Brace yourself😵‍💫

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal. — John Steinbeck. Revolution is in the air.

ALL incumbents need to be voted out.

[Brace yourself😵‍💫 @Cyrenitee]

https://t.co/wwtr0PboVC

[Dan Hill @dandinohill]

Congressman bragging to his constituents: "I am fighting hard for your future, and your children's future!"

Constituent: "You A-holes in DC have run up $40 Trillion in debt that our children will have to pay off! That's no future!!"

"You haven't been fighting FOR us. You've been stealing FROM us."

[Brace yourself😵‍💫 @Cyrenitee]

@PatrickCorrigan Always curious and want to read what is censored.

[Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho]

🇬🇧 Meanwhile in England

92 Year Old War Widow has a message for UK PM Andy Burnham as she’s arrested for saying words she’s not allowed to say.

This is England now.

[Dylan Ratigan @DylanRatigan]

A former defense contractor executive described Washington in four words:

“It’s all for sale.”

He knew because he had participated in the system.

Martin Kao, the former CEO of Navatek, pleaded guilty to campaign-finance and loan fraud. Then he began explaining to federal investigators how Washington worked. His company wanted government contracts. So it hired lobbyists, cultivated members of Congress, made political contributions, opened operations in politically useful states and pursued federal appropriations.

The taxpayers supplied the money. The politicians controlled access to it. The companies supplied the campaign cash. And after the contract was awarded, the American people still had to hope the company would actually do the work.

Federal contracting is full of projects that run over budget, fail to deliver what was promised or are terminated before completion, sometimes after enormous sums have already been obligated or paid. GAO has repeatedly documented major federal projects that are delayed, over budget or fail to deliver intended improvements, and federal agencies reported nearly 40,000 contract terminations in fiscal 2024 alone.

Kao told investigators the company’s government work produced no products the military ultimately wanted to buy, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

That is the business model.

According to ProPublica’s investigation, Kao gave federal agents a 50-page account naming lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress involved in what he described as a pay-to-play system. FBI agents reviewed corporate records and emails and found evidence consistent with substantial parts of his account.

One of the relationships investigators examined involved Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

Navatek wanted federal defense money. Kao and people around the company donated money into Collins’ political orbit. Collins supported federal funding for Navatek projects. ProPublica reports that FBI records showed donations, lobbying activity and federal funding requests repeatedly moving through the same network of people and communications. Collins denies any pay-to-play arrangement, and neither she nor her staff was charged.

And then something even more revealing happened.

The FBI agents pursuing the broader corruption investigation were pushed out. The Justice Department’s public-corruption operation was gutted. Agents and prosecutors left or were removed. The investigation died before the government finished answering the question it had begun asking.

That is the story.

Yesterday I wrote that the tax code is the moral code, and that the tax code is for sale.

This story shows that the tax code is only one counter in a much larger store.

Private contractors are using our tax money they were granted after bribing our government -- to secure more contracts of our money.

The contractors get rich on our dime, the politicians are paid off to do it -- and frequently the contracted work is never done or is worthless.

And when the institutions responsible for investigating corruption are themselves subject to political control, even accountability becomes part of the transaction.

We spend enormous amounts of time arguing about whether Democrats are corrupt or Republicans are corrupt.

That argument misses the architecture.

The system allows money to move toward politicians while government money moves toward the interests surrounding those politicians.

Kao apparently understood that perfectly. One former employee recalled him describing his politics this way:

“I’m not red or blue, I’m green.”

That is why our endless partisan argument is so useful to the people benefiting from the system. We argue over the jerseys while the marketplace underneath both teams continues operating.

Republicans accuse Democrats.

Democrats accuse Republicans.

Lobbyists write checks. Members of Congress raise money.

Contractors receive appropriations. Monopolies protect themselves. Consultants collect fees.

And taxpayers finance the entire machine.

Then every few years Americans are invited to choose which group will administer it.

So the cycle becomes complete.

The FBI started following the map, then the investigation disappeared.

Yesterday the tax code was for sale, today the evidence points to the larger truth:

It’s all for sale.

Subscribe: https://t.co/J9vB6EUwAt

[Brace yourself😵‍💫 @Cyrenitee]

@TroyJackson207 Run as an Independent.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Private equity owns 447 US hospitals. ER deaths rose 13% under PE ownership, per the Annals of Internal Medicine. Preventable adverse events jumped 25% after PE acquisition, per JAMA. Hospital assets fell an average of 24% within two years of a PE buyout, about $28 million per hospital that just disappeared. PE firms account for 7% of GDP but were behind 21% of all healthcare bankruptcies in 2024. Steward Health Care, once the largest private for-profit hospital system in the country, closed its safety net hospitals and went bankrupt. Twenty-five states have introduced 79 bills to address PE ownership of hospitals.

My Take
PE firms buy hospitals the same way they buy retail chains. Load them with debt, strip the assets, extract fees, and move on. The difference is when Eddie Bauer closes you find another jacket. When your hospital closes, the nearest ER is 45 minutes away and a stroke patient doesn't have 45 minutes.

They buy the building, sell the land underneath it in a sale-leaseback, then bill the hospital rent on property it used to own. The debt payments eat whatever revenue is left. $28 million per hospital gone in two years while ER deaths climb 13% and infections double. Federal Medicaid cuts are projected to pull roughly $1 trillion out of the system over the next decade. These hospitals already run on margins so thin that one bad quarter can force a closure. I don't know how the ones still under PE ownership survive what's coming, and the communities that depend on them don't have a backup plan.

