[BBC] The Pandora Papers is a leak of almost 12 million documents that reveals hidden wealth, tax avoidance and, in some cases, money laundering by some of the world's rich and powerful.
More than 600 journalists in 117 countries have been trawling through the files from 14 sources for months, finding stories that are being published this week.
The data was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington DC, which has been working with more than 140 media organisations on its biggest ever global investigation.
BBC Panorama and the Guardian have led the investigation in the UK.
[Free Beacon] One-third of inmates freed by Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear during the pandemic were later charged with a felony, according to a state report.
Beshear commuted the sentences of 1,704 inmates through executive orders last year, citing an interest in limiting the spread of COVID-19 in prisons and protecting the health of vulnerable inmates. A report from Kentucky's Administrative Office of the Courts, released under pressure from Republican state lawmakers, found that 553 of those inmates were subsequently charged with felonies as of August.
The Courier-Journal revealed the findings of the report, which also showed that with misdemeanor charges considered, nearly half of the released prisoners were charged with some crime.
While the report did not detail the specifics of the crimes, it tallied the number of felony charges by their class. Four were charged with Class A felonies against a person, and 24 were charged with Class B felonies against a person. Class A felonies include the most grievous crimes, including "murder ... first-degree rape, and sodomy involving a child under 12 years old," according to the Courier-Journal, and Class B felonies include "first-degree manslaughter, rape, sodomy, assault, and robbery."
The Kentucky Republican Party accused the governor of endangering public safety by releasing the inmates.
"While Gov. Andy Beshear kept kids out of school, businesses shuttered, and even sent law enforcement to stalk churchgoers, he let more than 1,700 criminals out from behind bars—hundreds of whom went on to commit felonies," a spokesman for the party told the Washington Free Beacon. "Despite the governor's repeated assurances that these offenders were nonviolent, they even included dangerous criminals convicted of crimes like attacking police and corrections officers, carjackers, gun crimes and domestic violence, and more. Gov. Beshear's commutations raise serious questions and he needs to answer to the people of Kentucky."
Beshear defended his commutations in April 2020, insisting the state selected for release only inmates who had not been convicted of violent or sexual crimes.
#1
30 years ago, a psychiatrist from UCLA gave a talk on prison reform. He said 1/3 of all prisoners continued as before, 1/3 changed their behavior to commit less severe crimes, and 1/3 stopped committing crimes altogether.
[The Naked Hedgie] The epic rise of Theranos and its equally epic unravelling has turned out to be one of the most spectacular stories in recent years.
Recall, dear Reader, that Theranos was a company chock full of Bright Young Things that supposedly had a breakthrough technology that would quickly perform vast numbers of very demanding blood tests using only a few drops of the patient’s blood. Unfortunately, that breakthrough had not been invented yet, and in fact continues to be the finest quality vapourware that at one point was valued at $9 billion before falling to zero in 2016.
It went down as the largest fraud since Enron and the greatest scandal in Silicon Valley’s history. But media narratives have invariably focused on the company’s young founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Countless reports and documentaries are all based on the unlikely assumption that Theranos was her own brainchild and that she herself was in control of events. We’ll consider a different perspective here: one which places Theranos in context of the current pandemic and the coercive measures planned by the global health authorities. As you’ll see, the real story of Theranos will prove very relevant to our present predicament. But most importantly, there is a very significant silver lining to this story. If you happen to feel pessimistic about the way things are going now, the real story of Theranos will give you encouragement and a great dose of optimism. * snip *
That story enabled the audacious 19-year old to launch her venture, raise a total of over $750 million dollars and assemble a board of directors counting some of the world’s most powerful individuals. Theranos obtained funding from a number of high profile capitalists including the billionaire venture capitalists Tim Draper and Don Lucas Sr, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, Betsy Devos, Larry Ellison, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and companies like Walgreens and Safeway.
Theranos Board of Directors included former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defence Secretary William Perry, future Defence Secretary General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, former U.S. Senator and Chair of the Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, power lawyer David Boies, Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gary Roughead, and former CEO of Wells Fargo Richard Kovachevic. It was indeed the board to take over the world.
