“American” Chipmakers Seek to Protect CCP from Americans

Paul Collier October 6, 2023

If you want to understand how radically opposed to American interests the corporations in our country are, the big computer chip makers inside America are perfect poster children for that treasonous nature, in spades.

Recently, Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm have been pushing back against the Biden administration’s moves to cut China off from high-tech chips and chip-making technologies. These companies “warn” Americans that not working with China on chip technology will somehow be bad for us, not understanding that they’re asking us to work with the 21^st century version of Nazis in the name of advancing their own international corporate interests.

Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said of the move to limit China’s access to chips and chip technology, “What you risk is spurring the development of an ecosystem that’s led by predators.”

An article in the NYTimes titled “How the Big Chip Makers Are Pushing Back on Biden’s China Agenda” is written in an extremely nuanced biased way that favors commercial interests over American ones, revealing what this writer believes is the seditious spirit behind the writers and the publication that allowed such a pro-CCP agitprop piece to represent their brand (especially one as sophisticated and nuanced as this article is).

Here’s one paragraph from an article that might as well have been written by the CCP (and who knows, maybe it was): The warnings from the companies speak to the tension between national security concerns and commercial interests and highlight an unavoidable quandary for the Biden administration: The economic interdependence of the United States and China, which has roots stretching back decades, means that any action by Washington to confront Beijing risks causing harm at home.

An American article would rightly conclude from the start that these companies represent an existential problem the nation has with “internationally focused” corporations that owe their allegiance to no nation, let alone the nation that enabled their rise to international power in the first place, America. But these writers (it took THREE people to write this pro-CCP agitprop) seek to present an “argument” that asks the reader to consider sedition when it invites profit and “technological advancement.”

Here’s another quote from the article that reveals the CCP-influenced nature of this seditious article: The companies have warned that a U.S. pullback could accelerate China’s development of an independent chip industry, paving the way to a world dominated by Chinese-created chips rather than American-designed chips.

Now they’re asking us to believe that withholding high tech from China will somehow lead to China becoming even more high-tech and will, of course, beat America at the high-tech game, with the tacit understanding in that quote being China is superior to us so we should just accept further entanglement with a fascist state that sells the organs of ethnic groups it deems undesirable.

All three of these companies are steeped in the self-righteous virtue signaling cult of American leftism, which rose to power largely through claiming the white fascist devil was going to kill us all so we have to combat whiteness to combat fascism. Meanwhile, they are spending millions lobbying our government to continue to entangle itself with the 21^st century version of the Third Reich that China truly is, from stem to stern.

The NYTimes article gives just enough counterview to the idea that cutting off China from American high-tech is a bad idea to cause you to doubt the claim that this is nothing but CCP-directed propaganda, but that counter-claim is far more convoluted and obtuse that the black and white claims that support further entanglement with a bloodthirsty fascist regime for “the good of the whole.”

A statement from the Semiconductor Industry Association(SIA) sums up the true seditious nature of our own American-based corporations, who demonstrate no allegiance to anyone but profit, Sedition Capitalism, if you will: “Recognizing that strong economic and national security require a strong U.S. semiconductor industry, leaders in Washington took bold and historic action last year to enact the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen our industry’s global competitiveness and de-risk supply chains. Allowing the industry to have continued access to the China market, the world’s largest commercial market for commodity semiconductors, is important to avoid undermining the positive impact of this effort. Repeated steps, however, to impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the U.S. semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China.

“We call on both governments to ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue, not further escalation. And we urge the administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies.”

It is no surprise these same corporations use their economic market powers to enforce the anti-American “morality” of what this writer calls “Woketariansm,” which is the corporate version of “woke,” which is an ideology that holds to the belief EVERYTHING must be destroyed and rebuilt, including America, even Christianity, because the white devil invented them. If we don’t destroy what the white devil built, the white devil will kill us all.

America as a free republic is an impediment to their ability to exploit international markets for maximum profit, even if it means helping America’s fascist enemy, China, surpass her. What do they care, as long as they think they can continue to make bank even under CCP rule.

