By Jo Nova
The Wall Street Journal — bless them — analyzed 12,000 officials at 50 federal agencies and sifted through 850,000 financial assets to uncover a seething well of graft, grift and pilfering. As the WSJ prosaically says, “The federal government doesn’t maintain a comprehensive public database of the mandatory financial disclosures of all senior executive-branch officials. So The Wall Street Journal built its own.”
There were problems everywhere but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) got the first mention on the “Six Takeaways” list of government corruption. Who would have thought that a public body holding the purse-strings to the rest of the economy, with vague ill-defined, unmeasurable long term goals would become so corrupt. More to the point, who would have thought they wouldn’t?
With so many public officials making out like bandits the point of carbon credits is not to change the weather, it’s a Bureaucrat Investment Tool. With the power to ban or gift exemptions to favoured firms, bureaucrats can insider trade their way to retirement.
Six Takeaways From WSJ’s Investigation Into the Stock Trades of Government Officials
By Michael Siconolfi, Wall Street Journal
Numerous federal officials owned shares of companies lobbying their agencies:
More than 200 senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. EPA employees and their family members collectively owned between $400,000 and nearly $2 million in shares of oil and gas companies on average each year between 2016 and 2021.
An EPA official reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.
Cocky, What? This is really blatant:
Some officials traded ahead of regulatory actions:
More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.
Not only did a lot of people have snouts in the trough, but there must have also been a lot of blind eyes to avoid seeing all that insider trading. And some numbers were surprisingly large for people earning an hourly wage. In some cases the individual trades were between “$5 million and $25 million”.
People say that the Tech Giants are private, but in some sense Big Gov privately owns Big Tech.
Federal officials are big technology investors:
While the government was ramping up scrutiny of large technology companies, more than 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks: Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
There are around 1,800 people employed by the government who have less than no interest in launching an anti-trust suit.
On the plus side, at least we know there is still a news agency left which has some journalists. And that’s a big deal.
As for the cause of the wave of self serving cheatery, we could do cultural psychoanalysis, but as I keep saying, it starts with fake money. Inflating the currency works like cancer on the delicate network of incentives. First people feel happy, more confident, and more willing to take risks. Things work out, especially for those at the head of the rocket. But pretty soon, things escalate — and before you know it, crazy-land is here, all traffic lights are stuck on Green, and one guy has a plan to hold back the sea and a ten trillion dollar fund to do it.
Somewhere along the way, desk clerks get an investment portfolio, and investment sharks get a job at the EPA. At some point half the population knows someone who’s on the take and getting away with it, and the next day nearly everyone is.
There’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously
The more money we print, the more corruption we feed.
The supply of US base money since 1960. If you thought the GFC was bad…
And if you think corruption is terrible now, just wait until bureaucrats and bankers get a Global Carbon Currency.
Congress photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash
The ‘Greenbacks’…
Not even United States Government issued.
The Federal Reserve Currency in US Dollars.
Is it any wonder this system needs to crash?
And crash hard into a different trading system.
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We need a great reset alright one that starts with mass jailings. Those internments might have a use after all.
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Liars and cheaters, the whole damn lot of them! And don’t think it doesn’t apply here in Oz! Not one of our politicians over the last 50 years has retired from Government in penury! WIFM is their war cry. Just consider Hawke, Keating, Gillard and even Howard. State Premiers are even “better” at accumulating shady $$$. Needless to say, their respective Permanent Heads are also beneficiaries of our unofficial largess.
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Obama came from humble background and Michelle was a lawyer. Suddenly they are in the WH and Barry pockets about $400k a year for 8 years. Tax takes some but he ends his term with a lazy $17 million left over to buy his sea rise threatened pad at Cape Cod. I was good at Maths but that does not make sense. Keating and Hawke also seemed to have a lot over when they left Parliament. Maybe they get a percentage of the money they print while in office. Joe will do well even without the CCP.
No wonder there is panic when a cleaner like Trump is elected.
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One of Bob Hawke’s techniques was to make himself sufficiently obnoxious that sooner or later someone would make an unwise criticism and get taken to court.
