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Author: Ian Welsh Page 11 of 421
Footage tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody appears to have been altered before it was shared with the public—despite being presented as unedited surveillance video—according to a joint investigation by WIRED and multiple independent video forensics experts.
Here’s what the analysis uncovered:
Hidden metadata embedded in the video file revealed that the footage wasn’t a direct export from the prison’s internal surveillance system. Instead, the file had been processed—apparently using Adobe Premiere Pro, a professional-grade video editing program. Evidence suggests it was stitched together from at least two separate clips, saved multiple times, and exported before being posted on the Department of Justice’s website as if it were “raw” footage.
But you’d have to be really stupid to think it’s the most likely possibility.
So, there are no Epstein files, Ghislaine was not involved in pimping underaged girls and it’s all just a big nothing. Good to know.
So, Trump sent a letter to Brazil announcing 50% tariffs. His demands are that Brazil stop prosecuting Bolsonaro (ex-President who tried to steal the last election, and stole the one before by getting Lula locked up on bogus charges) and that they let US social media platforms operate unfettered the country. If Brazil puts tariffs on US goods, then the US will increase its tariffs by the same amount.
Here’s the thing, Brazil and the US have essentially even trade:
(light blue is exports, dark blue is imports)
The most recent services data I can find indicates that the US has a services surplus.
But more to the point, Trump wants to interfere in Brazil’s internal politics in a way that no Brazilian patriot could countenance. Nor would would Lula be wise to submit.
And Brazil’s exposure to the US market isn’t as serious as it may seem, the exports amount to a bit less than 2% of Brazil’s GDP. It can weather this storm easily. It’ll just sell more elsewhere or even just eat the loss.
What it does do is encourage Brazil to move away from trade with the US entirely, and the US’s main exports to Brazil are refined petroleum, aircraft and parts, nuclear reactor parts and electrical machinery and parts. With the partial exception of aircraft parts and nuclear parts (for US manufactured aircraft and US designed reactors) there’s nothing there Brazil can’t buy from someone else and Brazil imports the things any sane trade policy would want other countries to import: largely manufactured goods other refined petroleum.
Even with nuclear and aircraft, China is now an alternative for new planes and new plants.
So Trump doesn’t have much leverage, actually. Way less than with Europe and Canada and Mexico and Japan and even Canada, Mexico and Japan have resisted his trade war.
All Trump is doing is pushing Brazil away and into the arms of Chinese, and giving them reason to de-dollarize sooner and faster.
Insanity.
Then there’s Trump’s announced 50% tariff on copper imports. Now, on the face, this makes some sense: copper is important in industrial manufacture and having the US dependent on other countries, especially China is bad.
BUT starting at 50% just means that costs for virtually all manufacturing in the US will go up and US manufacturing will be less competitive.
Once again, the way to do tariffs is announce they will happen in X years, where X is the amount of time it will take to build new mines and refineries in the US. Or you could star them at 1% say, and raise them another percentage point every two months till they reach whatever level is necessary to get people to mine and refine in the US.
Just imposing them is the stupidest possible way to do it.
Trump’s just fundamentally incompetent at policy. He can’t do it. Policy under Trump only works if he lets someone else do it and leaves them alone, but for anything high profile he constantly wants to meddle, and he’s a boob.
Trump’s economicpolicy mix — defunding research wholesale, starting a trade war with the entire world, vastly slashing social welfare, discouraging visitors and immigration and getting rid of migrant workers is just accelerating America’s decline.
Trump is an idiot, a fool and the will likely go down as the President who sealed America end as a hegemonic great power. Among post-war Presidents only Obama and Reagan are in competition with him for last place, but because they started and managed US decline, they will avoid much of the blame.
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How stupid do they think everyone is?
I’ll state the obvious, then make one observation.
The Obvious Epstein was an intelligence operation, probably US intelligence and Mossad working together. Every room had cameras, and everyone who partook can be blackmailed.
Observation: The great temptation with the Epstein files isn’t to release them or destroy them, the great temptation is to use them, because they represent a vast amount of power.
Anyway, British and American elites have a predilection for under-age sex and various sexual pecadillos. A taste for being spanked and buggery, in particular, are endemic in the English ruling class due to what goes on in a lot of boys boarding schools. This is so much the case that enjoying being beaten used to be called “the English vice”. We pretend it was just a Victorian thing, but it continues.
Being part of the ruling class traditionally comes with the ability to ignore conventional mores, but members of that class didn’t (and still don’t seem to) fully understand what the changes is surveillance technology mean. Every time some idiot is outed because they filmed their own sexual perversions I laugh, but, simply put, if one must be depraved, keep it in house, don’t film it, you moron, and don’t trust anyone. (This isn’t exactly advice, but a powerful person being blackmailed is even worse than a powerful person with a private vice.)
Trump’s has so far been able to push his program thru, but his approval ratings are underwater and important goals, like the end of birthright citizens immunity to revocation of citizenship are still to come. Trump needs leverage. I suspect he’s decided to use the leverage on hand.
