Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Thom Hartmann Program" channel.

  1. Abbott might want to be very careful about what he does and says in coming days. Other than the simple concept of negligent homicide there's the issue that he as a state governor has no right to control an international border. I'm Australian and even I know this. We've had all sorts of legal issues regarding boat people entering Australian waters and we've had calls from other countries to either get our SHlT better organised or face reprisals. Some of the Europeans basically threatened us with trade sanctions if we didn't get our act together. They're quieter now that they're having similar issues with the flood out of North Africa. I absolutely support the right of any country to decide who can and who can't enter their country. That is a basic law all countries, states and tribes have had for centuries, but these days we by international agreements we recognise the rights of people claiming asylum to have their case heard. That's not always easy and even if they are not accepted as refugees it doesn't mean you can simply let people die. You certainly can't just stand there and do nothing.
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  2. I don't know why anyone is really surprised. Go look through history and this has been done so many times in the past its almost a standard human trait. Considering the stresses in our society these days after 40+ years of neo-liberalism making everyone feel helpless to some extent, no one should be surprised by the sort of garbage we see. Add into that people who know how to weaponize the frustration of others and it becomes a very dangerous situation.
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  3. ENGINEER HERE: I worked on a waste water treatment plant for a Uranium mine in Australia back in 2005-06. There's a lot that can be done but removing tritium is not that easy and getting all of it out is near impossible. Plus to be fair the amount of toxins in our lives these days is now so great that the Fukushima water is negligible. Things like the lead that was in gasoline for decades did far more damage and effectively gave lead poisoning to the entire planet. The nuclear testing done in the post world war 2 period irradiated the entire human race. Its what makes all the steel made BEFORE that time so valuable and why Pirates raid the ships sunk in World War 2 and World War 1. All of the steel in all, our cars, boats, bridges, trucks,.... etc. is tainted by those tests. We have to accept that we have abused this planet in so many ways its hard to describe and either we learn to take care of it or we die as a species because there is NOTHING ELSE. What I don't like about BOTH SIDES of the nuclear debate is that NEITHER OF THEM tell the whole truth. The pro-nuclear brigade don't talk about either the construction costs, construction time or the decommissioning costs. The anti-nuclear brigade use a staggering amount of scare tactics when there are other things we need to be a lot more scared of like CLIMATE CHANGE, affordable housing, clean food and clean water for a couple of Billion People.
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  4. “It's Easier to Fool People Than It Is to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled.” – Mark Twain.
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  5. I'm Australian and one of the more astute observations was: "The Republican Oligarchs beat the Democrat CEOs"
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  6. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  7. Abbott might want to be very careful about what he does and says in coming days. Other than the simple concept of negligent homicide there's the issue that he as a state governor has not right to control an international border. I'm Australian and even I know this.
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  8. I'm Australian but went to college in America in the late 80s. I did engineering but a bunch of my frat brothers were pre-law so I had many discussion about the US constitution. What's amazed when I compare today with the 80s is the insane ignorance about the US Constitution. Americans used to be incredibly proud of the understanding of there own nation. Compared to any other nation (including Australia) Americans WERE the most well educated people with respect to HOW their country ACTUALLY DOES WORK. BUT ITS NO LONGER TRUE and that amazes me because Americans used to be PROUD they understood their own nation. My frat brothers were ADAMANT that America could NEVER become a totalitarian state BECAUSE THEY WERE EDUCATED.
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  9. Hey Thom your next video needs to be on the SCOTUS decision to castrate the EPA.
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  10. Australian here. Four Corners is a program not a station. Its very similar to PBS Frontline, BBC Panorama and Canada's The 5th Estate in fact sometimes 4 Corners shows Frontline or Panorama episodes. The station that produces 4 Corners is Australia's ABC which is our equivalent of PBS. Like the others 4 Corners usually just does 45 minute episodes but occasionally does multi episode stories like Follow the Money. Another great multi-episode 4 Corners is "Fox and the Big Lie" which is all about the involvement of Australian born Rupert Murdoch's Fox network's promoting Trumps election lies. It also includes the now famous interview with Sydney Powell.
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  11. It started before that when they awarded Milton Freidman the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. That gave his brand of psychotic garbage legitimacy. Did you know the Nobel for Economics IS NOT a real Nobel Prize? It was never sponsored by Nobel or any member of the family. It was sponsored by a Swedish Bank so that the BS economists pump out was made legitimate in the publics eyes. It really is the FAKE Nobel Prize. But Freidman's brand of psychotic shit was the worst thing they ever legitimized.
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  12. They rely on the simple concept that people like to think they are smarter than they are and if you give them information that the rest of us don't know about it REINFORCES that. This is why its so hard to convince people other wise. They then have to admit they were tricked or they were wrong or they just aren't as smart as they think they are.
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  13. Most people have never heard of them until recently. Just like we'd never heard of the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, CATO Institute and other right wing institutions and lobbyists until recently. America is going to need to comes to terms with these people because the influence they have on American politics is starting to effect other countries. I'm Australian and like Canada, Japan, Mexico, Britain and others, America is our major trading and security partner. These people aren't simply a threat to American Democracy they're a threat to Western Democracy.
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  14. @user-fv4nb3is3c Right now I can't see why we are making even stronger commitments to America when its in this state of flux. I actually went to college there on a scholarship and believe that overall they are a great country with fine people. The problem is they have sat back letting this minority gain a staggering amount of political power. They have had so many opportunities to put limits on this stuff and just didn't. They have let a small group of insanely wealthy people have too much power and that has never worked at any point in history. AND YES I know Rupert bloody Murdoch has been a major player in that. At some point we are going to have to deal with that entire family and their minions.
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  15. Asimov fan here - I love that quote. Isaac was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. I would have like to have met him. Here's another great quote regarding America from Vice President Henry A. Wallace. quoted from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
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  16. There's a PBS Frontline documentary on how the Kentucky Teachers lost massively in New York Stock Exchange trading and nobody really knew what was going on or the risks that were being taken. Be careful if you have throwable objects nearby. Its so aggravating that you really do feel you want to break something or throw something.
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  17. I'm Australian but went to college in America and this stuff with SCOTUS scares me a lot more than Putin or Xi or Kim. I have a lot of American friends I care about but also as an Australian (like many others - Canada, Japan, Korea, Britain, etc.) America is our most important trading and security partner. I was in Canada for work when Trump without any warning tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. All the treaties and commercial stuff is protected by the most pro-Business SCOTUS in history. Look at "Citizens United" - they don't care what Wall Street does to America, so imagine how much less they care about the rest of us? We trade with all these American companies and if anything comes up they run back to SCOTUS which they own and control. Ask the Central & South Americans about Texaco (Chevron). Secondly - Australia (and others) have backed our future security on the F35 program. What if the next version of Trump one days waves the middle finger and we get no spare parts? Or that spares come with conditions like helping to invade Iran? Its not only America's future that hinges on SCOTUS. Its effects the entire Western World.
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  18. I'm Australian but went to college U. Illinois on a sports scholarship. So I know this part of America quite well and despite the rivalry with Ohio is incredibly sad to hear about ALL THIS STUFF. There was the Governor of Illinois admissions scandal at MY ACTUAL SCHOOL, that affects my employment in Australia because anyone here who googles University of Illinois sees that. I dated a Hoosier for a while and to hear about the collapse of Indiana's manufacturing while Pete Buttigieg tells America how great he is ridiculous. I spent my first Thanksgiving in Kentucky. A while back I saw a PBS Frontline documentary on how the Kentucky Teachers lost massively in New York Stock Exchange trading and nobody really knew what was going on or the risks that were being taken. I spent another Thanksgiving in Cincinnati. I watched the COVID stats for that part of America and to see this on top of everything else that's happened is just heartbreaking.
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  19. ​ @CarlGerhardt1  WHAT DID I SAY IN THE LAST PARAGRAPH? Australia already has plans to grow from the current 26 million to over 50 million. I'm not against that but we can't suddenly do that now. We don't have the housing, infrastructure, energy, water, schools, hospitals just to start the list. We have to say NO and despite what the Europeans said to us they now know. I once saw Angela Merkel who oversaw Germany have the most open of border policies tell a young immigrant girl that "I'm sorry but we can't take everyone." She wasn't being mean or dispassionate or cruel she was just pointing out the basic reality. Every country has limits to what it can do. America is no different and I 100% support America's right to say NO. BUT BUDDY DON'T MISTAKE THAT FOR BEING AN ARSEH0LE. And Greg Abbott is an ARSEH0LE and a damn cruel one at that.
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  20. I am Australian and trying to point out the issues with our Agriculture Sector is like banging you head against a wall made of a combination of brick, carbon fibre, cement, marble, coated in carbide. In general we produce food for 75 million but only have 25 million. That means we feed about 50 million people in "other places." Australia's growth plan (if it can be called that) steadily moving towards 50-60 million because the economists say that will be good enough to support industry. What they really mean is that all those home loans will be a huge boon for the banks. BUT NOBODY wants to discuss what's to happen to all those people in other countries we feed. If we simply jump to 35 million. that means either we need to increase out own production to feed another 10 million or there's 10 million starving somewhere or 20 million only getting 1/2 the food they normally have. Either way we can expect several million starving people rocking up on our shore. Because starving people don't care about borders. AND THAT'S ONLY IF we have no issues with world wide food supply. The thing that really scares Australians (or the ones who are awake) is what happens of there's a crisis and millions of starving people see we have excess food.
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  21. The British rebel economist Gary Stevenson (here on YT) had a great line about when people like David Koch talk about how good or bad things are or how great or worse things would be if certain things were done. He said just add the 2 words "for us" to the end of everything they say. If they say something like "Getting rid of that regulation will be good." add those 2 words. If they say something like "The economy is going great." add those 2 words. If they say something like "The economy is a shambles." add those 2 words. Then everything they say makes sense.
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  22. What they have done is almost standard practice for religious movements with the goal of political power AND ITS NOT a Christian specific thing either. There's a common technique used by religious people where they lift a line or phrase out of the text and literally flip it on end and make it the opposite meaning to suit circumstances. One of the best examples of that is that snippet out of Romans 12:19 "Vengence is mine, says the Lord." Its regarded as one of the great misquotes of human history. Its been used as the Battle Cry for 100s of Christian armies over many centuries. Go read what that paragraph actually says - its the complete opposite. The Muslim suicide bombers and done similar by claiming its a from of martyrdom. Dozens of Muslim scholars have come out and said that's a misinterpretation. They completely ignore those parts that regard suicide as a sin and twist the parts on Martyrdom to include suicide if its against an enemy. The Seven Mountains people are doing similar. Both Revelations and Isiah use word pictures (like are used in parables) and its very easy to lift parts out and flip it into anything you want. But sometimes the explanations are right there in the text. In Rev 17 its says various part of the beast represent political entities as in kings & kingdoms. There's a woman riding on the back of that beast and what social institution has ridden on the back of politics like a prostitute selling itself in any way necessary to retain power, influence and wealth? Answer - organised religion. Revelation 17 is NOT about a religious movement taking over political control. Its the complete opposite. Its about secular politics getting tired of organised religion riding on its back and then turning on it and tearing it to pieces.
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  23. FIRST let me say that this group Thom's describing is despicable and the guy running it is a turd. SECOND Its not just simply women rejecting bad men they are rejecting a lot of good men too. I've watched several of my friends get their lives utterly torn up by their wives. They were not abusive or bad or did anything but try and be decent husbands. One just left one day leaving him with 2 wonderful kids because her boss bought her a car. About 15 years ago I read a report written by a FEMALE psychologist who pointed out that many of her patients were women depressed over their perception there were no men good enough for them to share a life with. She even wrote a book about this. She put much of the blame on an aspect of feminism that said "be demanding of men" being taken out of context. In terms of women demanding that men treat them fairly and with respect I don't no many men who don't agree with that, BUT what this psychologist said was that too many women had these lists of demands as to what a husband should be. These lists were unrealistic leaving a lot of women depressed.
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  24. I'm Australian but went to college at U. Illinois. So I know the Midwest reasonably well. This is kind of surprising because I thought it would have been Delaware (the world capital of tax evasion) or Idaho (the world capital of Russian money) or Texas (the world capital of "look over there at what they are doing"). My take on Ohio is that for every 2 children in Ohio one ends up playing sport for the Buckeyes and the other one learns to read & write.
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  25.  @yvonneplant9434  As for you comment about Australian's telling Americans what to do. We can certainly tell you how to hold an election, but then so can more than 100 other countries. Maybe you should ask the Russians or Chinese how to hold your next election.
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  26. He's a typical American Libertarian Libertarian rule No. 1: "We want the Liberty to strip you of your Liberty" Libertarian rule No. 2: "The Government only has the Liberty to spend money on what we want." Libertarian rule No. 3: "You have the Liberty to concede all power to us."
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  27. That's actually the smart comment among a lot of others some of which are incredibly ignorant. Thom doesn't help a lot with a real doozy. When he said the Bible allowed children to be stoned for being uppity. There's no such rule ANYWHERE in the Bible. People need to be very careful with the Bible. It wasn't written in English or anything close to English. It was mostly written in Ancient Hebrew which was structured very differently to most modern languages. Its made it very easy for unscrupulous people to take advantage of it with interpretations.
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  28.  @terryparenteau1200  I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s) and I thought at the time America was showing signs of slipping. Things like basic literacy and math skills. Don't forget America has a long history of simplifying spelling. Its one of those funny subjects between America and the rest of the English speaking world. Sorry fo he longer answer but you raise an important issue. I'm fairly well informed on what's happened in Australia with education as both my parents were High School teachers and 1 cousin was a high school principal. And our system is following America's. What's masking lower education standards are the advances in technology. If you've heard about how apps like MS Word have contributed to a decline in spelling skills because it auto corrects. We have a very similar issue in engineering with packages like AutoCad. Its brilliant in how it helps engineers design BUT it also makes them very lazy with some vital skills. The equivalent to spelling in engineering is tolerancing. That's where you decide how accurate each dimension on a part needs to be. In the past engineers had to think about how accurate each dimension needed to be and now they don't. I think there's been a long slow decline in Western Education that's been so gradual we don't realise it unless we something very specific. I've noticed in engineering but I'm certain its across the board. I think its being driven by at least 2 main things. First there's the fundamentalist religions for sure. That's the point you made and its all about power and obedience. Its been well practiced for 1000s of years by many religions that literacy is for priests and obedience is for the illiterate. Second is politics where its much easier to motivate mobs if they are less educated (eg. Trumpism). After those 2 I know of 2 others. There's pressure from business who again want obedience. There's a lesser and very significant pressure from the FAR LEFT (and I mean the far far far radical nutcase left) who want to take the "we are all equal" mantra to its extreme which means none of us are allowed to be smarter than the least intelligent person in the group. I see that in a lot of industrial training where there are NO GRADES just pass/fail. Its fine for many things but certainly not all. The strange thing is all these pressure drivers need people educated. They just don't like them too educated. Its like that great line from President Snow in the Hunger Games about how a little bit of hope is good and too much is very dangerous.
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  29. And California went onto be the worlds technology superpower. Not Texas, Not Wyoming, Not Florida, Not New York and not any of the other states.
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  30. When did Bernie join the UFC? This looked like a pre-fight press conference: Bernie "Functioning Brain" Sanders Vs Lindsey "Count de Money" Graham.
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  31. Australian here - seeing this from the outside. I have NO DOUBT the Russians were interfering in the 2016 election but I have seen very few people truly explain Putin's MOTIVES and what he actually sought. Masha Gessen (the Russian American Journalist) was interviewed on the Australian show called Planet America (for my mind) put forward the best explanation. FIRST - Masha explained that Putin wasn't a great strategic thinker and that's been born out with the disaster that is now Ukraine. Masha also explained Putin believes in ABSOLUTE LOYALTY and we all saw what he did to Yevgeny Prigozhin. So Putin would EXPECT someone like James Comey to keep his mouth shut. Most of all in Putin's Russia elections are decided beforehand and election days are just confirmations the general population knows their place or at least what percentage know their place. So in Putin's mind Hilary Clinton had already won long before election day. If that's the case then what was Putin really up to and what happened? Everybody has forgotten that out of 330 million Americans Putin hated NOBODY more than Hilary Clinton who had, as Secretary of State, called out Putin publicly and slapped Russia repeatedly with sanctions that personally hurt Putin. So just imagine this. 1) James Comey keeps silent on the emails because in Putin's mind that's what servants do. 2) Hilary then wins. 3) The Russians then leek the emails along with details James Comey covered up. What do you think Trump and the Republicans would have then done? No matter how it turns out Putin wins because: If Trump wins sure Putin gets to laugh at Hilary. BUT If Hilary wins Putin gets to watch America tear itself apart and at the very least Hilary's presidency is a disaster.
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  32. That's actually one of the more sensible comments on the subject I have seen. Well done.
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  33. I'm Australian and that is a staggering way to describe this situation in America. AND YES it seriously scares the crap out of the rest of the world. The rest of us simply can't afford America to fail for several reasons. First there's the obvious security issues, but just as important are the economic reasons. 1) America is still the worlds largest economy (24.6% almost 1/4) and that includes staggering amounts of foreign money invested in America including billions in Chinese money. 2) America (or certain states) have turned out to be some of the worlds largest storehouses of foreign money being hidden from other governments. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands might be where the Chicago & New York mobsters hide their money but Russian Oligarchs and 3rd World dictators prefer Idaho, Texas and Delaware. 3) The US dollar is still the worlds reserve currency and that's not changing anytime soon no matter how much the BRICS wants too or how much anyone else wants to. Its just such a massive task. SO NOBODY on the planet, NOT EVEN the Russians can afford America to implode because of the GOP freak show.
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  34. That's because he'll be in a small room, wearing bright orange and the golf course is on the other side of a fence topped with barbed wire. Go have a look at the prison where they send people like him. Its called Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery (FPC Montgomery) and its where Charles Kushner (Jared's father) did his time. AND YES its surrounded by a golf course.
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  35. This is one of those things that's almost crazy for men to comment on but there's clearly something wrong with these people. One of the things that men don't understand is how serious an issue it is for a women to get pregnant until it gets explained to them one day and a friend of mine's wife did one day. The rate of serous threat to life a pregnant women is far higher than men realise think. We've lost sight of the fact that with modern technology like ultrasounds that let doctors know if something is wrong or not. We forget that with healthier food and cleaner water that there are many complications women in modern societies don't face. A few years ago there was a scandal where American doctors were helping poor women in Bangladesh do a simple procedure to block their fallopian tubes and prevent further pregnancies for women who already had children and didn't want any more. The controversy was the technique they were using had something like a 1 in 10,000 chance of cancer. One of the doctors involved explained (I think on 60minutes) that poorer women in Bangladesh had almost a 20% chance that any pregnancy could kill them either during the pregnancy or in childbirth. The fact that Oklahoma has that high rate of deaths says a lot about where Oklahoma is these days. Maybe a bunch of men should stop and listen and think.
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  36. I think they mean the "New Normal" is unpredictable extreme weather.
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  37. Go and look what ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov said in an interview with the Canadians in 1984 about getting opponents so confused they would not be able to discern reality no matter what evidence was presented to them. Its here on YT. Other than the fact that it was the Soviet system that collapsed, what Bezmenov was wrong about was how effective the Soviets actually were with their psychological war. That was because back then they didn't have the right delivery system. What changed and ahs made this point in history so bad was the advent of social media where bad faith actors could just overwhelm people with staggering amounts of misinformation or facts taken out of context. With generative AI that's only going to get worse.
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  38. That's because it really is the Handmaids Tale come to life.
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  39. What actually is there to debate? This choice was made the instant Reagan was elected and he adopted Milton Freidman's "Greed is good" economics. The crazy thing is so many still hold him as a saint and they don't get he put in motion the things that wrecked their lives. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden have all just kept it going.
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  40. Yeah Peter Zeihan has EXPLAINED several times that Putin wont stop at Ukraine. Its got to do with certain historical strategic locations that the Russians like to control for security reasons. Ukraine isn't one of those locations but its on the way to 2 of them in Poland and Romania.
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  41. That's a good way to put it. America is going to need to come to terms with these hyper-powerful hyper-funded lobbyist institutions. I'm Australian and these organizations have influence in a global scale. By virtue of their power and influence in America they have effects over a lot more than just America. For Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Britain and many others America is the biggest and most influential trading and security partner we have. This place is a concern but its not the real problem and I wish people like Thom would start talking about Harvard and Yale a lot more. That's where the Federalist Society started and that crowd scare me more than anything else. Do you know that 14 of the last 18 SCOTUS judges are Harvard or Yale including 8 of the current 9? Do you know that 5 of the 7 short listed to replace Breyer including Ketanji Brown Jackson are Harvard or Yale. Do you know that both Clintons, both Obamas and Ted Cruz are all Harvard or Yale while Ted Cruz's wife is Harvard and a senior manager at Goldman Sachs? Do you know that AG Merrick garland is both a Federalist Society member and went to Harvard? You might not realize it but that influence affects the entire Western World. Particularly regarding SCOTUS because that's what all of America's giant tech and business monopolies hide behind. George Carlin famously said "Its a big club and we're not in it"
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  42. Interesting sentiment. My bet right now is that Trump will tear the GOP in half and Biden buy ignoring the progressives and pandering to the corporates will split the Dems in half. What might come out it is a 4 party split that then becomes 3 when the corporate Dems and Corporate Repubs merge. I call them the Republicrats because Democlitans sound crap. I think Trump is so hell bent on tearing shit apart because he's a narcissistic shit that he will happily tear the GOP apart. He threatened to do it in 2016 if they didn't back him. Then Again I wont be surprised that on December 15 the 2nd American Civil War will be declared. Either the EC will vote Biden in as they should and the Trumpists will riot or the EC will cheat Biden and the rest of the country will riot. Either way if Trump does not stop this madness America might only have 8 days left. FYI- I'm Australian but went to college in America. Its a great country with great people and the vast majority do not deserve this shit. Take Care & Stay Safe 👍👍🦘🦘🦘🦘🦘
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  43. It actually goes back centuries. For a while we all thought we had broken free of idiotic stupidity and ignorance through education. Then a guy named Reagan got elected by pandering to the Southern fundamentalists and suddenly a lot of idiots were given a stage to perform on. Then America did the stupidest thing of all when they let a guy named Rupert Murdoch get citizenship and then ownership of a media empire I'm Australian. We tried to warn the Brits when he moved there and they didn't listen. Then when he moved to America we tried to warn you guys as well and you guys didn't listen either. He is a master of tapping into peoples base emotions and jacking them up to ridiculous levels where they just simply lose grip with reality.
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  44. I saw a TEDx Talk a few years ago titled The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows | Laura Arnold | Its still here on YouTube (I just checked). It was about people writing stuff and publishing it as FACT when most of the times its nothing but PR designed to raise capital from investors. The point made was that for every study saying a new thing there's other studies showing its NOT TRUE. I think there's the same thing in politics and MAYBE the 4 most dangerous words in politics are "A New Report Says" or maybe "A New Poll Shows..." because we hear it so often that its meaningless and the tragedy is that we are likely to DISMISS that one report or poll that we really should NOT.
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  45. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  46. Agreed, I want to see the GOP explain their next military spending increase.
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  47. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s). I did engineering but a bunch of friends were pre-law and we used to discuss various things about how our countries worked. I'd studied Orwell in High school (Animal Farm and 1984) which was pretty standard in Australia. I used to argue, as Orwell warned, that any country could fall into a totalitarian state. They used to argue and assure mt that the American System via its constitution that it was not possible for America to become an totalitarian state. This was in the late 80s so they'd all studied civics in high school as as law students they were very well versed in the constitution and how the various parts of the system worked. I'd love to sit down with them now and ask how this has all happened considering they all assured me that this kind of thing was IMPOSSIBLE. They assured me that stripping away people's basic right to vote was IMPOSSIBLE. There's a lot going on in America they assured me was IMPOSSIBLE. They called it the "system of checks and balances." What we never discussed, because it was inconceivable. "What would happen if that system became corrupted?" The main part of that "system of checks and balances" is the US Senate, where senior government appointments and judges are confirmed. Mitch McConnel with massive funding via the Federalist Society has manged to corrupt that system so it no longer functions properly causing serious NEGATIVE EFFECTS through the entire system. And for any country that trades with and/or has security agreements with America its as serious as it can get because it means America is no longer a reliable partner.
