4streets

[Ryan Clark @Realrclark25]

Jalen Hurts wasn’t perfect yesterday in Tennessee, but when the moment demanded it, he was DANG GOOD.

That final drive by the @Eagles was a thing of beauty, and their Super Bowl MVP quarterback delivered when it mattered most.

I couldn’t wait to break down every throw, play by play. That’s “What Kept Me Up Last Night.” And there was no way I was doing anything else before getting to this one today.

@ThePivotSports Show @Thepivot

#ThePivotSports #ThePivot #NFL #JalenHurts #FlyEaglesFly

https://t.co/LVLVMvaQoh

[The Dan Le Batard Show @LeBatardShow]

"It's a whole lot of white people hiring a whole lot of white people." - Dan Le Batard on the current state of ESPN

[4streets @4thastreets00]

The go to show for black sports- For you, by you let’s go! Black excellence let em see!

[Ryan Clark @Realrclark25]

“What Kept you up last night?”

I LOVED tackling when my body still allowed me to do it! 😂 So I pay close attention to it.

Early in the season, DBs gotta understand space, angles, approach & leverage. I picked 4 plays from Week 1 to break down, & @FredTaylor helped me bring the tackling mindset to life.

Wish this would’ve helped me get HIM on the ground when we played… ‘cause that’s STILL what keeps me up at night! 😂

@Thepivot “The Pivot Sports”

#ThePivot #ThePivotSports #Tackling #NFLfilms

https://t.co/vLsKIgvfxp

[Gary Chambers @GaryChambersJr]

Louisiana ranks near the bottom in damn near everything that matters — economy, crime, education, healthcare, infrastructure — but instead of fixing that, they’re focused on taking power from a majority Black community in New Orleans.

This bill to remove the Clerk of Criminal Court isn’t about reform. It’s about control.

You can’t say you believe in local control and then override local voters when you don’t like who they elected.

I said it plain: this is reconstructionist, and it’s racist.

You use the government as a job farm building jails in your to employ your constituents and then talk efficiency and eliminate jobs in Black communities.

You’re failing your voters and some of them are starting to see the light.

Every vote you make reflects your moral character.

History will remember. So will the voters.

Share if you care 🦾

[Douglas Macgregor @DougAMacgregor]

4 drones stolen from Fort Campbell!

Army offering reward for information on the theft.

[☥ Seth Kemite ☥ @King__Bantu]

Les Noirs religieux pensent que c’est de la sorcellerie. Les Blancs et les Arabes ont fait du bon boulot pour vous convertir.

[Ben Wehrman @benwehrman]

Dr. Tony Martin: The Hidden History Behind the Jewish Slave Trade of Black Africans

[Don Salmon @dijoni]

Today topic self-destruction. Stockholm syndrome.. self hatred.. Brother Malcolm X who taught you to hate yourself. FBA xenophobic movement.

[🦅Coop〽️ @QuinyonClamps]

Bots on twitter will try and have you believe that he earned none of these and was carried all the way 😭

[kevin blue @kevinblue345]

The white man stole knowledge of malaria

[SinnersMovie @SinnersMovie]

Dive into SINNERS actress Wunmi Mosaku’s incredible journey in The Hollywood Reporter:

🔗: https://t.co/f6l26FslK1

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

If you're currently receiving Social Security, or if you're under 55 and you expect to ever receive Social Security, please read and re-post this.

There are critical facts about the system and its returns, that you MUST understand.

This is not a screed that's for or against.

However, once you understand what SS actually is, how it's been mis-managed, and what it's costing all of us, I'm certain you'll want to see it deeply reformed.

Let's start here.

As you know, the SSA's Trusts are operating at substantial annual deficits and are forecast to run out of money by 2033 or 2034. But, if inflation is higher than expected, the Trusts could run out of funds by 2030.

That's nothing compared to real problem with SS. The real problem is: SSA never invested any of our contributions. Instead, all of the money went into the government's general fund -- and was spent. The SS Trust account at the Treasury was credited with non-marketable Treasury securities, which paid SSA an interest rate based on the average yield and duration of all outstanding Treasury debt.

In short, rather than investing on our behalf, the government took all of the money and gave our accounts a bunch of mostly worthless IOUs. The returns on these IOUs has been about 2% a year. Abysmal.

