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Wed, 29 Sep 2021
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Snakes in Suits

Political Ponerology: A Psychological Anatomy of Evil, Politics And Public Trauma

Russ Winter
Winter Watch
Fri, 17 May 2019 00:00 UTC
Netanyahu

‘The biological, psychological, moral and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a biological necessity.’ — Dr. Andrew Łobaczewski (1921 – 2008)
Political psychologist Dr. Andrew M. Lobaczewski wrote a masterpiece on psychopathy and pathocracy, which he melded into the term "political ponerology." He describes political ponerology as science of the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes. We have used the terms "kakistocracy" and "Crime Syndicate" to express the same essential concept.

A more concise and abridged look at this work comes from commentary and additional quoted material by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who cuts through some of the denseness in Lobaczewski's book. She also pulls in the work of other researchers on the topic. I have extracted key takeaways and points, and the in-depth and highly recommended write up can be read here in two parts.

How to Understand Macrosocial Evil
pathocracy
Derived from poneros in New Testament Greek, the word ponerology suggests an inborn evil with a corrupting influence, a fitting description of psychopathy and its social effects.

Kazimierz Dąbrowski (1902-1980) indicated that extreme ambition and lust for power and financial gain "is particularly evident in criminal or political psychopathy." Politics by its very nature, would tend to attract more of the pathological "dominator types" than other fields. The MO is to infiltrate, contaminate, appropriate, and eliminate. (ICAE)

But little has been said about the nature, causes and genesis of evil. Materialist scientific culture does not readily admit that evil actually exists, per se. Yes, "evil" plays a part in religious discourse; but even there, it's given short shrift as an "error" or a "rebellion" that will be corrected at some point in the future.
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Stock Down

Ortex data shows losses on short positions in US hedge firms top $70 billion - not many crying

Sujata Rao
Reuters
Fri, 29 Jan 2021 17:53 UTC

Comment: "H-h-how much?!"

This is probably the single largest wealth transfer DOWNWARDS in all history...


gamestop
© REUTERS/Jim Young/File Photo
A sign is seen outside a GameStop store in Niles, Illinois, U.S. May 23, 2016.
Short-sellers are sitting on estimated losses of $70.87 billion from their short positions in U.S. companies so far this year, data from financial data analytics firm Ortex showed on Thursday.

The hefty losses come as shares of highly-shorted GameStop jumped more than 1,000% in the past week without a clear business reason, forcing short-sellers to buy back into the stock to cover potential losses -- defined as a short-squeeze -- while retail investors then piled in to benefit from the surge.

Comment: There's not much love for the predatory funds' predicament. 'Kamikaze' small investors vow their losses are not as important as punishing Big Money.







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Headphones

Video game retailer GameStop stock doubles again with no let-up in amateur interest - UPDATES: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets outright, RobinHood bans buying more stock


Reuters
Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC
gamestop
© REUTERS/Jim Young/File Photo
A sign is seen outside a GameStop store in Niles, Illinois, U.S. May 23, 2016.
Shares of videogame retailer GameStop Corp surged another 130% on Wednesday in pre-market trading as amateur investors continued to pile into the stock that has skyrocketed nearly 700% over the past two weeks.

The share spikes in GameStop and others including BlackBerry Ltd, headphone maker Koss Corp and Nokia Oyj, have sent short-sellers scrambling to cover losing bets, while raising questions about potential regulatory clampdowns.

The top securities regulator in Massachusetts thinks trading in GameStop stock, which has jumped to $148 a share from $19.95 since Jan. 12, suggests there is something "systemically wrong" with the options trading surrounding the stock, Barron's reported on Tuesday.

Comment: While it's kind of funny that a Reddit thread could be affecting the market in such a dramatic way, investing in video games would seem to be a rather safe bet in the age of lockdowns.

UPDATE: Here's Saagar Enjeti of The Hill explaining the larger story here:

Wall Street Elites DESTROYED, Beaten By Redditors At Their Own RIGGED Game:



UPDATE: It seems the Wall Street elites are not happy and are attempting to take down the Reddit r/WallStreetBets community in an attempt to fight back. From CNet:
Reddit's WallStreetBets is back, taking on GameStop stock after intentional lockdown
Ian Sherr Jan. 28, 2021 12:40 a.m.

For the past week, Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community has been the center of an epic war between large Wall Street investors and small-scale social media betters. On Wednesday evening, the community reeled from seeing the subreddit locked and hidden, only to be made public again about an hour later. Meanwhile, chat app Discord has banned WallStreetBets outright.

Around the same time, spooked investors appeared to dump GameStop and AMC shares the community had been buying up to take on people betting against the company's futures.

Then, as suddenly as everything began, the subreddit came back, a new Discord community was formed, and others bought in to the stocks, sending AMC and GameStop prices back up.

OK.

If all this is confusing, don't feel bad. These fast and dramatic moves are happening amid one of the most dramatic weeks on Wall Street in years. At stake are millions of dollars that small-time investors working together on social media have made while taking on Wall Street investors who bet GameStop and AMC stock would plummet. Instead, as the two company's stocks have soared, the Wall Street investors have reportedly hemorrhaged billions of dollars.