Hedgie🤗

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔A farmer in Vineland, New Jersey photographed a neighboring golf course and accidentally caught 62 unpermitted gas generators at a data center that powers Microsoft's AI tools. Each ran at 1,982 kilowatts, over 50 times the state permit threshold. New Jersey fined operator DataOne $1.1 million, the largest fine ever against a data center in the state. DataOne can keep operating while it reapplies for the permits it already failed to get.

My Take
DataOne applied for permits, got rejected, and turned the generators on anyway next to farmland, homes, and two schools. The fine is a million dollars for a company with billions in capital. They decided it was cheaper to break the law and pay the penalty than to wait for approval. And they're probably right, because the fine doesn't shut anything down. They get 45 more days to reapply while the generators stay on.

Oracle can't get a gas pipeline permit in New Mexico. Over 500 communities have banned new data centers. And here's a company that just skipped the permits entirely and got a fine it can pay without noticing. The AI infrastructure buildout is on a collision course with every community it touches. These companies need power now and they're not going to wait for anyone to say yes. New Jersey already killed data center tax credits because residents organized. The more of these stories that come out, the harder it gets to site the next facility anywhere. The industry wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, but the people who live next to it have a vote too.

Hedgie🤗

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Under capitalism if you steal from your employer you go to jail but if your employer steals from you then you need to win a class action lawsuit to get back what they stole, and they suffer zero consequences. Capitalism is all about using state power to protect capital by force.

[nogps @nogps1]

Our governments need to stop blocking our sun & poisoning our air

People are waking up, not just here in the USA but all around the world!

We never consented to this, enough is enough!!

@FAA_Chris @SeanDuffyWI @VP @epaleezeldin @POTUS @SecWar @SecKennedy @TheGeoFight_com

[Jesse Lynn♥️ @jesseRoss597206]

Chemtrails 101. Are you feeling any of these physiological effects?

[nogps @nogps1]

Don't worry, it's only water vapor!

Well.. actually, it's chemicals & heavy metals, but unfortunately, it seems easier for many people to believe a lie than face the actual "uncomfortable truth" of what's really happening in our skies!

Save our Skies 🆘️ Save our Souls

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

He's right, but of course what we fear - and what we see in stuff like Hugging Face - is AI behaving as sociopathically as the average Silicon Valley & Wall Street predator. It's not AI misaligned from human behavior. It's AI's accelerated super-alignment with bad human behavior.

[Antiwar.com @Antiwarcom]

US Kills Four in Latest Bombing of Alleged Drug-Running Boat in the Caribbean
At least 234 people have been killed in the US extrajudicial executions at sea since the campaign began last September
#Caribbean #LatinAmerica #WaronDrugs
https://t.co/ZgttmDJ6bP

[Antiwar.com @Antiwarcom]

US Launches Airstrike in Northern Somalia as It Continues Record-Breaking Bombing Campaign
The US has also been accused of bombing a water treatment plant in a separate strike launched on September 14 in southern #Somalia
https://t.co/1G2ibETZXY

[Brownstone Institute @brownstoneinst]

New report in the British Medical Journal explains how statistical masking buried the worst safety signals from the Pfizer and Moderna shots due to the deluge of reports. This is like wearing noise-cancelling headphones at a rave and then reporting that there is no music.

https://t.co/V6wfkdQcwi

[Brace yourself😵‍💫 @Cyrenitee]

@TPV_John U.S. is a capitalist country. I believe bribery is part of its manifesto.

[Ron Paul @RonPaul]

Flashback 2009: The "What if" Speech

The more things change...

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

American nurses says out entire healthcare system has become a scam

“The entire medical industry is just a big business operating off of marketing and scams:

- The nursing shortage is a scam
- The doctor shortage is a scam
- Safe and effective marketing slogan is a scam
- Trust the experts, scam
- Trust the science, the science that's funded by billionaires is a scam”

“I just don't believe any of it anymore. You have to prove to me that something is safe and effective, and it can't be funded by the same people trying to sell the products.

And you have to show me the studies, not the studies that you manipulated to make the drug look like it's safe and effective, and then when it's given to the public, that shows a different story. But then you can't write that science down because the manufacturers don't allow that. They only allow the studies that they want.

So I don't believe any of this anymore.”

She’s right and there are real documented cases where Big Pharma excluded research and studies of negative impacts of drugs. The manufacturers rejected research that showed their products had health safety concerns

One documented example is the GSK’s antidepressant Paxil, paroxetine, ‘Study 329’ in adolescents

- GSK ran multiple pediatric depression trials in the 1990s
- Study 329 plus two others failed showed the drug was no better than placebo and showed higher rates of suicidal thinking and behavior
- Internal company documents later showed GSK knew the results were “disappointing”
- They chose not publish 2 of the 3 pediatric trials
- They then published ‘Study 329’ in 2001 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry claiming Paxil was “generally well tolerated and effective.”

A literal outright lie

Things like this is what you can’t trust Big Pharma, it’s all about profits

[Brace yourself😵‍💫 @Cyrenitee]

@DawnsMission Worked on husband's rosacea.

[Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe @IRANinZIMBABWE]

American democracy every four years.