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That was also a common technique with Devil Wran (1926-2014) in NSW, ALP premier 1976-86 and the NSW ALP parliament in general.
(For overseas readers, Australia has extremely strict libel laws that apply even to politicians and truth is not necessarily a defence in some states.)
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Then there was the discovery of how printers ink made more $$$ when burned and not used to print the actual $$$ bills.
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The police didn’t do their job properly, but for the amount of money involved you’d think the insurance company would have properly investigated the matter.
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When every level of every enterprise/intitution (government and private) is politically infiltrated then two laws come into operation.
One for them.
And, one for you.
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Tax free too.
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Lawrie:
I thought that the Presidential ‘salary’ was tax free.
In that case there is only a $14 million deficiency on the Cape Cod mansion. Then there is the other one in Hawaii which was reported as more expensive.
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The US Presidential salary is taxable at the normal rate. The travel allowance of $100,000 and the entertainment allowance of $19,000 is not.
Gifts cannot be received but if they are given by foreign dignitaries etc., in order to not cause offence they are accepted and then put into the National Archives as public property. Clothing items are allowed to be worn once then put in the arcives.
The US President salary is exactly $400,000.
It has been since 1999 when Clinton signed legislation to increase it from $200,000.
The base salary of $100,000 was increased to $200,000 in 1969.
Pay rises are prohibited for sitting presidents.
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Also, no US public serpent is allowed to be paid more the the President.
Fauci appears to be an anomaly with an official salary of $480,654 making the US President ($400,000) only the second highest paid US federal public serpent.
Trump gave his salary away.
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Trump took $1 out of his 400k to make it official, the rest given to charities. Compare and contrast to the champagne socialists like obama, biden and pelosi…
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‘From $ea to $hining $ea,’
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Penguinite,
I’d tentatively propose one: Rex jackson. Sure, he took money in exchange for approving early release of prisoners, but that was small time stuff feeding a weakness he had for the pokies. Rex lived in a mediocre fibro house in Helensburgh. After he got out of prison he saw out his working life selling hot dogs from a caravan at Stanwell Tops. The real crooks did rather better.
If you want further evidence that Rex wasn’t so bad, look up what Mike Carlton or David Marr have to say about him. Anyone who can get that much venom from those two …
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President Trump raised awareness of “The Swamp”, but not even he knew just how deep and extensive it was.
And then The Swamp set out to destroy him.
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The UK swamp, which includes the supposedly independent Bank of England, is evidently aiming to take down Liz Truss as fast as it can. I hope she survives and thrives, but she will need to be amazingly tough and to have the support of the public, because the swamp and the BoE have all the weaponry.
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I don’t have much faith in Liz Truss … but she is looking more attractive now that she has the right set of enemies.
The news reported her “tax cuts” as bringing down the UK pound, but it had nothing to do with that … firstly no real tax cuts were put into operation, and anyway it takes years before any of that makes a real difference. The actual problem was pension funds sitting on highly leveraged government bonds meaning they cannot survive interest rate rises. I mean mathematically the UK bond rate cannot be allowed to rise because those funds will be destroyed. Tinkering with tax rates won’t make the slightest difference, they are stuck in a corner.
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The whole of the EU is in trouble as the ECB allowed negative interest rates in 2014. What madness. As Bond rates rise the ECB is trapped. There goes the EU Bond Market. Crash and the EU Pension Funds are bankrupt as they hold a lot of those Bonds………………
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Corruption USA is not OK for the Free World. The Founding Fathers would be most unhappy to say the least.
Roll on those November Mid Term Elections and the 2024 Presidential Election if we can get that far.
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Notice in the graph, the Trump effect, he pulled it up and started to reel the largesse in, but then Sleepy Joe really let the dogs off the chain.
The great reset is going to get ugly, and it’s not the reset the WEF was working towards.
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That is a brilliant observation, thankyou.
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If you look closely at the timing on the chart you see it rose steeply before Biden made office. It rose sharply due to Covid relief through 2020.
