and just in the last hours I've become more-confident Trump is just going to grift even more for himself and those in the Republican Party or otherwise "favored" by him.

The Trump "meme coin" should be all the evidence you need and its so "in your face" maybe -- just maybe -- it will wake his supporters out of their stupor.

Let me remind you that money is what you have left over after you make something of value and have paid for the materials and labor to do so.  If I drill for oil, hit oil and then refine said oil into usable fuels and lubricants, once I've paid the costs in doing that what's left is money.  It is the net improvement in my condition as a result of producing something of value to other people generally.

Credit is simply a promise to produce something of value in the future.  It spends exactly like money does; it is the future tense of money, to be precise.

But all "crypto" or "token" things are in fact nothing more than a negative-sum lottery.  The negative portion is quite-variable but not the primary aspect of it.

If you buy a lottery ticket some percentage of your spending on it goes into the prizes.  The rest is siphoned off; in the case of regulated lotteries a large part allegedly goes to education and the rest pays for the terminals and bounties that the winning ticket sellers get, plus the expense of operating the game (including auditing it if its a regulated one so as to assure the public it isn't rigged.)

If you buy a "meme coin" nothing was produced whatsoever.  The "increase in price" (or the converse) occurs solely because someone else pays you more than you paid for it.  The same, incidentally, is true of stocks traded on an exchange in the secondary market -- that is, most stocks.  Its a negative-sum game instead of a zero-sum game because nobody works for free and the exchanges have to be paid in order to continue to operate.

In this case only 20% of the coin is "float"; the rest Trump-controlled firms held back.  So your acts deposited your money into something that has no value and now those entities can siphon it off into Trump's pocket -- if people continue to buy it when the lockups expire and they can be sold.  If not then what he has (and what you have) is a huge money loser.  (Those who bought "HaukTua" anyone?)

Now contemplate proof of work or proof of stake coins.  They're even more of a negative sum game because the energy and hardware required to "mine" or "prove" them (or both) are quite expensive and yet when that is expended you have..... nothing.  In fact you spend all that only to exhaust it as heat into the atmosphere and ultimately trash into the landfill (the electronics themselves.)

Yet here we are.

Then there's TikTok.  Who believes that any "social site" is worth that sort of money as a mechanism to publicly post cute pictures of your cat?

Of course it isn't.

They have "value" because they can and thus are used to change human behavior.  This of course is not disclosed to any material degree; you believe you are obtaining entertainment (e.g. watch cute videos of someone's cat) but the real point is not to trap your eyeballs on the screen but to change your behavior and thus expenditure of funds or other actions taken in the real world.

Toward what end?

That's not disclosed, is it?

Of course it isn't.  But it has to be the case because cute cat pictures are not worth a trillion dollars no matter matter how many of them there are.

Convincing you the world will end if you don't stop using a gas-powered car and furnace, so that you screw yourself out of tens of thousands of dollars over the space of a few years and hundreds of thousands over your entire life, times the millions of users...... now that is worth enough to justify the valuations, is it not?

Oh incidentally that's one possible example out of many.

Now does it make sense why certain topics will get you tossed off these sites?

So how about the immigration situation?  Well Hohman is set to put up a good show but will he actually change anything?  We'll see.  How about the H-1b abuses; those screw the middle class bigly, especially those in technical fields, and on a per-capita basis have a lot more impact on Americans than do illegal Mexican roofers.  But the homebuilders are a small piece of the S&P and Nasdaq with roofing companies almost entirely absent from public trading; not so for Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Disney and similar.

Then we have the medical scam generally -- if you think the tech space is a problem in that regard the medical system is one dollar in five and 75% of it is stolen via various schemes from intentional recommendations to do things that slowly make your health worse (e.g. use seed oils) and disparate billing and extortion schemes that have been illegal for more than a century and twice ruled to apply at the Supreme Court forty years ago -- and yet nobody will bring the charges and enforce the law.  Of course the media, including social media, is a major part of convincing you (see the above again) to do those stupid things and the latest of the stupidity is the furor over "weight loss" drugs like Ozempic -- I guess they ran out of profits to be made suckering people into statins and then dealing with all the Type II diabetes it produced as a "side effect."

