Understanding Deception and Misdirection

I think it's important to understand the art of deception. Indeed, many of the problems we're facing right now as a people are the result of various interests lying about their activities, their goals, "the science" and the such. And the problem, as I'm increasingly seeing, is that the people who are meant to watch these interests are either negligent or complicit, and our political system now works to misdirect you to keep you from seeing the real issues you should be caring about. To see what I'm talking about, let's talk about what happened with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

For those who don't know, Silicon Valley Bank recently failed. It was the third or fourth largest bank failure in US history and its failure threatened to cause a series of cascading failures which would destroy millions of jobs and bankrupt tens of millions of people. Good times.

As a people, we should be outraged because of the following:

(1) Why was a bank allowed to become so large that it endangered the American banking system? This was supposed to have been fixed by the Democrats in 2008 when they "fixed" the issue of too-big-to-fail under Obama. How could a bank become too big to fail in light of that? And why are there still so many that have become so big? Why have they not been broken up?

(2) The Fed knew there was a problem months ago, so why did it not act before this became a potential doomday disaster? Indeed, the Fed even sent the bank a warning letter almost a year ago, but never did anything more.

(3) Why did the Fed and Treasury at first agree to cover all bank deposits in the US only to have Janet Yellen turn around and say that only those banks whose failure endangered the US banking system would be saved? In other words, she agreed to protect only the too big to fail banks, while abandoning the smaller banks. This resulted, as it obviously would, in a massive drain of funds from small banks which were then deposited in the too big banks, making the system even more dangerous.

(4) One of the reasons SVB got so big was that to get the best rates, you had to agree not to use other banks. That made its failure even more dangerous. That also happens to be a violation of anti-trust law and yet the Justice Department did nothing about it. Why not?

(5) Why was the bank board staffed with people who knew nothing about banking? That's negligence... but it protects insiders and famous people.

(6) Why was the bank allowed to hand out massive bonuses knowing it was essentially broke? Why were they allowed to make a massive amount of loans to insiders? That violates the very essence of good governance and is a fraud on depositors, creditors and shareholders.

These are the questions we should be focused on and demanding answer for as these are the reasons this became a crisis: Why did the government let a bank get so big that it endangered the system? Why did the Fed fail as a regulator? Why, when called upon to act, did the Treasury Department take steps that protected the big connected banks while thrusting a dagger into smaller banks? Why have the board and executives not been held to account?

Yet, no one is talking about breaking up banks or changing the incestuous relationship between the regulators and the regulated. Only Elizabeth Warren is talking about changing the law to let the government claw back bonuses and salary from executive (do you know how much it kills me to praise her?). So what is everyone talking about?

Well, the main stream media has ignored the issue of the failure of too big to fail. Instead, they have tried to shift the blame to Trump. So rather than report on the failure of too big to fail or dig into how the regulators failed or how the boards/executives functions, they tossed red meat into the ring and gave the left their villain to absorb all the blame and simultaneously distracted the right by getting them to defend Trump. This was a distraction. It was misdirection. What about Elizabeth Warren? They morphed her comments into a discussion of whether or not she'll run for President again.

It gets worse.

Progressive talking heads are doing what they always do. Too-big-to-fail was their thing and it failed, so they are shifting blame. They have chosen Trump as their scapegoat, claiming that he weakened key components of the regulations, even though those had nothing to with any of the issues in 1-6 above. Thus, they are blinding leftists to what is important here and leading them down the Trump rabbit-hole.

The right is no better. Talk radio found out that some pointless VP at SVB is a lesbian and was working on lesbian appreciation month and off they went to the deep end once more. You couldn't find a less significant criticism if you tried and yet talk radio has been pounding this home, along with the equally stupid idea that the bank made loans to woke causes. None of that was the issue here. Of course, you also had chest pounding that bailing out the banks was "socialism," proving that these talkers neither understand how to handle a crisis or what socialism really is. So after weeks of table pounding, their followers remained utterly ignorant and blissfully outraged.

Do you see the problem here? A group of insiders misbehaves in ways that endanger the whole country but escape any consequences because left, right and center would rather obsess about their pet peeves than understand what really happened. And let me tell you, this is happening on issue after issue after issue. The Romans talked of distracting the public with bread and circuses, well, our circus is called politics and our ringmasters are making a whole lot of bread keeping the clowns fighting.