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Image by TW Collins
Back in 2017 I wrote “The End of Cash”:
Understand, however, that getting rid of cash is part of this. Understand that blockchains, “coins” do not have to ultimately be a technology of freedom, but can easily be a totalitarian technology. Understand that virtually no one in a position of power is your friend on this: They want to know, they want to control, they want to be able to decide how you spend your money and your time, and they want to have an electronic dossier on you which is complete, and which will be usable to destroy you, because no one has never done or said something which cannot be made to look not just bad, but terrible and illegal, especially if you can pick, say, ten quotes or actions out of a lifetime.
In the 80s and 90s it was possible to live the cash economy, or the near cash economy (some checks, but no bank account.) Around 1990 I worked as a dispatcher for a printing company. There was an independent food stall nearby, the sort of place that was all “skilled short order cook” food. I bought most of my lunches there, and the owner ran a tab. When I was paid, by cheque, I endorsed them to him, he took 2%, and paid me cash, minus any tab I’d run up. I paid my landlord in cash, and I bought my food in cash.
At other points I was entirely casual labour: I painted, did light construction work for homeowners, various landscaping jobs, and helped people move. In most cases they paid me cash, if they paid me with a check and I didn’t want to wait the 28 days the banks often insisted on for “clearance” I’d endorse the check, lose 2% and count it not entirely unreasonable.
It’s very hard to do that now. Most people don’t pay with cash, or even checks, and everything goes thru a bank or payment processor and they are very picky about who they allow as customers. Legal activities (say selling nootropics, or porn) are often frozen out, and, indeed, banks have closed down clients accounts without even saying why. Indeed this was done to someone as prominent as Britain’s Nigel Farage, though he had enough fame and political clout to handle it. Perhaps you remember when PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all decided to stop letting people donate to Wikileaks.
Here’s a new case, in Germany, from the EU:
Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.
The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.
In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany!
Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!
Beautiful stuff, even cash is forbidden, BUT, of course, cash is hard to trace. Thing is, these days, most payments are electronic.
Back when the Trucker Protest happened in Ottawa Canada I opposed freezing their accounts, even though I thought they were a bunch of fools and opposed their agenda. Why? Because it is punishment without a trial or facing a jury. It’s devastating. And I understood that if it could be done to people I disagree with, it could be done to people I do agree with.
So Germany has made it so Huseyin will wind up homeless and possibly even starve to death simply by making him an economic non-person.
This is made much easier by the fact that there’s barely a cash economy any more
These sorts of administrative penalties are becoming more common. Palestine Action, for example, was designated a terrorist organization recently (at the same time as the terrorists who took over Syria were removed.) I’m going to come back to this, because it’s important.
But, basically, the end of the cash economy has made it MUCH easier for authoritarian governments to crush dissent, and in general, the removal of cases from courts, plea bargains, lack of jury trials, making it illegal to tell juries about jury nullification and the rise of “sanctions” and administravie orders has been extremely chilling.
Europe is trending hard authoritarian, with Britain and Germany leading the way. The US, of course, is working hard to end Habeas Corpus and other legal protections. Canada is moving in the same direction.
We need a new conception of how societies should run and until that happens we need a new conception of how to run organizations that the elite doesn’t approve of.
We’ll cover this more, soon.
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Obviously this is a pile of steaming garbage. Four trillion of tax cuts, paid for by cutting Medicaid (11.8 million people will lose health care according to the CBO) and perhaps 8 million people will lose food benefits under SNAP. Green energy subsidies are cut (no, shut up, there are tons of dirty energy subsidies) and there’s a huge budget increase for ICE (including more prison camps), America’s Gestapo.
And, of course, there’s all sorts of nasty in the details, like cuts to Planned Parenthood (which does far more than abortions).
A lot of Americans are going to be hurt by this. I’d go so far as to say it might be the worst American federal budget I’ve seen in my life, though Obama and the Fed’s giveaways to the rich were worse.
Oh, and politicians like Josh Hawley who pretend to care about ordinary people? Yeah, fake. He voted for the bill.
I reiterate that things in the US are going to get worse and worse for years, with only a small chance of a reversal (based on a Mamdani style left populism). Get out if you can, take steps to prepare and protect yourself if you can’t.
Update: worse than I realized. Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn in Republicans are wiped out in the mid-terms, and Republicans know that Democrats won’t reverse their cuts, so people will have no choice and the duopoly will continue:
Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.
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Chinese and American flags flying together
When I originally formulated this article it was just “Why does the CCP accomplish its goals?”
But that’s a stupid article. Certainly there are governments which fail to accomplish their goals, in countries which lacks state capacity or are in constrained positions. But for most of my life most Western governments haven’t been all that constrained, they just acted as if they were.