#4
Don't threaten school board members. Dont follow them into restrooms. Limit your activities to speaking out against the policies and running against the members.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
10/05/2021 7:39 Comments ||
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#5
See post below - Bidet says that's "part of the process, heh heh heh..."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/05/2021 7:46 Comments ||
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#6
the big problem I see is the lack of a common language: They talk about "feelings", micro-aggressions and patriarchy. To a non-woke person this sounds like demented babbling.
it reminds me of the abolitionists and pro-slavery people talking past each other in the 1850's.
We had much greater differences with the Soviets than we had with the Confederates, but during the Cold War both sides agreed on one thing: Nuclear war would be very, very bad. This one thread kept the peace long enough for the two sides to develop a common language that peacefully resolved our differences.
#7
#6 Good post. My particular concern is the speed at which the Narrative and its vocabulary continue to mutate. E.g., five years ago (or less) "woman" would have been considered a non-controversial term. It's tough to have a discussion when the language of the discussion switches from Farsi to Finnish after five minutes.
Posted by: Matt ||
10/05/2021 13:58 Comments ||
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[Babylon Bee] U.S.—Hubba hubba! Playboy subscribers are going crazy over the latest cover model to grace this month's issue: Dr. Anthony Fauci.
"When thinking of who we wanted on the cover this month, the choice was easy," said Playboy's Editor in Chief Timby McPiddle. "It was between our trademark beautiful women, or the savior of the world and sexiest man alive, Dr. Fauci. The choice was easy!"
Dr. Fauci has made history as the first male Playboy cover model to also unleash a devastating virus on the world that killed millions of people and then become a celebrity doctor making millions of dollars offering unsolicited advice on TV. The cover will show him in an alluring black girdle and bunny tail.
"As Playboy moves into a more progressive 21st century, we are proud to be featuring attractive progressive icons like Dr. Fauci!" said McPiddle. "Congratulations, Dr. Fauci!"
Sources say next month's edition will feature Nancy Pelosi.
Toss your capitalist cookbooks aside, this anti-capitalist cooking show walks you through the grueling experience of cooking... the socialist way.
[FOX] The last two years seem to have been one continual crisis—well aside from the coronavirus pandemic.
The spiraling prices of cars, gas, appliances, lumber, homes, and food are revisiting the miseries of the 1970s.
Anarchy defines the border.
A new divisive tribalism centers on "critical race theory."
Unelected Washington grandees in the CIA, FBI, IRS, NSA, and Pentagon—like John Brennan, James Comey, Lois Lerner, Gen. Mark Milley, and Robert Mueller—feign ignorance or mislead under oath—or even break or ignore laws without consequences.
Ancient customs and laws are under assault from the Electoral College to the century-and-a-half make-up of the Supreme Court.
The current administration looks to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the Paris Climate Accord for answers to America’s problems.
What is going on?
All of these daily melodramas are the natural dividends of the diminishing power of the independent American citizen—politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Citizens are becoming inert, as radical ideas take root that our Founders never envisioned.
#3
federal investigators have started using new "keyword warrants" and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim's name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows.
#4
Using the pretext of victim protection and investigation, they have moved into keyword searches with undisclosed parameters. Who trusts this after the clear pattern of utter FISA abuses?
[Raw Conservative] Taiwan’s foreign minister is warning of war with China and is asking Austraila for aid with intelligence, Australian Broadcasting reports.
The news comes after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China flew dozens of sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) beginning on Friday.
On ABC’s "China Tonight," Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said that if the PLA launches an actual strike, Taiwan is ready to repel it.
"The defense of Taiwan is in our own hands, and we are absolutely committed to that," Wu said.
The statement comse after Taiwan sharply criticized China on Saturday after Beijing marked the founding of the People’s Republic of China with the largest ever incursion by the Chinese air force into the island’s air defense zone.
Taiwan, a democratically governed island that is claimed by China, has complained for more than a year of repeated missions near it by China’s air force, often in the southwestern part of its air defense zone close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.
Taiwanese fighters scrambled against 38 Chinese aircraft in two waves on Friday, the Taiwan Defence Ministry said. It said Taiwan sent combat aircraft to warn away the Chinese aircraft, while missile systems were deployed to monitor them.
#6
#1 Might want to keep a close eye on Kadena and Guam. A two or three pronged attack is not out of the realm of possibility.