Biden Admin Sought to Destroy Musk’s Twitter Through FTC Lawfare Assault

Paul Collier July 14, 2023

The Federal Trade Commission, now ruled and infested with DNC seditionists, sought to strong-arm financial evaluation firm Ernst & Young to find Elon Musk’s then newly-acquired Twitter to be in violation of privacy and data protection regulations. According to sworn testimony from EY executives before a GOP-led House committee the FTC tried to force them to evaluate Twitter using their methods and to conclude outcomes they wanted before the investigation even started.

Actions like this show just how out of control this DNC-CCP administration has become, and how either desperate or emboldened they have become to so overtly defy American republican constitutional standards and laws in an effort to prevent Twitter from being lost to the DNC-CCP’s controlling reach.

Americans must demand Republican states declare the Democratic Party to be a terrorist, revolutionary organization working in collusion with foreign powers to destroy our republic and replace it with some form of “market socialism” styled after the Chinese model that is now becoming the hegemon of the world thanks largely to American corporate seditionists within our borders who traded American power for Chinese wealth.

California Creates Commission to Control Wages of Private Businesses

Paul Collier July 14, 2023

It appears California is continuing down its road to fascism, revising a defunct commission that will allow it to set the wages of workers within certain sectors of the economy. The board’s 5 members will be selected by Governor Gavin Newsome (D-CA). Assemblyman Vince Fong (R) told the Washington Free Beacon, “To put it bluntly, this commission could micromanage the operations over small business franchise in American.” The commission has an Orwellian name, the Industrial Welfare Commission, which hopes to make its indirect de facto nationalization of private business seem like a benign effort to assure industries are healthy.

The model California is following is the same model the Nazi Germans used to control their businesses rather than fully nationalize them.

The net effect is the same as if California just nationalized a select group of small businesses unable to defend themselves against the unconstitutional assault on their right to pursue their own defined happiness at its core.

The California Business and Industrial Alliance’s President and Founder Tom Manzo suspects the seditious DNC is seeking to target fast-food franchises. He stated, “I think that’s the whole reason they’re talking about kick-starting the commission and I think that’ll be the first thing on their agenda.”

This writer believes this commission doesn’t have the fast food industry as its primary target, rather it’s the easiest target to attack to then use as a premise-setting pattern that will allow the state to go full National-Socialist and seize control of all businesses within its borders by forcing them to comply with a Governor-appointed commission who would manage far more than wage prices just as the German Labour Front was empowered to do in Nazi Germany.

Merck Battles Government Over Price Fixing Law

Freedomist Editor June 14, 2023

The Inflation Reduction Act includes in it a provision that allows the government to set the price of medicine by allowing Medicare to “negotiate” a price with the drug manufactures when it is deems the price too high for “inflationary” reasons.” Merck is suing the government over the provision of the law and it is now working its way through the legal system on a collision course with SCOTUS, who must determine if, for the purpose of controlling inflation, the government can do something it could never legally do before (nor should it ever in the future), be allowed to set the price of markets. Should this precedent be allowed to be set, this writer has little doubt the government will expand its justification of price fixing until it controlled the whole market.

Biden’s Banking Blowup and the Bailout Fix That Might Make it Worse – A Report

Paul Collier March 14, 2023

BANK FAILS SHAKE UP THE BIDEN ECONOMY – The second largest banking failure in U.S history occurred on March 10, 2023 when the favored bank of Tech start up venture capitalists went bankrupt. Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt after a bank run precipitated by the selling off of bank stocks by the leadership of the bank, along with news that it had lost billions of dollars selling now nearly-worthless 10-year treasury bonds it had invested the bulk of its deposits in.

This led to a bank run, which began on Wednesday prior, culminating in long lines outside the physical location of the bank by depositors wanting to get their money out a sinking ship. This failure was followed by the third largest banking failure in U.S. history, the closing of Signature Bank, a bank that had once banned the account of former President Donald J. Trump. The question is whether the bank fails have stopped or only getting started.