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  48. I like dean but am going to take a more pragmatic view on his first point. There's NO GUARANTEE that Trump won't win. Hilary tried and lost that with some of the most stupid campaign strategies ever and she's now head of Biden's re-election team. I'm Australian but went to college in America U. Illinois). So I know the Midwest and Rust Belt fairly well. The moment I heard she wasn't going to campaign in Michigan I knew she was in trouble because I knew the Rust Belt was not going to take that sort of arrogance well. I wasn't alone in thinking she was going to lose. Both Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth predicted she'd lose but for different reasons. Rana Foroohar said it was her link to NAFTA and Mark Blyth because the Dems had just screwed so many of their BLUE states over time and time again. Not only did Hilary lose Michigan but also Ohio and Penn becoming the first Democrat since Dukakis in 1988 to lose all 3. Even Gore and Kerry won 2 of those 3. If you look at the EC votes if Hilary had won those 3 as Bill and Obama had she would have won. What NOBODY on America's Left has been willing to explain or even face up to was how Trump went from 63 million votes in 2016 to 74 million votes in 2020 when every poll for 2 years had said his base was shrinking. 1) The polling WAS WRONG and NOT by a little but by a staggering amount. An extra 11 million people turned out in 2020 to vote for this guy. Hate him all you like but he knows how to appeal to particular crowds. Jesse Ventura said he learned it from Pro-Wrestling. 2) Despite all the crap and craziness his people really do see him as someone who's going to save them from the career politicians who have made their lives miserable for the past 30+ years. They don't care at all about facts or evidence or how much BS he tells. His base hates the Washington Elite so much that they'd vote for a rapid dog if it would bite one of those elitist snobs. And yes I know Trump is actually one of those elitist snobs, but he knows how to sell his base a different story. EVERYONE FORGETS that before he beat Hilary Trump beat of 16 GOP favorite sons including Jeb Bush and he didn't just beat them he wiped the floor with them. America better wake up to itself and the Democrats need to take the coldest of cold showers and realise that those 74 million might turn out to be 85 million next year.
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  49. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. For so many America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35.
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  50. I'm an engineer and you are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Most people have NO IDEA how software is written or how it works AND ESPECIALLY how it can be manipulated AND EVEN WORSE how it can give the wrong answer. I write software for part of my living. I do industrial control systems and automation. Once the computer has the data and starts crunching it all comes down to the algorithm, BUT EVEN before that the data might be wrong. Look at what happened with the Boeing Max-8. Twice the sensor broke and twice the software acting on bad information flew the plane into the ground. There have been accidents where the AI in Tesla cars have been found to have caused fatal accidents. How many times have we heard how a computer system did something awful with records. Here in Australia we had this brilliant thing called "Robodebt" which was a system that was supposed to stop people getting more than they should from social services. It ended up taking millions of dollars off people it should not have. We still haven't got to the bottom of the that mess. Most countries have similar stories. The IT industry has acted, because of the money it can push on politicians through lobbying, gotten away with so much and the AI Revolution is just making that WORSE.
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  51.  @ryanosterman2651  I'm not an economist. I'm an engineer whose been looking for a means to beat clowns with economics degrees with the same club they have been using on the rest of us. I've watched a lot of Mark Blyth because he uses similar techniques to the system analysis I was taught in aerospace. He's mentioned Michal Kelecki's 1944 paper "Political Aspects of Full Employment" a lot and its free to download. Right now I have a full reading list. My basic hatred of Freidman was his narcissistic and destructive "greed is good" but me real hatred was the way he disparaged so many of the great minds of history who's motivation was understanding, knowledge and making the world a better place. The only person I have seen more full of his own sense of puritanical importance than Friedman is Trump.
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  52. HEY THOM: There's a report by the Congressional Budget Office on Family Wealth 1989-2019 released September 2022. Kyle Kulinski spoke about it last week after the Jacobin's Luke Savage Published a short piece on it. What's amazing is that not only was it published in September 2022 (almost 1 year ago) NOBODY on the America Left is talking about this. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America and I can tell you for a fact that our data is no better. I regularly watch British economist Gary Stevenson here on YT and he's saying the same sorts of things about Britain. Here's the bit that I am furious that nobody is pointing out in that report. When you compare the 2010 data to 2007 you can see the effect of the GFC and when you compare 2019 to 2007 you can see how people have recovered. Since Australia, Britain and other places all run similar economic policies its safe to say its the same or similar everywhere. Here's the comparisons adjusted for population and in terms of the wealth per person in each group. The Top 10% LOST 11.1% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 had recovered and were 21.7% UP The Middle 40% LOST 13.3% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 had recovered and were 4.6% UP The Bottom 50% LOST 49.5% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 were still DOWN 21.8% Yes 165 million Americans (and possibly more) had, by 2019, still NOT recovered from the 2008 GFC that they did not cause. Meanwhile the people who did cause the 2008 GFC and were bailed out with US$4 Trillion from Bush and another US$4 Trillion from Obama had not only recovered but had gained over $20 Trillion in collective wealth which has since grown another (estimated) US$8 Trillion during the pandemic years.
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  53. Yeah sure they are??? That's why he's facing over 30 charges because he kept his own documents. 🐂💩
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  54. That's all true and others have pointed it out. BUT WHAT ARE THEIR STANDING ORDERS - as in what are the Police told to do under these circumstances. This isn't the first time police have stayed back to secure the perimeter and wait for the tactical team. I'm not saying its right or wrong. I'm asking what they were told to do or what does their training tell them to do? There's clearly a problem, but it wont get fixed yelling and screaming.
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  55. Australian here: As an outside observer and someone who went to college in America there's an easy answer. All those clowns from Harvard's Medical School need to do is walk a few yards over to the Harvard Business School and they'll get the answers they seek.
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  56. Go watch Glenn Kirschner's channel. He's an ex federal prosecutor and before that a JAG lawyer. So he knows both civil and military law. He's been pointing out for several years that many of the Judges appointed by Trump are what's termed "not qualified" and he's stressed that does not mean unqualified. Its things like they did law as an undergraduate but didn't go to law school or did go to law school but haven't passed the bar. So these are people who have qualifications but are "not qualified" to be a judge. Its one of the things that freaks people from other countries out. The lawyers who argue cases must be qualified including passed the bar, but judges can be anyone.
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  57.  @davidlafleche1142  CLOWN.
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  58.  @davidlafleche1142  Yeah sure God wants you supporting an ADULTERER and LIAR in Trump. Go back and actually read your Bible instead of preaching to people. And while your at it check up on Jesus words at Matthew chapter 7 about frauds.
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  59. AUSTRALIAN here - we have the same problem with money in politics. Its just not as bad or as obvious or "in your face" we don't care but its an issue that's getting worse.
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  60. I was told a very similar thing by a doctor many years ago. Its one of the issues with palliative care. They eventually get to a point where the treatment is doing more harm than good. I have watched 3 members of my family die from cancer so I am familiar with cancer.
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  61. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: News Flash. EVERY Telescope looks backwards in time. Even a telescope you can buy at the hobby store looks back in time. Even your naked eye looks back in time when ever you look up at the night sky. Every little twinkle from every star you can see is the result of photons travelling across space and time to your eye. If you look at Orion's belt there are 3 stars in a line. They are Alnitak (left), is about 800 light-years away, Alnilam (middle) is about 1,300 light-years away and Mintaka (right) is about 900 light-years away. When that twinkle from Alnitak started its way to you in the 13th Century Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire When that twinkle from Mintaka started its way to you in the 12th century the Crusades were in full swing. When that twinkle from Alnilam started its way to you in the 8th century the poem Beowulf was composed, Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III and iron horse shoes started to be used.
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  62. I'm Australian and went to college in America (late 80s). I did aerospace engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and used to drag me into discussions on the constitution from time to time. I'd studied Orwell (Animal Farm and 1984) and used to argue that ANY nation could fall into a totalitarian nightmare if they weren't careful. They used to argue that it could never happen because of how the US Constitution was written. We never discussed what might happen if people like Trump, Charles Koch and Robert Mercer were allowed a free hand to do as they pleased without restraint and worst of all started dismantling the system they said could not fail. If you actually look through it then you get to a simple conclusion. These American billionaires are a bigger threat than China and Russia combined ever were. We all trade at the international level in US Dollars because that's the reserve currency for international trade and has been since we all greed at Breton Woods in 1944. If they get their way it will destabilise America and with it the US Greenback. That means chaos as in total utter maniac chaos for international trade and that hurts everyone.
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  63. Here's 2 things 1: Curing the insane ignorance in people who give million and millions of dollars to the snake oil salesmen like Ken Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Jim Baker and others who also get them to vote for people who do nothing but pander tot he billionaire class. 2: Getting the educated but ignorant suburbanites who keep voting for people who do nothing but make their lives precarious to wake TFU and realise these people they keep electing do NOTHING for them because they are also pandering to the billionaire class.
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  64. You forgot Cheney, Wolfowitz, Blair (Britain), Howard (Australia), John Yoo (the author of the torture memo) and about 20 others from Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately we missed out on charging Powell and Rumsfeld, but their names should be included so that history doesn't forget what they did.
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  65. Your first sentence was sensible and after that it was just rambling pile of frustration. Climate change as we now define it has NEVER happened before. There have been localized events like Easter Island and you'd be quite right that we need to consider what happened there as an example. What we are now seeing isn't an island in the Pacific its to a whole planet. There's no other island to go to this time. I can tell you as an aerospace engineer Elon and his band of delusional space trekkers and so far of the mark Most of it is being driven by a insane group of ageing narcissists who are addicted to their power and money. It has nothing to do with native Americans or native populations anywhere although how they are treated is a symptom of the problem. The real problem is the top 1% of the human population who are dominated by an ageing pack of insanely selfish disconnected narcissists. Look at the age of most of the power people around the world both in politics and business. How old are people like Biden, Pelosi, Murdoch, Koch, Trump,.... They wont retire and they wont let humanity make progress towards a functioning planet.
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  66.  @ryanosterman2651  Good points and to add to it - at its core is are the concepts of Milton Friedman's "Greed is good" hypothesis that was the foundation behind Reaganomics and Thatcherism. There's an amazing interview of Freidman by Phil Donahue that can be found on YT. There's 2 things I noted. 1) Was the complete self importance and arrogance of Freidman. Watch it without sound and pay attention to his body language. The arrogance and dismissiveness is beyond absurd. 2) He made this astounding claim that "Greed drives innovation." I'm an engineer and that's utterly ridiculous. 3 of the worlds most important inventors and without whom the modern world would NOT exist were not driven by greed but by a desire to make the world a better place:\ Nikola Tesla - famous for his work in electricity and who Edison and Marconi cheated and lied about. Jacques de Vaucanson - whose V-Bed Lathe made the Industrial Revolution possible. Carl Edvard Johansson - whose Gauge Blocks enabled modern manufacturing to exist. NONE of them did it out of greed and NONE were Oligarchs. Neoliberalism is based on a litany of lies, garbage and false premises. Its just taken us 40+ years to work out how damaging it really is. The real question isn't how bad it is. The real question is how do we get past it so we can start fixing the planet, while we can.
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  67. @Armament Armed Arm Well what do you think they actually did study in civics. How old are you? What do yo u base any of that claim on? What does law is theater have to do with civics classes? If you want to contribute to a discussion contribute. But if you want to make stupid claims then just go over to the channels where that sort of garbage is popular.
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  68. I think you are saying 1 of several 100 things that need to be said out load. We have desperate pathetic politicians desperate to either hold or gain power by playing each other off against each other. I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who said a couple of years ago "There's this cacophony where the Radical Right and Radical Left just scream at each other while the rest of us trapped in the middle are exhausted." I know that comment was aimed at Western politics but it applies to all these situations where we allow 2 groups of fanatics fight while innocents are trapped in the middle and get slaughtered.
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  69. I'm Australian and almost totally agree with you. My answer to Thom's question Will The Davos Billionaires Team Up Mean The End Of America? Is NO - they will NOT mean the end of America they will be the end of Western Civilisation. Just as America calls it Reaganomics and the Brits called it Thatcherism we had our version of Neoliberal economics called Economic Rationalism. I had a boss try and explain it to me back in the 1990s and he said the bizarre joke was they called it rational and there was nothing rational about it. My old boss used to ask: "What's rational about making slabs of the population unemployed by sending their jobs to China?" It didn't mean much to me in the 1990s but it means a lot these days. The bit where you're not quite right is that Neoliberalism is already well entrenched in Canada like it is everywhere else. What you're talking about is the CPC going EVEN FURTHER and becoming more Trump like and pushing neoliberalism to a new height. We have exactly the same problem here. FYI - I was in Canada for work late 2017 early 2018. When I heard Canadians speak about politics it was quite hard to figure out if they were talking about Canada or Australia. You guys talk about Ottawa in exactly the same terms we talk about Canberra. Had it not been for the accents and freezing cold I wouldn't have known I wasn't in Australia. Canada and Australia are so alike in so many ways its kind of scary. Everything has its equivalent.
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  70. I've been trying to warn people of exactly a French or Russian Peasant style revolution for the last few years. There's a report by the Congressional Budget Office on Family Wealth 1989-2019 released September 2022. Kyle Kulinski spoke about it last week after the Jacobin's Luke Savage Published a short piece on it. What's amazing is that not only was it published in September 2022 (almost 1 year ago) NOBODY on the America Left is talking about this - including Thom. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America and I can tell you for a fact that our data is no better. I regularly watch British economist Gary Stevenson here on YT and he's saying the same sorts of things about Britain. Here's the bit that I am furious that nobody is pointing out in that report. When you compare the 2010 data to 2007 you can see the effect of the GFC and when you compare 2019 to 2007 you can see how people have recovered. Since Australia, Britain and other places all run similar economic policies its safe to say its the same or similar everywhere. Here's the comparisons adjusted for population and in terms of the wealth per person in each group. The Top 10% LOST 11.1% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 had recovered and were 21.7% UP The Middle 40% LOST 13.3% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 had recovered and were 4.6% UP The Bottom 50% LOST 49.5% of their wealth in the GFC but buy 2019 were still DOWN 21.8% Yes 165 million Americans (and possibly more) had, by 2019, still NOT recovered from the 2008 GFC that they did not cause. Meanwhile the people who did cause the 2008 GFC and were bailed out with US$4 Trillion from Bush and another US$4 Trillion from Obama had not only recovered but had gained over $20 Trillion in collective wealth which has since grown another (estimated) US$8 Trillion during the pandemic years.
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  71. ​ @chriswilkinson7636  I forget who it was and it might have been Thom but they had an author on who'd done a similar book but more on the psychology of WHY people follow conspiracies. Just watch the arrogance they talk with and you'll see it. There's a channel called Scimandan. He's a Brit who debunks flat earthers and other nonsense people. Its staggering how much nonsense is being promoted. I think a lot of them KNOW its BS but they make money from the advertising on social media or sell merchandise.
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  72. HEY THOM. if you go and look at the Wikipedia page for Roe V Wade one of the major points that won the case when it was argued was the 4th Amendment right to privacy. The basis was that what happens between a doctor and their patient is PRIVATE. This is why in TV show after TV show you hear medical practitioners tell investigators to go and get a warrant. With the wiping away of Roe V Wade what Americans actually lost was the RIGHT to MEDICAL PRIVACY. Anyone who understands this was expecting this sort of stuff to happen.
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  73. Yeah go have a look at the Wikipedia page on her. She has a damn long history of of "questionable" actions and associations.
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  74. FINALLY SOMEBODY SAYS THE MOST OBVIOUS THING IN POLITICS "progressives are people who want the country to progress to move forward" How come none of the other clowns making all sorts of grand speeches can get that simple fact right?
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  75. That's actually a very good point, but then who would have thought the Supreme Court could have been stacked with radical maniacs. Who would have thought the Senate that exists to make sure other parts of the state function as intended could have become so corrupted that its made the entire US Government malfunction to the extent where a President can commit crime after crime and not face any justice. Look at the Judge in Florida and how biased she is. If you rate absurdity on a 1-10 point scale she's well over 1,000. The real question for Americans right now is: _"How did it get this far?"_. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s). I did engineering but a bunch of friends were pre-law and we used to discuss things like the US Constitution regularly. Because I had studied Orwell (Animal Farm & 1984) in high school I used to argue that any country could fall into a totalitarian state because that was what Orwell warned. My friends, who had all done civics in high school, would argue that it was IMPOSSIBLE in America because of how the Constitution was written and how the system operates. I love to ask them right now how this has all happened? Because as an outside observer I am seeing things they told me were impossible.
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  76.  @DarylBark  Great comment and considering some of the idiotic stupidity I have seen in the last 24 hours MUCH NEEDED. Thanks.
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  77. Not really the definition of fascism but certainly the definition of corruption. More interesting are the originalists on SCOTUS because they voted for citizens united which certainly wasn't what the original writers of the constitution thought which is who they claim to channel.
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  78. Yeah in legal terms its called a SHlT defense but then that's all he's got right now.
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  79. Great idea and it wont ever happen anywhere where political parties have control. Do you really think they will cancel their money stream?
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  80. HEY THOM (and anyone else paying attention) the line you really want to quote to people like Rachel Campos-Duffy is by Jesus himself, because this line confuses the daylights out of them. Right at the start of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gave what are called the The Beatitudes where Jesus said who would be blessed. The 3rd of those recorded in Matthew 5:5 is "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." Just ask them how are the meek going to be blessed if they inherit a toxic garbage dump that wont support life? If you really want to confuse them, then ask them this. Considering one of Jesus tasks (as described in the bible Matthew 25:31-33) is to separate the sheep from the goats (as in likeable people from stubborn people). How is Jesus going to take it, when the planet that he wants these "meek" people to inherit IS TASHED BY YOU? There's a big hint at Matthew 25:40 and the verses that follow.
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  81. I have the same question - where is the charge of perjury???
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  82.  @falconquest2068  I'm Australian but went to college at Illinois in the late 80s. I can remember see the televangelist of those days and thinking this stuff is going to come back to haunt one day. What I try and explain to Americans is that this stuff has gone global. These sorts of institutions that get hijacked by right wing publicity and propaganda machines is common across the entire Western World. Australia has an array of right wing think tanks all calling themselves "something something INSTITUTE" all pretending to be neutral academic places where very smart people to outstanding work for the benefit of everyone. Does that sound familiar? Without doubt this stuff is a lot more visible in America, but its happening everywhere.
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  83. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  84. To all of Thom's watchers. Trump endorsed Kari Lake whos running for governor of Arizona had a train wreck interview with Australian 60 Minutes that was broadcast free to air only hours ago. Before she stormed out she abused the reporter and gravely insulted Australia. FYI - I am Australian, I went to college in America and this might blow up. This wasn't some silly rant by some clown on YouTube this was a Trump endorsed candidate going off the rails. Don't forget Australia, Britain Canada and others just spent most of the last 20 years supporting America in Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn't popular anywhere, but we stood by America. I was in Canada for work when Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. How do you all think this makes us feel about America? We are all now asking if there is anyway we can believe that America will be a reliable trading or security partner going forward.
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  85. Why not they now have almost absolute control of SCOTUS? With that level of control what can't they get done?
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  86. But what is your definition of "true democracy." I did a few classes in classical civilizations in college as part of a humanities sequence. Ancient Greece (particularly Athens - the birth place of democracy) was not even close to being fair but they elected their leaders. Of note Russia, even during the Soviet era, still had elections. Iraq under Saddam Hussein had elections. Democracy is fundamentally where leaders are chosen by a vote. There's nothing in it fundamentally that says it has to be fair or equal or just.
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  87.  @ishaq24722  Good comment 👍👍👍
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  88. Yeah I would agree but then what would you say about America? Because America since the end of WW2 repeatedly overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them with dictatorships when those governments wouldn't do EXACTLY what America wanted. Here's 4 examples - Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Indonesia. FYI - I'm Australian. I love America. I went to college there on a sports scholarship, but American's are very badly informed on what some of America's 3 Letter agencies have done. Usually at the request of American business interests. Its something a lot more Americans need to ACCEPT and start dealing with. Most people around the world have no problems with the American people or their culture. Hey my team the 49ers is in the Superbowl this Sunday. BUT when it comes to what America does to other countries the American people are badly informed. You know how many Americans have this innate (almost insane) mis-trust of the US Government? Simple question -> How do you think the rest of us feel? Because we often wonder - who controls the CIA? Is it the US Government or the American billionaires? Don't forget George H. Bush was not only an oil tycoon but also head of the CIA at one point.
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  89.  @thomasskokan2001  I wouldn't doubt any of that because I have seen that sort of stuff everywhere I have been. We have parts of Australia just like it. We have country towns where I woudln't dare take a person from another country even if they were white. We also have parts of every major city I wouldn't go IN BROAD DAYLIGHT and at night our police are in full body protection. We don't like to put that on tourist brochures but everywhere has "Those places!" I was in central Saskatchewan a couple of years ago for a project. Loved it. Beautiful country and beautiful people. Then one day one of the guys from Regina warned me about a couple of nearby towns to where we were working. Clan towns he called them. When I asked WTF he meant he said there's a section of Sask that even the rest of Sask avoids. Its the sort of place a guy like Greg Abbott would be right at home. Every country has "Those places!"
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  90. I'm Australian and totally agree with you. My answer to Thom's question Will The Davos Billionaires Team Up Mean The End Of America? Is NO - they will NOT mean the end of America they will be the end of Western Civilisation. Just as America calls it Reaganomics and the Brits called it Thatcherism we had our version of Neoliberal economics called Economic Rationalism. I had a boss try and explain it to me back in the 1990s and he said the bizarre joke was they called it rational and there was nothing rational about it. My old boss used to ask: "What's rational about making slabs of the population unemployed by sending their jobs to China?" It didn't mean much to me in the 1990s but it means a lot these days.
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  91. Extend that to never trust ANYONE who ignores common sense and rules via an ideology. You can take any of the worlds "isms" and they all seem based on some basic sensible proposition. But if you let ideologues run rampant with it without any restraint then you get Stalinism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, Maoism, Feudalism. As a thought go and look at the worlds major environmental catastrophes and you get things like the Aral Sea, the destruction of the lower Colorado River, the mass destruction of Chinese Water ways, the depletion of the Southern California aquifer, destroyed rivers and other waterways across former Soviet Eastern Europe. And that's just looking at water. That's not even going near forest destruction, land degradation, toxic waste dumping or climate change let alone any of the social issues.
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  92.  @freyathewanderer6359  Australian here and YES we HAD some serious issues with Police and high intensity confrontations where they shot and killed too many people. We chose to NOT go down the American path and ended rethinking and then retraining every officer in the country on how to deal with high intensity situations. Even after all the effort we've made things still go wrong every so often, but at least we have nowhere near the issues America has. We don't have cops choking people to death in the street as people film it on their smartphones and our children can go to school and not get shot in a rampage.
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  93.  @geezzerboy  OH HELL YES THEY DO. The ramifications are massive and nobody knows what any of it might mean. You'd be right if you said they didn't WAN'T to care or if you said a large chunk of humanity doesn't care, but anyone who's awake is scared because of the effects and consequences.
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  94. Yeah Peter Zeihan has EXPLAINED that several times. Its got to do with certain historical strategic locations that the Russians like to control for security reasons. Ukraine isn't one of those locations but its on the way to 2 of them in Poland and Romania.
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  95. You've all quoted properly (for a change) valid biblical points and its impressive. Summarizing: Here are the top 5 reasons Jesus could not be a modern Republican. 1) He believed in universal health care, irrespective of a persons wealth or social status. 2) He believed in helping people who had no food by giving them food. 3) He defended people from unjust treatment, even those in questionable professions like tax collectors & prostitutes. 4) He believed in free public education. Shown when he gave FREE sermons like the famous one on the mount. 5) He didn't believe in profiting from religion. Shown when he threw the money exchangers out of the Temple. But there's also 2 practical reasons why Jesus could NOT be a modern Republican. Where among them would God find 3 wise men let alone a virgin?
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  96. Of course Jesus was too woke for them. He believed in free public health care. He believed in free education. He believed in paying your taxes to the government. He believed in feeding people who had no food. Most of all he actually cared about people and especially poor people.
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  97.  @davidlafleche1142  Yeah don't mention that to a Trumpster they might have a brain seizure.
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  98. Yeah its a great idea. In fact its a brilliant idea. Now explain what you are going to do about Pelosi and the other Dems who trade stocks with inside information? Because when they listed the top 25 in congress for insider trading the top 4 were GOP *BUT there were more Dems on the list than GOP. Pelosi was the top Dem at #5.
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  99. JUST LIKE Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban, except there'd be crosses.