As the drama unfolded from the Discord ban and the Reddit community going on lockdown, GameStop shares fell 32% in after-hours trading late Wednesday, to $218.32 per share, down from $347.51 at their close. During the day, they'd more than doubled. AMC shares also fell, dropping more than 40%, to $11.90 per share, after closing at $19.90. That stock had risen more than 301% during the day.

Both stocks have recovered somewhat, and the r/WallStreetBets community is back. If you'd taken an hour and a half to watch Pixar's new movie, Soul, you'd have missed it.

Though GameStop shares have been jumping in recent days, analysts and experts say they're doing so because of quirks in the market and not because of actual increased value for the struggling video game retailer. The same is true for the movie theater chain AMC, which had warned it was near bankruptcy late last year.

All this wasn't the only bad news for the WallStreetBets community. Its worst community members, who repeatedly broke Discord's rules, caused the group to be banned from the platform, the chat app company said in a statement. "Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings," Discord said. It added that the ban had nothing to do with any talk of finances or stock that happened among WallStreetBets users.


Yeah, right! It just so happens that now, coinciding exactly with what's happening on the stock market, the hateful content has suddenly become unacceptable. No one in their right mind would believe that for a second!


Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla who's helped to drive attention to the GameStop stock madness, tweeted his disappointment with Discord Wednesday.

UPDATE: The trading app Robinhood has banned users from buying GameStop, AMC, Blackberry and Nokia stock, citing "market volatility." Users are rightfully infuriated (more than half of Robinhood users have GameStop stock), with many accusing it of blatant market manipulation. They received over 100,000 1-star reviews in one hour on the app star, and a class-action lawsuit has already been filed in New York. House Financial Services allegedly is getting flooded with calls about the issue.




There is some chatter about shady dealings between Citadel and Robinhood. And calls to Robinhood from the White House and Sequoia Capital:


Here's Tucker Carlson's take:


Wokal Distance on Twitter has a useful summary and analysis here.

UPDATE: RobinHood is selling off people's GME shares without their permission.


The red pills are flying...


UPDATE: Wallstreetbets is back up on Discord after a brief ban. From Bloomberg:
WallStreetBets, the investment group famous for fueling rallies at GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., is back on Discord's service after getting banned for allowing hate speech.

The group is now up and running on a new server -- a digital room where people can gather to chat -- according to Discord, a communications platform that's popular among gamers.

Discord said Wednesday that it had barred the group for not doing enough to stem hateful speech. The company cited multiple violations of its community guidelines and said it had issued warnings to the administrator of its server. The move wasn't tied to the group's efforts to promote stocks such as GameStop.

"We will welcome the group back so long as they improve their moderation practices and follow our community guidelines," Discord said in a statement Thursday. "We have reached out to the moderators to provide them with support and advice, like we do for many of our large communities."


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Stock Down

GameStop Roller Coaster: Clown World Finance

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen
Mises Institute
Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
GameStop clownworld
The recent blowup of GameStop shares has revealed, if anyone was still doubting, that the center of clown world is not Washington, DC, nor Silicon Valley — but Wall Street. To be clear, this is not meant to refer to the gallant band of redditors from r/wallstreetbets — those few, those happy few, that band of brothers who, as of this writing, may very well be poised to force several hedge funds into bankruptcy. Rather, the clowns are those hedge funds and all those other institutional investors who have been propped up by central bank intervention for decades while congratulating themselves that their seven-figure earnings were all due to their own financial brilliance.

What Happened?

The story of what happened (so far) is briefly told. It was revealed that GameStop was one of the most shorted shares in Wall Street, with the fund Melvin Capital taking the lead in shorting it. While this may or may not be a sound position based on market fundamentals — I have not investigated and think it's a mug's game to waste time on fundamentals these days — people did not take kindly to the revelation. Specifically, redditors at the subreddit Wallstreetbets saw that the short sellers were vulnerable, and they organized a campaign to drive them into the ground. Suddenly, retail investors flooded the market, bought up shares and drove GameStop shares, which had been trading below $20, into the stratosphere, topping $365 Wednesday morning (January 27). Melvin Capital suffered huge losses, up to 30 percent, and had to be saved by an infusion of $2.75 billion Tuesday afternoon.

Comment:



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Bullseye

Covid Odyssey

John Griffin
OffGuardian
Sun, 24 Jan 2021 07:14 UTC
the odyssey
Who else senses the world shrinking around them? Was it only a year ago we could twirl a multi-hued globe and contemplate a trip to one of those inviting islets of colour?

Now, such goals have become uncertain, hazardous, forbidden even. We are confined to our country, our state, our town, a backyard. An immemorial freedom is being curtailed. We began as a freewheeling species, nonchalantly strolling out of Africa. A hundred millennia later and a trip to the local supermarket will soon be a grand day out, and even this dependent on the whims of a president, a prime minister, a mayor.

Are we destined to settle for Hamlet's fancy, a world 'bounded in a nutshell'?

That feeling of confinement and frustration brought Melville's Ishmael to the point of knocking people's hats off in the street. Today, it's masks.

And so, to sea.