BIDEN CREATES NEW LAW DECLARING DEPOSITORS TO BE PROTECTED IN RECENT BANK FAILS – President Joe Biden recently revealed in a statement to the nation that offered no press opportunities for questioning that his administration would protect the deposits of everyone entangled in the recent bank failures of Signature and Silicon Valley Banks. Defying rule of law, he declared that depositors with even more than $250,000 deposited (the legal Federal limit on bank deposit protections) will get all of their money back. While he pledged this would not be a bailout that would reward the leaders of the banks that failed, he made no mention of how the government could get back the millions in bonuses and stock sell-offs the leaders of these banks have already made. He also pledges somehow U.S. Taxpayers won’t be on the hook for this bailout that is not a bailout.

BIDEN’S BANKING BLOWUP BAILOUT CULTIVATING UNSECURED BANKING PRACTICES – After President Joe Biden announced plans for the federal government to back up bank deposits over $250,000 in the risk-seeking bank Silicon Valley Bank, experts are pointing out that such a move will only cultivate higher risks both from banks and the depositors that choose them. Knowing the loss will be covered by the Federal government, the depositor will see no reason to not bank with one of these high-risk, high-reward-promise banks, which will lead to the proliferation of more unstable practices in the banking industry as a whole.

A research fellow in economics for The Heritage Foundation, St. Onge, said of Biden’s move, “If the administration gets away with this, then we are going to start moving into a world where bankers, where Wall Street, feels like they can take any risk they like, because this is all going to get bailed out because you’ve got these human shield.”

More importantly, those who flourish under such a corrupt system will be directly beholden to the Democratic Party, whose stranglehold on power through mass mailer elections must be maintained in order for these corrupt “capitalists (CINOS, Capitalists in Name Only) to continue to exploit such a dangerous marketplace.

ARE THE BANK COLLAPSES AN OP TO SIEZE CONTROL OF AND POLITICIZE AMERICA’S FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS – A segment on Tucker Carlson asks the question, “What does the Federal Government hope to get out of [the bailout]?” Tucker posits the DNC-controlled Feds gain two things, one is an opportunity to inject more DNC-engineered anti-American woketarianism into the system and two is an opportunity to consolidate regional banks into the larger banks, making it easier for a few bankers to enforce DNC law on Americans than it is for the DNC to control many bankers, some of which might reject their hostile assault on the American republic. Tucker said, “Remember that after 2008, the Obama administration, Eric Holder swooped in and imposed DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion standards on the entire financial sector, and that’s one of the main reasons our big banks are now increasingly incompetent and one of reasons Americans are so divided by race. Ideologues who used the 2008 bank bailout to kill American meritocracy, that’s a big step, mostly unacknowledged, but we are living with its consequences. So, you have to ask yourself, what are they going to do this time?”

DNC SENATOR LOOKS TO BIG TECH TO PROTECT THE PARTY FROM “MISINFORMATION” ON BANKING COLLAPSE – Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) asked government officials from the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and FDIC (Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation) if they had a plan to censor information that might counter whatever narrative the DNC wants pushed in relation to Biden’s banking blowup. He was exposed by Republican congressmembers who were on the call, with U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) saying “On our conference call, led by [Senate President Chuck] Schumer, with Fed, FDIC, and Treasury, a democrat senator asked the three agencies if there was a program underway on social media to censor information that would lead to a bank run.”

Senator Mark Kelly denied the claims, saying he was only asking about “foreign adversaries” spreading misinformation and protecting against that. But remember, this is a party that calls loving the Constitution a dog whistle for white supremacism. To them, Americans ARE the foreigners, as manifest in the Twitter files that exposed the scare tactic of foreign misinformation spreading to ban American citizens from social media platforms.

Infrastructure – America’s Jugular Vein

Michael Cessna February 4, 2023

Unless a person has paid essentially no attention to any news for the last twenty years, strident complaints and warnings about the abysmal state of basic infrastructure in the United States is nearly impossible to avoid.

Highways, local roads, bridges, railroads – the arteries that carry both commerce and the work force, both inter- and intrastate – are in terrible condition. The situation has become critical enough, that it has noticeably slowed the velocity of the supply chain, compounding the impacts of both the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the grounding of the MV Ever Given container ship in 2021.