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  100. Yeah you are right his famous quote on American fascists is a classic. I have been pointing this out to everyone Last week Richard Wolff pointed the December Congressional Budget Office report on Family Wealth. You can find it easily buy googling "congressional budget office family wealth" Look for the link referring to Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019 The main graph on the web page is interactive and you can see the data for any year. The report is downloadable as a pdf. This is not any professor playing word games or some media hype. This is as official as it gets. That main graph shows. The top 10% of America has a combined wealth of $82.4 Trillion The 51st to 90th percentile has a combined wealth of $30.2 Trillion The bottom 50% of America has a combined wealth of $2.3 Trillion (about 1/36th what the top 10% have)
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  101. Its a great idea making the funding source known, but your idea of holding them accountable is a dangerous folly for the simple reason that such laws would allow any government to dictate its version of reality. That's exactly what Orwell warned about. The problem with problem solving is to have solutions that don't make the next problem or make the original problem worse. I'm an engineer and I've spent my life problem solving and it gets damn hard when you only have complicated machinery. It occasionally gets even harder when someone interferes. Trying to solve the problem if humanity is off the chart hard. Not only because its so complex but there always someone interfering. Further, that person is usually interfering with the INTENT of not letting the problem be solved. Its done around the world, but its nowhere more obvious than the American GOP and Mitch McConnell's Senate obstructionism. Its not as obvious in other countries but it does happen.
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  102. I really like Prof Wolff, because he's at the very least giving an educated alternative opinion on economics, but there are times he lets brain take it too far. To call Capitalism unstable is to ignore what the terms stable and unstable actually mean. I'm an engineer and we have to learn and understand what stable and unstable actually mean because otherwise the modern world can't exist. Power stations and the power grid wont work, your car wont work and airplanes will tear themselves apart mid-air- that kind of stuff. Sorry this is a longish explanation. This is basic high school science level. Something that is naturally stable is something that will self correct from a disturbance. An example of stable system is a ball in a bowl. If you bump the bowl and the ball moves, it will eventually settle back down to the bottom of the bowl. An unstable system will not recover from a disturbance. If you balance a broom stick on its end. Any disturbance and it will just fall over. HOWEVER if we stand the broom stick upright on our hand and move our hand to correct for disturbances you then have something not entirely stable or unstable. We call that "artificially stable," as in there is something else keeping the system in a stable state. In engineering we have many systems that are artificially stable and quite often there's a combination of stabilisers. The suspension in your car has shock absorbers that allow you to hit bumps and not have the suspension bounce around. There's also the tires and suspension geometry. A main part of it is the drivers brain which makes corrections like steering inputs. One of the incredibly important concepts of artificially stable systems is that the stabilisers have limits and if you exceed those limits the system can break or fail. If 1 of the shock absorbers fails and reduces the cars stability. If the car hits a big enough bump and shock absorbers reach their limit. IF driver's brain cannot compensate then the car crashes. Modern capitalist systems are "artificially stable." There are shock absorbers and adjustments that governments use to keep there economies stable. Part of that system are interest rates, but there's also government spending (via policies and projects), the rate at which they print new money, bond rates and the regulations they place on private industry (like banking rules). The real problem is we are now bumping into the limits that our economic stabilisers can handle.
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  103. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I spent one of my Spring Breaks doing what us Australians call "walk about." In 9 days I did about 2,000 miles. I started in Illinois went down to Texas across to New Orleans, Alabama and Florida before heading back to Illinois. It was the late 80s and I never saw any of this stuff down there. All I met were decent friendly people who thought my accent was funny and wondered if I was Crocodile Dundee's cousin. There were hints that there were people who thought a little this way. The televangelists like Jim Baker were ranting and raging before they all got caught in sex scandals. BUT NONE OF IT WAS THIS BAD. Most of my experiences in America were really great. This stuff isn't the America I remember and I really do hope you guys can start finding some political leaders who actually care about America rather than playing these culture war issues. And so you know we also have some of this culture war nonsense but not this bad. Yeah I know Rupert Murdoch is partly to blame and we are sorry for his existence BUT THEN we did warn you like we had warned the Brits what he was like.
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  104.  @marvinmartin4692  It might sound like a great idea but the last thing anyone should wish for is a peasant revolution. They tend to get very destructive and out of control very quickly because they involve so much rage and anger. Go look at the French & Russian examples.
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  105. EVERYONE - search for "porky's tallywacker scene" For millennials and zoomers go ask your uncle or aunt about it. I just want to here MTG say the words "incriminating mole" and "I'd recognise it anywhere!"
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  106. Australian here and although that stuff is all well before my time I have met older Australians WHO STILL RESENT the American GIs that came to Australia. There was a perception that they were lazy and instead of fighting the Japanese they were here shagging our women, which to some extent was certainly true. One thing that didn't help at all was Eddie Leonski an American GI who beat and strangled 3 women in Melbourne. Oddly he was tried, convicted and hanged under American law. We just provided the rope.
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  107. HEY THOM You really need to bring Professor Robert McChesney in on discussions of the media and how its been slowly eroded over decades. He was one of the people who helped make the 2004 documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" He's actually a professor from my Alma Mater, but joined the faculty after I graduated. Circa 2008/09 he was here in Australia on a book tour. I caught the 2nd half of one of his talks on TV. At the time I didn't realise who he was, but I do remember an incredible point that he brought out. After WW2 most American newspapers had people around the country and the majors had people around the world. Journalists actually went out of the office and met people. So if you heard on the radio or read in the newspaper and they quoted someone it was because a journalist had gone and met that person and asked questions and written down their replies. The stories that weren't done that way were about actors, sports stars and businessmen which involved PR people. I remember that after Robert McChesney explained how journalists used to work he then explained that there were around 4 or 5 journalists for every PR person AT THAT TIME. Then when news papers, radio and TV started to merge into larger and larger conglomerates that ratio of 5 to 1 started to change. Shareholders didn't care about facts. They wanted dividends. Into that environment came people like Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and others. By the early 2000s that ratio of 5 to 1 had flipped to 1 to 5. Journalists didn't go and meet people. They stayed at their desks pumping out story after story chasing clicks. Information in stories STOPPED coming from research and started coming from PR people. Journalists shifted from doing research and investigating to "cutting & pasting & posting" from what the PR people handed them. Think about how many news stories in the media (all types) are just like an advertisement. I'm certain you already know some of this. But you should really try and get Robert McChesney on. he's done a couple of interviews for people like Paul Jay (the Analysisnews)
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  108. For everyone interested here's the full Henry Wallace quote from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  109. Well done I think you've made the important distinction. American G.I.s didn't believe Tokyo Rose but a fair number of the 74 million who voted for Trump think everything out of Tuckers mouth is gold. I wont be surprised if (and or when) he's named as Trumps VP running mate.
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  110. You do realise that if you compare someone who got a score of 2 out 10 on a test to someone who got 1 out of 10 on the same test you'd be able to claim that the first person did twice as well as the second person and FALSLEY ASSUME the first person was fantastic for doing twice as well. But 2 out of 10 as a test score is a FAIL. Biden might be twice the human being Trump is, but that doesn't make him a successful POTUS who deserves a second term.
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  111.  @ld3511  Somebody did a vid story on tax evasion and hidden money in America around the time they slapped sanctions on the Russian Oligarchs after Russia invaded Ukraine. It might have been Thom. They pointed out that Delaware is the world capital of shelf companies. Its the easiest place in the world to set-up a company and avoid tax. After Delaware, Idaho is the next easiest place to set up a company and its even better because its incredibly easy to hide who owns the company. They think there's several Trillion dollars in Russian monetary assets that were taken out and washed through the London Laundromat and then deposited into the Idaho blackhole of financial secrecy. So sorry to disappoint but as far as I know Texas is (at best) number 3.
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  112. Actually NO. Bernie needs to take on the role of the elder wiseman and guide the next generation to NOT make the mistakes he made and get better outcomes. Bernie's too old and he's had his go. What he should have done AFTER 2020 was grab the younger people like Ossoff, Warnock, Padilla and get them organised to do stuff in the Senate. Bernie should have dragged Andrew Yang away from the corporatist scum in the DNC and guided him. Yang was lead to the slaughter house by the DNC. That question that killed his New York run was a setup. Bernie should have jumped in and helped Warnock smash Herschel Walker. That race should never have gone to a run off. At the first go that should have ended in complete humiliation for the GOP. Bernie can't be president but he can be the Bill Belichick who coaches and guides a team.
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  113. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  114. AUSTRALIAN HERE: Thom you are wrong on where the Australian Liberal party is on the political spectrum. They ARE NOT far Right but Centre right. However they have been steadily moving to the right for the last 25years or so. Economically speaking they are almost identical to America's Democrats. The National party of Australia which forms the junior partner of the Liberal-National Coalition is further to the right and is closer to the rural conservatives of the American Republican Party. In recent years we have had some smaller parties emerge that are VERY FAR Right like Clive Palmer's United Australia Party which is just one of its names. Clive is like Trump a billionaire of dubious means and with questionable business practices. Clive's ideology is almost identical to people like Charles Koch and his Party is similar to the American Tea Party. FYI - I went to college in America and even though I did engineering I am reasonably familiar with the differences between the American Liberals and American Libertarians. The way I would describe that difference is as an outsider looking in is: American Liberals believe that individual Liberty is best defended by a healthy set of regulations and laws upheld by a functioning court system and effective government so that no individual can be stripped of their basic rights by another person or a corporate entity and that they can get restitution through the courts from injury. American Libertarians believe that individual Liberty is best defended by removing any and all controls the government has except the protection of the state from foreigner nations, the protection of individual property through the police and that the main purpose of the courts is to uphold contracts. That was expressed by Milton Friedman many times.
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  115. Actually, there's some veracity in that. I'm Australian but in the aftermath we an English Historian explain WHY? It turns out that Bush Senior and Bin Laden Snr did oil business together and to help that they set up their sons to do some business together. So Dubya owned a business 50/50 with a Bin Laden. Its been many years so I might have some details less than perfect. Osama wasn't the Bin Laden Bush did business with that was another of the 17 (or so) Bin Laden boys. Osama was way down the Bin Laden list. His mother was Lebanese?? and became wife number 4 via a business deal. Osama's older brothers used to give him crap so he became the "better Muslim" and to prove that joined the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan to fight against the godless Russians. That 1 brother who was in business with Bush supposedly told Osama "I get what your doing and its commendable. If you get in trouble call me, my business partner's father is ex-CIA and now Vice POTUS." Osama goes to Afghanistan where they are getting hammered by the Russians with their helicopter gunships. Osama calls his brother who calls Bush Jnr who calls Bush Snr and Osama gets stinger missiles and lots of Russian helicopters get shot out of the sky. That brother who supported Osama gets whacked by a Saudi Prince who then takes a chunk of Bin Laden enterprises for himself. Osama calls George Bush Jnr and says something like "We have to get this Saudi Prince" to which Duba says "*NO WAY* we do business with him!" Osama does NOT take that well. In his brain that's a kind of super-hyper-betrayal and decides American has to be punished and we know how that went. Again I might have some details wrong but my understanding is that it was super personal with Dubya over the murder of his brother by a Saudi Prince.
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  116. "Word has it" journalistic lingo to let you know what's about to be said has NOT BEEN FACT CHECKED.
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  117. Will The Davos Billionaires Team Up Mean The End Of America? NO - they will NOT mean the end of America they will be the end of Western Civilisation.
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  118. One of the parents at Uvalde recognised what was left of their child by the green sneakers they wore. (edit) That was the most chilling story out of it I heard. Matthew McConaughey mentioned it in his address.
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  119. ​ @soulslip  I'll give you this explanation and sorry if its a longish. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and they used to drag me into all sorts of discussions probably because I could throw in different perspectives. I uses to argue all the time that any country could fail and fall into a totalitarian dictatorship because that was the main lesson I got from studying Orwell (Animal Farm and 1984) in high school. I didn't mind Animal Farm but 1984 was a headache for teenager but these days I'm grateful. One thing people sometimes miss with Orwell is that he wasn't really anti-communist but anti-dictatorship and dictatorships can be Left (like Soviet Russia, Communist China,...) or Right (like Imperial Russia or Imperial China. Iran is an interesting case because before its current Right wing RELIGIOUS dictatorship it had a Right wing monarchy. The point Orwell made was that dictatorships can take almost any from from almost any political system. People forget the Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were elected. As was Mussolini and his Fascists. My friends used to argue that I was wrong. America could NEVER FAIL because America had this system of "checks and balances." It was hardwired into the American system with multiple layers - POTUS with executive control, The House who write laws, The Senate who make certain bigger states don't dominate an SCOTUS who check those institutions are doing things in a lawful way. What NONE of us every discussed was what might happen if that system of checks and balances was undermined by very determined people with enough money to get what they wanted. There's a great PBS Frontline on Citizens United. Its here on YT and EVERY person who lives in a democracy should watch it. Its title is "How the Citizens United Decision Changed U.S. Political Campaigns" About 20 minutes in they interview the lawyer who won Citizens United. His name is Jim Bopp and he started as a pro-lifer and wanted abortions banned. To get what he wanted he had to be able to make money work how he wanted it to work. It was also exactly what some of the Fossil Fuel billionaires needed to get what they wanted. I once had the term "High Machiavellian" explained to me. Machiavelli has been wrongly credited with approving of "the end justifies the means" when in fact he was describing how certain people operated. Its important to understand this isn't about how people "act" but how they "operate" because operation implies planning and goals rather than just responding. If you watch that documentary Jim Bopp is a "High Machiavellian" and that means he truly believes that he has to do whatever it takes to get the end result he wants and any collateral damage is irrelevant. So when he says Citizens United was necessary to democracy he really believes it because the consequences to other people is irrelevant because his task was to rid America of "Roe V Wade." Nothing else mattered to him and his people. At the same time its also allowed the billionaires who backed Jim Bopp to get the people they wanted elected to congress and put on SCOTUS so they could dismantle the IRS, FBI, EPA, FDA, FAA and any other 3 letter agency that restricted their profits. The craziest aspect of throwing out "Roe V Wade" is that its also thrown out the right to privacy over medical records that were (past tense) covered by the 4th Amendment. Go look up the Wikipedia page on Roe V Wade. One of the main arguments was the right to privacy between a medical practitioner and their patient. Remember how on all those TV crime shows like "Law and Order" where they'd go to a doctor and ask for something and the doctor would say "Go get your warrant" and the judge would say "give me a GOOD SOUND reason or go away." Yeah sorry mate but that's gone. Because when Jim Bopp finally got what he wanted he also threw out you basic right to privacy over your medical records. America is now a lesson to the rest of the Western democratic world that if you allow High Machiavellians to go unchecked they will eventually do staggering amounts of damage to your nation and society that CANNOT be easily fixed. Sorry for the length of this but I have a soft spot for America and wished I did have magic wand to fix it. I really had a great time going to college there. The vast bulk of Americans I met are good people and they deserve better than the situation they now have.
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  120. As an engineer I am READY TO SCREAM AT PEOPLE WHO BLAME THE WAR IN UKRAINE FOR ENERGY PRICES. Energy prices across the world have been rising for years all that the war in Ukraine has done is exacerbated the situation. The reason why every economist on the planet keeps claiming its the war is because they don't want to admit it was the widespread privatisation of energy assets that they championed during the 1990s that's caused this. I have spent a lot of time over the last few years informally studying economics so that I could make the argument for what they did. Prior to privatisation when governments built big massive energy projects like Tennessee Valley (America) or Snowy Hydro (Australia) or the nuclear programs in Canada, Britain, France, Japan they had 2 main metrics - GDP growth and Employment. It was a fairly simple concept they built the power stations ahead of the demand created by population growth. It created lots of extra energy so that factories and businesses could be started and they'd have cheap power making it easier to EMPLOY people and be profitable. When the flipped to privatised power ALL OF THAT WENT OUT THE DOOR. Private companies have no social responsibility to GDO growth or employment. Milton Freidman said "There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits..." Its just taken 25 years for the privatisation nightmare to get to this point where we are shutting down older power stations NOT because they have emissions or they are nuclear BUT BECAUSE they are just so old they can't keep running. Just this week in Australia we shut down the Liddell power station which just adds to our list of power stations we have shut down. We have built out a huge amount of solar and wind but NONE OF THAT is BASE LOAD POWER which is what industry needs.
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  121. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. For so many America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35.
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  122. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  123. TO ALL: I am an Australian engineer and there is some very concerning stuff here and some stuff that really doesn't mean anything. The cruise ship stuff doesn't really mean anything. It might be something that's easily explainable. In any form of engineering there are parts that can be used almost anywhere. The fact that somebody used the same generators and pumps off a cruise ship might not look good to the average person but it means nothing compared to the FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATIONS and REQUIREMENTS. The "what does it have to do" stuff. For any engineered system the first question that should be asked is "What does it have to do?" followed by a string of questions regarding how well it has to do it. So for emergency generators and pumps it starts with things like: How fast does it have to respond? What's the minimum amount of time it has to be able to run at full power? If its a generator what's the power does it has to deliver? If its a pump how much water (flow rate & pressure) must it be capable of pumping? HOW RELIABLE DOES IT HAVE TO BE? Those answers become the Functional Specifications and Requirements. It may or may not include the specific industry. What can happen is that devices made for one industry are well enough designed to meet the requirements and or standards of other industries. An emergency generator for a cruise ship would have to have very high reliability because part of its specification would be the ship is at sea, in a storm and help is days away. Forget nuclear power station and cruise ship and think - its an emergency system so when its actually needed ITS AN EMERGENCY. I work in control system and part of that are the control circuits behind those big red buttons with EMERGENCY STOP written on them. You'd be amazed how many people, including other engineers, who just forget that the reason someone actually presses and E/STOP is because something bad is already happening. The REQUIREMENTS for any EMERGENCY device isn't what it has to do when everything is normal. It has to do its job when the shit has already hit the fan and being thrown everywhere. So the cruise ship stuff is meaningless BUT the failure to perform as SPECIFIED and REQUIRED is absolutely scream as loud as you can stuff.
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  124. Sorry to break it to you Thom but this Rabbi is just doing what so many other people have done. Rabbi Kulka, like others, is trying to fit text written 1000s of years ago in an ancient language to suit their narrative. Anybody who has ever taken a simple honest examination of the first chapter of Genesis knows that what he is claiming about Adam being androgynous is complete nonsense. Its just as stupid as so many other clowns who try and fit some part of the bible or any other religious text to their narrative.
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  125. If you have ever had a person who's a narcissistic sociopath in your life you'd recognise what's happening. Unfortunately I had a friend back in the 90s who went this way. For the first year or so he was fine, fun, helpful on a few things, but eventually just became overbearing to me and others in our circle. He started to interfere in our affairs and become divisive. Once we realised what was going on we flicked him off and that's when things went this way. The single biggest stressor to narcissists is REJECTION and losing the 2020 election was something a person like Trump could never handle. In these circumstances they become destructive. Its only a matter of how destructive and in what ways they become destructive. PLUS Trump has never been held accountable before or at least not like this. Having experience this (even in a far smaller way) I can see the same things - Trump blames everyone else for his own actions and lashes out at anyone who questions him and throws them under the bus. Hilary Clinton who's also a narcissist (just not as bad) couldn't handle losing to Trump and was still blaming others years after the fact. She lashed out at Bernie Sanders claiming he cost her the election despite the fact he'd campaigned for her after she got the nomination.
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  126. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. 1) Don't be ashamed to be an American. Be ashamed of SOME Americans. I have gotten into some arguments that America doesn't lack for good leaders. It lacks for them in positions of power. America's real problem is the combination of the stagnant, decrepit duopoly that is the Dems & GOP. Its not one or the other ITS THE COMBINATION. 2) Also realise that for so many countries, America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35. I was actually in Canada (for work) when Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. How TF do you treat your neighbor like that, that's without even considering its Canada the one of the politest countries in the world.
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  127.  @terrymyre8815  I spent 4 months in Sask a few years ago and loved the place. I even got used to the cold. Go Roughriders.
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  128. Then how can we see it??????
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  129.  @A_kiwis_view  The problem is the higher the pressure on society before it snaps the more brutal the response. Look at the French and Russian Revolutions for examples. Prior tot he French Revolution the French were the technically dominant society on the planet. They lead the world in math, chemistry, astronomy and engineering. its actually staggering where they were and most of it ended up in the hands of the English. I don't think that America is going to simply lose I think they are going to lose huge if they don't stop going down this path.
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  130. ​ @justadbeer  Your right to some extent. What your forgetting is that America made the rest of the world dependant on it and in particular security but it wasn't the only thing. You should go and listen to Peter Zeihan who's a geopolitical strategist. I don't agree with all that he says particularly when he talks technology, but then I'm an engineer. People like yourself are quite right. The rest of us all run to America when there's a problem. But then a lot of those problems were in part caused by various American entities in the first place. Lost in the disaster of Ukraine are a string of broken promises that America made to Russia after the fall of the Soviet System. Then there's all the economic interference that Americans advised Russia on that lead to the rise of the Russian Oligarchs. I recently heard Jeffrey Sachs, whining about how the Russians didn't listen to their advice. BS - the Russians are in the mess they are in because they DID LISTEN to American advisors who told them to sell of all their state assets. What your also forgetting is that BEFORE WW2 was even over there was the Breton Woods conference. Where America with its staggering gold reserve basically forced the rest of us to accept the US Dollar as the future worlds reserve currency. Along with that (as Peter Zeihan points out) American basically promised the rest of us it would keep international trade safe. With that we all agreed to be the cannon fodder between American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Peter even points out that China would never have had the chance for its economic growth without America keeping the world's trade routes safe and open. So there's been a lot of benefits and costs to all of us. The bug in that whole system is that certain American's learned how to take advantage of the system and these people are now a problem for ALL OF US. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I'm a very rare person in that I'm a huge fan of the US Constitution. I often say that I believe its one of the greatest achievements in human history AND I REALLY DO BELIEVE THAT. However the US Constitution is not perfect and the institutions it birthed are now failing. Without doubt SCOTUS is one of the most important institutions in the world and its been so badly corrupted that its almost non-functional and that has some incredibly serious consequences. No matter what the rest of us feel about any particular American or the nation, American is still 1/4 of the world's economy and almost all international trade is reliant on the US Dollar. Either that trade is done in $US or the transactions are done via banks that operate in $US. That's what it is to be the World's reserve currency AND NONE OF US ASKED FOR IT - we inherited it and a dysfunctional America is a nightmare. So you might think that Russia is the topic but in fact America is ALWAYS the topic. America wanted to be number 1. Well you got there and with that comes responsibility and if America has an Achilles heel its responsibility. None us are really good at it, but we aren't the World's reserve currency. Our Economists don't trapse around re-organising other countries. Our agencies don't sneak in and overthrow governments so our companies can come in and strip those nations. Most of all we don't have an arsenal of nuclear weapons to wave at people like its a giant middle finger. Apologies for the long rant.
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  131.  @ronschafer4533  Short, blunt and also sadly true.
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  132.  @justadbeer  If you look through the comments you'll find there are a lot of Australians and others watching people like Thom. I don't think Americans really get how scared we are of an American collapse and I don't just mean financial. Trump has tapped into a staggering amount of anger and frustration that IS LEGITIMATE. Richard Wolff who's a Marxist economist had this great comment about West Virginia in one of the Michael Brooks tributes (panel 3 just before 35mins). He points out how much the Dems & GOP have screwed those people. Trump gave them an alternative to being screwed yet again. I keep pointing out to Americans there's Congressional Budget Office report Bernie Sanders had updated on Family Wealth 1989-2019. If you just look at the first graph it shows how screwed 50% of America really is. Even when the economy has been better they haven't been better. The Top 10% have got it better the middle 40% have had it reasonable but the bottom 50% have been screwed and screwed and screwed. I've checked what I can of Australian data and its the same basic story. It should be because many of our top economists went to Harvard, Yale,.... etc. Trump and people like him aren't the problem. They're symptoms of a much larger economic issue. Thom is one of the very few with even 1/2 a grasp of it. He understands what the Neoliberals have done. What he might not realise is that they have done it across the entire Western World. But here's the issue. If Australia collapses, then so what? We won't take the world down with us. Neither will many other countries. BUT if America collapses we all go down. Global trade relies on the US dollar because back in 1944 at Breton Woods we all agree it would be the World's reserve currency. So if the US dollar breaks the worlds economy breaks. We can't afford 4 more years of either Biden or Trump, but especially Trump. I can give legitimate security and financial security reasons to at least 100 countries to give him a Chitown love tap. FYI - I went to college at U. of Illinois so I know what a Chitown love tap is. And I do mean that we really can't have Trump 2.0.
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  133. "Word has it" journalistic lingo to let you know what's about to be said has NOT BEEN FACT CHECKED.