The problem with corruption like this is that once it takes root like this through an economy its like a parasite that gets into your blood; it goes everywhere and infests everything.

Well, supposedly today a new hour and era dawns for America with Trump's swearing in.

We'll see if it really is all that, or if he's just going to redirect the scam to his friends and away from Joe's -- while you still get it in the ass.

As I said in my podcast I'll reserve passing judgment until approximately the end of March, unless of course I see evidence before then that all he's really doing is capitalizing on this for himself and then playing with himself in the Oval Office.

The last day or two with the meme coin thing certainly doesn't throw any cold water on that premise, does it?

The cancer industry, that is.

Yes, its an industry.

There have been plenty of things over my years that sounded good but over time proved to be quack-quack.  Laetrile anyone?

Of course there are those things which the industry likes to bury -- their products that were proved to cause cancer.  Yes, the medical industry's products.  One of the most-striking (and damning) examples was SV40 contamination in polio vaccines from 1955 to 1963; tens of millions of people were given it.  That signal took a fair bit of time to show up and (obviously) even longer to go away; it mostly has at this point and obviously if it kills you then the "go away" is a bad thing from your personal point of view.  Notice how nobody ever brings that up when it comes to drug safety?

That's one of many examples and its not some wild conspiracy theory either; the government has admitted it occurred and that was before the vaccine immunity programs were passed into law too.  How many people did that kill?  We don't know and "accepted medicine" claims there's no evidence it caused cancers however, the signal is in the cancer data, it began at the right time and now is waning, never mind that admitting it was in fact responsible for deaths wouldn't exactly inspire confidence, would it?

Gibson was recently on Joe Rogan's podcast and referred to people he claimed were personal associates who all had cancer and no longer do -- and used certain drugs off-label and either did not use "mainstream medical" treatments or tried them first and they failed but these succeeded.  There are many others who have made similar claims.  The plural of anecdote is not data but Gibson's appearance has definitely resulted in a panic among the "industry", especially in Canada which felt a need to claim he was full of crap in a public post on "X".

Unlike many of the obvious quack-quack things claimed over my life this particular combination has mechanism of action plausibility.  This of course does not mean that it in fact works and further, nothing works every time for any condition.

Cartels, however, hate competition.  This is, at the core, what's wrong with "medicine" in the western world; we have enabled and grown cartels, which incidentally is seriously (felony-level) illegal in the United States.  All you need to do to figure out whether something is a cartel, by the way, is simply observe whether you get more (better and/or faster) for less (cheaper) or if both results and cost are going the other way.  If they are going the other way its a cartel every time because human ingenuity means all things trend toward one or more of better, faster and cheaper.

In fact that is the definition of productivity -- getting more from less.

The confounder at getting to truth on this lies there: Cartels that would be destroyed if this particular set of results is true because their product or service in comparison would not have any value and thus they will do anything they can, legal or not, including lying that causes people to die, to protect their income stream.  In fact they would slaughter people wholesale if they could to protect their livelihoods.

Of course whacking a movie star is not exactly something you're likely to get away with; that's the tempering factor in that if they did that and got caught being behind it, whether proved or simply plausible, that would be end of the game for them.  But screaming quack-quack and going after any physician who believes in it, including trying to punch their ticket is risk free.

Are they're right?

Or is Mel (and quite a few others) right?

There is a way to find out: Destroy the cartel, and incidentally the existence of same is illegal anyway.  Such behavior in the United States is a felony under 15 USC Chapter 1.  Ruin everyone making a living from it and throw them in prison.  Then the incentive to bury things disappears as there's no longer a monetary and personal advantage in doing so.

That doesn't mean Mel is right -- he might not be.

But it does mean that in this case, and in many others, we'd be able to find out.

That's the reason, from a public policy point of view, that cartel behavior is illegal; its not just the theft of money in size, its also human progress and in some cases life itself.