Critically, failures in the railroad network caused by favoring profiteering over operational efficiency – one of the few examples of actual failure in deregulation policies – are leading to staff cuts of up to twenty-nine percent, while the mileage of operating rail track has steadily decreased, even though per-mile profits rise.

*An eastbound freight train at West Drive overpass in Brampton, Ontario. CCA/4.0*

This is a toxic situation, as the imbalance between railroads and over-the-road (OTR) trucking continues to grow. Even given the inefficiencies inherent in OTR vs Rail (as freight trains commonly haul between 200 and 300 intermodal containers, or dedicated freight cars, allowing a crew of three or four to do the work of 200 or more people), slowdowns caused by poor infrastructure increasingly impact the economy…

All of this has been known for decades, although it is little remarked about in the mainstream press, unless there is some major newsworthy nugget to titillate the audience…That said – what does this have to do with a critical strategic threat to the United States? What does this have to do with security and defense, aside from the obvious logistics advantages?

A recent YouTube video by the channel “Real Life Lore” (YouTube link) pointed out that the Continental United States, i.e., the “Lower 48”, is uniquely blessed with a unique terrain that practically guarantees global economic dominance to anyone who can control this territory. This has, in fact, been the reason for the meteoric rise of the United States over the course of the last one hundred and thirty-odd years.

*A map of the Mississippi River Basin, made using USGS data. CCA/4.0*

The driving engine behind this geological and geographical system lays in the facts that, first, no major agricultural or manufacturing center in the Lower 48 is further than 150 miles (240km) from a navigable waterway. East of the Rocky Mountains, the majority of navigable waterways feed into the Mississippi River system (which is itself navigable all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota), which then flows south, to the port of New Orleans.

From there, the Intracoastal Waterway chain of barrier islands provides a near contiguous navigable seaway, for almost the entire length of the US coast, from Brownsville, Texas, to Virginia, and from there, to the Hudson River, which connects to the Great Lakes, all with little exposure to open sea conditions. No other continent has this precise mix of features. And, as water transport is anywhere from ten to thirty times more efficient than any other type of transport, the titanic economic advantages are obvious.

However – there is a catch: Vidalia, Louisiana.

Most readers will have never heard of Vidalia. This is not surprising, as it is a tiny town of barely 4,300 people, even though it is the seat of Concordia Parish. Vidalia, however, is home to perhaps the single-most critical point of physical security in the world:

The Old River Control Structure.

Completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1963, the Old River Control Structure was built to prevent the Mississippi River from diverting its course into the Atchafalaya River. The Mississippi River’s tends to wander over time. For the entire existence of the United States as a nation, the Mississippi followed (more or less) its current course. As a result, the city of New Orleans – and its seaport – was built and expanded into the critical complex that it is today. Indeed, it was a pivotal point in the War of 1812, in a battle that launched the career of a future President, and later formed a cornerstone of Federal strategy in the Civil War.

*The delta of the Atchafalaya River on the Gulf of Mexico. View is upriver to the northwest. 1999. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.*

In 1953, however, the Corps of Engineers concluded that the Mississippi was beginning to shift its course again, and that if left unchecked, it would divert into the Atchafalaya Basin by 1990. Thus, they launched the Old River Control Structure project at their predicted point of divergence at Vidalia, as the result of such a diversion would be catastrophic, as the Mississippi river would quickly and violently carve a new channel and river delta complex, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico some sixty miles to the west of New Orleans, an even that would leave both New Orleans and the Louisiana state capital of Baton Rouge not simply ‘high and dry’, but would leave both major cities without a source of fresh water.

Aside from the catastrophic environmental impact on the United States and major cities along the river’s route –as well as the significant impact on the strategic military system of the US in the Lower 48 – the impact on the economy of the United States would almost certainly lead to another “Great Depression”, virtually overnight, an economic contagion that would almost certainly crash the world’s economy, as the United States’ economic system is not designed to flow “upriver”.