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  134. HEY THOM. Can you please interview Prof. Mark Blyth from Brown. Several times he ahs brought up a study that says if America triple glazed its office towers which use massive amounts of energy it would no t only reduce America's energy needs which would then reduce prices because energy demand would reduce (as per Econ 101). Also it would save so much energy that it would put America well on the way to meeting any of the 2050 emissions targets. Its easy to find studies and articles on this via google. In particular all those monstrous class towers that clown brained architects have been designing since the 1970s EITHER get incredibly hot and need cooling OR they get cold and need heating. I am an engineer and this is a no brainer. Its not common knowledge outside the engineering space but people have discussed these sorts of things for years now. Its almost like a standing joke about how INEFFICIENT those pretty class towers are.
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  135. Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States in the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  136. We'll know which days he got rid off stuff. We'll just have to check for the days they called a plumber to unblock the toilet.
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  137. As soon as one of these pro-business libertarians clowns explains why the rest of the human race had to bail out the billionaires in 2008 I might listen to what they have to say. Libertarian economics can be simply summed up: "I want what I want and you can go f--k yourself"
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  138. What a great quote.👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
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  139. We not only chose to ignore the science our governments and the people who voted for them chose to listen to the same people who LIED and LIED and LIED and LIED about tobacco. The world never held any of the liars who campaigned for tobacco accountable and we are now paying for that mistake.
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  140. This could just as easily BACKFIRE on the GOP because a massive chunk of their base are poor anti-government types who might just as easily not pay their fines.
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  141.  @matthewingerson  Calling Thom Hartmann a right winger is about as stupid as it gets. He's certainly not as Left as prof Wollf, but he's no right winger. Can people just stop trying to paint everything black and white. Humanity is 7.8billion shades of grey.
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  142.  @matthewingerson  Long comment and I agree on most of especially the fact that America does not have left and right parties America has right and far right parties. The Democrats have none of the basic history of parties like the communist and socialist parties they have in Europe or the union derived Labor parties found in the British commonwealth countries. Plus America allows certain things in its politics like insider trading and unlimited political funding that no other country has or wants to have.
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  143. What makes you think its just Americans?? I'm Australian and at times it feels like 2/3rds of the country has lost its mind. We may not have gone as far off the deep end as America but it feels like we're trying to catch up.
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  144.  @mtn1793  Adam Tooze the Economics Historian in a discussion with Mark Blyth called them the GOP a "ruthlessly cynical political actor." They'll scream and yell about the Dems doing something and when they do exactly that things telling everyone its something else entirely. its seems to be a very right wing thing EVERYWHERE. Here in Australia, we just voted them out of power and no sooner had they been booted out they started screaming about holding the incoming Labor Party government accountable. Just this week we found out the previous Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) secretly breached our constitution. Plus their spokesman on the military blasted off about solving our navy's submarine problem when he'd had 8 years to fix it AND FAILED. There seems to be this incredulous hypocrisy with right wing parties these days. How often do we hear; "We are the party of Law and order" and we see them break laws. "We are the party of a strong military" and we they make stupid military mistakes and solve them with more spending. "We are the financially responsible party" and we see them pander to the banks and spend like drunken frat boys. I'm not saying the Left in any country are innocent of political shitfuckery (as we now call it) but the Right everywhere seem to have taken it to new levels in recent years.
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  145. 1st question I'd have is: What's it like to win the "FAKE" Nobel prize? 2nd would be: Were your born this arrogant or did you take classes? 3rd would be: What makes you think sending 50% of the population backwards, keeping 40% of the population stagnant, letting 9% be reasonably well off and letting 1% run off with everything while paying no tax and collapsing the American manufacturing is sound economics? The only favor Milton Friedman ever did the human race was stop breathing on November 16, 2006, which was 94 years overdue.
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  146.  @candorsspot2775  Yeah its real funny how you narcissists always have the same answer. FK-OFF and take your sociopathic narcissism and get the FK out of our lives.
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  147. Australian here and since you're from California I have a question. What would you say to a Newsom-Harris ticket where Kamal stays as VP? Because as an outsider looking in I can't see Kamala winning. She's terrible on the Campaign trail as was shown 4 years ago when she could not even win California (her home state). HOWEVER her coming on as Newsom's VP it gets past the funding issues that I keep hearing about and Newsom is a lot better of a campaigner. Is age also would get past many of the issues the Democrats now have. FYI - I went to college in America on a sports scholarship (U. Illinois) and spent 2 of my 3 summers in California. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and they used to drag me into their discussions. So I got an unusual education into how the American system is supposed to work but that's a longer discussion. But for this question just assume I have a reasonable understanding of American politics and how it works and I am genuinely interested in what you think of the possibility of Newsom-Harris ticket.
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  148.  @rjung_ch  You are right nobody really needs an Aston Martin. But the people who make them and the people who make all the bits that go into them do need somebody to buy them. You'd be right saying they could be doing something else, but if you don't have those few companies pushing the technology limits then development can simply stop. We wouldn't have things like safety cells, airbags, and ABS brakes if there weren't companies like Aston Martin. The problem isn't there are Aston Martins. It isn't even the person who can afford one. Its the people who can afford 1 for each day of the year. The Sultan of Brunei is rumoured to have a bunch of Ferrari F40s. Not a bunch of Ferrari's this is a bunch of just 1 type and most have barely been driven at all. That's simply absurd. The real problem are the super rich who collectively hoard TRILLIONS of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Yen and other currencies in tax havens.
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  149. Its America NOT France. The French had a rule that if the guillotine blade stuck then you got to go free. It was sort of God's choice. Unfortunately it was a very rare thing.
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  150. Yeah I kind of agree. As the saying goes if you lay with dogs expect to wake up with fleas. He chose to work for Trump, he wasn't forced and I don't hear him accepting a lot of responsibility.
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  151. All those clowns from Harvard's Medical School need to do is walk a few yards over to the Harvard Business School and they'll get the answers they seek.
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  152. ​ @ramonaboggio7402  I'm Australian but went to college in America. So I know what we have down under and I have some experience of being in America. We also hear lots about places like Canada and Britain. My father also had a heart attack while visiting Italy so my family has seen their system in action. No one has the perfect system BUT the one thing I can state with absolute certainty is that NOBODY in the world wants to copy what America has right now. The problem for America is how do you change a system with 330 million people in it. Australia has 26 million and we struggle to change things. So changing the health care system for 330 million people is going to be unbelievably difficult and anyone who simply says _"Lets just do A, B, C..." is talking out their butt. I can't see America moving to a British NIH type system but maybe you could move to a system like Australia which has BOTH public and private systems running in parallel OR maybe something like Canada has which is sort of part way between Australia and Britain. The one thing I think America could do which would be a massive step in the right direction is to control the prices a lot better. We hear of some of the prices you guys pay and fall over in disbelief. At the core of it America's real problem isn't capitalism its the type of unrestrained capitalism that's running right now where profit is the only measure of economic value. Your lobbyists, Think Tanks and Super Pacs are simply out of control. Looking back the stupidity and ludicrous nature of the Citizens United, that decision has to be overturned. Until that's fixed there's almost zero chance of fixing anything in America because whoever has more money to lobby with and spin the public narrative with wins.
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  153. I think this is one of the very few times I have heard ANYONE point out the obvious flaw in hammering the crap out of the middle class in a consumer economy. If you rely on consumption you need a population that is financially capable of consumption - DUH In what PRACTICAL UNIVERSE does that not make common sense? BUT according to Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman corporations have no other responsibility than to their share holders. I'd love to see any economist explain how destroying the market you sell your goods and or services into serves the best interest of your share holders?
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  154. Reasonable Republicans is a contradiction in terms like military intelligence, miniature giant, jumbo shrimp, colorful shade of grey.
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  155.  @bobpeters61  Yeah Christians have a problem with that 3rd Commandment, Especially the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox churches. That includes all of them who wear a cross around their neck. Exodus 20:4 You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;... There's a crystal clear warning by John at 1John 5:21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. Many translations have the word "guard" instead of "keep." There's also a great line somewhere in the OT about how people will take a piece of wood and carve 1/2 of it into something sacred that they pray too, while they cook diner with the other 1/2.
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  156. I know this will sound callous but they are using the wrong gas. They should be using Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Please bear with because there is a shocking part to this story. A number of years ago when the types of drugs being used were under question a British Journalist did a straight forward "what are the alternatives" documentary. I saw it on the website for the Melbourne Age (part of Fairfax media) in Australia. After evaluating all the different ways that animals are disposed of and humans are executed the most reliable and least invasive and least cruel method this journalist found was carbon dioxide. Above a particular level CO2 simply knocks a person out after a brief moment of euphoria (light headedness). Its very quick as was shown with the Lake Nyos (Cameroon) disaster in 1986. A cloud of CO2 was released from the lake and it swept downhill and wiped out several villages. They could see from the footprints that most people were knocked out instantly with only a few taking a couple of foot steps. THIS IS THE SHOCKING PART. When the journalist presented what he found to the doctor in charge of executions in one of the US States (Sorry I forget which one) that doctor replied that he didn't care and said (paraphrasing) "Its not meant to be nice its a punishment." Just so we are clear my issue with the death penalty is not that it exists. There can always be some argument made that person 'X' did crime 'Y' and its so egregious that they deserve death. My problem with the death penalty is THE ATTITUDE of those pursuing it. As in are they pursuing justice or something else like vengeance or political gain. In my home state of Victoria (Australia) our last execution was Ronald Ryan a small time criminal who was convicted of killing a guard during a prison escape. There were numerous flaws in the evidence presented with at least 2 witnesses lying. The ballistics made it almost certain the guard was accidentally shot by another guard in a tower on the prison wall. Government papers from meetings that were only released only a few years ago have made it clear the government of the day were fully aware of the actual facts (the lies and the ballistics). Its in the record that when presented with these facts the Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte was noted to have said words to the effect "We have an election to win later this year and this will make me look tough on crime." They went on to win that election in a landslide.
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  157. WTF are you talking about? When has Thom EVER supported American Imperialism?
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  158. David Pakman and some others covered it as well and have covered him in the past. This guy is truly off the deep end.
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  159. I hate to bust Thom's and everyone else's balls but Kamala Harris is a terrible campaigner. She DID NOT WIN California in the primaries AND THAT SHOULD RESONATE. OR are you NOT OLD enough to remember Dan Quayle, who was mocked brilliantly by Robert Redford. Like Kamala he was a lawyer and was smart enough to get into and finish Law School. BUT he was slaughtered in debates and mocked relentlessly. There was the gaff that went around the world over his Murphy Brown snipe. I'm not saying Kamala isn't intelligent or that she has good ideas but her political savvy is terrible and it shows EVERYTIME she gets away from scripted speeches.
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  160. ​ @yvonneplant9434  That's actually a very good question and there's an answer. Sometimes you have to listen to the other side and give them their moment to state their case. I recently saw an interview with British actor/comedian Tom Walker who plays the character Jonathan Pie. He made this incredibly valid point that if you don't listen to the other side you can never deal with what they are saying or doing. If you have watched this video you can now tell other people you have actually heard and interview with Peter Navarro and seen him dodge the question on proof the election was stolen. NO TRUMP SUPPORTER can now say you haven't listened or tried to listen to their claims. Thom challenged him that all the Trump Team have done is a marketing campaign where if you tell a lie enough times it becomes the public narrative and eventually accepted truth. David Pakman has had Mike Pillow on several times including today. It was bonkers and aggravating and annoying and ridiculous BUT AT TIMES WE HAVE TO HEAR THESE PEOPLE so we can then answer other people's questions.
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  161. Its a great idea and could be done all across the world EXCEPT All of our financial controls were effectively privatised via the consulting industry.
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  162. Even Joe Manchin went for that and he's the most corporatized (or at least one of the most) politicians in any Western Democracy (not just America) on the planet.
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  163.  @rjung_ch  Well said and explained which for social media isn't done enough. There's a lot more than Switzerland nervous. Ireland, Holland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, most of the Caribbean, the Channel Islands, the state of Delaware and a few other tax havens.
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  164. To all of Thom's watchers. Trump endorsed Kari Lake whos running for governor of Arizona had a train wreck interview with Australian 60 Minutes that was broadcast free to air only hours ago. Before she stormed out she abused the reporter and gravely insulted Australia. FYI - I am Australian, I went to college in America and this might blow up. This wasn't some silly rant by some clown on YouTube this was a Trump endorsed candidate going off the rails. Don't forget Australia, Britain Canada and others just spent most of the last 20 years supporting America in Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn't popular anywhere, but we stood by America. I was in Canada for work when Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. How do you all think this makes us feel about America? We are all now asking if there is anyway we can believe that America will be a reliable trading or security partner going forward.
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  165. Its NOT our reliance on fossil fuels that is blocking humanity's future. ITS THE RELIANCE of POLITICIANS on the fossil fuel money they use for their campaigns that's the problem.
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  166. I'm an Australian who went to college in America and this disturbs me at several levels. 1) It angers me that these clowns are wrecking a country and people I love. 2) It scares the crap out of me because like Canada, Britain, Japan and others we are getting further into deeper security ties with America and NOBODY can tell us with this going on that out main security partner is being overrun by crazy people who don't care about right and wrong. 3) No matter what anyone does or does not think about America the US$ is still the worlds reserve currency. Despite that the Chinese and Russians are pushing the BRICS currency nobody is buying it because who can trust any of the main players? The Euro is only as reliable as the weakest economies in the EU and some of those are seriously unreliable. So no matter what almost all international trade is still going to depend on the reliability of the US$ for a while. If these clowns destabilise America and the US$ with it then the entire planet is in trouble including the Russians and Chinese who both have massive investments in America. So no matter what NOBODY on the planet can afford this sort of nonsense. It goes well beyond America's borders and beyond the American people. You wanted to be the worlds dominant player well that comes at a cost and the cost is RESPONSIBILITY.
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  167. Yeah WTF is this all about. Yeah us men have issues and some of us have some damn serious issues and others have issues at a level that's terrifying but this sounds like a heap cultural mansplaining instead of the actual issue. The Uvalde shooter was known to enjoy killing animals and posting it online. That came out day 1 and that's 1 of the key indicators of psychopathy. I might have only done Psych 101 but even I know that. Trying to re-explain this as some male cultural issue isn't going to help anything. The kid had issues letting those fester wasn't good. Letting have a gun was a disaster in the making.
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  168. AUSTRALIAN HERE There is no doubting one sleazy damn fact about America culture. No mater how immoral or unethical or miserable a situation is there's always some PIECSE of SHlT sneaking about the situation trying to make money our of it. Do you guys all realise that when Superman used to announce that he was there for "Truth, Justice and the American Way" that that implies that the "American Way" does NOT include either truth or justice? There's something seriously WRONG in the minds of a nation that creates a BULLSHlT character like Superman to convince themselves they are somehow better than any other nation, tribe or culture on the planet. FYI - I went to college in America and love the American people and MOST but not all of their culture. But this aspect of American Exceptionalism is a cancer that has metastasised into the malignant narcissism that is Trumpism.
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  169. Do I hear a cheer for Milton Freidman and the Reaganomics he inspired in that? Is it just me or do you think if we had access to Dr Who's Tardis that Milton would be at or near the top of the hit list.
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  170. Very interesting opinion and I think you're absolutely right they could be more reliable than Saudi Arabia. The question is after demonizing them for that last 40years after having supported a repressive regime since the 50s that the CIA helped put in place via a coup that overthrew a democratically elected government and then after Trump simply tearing up a treaty in a combination of tempestuousness, childishness, stupidity and lies - WOULD YOU TRUST ANY AMERICAN DEAL IF YOU WERE THE IRANIANS? Lets not forget Trump also whacked a national hero who was on a peace mission at the time or forget that Trump tightened sanctions at the moment Iran was getting hit by COVID or forget the deal Reagan made where he got them to keep Americans hostage to help win an election. I don't doubt your claim they would be a better partner long term, but if you're the Iranians what deal can you make with America that you can trust? Sorry but this is the legacy leaders like Trump & Reagan left America with.
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  171.  @progressforward  I'm Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship. I find it very sad to see a great country being dragged down by a very selfish minority who have learned how to manipulate large slabs of a population into believing garbage. Both the DNC and GOP are guilty of that. We don't openly talk about it much here but we do have concerns for our long term security. We just backed our future on the F35 and a few other toys. What if another Trumpist (from either side) gets in and starts tearing up treaties? I was in Canada (for work) when Trump tore up NAFTA and imposed tariffs on Canada. No one and I really do mean NO ONE outside of Trumps circle got what that was about. Its Canada the most polite nation on earth and Trump just turned around and kicked them in the face. There are enormous American investments in Canada. The infamous far right Koch brothers are THE MAIN player in the Alberta Oil Sands. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️
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  172.  @progressforward  Yeah and America exported it to the rest of the western world world. In Australia right now we have a overly influential pro-China lobby. They are either miners selling raw material, importers importing crap or housing people selling housing. They make so much money, they will do anything to keep the cash rolling in. If you strip away the the surface its almost identical to the American oil money in terms of influence. I just saw a graph yesterday. In 1921 (100 years ago) America lead the world in iron ore production with 21MTA (million tons per annum). We currently mine over 850MTA most of which goes to China. Just like America has people saying that America needs to break its addiction to oil, our people are saying we have to break our addiction to Chinese trade. AND its the same reason - that addiction produces incredible levels of corruption.
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  173. For everyone interested here's the full Henry Wallace quote from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  174.  @davehendricks4824  What DOJ? You know that thing that criminals used to be scared of? Yeah - That DOJ!
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  175. Good reply. Thom is right about many things in this but the Bible does NOT have abortion other than to mention that if you injure a pregnant woman who then miscarries from that injury you can be held accountable. On the subject of slaves the word in the bible for slaves also means EMPLOYEEs. The actual word for employee and the modern concept of employee is very recent in terms of history. There are so many ideas and concepts in the bible that have been misrepresented and misconstrued by organised religion it staggering that anyone even links the bible to religion any more. that moment when Trump held up a bible and it was upside down was maybe one of the most accurate representations of religion ever - they have it upside down.
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  176.  @roypitta3459  You absolutely right. How Reagan is held in the esteem that is the greatest PR exercise in history. Second place is Margret Thatcher who did the same in Britain. Just last week in some discussion about the Regan era somebody pointed out SCOTUS judge Gorsuch's mother. She's one of the best face palms ever. She sacked 100s of EPA inspectors and regulators and the few she replaced were all industry hacks. It reads like sacking the FBI Organised Crime division and re-hiring a bunch of mobsters and wise guys to police the Mafia. Trump wasn't the first to pull that crap he just copied Reagan. Somebody needs to write book about the effects and consequences of what Reagan, Thatcher, Freidman and others did.
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  177.  @crysstoll1191  I think Gary's channel is one of the most underestimated YT channels there is. I stumbled across him when he was interviewed by another channel. The actual channel is called "Garys Economics." He hasn't done anything for a couple of weeks but all the stuff he's done previously is worth watching.
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  178. Almost every label in politics has been abused, misused and misrepresented so often these days almost NOBODY knows anything anymore. I'm an engineer and spent most of my COVID downtime looking into economics because I'm tired of having economists scuttle proposals. I've tried to learn their language so I can talk to them. What I found is that most economists are so confused over what economics is and how it works because so many professors and commentators have no idea what they are saying or teaching. The best comment I saw was recently when someone said: "most economists think they know what economics is, but almost none of them have any idea how it works" Politics is even worse. When you combine the 2 you have the mess we live in.
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  179.  @nedludd7622  Actually you are very very right except on the final point. The most important function of the second Amendment was providing SECURITY of a free state. There is NOTHING about the government. A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. What many Americans don't realise is that first part A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,... had incredibly profound effects on the world. Prior to the American revolution most societies had people like sheriffs, marshals and bailiffs BUT NONE of them had a civilian police force separate from the military. All those sheriffs, marshals and bailiffs used regular military units or special units of the military like the Praetorians of Rome for enforcing government rule over civilians. EVERY country was (to some extent) a military dictatorship. When Pilot sent his men to get Jesus they were Roman soldiers, not police officers. The concept of what we now call a police force didn't exist. Then one day a group of people decided they'd had enough of that threw out their king and his soldiers and started this country called America. After deciding that (like the Athenian Greeks) every citizen could help choose the government they decided every citizen had some basic rights. The FIRST right was citizens could believe what they wanted, say what they wanted and most importantly tell the government what they didn't like (as in their grievances) and not be publicly executed for it. It was a truly revolutionary concept that most of the kings and emperors since have come to regret. The SECOND thing they decided was that it would be local citizens under local control who would supply security for the villages, towns and cities of this new nation. It was a revolutionary concept the federal government would not use the military to rule over the population and enforce laws. That task would be done by a "well organised militia". They went even so far that local people could not only vote on who would be their sheriff but who would be the lawyer responsible for trying criminal cases. Not every country since has taken it that far, but every developed nation since that has a civilian police force TOTALLY SEPARATE from their military owes that to the Founding Fathers of America. FYI - I'm Australian and studied engineering in America (late 80s) and a bunch of my frat brothers were pre-law and used to drag me into discussions on the Bill of Rights. So I had a fairly unusual introduction to American civics.
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  180. Welcome to modern politics in every developed country in the world. I'm Australian and the number of lawyers in our politics is over the top terrifyingly scary. All they are trained to do is argue semantics and its why they can't get a damn thing done. Did you know Biden, both Obamas and both Clintons are all lawyers along with Ted Cruz? Those are just the few I can name of hand. And just like ours all any of them can do is argue semantics the rest of us don't care about. Maybe after the next revolution we put a tariff limit on the number of lawyers allowed in society.
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  181. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  182. Australian here looking at this from the outside. The craziest aspect of the American-Israeli thing is the GOP's near fanatical pro-Israeli stance, because one of the core fundamentals of GOP ideology is the complete dismantling of social welfare including public education and publicly funded health care. This is all summed up in Ronald Reagan's infamous "Welfare Queen" remark. Heres' the thing. Israel is now politically dominated by the ultra-orthodox Jewish population and they don't work at all. Their men sit in Yeshiva's all day long and study the Torah. Their women mostly stay at home and raise their large families. They get their food, rent, power and medical all paid for by the rest of society and its all underwritten by the American tax payer. Up until recently they rarely served in the military. So how does the GOP support the State of Israel with tax payer money that has a welfare system that they would NOT TOLERATE in America?
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  183. As an outsider (Australian) looking in - YES, not prosecuting Trump over January 6th has been incredibly damaging to America's image and reputation. IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - Not only would Trump and all those who spoke at the rally but anyone who entered the capital on that day would have been in custody AND NOT RELEASED as fast as they could have been captured. In ANY OTHER COUNTRY they would have received lengthy jail sentences and in more than a few countries MOST of them would have been EXECUTED. The Chinese executed people after Tiananmen Square. The Saudis and Iranians execute anyone who protests their regimes. The Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 others for protesting against the environmental damage of oil companies. Trump's buddy Kim Jong Un would have executed ALL OF THEM in a heartbeat. When American history is studied in future Merrick Garland will be viewed in similar context to Benedict Arnold for the betrayal of the office for which he was entrusted with. When he was first appointed an people cheered that justice was coming there were a few people pointing out that he was also a known member of the Federalist Society and warning that he'd do nothing.
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  184. Its already been tried. NASA adapted Hubble Space Telescope technology for the task but every time they pointed it at a politician the electronics inside the camera melted. At first they thought it was a design flaw in the lens before they worked out it was like a human eye looking directly at the sun. They are currently adapting other space telescope technology to get past this problem, but are having trouble getting congress to fund it. 🤔🤔🤔🤔
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  185. HEY THOM: Please interview Sir Angus Deaton on the subject of healthcare in America. I just listened to him with Prof. Mark Blyth (Brown U. and a person you should have on regularly) for the Rhodes Centre Podcast (here on YT). Angus has just published a book Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist in the Land of Inequality. Mark Quotes from the book "If you gave every person in America the Swiss health care system they would get 5 more years of life and a $3,000 check each year" and then asks Angus why nobody can do anything. That gets to your favorite topic (or one of them) on Lobbyists. I really do recommend you interview BOTH Mark and Angus. By the way I am Australian but went to college in America. Love your vids because unlike so many others your actually working to INFORM people. Also are you aware of the PwC scandal in Australia and what (so far) they have been allowed to get away with?
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  186. You make a great point - its predatory capitalism NOT capitalism that's the problem. I recently bought a copy of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" it has 2 introductions. One it nuts the other is a brilliant essay by a professor from the LSE. He points out that Smith was concerned with EVERYONE in Britain having the opportunity to gain some wealth. Smith was actually reacting to the existing economics called "mercantilism" which was like predatory capitalism and resulted in entities like the British East India Company. We think Amazon and google are big. The BEI at one stage was 50% of the worlds economy. It took the British government 70 years to break it up and they only got there because they had a bigger army and a bigger fleet.