Let's just look at the recent past for evidence as to intent of every one of these **********s in the medical realm.  Its not like that very same cartel told you that if you took a different medication you would not get Covid, right?  Oh, wait, that did happen in the very recent past!  That the shots were incapable of preventing transmission was not only in the data before the shots showed up in fact the trials performed with them were deliberately not designed to produce evidence of interrupting transmission and thus those claims were not a mistake, they were intentional lies.  Indeed even Birx, one of the chief advisors to the US Government on the shots and Covid generally has admitted this.

Exactly zero cartel members have faced any sort of retribution or justice for having done that.

One deliberate and quite-recent lie being proved does not mean that they're at it again, but it certainly should raise your eyebrows.

Right?

The California fires have laid bare, for those who can think anyway, the sheer scale of the scams, grift and frauds that every American deals with silently and -- in many cases without even thinking about it -- every single day.

They've got a "public works" employee who makes $750,000 a year.  How many ordinary people in LA make $750,000 a year?  Exactly how do you justify a salary nearly double that of the President of the United States when you can't manage to keep fire hydrants full of water under pressure when there is a fire?

The Fire Chief, who publicly stated that LGBTQRS++++ and "equity" were the most important things in her department, and even went further and when questioned on this, since there are basically zero women who can pass firefighting physical standards designed to insure you can carry a grown man down a ladder out of a 2nd story window if required that "if that happens then the man shouldn't have been there" -- and this was good for a total pay in 2023 of $439,772.39.  Oh by the way, the next two down the ladder in the Fire Department in terms of salary are paid $331,371 and $403,577 respectively for a total of roughly one million in salary and benefits.

None of those three nor anyone else in LA's alleged "engineering" departments thought that buying sea-scooping aircraft was advisable even though dropping water from the air is one of the best ways to fight fires that are not adjacent to a public street simply because there are no pipes there -- and in the case of LA there is an inexhaustible source of water right there called an "ocean."

How many IQ points do you need to look out over the city and county you were hired to manage and observe lots of combustible materials in places where a truck cannot easily get -- or get to at all?  It appears however many IQ points that requires none of these three possessed them!

Apparently none of these people also had the IQ points between them to figure out that a public campaign demanding that fire mains not connected to the domestic supply lines and sequential pumping stations to reservoirs up on top of the hills be installed -- even where they could be quite cheaply, such as right on the Pacific Coast highway and beach!  HDPE, the common pipe used today for mains, is heat-welded, thus has no couplers to fail and is impervious to corrosion including by salt water.  You cannot use domestic water mains for large-scale firefighting -- they're adequate for a single house fire but not for widescale fires because (1) as each house burns and fails the entrance pipe to it is destroyed and once a few of those houses burn the system is open and pressure will collapse as it goes beyond the maximum design demand and the number of hydrants you wish to use exceeds the capacity to fill them.  Empty reservoirs don't help but the fact is you need large fuel-driven pumps to drive pressure through dedicated fire mains for such service which are not connected to the domestic supply mains and thus will not go "open line" and suffer a pressure collapse as houses and businesses burn.  Yes, such a system is expensive but wildfires have always been inevitable in that part of the country.

Further, none of those three nor anyone else in LA's alleged "engineering" or public safety departments believed that getting the fuel off the forest floor or forcing the electric company, which enjoys rights of way granted them by said government to remove all trees that could contact power lines, clear the ground under said lines of all combustible material and invest in replacement of aging poles and attachments so when there is a windstorm (1) the lines don't come down and (2) if that fails there is nothing to ignite.  Oh by the way they also did not force said utility to invest in the capacity to monitor for arcing on said transmission system and disconnect any portions of it where it occurs.  Arcing produces a very distinctive electrical signature that looks like nothing else and thus can be detected and interdicted if you look.  That this occurs is in fact why all newer homes have to have arc-fault breakers on the panel for all bedroom circuits because arcing causes fires and people do stupid things like run extension cords under rugs.

So now in addition to not having any resources to fight said fires the same public works people refused to mitigate human ignition of fire which is the cause of basically all (>90%) of wildfires in that part of the country!  The reason is simple: Dry lightning, which is the natural cause of fire, is extremely rare in that area.