The Corps of Engineers did a fantastic job on the control project; the only significant natural threat to the structure was the Mississippi flood of 1973, with damaged the structure to a degree.

*Mississippi River inundating Morgan City, Louisiana, May, 1973. Environmental Protection Agency. Public Domain.*

But now, we live in the world of the early 21^st Century, and “lateral thinking” about security has to be taken into account…Specifically, the “Poor Man’s Nuclear Weapon”.

On April 16, 1947, an explosion in the port of Texas City, Texas mostly vaporized the SS Grandcamp, formerly, the SS Benjamin R. Curtis, a Liberty Ship built during World War 2 and later gifted to France to help rebuild that country’s merchant marine. The ship had been loaded with approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate – used in fertilizer or explosives – as well as small mounts of other cargo. The explosion leveled nearly 1,000 buildings within 2,000 feet of the explosion, killing at least 560 people (including all but one of the town’s 28-man volunteer fire department) and injuring more than 5,000 people, almost 1,800 of whom were admitted to area hospitals. Some 63 people were unidentifiable, and were buried in a memorial cemetery; an additional 113 people were declared “missing”, because no identifiable parts could be found. The Grandcamp’s 2-ton anchor was hurled over 1.5 miles, digging itself into a 10-ft deep crater, while one of her propellers was thrown 2 miles inland. More than 1,100 vehicles, 360 rail freight cars and 500 homes were damaged; 10 miles away, in the city of Galveston, half the windows in town were shattered. All told, damages totaled between $1,000,000,000 and $4,500,000,000, in 2019 dollars.

*Texas City disaster. Parking lot 1/4 of a mile away from the explosion, 1947. University of Houston Digital Library.*

Then, on August 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer – confiscated from an impounded ship nearly a decade before – detonated in a gargantuan explosion. The blast – estimated as equal to 1.1 kilotons of TNT – killed at least 218 people, injured over 7,000, and left nearly 300,000 people homeless.

*Port of Beirut, Lebanon. Before (Left, 7/30/2020) and after (R) comparison showing blast damage from the August 4,2020 explosion (circled area). Google Earth Pro and Maxar Technologies.*

Such a blast would critically damage the Old River Control Structure; two or three, should they happen simultaneously, would certainly destroy it outright. Neither ships, nor ammonium nitrate, are hard to come by. And they are not, comparatively, all that expensive. Both are within easy reach of many “extra-national hostile groups”. And the MV Rhosus, the ship at the center of the Beirut blast story, would have been capable of transiting for most of the Mississippi’s length…

…And yet, there are no real security measures in Vidalia that would prevent an American version of the St. Nazaire Raid.

Someone should really look into this.

Really.

*The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To*

Memory Lane: The MPC & Its Possible Return

Michael Cessna January 29, 2023

As strange as it may seem, the “Vietnam Generation” – meaning, those of age to have fought in that conflict – are in their very late 60’s, at best, and more likely in their early- to mid-70’s. In addition to the more “televisable” repositories of collective memory that have been lost, there are nuances within those repositories that fade into the background.

One such is the “MPC” – the “Military Payment Certificate.”

The MPC (pdf link) was a form of “occupation currency”, used by the Armed Forces of the United States from 1946 to 1973. The idea was to try and control inflation in occupied zones, as well as attempting to limit black market activity in the various occupied nations as close to the minimum as possible. The very first iteration of this practice, however, was the “HAWAII Overprint” note, issued from 1942 to 1944.

The Hawaii Overprint was an otherwise-valid US note that was printed by the US Mint in San Francisco, but that was stamped “H A W A I I” on the reverse. The rationale was that, in the event of the island chain’s invasion and capture by the Japanese Empire, all existing “HAWAII” stamped notes could be declared invalid, preventing Japan from trying to inflate the United States’ currency reserves by mass-dumping captured cash back into the US economy via Mexico. In fact, a version of this strategy was employed by the Nazi SS in their “Operation Bernhard”, which resulted in £15-20 million worth of nearly undetectable counterfeit notes being in circulation by the end of World War 2; adjusted for inflation, this amounted to approximately £493,146,000 – 657,528,000 (c.$611,052,280 – $814,736,370) in 2022 figures.