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  187. Henry A. Wallace “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." - the New York Times, April 9, 1944”
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  188. That's a reasonable comment except just check your history to see what happens when the Left go too far like they did across Eastern Europe. At the moment people are forgetting the Far Left can be just as insanely destructive as the Far Right. Some foe worlds worst offenders of human rights were Far Left governments. Look at China right now for their ethnic genocide of the Uyghurs. They are also among the worlds most destructive when it comes to the environment. Look at what the Soviets did to the Aral Sea. When it comes to propaganda and feeding an entire population misinformation look at North Korea or right now Russia. Look ay any authoritarian regime - Left, Right, Religious Theocracy, Military dictatorship, Oligarchy,..... etc and the first thing they do is restrict information to the narrative they want people to hear AND they will always claim THEY are the TRUTH SPEAKERs like all those goons across the Murdoch empire. Before he screwed up his brain on drugs and was still a reasonable person Jordan Peterson pointed out that it was easy to know when people had gone too far to the Right - they became racist. But there wasn't as simple of a marker for when people had gone too far to the Left. I think he missed the more generalised assessment that when people start to put their ideology (what ever type) ahead of common sense and allow it to HURT other people and/or DEGRADE their lives THEN they are going too far.
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  189. Yeah but he's also completely IGNORANT of what White Supremacy actually is. Its NOT the be all and end all of everything. As an African American I sure he see's it as the be all and end all BUT HE IS WRONG. Its fundamentally a racial superiority issue that EVERY tribe and culture has some version of it. Irrespective of if you take a look at ancient or modern history we see the same thing again and again and we have so many examples that HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE PEOPLE. Thom's example of Korea is just one example of the entire Asian continent. Dig a little and you will find examples of this racial superiority in all of them and at one time or another they have all used to to do great harm to each other and there was not a WHIT PERSON ANYWHERE. FYI - I'm Australian and yes we have a serious issue with White Supremacists but we also have some other racial issue that HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE PEOPLE. We have sizeable communities of Pakistanis and Indians and others form the sub-continent and you have to be damn careful what you say around them. Most of them are fine but like every culture there are those who have this racial superiority trait and they can fly off the handle. Another 2 groups we have to be very careful with are Vietnamese and Cambodians. There's several 1,000 years of conflict there and there is NOT A WHITE PERSON INVOLVED. This guys claim that the African conflicts are 100% the fault of White People is just nonsense. There are tribal conflicts going back 1,000s of years just as there is everywhere else. I can understand his point of view being African American but he's simply WRONG.
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  190.  @DarylBark  George Carlin once said look at how stupid the average person with an IQ of 100 is and then realise that 1/2 the population has an IQ under 100. This is one of the crazy aspects of sending trying to send 80% of high school leavers to university to get a degree. In that model - out of every 100 high school kids 80 go to university and 30 of those 80 have an IQ under 100. Yeah 3/8ths of all the people who go to university shouldn't. This is why the drop out rate is so high across the world. IT DOES NOT mean they are stupid or worthless it just means they aren't suited to that type of study and there's a lot of other stuff they could do and trained people we do need. I'm an engineer and there's lots of technical jobs like lab technicians, welders, machinists, electricians and other technicians that don't require a degree but do require an advanced diploma or similar PLUS we are super short of them across a bunch of fields. Go ask any doctor about lab tests and they howl about the shortage of lab techs. Go ask the police about their shortages of forensic techs. Sorry to go on but its a favorite rant of mine. Even when we get away from the Wars and stupid politics there's stuff NOBODY is addressing and its slowly eating our societies.
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  191. Yeah - professional sports like car racing and European Soccer. They brag about better conditions (better equipment, better facilities, faster cars,... etc.) and better pay and some of them even pay taxes except when they pay their employees so much money they run at a loss.
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  192.  B G  As an Australian I can tell all of America (and I have seen many others from around the world say the same) "Citizens United" is one of the stupidest things any nation has ever done in all of human history. Its a self induced malignant cancer that is metastasising into a nightmare not just for America but the entire World. If you listen to the most recent vid Thom did with Richard Wolff he remined us all that 44 allied nations agreed at Breton Woods in 1944 that the US Dollar would be the worlds reserve currency and how that works. YES - Breton Woods has been surpassed by other agreements, but the US Dollar remains the worlds reserve currency. Even though it is being traded less and less the stability of the currency exchange markets still relies on the stability of the US Dollar. Even though that annoys the crap out of many people we put up with it because it works. However with Citizens United certain billionaires are now going UNRESTRAINED on what influence they can buy. People like Charles Koch and Robert Mercer who have unusual views on how they should run America. See Thoms other vids on Koch & Mercer if you haven't. What those 2 are working on should scare everyone. If that disaster of a Constitutional Convention Koch wants goes ahead America as we know it ends. That would be incredibly bad for America and likely end in civil war and or the complete break-up of the United States of America. For the rest of the world it would also completely destabilise the currency markets because we all have money in New York Federal Reserve as Prof Wolff Described. Think of the bank rush there'd be if nations panicked and started scrambling to get their money out and what that would do to the NYSE and with it the other major stock exchanges.
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  193. I'm Australian and an outside observer to all this nonsense. Its pretty damn obvious all of the Hunter Biden & Joe Biden nonsense is simply a distraction from just how close this mess cam to ending democracy in America. I actually went to college in American. I did engineering but a bunch of friends were pre-law and they used to drag me into all sorts of their discussions. I had studied Orwell in high school (Animal Farm & 1984) so I used to always put forward that ANY DEMOCRACY could fall into a totalitarian dictatorship (Left or Right) because that was what Orwell warned about. People think Orwell was only about what happened in Russia and that's not true. His message was a warning against ANYFORM of absolute dictatorship. My friends used to argue that such a thing was IMPOSSIBLE in America because the US Constitution had too many checks and balances to get around. I am stunned at what's happening now because that system of checks and balances has failed. At the moment I put the blame squarely on 2 people in particular - Mitch McConnell and Merrick Garland. McConnell could have slapped down Trump at the FIRST impeachment the same way they muzzled Clinton with a "We aren't throwing you out but you are now going to behave and do your job." McConnell could have at the SECOND impeachment simply said "No this is too much. Get out and stay out!" Garland should have seen the failure of McConnell and done the right thing by simply charging Trump the moment there was sufficient evidence and there was enough. The fact he put his Institutionalist ideology in front of the reality of the situation will haunt America for generations.
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  194. NO - not a chance. World leaders with UN security counsel veto don't get charged. Clinton fired missiles into the sovereign nation of Sudan - what happened there? Bush & Cheney threw the Geneva Convention out the window and had people tortured - what happened there? Obama let the CIA bomb women and children using drones - what happened there? Trump actually murdered an Iranian General on a peace mission - what happened there? Most of the Western World supported those actions - what happened there? World leaders need to do something truly despicable like bio or chem weapons against children and then its a maybe.
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  195. Exactly. I don't know why anyone thinks there is a "secret cabal" running everything when groups like the Federalist Society do it all out in the open. The entire world knows that the super wealthy hide their money using off shore banking. They don't even hide it anymore - they don't need to. The Panama Papers came out and nobody went to jail. The Paradise Papers came out and nobody went to jail. Trump tweeted come to Washington "it will be wild" and then he told a wound up mob to go down and "STOP the steal" and they did and it was all on film and HE GOT AWAY WITH IT (so far).
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  196. For everyone interested here's the full Henry Wallace quote from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  197. Milton Friedman the man who gave the world "Greed is good" also said: “Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.” The great BULLSHlT of that is he and his Chicago School Buddies through the ACTIONS of GOVERNMENTS went and REARRANGED the entire World's Economy. There's a famous photograph of him and Augusto Pinochet the Chilean dictator. The so called genius economist. As Thom has said several times he was a psychopath
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  198. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. For so many America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35.
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  199.  @sheldonbodryn1003  A few years ago I was in Canada for work right at the moment Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. It was interesting to watch Canadians drop the politeness and go into hockey mode. I used to joke with them, what was going to happen when they had hoards of American refugees at the border trying to escape the Trumptocracy? For all their sense of humour, they never found it funny.
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  200. ​ @sheldonbodryn1003  I was in college in America in the late 80s. I did engineering but a bunch of my frat brothers were pre-law and we used to discuss these thigns a lot. Because I had studied Orwell (Animal farm & 1984) I use to argue that ANY country even America could become a totalitarian state if it wasn't careful. They used to argue that the US Constitution would NOT allow anyone to take America down that path. Look at America right now. SCOTUS has been corrupted by the Federalist Society. Congress has been corrupted by the corporate elites. The free speech of the 1st Amendment is under threat. The security of the free state of the 2nd Amendment has been hijacked by the NRA. The 3rd Amendment isn't used any more and I personally think its incredibly important and underrated. Its actually about protecting the land and resources. So when the EPA is regulating polluters they are actually protecting people's 3rd Am. right to their land not being spoiled. But the one that amazes me more than anything is how The Patriot Act tore a hole right through the 4th. The NSA can be watching us right now, without a warrant, without cause, without due process or anything else. I'm not even American and I think the US Bill of Rights is one of the greatest achievements in human history and to see it trampled is a tragedy of epic proportions.
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  201.  @L98fiero  Yes ask the Iranians, Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians and a few others what its like to elect a government they US does not approve of. When I was in college in America (late 80s) the New Zealanders put a complete ban on nuclear vessels. NOT just nuclear armed but also nuclear powered. America tore up the ANZUS treaty over it and Americans went nuts. People actually came up to me all aggravated and upset that New Zealand would dare tell America anything. When I mean aggravated they were going nuts. Their brains shorted out and blew fuses. They could not handle the concept that ANYONE would tell them something like the New Zealanders did. When I told people "Its their country, they are allowed to chose for themselves." Americans went bonkers, like genuinely bonkers and a few times I was scared it was going to get violent. There's actually a problem with BOTH sides of American politics (the liberals and realists) where its hardwired into both that with foreign policy America has the superior system and others must acknowledge and accept America's ideological superiority. I recently saw a 2017 lecture by John Mearsheimer - U. Chicago REALIST professor and one of the fathers of the neo-cons. He explained how the American LIBERALS can't help themselves interfering in other countries they feel aren't giving their citizens an acceptable liberal democratic system. He was 100% right about the American liberals but totally avoided that his side "the realists" who are almost hyper Machiavellians. They'll interfere with any country that has resources they want and do it by what ever means are effective. America is unlike almost every other nation. They DON'T have a left and right like the rest of us have. They have 2 Right wing variants that are like the 2 sides of a coin. They are also identical in most ways accept for how they exercise power. One side believes every voice should have its chance to be heard and the other side believes their voice is the only one that should be speaking. And they both agree that America has the right to interfere in other countries.
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  202. Trump tore up NAFTA and other treaties and agreements while Putin tore up Budapest. The lesson is DON'T trust superpowers and especially don't trust them when they have narcissistic maniacs in charge. They will do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want and not give a damn about the rest of us. In the end the rest of us are just pawns for them to sacrifice in their games.
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  203.  @markfeland2285  Really I heard from this guy that Mississippi was the most corruption free state in the world. He was this guy about 6'2" with a beard, mid 50s and going a bit grey. Said his name was Brett something and was wearing a Packers shirt.
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  204.  @walkertongdee  How and Why? Common don't just make the claim tell everyone WHY and HOW he's what you claim?
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  205. HEY THOM: you are going to have to do a major retraction and apologise. AT 6:40 It was Jared Kushner NOT Hunter Biden who got the $2 Billion form the Saudis and got several hundred million from Qatar to bail out his family's business. The case with Hunter Biden is about his time in Ukraine and his deals with China. They might be sleazy but they weren't as abd as what Kushner has done.
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  206. THIS DIDN'T AGE WELL. Pomerantz resigned and Trump was never charged or indicted or anything else.
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  207. This clown who called in has the same crap argument that we hear all around the world and its the same stupid shit from the same selfish clowns everywhere.
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  208. @Just Be Crazy as it sounds that's really good analogy to the stupidity that's gone on. Well done.
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  209. That's a really good point, that goes a lot further than just the Fed. And the same can be asked of almost any country, it just might NOT be as "in your face" obvious as America.
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  210. To all of Thom's watchers. Trump endorsed Kari Lake whos running for governor of Arizona had a train wreck interview with Australian 60 Minutes that was broadcast free to air only hours ago. Before she stormed out she abused the reporter and gravely insulted Australia. FYI - I am Australian, I went to college in America and this might blow up. This wasn't some silly rant by some clown on YouTube this was a Trump endorsed candidate going off the rails. Don't forget Australia, Britain Canada and others just spent most of the last 20 years supporting America in Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn't popular anywhere, but we stood by America. I was in Canada for work when Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. How do you all think this makes us feel about America? We are all now asking if there is anyway we can believe that America will be a reliable trading or security partner going forward.
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  211. That's because America's (and by extension the rest of the Western World's) entire economic model was designed by the father of "Greed is good" Milton Freidman. Make no mistake Freidman was incredibly intelligent, but just like Hannibal Lecter or a James Bond Super villain he was also insane. Go look up some of Thom's videos on him.
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  212. HEY THOM: Here in Australia the program Planet America reported this week that according to stats in 2017 there were over 112,000 transactions that were DENIED because people had made "mistakes" on the forms to buy a gun. Only 12 times were people charged with a crime like Hunter Biden is now charged.
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  213. BECAUSE THERE IS NO LIMIT TO GOP HYPOCRISY!!!!! If they win and retain power then ANYTHING is acceptable.
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  214.  @sr2291  Never said she didn't but has she actually passed the bar? That's one of the other things that's been pointed out. There's sitting judges who have NOT passed the bar that might have been to law school and got their JD. That's why they are referred to as NOT qualified instead of UNqualified.
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  215. American Libertarian ideology 101: "I demand the liberty to strip others of their liberties." This is the amazing thing about the American Libertarian mindset. They are 1,000,000% of the view that "Nobody, NOT the Government, NOT the teachers, NOT the police, NOT science, NOT anyone with actual expertise and especially NOT the voters has the right to tell me what I can and can't do, BUT as sure as the sun comes up I'm going to FORCE my views, my standards and my rules on everyone else."
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  216. To ALL I was checking something the other day. Just after Trump lost the 2020 election he ordered/allowed the execution of 3 Federal prisoners. It was very unusual because it was the first time in over 140 years a president had ordered or allowed anyone during the Lame Duck period. There is no law it just became tradition to leave it to the incoming President. What I found were 2 extraordinary facts. 1) After the riots of January 6th Trump had or allowed 3 more executions on January 13, 14 and 16 of 2021. yes in the post January 6th turmoil when there was no effective government 3 people were actually executed and we KNOW trump had the 3 in November and December killed because he told everyone he did it. 2) Between July 14, 2021 and September 24, 2021 Trump had or allowed 7 executions to take place. There is no doubt that some of those crimes were horrendous and justice might well be served by executing those perpetrators. Since the resumption of executions in 1976 the US Federal Government has only executed 16 people. Mostly its done by the states. Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Obama and Biden COMBINED had NOBODY executed. Bush Junior executed 3, one of whom was Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma Bomber. Those 3 happened in June 2001, June 2001 and March 2003 so were nowhere near the election campaign for 2004. Trump did not execute anyone until July 2020 when the campaign was underway. In fact 1 happened during the GOP convention on August 26th and another the day after the convention on August 28th. The timing is bizarre and leads to only one conclusion - Donald Trump had 7 people executed to help win the election as his campaign faltered over his mishandling of COVID, and when that failed he lashed out and had 6 more people killed. WHY NOBODY IN THE MEDIA IS POINTING THIS OUT IS A MYSTERY.
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  217. I understand this guys point of view because he's African American but he is completely IGNORANT of what White Supremacy actually is. Its NOT the be all and end all of every problem. Its fundamentally a racial superiority issue that EVERY tribe and culture has some version of. Irrespective of if you take a look at ancient or modern history we see the same thing again and again and we have so many examples that HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE PEOPLE. Thom's example of Korea is just one example of the entire Asian continent. Dig a little and you will find examples of this racial superiority in all of them. At one time or another they have all used some form of racial superiority to to do great harm to each other and there was not a WHITE PERSON ANYWHERE. FYI - I'm Australian and yes we have a serious issue with White Supremacists but we also have some other racial issues that HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE PEOPLE. We have sizeable communities of Pakistanis and Indians and others form the sub-continent and you have to be damn careful what you say around them. Most of them are fine but like every culture there are those few who have this racial superiority trait and they can fly off the handle. Another 2 groups we have to be very careful with are Vietnamese and Cambodians. There's several 1,000 years of conflict there and there is NOT A WHITE PERSON INVOLVED. This guys claim that the African conflicts are 100% the fault of White People is just nonsense. There are tribal conflicts going back 1,000s of years just as there is everywhere else. I can understand his point of view being African American but he's simply WRONG.
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  218. HEY THOM - the only person who cost Hilary Clinton the 2016 election WAS HILARY CLINTON. As numerous people have pointed out: 1) She was NOT well liked and aggravated as many people as she brought on board; 2) She was a neoliberal whose husband had signed NAFTA into existence causing many factories to close and jobs to be lost. 3) Despite all the claims of broad popular policies the only one that was ever mentioned was "First Woman President." 4) WORST OF ALL - She flipped off the people of Michigan and announced she'd instead do fundraisers with the New York Elite who were the people making the decisions that closed factories and destroyed towns all across the Rust Belt. She then LOST Michigan(16), Ohio(18) and Pennsylvania(20) a total of 54 EC votes which Obama had won in 2012. had she won those 54 votes she would have beaten Trump 281 to 250.
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  219. Actually some of them like Disney because it reinforces their fantasies. Some of them like the NFL because its shows that black people are only good for certain roles in society. The do hate those NFL players, like Colin Kaepernick, who buck that fantasy. Some of them like targets especially when those targets are in the shape of a deer. Some of them like certain parks especially the ones they can shoot stuff.
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  220.  @taniagordon2589  I'm an engineer and back in college I did a sociology class as an option on "technology in society" and one of our case studies was the M16 the military version of the AR15 and yes there are some differences. The bullet dynamics of the AR15 were specifically designed for maximum damage to a human body. Its not just the shape and size of the bullet but how it spins and tumbles. Don't be shocked it was designed for war and the task in war is to kill the enemy. Its the result of several thousand years of warfare experience and strategy. The idea that AR15s (and similar) belong anywhere but a battlefield is utter nonsense.
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  221.  @StacyWorth  SHIT4BRAINS lets get it right. Hillsdale WAS (past tense) a fine college. Now its an indoctrination centre pumping out mindless meme pumping drones. And lets put it correctly. The American Far Right Believes in THEIR freedom it does not believe in the freedom of other people except in the context of "You are free to choose what we tell you to choose." Don't talk about freedom when your people just stripped millions of American women of their freedom and with it everyone's freedom to keep their medical records private. Yes DlCKHEAD I know exactly what the American people just lost. Roe V Wade was first decided on the basic right of privacy between a patient and their doctor. Thanks to you and your people the US Government, any State Government or any federal or state agency of those governments can now access your medical records. Yes Stacy if any part of the US government wanted to check the records of Stacy Worth Huntsman to see what her mental health is or has been or if she ever had an abortion then YOU Stacy Worth Huntsman can't stop them because your people took that protection away from you. Who's the ignorant one?
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  222.  @StacyWorth  Unfortunately this is where self righteous hypocritical psychopaths like you are dead wrong. And before you start the self righteous Christianity barrage DON'T. Jesus told his people to preach the Good News to the world. HE DID NOT GIVE ANYONE THE RIGHT TO FORCE THEMSELVES ON ANYONE. That's before we get to the insane hypocrisy of people like you who demand people give birth and at the same time demand those children are not given an education or health care before you send them of to kill or be killed in the WARS you people start.
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  223.  @StacyWorth  YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I DO AND DON'T BELIEVE and yes I am screaming that back at your foul and disgusting arrogance. Go read Matthew 7 and this time put aside your arrogance and actually listen to what Jesus said about people with YOUR ATTITUDE.
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  224. If I have rage its because of ARROGANT SELFRIGHTEOUS PIECES OF DISGUSTING GARBAGE LIKE YOU
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  225.  @StacyWorth  And by the way when you do bother to look at Matthew 7 pay particular attention to verses 15 through 23 because its all about YOU and people like YOU.
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  226.  @StacyWorth  And when you get tired of denying that Jesus is speaking about YOU and people like YOU in Matthew 7 you can look up all the times he spoke to the Pharisees BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE.
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  227.  @StacyWorth  YOU ARE NOT A CHRISTIAN YOU ARE A PHARISEE Its the self-righteous arrogance and the way you attack people that gives you away.
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  228.  @StacyWorth  I NEVER SAID IT WAS You claim murder is wrong but you will happily send those children to war. You will happily execute some of them whether they are innocent or not. This is the problem with self righteous people YOU NEVER LISTEN. You people wont even listen to Jesus. He never forced his teachings on others. He used reason and common sense. He actually cared about people and their welfare. You need to start reading your bible instead of bashing people with it.
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  229.  @StacyWorth  Ans lets be crystal clear I NEVER SAID I SUPPORTED ABORTION OR KILLING BABIES That's your assumption.
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  230.  @StacyWorth  YOU REALLY HAVE LOST IT HAVEN'T YOU. Look at what you just wrote. You're now accusing me of WHAT YOU DO. JUST GO AWAY and take your pills.
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  231. If you do bother to pick up a Bible anytime soon, the try Matthew 7:21-23 That's Jesus and he's talking about PEOPLE LIKE YOU.
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  232.  @StacyWorth  I suspect from your delusional memes that you are actually software bot. ITS THAT OR YOU ARE PSYCHOTIC. You are certainly NOT a Christian. I do not consider evangelical fanatics like you who think they have the delusional right to FORCE themselves on others to be Christian.
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  233.  @StacyWorth  Jesus was never smug, snide, rude or forced himself on others. Your entire rant is over the fact you can't handle having your precious cesspool of radical indoctrination called out for being the dump that it is.
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  234.  @StacyWorth  And for the record I am not backing out of any of my ORIGINAL STANCE. HIllsdale is a SHlT school that teaches radical fundamentalism. Forcing your beliefs on anyone is WRONG. The World would be a much better place without disgusting sanctimonious hypocrites LIKE YOU.
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  235.  @StacyWorth  If you don't take advice from strangers then WHY ARE YOU HANDING IT OUT.
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  236.  @StacyWorth  You're not discussing IMPORTANT IDEAS YOU are being an rude disgusting self righteous FANATIC. You rant about radicalised leftists - well what about you and your precious Hillsdale? Its your blind hypocrisy that generates hatred. If you think me such a bad person then F⋃CK OFF and STOP HARASSING ME.
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  237.  @StacyWorth  If people get angry at your behavior smart people STOP and think WHY IS THAT PERSON ANGRY AT ME? But then you are too self righteous to be self reflective.
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  238.  @StacyWorth  People HATE self righteousness and you have one of the WORST cases I have ever seen.
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  239.  @StacyWorth  AND SO WE ARE CRYSTAL CLEAR Nobody has ever really rejected the Bible or Jesus, but MILLIONS of people have rejected people LIKE YOU. Now go see your doctor and get that tumour removed.
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  240.  @jimstoner6884  I know Australia is responsible for Murdoch, we tried warning the Brits and America what he was like and NONE OF YOU LISTENED. And Yes Australia is currently run by a conservative coalition at the moment. I'm glad you know that because on another thread on this page we were just described as radical communists. That's separate from what Kari Lake just ranted and raged about. I just checked the interview isn't on YouTube yet, but I expect it will be shortly. Kari Lake went bonkers and didn't realise the cameras were still on. We are actually kindred sprits here. I have been trying to tell Americans for months that all this political BS isn't an American thing. Its going on everywhere. The difference is that America is deeper down the hole than the rest of us. We even have our own version of Trump here. He's a billionaire mining magnate named Clive Palmer. His campaign so far has been straight out of the Trump play book. Its all based around fear and isolating people from reality. Dude we are on the same side here. Trump getting back in is a huge issue for us. If he takes America further down the hole that has both huge security and economic implications. Because of globalization, which America shoved down our throats by the way, all of our economies are interlinked. UNDERSTAND THIS - IF AMERICA FALLS WE ALL FALL.
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  241. IMAGINE what the NRA and other gun advocacy groups would say if the police were handing out the details of what sorts of guns various people had? IMAGINE what the libertarians would say if the Electoral commission started handing out the details of what money various PACs and Super PACs were getting and who they got it from??