Let me show you how this feckless behavior has impacted our lives.

Let's assume that in 1971, when we left the gold standard, the SS Trustees realized (as they should have) that the government's IOUs were now only paper... paper that the government could (and surely would) print. So, instead of holding government IOUs, they put the existing reserve ($40B in 1971) and all additional net contributions into the S&P 500, matching the rebalances that have occurred since then. In other words, what if SSA had invested in stocks rather than into government debt?

If those changes were made in 1971, and nothing else about SS changed, (payout ratios remained the same) the Social Security Trust Funds would have $50 trillion in them today, not $2.7 trillion (18x more).

That's the difference between earning 11%+ a year from '71 until '25, instead of the meager 2% the Trusts actually earned. And so, you might say, so what? That didn't happen. Now we're screwed.

Yes, but you really still don't understand how screwed.

If you scaled the payouts proportionally to match the growing size of the fund (keeping the payout ratio the same as it was before) and you maintained the current 104%+ cost-to-revenue payout ratio that exists now, the value of the payouts would increase by 18X too.

Today the average payout is $24,100, with an estimated total payout (over 20 years) of $482k. but, if the SSA had invested in stocks (S&P 500) instead of government bonds and if payout ratios were maintained as they are now, the average payout would be $442,300 per year, with an estimated lifetime value of $8.84 million.

Obviously, this is hypothetical. But is based strictly on the actual math of the current system. Payout ratios should be vastly larger. And the reserves of the system should be too.

The problem with SS isn't merely the law surrounding it. Flemming v. Nestor (1960) makes it clear that your 'contributions' don't belong to you; Social Security's payroll taxes are just that -- taxes. You have no legal right, whatsoever, to any return or any payout at all. You can argue all you want that you paid 'contributions' not taxes, but that entire idea was merely a lie the government told to sell you on paying the taxes without complaint.

Additionally, like all government programs, the Social Security Administration is vastly too expensive ($14.2 billion a year in overhead) to administer). That's as much as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America spend on their IB staffs. I hope it's obvious to you that the SSA staff are not the same caliber of people Goldman hires. You could easily gut 95% of SSA's overhead using off-the-shelf technology and simply investing in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund.

Finally, there's real problem we all face. SSA uses the government's CPI-U (consumer price index, urban consumer) to increase SS's payouts each year, supposedly to keep pace with the impact of inflation. These numbers are farcical. Or fraudulent, depending on how cynical you are about the government.

Real world price indexes (like the Chapwood Index or the Case Schiller Housing Index), which measure the exact same item (the same house) or the same bottle of ketchup show that inflation has been over 10% for more than a decade, on average. More or less, since the financial crisis of 2008, the government has been printing money to pay its bills, including the SSA, and then lying about the inevitable resulting inflation.

How do I know for sure? Simple, just measure the value of the average SS payout in gold eagle coins (1 troy ounce of pure gold, 31.1035 grams).

In 2001, the value of the average SS payout ($10,493) was worth 38 gold eagles. But 2011 (just after the financial crisis) the average payout had risen ~40% to $14,743. That sounds pretty good... except by then, SS's average payout had fallen dramatically in the real world. That year's payout would only buy 10 gold eagles, a decline in real terms of nearly 75%.

Surely, it couldn't get worse... but yes... after the Covid bailouts, it did. Much worse.

By 2025, the average payout was $24k, up 63% in dollar terms. But, that amount only bought 6 gold eagles, a decline in real terms of 40%.

Whether you want to believe it or not, the CPI is fake. That's most obvious when you study the real world value of the SS payouts. If you do, you'll soon discover the real return of the SSA's "investment strategy" since 1971 was actually negative.

Every dollar you're paying into the current system is, like all taxes, being destroyed and wasted by the government. That might be necessary or worth it when comes to national security, highways, and other critical shared resources.

But it absolutely not necessary or worth it when it comes to our retirement accounts.

If we don't fix Social Security in the next five years, it is going to wipe out an entire generation of Americans -- Gen X. And there will be nothing left for Millennials or Gen Z either.