Posted by: Besoeker 2021-10-05 07:40
My concern would be this: IF they can time it right (remember, the Japanese didn't) they can launch their attack on Taiwan and then tell us in no uncertain terms that there are missiles aimed at Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, and Seattle - then simply ask, "Are you willing to trade these cities for Taiwan?" I figure at that point, those respective Governors will soil themselves and demand we stay out of it. In OR and WA, I suspect Antifa will deploy right quick to cripple or at least slow down any US military effort through those states.
I simply do not see a Biden Administration standing up for Taiwan in the face of any political opposition or violence.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/05/2021 10:57 Comments ||
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#7
Then the Chinese are cut off from the international trade. No oil, coal, food, raw materials imports. No selling the labor of a 100's millions of factory laborers. Hope it's worth it for them. It will be worth it for America as industry has to rebuilt.
#10
Meanwhile, MSN is creaming their jeans over the blockbuster movie from the CCP regarding the Battle of Lake Changjin. We used to recall this as Chosin Reservoir, and we used to root for the USMC.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
10/05/2021 18:54 Comments ||
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#11
Confucius say, "Chinese oppression
Save North from its war of aggression,
And thus -- hush ma mouth! --
It's not part of the South
But our poor enslaved puppet possession."
[Cloudflare] “Facebook can't be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second.
Today at 15:51 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.
Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had "pulled the cables" from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.
How's that even possible?
Update from Facebook
Facebook has now published a blog post giving some details of what happened internally. Externally, we saw the BGP and DNS problems outlined in this post but the problem actually began with a configuration change that affected the entire internal backbone. That cascaded into Facebook and other properties disappearing and staff internal to Facebook having difficulty getting service going again.
Now on to what we saw from the outside.
Meet BGP
BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It's a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver every network packet to their final destinations. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn't know what to do, and the Internet wouldn't work.
The Internet is literally a network of networks, and it’s bound together by BGP. BGP allows one network (say Facebook) to advertise its presence to other networks that form the Internet. As we write Facebook is not advertising its presence, ISPs and other networks can’t find Facebook’s network and so it is unavailable.
The individual networks each have an ASN: an Autonomous System Number. An Autonomous System (AS) is an individual network with a unified internal routing policy. An AS can originate prefixes (say that they control a group of IP addresses), as well as transit prefixes (say they know how to reach specific groups of IP addresses).
Cloudflare's ASN is AS13335. Every ASN needs to announce its prefix routes to the Internet using BGP; otherwise, no one will know how to connect and where to find us.
Our learning center has a good overview of what BGP and ASNs are and how they work.
In this simplified diagram, you can see six autonomous systems on the Internet and two possible routes that one packet can use to go from Start to End. AS1 → AS2 → AS3 being the fastest, and AS1 → AS6 → AS5 → AS4 → AS3 being the slowest, but that can be used if the first fails.
Key part of Cover Story:
Problems began with a routine BGP update that went wrong, wiping out the DNS routing information that Facebook needed.
Facebook-Group down 6+/- Hours.
It was reported by a few anon staff Facebook sent a CERT Team to its Cal. data site to address the server issues and had badge access problems, requiring landline comm verification for access.
It was verified the Facebook outage also lockout many employees from communicating with each another using their internal Facebook tools. FB employs a LARGE number of HOME WORKERS.
Outage coincidentally happened around CBS’s 60 Minutes release of the interview with Frances Haugen (Facebook Whistle Blower). She is scheduled to testify in the US Senate Oct. 5th. regarding FB User safety and Political abuses in 2020.
Sources speculate if the 2019-2020 political censorship engagement data trail/files were "lost" during the "crash".
A few dark ch. sources reported big offers of $$$$$$$/ employment to the person or persons responsible for the outage were authorized. Which fueled initial reports of a DNS Hack. IT Security Expert Madory said. “We obviously can’t rule out someone hacking them, but they also could have done this to themselves.”
Its estimated that Facebook and its acquisitions lost about $5.9B in related revenue during that 6+/- hrs.