*Hawaii overprint note issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during World War II. National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History. Public Domain.*

The United States’ MPC, along with various similar types of scrip from other occupying powers, accomplished this by paying Allied troops stationed “in country” in specifically made military scrip, instead of the normal national currency. In this way, the troops could spend their pay within the local economies, without injecting inflationary levels of hard currency – such as US dollars or British pound-sterling notes – that would trade at far higher levels of exchange on the local black markets, thus forcing the occupation governments, in turn, to print vast quantities of paper currency to compensate, devaluing the local currencies even further. In fact, such a resultant death spiral of currency hyperinflation in post-World War One Germany (albeit for different reasons) was one of the root causes that allowed the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.

*An Operation Bernhard forgery of the Bank of England five pound note. UK-Public Domain.*

The United States continued its use of the MPC throughout its occupation period in both Europe and various parts of the Pacific, into the 1960’s, when the war in Vietnam began to accelerate. In the same way as in the post-World War Two era, the South Vietnamese đồng (which had replaced the French colonial piastre in 1953, at their independence) was simply too weak to survive against the US dollar. MPCs were issued as pay for US troops posted in the country, to limit the arbitrage impact. The method the United States used to effect this was to arbitrarily convert to a new issue of MPC to US troops; US troops were never told when a “Conversion Day” (or, “C Day”) would happen, but would find themselves suddenly restricted to base, where they were informed that they had to exchange their old MPC issue for the new version, as the previous MPC issue would not be valid for exchange after that C Day. This, in turn, prevented the MPC from acting as a wholesale stand-in for the US dollar.

The MPC program was retired after the United States’ involvement in Vietnam ended. The MPC system was deemed unnecessary by then, as by the 1970’s, the nations occupied at the end of World War Two had been long ago released from their occupied status, and their economies were, in general, strong and flourishing. As a result, the circulation of US dollars paid out to US troops stationed there was not deemed to be destabilizing, and the United States went back to simply ferrying US dollars in cash to various bases for direct disbursements to troops stationed there.

In 1997, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the United States found itself deploying forces to semi-permanent stations for “peacekeeping” duties – occupation duties, in all but name – in portions of the former Yugoslavia, as the region exploded in a series of ethnic and sectarian wars.

The costs of transporting cash to troops stationed in the hostile areas quickly became very expensive. Given that the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) had established a vast, world-girdling logistical network by then, and given that there was very little available for purchase in the war zones, the DoD expanded what had been a pilot program used in various military basic training facilities within the US, into the “EagleCash” system.

EagleCash functions in a manner similar to a gift card, in that it allows deployed troops to use an ATM-like kiosk to transfer money from their bank accounts in the US to the EagleCash card, then use that card to purchase various goods and services from on-post stores and exchanges.

There is, however, a catch: The EagleCash system, like so many other things in the 21^st Century, is a great, streamlined system of finance that functions reliably to pay troops forward-deployed in hostile areas…as long as the backbone infrastructure the system relies upon works.

With the rise of cyber warfare, as well as the potential for a disruption of the satellite communications network – to say nothing of actual nuclear warfare – there is a very good chance that the United States and its allies may well need to return to an MPC-type system of finance for deployed troops. While there is a specific entry in the Code of Federal Regulations (pdf link) regarding MPC’s, it remains unclear if the US government is prepared to reissue paper MPC’s in the event of some major network disruption…

…And unpaid troops can become very unhappy and disgruntled troops, very, very quickly.

Food for thought.

As Facebook’s Stock Falls What Can It Do To Survive?

Bill Collier September 30, 2022

OPINION by Bill Collier- A recent article on CNBC about Facebook/Meta losing over 2/3rds of its stock value in a year has analysis and investors wondering if the tech giant will even survive. Whereas in 2021 at around this time, Facebook was valued at around a trillion dollars, this year, it is $377 billion in total value.