The solution is utterly simple: take the SSA out of the government's hands. Pay a private sector institution, with legal fiduciary obligations, 95% less to administer a SS system that is privately owned (your actual property) and governed by a familiar set of rules. You and your employer would both be required to contribute (tax free) at a minimum rate of 6.5% a year. And you'd have to invest, for the long term, into one of a few high quality, broadly diversified index funds (S&P 500, QQQ, etc.) Or, if you prefer, you could also own short-dated corporate investment grade bonds. Employers could compete for talent by offer higher matching contribution rates (ie, employee pays 10%, employer pays 10%).

Folks with more than 20 years remaining until retirement age (which really should be at least 68) would have the option of keeping the current system (bad idea) or opting into the new system. And, to ease the risk of the transition, the government could guarantee 80% of the value of the current system, so you wouldn't have to bear the full burden of the risks.

It's win-win for everyone, but most especially for people under 40 who would see a massive increase in the value of their contributions.

Would love to hear from anyone who thinks this is a bad idea.

Would also love to hear from anyone who thinks they know how to get this accomplished with the current Administration.

[Typical African @Joe__Bassey]

Africa doesn’t need saving, it needs awakening.

[Typical African @Joe__Bassey]

After several years of Europeans and Arab Whitewashing Ancient Egypt history, Duse Muhammad Ali, a Muslim Egyptian-Sudanese activist, playwright and historian who reclaimed Nile Valley history as African. Listen to Abir Ibrahim speak.

[Gene Trevino @GenoVeno73]

🚨 THIS IS TRAGIC

US Marine Corps Colonel and combat veteran, Doug Krugman, "resigned from the military because of Trump," after 24 years of service.

He wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post stating, and I quote:
"United States military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution without mental reservation or purpose of evasion. I swore or repeated that oath under five presidents, starting with former president Bill Clinton. I risked my life for it, serving as an infantry officer in two wars. I watched Marines die for it."

"No commander in chief is perfect. President Clinton’s moral failures are well known. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq might be one of the worst errors in U.S. history. All recent presidents share responsibility for our failure in Afghanistan. I continued to serve despite all that because I believed the Constitution brought the country more success than failure, and I believed our presidents took their oaths to it seriously."

"With President Trump, I no longer believe that. During his first term, his actions became increasingly difficult for me to justify, culminating with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress as it tried to execute its duties. I hoped he had learned from those errors, but it only took a few days of his second term for me to realize he had not. I could not swear without reservation to follow a commander in chief who seemed so willing to disregard the Constitution."

"Worse than immorality, however, has been President Trump’s willingness to disregard the law and Constitution to achieve his goals. When asked in May about the Fifth Amendment requirements for due process and if he needed to uphold the Constitution as president, the first words out of his mouth were "'I don’t know.'"

"Instead of trying to work within the Constitution, or to amend it, President Trump is testing how far he can ignore it. If voters and legislators cannot close the gaps in our laws to clarify the limits to presidential power, those who serve our government will continue to struggle. The next president — of either party — may continue us down this path toward collapse."

"I voluntarily gave up my rank as the president suggested, but the future of our country is more important than any individual’s career, wealth or power. I have no regrets about my decision. I have given up the service I loved for the freedom to do the right thing, the freedom to speak my mind and the freedom to speak in defense of our country."

[𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐝 𝐙 🇷🇺 🇮🇪 @SMO_VZ]

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED !!!

CRYPTO is a US GOVERNMENT mechanism to devalue the $$$ & erase DEBT

Putin’s advisor Kobyakov: The U.S. has devised a crypto scheme to erase its massive debt at the world’s expense.

“The U.S. is now trying to rewrite the rules of the gold and cryptocurrency markets. Remember the size of their debt—35 trillion dollars. These two sectors (crypto and gold) are essentially alternatives to the traditional global currency system.

Washington’s actions in this area clearly highlight one of its main goals: to urgently address the declining trust in the dollar.

As in the 1930s and the 1970s, the U.S. plans to solve its financial problems at the world’s expense—this time by pushing everyone into the “crypto cloud.” Over time, once part of the U.S. national debt is placed into stablecoins, Washington will devalue that debt.

Put simply: they have a $35 trillion currency debt, they’ll move it into the crypto cloud, devalue it—and start from scratch.

That’s the reality for those who are so enthusiastic about crypto.”

>>>

[𝗩𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗱 @vinguard254]

I'll leave this one here for you.