Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.
I'll Take Any One We Can Get.
See them standing in the foothills
Waiting for the kill
On wings of fear the terror sweeps
Into the city beat
To defend
This is the pact
But when life's scorned
An' damage done
To avenge
This is the pact...
On wings of vengeance, Taarna finds them
Death for barbarians
The enemy shrivel and die
The enemy shrivel and die
Yellen defends IRS rule requiring banks to report all transactions over $600
During an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday, Yellen was pressed on whether the IRS has the “wherewithal” to collect more information about taxpayers and bank accounts including cash flows, something many Republicans have called invasive.
“Well, of course they do,” Yellen said. “Right now, on every bank account that earns more than $10 a year in interest, the banks report the interest earned to the IRS. That’s part of the information base that includes W2’s and reports on dividends in other income that taxpayers earned. So collection of information is routine.”
Yellen cited the “enormous tax gap” in the US as the reason behind the proposed tax hikes and information collecting, blaming the gap on places where information on income “can be hidden.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen defended President Biden’s plan to have banks inform the IRS of transactions of $600 or more as simply “routine.”CNBC
“It’s just a few pieces of information about individual bank accounts, nothing at the transaction level that would violate privacy,” the secretary said.
The collected information would ostensibly help the Treasury Department determine which high-income wealthy individuals may be concealing transactions and income, and “these would be helpful indicators of where it would make sense for auditing to occur,” she added.
“So, it is not reporting of individual transactions or anything of the like. And it would be a simple thing for banks and other payment providers to provide along with the other information they’re already providing.”
Under the proposal, banks would be required to turn over aggregate inflow and outflow numbers annually to the IRS and would cover bank accounts with at least $600 or at least $600 worth of...
Facebook ‘Whistleblower’ Donated 36 Times to Democrats, Including to Anti-Primary Extremists And AOC.
Looks like this 'whistleblower' is doing less whistling and more blowing.
Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen is a longtime Democrat donor, supporting campaigns for far-left extremists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has also donated money to activist groups actively attempting to derail the U.S. primary process that allows ordinary members of the public to beat out establishment, career politicians, The National Pulse can reveal.
Blowing the Establishment.
Haugen’s “whistleblowing” has been lauded by the corporate media: a sure sign that rather than being a sole actor attempting to call out corporate abuse, she is likely backed by some hefty interests. Haugen first anonymously leaked internal documents before revealing her identity and calling for mass censorship on the Facebook, but only of political ideas she opposes.
The National Pulse has thus far identified 36 donations from Haugen during her time as an employee of Facebook, Pinterest, and Gigster. All of the donations, which total nearly $2,000 since December 2016, have gone to Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On January 13th, 2020, Haugen sent money to Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign and a further contribution to her “Courage to Change” Political Action Committee (PAC).
“All endorsees will embody the ideals of racial, social, economic, and environmental justice,” promises the PAC.
Haugen’s most recent donation was August 4th, sending $100 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Anti-Democracy Campaigners.
In-keeping with her wishes to purge political views other than hers from social media, Haugen has also donated to a left-wing “resistance” group which lists as one of its top priorities the dismantling of the U.S. primary process for elections.
America is somewhat unique on the world stage in its commitment to a decentralized process whereby ordinary citizens can become political party candidates. It is perhaps the most democratic part of U.S. elections.
But, in the words of the Haugen-backed “It Starts Today” campaign, “the modern partisan primary—particularly within the GOP—has turned out to have an unintended consequence: extremism in our elected officials and dysfunction in our legislatures.”
There is, of course, far more extremism on the political left in the U.S. Congress than on the political right. But as of June 2021, the group founded by ActBlue’s Jonathan Zucker decided that the way to beat Republicans was not to win the battle of ideas, but rather to stop real conservatives winning primaries.
Haugen donated twice to “It Starts Today,” and curiously claims that it “holds donations” for...
Educated Idiots, Critical Race Theory, and Other Bad Ideas
A recipe for civilizational corruption and decline.
“Educated idiots” is how my old man described college-educated people who were completely devoid of common sense and moral intelligence, or what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” But what made them especially annoying was their arrogance, their assumption that because they were professionally credentialed in one area, they were equally knowledgeable about everything else.