The current downturn has been during Biden’s presidency.
Trump did make big inroads but Covid messed it all up. Almost as if the timing of Covid was to unsettle the Trump administration and reduce the prospect of a second term.
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Geez RW, there’s a lot on this blog who have a healthy sceptical view on most things. I, maybe like a lot of others, try NOT to be a conspiracy theorist, but many times I have thought about that very fact. That being- was COVID actually dreamed up to get rid of Trump? When you run that theory there’s a lot of things that fit in the jigsaw. One of the big ones being that the Chinese have always rigorously contested that they released the virus.
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But also bear in mind Trump only has so much influence on interest rates and the people who do set them may choose to tighten the screws to make things harder or even trigger a crash. Stock prices are determined by how much people are willing to borrow to buy them…
Look closely at who pulls those strings and ask how did it get this way… Why isn’t the price of money and the amount of currency set by those who answer to the voters?
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I am surprised there is not mandatory public disclosure of the financial interests of these US public serpents when it involves an actual or possible conflict of interest.
In the case of Australia, even though I would never trust a senior public serpent as far as I could kick them, especially when they are a quota hire, they are theoretically bound by a code with regard to conflicts of interest as follows:
https://www.apsc.gov.au/publication/aps-values-and-code-conduct-practice/section-5-conflict-interest
In the case of Australian politicians, despite their general dishonesty, they are legally required to disclose their financial interests, although I suppose they then give the holdings to family members.
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Plrase don’t neglect to read Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book about Fauci with respect to these type of inappropriate relationships with the people the agencies are meant to be regulating.
Also see Rand Paul’s interrogation of Fauci. Watch Fauci squirm.
https://youtu.be/imKkATI331g
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Now I have learnt that Fauci’s daughter is a software engineer at Twitter, who has a lot influence. If you wanted to run a disinformation campaign against people not supportive of COVID polices/vaccines, what better person could you have on your side. “.. hey sweetie, any chance you could alter the algorithms a bit, I’m copping a bit of flak regarding COVID policies…”
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Alison Fauci.
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https://theredwire.com/faucis-daughter-caught-working-for-twitter-propaganda-machine/
SEE LINK FOR REST
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I don’t know how we’ll ever begin to clean up this mess.
Most people are completely unaware of these con merchants and fra-dsters and just try to live their lives and do the right thing.
But these type of parasites are very thick on the ground and this morning we’re told that the churches are pressing the Albo govt to do more about their terrible CC.
IOW waste many more billions $ and more quickly because some idiots like Turnbull or C Brookes or Twiggy Forrest etc told them it must be done.
Fair dinkum the western world’s gone mad, bad and sad and we always seem to vote for these disaster con merchants who’ll always make our lives more difficult.
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Unfortunately so many have been completely poisoned by Leftist nonsense.
My view, and its a negative one, is that we have to have the whole place collapse before people realise the depths of evil, yes evil, which has taken hold of our country and so many others. Lies have become the modus operandi for a corrupt and dangerous govt, who just do what they want and bugger the tax payers or voters.
So many have literally no idea about what science is or data or, it would appear, integrity. Hopefully the next few painful years will show people how bad it has become and they demand that public officials and our politicians are fully accountable.
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pob >”we have to have the whole place collapse before people realise the depths of evil, yes evil, which has taken hold of our country”
Biden’s doing exactly that according to Stephen Moore, former senior economic advisor to President Donald Trump:
Stephen Moore: Seven Ways America Is Being Destroyed
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stephen-moore-seven-ways-america-being-destroyed
# ‘The first thing you would do is you would destroy its finances.’
# ‘The second thing you do is destroy its currency.’
# ‘Third, you would destroy its energy supply.’
# ‘The fourth thing you would do is you would provide money to your enemies.’
# ‘The fifth thing you would do is you would divide the nation.’
# ‘Sixth, you would destroy the stock market and people’s lifetime savings.’
# ‘Seventh, you would weaponize government agencies by going to imprison or punish your political enemies.’
How long before Biden hangs out the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner à la Bush?