FB stock price fell roughly $20 a share in 6 hrs
Several different domain name registers listed the domain Facebook.com as up for sale. Yep you could have been the owner of Facebook.com for a few hours ☺☺☺
Either way the X & Millennium generations got to exp. a sample of 1960 retro communications
#4
This looks like some powerful player identified (or created) a single point of failure for one of the internet's major infrastructure hubs and then pulled the trigger.
<speculation>
I wonder if this Facebook trouble was Russia's strategic retaliation/shot across the bow for Pandora.
</speculation>
OK I'll ask...
Having been in I.T. relate operations for over 35 years.
Our common sense roll out practice was always to BETA TEST ANY UPDATE .....BEFORE..... to going operational.
Are we to believe a F-100 company does not practice common basic operational safety roll out steps?
#11
I developed a network for a Paradyne product in the 1970's. And it was impervious to failure because all the nodes continuously updated their routing paths. That was a mickey-mouse operation. Am i to believe that the internet is dependent on a single node?
#12
It's hard to test anything as core as naming and routing -- do you build a separate Internet for testing? -- so mostly you do with layers of reviews. Sometimes mistakes still filter through.
This one sounds like someone didn't do any immediate checking, and let an error propagate for a while.
And, no, the Internet isn't dependent on a single node -- but when all nodes are getting the same (wrong) answer...
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
10/05/2021 12:48 Comments ||
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#13
Insightful comment from old timer Internet Engineer Bill Woodcock on KrebsOnSecurity.com:
"In old-school networking, we had literally dozens of routing protocols to choose from, and as we had a wealth of layer-1 and layer-2 protocols to choose from. So the chances that an organization would be running the same IGP (internal gateway protocol) and EGP (external gateway protocol) were essentially nil; one chose best-of-breed for each independently, and they have very different needs.
"By about 1996, the EGP choice had devolved into a monoculture of people running BGP, and that makes sense, because convergence on a single protocol is driven by the Network Effect, just as a common trading language makes it possible to do business across borders… Knowing that you’d be using the same routing protocol with all your external neighbors decreased the time and effort needed to reach the goal. Unfortunately, when we reached an EGP monoculture, competitive pressure also went away. We were using BGPv4 in 1996, and we’re still using the same version now today, twenty-five years later, with literally no significant improvement or development to the protocol. And although it played no part in yesterday’s incident, the thin layer of security that’s added on to the side of BGPv4 to try to remedy its worst deficiencies has actually _lost_ significant ground since its peak in about 2003-2004.
"It took longer for IGPs to die out, and when they did, the monoculture that took hold was in the form of “iBGP,” which meant simply using BGP for internal routing as well as external routing, even though it was a technically much worse choice for the purpose… and I’m afraid I was one of the people who pushed that forward, in the name of efficiency and, frankly, laziness. A lot of the poor Internet engineering choices that we’re now living with the consequences of were done in the name of laziness, in times when businesses were striving for exponential growth, money was plentiful, but time and attention were scarce and growing scarcer. So today, essentially _every_ network of global scale runs BGP as both their external and internal routing protocol
"And it’s in this environment that a problem like the one Facebook had becomes possible. Pushed to simultaneously grow and cut costs, their engineering departments are hollowed out, losing the entire middle to a bipolar structure of a very small handful of the same old farts that I was working with when they were kids, thirty years ago, who actually know how things work, and a lot of actual kids who are paid a pittance and given no meaningful path to intellectual and career growth; where before they’d have had mentors and a ladder of ever-more-challenging work to make their way up, now their growth path is blocked by automation. “Dev Ops” automation that allows the attention of a team of two or three or four people to be spread across thousands of routers and tens or hundreds of thousands of servers through abstracted fleet management, using the kids for “rack & stack” grunt-work, where they never get to touch anything that they could break, but also never get to learn how it works. Like I said, I’m dealing with exactly the same small set of people now, in my counterpart networks, that I was thirty years ago… but some of them are starting to retire, others are wanting more time with family, and we’re all just getting old; this isn’t sustainable. So, in this environment of too little attention from too few senior people stretched too thin, and using too many abstraction layers of automation that was all-too-often written for unrelated purposes, you get own-goals like yesterday’s, where the senior people have to dig through layers and layers of crufty scripts in half a dozen languages (an area where there has _not_ been useful consolidation) to find and remediate the problem, while the junior folks are _literally_ locked out and unable to help.