Not surprisingly for a globalist corpostate press organ, the CNBC article totally misses the elephant in the room, which is that Facebook’s core problems revolve around poor community governance (things like moderation and “fact checking”) and a fundamental misunderstanding of and lack of appreciation for their users, many of whom do not feel they and their creeds are treated fairly.

I like Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the core business model is for FB to become more of a platform for all than a private community with a more globalist corpostate ideological bent.

Allowing people to connect to family, friends, interests, and causes in a dynamic manner and with civility and common decency that is governed with fairness, common sense, and consistency, without bias or editorial (disguised as “fact checking” bit which is really opinion policing), would work.

This would be a great path forward, as opposed to reacting to activist (usually on the left) “demands” coming from audience groups (young wokatarians) who don’t use the product is, in my estaimation, a massive distraction from the core business. It is costing users, reputation, and now revenue.

Facebook serves an older demographic and, frankly, the older set will remain a core constituency well into the next 30 plus years. Providing other platforms for the younger set would be good, but it would be a mistake to simply roll out another iteration of a more popular platform.

Facebook has long suffered poor governance issues, not least because of the perceived editorializing-as-standards and the clear globalist corpostate bias of its “fact checking”, which creates distrust and which opens the platform up to constant criticism from right and left. All these fires keep distracting key decision-makers whose talents are essentially a wasted resource.

People don’t want a “free speech platform” that is “anything goes”, but if the user base is diverse in its religious, political, and philosophical perspectives, tending to favor one part of the user base over others, as it is perceived is the case, will necessarily decrease the engagement and participation of the “offended” group. It doesn’t matter if this is factually true or if it is the intent.

This is a perception at least partially caused by the inconsistent, often illogical, implementation of governance and, frankly, the oddball way “fact checking” is applied which makes the platform both seem biased and illogical.

For instance, to refute the statement “there are only two genders”, Facebook’s “fact checkers” cited the extremely rare case where people are BORN with a mix of gender traits as “proof” there are more than two genders.

The exception does not disprove the rule. but this illogical, upside-down, and absurd, use of an extremely rare exception as “proof” that the claimed rule, “there are only two genders”, is wholly false did nothing good for Facebook’s reputation or bottom line.

This kind of thing, as well as many instances of inconsistent application of standards which are perceived as putting the thumb on the scales against half their user base’s creeds, is anathema to being perceived as an honest broker and neutral arbiter. It is bad governance.

To be clear, while the rank and file bias of most of Facebook’s staff are likely leaning toward corpostate globalism or leftism in general, it may in fact be unfair to say Mark Zuckerberg wants to push a “leftist agenda.”

The fact most moderators and community governance staff may tend toward a bias, and perhaps it shows, is less a reflection of ownership bias and more a function of a poor governance architecture.

Instead of investing in new tech that is not taking hold, the whole metaverse, Faecbook should reexamine its entire governance system and the structure of the platform to provide a safe and friendly environment that is welcoming to all, regardless of creed and etcetera, but that insists users must, foremost, decide the content and entities they wish to be exposed to without being able to demand the platform cancel others who are otherwise well behaved.

Facebook/Meta isn’t focusing on keeping and growing a user base to whom advertisers can pitch themselves and their messages. What is really happening is that Facebook is trying to claim to be such a platform while its governance and “fact checking”, and how it spends its political dollars, all tend to lean in direction that half or more of their user base do not fancy.

Facebook is seen as a booster for the Democrats that tries to also pretend it is a platform for all, even if this may be an unfair characterization. The reputation hit among those on the right cannot be good and is not substantively addressed while kowtowing to the media-induced and leftist-activist supported frenzy of the hour hasn’t earned the support of the Democrats or the coveted younger demographic who, one suspects, Mark Zuckerberg thinks are represented by the very loud but tiny woke minority.

It may be true, though I am not prepared to claim it is true, that most Facebook users represent a more “conservative demographic” than a leftist demographic and that if Mark MUST use ideological sympathy to gain more users who are more engaged he may want to radically change course and lean right.