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Moore:
It’s not just those with D’s behind their names, but many with R’s behind their name have been complicit and enablers. They need to go too.
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The most effective means is to remove the privilege of creating the world money. Remove that and USA can no longer create money out of nothing and use it to buy stuff. The USA owes the rest of the world a whole year of gross output. That would be hard to serve if the debt was not denominated ib USD.
The current global situation has strengthened the trading bond between China and Russia. No point using USDs because Russia is prohibited from using that means of exchange. This strengthens the CNY and RUB as trading currencies. European countries are paying for gas in RUB despite claiming they would not do that.
Only China can now make the stuff needed to TRANSITION. And no one has asked China if they have the capacity to make billions of solar panels every year and hundreds of thousands of wind turbines. The fantasy continues and reality is just around the corner.
Germans will have no ability to wage war by 2023. They will be hard placed to stay warm and keep the lights on.
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Rick >”That would be hard to serve if the debt was not denominated ib USD”
Destructive debt bomb:
Fed Rate Hikes Will Add Trillions to National Debt
https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/interest-rate-hikes-will-add-trillions-to-national-debt/
This is committed and unavoidable (see next comment).
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Upthead I linked to ‘Stephen Moore: Seven Ways America Is Being Destroyed‘
Biden’s legacy.
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Unfortunately, we get either ‘bad’ or ‘worse’ as our voting options. We have to choose those that inflict the least damage…..
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We are seeing the modern equivalent of the fall of Rome.
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The fall of Rome seems vaguely familiar….
https://www.history.com/news/rome-republic-augustus-dictator
SEE LINK FOR REST
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_social_scientist_Luke_Kemp%2Cis_close_to_340_years?wprov=sfla1
If we define modern Western Civilisation as having started with The Enlightenment, often regarded to have started about 1685, then 340 years hence is 2025…
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But he did say average which means some lasted longer. The Roman Empire is probably the closest to Western Society in modern times and lasted 700 years. But it did not totally disappear and some of it survives to this day in language for example as well as architecture and building materials. The replacement for Western Society is what? I know that Schwarb and the WEF might want to destroy what we have but they also want to enjoy the benefits the West has created. Leonardo DiCaprio and Greg Hunt won’t be giving up their cars and travel to walk and live in caves as they advocate for us. So civilisation is a continuum and not segmented. Each generation builds on the last or it did until the me generation arrived. They will learn their lessons as we did when they have to face a few home truths such as food shortages brought on by ridiculous and unnecessary regulations and unreliable and unaffordable electricity. The great reset is fast becoming the great awakening. Come 2025 the climate clowns are going to be well and truly exposed and they will become the laughing stock. We will survive but every sensible person will have to do their bit.
Here is an entertaining but also informative speech by a lawyer explaining why green energy will fail. https://youtu.be/_YiM7Gf_snQ
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Interesting that considering this article and recent research by Maryanne Demasi in the BMJ suggesting the TGA are 96% funded by Big Pharma, Australia is legislating to remove the right of doctors to dissent in any way from the the Health bureaucracy edicts upon pain of deregistration. The corporate world now has total control of all governments, bureaucracies and MSM, and the general public don’t know or care.
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It’s almost as though the Leftist repressors of freedom are all playing from the same song book, all over the world.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/10/california-makes-it-illegal-for-doctors-to-disagree-with-politicians/
SEE LINK FOR REST
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A conspiracy theorist may think that, though I couldn’t possibly comment.
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DoctorT,
How did doctors let this happen?
In particular, why did they allow authority to gravitate to the useless clucks in Canberra. How was that going to be better than separate boards in NSW, Victora, etc.? They haven’t been dumb enough to let the Feds take over in the USA, but here we’re stuck with a single authority pushing a monoculture of medical mediocrity.
Seems to me the AMA has represented the interests of doctors and medical practice in exactly the same way as Bill Shorten represented the AWU members. They don’t represent the doctors, they *own* them.
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There is now a pro-reason, pro-medicine association for medical professionals as an alternative to the far Left AMA.
https://amps.redunion.com.au/
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How did it happen?