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  242. Ukraine isn't actually getting money its getting hardware and most of the hardware is surplus or becoming outdated. Basically America is emptying its warehouses and getting rid of the stockpiles. That means those stockpiles will have to be replaced. That means some very juicy contracts for American military manufacturers. So when Biden sends a $billion to Ukraine it actually means a $billion contract for a supplier. The money is NOT leaving America at all.
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  243. The better question is why have NONE of them ever been held accountable. This is why Donald Trump was laughed at when he spoke at the UN. America has become a sad joke. Americans constantly talk about the "rules based order" and howl that Putin is a war Criminal and needs to be locked up and then lets people like Elliot Abrams, Henry Kissinger, John Bolton and others walk around free. One of the most notorious of these people is John Yoo who was Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel and wrote the infamous "torture" memos that allowed water boarding and the other "enhance interrogation" methods and that lead to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB. On Wikipedia it says "A report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility stated that Yoo's justification of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" constituted "intentional professional misconduct" and recommended that Yoo be referred to his state bar association for possible disciplinary proceedings." But that was overruled in 2010 by Senior Justice Department lawyer David Margolis. John Yoo now serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. America doesn't hold people accountable it PROMOTES THEM.
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  244.  @WEREFEAT003  In what way is that greedy psychopath Hilary Clinton a Marxist??? If your going to slander that cow then use your words properly. Besides most of those clowns who preached Marxism and Leninism have been proven to BE WRONG in so many ways that to take anything they said (or still say) without clarification to be idiotic. Your also forgetting how people twist things to mean whatever they like. In a few ways Marx wasn't that different to Adam Smith in that he thought the elite of his day who were mercantilists were out of control much they way we see our current oligarchs as out of control.
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  245. YEAH THERE IS A GROUP MANIPULATING THE GOVERNMENT They are called billionaire donors like Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, Rupert Murdoch, etc. and they operate via their Think Tanks like the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute.
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  246. When they listed the top 25 in congress for insider trading the top 4 were GOP *BUT there were more Dems on the list than GOP. Nancy Pelosi was the top Dem at #5. The corruption problem in Washington isn't Donald Trump, its Donald Trump PLUS the GOP and PLUS the Dems.
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  247. Oh, please don't go there.
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  248. The moment you mention any links to people like Charles Koch and the CATO Institute then you know its a nasty as all hell fascist entity with bad intentions. Add in people like the Mercers, DeVos family, Peter Theil (an admitted anarcho-capitalist) and you know there's nothing good about any of this stuff.
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  249. The most ridiculous part of the entire "woke" discussion is that up until a few years ago it woke had NOTHING TO DO with LBGT rights or anything on the political Left EXCEPT for the economic situation of African Americans. This is where people on the Left repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot and fail to get things done in meaningful ways. 1) They grab a hold of a cause; AND THEN 2) Hijack the public discussion with a convenient tag, like woke; AND THEN 3) Make it the center piece of EVERYTHING they see wrong with the world; AND THEN The Right come in with their culture war BS and bash the hell out of everything turning it into a gigantic ugly shitfest.
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  250. Trump hates ANYONE who gets noticed at his expense. He's a pure narcissistic sociopath with compulsion issues. You don't even need to be a psychologist to see him for what he is. He can't handle not being the centre of attention or handle rejection and cares so little for other people he will do anything to be the center of attention and be incredibly destructive towards anyone who rejects him.
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  251. It is. Its called the 14th Amendment. The problem is its the most inconvenient Amendment for the conservatives so they do everything they can to undermine it. America is finally starting to realise just how insidious Mitch McConnell's program of seizing control of SCOTUS and how much a threat to the American people it actually is. Like every nation both historical and current America is learning that its greatest threat is rarely external but internal. Go look at all the great empires of history the reason they all fell was because INTERNALLY they were already weak when the next empire emerged.
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  252. SORRY BUT - I went and checked this and maybe Thom could have done some checking too. None of what I found said she is or isn't corrupt but the link to mobsters is incredibly thin. There definitely is a direct link from Cannons husband (Josh Lorence) to John Rosatti, but there's not much of a link between John Rosatti and the Colombo crime family and nothing to suggest he's actually a mobster. According to FBI informant and former Colombo captain Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta "in late 1993, Victor Orena asked multi-millionaire businessman John Rosatti to provide cars from his dealership to be used to carry out murders, Rosatti declined and instead handed over $50,000 to Orena." (source Wikipedia on the page about the Colombo Crime Family). So there's no actual claim anywhere that Rosatti was actually a mobster just a claim that a mobster approached him at one time and the implication he paid money to NOT be involved.
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  253. WRONG word - Tuberville is too stupid to be an asset to anyone. BUT he sure is a BENEFIT to a lot of people that is the consequence of a political party that has lost its mind. He's a side effect of a much bigger problem. If you've listened to Thom about the 20+ billionaires who spend 100s of millions each election cycle then you'll know that they want puppets. They don't want people who can think they want people who they can yank their strings and have them dance a jig. This is a perfect example of CONSEQUENCES and/or SIDE EFFECTS and/or COLLATERAL DAMAGE. When the billionaires get their way and put clowns into congress who' surprised it ends up a circus.
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  254.  @MrCanucklehead75  WHAT LIE? She blamed Bernie Sanders for her loss during the 2019 campaign season in her support for Joe Biden. THAT'S A FACT She's a narcissist who can't handle rejection. She's just not as bad as Trump.
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  255. Yeah that's a point I have been making and very few others have. So fantastic to see someone else pointing that out.
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  256. EVERYONE GO AND Listen to the interview Prof. Mark Brown had with Sir Angus Deaton on his latest book. Its here on YT. The video is titled "The Rhodes Center Podcast: An Immigrant Economist in the Land of Inequality" Listen to what is said about the comparison between the Swiss Health Care system and the American Health Car System. According to Angus Deaton's Research - if America simply had the Swiss system 1) It would give (on average) every American 5 more years of life. 2) It would save America US$1 Trillion per year, which would be the equivalent of giving EVERY American a cheque for US$3,000 per year or simply saving them US$3,000 EVERY YEAR.
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  257. PS - Thom should do a follow up interview with Angus Deaton about this. And he should have Mark Blyth on the show regularly.
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  258. Yep you got it right. Its about power and stuff. They want more power so they can have more stuff. Anything that can be commandeered or hijacked and used is to be commandeered or hijacked and used with no regard to consequence. Anything that's in the road is to be eliminated by whatever means. We are headed directly into World War 3, but most people have it totally wrong. Its not going to be nation against nation. Its going to be internal tribe versus internal tribe as in civil wars and revolutions everywhere. If you put people under enough pressure they will eventually break. this relentless pressure from the top 1% EVERYWHERE is going to break people.
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  259.  @yvonneplant9434  I never said or claimed Australia was perfect. I really like America and have a lot of time for most Americans. My college friends cold explain the US Constitution so well I have no doubt its one of the greatest achievements in human history. Its why I hate your kind of American as much as I do. You have crapped all over the greatest gift the people of any nation was ever given. I believe in the US Constitution more than you do.
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  260. As soon as one of these pro-business libertarian clowns explains why the rest of the human race had to bail out the billionaires in 2008 I might listen to what they have to say. Libertarian economics can be simply summed up: "I want what I want and you can go f--k yourself"
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  261.  @earlviney5212  One of the things that America did NOT inherit from their British cousins was the idea of the "debtors prison" where they basically threw you in jail for your debts. Prof. Mark Blyth (Brown U.) mentioned that there used to be a saying: "Bail, fail go to jail!" Which basically meant that if you failed after being bailed out people just tossed you in jail. Mark says that's been replaced with" "Bail, Bail nobody goes to jail." You really have to screw up and do a real crime to go to jail like Elizabeth Holmes did.
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  262. To America: This behavior of this SCOTUS no longer just involves America. Absolutely this is way more important to you that anyone else, but for every country that trades with America and especially any country with security arrangements with America this SCOTUS is of serious importance. If any American company gets into an issue for activities outside America they drag the case back to America. Go and look up the case with Steven Donziger and Chevron. That case had nothing to do with America or American courts. Yet it was dragged back to the American Courts where Chevron had everything in their favor. As for security who knows how far this court will go in future. Today they are making SOCIO-POLITiCAL decisions for 328 million people who did NOT vote them into office. What decisions will they make in future that might have grave security implications. The 45th President has been found (in breach of American laws) in possession of classified materials. What if this court makes some ridiculous decision regarding that? What are other countries meant to do if future Presidents just do as they please with classified materials and there's no recourse? FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. A bunch of my friends were pre-law and we ended up discussing the constitution a lot. I can barely believe what's happening with SCOTUS. This is the sort of stuff they told me could never happen. The system of "Checks & Balances" was rock solid. I don't think anyone ever considered that a pack of billionaires along with a few insanely corrupt Senators could smash that system, but they have. SCOTUS is a massive issue but if you don't FIX THE SENATE and get rid of the cancer that's there it won't matter.
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  263. Modern political theory 101 course notes: 1) Whatever we do is fantastic. 2) Whatever they do is evil, wrong stupid and will destroy the nation even when its something we'd do anyway. 3) Spin is truth, Logic is false and evidence means nothing unless its evidence that we can use against others. As the maestro of logic Rudolph William Louis Giuliani said "truth isn't truth."
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  264.  @A_kiwis_view  Yep, go look at history when the the system fails only 2 things happen. New leadership or a Revolution followed by new leadership. The only thing that might vary is how violent the revolution is.
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  265. To all of Thom's watchers. Trump endorsed Kari Lake whos running for governor of Arizona had a train wreck interview with Australian 60 Minutes that was broadcast free to air only hours ago. Before she stormed out she abused the reporter and gravely insulted Australia. FYI - I am Australian, I went to college in America and this might blow up. This wasn't some silly rant by some clown on YouTube this was a Trump endorsed candidate going off the rails. Don't forget Australia, Britain Canada and others just spent most of the last 20 years supporting America in Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn't popular anywhere, but we stood by America. I was in Canada for work when Trump tore up NAFTA and hit them with tariffs. How do you all think this makes us feel about America? We are all now asking if there is anyway we can believe that America will be a reliable trading or security partner going forward.
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  266.  @eh3477  Hey we tried to warn the Brits what Murdoch was like when he moved there and they DIDN'T LISTEN. THEN we tried to warn the Americans when he moved there and they didn't listen either and even gave him citizenship. WTF do you want us to do, he's their problem now? They wanted him, they gave him citizenship and a passport. His own people keep screaming about "those people who come to America and screw things up!" Go tell Sean Hannity and Jesse Waters to deal with him. 😉😉🤔🤔
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  267.  @johnwright9372  I just watched a really interesting documentary called "Unfit" (here on YT) about Trump. There's a really interesting passage with Anthony Scaramucci where he talks about WHY Trump won. What's weird is he's a typical Harvard educated capitalist and he said almost identical things to what I heard Richard Wolff who's a Marxian Economist say over 2 years ago. The only thing they have in common is they both went to Harvard. Wolff for his BA and Scaramucci to do Law. Yet their observation that the 2016 Trump supporters REALLY DID make an economic decision to REJECT Hilary and the Status Quo. Trump's base at THAT TIME (not now in 2024) had been smashed economically and they NEEDED change. That's why they rejected all those GOP goons and then rejected Hilary.
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  268. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. For so many America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35.
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  269.  @greenthumb6241  We didn't exactly give you Fox news. YES Rupert Murdoch was born here. But we tried to warn Britain went he went there and they didn't listen. AND we tried to warn America when he went there AND YOU DIDN'T LISTEN EITHER. PLUS - Do you know that America changed its citizenship laws because of him and how he managed to buy Fox in the first place? If you want to know about it ask me, but its not a quick story. In its simplest - for over a decade Australians found it very hard to work in America and that had profound affects on the careers of 1000s of Australians and I'm one of them.
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  270. YEAH absolutely and I have the same thing to add as I have in a couple of other places This M0R0N needs her facts checked. Hilary Clinton did not lose because of anyone else but Hilary Clinton. Her and her fans are still blaming everyone else and not taking any responsibility for what happened in 2016 and its disgusting. When will they get over themselves and accept some responsibility. For anyone who wants to check go and look up the interview that Rana Foroohar gave to the Realignment Podcast. Its easy to find just search "rana foroohar realignment." Its episode 301 and about 29 minutes she she explains where BOTH the GOP and Dems went wrong with handling Trump in 2015 primaries and 2016 election. Also Mark Blyth predicted Trump would win more than 6 months out form the 2016 election for similar reasons. This is why is just so egregious to hear YET ANOTHER Hilary Clinton symp blaming other people for their failure.
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  271. Seriously Thom - Steve Schmidt is NOW a RELIABLE information source. Hers's a pathetic grifter who along with Rick Wilson started the Lincoln Project which did what exactly? Yeah the LP made lots of money for its founders and did some clever clever clever advertising that got what EXACLTY? This guy is one of the turd brained clowns that wrecked American politics and turned political campaigns into M0R0NIC SHlTFESTS. If anyone doubts it go and look for a book talk his buddy Rick Wilson did at the Commonwealth Club of California in 2018 where he explains how they won election campaigns. Yeah its a long vid to watch but its a real eyeopener on how America's election system was eaten from the inside out by narcissistic turb brains like Steve Schmidt.
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  272.  @moonchildspirit5581  Just when we thought America's level of crazy had gone too far, it goes for another high.
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  273.  @irvingkurlinski  It was well predicted. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever." - George Orwell.
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  274.  @irvingkurlinski  That's at the core of what Prof. Mark Blyth calls Angrynomics. He's someone Thom should be interviewing on a regular basis. If you haven't heard the term look it up. He's part of f lose collective of mavericks who are speaking about this stuff.
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  275. When they listed the top 25 in congress for insider trading the top 4 were GOP *BUT there were more Dems on the list than GOP. Nancy Pelosi was the top Dem at #5. The corruption problem in Washington isn't Donald Trump, its Donald Trump PLUS the GOP and PLUS the Dems.
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  276. Oh yeah if you want to single out the Murdoch's for being a major part of the problem then go right ahead. If that family had a mysterious plane trip and couldn't be found. We wouldn't be sending out a search party.
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  277. And for the religious ones ask them to explain Matthew Chapter 7. And before they object, point out that you know that's Jesus himself speaking. If you don't know Matthew 7 is the 3rd of 3 chapters covering the Sermon on the Mount and its all about frauds. The first 2 chapters are all about being sensible and nice but the 3rd chapter is a warning. Yes Jesus himself not only predicted frauds would exist but told people how to identify them. Its also not the only time Jesus or the other disciples warned about frauds, but its the most significant because its part of the Sermon on the Mount.
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  278.  @max420thc  FOR what DlCKHEAD? What will al those federal employees be arrested? You do know there's this process before you can arrest people. FIRST - there has to be an actual crime. SECOND - there has to be something that says "that person" should be arrested in relation to "that crime." THIRD - Oh SHlT I forgot your one of "those people" who doesn't believe in the law or due process.
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  279. Well I'll take the other more pragmatic view on his first point. There's NO GUARANTEE that Trump won't win. Hilary tried and lost that with some of the most stupid campaign strategies ever and she's now head of Biden's re-election team. I'm Australian but went to college in America U. Illinois). So I know the Midwest and Rust Belt fairly well. The moment I heard she wasn't going to campaign in Michigan I knew she was in trouble because I knew the Rust Belt was not going to take that sort of arrogance well. I wasn't alone in thinking she was going to lose. Both Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth predicted she'd lose but for different reasons. Rana Foroohar said it was her link to NAFTA and Mark Blyth because the Dems had just screwed so many of their BLUE states over time and time again. Not only did Hilary lose Michigan but also Ohio and Penn becoming the first Democrat since Dukakis in 1988 to lose all 3. Even Gore and Kerry won 2 of those 3. If you look at the EC votes if Hilary had won those 3 as Bill and Obama had she would have won. What NOBODY on America's Left has been willing to explain or even face up to was how Trump went from 63 million votes in 2016 to 74 million votes in 2020 when every poll for 2 years had said his base was shrinking. 1) The polling WAS WRONG and NOT by a little but by a staggering amount. An extra 11 million people turned out in 2020 to vote for this guy. Hate him all you like but he knows how to appeal to particular crowds. Jesse Ventura said he learned it from Pro-Wrestling. 2) Despite all the crap and craziness his people really do see him as someone who's going to save them from the career politicians who have made their lives miserable for the past 30+ years. They don't care at all about facts or evidence or how much BS he tells. His base hates the Washington Elite so much that they'd vote for a rapid dog if it would bite one of those elitist snobs. And yes I know Trump is actually one of those elitist snobs, but he knows how to sell his base a different story. EVERYONE FORGETS that before he beat Hilary Trump beat of 16 GOP favorite sons including Jeb Bush and he didn't just beat them he wiped the floor with them. America better wake up to itself and the Democrats need to take the coldest of cold showers and realise that those 74 million might turn out to be 85 million next year.
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  280. Following on from the Rand corporation report Bernie mentioned. Recently Richard Wolf mentioned a report from the Congressional Budget Office on family wealth. Its easy to find by googling "congressional budget office family wealth" (the publication number 57598) Its downloadable but the main graph on the web page is interactive and you can see that data. Right now the bottom 50% of America is worth $2.3 Trillion while the top 10% is worth $82.4 Trillion. That's 36x the combined wealth for 1/5th the number of people. If you do the math each person in the top 10% of America is worth (on average) 180x what each person in the bottom 50% (on average) is worth. I don't know why Bernie isn't screaming from the roof top of congress about this report as his people in his office should have received it. Also that Rand report on wages is easy to find by googling "rand wages report" Its titled "Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018" (the report number is WRA516-1) FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America which is part of why I watch America. I also watch America because our economics are also run by people who went to Harvard & Yale. I checked our Bureau of Statistics and there data (which is presented differently) shows that our top 20% are 90x the net worth (on average) of our bottom 20% (on average).
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  281. There's already a string of words for it. Oligarchy - This is a more general term to describe any system of rule by a small elite of any type. All the rest below are specific forms of Oligarchy. Check Wikipedia if you want to know more. Monarchy - rule by a single person who inherited their position (North Korea) Dictatorship - rule by a single person who did not inherit their position. Theocracy - rule by a small elite priesthood (Iran, Saudi Arabia) Plutocracy - rule by a financial elite. (eg. America) Kleptocracy - rule by an elite who steal the nations resources and wealth. (eg. Russia)
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  282. I'M AUSTRALIAN AND WE KNOW ABOUT THIS.
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  283. The most obvious issue with SCOTUS is the hijacking of it by elitists. The Federalist Society, which started at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago now has almost complete control of SCOTUS. There are currently 4 Harvard and 4 Yale on SCOTUS. The other judger is Amy Coney Barrett who went to Notre Dame for her JD but is also a know member of the federalist Society. Of the nine judges they replaced most went to Harvard at some point in their education. No one can deny Harvard is a good education system but allowing a group to form that strong of a power base and then get their way is incredibly dangerous. As the saying goes, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely!" and the current corruption of the SCOTUS is so bad that every American and every non-American who relies in some way for America to function as a responsible global citizen should be concerned.
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  284. IMAGINE what the NRA and other gun advocacy groups would say if the police were handing out the details of what sorts of guns various people had? IMAGINE what the libertarians would say if the Electoral commission started handing out the details of what money various PACs and Super PACs were getting and who they got it from??
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  285.  @LisaForTruth  I know that - when Newsom was suggested as a VP to Kamala that came up and it was pointed out either of them could simply change their residence. I just can't see Kamala winning as the top of the ticket. She must be intelligent or she'd never have got into Law School let alone passed and then passed the bar exam, but that's not a requirement for POTUS. The only true requirement in any democracy is being able to convince people you're worth voting for. Skills, training, experience,.....etc are all nice but mean nothing if you can't convince people that you're the person and Kamala failed that test badly in 2020. Maybe she's learned. I don't know on that. The thing that scares me most about Kamala is her ability to stand on the World stage because (as I have said to others) we don't need America to fix the problems the World faces on the global scale but WITHOUT America its so much harder. The next US President doesn't just have to get into the Whitehouse but they have to make a POSITIVE IMPACT on the world. On that Biden is a failure and Trump is a disaster. *So the next POTUS has to be markedly BETTER and these clowns waiting for 2028 are NEVER going to be an answer because if they can't step up now then they are never going to step up in the way that's needed.
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  286.  @pinetree909  AND THE REST OF US can't believe that people LIKE YOU refuse to see that Biden is NO LONGER ABLE TO DO THE TASK. And I really do wish I could scream that at you and the others like you. YES - Joe did a great thing and got Trump out of the Whitehouse but ITS TIME for him to go. Tom Brady had to face it was time to stop playing football Mario Andretti had to face that he couldn't keep driving race cars. 1,000s and 1,000s of people have to face the fact that their time is up every day. Somebody somewhere right now is probably telling their aged parent that they can't drive a car anymore or do something else.
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  287.  @MaggieMiller1  AND THAT'S exactly why the Dems keep losing. So long as you keep thinking that you RISK something rather than OFFERING A SOLUTION you fail and fail and fail and keep on failing. This is where the Biden supporters right now are headed for ANOTHER disaster. Look at SCOTUS. The Dems have held the Whitehouse for 20 of the last 32 years while the GOP has only had it for 12 (basically 1/2 as much time) and yet who now controls SCOTUS and with it the courts??????? The Dems MUST get out of this idiotic mindset of trying to please everyone with every decision. Its a trait Leftists and Left leaning centrist parties all across the world have. Its why they keep losing EVERYWHERE. 1) They wont make decisions that might upset someone so they don't make any decisions at all; OR 2) They make decisions that are so weak and so ineffective they fail; OR 3) They go over the top and make the grandest of all failures. See Mao's Great Leap Forward or what the Soviets did to the Aral Sea for examples. I will grant anyone on the Left any day of the week and twice on any Sunday that THEY HAVE BETTER IDEAS. But their ability to get things done is hopeless. Its why they lose.
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  288.  @yvonneplant9434  We wont get to the state of Venus as we aren't close enough to the sun, and we don't have the right combination of elements in the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean we aren't FKD either.
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  289. Go watch the interview Sam Harris did on Triggernometry. He comes at this from a different perspective but its the same conclusion. Trump is that much of a threat that things like Ukraine, Hunter Bidens lap top and other political issues don't matter.
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  290.  @50-50_Grind  Therein lies the other major issue with America. Its not that the conservatives are against woke or wokeness, they are against EVERYTHING they don't like. The problem with Americans is they have an incredible combination of childishness and selfishness. Its not unique to Americans but its always present with them and when its let lose it flies with incredible ferocity. Anybody (and I do mean anybody) can get angry, frustrated and throw a tantrum. Its just when Americans do it there's a good chance they are holding a gun or have their finger poised over a big red button.
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  291. HEY THOM Damaging America for 40 years????? What about the rest of the world or don't you think about our pain, misery and suffering. Because we all got told things like: "This expert out of Harvard says that competition will get you better services at lower prices. Now start selling off all of your state owned assets like buildings, roads and power stations. But only sell us the good ones because Milton told us 'Greed is Good' and we don't need the stuff that wont make us money." I'm Australian and you know that sweet little power grid in Texas that works so awesome that children die frozen in their beds. Yeah the one that was designed by an Economics Professor at Harvard. Well we had an Australian go to Harvard and when he came back he did the same thing to our water systems. He told us the same stuff: "The best way to distribute resources is with an unrestricted free market." He even bragged to the Germans DW network in one of their water documentaries about how great our "sophisticated" water market was. A while back there was a news item here on YT about rising energy costs. It was before the current crisis. In the middle of the discussion a guy claiming to be Romanian told us all to go f--k ourselves because other Europeans and Americans had come to Romania and got them to privatise the Romanian energy market. Do you know what the Romanians were told? "Competition will get you better services at lower prices." Just like everywhere else where massive privatisation programs were done the services went down and the prices went up because everyone also forgot that Uncle Milton also said: "The only purpose a corporation has is to deliver profits to its owners." Better services at lower prices don't fit well with Uncle Milton's ideology. So Thom, Please stop thinking that these are just American issues.
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  292. How about we call it the Clobama Party because its run by the Clintons and Obamas.
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  293. I'm Australian and the interesting thing on that is that Charles has hinted in the past that countries like Australia should consider their future and constitutional arrangements. After the last time we had a referendum on it failed quite a few Australian Republicans said they'd wait until Elizabeth stepped down or died. So I we'll have another referendum on the subject. If the Australian Republicans are smart (which they weren't last time) they'll wait a respectful amount of time and be respectful to our past and likely win. If they repeat the stupidity of last time they'll lose. The one thing I can say Australians don't want is a highly politicised head of state like America does. That was what some of them wanted last time and was why it lost.