When you see issues like this, ask yourself, is the guy on the radio or television actually talking about what really went wrong and is he offering a solution that can fix it, or is he just jerking me off with talking points.

Reparations... for Morons

So many things to talk about. The world is such a disaster right now. Let's start with something that is breathtaking in its idiocy and its crapulence: reparations.

For those who don't know, San Francisco and some other dens of liberal dogmacy are hard at woke jerking themselves off with the fantasy of reparations. What are reparations? Supposedly, they are paying black people for the ills of slavery. Words fail, however, when it comes to describing the utter idiocy of this whole concept. Let's go through some points:

(1) There are no living slaves. So who exactly is supposed to get this money? Why, black people of course. But you forget that we don't go back generations to hand out compensation, because we have never legalized original sin. Nor do we allow group guilt because that is the worst form of racism. And if you want to open that can of worms, you better hope none of your relatives killed anyone or stole anything because anyone can make themselves a victim if they want to.

(2) Many American blacks have no slave ancestors, either being free blacks or coming from Africa long after slavery ended, so you're trying to pay people who were never injured. That makes this fraud, at best.

(3) You've already got compensation through things like affirmative action and minority set asides, public housing, food stamps, etc.

(4) Not one single American alive today ever owned a slave AND the overwhelming majority of whites came to the US after slavery ended, so you are trying to tax people for something neither they nor their ancestors did... that's called slavery.

(5) As an aside, "taxpayers" includes more than a couple Asians, Indians, native Americans, Mexicans, Pacific Islanders, and God-knows-what else. How did they benefit from slavery?

(6) California was never a slave state, so your argument is invalid on its face. And your claims of "structural racism" are crap because, a vast number of minorities of all types succeed despite these supposed barriers.

(7) The amount of money demanded is insane. San Francisco wants to give blacks in San Francisco something on the order of $640 billion when last reported -- the number keeps going up. San Francisco's budget is $13.2 billion annually. So that proposal would require the entire San Francisco budget for 49 years.

(8) Clearly, math is not your strong suit either because the $640 billion is based on an average payout of $360,000. BUT the proposal actually includes a $5 million payment to each candidate plus a yearly salary for life of $97,000 plus debt forgiveness plus $1 homes. I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure that actually works out to a lot more than $360,000.

(9) And let's assume the $360,000 is a real number for a moment. If you were enslaved by evil San Fran'ers for generations and then supposedly kept down by their wicked structural racism for your entire life, would $360,000 come anywhere near paying that off? So is this all just some giant jerk off?

(10) Moreover, let's assume the $640 billion number is real for a moment. San Francisco's GDP is around $500 billion a year. So while these race-baiters like to claim that America was built on slavery, which I assure it was not -- everything the South build was reduced to ash at the end of the civil war (meaning $0 in asset value at the end of the war), they are claiming that the total value of the labors of the entire slave population of San Francisco and as much as the racist whites and Chinese could steal from these poor victims through their structural racism is supposedly compensable by roughly 1.28 years of GDP? Really? So slavery contributed 1 year's GDP to a country with 300 years of economic growth... 0.3%. If I was black, I'd been kind of pissed to be told that's my value to America.

Personally, I think they should go for it. San Francisco should pass a law obligating the city to pay this $640 billion (enhanced by the stuff they aren't counting) until every penny is paid. In the meantime, the city should not be allowed to racistly pay another penny for anything. What's more, to make sure the guilty don't escape, they should require anyone who lived in the city in the past 20 years to pay an equal share, regardless of where they've fled to since. It's only fair.

In all seriousness, this is idiocy of the lowest order. It's insulting. It's stupid. It's an attempt to stir race hate and enshrine official victim status. What's worse, if you want to spark a race war, this is how you do it. Go tell poor white trash and Mexican laborers and Chinese small business owners, all of whom are scraping to get by, that because some rich land owners over 160 years ago did something wrong, they need to pay massive guilt money to black doctors and computer programmers, and see what happens. You're going to get a lot of very nice people killed with this crap.

Thoughts?