1/ the school and university system has produced compliant, woke, automatons who do what they are told, and don’t engage their right brains.
2/ The older, thinking doctors have retired, been registered, or just keep their heads down (that’s me).
3/ The AMA represents less than 15 percent of doctors, yet has all the power (just like the trade unions), and is a hard left organisation. Bruce Shepherd would turn in his grave.
I have justjoined the AMPS- the doctors’ branch of the Red Union.
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Suppression Campaign
The American Medical Association asks the federal government to prosecute critics of radical gender medicine.
Last week, the American Medical Association, the Children’s Hospital Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland requesting that the Department of Justice “take swift action to investigate and prosecute” “high-profile users on social media” who have allegedly created a “campaign of disinformation” against children’s hospitals that offer “gender-affirming health care,” leading to threats and harassment, including a bomb-threat hoax at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The letter poses three significant problems.
First, the medical associations obscure the radical nature of so-called “gender-affirming care.” The basic facts, which have caused justifiable public outrage, are well-established: according to the medical literature, American doctors have been administering puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and experimental gender surgeries on minors—including double-mastectomies for girls, which involves surgically removing the breasts, and vaginoplasties for boys, which involves surgically removing the penis and turning the tissue into an artificial vagina. Despite what trans activists have insisted, the medical evidence to support these procedures for minors is thin, weak, and contested. Medical authorities in Europe have recently turned against many of these practices.
Second, the AMA, CHA, and AAP provide no evidence, or even a working definition, of “disinformation.” The “high-profile users on social media” would undoubtedly include those of us who have published investigative reporting on radical gender medicine at children’s hospitals, often using original source materials published by the hospitals themselves. Rather than grapple with the facts, however, left-wing activists and medical providers have dismissed them with accusations of “disinformation”—even when journalists have directly quoted their own words. This unsubstantiated accusation of “disinformation” is even more troubling because, in addition to asking the Justice Department for investigations on these vague and undefined grounds, the medical associations also asked technology companies to silence critics of “gender-affirming care” on social media platforms, an essential public forum.
Third, the call to “investigate and prosecute” journalists, activists, and citizens critical of radical gender medicine is wholly contrary to the principles of free speech; if the attorney general were to carry out this request, it would be a violation of the First Amendment and a blatant attempt to criminalize political opposition and intellectual debate. At their founding, these three medical associations embraced the idea that they should be nonpartisan, neutral, and driven by scientific evidence. But by issuing this reckless call to prosecute critics, they have revealed themselves to be hostile to open debate and free scientific inquiry. They are behaving like dangerous ideologues rather than custodians of the public trust.
Is Garland following the same playbook with the AMA? To answer that question, I am preparing a public-records request to discover whether the Department of Justice had prior knowledge of the AMA’s campaign to silence journalists, as it did with the National School Boards Association’s campaign to silence parents. Either way, the intention of this gambit is clear: the most powerful medical and political authorities in the nation would like to make experimental gender surgeries a forbidden topic of debate.
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Critics of radical gender medicine should remember that we are the underdogs: the AMA has a $460 million annual budget, and the attorney general has the entire federal law enforcement apparatus at his disposal.
Still, the only way forward is to hold fast against their malicious intimidation campaign. If they believe that puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and genital surgeries are the best treatments for gender dysphoric minors, let them defend those practices in public—not silence or jail critics.
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This mass genital mutilation and sterilisation of children and young adults is horrific child and adult abuse.
Routine extreme surgery for the mentally ill went out of fashion with the prefrontal lobotomy.
However, it has come back into vogue for the treatment of the mental illness of gender dysphoria. Of course, its proponents claim it is not a mental illness but don’t say exactly what it is.
Its proponents also lie to children and tell them you can change sex which of course is a biological impossibility. Some even falsely claim the treatment is reversible.
Lots of children and adults are being lied to.
And obviously it is the Left promoting this BS.
The Left keep telling us there is no real difference between men and women so why would one want to change into the other?
