I think a time will come when right-leaning and libertarian Americans who are not in agreement with the establishment will realize that their country is captured beyond any hope, that Trump 2016 was the last anti-establishment presidency and the people are no longer represented. It has not happened yet, there is still hope. But once you all come to that understanding, just remember this: There is not enough room for you all in New Zealand.
Discussion
trump being anti-establishment is laughable. blue blood, new york real estate tycoon. doesn’t get much more establishment than that.
The establishment is anti-Trump. That's the only direction that matters.
the establishment adores trump. he provides the most important “my side is the best one” issue for them to exploit to distract from the destruction of our future.
Riiiight. That is why they throw hundreds of lawsuits at him, suing to get him off of the ballot. Just to distract us from the fact that they love him and want him to win. 😑
Exactly! Being a non-affliliated centrist, I think being a Trump fan in 2024 is more brainwashed than a Joe Biden fan, and *that* is saying something.
What? The establishment put Trump there. You cannot be President without the establishment, obviously. I think the big thing people miss is how far the establishment will go. They know the populace like drama and want a hero and a hero they will provide. Lawsuits, bad press, whatever drama it takes.
Look, we can't have this debate without breaking down what we mean by Establishment. There are a lot of powers that often work together and appear as one giant thing. But sometimes they work against each other. It depends on the thing.
The media LOVED to hate on Trump. Huge for ratings.
Big pharma LOVED Trump for operation warp speed.
Israel LOVED Trump for moving the Embassy, recognizing Golan Heights, Jared Kushner negotiating the Abraham accords, assassinating Solemani.
The mliitary LOVED Trump, he funded them massively.
The FBI and CIA were split, but mostly worked against Trump. Trump is trying to repair that by offering the FBI a new headquarters building. Smart political move, but I'm not sure how far it will go.
But if you have not noticed, there are other powerful people working extremely diligently to make sure Trump does not get elected in 2024. They were working hard to make sure he didn't get elected in 2016 (and failed) and in 2020 (and succeeded). They obviously include the Democrats, but they heavily infect the FBI and CIA, many judges, University administrators, etc.
The point is that it used to be the case that Americans could freely elect their President, and these powers worked to influence the vote but by "above board" means. Your vote still counted. I don't think that's true anymore, now I think they use any scheme they can, legal, illegal, unconstitutional, removal from the ballot, child-pedo-ring extortion,... anything and everything. And as a result your vote doesn't count anymore. It is only a battle between verypoweful people, and you are I are not "part of the club".
In contrast, here in NZ we may get bad leaders, we may not agree with our leaders on everything, and our leaders may have too much power without as much separation of power or constitutional guard rails that the US has... but at least we do elect them fairly. At least I believe we do.
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I propose that the establishment is not that. Before I give evidence as to define establishment I'll say that it is not possible to oppose the CIA. I've busted Nation-State spies personally. I had clearance, more than half my extended family is TS/SCI or Q. The CIA comes from OSS, Allen Dulles, formerly of the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. The CIA works in lock-step with Military, DARPA, Treasury.
The Military forced Trump to approve the budget, they hate each other, as one would expect.
Anyways, during the lockdown the only countries in the *world* that did not lockdown was I believe Leichtenstein and some small island.
https://www.who.int/countries/
Russia, China, North Korea, every country in the world, under bodily control of the UN chartered WHO.
I respectfully disagree with some of that, but thank you for busting nation-state spies.
Yes these institutions you mention generally coordinate.
The entire concept of classification and "need to know" causes a serious problem: the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. It can't be audited. It can't be cleaned up. Psychopaths have entrenched their empires. Movies have been made about it (the Bourne Identity comes to mind). It is more confusing than not to consider it a single entity, and if you don't consider it a single entity, then which part is working in lock-step with the Military, DARPA and the Treasury? Just the figureheads.
My judgement is that Trump does not hate the military, nor was his hand forced.
The following places did not lockdown: Belarus, Brazil (Roraima and Rodonia), Burundi, Iceland, Japan, Niacragua, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Tanzania, USA (Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming) and Uruguay.
The WHO is trying to put legal infrastructure in place to enforce global lockdowns, but they didn't have it when COVID hit.
Speaking of busting nation-state spies... When AMD released the Zen2 chips, the RDRAND instructions were outputting all 1's (the number -1) consistently. That's not very random. It was fixed in a bios update. The fact that this happened tells you a lot:
1) The random number generator can be bypassed
2) Someone at AMD intentionally bypassed it as a "bug" in order to alert us.