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  294. Not necessarily. Like every system of government its about HOW its applied. If there was a theocracy that actually did follow Jesus or a few other prophets then there'd be free health care for all, free education for all, there wouldn't be the money in religion like there is today. If those maniacs in Eastern Europe had actually followed some of what Marx told them about being fair those countries would NOT have collapsed they way they did. These days I hear so many people screaming about capitalism and the NEVER point out that its the current from of rapacious capitalism we now have that's the problem. They all forget that under the post WW2 Keynesian system inequality was lowest its ever been, WEALTH increased across most of society. Then Reagan and the neoliberals started pulling apart all the things that had made American society so wealthy that they went to the Moon with the spare change. The things is if you let ANY of these political systems go unchecked into the hands of people who will abuse society it doesn't matter what kind of "ocracy" or "garchy" that you have the bulk of society will end up suffering.
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  295. That's actually the real threat getting young women to use their brains. Conservatives want those girls back in the home making babies, not in college, not having a career and MOST OF ALL not having an opinion of their own.
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  296. Right now here in Australia we are having the worst floods in our recorded history and its going to cost billions. Before this we had bush fires that cost billions. Before that we had drought and it cost billions. Every time someone says we need to shut down our coal industry they ask *"Who's going to pay?"
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  297. To ALL I was checking something the other day. Just after Trump lost the 2020 election he ordered/allowed the execution of 3 Federal prisoners. It was very unusual because it was the first time in over 140 years a president had ordered or allowed anyone during the Lame Duck period. There is no law it just became tradition to leave it to the incoming President. What I found were 2 extraordinary facts. 1) After the riots of January 6th Trump had or allowed 3 more executions on January 13, 14 and 16 of 2021. yes in the post January 6th turmoil when there was no effective government 3 people were actually executed and we KNOW trump had the 3 in November and December killed because he told everyone he did it. 2) Between July 14, 2021 and September 24, 2021 Trump had or allowed 7 executions to take place. There is no doubt that some of those crimes were horrendous and justice might well be served by executing those perpetrators. Since the resumption of executions in 1976 the US Federal Government has only executed 16 people. Mostly its done by the states. Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Obama and Biden COMBINED had NOBODY executed. Bush Junior executed 3, one of whom was Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma Bomber. Those 3 happened in June 2001, June 2001 and March 2003 so were nowhere near the election campaign for 2004. Trump did not execute anyone until July 2020 when the campaign was underway. In fact 1 happened during the GOP convention on August 26th and another the day after the convention on August 28th. The timing is bizarre and leads to only one conclusion - Donald Trump had 7 people executed to help win the election as his campaign faltered over his mishandling of COVID, and when that failed he lashed out and had 6 more people killed. WHY NOBODY IN THE MEDIA IS POINTING THIS OUT IS A MYSTERY.
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  298. He claims to be a Harvard educated man then why can't he just accept reality. These people just keep pumping this garbage narrative and when pressed he starts on an election from 1/2 a century ago. And again near the end he said regarding the claims of election fraud "we haven't had that debate" So what were all those court cases where they never produced any evidence about? These people are truly demented because any fact they don't like they treat as if it doesn't exist.
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  299. I'm Australian and that case is of huge concern to us because Chevron is a major player in our gas industry.
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  300. For everyone interested here's the full Henry Wallace quote from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  301.  @mikeboothe  I the classic libertarian mantra. "I want what I want and everyone else can go to hell"
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  302.  @brucehitchcock3869  Do you know what Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia and Iraq all have in common? They all had democratically elected governments overthrown with the support of America. Yeah even Saddam Hussein operated a democracy and won elections. Sure they were corrupt but he was an elected head of state that America handed over for execution. Allende's mistake was that he told the CIA to go away and Chile would do what they wanted to do with their natural resources. And Chile has the best copper resources in the world. Several of the worlds leading engineering companies have major offices in Santiago to support that industry. I'm an engineer and after oil, gas and iron the next most important resource for building the world as you know it is COPPER. Think about how many devices you own with copper in them? Every electrical device you own has copper. Then there's the water and gas piping. Then there's all the other uses in alloys - brass, bronze, etc. If you control the worlds best copper resources you control the worlds economy. Allende's mistake was not realising how ruthless the world he lived in really is.
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  303.  @nedludd7622  Absolutely correct. If you want to see one of the more poignant memes of all time type into google "aboriginal meme boat people" I forget who originally drew it but when there were a staggering number of boats coming with middle eastern asylum seekers in the post 9/11 era the Howard government stated "We'll decide who comes here and under what conditions" there was a political cartoon that started that meme. So yeah mate MOST but not all Australians of European descent are well aware we are the descendants of boat people. I'm of Anglo descent - last name wilson is kinda obvious. As far as I know both my mothers and fathers families came here late 1800s BY BOAT. Also most of Australia's post WW2 immigration was by boat. We call them "10 pound Poms" not because they weighed 10 pounds but the ticket to Australia for Brits cost £10. In that Post WW2 era we also got a massive influx of Italians, Greeks and Turks with a scattering of other Europeans who just wanted out of the mess that Europe was and they all came by boat. I checked to see if America had an equivalent meme. Just google "native american meme immigration"
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  304. Just so we are a bit more clear. In that post WW2 era Australia needed to replace the men we'd lost fighting all over Europe and Asia as well as grow. We were a very small population and most of the people who came we needed. We did this massive power and irrigation scheme that was our equivalent of the Tennessee Valley project called the Snowy River Scheme. Most of it was built by European migrants. In my home state of Victoria we built out the Latrobe Valley power stations that enabled our manufacturing to grow. Most of that was done by European migrants. So its not like we haven't had massive influxes in the past. The problem Australia has right now is we already have a triple whammy of housing crisis, energy crisis and water crisis all at the same time. We've had mismanagement FROM BOTH SIDES of politics. Our elections for decades have been a choice of what kind of SHlT we'll eat for the next 3 years.
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  305. ​ @nedludd7622  Yeah the Brits made a mess of Palestine. By the time of the post WW2 "what do we do now" moment the Brits basically just wanted to get TF out of that mess. They TIRED to tell everyone it was going to end in tears, but then everyone wanted everything without any compromises. I actually went to college in America (U. of Illinois) and I had an really weird moment at a party where I encountered some hard core Zionists. I had no idea who they were or what their issue with me was. The next day I told one of my best friends who was Jewish about what happened. 30+ years later I still remember him putting his hand to his face and saying "Oh shit, you've met them." He then explained to me how the "ultra-Zionists" as he called them were the Jewish equivalent of the KKK. They are what we now tend to call "ultra-nationalists." The craziest thing about what my friend told me was that for however nasty they were to me they'd be much worse to him because he had friends who weren't Jewish. It was a really good point about ultra-nationalists we don't often hear about. They might be vicious to outsiders, but they are even more vicious to their own people because they need to keep them in line. We see this in a number of regimes that are incredibly harsh to their own people as they claim how they are "protecting the state" or "protecting their culture" from bad influences.
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  306. YEARS AGO BACK IN THE 1990s I remember and American psychologist explaining these sorts of mass shooters and he labelled it "Rambo Syndrome." These days some people call it "suicide by cop." I always thought the Rambo label was wrong because the movie character John Rambo never tried to commit suicide, while the people who do these sorts of shootings are trying to commit suicide. There's nothing new in this explanation as psychologists have been trying to explain it for several decades. However there are 2 other types of people who do this. 1) The mentally disturbed attention seeker. I'm Australian and Martin Bryant who murdered 35 people and injured 23 others in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which at the time was the worst mass shooting in the world, is an example. He has a very low IQ and is borderline mentally retarded. He's very rare in that he survived the incident and was interviewed by police and psychologists. Just recently the police interviews were released. They're chilling because they show his excitement at the attention he was getting. 2) The ex-military PTSD sufferer who has a disconnect with reality. Again we have an example of this in Australia with Julian Knight who shot 7 people dead and injured 19 more in 1987. He'd been dumped from the Army for psychological reasons after stabbing a superior. On a documentary about that massacre they showed excerpts of his walk around the scene of the killings. Its chilling just how disconnected from reality he was. On that documentary a childhood friend related how several weeks later when the fog had cleared from his brain and he realised what he'd done he curled up in a ball and cried for 3 days. Its a sad example of the military recruiting somebody they should not have recruited, then teaching him some lethal skills and then dumping him out the back door like a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
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  307. WHAT Trumps punishment SHOULD BE versus WHAT IT WILL BE are 2 very, very, very, very different things. Sadly the fact is Trump is an ex-US President and as such is entitled to Secret Service protection. So whatever happens must take that into consideration and that's just the first of many things. No matter what anyone thinks this is an extraordinary event for America. Despite all that various America presidents have done over 200+ years deserving of punishment Trump is the FIRST convicted in a criminal court. This puts America into unchartered territory and NOBODY knows where it will go.
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  308. You are 1/2 right. Bernie needs to stay out of 2024 and 2028 no matter who is running. Bernie needs to take on the role of the elder wiseman and guide the next generation to NOT make the mistakes he made and get better outcomes. Bernie's too old and he's had his go. What he should have done AFTER 2020 was grab the younger people like Ossoff, Warnock, Padilla and get them organised to do stuff in the Senate. Bernie should have dragged Andrew Yang away from the corporatist scum in the DNC and guided him. Yang was lead to the slaughter house by the DNC. That question that killed his New York run was a setup. Bernie should have jumped in and helped Warnock smash Herschel Walker. That race should never have gone to a run off. At the first go that should have ended in complete humiliation for the GOP. Bernie can't be president but he can be the Bill Belichick who coaches and guides a team. And for exactly the same reasons Biden needs to do similar. Kamala is not worth discussing. Not unless something seriously changes and she steps up her game orders of magnitude.
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  309. Thom I think you'll find they want to go all the way back to the original form of Democracy in Ancient Athens when only "citizens" got to vote. In that system the only people who were citizens were men and only those who had been vouched for of who had the money to join the club. The other 99% of the population were women, children and slaves.
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  310. HEY TOM and everyone else here's an idea. According to the Originalists like Neil Gorsuch unless its stipulated by congress then nothing is allowed that wasn't already in existence at the time they wrote the constitution. Under their logic abortions are not allowed because they came after the constitution was written. Under their logic the EPA cannot regulate CO2 Emissions because the EPA came after the constitution was written. If you use Neil Gorsuch's wonderful judgement on the EPA then basically unless its a muzzle loading flintlock then its not protected under the 2nd Amendment. Guns that self load or that use brass cartridges or plastic cartridges did not exist when the 2nd Amendment was written. According to Judge Gorsuch congress must specifically write directives to the ATF telling them which guns and ammunition are allowed to be owned by the general public. Sorry gun nuts but I think Gorsuch might have screwed you.
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  311.  @TheMobileHomestead  Your 100% right. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I did engineering but it was the late 80s so everyone around me had done civics in high school. Not only did they know how the system was meant to work but they could explain it. So from an outside perspective, but with some understanding I think Senate reform is the most important thing that happens in America. There's been all this talk in recent years about the Electoral College system for POTUS, but then POTUS was never meant to be the main political force. Newt Gingrich made a big issue about that when he became speaker. The Speaker & House were meant to run the nation, the Senate were meant to check things, SCOTUS was meant to make sure it was all legal and POTUS was meant to sign it and then shake hands with foreign dignitaries. What Mitch McConnell has done to the Senate is mind boggling. He's not only wrecked the Senate but also the American Judiciary. What he's done its so profound and has such a massive influence that he's more of a threat to Western Democracy than Communism ever was. Consider this: How is any foreign company meant to do business with any American company when the only means to resolve any dispute is via the American courts? Go check the Chevron case with Ecuador over what Texaco (now part of Chevron) did. After losing the case they dragged it back into the America courts and even sent the lawyer representing the Ecuadorians to jail.
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  312. I agree the entire Nobel prizes system is now so corrupt and bent and twisted that its meaningless. The fact they not only awarded the Peace Prize to a monster like Kissinger is just the start of a very long list of hypocritical winners. In that vein 3 of the most ridiculous I know of are: - Barrack Obama got the Peace Prize as he was increasing drone strikes that lead to more innocent lives being lost. - William Nordhaus won the economics prize for his modelling of climate change economics despite the fact he was instrumental in scuttling climate change policies during the Bush Whitehouse in the early 90s. - Milton Freidman who with Kissinger worked with Pinochet and re-wrote the economics of Chile and that's before anyone starts discussing what Freidman's garbage has done to the rest of Western Society.
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  313. SORRY THOM You are 100% right that Trump was involved in an insurrection, but you and others are 100% WRONG that he committed treason. This is because the LEGAL DEFINITION of treason in America is very narrowly limited to times of war. If America had the same basic definition of treason that almost every other country on the planet has then Trump's phone call to Ukraine should have had him charged with treason because he was organising with a foreign party to act against American interests. If America had the same basic definition of sedition then Trump would have been in handcuffs after January 6th and in many countries would have been executed. BUT the Founding Fathers decided rightly or wrongly to get rid of the standard definitions of both treason and sedition which the British had used with utter ruthlessness against the American Colonials and every other nation they took over. Its also what many other European nations used to maintain control of their homeland as well as foreign territories. That's why America has the Impeachment system, which as far as I know NO OTHER COUNTRY in history has ever had. Its (as far as I know) unique to America, because the Found Fathers realised that with such narrow definitions of Treason and Sedition they would not have been able to deal with people like Trump. What the Founding Father's didn't plan on was people using the Senate and Supreme Court as weapons to undermine it.
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  314. THIS CLOWN ON THE PHONE is exactly why the Americans get into SO MUCH TROUBLE on the international stage. They think a gun is the way to solve every problem. You cant just go an assassinate a foreign head of state because you don't like how they run their country. This is the STUPIDITY of American EXECEPTIONALISM - Americans think they have THE RIGHT to interfere in other countries and if those countries DO NOT do as they are told the CIA, NSA or one of the other 3 letter agencies will go in and ENFORCE COMPLIANCE. JUST STOP telling the rest of us how to run our countries and EVEN BETTER - STOP GIVING GUNS to CRAZY PEOPLE!
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  315. Thanks I did just that and found it. I hate to break it to Thom but this Rabbi is just doing what so many other people have done. Rabbi Kulka, like others, is trying to fit text written 1000s of years ago in an ancient language to suit their narrative. Anybody who has ever taken a simple honest examination of the first chapter of Genesis knows that what he is claiming about Adam being androgynos is complete nonsense. Its just as stupid as so many other clowns who try and fit some part of the bible to their narrative.
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  316. "Word has it" journalistic lingo to let you know what's about to be said has NOT BEEN FACT CHECKED.
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  317. To America: This behavior of this SCOTUS no longer just involves America. Absolutely this is way more important to you that anyone else, but for every country that trades with America and especially any country with security arrangements with America this SCOTUS is of serious importance. If any American company gets into an issue for activities outside America they drag the case back to America. Go and look up the case with Steven Donziger and Chevron. That case had nothing to do with America or American courts. Yet it was dragged back to the American Courts where Chevron had everything in their favor. As for security who knows how far this court will go in future. Today they are making SOCIO-POLITiCAL decisions for 328 million people who did NOT vote them into office. What decisions will they make in future that might have grave security implications. The 45th President has been found (in breach of American laws) in possession of classified materials. What if this court makes some ridiculous decision regarding that? What are other countries meant to do if future Presidents just do as they please with classified materials and there's no recourse? FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. A bunch of my friends were pre-law and we ended up discussing the constitution a lot. I can barely believe what's happening with SCOTUS. This is the sort of stuff they told me could never happen. The system of "Checks & Balances" was rock solid. I don't think anyone ever considered that a pack of billionaires along with a few insanely corrupt Senators could smash that system, but they have. SCOTUS is a massive issue but if you don't FIX THE SENATE and get rid of the cancer that's there it won't matter.
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  318. Garland isn't so much a wimp but a federalist society member and an institutionalist. As an Institutionalist his views are reasonably well known that he believes the OFFICE of the presidency to be sacrosanct and it much not be besmirched in any way including dragging any president or ex-president through any court case. This is the same stupidity that lead Gerald Ford to write a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon despite the fact Nixon was never charged with anything. The stupidity of that ideology is that it ignores the fact that the President can commit actual crimes that must be dealt with or the very institution they are trying to protect becomes corrupted to the point of being irrelevant.
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  319. So which MMT or MMT sympathetic college professor have you been listening too? Mark Blyth, Adam Tooze, Stephanie Kelton,..... Or do you listen to geopolitical people like Peter Zeihan?
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  320.  @thiosemicarbizidebenzoylal2921  Yeah I know that. Freidman was the guy behind both Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Thom's done a couple of great exposés on neoliberalism and at least 1 book. He's covered the history of how Freidman and others started their crap in the 1940s and had to wait until the 1970s to unleash it.
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  321. I went and checked and checked the transcript. at 0:43 " we all know their corporate taxes are just the government's way of taxing poor people" and his justification for that claim is "I mean that that's those taxes are passed down whether in the price of the product or in jobs because I see that myself. I've been in corporate world for over 20 years that's what happens when corporate taxes go up either they lay people off they raise the price of their goods. uh. it's it's usually one of those two things." There was time when the wealthy were not taxed it was called feudalism that was noted for slavery or being indentured to the "Lord of the land" as granted to him by the sword of the king. Is that what this clown wants us to revert to? Some form of corporatized feudalism. This is the true stupidity of libertarians they are advocating for a from of anarchy where the wealthy just get everything without any obligation to society at all and deliver nothing to anyone but forms of enslavement and indenture. They all claim to be thinkers, like this guy claiming this leads to that, but they never go further than what's convenient. If a company gets taxed more and that lowers the bottom line then its stupid to sack people or lower wages, because either way you lose productive people. They leave because you make them leave or they leave for better wages somewhere else. Either way the company loses MORE money because its less productive.
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  322. This is NOT an American problem, this is now across the entire Western Democratic system. Remember the Panama Papers that showed how the rich used a Panamanian financial services company to do tax evasion on an industrial scale. NOBODY has even been charged let alone convicted of anything. That was followed by the Paradise Papers detailing a similar industrial system based in the Bahama's. Again NOBODY has even been charged let alone convicted of anything. That has been followed by the Pandora Papers detailing a system bigger and more widespread than either the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers detailed. So far NOBODY's been charged let alone convicted of anything. Can you see what's going on? The hyper-wealthy now have control of not only our governments but also our justices systems. Every society, tribe or nation that did that ended up in the flames of a peasant revolution.
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  323. ​ @charlesciminera5881  Yeah the only the super wealthy eve go to jail is when they rip off other super wealthy people - Theranos chick???? On America needing an actual leader the problem is that both the Dems & GOP are so tired to their big donors and doing what those donors want its impossible for a real leader to come from either. Its not like America doesn't have good leaders, its got plenty across various fields it just NONE of them are in politics. I was in America when Walter Payton was playing so I got to see true greatness. The fact he still inspires people to think about others less fortunate in society is incredible. So here's my hypothetical and sorry if its long: Imagine if Andrew Whitworth and Captain Brett Crozier ran on a ticket of "We will give the White House back to the American people. It does not belong to the Democrats or Republicans." If you go back before the great depression the President had very little to do with running the country. That was the job of congress lead by the speaker of the House. Newt Gingrich made a huge fuss that he was going to restore the power of the speaker. He went to great lengths to explain what the Presidents job was supposed to be and it wasn't running the country. So in Andrew Whitworth you have the latest WP Award winner and you saw his acceptance speech you'd want him leading a country. There's no doubt he's a guy who cares about the American people. In Brett Crozier you have a career military man who gave a massive chunk of his life to serving America and when the moment came he put his career on the line for the safety of the men and women he was entrusted to lead. Remember him leaving the ship and the crew cheering? Here's an image: Imagine Vladimir Putin (at 5'6") meeting Andrew Whitworth (at 6'7" and 330lbs) and the scene of Whitworths and wrapping around Putin's hand squeezing just enough to let Putin know. It would be worth voting for him for just that moment. Better that could run on a "We don't need policies, but 1. We will make congress do their job." They could just point out the issues and call out the committees to solve the problem. He could just do the Belichick "Do you job!" line. Plus Brett Crozier could have a ball calling out the waste in the military. Just spend 4 years cleaning the idiots and clowns out of the Pentagon. Its just an idea I thought up for: How can America do a reset without having to have a second revolution or second civil war? Because a second American revolution or civil war is monumentally bad for the entire Western World. For a lot of countries, Australia included, America is our most important trading and security partner. If you are wondering why people are so frightened of a second Trump presidency THAT'S WHY. The problem isn't just if he wins its also what happens if he loses again?
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  324.  @charlesciminera5881  Obama was close to being an independent but they manged to drag him into line pretty quickly. He promised a lot but actually got very little done, even when he had a super majority. That's how much of a failure he was, for the first 2 years he should have been able to pass almost anything and the only major thing he got past was a health care plan that was basically written by Republicans. Your assessment that the Dems & GOP act like criminal gangs is pretty damn close. I've never heard anybody describe them that way but its right on how they act. That's why I think a president who runs in a very unusual way might be a fix. Otherwise its civil war and that is as big of a problem as a nuclear exchange. It would be catastrophic to world trade and security. I'd put way more of the blame on Republicans for the divide in America but the Dems have been utterly hopeless at fixing it. I saw a recent graphic of the 25 worst offenders for insider training. The top 4 were GOP but there were MORE Dems on the list. They are just as bad as the GOP. We have similar issues here in Australia. We don't have the insider trading but we have a huge issue with people making decisions and then going to work for companies that were favoured by those decisions. There are rules in place to prevent it but they are never enforced. Then we have some raging maniacs including our own Donald Trump, a real POS named Clive Palmer. Right now he's using the EXACT same strategy Trump used in 2016. Our system also makes it possible for a very small party to get incredible power under certain circumstances. Its the same problem they have in places like Israel.
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  325.  @charlesciminera5881  If we are well informed about America its because the situation scares us so much. As I keep telling people America is the most important trading and security partner many countries have. Do you realise that the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020 is more people than every country in Europe except for Germany and Russia. The 3rd and 4th places are Britain and France both at 67 million. American's don't seem to realise just how big their nation actually is in terms of population. Have you ever heard of Bretton Woods? It was an economic conference in Vermont a year before the end of World War 2. All of the Allied nations were there and they decided how the worlds economy would work after the war. Everyone else was smashed and flattened and America had more than half the worlds gold reserves so the greenback became the worlds de-facto means of foreign trade. Everybody did well from the trade but America made billions on top of billions via the currency exchanges. Prof Richard Wolff talked about that aspect of Bretton recently, because there are now other means to trade - The Euro and Yuan. Its why Putin has demanded all oil & gas contracts are now paid in Rubbles. Putin might be crazy, his generals might be clowns but apparently he's had some good economic advice.
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  326.  @genossinwaabooz4373  I am still at a loss why that report is being screamed about from the roof tops. It shows that 10% of America has utterly screwed 50% of the country and then made another 40% pay for it. You'd think that every left leaning commentator would be going nuts and people like Marianne Williamson would be waving it like a Viking Shieldmaiden's axe while screaming at BOTH the Dems and GOP.
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  327. I am going to go 1/2 against Thom on this, because as Mitch McConnell, Diane Feinstein and others have shown NOT having limits can be just as worse because you can get entrenched cronyism which is like cancer and just as lethal to a functioning society. Just to check I looked up term limits and there's a Wikipedia page on term limits in the US. Couple of surprises: 1) POTUS is limited to 2 terms but VPOTUS has no limits. 2) Almost all of the state limits are 8 years in all sorts of mixtures of 2 and 4 year terms with a few places having 12 year limits. That seems to be the sort of thing Thom is talking about. Its too short for people to actually make any sort of a long term difference to their state. How do you do anything that's long term when you can't see it through from initial concept to final outcome?
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  328. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE tell this clown and all the others like her to STOP framing everything in terms of white supremacy. As a person from the subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan,....) she should know there are lots of racist narratives that have NOTHING to do with white people. I'm Australian and we have a staggering array of cultures here theses days AND EVERYONE of them has some "issue" with another group or several other groups. Whether you want to call those "issues" racism or cultural bias or tribalism IT DOES NOT MATTER these issues exist and they have nothing to do with white people. If you ever want to hear some really nasty comments get some of the Asians talking about each other or any of the subcontient people talking about each other. Plus has everyone forgotten about the Rwandan Genocide that rage between the Hutu's an Tutsi tribes? There was not a white person in sight of that mess. Racism is not just a white problem its human problem.