"It’s worthy of note that this monoculture/stagnation process has certainly not been limited to routing protocols; where we had many competing and improving layer-2 protocols, since about 2001 they’ve pretty much all been squeezed out by Ethernet in its many, equally mediocre, forms. There used to be dozens of email formats, with a rich market in gateways between; since that competition was eliminated, email has become homogenous and an efficient home for spammers. It’s precisely this trend toward stagnation in open standards and open protocols that has made the predatory centralization of proprietary garbage like Gmail and Office365 and Facebook possible… When there were alternatives, nobody would ever have given such half-assed things a second glance."
#15
What of the reports of employees not even able to gain access to the building so as actually work on the situation?
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
10/05/2021 14:51 Comments ||
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#16
DevOps is where the adults work. The other software dev teams are full of young H1B drones who know little and have next to no experience to draw upon.
Care to guess which group gets executive attention and lavish resources, and which is starved?
#19
Proof that the entire internet can be shut down for an extended period. Crippling many businesses that do financial transactions on line, etc. during that time.
[GatewayPundit] Stuart Scheller had this to say about President Trump and his family.
President Trump. I was told by everyone to kiss the ring because of your following and power. I refuse. While I respect your foreign policy positions, I hate how you divided the country. I don’t need or want your help. You do not have the ability to pull US together. You may even win the next election. But your generation’s time is running out. Tell your son to stop tweeting about me. Your whole family knows nothing about US or our sacrifices. I could never work with you. I’d rather sit in jail and be released with a dishonorable than make compromises in my beliefs. I have opinions in this new light of Stewie, all of them vulgar
Not everybody likes President Trump — his personality is polarizing. But note that Colonel Scheller respects his foreign policy positions, a sentiment he likely does not feel for President Biden’s, and ditto about Biden’s domestic policies.
#1
After Lt Col All Mouth spewed spital against Trump his fund raising stalled. His idiocy is that Trump devided America. But Lt Col Know Nothing is too stupid to know that when America saw the Dems and Republicans were united and one was just as corrupt as the other (aka DC Establishment) the voters broke from the norms and sent in a non-politician.
For years this moron lived off the tax payers as part of the military and is 100% clueless about any thing outside of his Deep State bubble. 10 years in Levenworth aught to do it...
#5
Amazing as the DC DOD Brass royal screw up in Afghanistan is being spread. How quickly narrative and comments made by a person locked in solitary confinement and unable to defend himself changes.
Being a skeptic... I'll wait to hear it directly from him instead of trusting what is said in the MSM and printed in Social Media.
#7
plenty of cell phones in prions, some county jails you can even rent ipads. Don't know about the brig though.
Posted by: Chris ||
10/05/2021 9:00 Comments ||
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#8
I believe the President is not as polarizing or divisive as what is so loudly said of him. LtCol Scheller did very purposefully violate a direct order to no comprehensible end; he has already resigned and is on the way out and nothing he has said is timely.
His adult and professional life have been lived in a space with jealously guarded hard edges. Whether nascent hero or broken clock he got himself exactly where he is through his own efforts. Time will tell who he is or can be.
#9
So he hates Trump. Get in line with about half of America. This is not news. Its an attempt to sway Trump supporters to leave him in jail. He was not jailed for his anti Trump rant. But the propaganda blast seemed to work, now BB is overlooking the real reason he is in jail, and walking away. I say good job to the psyop groups.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/05/2021 11:38 Comments ||
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#10
Rank and file has a lot to be frustrated about.
I may even agree here; if the reports have been ten years of rainbow farts, what has been going on?
FFS, that story about Brave Sir Donahue and his Last Man Out picture, when really he was collecting war booty (Hilex with a ZSU-23 mount) at the cost of evacuees? WTF? If that is true, it is an easy step to take that he was there to explicitly make sure Afghans were taken instead of Americans.
Got Milley lurking around in the curtains. And these are just the faces, what is in the machine?
#11
Scheller is that rare animal who is truly guileless. He would never have made general. Most people tamp down their personal views/ambitions when they clash with those of people useful for their personal advancement until those people are superfluous to said goals. For good or evil, life is not a test graded by impartial arbiters. What he said will have an impact on Trump's comeback hopes. And people like me, who are relying on that comeback to repair some of the damage still unfolding under Democrat rule, will abstain from contributing to a man unconcerned about continued Democrat domination.