Deglobalisation Is Inevitable

Bill Collier September 13, 2022

De-globalisation is inevitable, but the global corpostate ruling class do NOT want this and will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. The heyday of being able to buy anything from almost anywhere and being able to travel relatively inexpensively will be over soon, enjoy it while you can.

Local financial self-reliance and energy and food independence will become as essential as local governance that provides fair rules, free exchange, peace, and security. While these things may seem theoretical today, over the next 5 years we will see an increasing demand for local communities that can care for their own own and financially sustain themselves.

As you may see from the video below, the trend toward deglobalisation is happening now and higher ranking economic and political authorities are beginning to take serious notice. Outsourcing the economy and specialization are out, self-sustaining self-reliance are moving in as key economic concerns for policy makers.

Non-Weapon Military Supply On A Budget

Michael Cessna April 23, 2022

Guns are sexy. It’s a known fact that linking firearms (as well as many other odd things) to sex increases sales. That’s what keeps good-looking models, both male and female, working.

However, as anyone who has dealt with any kind of military force understands, there is a very great deal of other, non-firearm equipment out there, and most of it can only be sexualized in the grossest of manners. As a result, the ‘zhush‘ tends to get lost in the shuffle when people think about “things military”.

*Roof-high shelves of military equipment at the Australian War Memorial’s Treloar Technology Centre, 2012*

What do I mean by ‘zhush‘? Simply, the “other stuff”: uniforms and boots, personal load-bearing gear, helmets, gas masks, tools, computers, desks, engineering vehicles…in short, virtually everything you could find in all of an office complex, a clothing outlet, and a construction company, you will find in the organizational table of a light infantry or military police battalion.

The problem for supply officers around the world, especially those serving in armies below the top tier, is how to get at that gear and equipment on a razor-thin budget. Psychologically speaking, it is humiliating for a formally-organized armed force – which relies on the concepts of duty, honor and pride to function reliably and effectively – to accept hand-me-downs from wealthier states, except in the most dire of circumstances; the Free French and other remnants of European forces overrun by Nazi Germany that escaped to Britain after the evacuation at Dunkirk, France, in 1940 come to mind. At the same time, there may well be no real domestic industrial base for an army to draw upon in a small country. Doubly damaging for a small state’s force, is the idea of buying second-, third- or even fourth-hand surplus, and having to mark over the originating nation’s identifying marks from the gear.

*A Bolivian soldier armed with a Belgian-designed 7.62 FN FAL rifle, wearing an OG-107 uniform from the United States*

For decades, this was the conundrum – small, poorly funded armies had to either swallow their pride and accept handouts, or look like a street gang until either domestic production came online, or money was let from their (often horrifyingly corrupt) governments to contract out production to foreign companies to produce basic equipment to their specifications.

Globalization and the rise of the Internet, however, have radically revolutionized the small-state military supply problem…and leading that charge is the Chinese clearinghouse known as the Alibaba Group (although Vietnamese competition is coming on strong).

While shopping sites such as Amazon cater to the individual buyer, sites like Alibaba have a far more extensive wholesale section, where buyers can take advantage of the mass production capacities of several dozen Chinese companies, giving them access to at least “good enough” military equipment, as well as expendable supplies and tools that would have been prohibitively expensive for a small army to purchase before about 1999.

The only items not available via Alibaba and other suppliers are actual firearms and larger military weapons, ammunition, explosives and drugs; however, those items are not overly difficult to get with an End User Certificate, even for non-state actors. While a disadvantage for the military buyer, the ability to equip everything else more than makes up for the lack of military-grade weapons on the site.

*Unidentified rebel fighters during the Second Liberian Civil War, c.2004*

This is an advantage that cannot be overstated. While a rifle, three magazines, a cheap water bottle and a box of breakfast cereal might seem like a workable equipping plan for supplying and army, especially if that force is bereft of money, it is most definitely not. The ability to equip a relatively capable military force for comparative peanuts leaves no excuses for anyone with pretensions of logistical competence – if you have access to the internet and a credit card, there is no excuse for sticking with the abysmal state of the past.