The truth is that Western governments have mostly accomplished their goals over the last 45 years: it’s just that their ur-goal was to make the rich richer. If that meant burning everything else down, they were OK with that. There are a number of reasons for this, but basically political elites were bought: do what the rich want and even if you lose office you’ll be very well taken care of. Instead of viewing government as “theirs” and their countries as “belonging to them” they viewed political office as a way to get rich. Instead of viewing the rich as their competitors for power, to be kept under control, they viewed them as their benefactors and as the ones who could put them into office. Or, put another way, most elected representatives saw themselves as de-facto employees, or contractors, of the rich and corporations.
This view has explanatory power: politicians do what you’d expect them to do if it were true. Take a look at Trump: his budget has 4 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, and to partially pay for those cuts, it is getting rid of 800 billion in Medicare funding. The idea that he’s some sort of economic populist is laughable. He’s making the rich get richer, just like every other President since Carter (though Reagan was the real inflection point.)
This wasn’t always the case. From 33 till around 68 or so, the primary policy goal in America was the growth and prosperity of the middle class, and most politicians, while they’d take the money of corporations and rich to some extent, saw them as the enemy, to be kept under control.
So, let’s turn to the CCP. They have lifted more people out of poverty than every other country combined. The one-child policy, whether you agree with it or not, did get China’s population growth under control. They are ahead in 80% of techs, when 20 years ago that number belonged to the US. They have the largest industrial economy in the world. They are reducing housing prices, which was their goal. They are reducing inequality and smashing the number of billionaires. They are installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. They are building industrial stacks so that nothing they actually need comes from the rest of the world—they’re not quite there yet but they will be. (Don’t invest in TMSC long term, their near monopoly position is almost over and they will soon be overtaken by the Chinese. Three to five years at most is my guess.)
The CCP accomplishes its goals. Its primary goal is:
The Preservation of its own power. There are two branches to this: avoidance of foreign military conquest or regime change, and avoidance of domestic collapse or revolt.
To be powerful, and thus not be at the mercy of foreigners (one of Mao’s main goals) requires an educated, prosperous population and an industrial economy, because military power post-industrial revolution is primarily a result of technology plus industry. If another country can defeat you militarily, you won’t stay in power if they don’t want you to.
Domestically if the population loves you (and all polling shows vast support for the CCP) you will keep power. If they despise you, you will eventually lose power. The Soviets, with all their tanks and soldiers, fell in part because neither the people nor the elites believed in rule by the Party any more. So making the people prosperous is job one for protecting the CCP’s rule. Prosperous people don’t revolt. The Chinese believe this more than any other civilization. The entire “Mandate of Heaven” is based on this, and for over two thousand years the Chinese have regarded the government as responsible for prosperity. When it can no longer provide it, not only is overthrowing it justified, it is even virtuous. On the other hand, to overthrow a government which takes care of the people is vile, and understood as such.
Likewise, if one doesn’t want a change in which elites control the country, one can’t allow domestic power centers other than the party to spring up. This is why the CCP has been crushing billionaires. This is why the CCP banned the Falun Gong (who had widespread membership, including members in the CCP.) Bilionaires were particularly pernicious, because they corrupted party members, and those members goals changed from keeping the CCP in power by making China stronger and people more prosperous, to making a small number of people rich at the cost of general prosperity.
Xi was absolutely correct to make going after corruption his first and most important goal, because the CCP had split into factions and those factions were putting their own prosperity and strength above those of the party and the country. Left unchecked China would have fallen into a corruption spiral, inequality would have spiralled out of control and even if the CCP existed in form, it would no longer be its own power center, but controlled by others.
Now it should be understood that the CCP’s basic ideology isn’t “stay in power at all costs”. Like all ideologies it justifies it otherwise. It would say, and many party members, probably including Xi, would say that the party wants to stay in power because it can make China powerful and prosperous.
Given China’s progress since the party took over (and there was plenty of progress under Mao, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — education and lifespand went way up), the CCP feels entirely justified in this belief.
Of course all things pass, and at some point the CCP will fail and be replaced, either in form (abolished) or by takeover. The Democratic party still exists in America, after all, but FDR or even LBJ would not recognize it, nor have any respect for it. Even Carter, the original neoliberal, by the end of his life, found it abominable. (I suspect young President Carter didn’t fully understand the consequences of what he helped birth.)
But for now, the CCP stands in its glory, having accomplished much of what it originally set out to do. It kicked out foreign occupiers. It made China strong enough that it could no longer be pushed around or occupied. It made the Chinese people prosperous. It gained the technological and industrial lead over the West.
It did so because it regards China as belonging to it, and believes that it has a responsibility to the people of China and that it deserves and will keep its power only if it delivers for the people of China: not for a minority, but for the masses.
None of this is to say the CCP is perfect, just that it’s an effective government which actually wants a prosperous population.
Our governments are effective, but what they want is richer rich people. As a result they will become ineffective and at some point they will either fall and change form and rise again, or they will devolve into full-on failed states.
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