#12
Trump was and is a goof. Yes, most of views on the burning issues were correct, but his leadership was in incoherent, inconsistent, and weak. Not a model C-in-C.
#13
Which is why we will see more and more articles like this, to discredit and divide the opposition.
There is that smell in the air that what was going on over there was a Mexican Donkey Show and those stories can only be suppressed and dripped out so much.
This is a hyped up Trump People and Mean Tweets, but still excellent points Zhang Fei.
#14
Trump was and is a goof. Yes, most of views on the burning issues were correct, but his leadership was in incoherent, inconsistent, and weak. Not a model C-in-C.
You've mistaken Trump for a king, who can put (some of) his opponents in the ground.
You go to the elections with the candidates you have, Sheba tse Tung4690, not waiting for a Platonic Ideal of a prince on a white charger (who never shows up anyway). Would Hillary have been better? Is Mr. Biden?
The only way President Trump could have been a stronger Commander in Chief would have been to fire the all the senior officers who were busily “resisting” his orders instead of actually doing the job they were sworn to do. Ditto on the civilian side among the bureaucrats, of course, but that is not the question at hand.
Little Stewie hadn't the brains to realize it wasn't Trump dividing the nation it was, is our ChiCom Leftist Industrial treasonous media that did that.
No one asked this fruck to kiss "Trump's ring". But now he sure is kissing Biden's ass.
#18
Yes: Trump faced severe resistance from the swamp.
Yes: the election was a farce, and likely stolen.
Yes, his enemies lied and cheated and stoked riots and forged ballots and fabricated stories out of thin air and collided with our enemies to destroy Trump.
- AND -
Yes, Trump shot himself more times than they shot Rasputin.
And yes, Trump was and is a goof who threw away his chance at winning re-election.
I feel like I'm in France 1943 and I'm getting pretty tired of the people who just want to argue about whether Paul Reynaud was a good leader or not. Can we put it off until we actually have meaningful elections again?
[PJ] As President Joe Biden pledges to bridge the divide between those who want an immediate vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and radicals determined to block legislation until they get the highest profligate social spending possible, Biden’s allies took to the Sunday shows.
"We need to deliver for the American people," Cedric Richmond, a senior presidential advisor, told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. "And so, what we have work to do is make sure that Senator Manchin understands how this affects the future in terms of making sure that we invest in American families so that they can determine their own destiny. We think we have unity of purpose with Senator Manchin. That’s what the president does best and that is to talk to Senator Manchin and make sure that he understands the entire vision why we need to do it and what amount."
But when Richmond echoed the Democrat lie that trillions of dollars actually equal zero, Wallace interrupted, explaining, "It doesn’t cost zero. Whether it’s $3.5 trillion or $2 trillion, it — or $1.5 trillion, whatever, it costs that amount of money. Now, you can pay for it either by borrowing it or you can pay for it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but it doesn’t cost zero."
[Bloomberg] Given the scope of their ambitions and our dependence on them, behemoth brands should be treated, and held to account, for what they really are: commercial superpowers.
It’s getting harder to distinguish brands from nation-states.
customers (citizens), shareholders (legislators), boards of directors (executives), chairmen (monarchs), CEOs (presidents), and oversight boards (judges)
... or even size, though the comparisons are startling:
Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed ||
10/05/2021 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
That's simple. Whatever you may think of them, Amazon and Facebook are successful entities that aggressively accomplish their goals.
The UN is a festering cesspit of triple parking, skip out on the tab, 2nd to 4th sons. Too stupid to survive in their country of origin, this herd of mouth breathing rent seekers issues extravagant demands that would embarrass Arafat.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Babylon Bee] U.S.—Hubba hubba! Playboy subscribers are going crazy over the latest cover model to grace this month's issue: Dr. Anthony Fauci.
[FOX] The last two years seem to have been one continual crisis—well aside from the coronavirus pandemic.
[Raw Conservative] Taiwan’s foreign minister is warning of war with China and is asking Austraila for aid with intelligence, Australian Broadcasting reports.
[GatewayPundit] 