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  329. ​ @CyberiusT  A few years ago I worked with a guy born in India and one day he said some flippant comment and I remarked back that his comment was sort of racist. I knew he wasn't being serious or meant any harm but his next comment stunned me. He said Indian people are not racist. So I asked him about various peoples from countries around India and as I knew he would he said some fairly blunt things. I then asked him about a well known incident involving an Australia cricket player named Andrew Symonds who was of Afro-Caribbean descent in India and he said it wasn't racist when people in the crowd called him a monkey. Eventually I asked him what his definition of racism is and he said "Its what white people are!" He was actually surprised when I told him "No its when anyone degrades another person of a different race based on that persons race." This was a guy who was a well educated engineer. There are a lot of people who have been brought up to believe that only white people are racist and they are surprised to find out that's not true.
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  330. The better term to describe them is libertarian, but the way they are going about it is reactionary. The truly weird thing about comparing liberals to libertarians is they both found their ideology around the word liberty. My explanation of them is. Libertarians want the government to have as little power as possible so they have the liberty so they CAN FORCE their beliefs on others. Liberals want the government to have the power to regulate what limits people have so that they CANNOT FORCE their beliefs on others. What do you think?
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  331. ENGINEER HERE: This is the sort of thing people need to become way more educated about. Most people have NO IDEA how software is written or how it works AND ESPECIALLY how it can be manipulated AND EVEN WORSE how it can give the wrong answer. I write software for part of my living. I do industrial control systems and automation. Once the computer has the data and starts crunching it all comes down to the algorithm, BUT EVEN before that the data might be wrong. Look at what happened with the Boeing Max-8. Twice the sensor broke and twice the software acting on bad information flew the plane into the ground. There have been accidents where the AI in Tesla cars have been found to have caused fatal accidents. How many times have we heard how a computer system did something awful with records. Here in Australia we had this brilliant thing called "Robodebt" which was a system that was supposed to stop people getting more than they should from social services. It ended up taking millions of dollars off people it should not have. We still haven't got to the bottom of the that mess. Most countries have similar stories. The IT industry has acted, because of the money it can push on politicians through lobbying, gotten away with so much and the AI Revolution is just making that WORSE.
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  332. They aren't but then I think you are misunderstanding the power of symbolism especially to national and cultural identity.
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  333.  @juliehenderson1672  NO they should be allowed to fail the same way any small business does. Send in the receivers and chop it up into bits to sell off. The whole "Too big to fail!" should have been taken as a guilty plea for an anti-trust case. We are now living with the consequences of the cowardice of Eric Holder and his DOJ team at the time.
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  334. AUSTRALIAN HERE - This is exactly why the next US POTUS is such a big deal to the rest of the world. Either America will elect someone who can reign in this out of control SCOTUS or THE REST of the world will end up REBELLING AGAINST America and that includes all those nations that usually side with or are allied to America. No matter what any America thinks there is the simple fact that the US$ is the World's Reserve Currency. Almost all international trade depends on the STABILITY and RELIABILITY of the US$ and for that to happen 2 things have to exist. 1) The US Government is RELIABLE, RESPONSIBLE & PREDICTABLE; and 2) We can rely on the US Courts to be RELIABLE, RESPONSIBLE & PREDICTABLE. And with the current status of SCOTUS neither the US Government or Courts are RELIABLE when SCOTUS can simply overrule anything the US Government wants or overrule anything other courts adjudicate on including courts in other nations. Go look up the Steven Donziger case regarding what Texaco (now part of Chevron) did in Ecuador. How is anyone meant to do business with America when the US Courts behave like that?
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  335. Australian here looking at this from the outside. The craziest aspect of the American-Israeli thing is the GOP's near fanatical pro-Israeli stance, because one of the core fundamentals of GOP ideology is the complete dismantling of social welfare including public education and publicly funded health care. This is all summed up in Ronald Reagan's infamous "Welfare Queen" remark. Heres' the thing. Israel is now politically dominated by the ultra-orthodox Jewish population and they don't work at all. Their men sit in Yeshiva's all day long and study the Torah. Their women mostly stay at home and raise their large families. They get their food, rent, power and medical all paid for by the rest of society and its all underwritten by the American tax payer. Up until recently they rarely served in the military. So how does the GOP support the State of Israel with tax payer money that has a welfare system that they would NOT TOLERATE in America?
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  336. For everyone interested here's the full Henry Wallace quote from the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
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  337. Yeas and with that he also claims to be a Harvard educated man. If true then why can't he simply accept reality. These people just keep pumping this garbage narrative and when pressed he starts on an election from 1/2 a century ago. And again near the end he said regarding the claims of election fraud "we haven't had that debate" So what were all those court cases where they never produced any evidence about? These people are truly demented because any fact they don't like they treat as if it doesn't exist.
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  338. ​ @robertsharp3238  That is a very very very risky attitude because there is no doubt the Iranians HAD a nuclear weapons program in full swing before the treaty Obama got them to agree to. Since Trump went and did his typically childish thing of tearing up anything Clinton or Obama did that fat clown gave the Iranians the opening they wanted. PLUS (and this is only a guestimate) they traded something to the Russians for those drones. The Iranians have all the oil they need but they might be short of currency and the Ruskies have stacks of that. So maybe they Ruskies paid in gold - reasonable guess. Maybe the Iranians got something else, like N-triggers or other hard to come by parts or maybe the Ruskies traded a couple of tactical units. Not enough to do anything really bad but just enough to tell everyone else to FK-OFF.
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  339.  @robertsharp3238  The other thing is if the Iranians have any brains those facilities will be so far underground nothing will touch them. And before you can say Tom Cruise can do his Luke Skywalker drop the bomb down the hole trick - this is the real world. But then then again DUMBER things have been happening a lot lately.
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  340. Remember Trump did something no incumbent had done in over 130 years. He had people executed during the lame duck period after the election. I am not interested in the if they should or should not have been executed. What I am interested in his the double standard. For over a century presidents had left those decisions to the incoming administration. Trump said "No to that" and these 3 are bad people who have been judged and I am sending them to the grave. In the weeks following he pardoned the Nisour Square 4 who had killed innocent civilians 17 people in a massacre in Iraq including a child. So if you work for the brother of Trumps education secretary you can kill 17 people including a child and then get a pardon and if you don't you get a needle.
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  341.  @davidlafleche1142  Yeah you are right Trump never said or declared that "conservatives breaking the law is not illegal." But why don't you explain all those pardons for criminal convictions that his friends did?
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  342.  @davidlafleche1142  1ST I regularly point out the failures of not just the Dems and GOp but all of the establishment parties around the world. 2ND Don't ram or pound God down anyone's throat if you wan to be taken seriously. Its the quickest way to be told to FK-OFF. The dirtiest fact of BOTH historical and modern politics is how people have used "God" (or Gods) to hurt people. If you want to bring up as so many do that God will destroy the evil doers in politics and society then you better also believe he will do the same with the evildoers in religion.
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  343.  @TNuss  WTF is your problem? All those classified files he's been caught with ARE EVIDENCE. 🤷‍♂🤦‍♂ Were you born this dumb or did you take classes?
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  344. To both of you (and any others) this is why the rest of the world is getting more and more scared of America. I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s). I remember arguing with frat brothers that if America wasn't careful it could lose all that was great about it. They used to argue that the US constitution guaranteed that America could not go the way other nations had. Their 3 favorite reasons why America could never fall into the disaster that Soviet Russia was were: The 1st Amendment, The 4th Amendment and SCOTUS. If the government did something then the entire nation would find out via the free press. If the government wanted touch you then they couldn't because the 4th Amendment protected them from the "police state". Yes they used to explain the other Amendments (mostly the ones about trials). BUT MOST OF ALL they contended that SCOTUS would protect all their basic rights. My favorite argument with Trump trolls is "How do you explain that Trump signed away your 4th Amendment rights tot he NSA?" I then like to remind them the NSA is scanning all social media including their comments. I would love to catch up with all the guys again, maybe this year it finally will. Because I would love to ask them all "How come you guys said all this stuff couldn't happen and yet it has." Even the 1st Amendment is being trampled on. As an Australia we've all watched the Assange fiasco. I know that in the past that would have been laughed out of court of 1st Amendment issues. Not just for the press freedom either. The grievance issue would/could/should make it a slam dunk.
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  345. I'm an Australian who went to college in America (late 80s) and have been warning that this is a huge issue to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, Europe, the Philippines and many others. For so many America is our most important trading partner and MORE IMPORTANTLY our most important security partner. Like others we've staked our security future on things like the F35.
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  346. I'm Australian and been trying to warn about this garbage with Trump for months now. This nonsense of NOT putting Trump and his pack of Jan 6th organisers in jail right after that was always going to end up a problem for other nations. Its a shame Thom hasn't also mentioned the tensions in Fiji after their recent election or the ongoing issues in other pacific nations. WAKE UP AMERICA and DEL WITH TRUMP
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  347. HEY THOM: I'm Australian and someone deleted my comment referencing the Murdoch's almost instantly. WHAT IS GOING ON
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  348. In case you're wondering I referenced 2 episodes of ABC Australia's Media Watch program regarding our terrible 2019-2020 bushfires. On is from 4 Feb 2020 and the other from 9 Sept 2020. The first includes a public statement by James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn's debunking of the claims being made by Murdoch employees regarding how the fires were started by arsons and had nothing to do with climate change. The second program highlights the police report into those allegations and how the lies spoken earlier had been repeated by other Murdoch employees around the world.
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  349. AUSTRALIAN HERE: I have the simple answer DUH As in DUH - you are supplying the Ukrainians (as are we and others) with a giant pile of kick ass toys that they are putting a lot of Russian sons in the grave and causing Putin the biggest headache in Russian history. What part of retaliation don't you get? Do you really think the Russians ARE NOT going to try everything they can to cause as much chaos and harm to America and everyone else that they can? Under the circumstances they can't do anything direct so they have to go through indirect channels and that means spreading as much misinformation on social media that they can. Which has been made even easier by the idiotic greed of America's billionaire class. I bet those GOP clowns have their email inboxes full of bot generated nonsense. We are about to see a shitstorm of misinformation over the coming months and in so many ways the entire Western hemisphere will only have itself to blame because when we should have dragged social media back to something sensible WHICH NOBODY DID after the disaster of the Brexit campaign, which was stage managed by American Billionaire Robert Mercer via Cambridge Analytica. Brexit proved you could MANIPULATE public opinion with the right misinformation campaign.
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  350. It hasn't since Reagan gave explicit instructions to stop pursuing anti-trust cases. That's since spread into other areas the top 1% want the DOJ to stay away from.
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  351.  @ChillAssTurtle  Sorry, you misunderstood but the biblical word for slavery meant BOTH and other things. Yeah it meant literal ownership of a human BUT it also meant employee, indentured servant, serf as well as what we might now call a contractor. People don't realise that older languages didn't have the variety of words we now have and the older the language the fewer words they had. its what makes interpreting older languages difficult. I'm not an ancient Hebrew scholar but I know a couple of things. Its a language that's built around descriptive words not specific labels. The best example I know of is the word used for round objects. Ancient Hebrew didn't have specific words for circle, band, sphere, globe, disk, ellipse, oval, ovoid, cylinder,... It just had a word for labelling or describing round things. Its why the religious element of the flat earthers claim the bible calls the Earth, Sun and Moon flat disks because it uses the word to describe disks. It doesn't say they are disks it just says the Earth Sun and Moon are round. That comes up in flat earth discussions from time to time. The slavery thing comes up occasionally in discussions about what the bible did or didn't say about slavery and employment. Prior to the concept of modern economics and contract law the idea of an employee was almost non existent.
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  352. "Word has it" is journalistic lingo to let you know what's about to be said has NOT BEEN FACT CHECKED.
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  353.  @melanieking724  It was actually Ghostbusters 2 but then I'd forgotten that. Good point. Your explanation is better than mine.
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  354.  @lorenzoblum868  Fair enough.
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  355.  @lorenzoblum868  But I do like the Ghostbusters idea. And no where does Thom actually say where they got the expression pink slime from or why they are calling these fake news sites pink slime just that they are being labelled pink slime. Check the text.
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  356.  @lorenzoblum868  Yeah I saw that in the text and didn't buy it. Who's ever tried to pass off pink slime as meat??????????
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  357.  @lorenzoblum868  No. WTF are you asking that for? I've never heard anyone claim pink slime meant bad or fake meat, but the pink slime in Ghostbusters did make people fight against each other. I've never heard the term before today and it looks like a fairly recent label somebody has started and its not that clear why they started using it. That said its as good of a label as any for what people are doing.
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  358. "Word has it" is journalistic lingo to let you know what's about to be said has NOT BEEN FACT CHECKED.
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  359. I really like Prof Wolff, because he's at the very least giving an educated alternative opinion on economics, but there are times he lets brain take it too far. To call Capitalism unstable is to ignore what the terms stable and unstable actually mean. I'm an engineer and we have to learn and understand what stable and unstable actually mean because otherwise the modern world can't exist. Power stations and the power grid wont work, your car wont work and airplanes will tear themselves apart mid-air- that kind of stuff. Sorry this is a longish explanation. This is basic high school science level. Something that is naturally stable is something that will self correct from a disturbance. An example of stable system is a ball in a bowl. If you bump the bowl and the ball moves, it will eventually settle back down to the bottom of the bowl. An unstable system will not recover from a disturbance. If you balance a broom stick on its end. Any disturbance and it will just fall over. HOWEVER if we stand the broom stick upright on our hand and move our hand to correct for disturbances you then have something not entirely stable or unstable. We call that "artificially stable," as in there is something else keeping the system in a stable state. In engineering we have many systems that are artificially stable and quite often there's a combination of stabilisers. The suspension in your car has shock absorbers that allow you to hit bumps and not have the suspension bounce around. There's also the tires and suspension geometry. A main part of it is the drivers brain which makes corrections like steering inputs. One of the incredibly important concepts of artificially stable systems is that the stabilisers have limits and if you exceed those limits the system can break or fail. If 1 of the shock absorbers fails and reduces the cars stability. If the car hits a big enough bump and shock absorbers reach their limit. IF driver's brain cannot compensate then the car crashes. Modern capitalist systems are "artificially stable." There are shock absorbers and adjustments that governments use to keep there economies stable. Part of that system are interest rates, but there's also government spending (via policies and projects), the rate at which they print new money, bond rates and the regulations they place on private industry (like banking rules). The real problem is we are now bumping into the limits that our economic stabilisers can handle.
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  360. I generally like Thom but this is simply the worst story I have ever seen him do. Hilary Clinton like the GOP idiots who ran against Trump misunderstood the American public. Worse all Hilary and others have done since is blame everyone else and taken not 1 gram of responsibility for their own failures. Go and look up the interview that Rana Foroohar gave to the Realignment Podcast. Its easy to find just search "rana foroohar realignment." Its episode 301 and about 29 minutes she she explains where BOTH the GOP and Dems went wrong with handling Trump in 2015 primaries and 2016 election. Also Mark Blyth predicted Trump would win more than 6 months out form the 2016 election for similar reasons. This is why is just so egregious to hear YET ANOTHER Hilary Clinton symp blaming other people for their failure.
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  361. Its not simply Fox. By far the biggest influence peddlers are the think tanks and its not just an American issue they ARE EVERYWHERE. They are all funded and controlled by Baby Boomers in their 70s, 80s & 90s who just wont stop interfering in everything. David Koch funds more than 90 think tanks around the world to stall and delay any action on climate change. They all have names that include the words Foundation, Society or Institute to make it sound like they are some from of benevolent or academic institution. At some point we will have to confront them and their influence peddling.
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  362. The only immunity America has to COVID is the ability to rationally discuss it.
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  363. AUSTRALIAN here with an outside observation. Apologies for the length of comment. YES - American deserved Trump (past tense) and in some ways almost every other democracy in the world (including Australia) needs (or deserves) their version of Donald Trump. For decades we have all kept electing clowns, idiots, morons, liars, cheats and all we do is complain about them. ONE of the great things about democracy is that we can change our government when it fails us, but when we all we do is decide which flavor political SHlT sandwich we'll eat for the next few years we should NOT complain about how that tastes. Donald Trump is NOT the problem, he's just a symptom of the problem. The Constitution is NOT the problem. I went to college in America in the late 80s and was surrounded by people who'd all studied the constitution in Civics class. A bunch of them were pre-law and were studying it even further. These days, (from all the conversations we had) I have no doubt the US Constitution is one of humanities finest achievements. So its NOT the problem. The problem is the American people who keep electing crap into their state and federal politics for all the wrong reasons and those people then trample all over the constitution. The American people have ALLOWED organisations like the Federalist Society to wreck the court system. The American people have ALLOWED Lobbyists and Think Tanks like the Heritage Society and CATO Institute to corrupt the political system so a handful of billionaires can do whatever they like. The American people have ALLOWED their politicians to buy and trade stocks while deciding which companies won which contracts. The American people have ALLOWED their education and health care systems to be gutted for profit. The American people have ALLOWED their infrastructure to crumble. The American people have ALLOWED their politicians to send their sons and daughters to be stationed in places of no value to die for no sensible reason. AND TO BE SURE - EVERY other democracy on the planet is doing similar things and that INCLUDES Australia. CASE 1) Australia recently caught PwC (Price Waterhouse Coopers) handing over confidential information. PwC had been hired as consultants to help the Australian government close up tax loop holes. They then on sold information to other clients to get around what they were advising the Australian government. Instead of CHARGING PwC and their clients with conspiracy to defraud the Australian people they have been let off WITHOUT ANYTHING. CASE 2) Before the PwC scandal we had a Royal Commission into our banks. For Americans its not to dissimilar to a Senate Inquiry in that its a activity where the presiding officers can subpoena people to appear and if they lie its perjury and the evidence gathered can then be used at subsequent trials. Our banks admitted to things like systematic theft from accounts with illegal fees. CEOs, CFOs, and other actually admitted to the commission that they did it. They did things that would put a normal person in jail for decades. Just like after the 2008 GFC NOBODY when America's DOJ refused to prosecute the CEOs and CFOs who caused the problem nobody here was charged and nobody went to jail and NOTHING was fixed. The problem is "We the People" have failed "Us the People" by continually electing people who lie and cheat us. America got Donald Trump because they elected him. Every other democracy got who they got because they elected them.
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  364. AUSTRALIAN with an outside observation. When all that anyone had to compare Trump to was an ageing frail Biden then Trump didn't look as bad as he does compared to a much younger Kamala Harris. The real set if issues facing whoever is the next POTUS include: 1) An out of control SCOTUS backed by a cadre of out of control billionaires; 2) An out of control Israel backed by a cadre of out of control billionaires; 3) An out of control House run by a religious maniac in Mike Johnson and backed by a cadre of out of control billionaires; 4) An out of control Russia run by a cadre of out of control billionaires; 5) An out of control China run by a single man with homegrown issues so out of control its hard to see China surviving. 6) Wealth inequality that's been caused by out of control billionaires meddling in politics to get whatever they want and is causing the incredible 120 million displaced people and refugees trying to find a better life and causing all sorts of issues. 7) Climate change.
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  365.  @ohms497  One of the great questions of modern society is: "If aliens exist where are they?" The answer is simple. They're hiding from us until they work out a way to deal with us.
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  366. SO WHY aren't these people also defunding the investigation into Hunter Biden??? They're all claiming the Trump investigations are political so what do they call the Hunter Biden investigation???
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  367. Go look at the latest debunk video Thunderf00t has done on a company that's claiming they can use solar power to get water from the air and supply their needs. And this isn't the first company in recent times to try this. What was it that Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen did for a living? Moisture Farmer!!!!!
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  368. A lack of evidence is not proof of anything other than there is not evidence or not enough evidence to support a particular claim or conclusion. That's because the state of evidence can change. Investigators might find something new or a different test might show something new. All you are really saying is they have not yet found something that makes a particular conclusion reasonable or provable in a court of law.
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  369. Its called frustration and anybody who thinks there aren't large slabs of the developed world who feel left out, left behind, thrown in the gutter and left feeling their is no way forward has NOT been paying attention. Go into any developed country and check on governmental policies that promised to make our lives better. How many times did a few people get it better and the rest paid for it. How many times did a factory get shut down and everyone was promised getting cheaper products from somewhere else would be better for consumers. Seriously how many time have you heard that claim - "consumers will be better off" and we never were. Its not just a matter of these people being crazy they have been driven crazy by decades of having their lives trampled. Added to that the incessant need for our political leaders & parties to have one policy that rules above all others "What do the billionaires want us to do." There's an old line about beating a dog with a stick. No matter how many times it submits one day it will turn and bite.
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  370. What don't you stop for a moment and consider what this clown is actually saying. 1) What rights are actually being violated? These people are always screaming about how their rights are being violated and NEVER say what rights are actually being violated. 2) Look at the English language skills - "if want to suspend the constitution" Who this clown talking about? This is the language skill of a high school failure. 3) How would it even be possible for ANY American State or the Federal Government to "suspend the constitution" This is dog whistling at its dumbest and look at all the dogs barking.
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  371. Following on from the Rand corporation report Bernie mentioned. Recently Richard Wolf mentioned a report from the Congressional Budget Office on family wealth. Its easy to find by googling "congressional budget office family wealth" (the publication number 57598) Its downloadable but the main graph on the web page is interactive and you can see that data. Right now the bottom 50% of America is worth $2.3 Trillion while the top 10% is worth $82.4 Trillion. That's 36x the combined wealth for 1/5th the number of people. If you do the math each person in the top 10% of America is worth (on average) 180x what each person in the bottom 50% (on average) is worth. I don't know why Bernie isn't screaming from the roof top of congress about this report as his people in his office should have received it. Also that Rand report on wages is easy to find by googling "rand wages report" Its titled "Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018" (the report number is WRA516-1) FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America which is part of why I watch America. I also watch America because our economics are also run by people who went to Harvard & Yale. I checked our Bureau of Statistics and there data (which is presented differently) shows that our top 20% are 90x the net worth (on average) of our bottom 20% (on average).
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  372. YEAH absolutely - This M0R0N needs her facts checked. Hilary Clinton did not lose because of anyone else but Hilary Clinton. Her and her fans are still blaming everyone else and not taking any responsibility for what happened in 2016 and its disgusting. When will they get over themselves and accept some responsibility. For anyone who wants to check go and look up the interview that Rana Foroohar gave to the Realignment Podcast. Its easy to find just search "rana foroohar realignment." Its episode 301 and about 29 minutes she she explains where BOTH the GOP and Dems went wrong with handling Trump in 2015 primaries and 2016 election. Also Mark Blyth predicted Trump would win more than 6 months out form the 2016 election for similar reasons. This is why is just so egregious to hear YET ANOTHER Hilary Clinton symp blaming other people for their failure.
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  373. How about we call it the Clobama Party because its run by the Clintons and Obamas.
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  374. COMPLETELY UTTERLY TOTAL WASTE OF EVERYONE'S TIME TO EVEN WATCH OR LISTEN TO THIS Did nobody learn anything of Trump's 2 Impeachments? Unless the dum-o-crats can find a way to get total control of the Senate and complete control of congress AND control of the Whitehouse why is anyone bothering anyone with this garbage.
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  375. ITS VERY SIMPLE - Ramaswamy is an arrogant smug clown who thinks that every time he opens his mouth that every person in the room thinks he's a genius. We've all met these types all through our lives. They can't be told "NO" to anything. They are an expert in everything. They are always HAVE TO BE the center of attention and get obnoxious whenever anyone else gets attention. And if people really start to ignore them or tell them to "just go away" they start breaking things. Malignant narcissism mixed with sociopathy seems to fit as a description quite well.
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  376. Sorry but here's some news you missed. Hilary Clinton like the GOP idiots who ran against Trump misunderstood the American public. All Hilary and others have done since is blame everyone else and taken not 1 gram of responsibility. Go and look up the interview that Rana Foroohar gave to the Realignment Podcast. Its easy to find just search "rana foroohar realignment." Its episode 301 and about 29 minutes she she explains where BOTH the GOP and Dems went wrong with handling Trump in 2015 primaries and 2016 election. Also Mark Blyth predicted Trump would win more than 6 months out form the 2016 election for similar reasons. This is why is just so egregious to hear YET ANOTHER Hilary Clinton symp blaming other people for their failure.
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  377. The first thing the American Democrats need to do is clean out their own leadership who are almost as pathetically corrupt as the GOP. The entire world has seen the Feinstein issue unfolding and its as disgusting as it gets in politics.
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