In fact, it is the Left that believes in extremely rigid gender stereotypes and the instant a boy plays with a doll or a girl climbs a tree they are declared “trans” and sterilised and mutilated as soon as possible.
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Now do the FDA- that would be a pandoras box of worms, if ever there was one.
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I think the Feds put Martha Stewart in jail for 18 months because of a trade that netted her just $53,000, all the while Bernie Madoff had a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. The terrible irony is that the government is incapable of policing itself, no matter how much inside dealing it does.
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I think she was caught lying to the Feds and that’s the reason she went to jail. The trades were unsavory, but not criminal.
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But all our progressive comrades will insist the solution is…. MORE GOVERNMENT.
We have spent the last 6 decades relearning the obvious.’Everything government touches turns to shit”.
And throughout the Dread Covid Theatre of these last few years,we have watched all our “Watchdog institutions” turn on us and betray their reason to exist..
Of course the “regulators” are corrupt,this is their function..
The Parasitic Overload is not going to starve itself.
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Politics is broken . Humans being what we are , can be manipulated easily and this makes us behave in ways that are contrary to our needs . What is the use of having a trillion dollars , ten houses or twenty cars ? Greed has been turned from being a bad thing into an aspirational goal . The person with the most money still dies . Civilisation requires we all co-operate to achieve outcomes that benefit all participants – this no longer applies . We have to make all branches of our civilisation (and government) accountable again .
Truth , honesty and honour are the only thing that will save us .
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Connecting “Energy Inflation” With “Climate Extremism”
In the approaching 2022 midterm elections, American voters will have the opportunity to decide whether oil industry executives are really to blame for high energy prices—or if it’s instead the political class that needs a shakeup.
In a new report for Real Clear Energy, Joseph Toomey, a career-management consultant, makes a persuasive case that the energy inflation now victimizing American consumers and taxpayers is the result of deliberate public-policy choices made here at home. Even as President Biden vilifies energy companies, the evidence is overwhelming that the current regime in Washington is beholden to climate extremism at the expense of affordable energy, Toomey argues.
As Toomey explains, Biden is poised to create a new industry of climate activists who will use the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a conduit for constraining private enterprise with the ostensible purpose of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions.
Meantime, the president’s EPA regulators are doubling down on biofuel blending mandates, collectively known as the Renewable Fuel Standard, a byproduct of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The onerous new rules impose retroactive compliance requirements over a two-year period. They’re just the latest of the Biden’s administration’s anti-energy initiatives. Recall that the president canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office and imposed a moratorium on oil and gas drilling on federal lands just a few days later. And Toomey documents a host of other choices that have put U.S. policy in the hands of “anti-energy zealots.”
Or consider two key Biden appointees: John Kerry, the administration’s climate envoy, and Gina McCarthy, top climate advisor, who served as EPA administrator under Barack Obama. Kerry has been a longtime proponent of the Paris Climate Accord, a U.N. agreement designed to put America last and China first. McCarthy, who recently left the White House, is a former president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a green group with close ties to China.
Search for White House statements critical of China’s environmental record and you won’t find much. Biden did manage to express indignation when Xi Jinping, China’s president, declined to participate in the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow last year. But it hardly compares to the “harshly worded letter” addressed to American energy companies, as Toomey explains, in which Biden needled companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron for their “historically high profit margins for refining oil into gasoline.”
A major challenge besetting American industry is the accelerated pace of refinery closures. Several factors have played a role—but especially Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) polices, which, as Toomey points out, have found a home in corporate boardrooms and in the Biden White House. Over the next few months, and into 2024, we will see “significant refinery closures,” Toomey warns, in response to corporate America’s ESG-driven anti-carbon initiatives.
“These policies will see China become the world’s leading refiner for years to come,” Toomey warns, “and that fact doesn’t seem to bother anyone in Washington.”
But it should bother American voters.
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BREAKING: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia confirms Biden attempted to coerce them to postpone oil cuts until after the midterms, announce they have rejected his quid pro quo
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JP Morgan CEO: Biden Is ‘Getting Energy Completely Wrong’
At least one financial industry CEO is not so mesmerized by the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement that he has lost their mind. So while BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talks about the virtues of high gas prices, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon provides an excellent counterbalance. In an interview on CNBC, Dimon criticized the Biden administration’s energy policy and called on the U.S. to take a leadership role.
