deception campaign designed to keep Trump supporters chasing ghosts and deadends. Entities such as QANON and THE GREAT AWAKENING are, in my view, only two of the more prominent examples of this information warfare.
Anyone that has ever owned a puppy and taken said puppy for a romp in his or her backyard or the local park, knows what happens when a squirrel or rabbit shows up. The puppy is immediately distracted and runs frantically and futilely to try to nab the furry critters. Squirrels and rabbits usually get away and the only positive outcome of this exercise is the puppy expended a lot of energy and will be ready to nap once back inside the house. Once your pet learns to associate the term "squirrel" with the furry rodent that flees the scene and scampers up the nearest tree, you need only say the word, "squirrel" and your little hound will tear off chasing an imaginary squirrel."
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Restoring the Machinery of the American Republic
"Simple question: Are you good? Ask yourself: am I a good person? Not just every now and then, but 100 percent of the time in every situation.
Before you answer, let me tell you that if you say yes, you’re lying.
Thousands of years of empirical evidence teaches us humanity is capable of great good, but incapable of sustained good at all times. It is simply impossible for imperfect human beings in an imperfect world always to be good or always to do the right thing in every circumstance every time, if for no other reason than that we are very self-interested beings.
That understanding is precisely what the American Founders also believed. It’s abundantly clear in their actions and words that they did not trust human nature with consolidated power. They didn’t even trust themselves. The leading men of the day spent months in Philadelphia that summer of 1787 constructing a form of government that would limit their control over the new republic. If they’d actually been hyper self-interested in power and control, they would have created a rigged system that benefitted themselves, one that put consolidated power into their own hands. But they did the precise opposite of that."
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Box seat: scientists solve the mystery of why wombats have cube-shaped poo
"How wombats produce their cube-shape poo has long been a biological puzzle but now an international study has provided the answer to this unusual natural phenomenon.
The cube shape is formed within the intestines – not at the point of exit, as previously thought – according to research published in scientific journal Soft Matter on Thursday."
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Nancy Mace Doesn’t Represent Republican Women
"Thomas Jefferson said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Having lost many of our liberties a long time ago, eternal vigilance has become the price of having a Republican Party not entirely dominated by snakes and traitors.
The sad truth is a new roster of swamp creatures is coming up in the GOP in the wake of the 2020 election and it is best embodied by Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina. We will find out who the frauds and fakes are of the freshman congressional class in no time, but Mace right out of the gate—along with Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan—is leading the charge for the next generation of RINOs at the ready to deceive and betray for the highest bidder.
Before she was elected, Mace posed as a pro-Trump Republican to win her primary and win conservative votes in the general election, where she rode the president’s coattails to a victory that was almost five points smaller than Trump’s in her district. Yet the moment Election Night concluded, she barely paid lip service to the rabble and their concerns about suspect mail-in ballots and hackable vote-processing computers. She did not want to dwell on the past and take on fights that could hurt her standing in the Beltway.
After all, she is the future, as the consultant class has made abundantly clear. Mace checks all the right victim group bubbles on the survey, so she can be a leader in the age of diversity. After all, that’s what matters in a modern society. She intends to take full advantage of all the advantages and privileges at her disposal."
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FBI Lawyer Who Forged Email In Carter Page FISA Process Sentenced To Probation
""The entire game is rigged.
DOJ is trying to throw a troll in prison for 10 years because of a meme from 2016.
Meanwhile, a corrupt FBI attorney gets probation for defrauding a federal court in order to spy on his enemies.
The rule of law is dead."
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The judge noted that he received roughly 50 letters attesting to Clinsemith’s character. Boasberg also noted that he can’t ignore the harm that Clinesmith has already suffered, including the loss of his government job and the potential of losing his attorney license. The judge noted that Clinesmith was thrust from being an obscure attorney to the center of a national hurricane over the improper surveillance of Trump campaign associates."
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Would You Be Considered A Domestic Terrorist Under This New Bill?
"The DTPA is essentially the criminalization of speech, expression, and thought. It takes cancel culture a step further and all but outlaws unpopular opinions. This act will empower intelligence, law enforcement, and even military wings of the American ruling class to crack down on individuals adhering to certain belief systems and ideologies.
According to MI Congressman Fred Upton:
“The attack on the U.S. Capitol earlier this month was the latest example of domestic terrorism, but the threat of domestic terrorism remains very real. We cannot turn a blind eye to it,” Upton said. “The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act will equip our law enforcement leaders with the tools needed to help keep our homes, families, and communities across the country safe.
Congressman Upton’s website gives the following information on DTPA:
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 would strengthen the federal government’s efforts to prevent, report on, respond to, and investigate acts of domestic terrorism by authorizing offices dedicated to combating this threat; requiring these offices to regularly assess this threat; and providing training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement in addressing it.
DTPA would authorize three offices, one each within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to monitor, investigate, and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. The bill also requires these offices to provide Congress with joint, biannual reports assessing the state of domestic terrorism threats, with a specific focus on white supremacists. Based on the data collected, DTPA requires these offices to focus their resources on the most significant threats.
DTPA also codifies the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, which would coordinate with United States Attorneys and other public safety officials to promote information sharing and ensure an effective, responsive, and organized joint effort to combat domestic terrorism. The legislation requires DOJ, FBI, and DHS to provide training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in understanding, detecting, deterring, and investigating acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy. Finally, DTPA directs DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Department of Defense to establish an interagency task force to combat white supremacist infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement."