90 Miles From Tyranny

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Sunday, May 8, 2022

Visage à trois #226

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:






Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #399

 











The Chinese Slowdown: Much More Than Covid


The most recent macroeconomic figures show that the Chinese slowdown is much more severe than expected and not only attributable to the covid-19 lockdowns.

The lockdowns have an enormous impact. Twenty-six of 31 China mainland provinces have rising covid cases and the fear of a Shanghai-style lockdown is enormous. The information coming from Shanghai proves that these drastic lockdowns create an enormous damage to the population. Millions of citizens without food or medicine and rising suicides have shown that the infamous “zero covid” policy often disguises mass population control and repression.

It is easy to use the covid-19 lockdowns as the reason for the weakening of the Chinese economy but that would be a gross simplification. The problem is deeper.

China is going through a severe slowdown caused by the burst of the enormous real estate bubble and the crackdown on the private sector, which has led to a cut in investment growth.

According to Nomura Research, China faces the worst slowdown since the covid outbreak in 2020 and the world should be worried about a further slide, as the challenges persist. Official gross domestic product (GDP) figures may be massaged to deliver the government’s target, but all other macro figures point to a much weaker growth.

We must remember that there are two ways in which the Chinese government “boosts” real GDP: By publishing a low inflation and GDP deflator figure and by massively increasing credit and infrastructure spending. However, those two cannot disguise the importance of the weakening of the Chinese economy, because it is now structural.

The collapse of the real estate bubble is the biggest problem. A research paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang estimated that the real estate sector accounts for around 29 percent of China’s GDP. It is impossible for the Chinese government to offset the impact of such a massive part of the economy with other high-growth sectors. Furthermore, real estate’s impact on the job market is hard to substitute. Economist George Magnus warned that the impact of the real estate collapse would last for years.

To add to a difficult real estate problem, the government crackdown on the private sector makes it even more difficult to boost growth in other industries and businesses. The fear of constant political intervention is leading to a massive slowdown in foreign direct investment growth as well as fear of deploying capital and taking risks in the Chinese economy only to suffer grave penalties from the authorities when profits arrive.

The extent of the deterioration of the Chinese economy is evident in the recent leading indicators. The Caixin China General Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) slumped to a twenty-five-month low of 48.1 in March 2022, signaling contraction. The Caixin Services PMI plummeted to 42.0 in March from 50.2 in February, dropping below the level that separates growth from contraction. This reading indicates the sharpest activity decline since February 2020.

The political intervention in the technology sector, which is one of the leading job creators in China, has sparked fears of frozen headcounts and layoffs, according to various media reports. Additionally, the decision of the central bank to cut reserve requirements for banks has not avoided a significant decline in credit growth, as reported by JP Morgan.

To all this we must add a currency, the yuan, which is used in less than 3 percent of global transactions, according to Reuters, due to the extreme capital controls and the exchange rate fixing imposed by the central bank. Confidence in the local currency is low due to the extreme intervention on the currency market, which is preventing China from having a truly international means of payment.

China’s high debt is also a problem. Total debt stands above 300 percent of GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance. The European Central Bank (ECB) points out that China’s debt-to-GDP ratio for the entire private sector now stands at over 250 percent and the corporate component of this debt is the highest in the world. The ECB points also to the risk created because a “significant proportion of funding is...

2000 Mules Documentary Provides Compelling Evidence That 2020 Election Was Stolen


After the 2020 election, government officials and their allies in the media repeated the mantra that the election was the “most secure in American history,” Dinesh D’Souza pointed out before the premiere of his new documentary film 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, Wednesday night.

But how would they know that? D’Souza wondered. Even if they couldn’t prove the election was rigged, “it still doesn’t follow that it was the most secure election in history,” he said. “The only way you could prove that would be if you were to compare the amount of fraud in 2020 with 2016, with 2012, with 2008, with 2004, and show that there has been less fraud now than in any of those elections.”

D’Souza’s question is a good one.

Did election officials study the security of every election prior to 2020 to make the determination that the 2020 election was “the most secure ever”? Or were they just spinning another false narrative that benefits one side of the aisle?

The movie 2000 Mules handily answers that question.

Using state-of-the-art technology, the film convincingly makes the case that the 2020 presidential election was perhaps the most unsecure election ever, and was stolen from former President Trump.

The election intelligence organization True The Vote gathered geospatial and temporal data—amounting to a total of 10 trillion cell phone pings—between Oct. 1 and Nov. 6 in the battleground states of Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The researchers looked at data surrounding ballot drop boxes in targeted areas, as well as UPS stores and select government, commercial, and non-governmental organization (NGO) facilities.

This data, coupled with the surveillance video of the drop boxes, provide damning evidence of a coordinated illegal ballot trafficking operation across critical swing states.

“Without free and fair elections, we are not a democracy, we are a criminal cartel masquerading as a democracy,” D’Souza argues in the movie.

2000 Mules features commentary from TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager, conservative commentator Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Christian author and talk show host Eric Metaxas, and conservative writer and talk show host Larry Elder. Before seeing the data, most of the them had believed that there was something very off about the election, but were unconvinced that there was enough evidence to prove it. After seeing the data, every one of them was a true believer.

The research was spearheaded by True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, and former welfare reform and health and human services executive Gregg Phillips.

According to Engelbrecht, the fraud begins with dirty voter rolls— inflated voter lists packed with invalid registrations.

“The way that the ballots were collected becomes this multi-tentacled hydra. There’s all manner of ways that those ballots came in but the important take away is that dirty voter rolls allow for a big portion of this grift,” she explained in an interview last month.

Each trafficker—or mule—went to an average of 23 ballot drop boxes,” according to...

Visage à trois #225

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:






Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #398

 











To All Mothers: Happy Mothers Day!!


Dear Mom/Moms:

You Comfort Us
You Protect Us
You Fight For Us.

All the little tender things you have done for us,
All the sacrifices you have made for us

We see these things. We appreciate these things.

How can we repay you for all these things?

We can love you
We can spend time with you
We can do all these things as you grow old and frail
We will comfort you, protect you, and fight for you.

I love you mom, more than any words can describe.



 

Happy Mother's Day To All Mothers Especially Mine!!




Genetic Mutants? 5 Strange Science Facts About Moms


Is the American Postmodern Left a Fascist Movement?


For my work in corporate social responsibility, I was recently reading The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi’s critique of capitalism, when something he wrote gave me one of those really uncomfortable “Aha” moments.

Polanyi was discussing the alternatives to capitalism -- left socialism and right socialism (which we call “Fascism”). His point was that these two socialisms were created to undo the disruptions of capitalism which had privileged “money power” to degrade human sociality into atomic individualism driven by self-seeking greed.

When I read his observation that the Fascist phase of anti-capitalism brought about “Irrational philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anti-capitalist demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the ‘regime’,” I thought “How odd, that sounds just like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the postmodern Left.”

So, I took a moment to do a quick scan of Polanyi’s criteria of a Fascist movement to see how well they embrace our postmodern Left.

I concluded that our postmodern Left meets each of Polanyi’s criteria: 
  • Irrational philosophies: Postmodernism is an irrational will to power; intersectionality is irrationally prejudicial; toxic masculinity is irrationally prejudicial; destruction of a fetus when it can survive as a person outside the womb is an unbalanced application of the principle of human dignity.
  • Racialist aesthetics: stigmatizing “Whites” or considering them morally deformed by “White Privilege” is a racialist aesthetic regarding human persons; blaming institutional racism for the achievement gap is racialist aesthetics at work in public education; Harvard created a special racialist aesthetics for Asians to denigrate their possible contributions to “student life”.
  • Anti-capitalist demagogy: Green New Deal, Medicare for All, forgiveness of college debt, Woke Capitalism.
  • Heterodox currency views: Modern Monetary Theory
  • Criticism of the party system: privileging ideology with cancel culture
  • Widespread disparagement of the ‘regime’: the narrative of Systemic White Racism; defund the police; the fervid anti-Trump Resistance using mainstream media, the CIA, the FBI, and a special prosecutor; setting up a purifying “Ministry of Truth” in the Department of Homeland Security, our modest version of a Ministry of State Security; abolishing the Electoral College, and packing the Supreme Court.
I investigated further, pulling out my copy of Mussolini’s pamphlet The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), finding the 25-point program (1920) of the German Workers Party (which was soon renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party) and the 1919 Manifesto of Mussolini’s new Fascist Party in Italy, to see how our progressive Left might align with the national socialist goals of that earlier era.

Perfectly, it seems.

The 1920 Program of the National Socialist German Workers Party demanded that the State nationalize all industries; arrange for a division of profits of all heavy industries; expand old-age welfare; create a healthy middle class and the contract directly with small firms; expropriate land for public use, abolish land taxes and prevent of all speculation in land, provide higher education for every capable and industrious German and subsequently give them leading positions, and elevate national health.

The 1919 Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat (Mussolini’s new party) demanded that the State provide Italians with: an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, worker and union power to supervise industry; medical care; retirement at age 55; and impose “a strong progressive tax on capital (including a “partial expropriation” of concentrated wealth).”

Fascism thus proposed replacing the market with the national State. Mussolini said that “The one who can resolve the contradictions of capitalism is the State.” The National Socialist German Workers Party program demanded:

Morning Mistress

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1012



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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1712


You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside? 
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific, 
from the beautiful to the repugnant, 
from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed, 
you could be inspired, you could be appalled. 

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. 
You have been warned.

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