This perennial character flaw was recognized by the ancients. Socrates in his defense speech noted this presumptuous claim among the Athenians he questioned during his search for someone wiser than he. The poets and artisans, for example, because they had many useful skills and technical knowledge, “thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Nor were the highly educated immune: “There is nothing so absurd,” the Roman orator Cicero wrote, “that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” Humans by nature are vain and crave recognition for being superior to their fellows, which make us vulnerable to this willful error of thought and character.
But over the last 150 years, the broadening of formal education to include the masses, the increase and hyper-specialization in university disciplines, and the prestige of the natural sciences from the technologies that improved material existence, have made this bad habit ubiquitous. Worse yet, the aggressive promotion during the last fifty years of “college for everyone”–– which necessarily required lower standards and a decline in foundational skills––multiplied the numbers of people with this affliction, even as the quality of their degrees was degraded.
Those trained in the humanities and soft “sciences,” that is, disciplines that lack the rigor and real-world accountability of real sciences, are particularly prone to this intellectual disease. This phenomenon explains why we see so many preposterous, unsubstantiated, politically biased, and just plain whacky ideas like Critical Race Theory or “white fragility” promulgated by self-styled “brights” with such arrogant certainty, and passed off as “science.”
The result of these changes is manifested in several ways. Human nature and human experience, once the province of religion, philosophy, and traditional wisdom, became the objects of “scientism,” new disciplines like sociology and psychology that adopted the quantification and jargon of real science to disguise as “science” dubious philosophical claims about human and social reality. These disciplines proliferated in the universities, and their conclusions and “knowledge” trickled down into K-12 teacher-training and school curricula. The big leap in the numbers of those attending college distributed this false knowledge more widely throughout the culture, from movies and television shows, to newspapers, magazines, and web sites.
The story of “scientific racism” and eugenics during the first half of the 20th century is a notorious example. The theories of Charles Darwin, particularly the “survival of the fittest,” and the false analogy with the cross-breeding of farm animals, were crudely applied to humans.
Darwin himself legitimized this practice in The Descent of Man: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” But misguided sentimentality, traditional religion, and short-sighted charitable impulses interfered with natural selection that culled out the unfit: “The weak members of civilized societies,” Darwin wrote, “propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” The positive and negative “traits” that were the object of natural selection were linked to the reductive notion of “race” to establish ethnic and racial hierarchies defined by biological superiority and inferiority.
These ideas were taught and studied in America’s most prestigious universities. Research centers like Cold Spring Harbor gathered immense troves of data purportedly documenting the transmission of “traits” through family histories. Newspapers and magazines ran stories about the impending “race suicide,” as Theodore Roosevelt called the failure of retrograde people to acknowledge the “settled science.” And books like...
Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor
"Whistleblower" Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.
Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.
The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.
There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.
But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own...
Japan Making ‘Preparations’ for Possible Chinese Attack of Taiwan
Japan’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it would consider its “options” and make necessary “preparations” toward supporting Taiwan if China continues to ramp up its military intimidation of the island.
Asked by reporters how Tokyo views Beijing’s record-breaking flyovers through Taiwanese airspace in recent days, Japanese Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu said he hoped “this matter is resolved peacefully between the two parties through direct talks.”
“Additionally, instead of simply monitoring the situation, we hope to weigh the various possible scenarios that may arise to consider what options we have, as well as the preparations we must make,” he said at an October 5 press briefing.
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| Japan’s Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, wearing a face mask to curb the spread of COVID-19, sits at a table during bilateral talks with United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers meeting, at Grosvenor House Hotel, London, Monday, May 3, 2021. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP) |
“Motegi’s comments on Taiwan mark a departure from the past by explicitly speaking of possible involvement, and were also aimed at drawing international attention to the issue and pressing China,” Reuters observed on Tuesday, citing the analysis of political experts.
“That part was always unspoken … but this time, they’re taking a stronger stand,” Yoichiro Sato, an international relations professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, told Reuters on October 5.
Japan’s use of assertive language while addressing the Taiwan-China conflict on October 5 signaled a significant shift in rhetoric according to Robert Ward, a London-based senior fellow for Japanese Security Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“It is drawing a line of sorts and thus creating expectations,” he told Reuters.
“The new government will continue with the harder line, as Motegi is showing. This fits with Japan’s broader push to balance China from a position of...
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