I propose a new Odyssey. In the spirit of Tennyson's 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', it shall be a voyage to discover the origins of Covid. In time, the story may evolve to become an epic to rival Homer's. For now, we will have to be content with a synopsis.
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NPC

Not the Bee! If 2 masks are good, 3 masks are better, CNBC claims - echoing notorious satire site


RT
Wed, 27 Jan 2021 20:13 UTC
surgical masks
© Reuters / Fabrizio Bensch
CNBC's embrace of multiple masking to stop the spread of Covid-19 has reached Babylon Bee levels - literally - as the infamous satire outlet published a story on triple-masking on the same day that CNBC encouraged the behavior.

Capitalizing on audience confusion over whether masks are supposed to protect others or the wearer, CNBC's Contessa Brewer explained (in an increasingly muffled voice as she demonstrated proper mask application on camera) on Monday that while the first mask protects others, the second one protects the wearer.

This is especially important as new and seemingly more contagious strains of Covid-19 spread among the population, US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci claimed.

For those who really want to be safe, however, wearing three masks is 90 percent effective, CNBC claimed in a graphic accompanying the segment, which cited a recent study that actually claimed a three-layer mask was hypothesized to be 90 percent effective.



For those unwilling to take the triple-mask challenge, Brewer held up a line of Chinese-manufactured masks similar to the N-95 variety that was so much in demand in the early months of the pandemic, explaining discomfort was proof the five-layer face covering was working.

Comment: They're barely bothering to pretend anymore.

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Chess

After COVID, Davos moves to Great Reset

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
chess pieces
With the USA Biden Presidency, Washington has rejoined the Global Warming agenda of the Paris Accords. With China making loud pledges about meeting strict CO2 emission standards by 2060, now the World Economic Forum is about to unveil what will transform the way we all live in what WEF head Klaus Schwab calls the Great Reset. Make no mistake. This all fits into an agenda that has been planned for decades by old wealth families such as Rockefeller and Rothschild. Brzezinski called it the end of the sovereign nation state. David Rockefeller called it "one world government." George H.W. Bush in 1990 called it the New World Order. Now we can better see what they plan to impose if we allow.

The Great Reset of the World Economic Forum is a 21st Century rollout for a new form of global total control. "We only have one planet and we know that climate change could be the next global disaster with even more dramatic consequences for humankind. We have to decarbonise the economy in the short window still remaining and bring our thinking and behaviour once more into harmony with nature," declared WEF founder Schwab about the January 2021 agenda. The last time these actors did something at all similar in scope was in 1939 on the very eve of World War II.

Comment: The world is getting wise to what the elite-manufactured Great Reset is all about:

Don't miss what may be the next shoe to drop in this process:

Another Mega Group spy scandal? Samanage, sabotage, and the SolarWinds hack portends possible attack on Microsoft world-wide in service of Great Reset

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USA

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Censorship and oppression threaten America's trademark standards of democracy and open debate


Children's Health Defense
Wed, 23 Dec 2020 02:47 UTC
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
© Evan Vucci /AP
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Watch as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addresses health freedom advocates gathered in Copenhagen to strategize ways to maintain human rights on a global basis


On the eve of the 57th anniversary of his uncle John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed health freedom advocates gathered in Copenhagen to strategize ways to maintain human rights on a global basis.

Robert Kennedy said that when Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee asked then-President Kennedy what he would like to have written on his tombstone, Kennedy replied, "He Kept the Peace."
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Attention

Tucker Carlson: Deep State using military to send 'power' message to American people


Fox News
Tue, 26 Jan 2021 21:39 UTC
carlson pentagon military
This is actually a week-old monologue from The Tuck. It's worth listening to, however, if you haven't yet. Carlson is well known now as one of the last remaining sane voices on US mainstream news. In this show he warns that the Establishment is preparing to launch a 'War on Terror' on its own citizens. The Biden regime is going to be one long dark winter...

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Attention

Tip of the iceberg? Thousands of COVID vaccine injuries and 13 US deaths reported in December alone


Children's Health Defense
Thu, 14 Jan 2021 10:26 UTC
vaccines
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna permission to distribute their experimental mRNA coronavirus vaccines to Americans on an "emergency use" basis in December, it opened the floodgates for other countries to quickly follow suit.

By Jan. 11, counting China and Russia, 43 countries had administered at least 26 million doses of vaccine — especially Pfizer's — with far more ambitious plans for the coming year. The companies' global delivery targets for 2021 include two billion Pfizer/BioNTech doses and at least 600 million Moderna shots.

Drawing on the tried-and-true marketing technique of drumming up the "illusion of scarcity" to "accelerate demand," U.S. officials have been attempting to direct the public's attention to the concocted drama of vaccine supply shortages and a slower-than-expected rollout.

However, as the early warning signs already apparent during clinical trials begin to translate into serious adverse reactions on a wider scale, officials now face a new public relations challenge — that of "managing expectations" to ensure population willingness to take the vaccine.

As more people hear about adverse events, and more adverse events occur — ranging from life-threatening anaphylaxis and emergency room visits to brain inflammation and death — "selling" the experimental injections may become an increasingly uphill battle.
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