Instead of actually mitigating risk and then having infrastructure in place to deal with the problem if the mitigations fail despite best effort everyone out there who is trying to save their own scalps from well-justified gallows that should be under construction right now by the residents blames "climate change" -- which is outrageously false and should get these people executed on the spot as it is nothing more than a rank admission of their own culpability and grift.

Don't kid yourself that this is only about certain people in LA -- or for that matter California.  Its not.  While at a State level Californians voted for a bond issue to provide billions of water storage and transport for firefighting -- which many years later resulted in zero being spent on that and presumably blown on other things like housing and providing medical care to "migrants" at a national level Congress appropriated billions for rural Internet connectivity several years ago that has not connected a single person to the Internet.  Since money is all fungible the truth is that it was stolen and spent on other things -- like EBT cards and $500/nt hotel rooms for illegal aliens rather than its intended purpose.

Never mind the CR that was just passed including $100 billion for hurricane relief and now FEMA is kicking people in WNC out of hotels so, as Biden has assured California, he can divert (that is, steal) the $100 billion and give it to the very same chuckle****s who are responsible for the fire having occurred and their inability to effectively respond to it because hiring lesbians who can't actually hump the gear to fight a fire was the stated goal of the fire chief!

Congress' response to this?  A shrug of the shoulders; they appropriated the money and could claw it back before its spent on something other than its claimed appropriated purpose.  But they haven't and won't so spare me about how "your" chuckle**** Congress-critter is somehow "better" than the ones representing all the various blue zoos.  I will toast any death by freezing should it occur to any of them and/or any of their family members, yes, including their children since they seem to think that's perfectly ok for those in WNC they voted to assist and then sat on their ass and played with their genitals, probably while watching porn and/or fantasizing about sexually abusing children as the current Administration boasts that they're going to steal the money.

Now look at firms like Blackrock which is up to its neck in various schemes such as "ESG" in allocating funds which incidentally a recent court decision against American Airlines says is illegal under ERISA.  This is egregiously unlawful in that ERISA is clear in the responsibility of plan administrators as fiduciaries to the plan members and permits no other superseding goal.  That act was malicious as ERISA was long in existence before the "ESG" crap started and the law is both clear and unambiguous so where are the criminal indictments against Blackrock and others?  Oh by the way note this from the decision:

But the pilots failed to prove a violation of the statute’s prudence rule, he said, because the airline “acted according to prevailing practices and in a manner similar to other fiduciaries in the industry.” That’s true even though those standards may stem from BlackRock’s “alarming degree of control and influence over the retirement industry"—an industry O’Connor described as “incestuous” and full of “oligopolist or cartel-like behavior.”

That's a separate felony under 15 USC Chapter 1, remember?

Well?

The Constitution, under the 14th Amendment, states that all persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws.

Here is the actual text:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Note that equal protection means just that; there can be no "super class" within the United States.

But, in addition "person" is a human person.

Therefore a corporation, or other "artificial person" created by dint of other than the biological act of joining egg and sperm of untampered, natural human origin is not a person and therefore has no rights under the Constitution whatsoever.

A corporation has privileges granted by its corporate charter which is either the domestic charter (in the state where it is incorporated) or a foreign charter which it can be compelled to apply for in each state where it operates and in each of those states it may have different privileges depending on State Law.

One thing must be made clear at the same time: No corporation can override actual Constitutional Rights held by a person.  That is, "pre-dispute arbitration" or "waivers" proffered by a corporation to a person are void ab-initio.  A corporation can sign those with another corporation and have them be valid because the other corporation has no Constitutional rights either but they must be held to be void in all interactions with actual persons.

In short a corporation has no due process rights because it has no rights.  A state may allow such protections within its borders but while Interstate (and international) Commerce resides under exclusive federal jurisdiction once products or services reside within a given state the conduct of said business inside the state carries no rights by the corporation -- only privileges the state may choose to enact and they may be revoked at any time through state legislative process without recourse.

This also applies to any other created "artificial person" -- such as an AI.

This change solves many problems all at once.

Let's get it done.