While Fink believes rising energy prices will reduce the “green premium” and cause people to embrace renewables, Dimon’s perspective is much more realistic. The Biden administration has decided to beg some of the worst petro dictators in the world to produce more oil rather than taking it out of the ground at home. As Dimon observes, this has not reduced fossil fuel use:
“Well, I think we’re getting energy completely wrong, which is, you know, ever since this war started, you know that Europe is going to have a problem.”
“And that it was pretty predictable that Putin was going to cut off some gas and some oil, and oil price would go up and, by the way, for the climate folks here, it’s made the climate worse because people have this bad assumption that higher oil prices and gas prices reduce consumption, reduce CO2. No. Poor nations, India, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, are turning back on coal plants, as are rich nations called Germany, Netherlands, France.”
NIMBY energy policies, like those adopted by Biden, Germany, and other EU countries, have always made the world dirtier. Western nations outsourced their fossil fuel production to countries in the Middle East and Russia that use less environmentally sound extrusion practices. China makes much of the solar and wind equipment they install, and the CCP is building record numbers of new coal plants. These policies do not reduce CO2. They just move the source to another country.
Now, Biden is refusing to fill in any shortages caused by the war in Ukraine. However, the administration’s policy keeps the apocalyptic climate freaks quiet at home. It also keeps them delusional.
Dimon was the CEO who had to burst Representative Rashida Tlaib’s green bubble when she asked him to commit to divesting from fossil fuel companies during congressional hearings. “Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America,” Dimon responded.
Dimon is correct. America suffers from a shortage of refining capacity that is not likely to get remedied as long as firms like BlackRock and the Biden administration keep attacking the oil and gas industry. Even California Governor Gavin Newsom is getting in on the action, threatening to punish oil companies for “rank price gouging.” Of course, this is just political theater, as Valero’s vice president for state government affairs, Scott Folwarkow, noted in his response to an inquiry from the California Energy Commission:
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It’s good to see the media doing its job in this case. There must be more lifting the lid off the “Deep State” plague that has infested and corruptly rewards itself in western democracies.
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In a new report for Real Clear Energy,
Energy Inflation – Was by Design
The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war.
This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.
Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democrat- ic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the- above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.
Passage of the comically mistitled Inflation Reduction Act places this option beyond Biden’s reach, even if he were so inclined. Democrats are hardly going to take a vow of climate omertà when they’ve achieved a political triumph of pushing through Congress what they regard as the most significant climate legislation to date. Although the price of oil has slipped back from recent highs, the factors behind high gasoline prices remain in place. Foremost among these is the steep decline in U.S. oil refinery capacity triggered when Covid lockdowns crushed demand but continued after the economy reopened. There has never been such a large fall in operable refinery capacity. Moreover, Gulf Coast refineries were operating at 97 percent of their operating capacity in June 2022. As Toomey remarks, “There isn’t any more blood to be squeezed out of this turnip.”
Toomey identifies five factors driving this decline in refinery capacity.
An Extremely Long and Fascinating Paper – have downloaded
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-details-on-visas-attempt-to-influence-pelosi/
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Isn’t it nice to know federal officials believe in investing in the businesses important to the Nation?
I do, but as Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook.”
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…Visa tried to wield influence over former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi…
The (very wealthy) Ms Pelosi is, if we can trust Wikipedia, the current Speaker of the House. Fingers crossed for November 2022…..
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It’s becoming harder and harder to save America.
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Do I believe the United States is home to corrupt, one eyed and self interested, climate change beaurocrats and officials? Yes I do . .
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Trump was right again, the swamp is indeed very deep. The Republicans will likely flood Washington when they drain the swamp. Time for all federal, state and local government employees to have time limits on their employment.
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[…] US Govt Corruption-fest: One third of top EPA officials also invested in companies they oversee […]
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