Funny that you mention that! I invented a new CVSS scoring system just to highlight an exploit chain of LogoFail + Zenbleed || Downfall. Lenovo was supposed to release the Zenbleed fix, microcode CPU update on Jan 6th, yesterday. Now they've pushed it back 2 more months!
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/ps500571-amd-cross-process-information-leak
This new bios update fixes the bug and adds 2 more that we hope you won't figure out too soon.
;-)
New Zelans is not captured?
Some parts of NZ are indeed captured (like the HRC) but mostly by ideological ideas rather than by wealthy sociopaths. Other parts are not. The two big parties mostly give you the same product in a different colored wrapper, and the mainstream media is a mouthpiece of the government and especially of the left (and we have really good underground media fighting back - Reality Check Radio).
But in my opinion, less of the infrastructure, the voting, the courts, etc, are captured. Small parties get into parliament and make a difference.
Also, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, New Zealand ranks 2nd in terms of democracies at a score of 9.61, while the US is at 7.85 and falling. Greece, the Czech Republic, Estonia... all score higher than the USA.
Interesting perspective, thanks.
Something that makes me think the US is better of than countries like NZ is the rate and amount of gun ownership. Nowhere else compares.
It seems like everywhere else, you just have to sit and wait as every institution is corrupted. In the US, you sit and wait too, but with a huge collection of guns.
Switzerland at least used to be that every man of a certain age range was issued a rifle and a sealed canister of ammunition, and was periodically trained by the military, and if your canister was opened you had to explain why. Guns and ammo were controlled, but everybody had them.
New Zealand has gun onwership. 5% of people have firearms licences, and there are about 1 million guns among 5 million people, or about 4 guns on average for every licenced firearm owner. Gun laws are stricter: you must keep them in safes, and ammo/bolt in a separate safe. You must be approved by the police (e.g. not have a criminal record, not be a danger to yourself or society in any way). Pistols are much harder to get approved for so there aren't a lot of pistols, and for some dumb reason anything that looks scary has recently become illegal. I have a firearms license.
But nothing compares to America on this point.
In what ways is NZ freer than the USA?
We have fair elections. And we don't have a police state targetting the political opponents of the people in power.
Those are admirable qualitites. Unfortunately, I think it's fair to say elections (even fair ones) are a poor predictor of good government. I would rather have a system with respect for property than a choice among rulers.
My (perhaps unfair) impression of NZ is people elected a tyrant Jacinda, right? But then she resigned? My other impression is the Kim Dotcom raids where the NZ government is complicit with USA government. Oh and five eyes.
I hope I'm not coming down too harshly on NZ, I am genuinely curious to know. Perhaps the past three years have lit a flame of liberty in the minds of the NZ people and things will get better. I hope the same for the whole world.
The news that gets out of NZ tends to be the bad stuff. No country is the magical mystical libertarian or anarcho-capitalist utopia. I wouldn't consider New Zealand to be close to such a thing. But it is a sane, safe, mostly free, democratic, liberal and productive place to live with fewer crises going on.
When the left is in power they have crazy bad ideas (take from the whites to give to the browns, control the media so that nothing bad is said of the government, restrict guns of lawful people, lockdown to save grandma, try to compete in the real estate development market, try to run a railroad, try to run a bank, try to build public transport on massive scales, shut down oil and gas exploration and rely on unreliable wind power - later necessating importing coal from China to keep the lights on, etc), but they are highly incompetent so they can't actuate most of their ideas. Basically they waste a bunch of money and get nothing done except marketing of themselves. At least they get nothing done. When the right is in power, they are much more competent and their ideas are more sane so there is less to worry about. But they want more power for themselves, more support of US and Israel, disrespect freedom of association, they lockdown for grandma too. Nobody is perfect but they are far better.
I don't think the U.S. has more "respect for property" than NZ does. The U.S. has high levels of civil asset forfeiture without judicial review, anything law enforcement claims was involved in a crime... and indeed that isn't even necessary anymore. Most states also permit local prosecutors to take personal property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime. In NZ they generally can only take the proceeds of crime and only after conviction.... civil asset forfeiture requires a high court ruling that the asset in question was indeed part of a crime before it can be taken.
Jacinda was an authoritarian. That wasn't obvious from the start (although some of us had seen the young-socialists videos). She had her way of seeing things. I don't think she was evil, she just had a different opinion and one that many of us did not want to live under. She wanted to protect everybody and punish people who interfered with that. She couldn't handle the feedback though so she resigned.
The NZ government is very subservient to the US regulations, including banking, five-eyes spying, extradition of Kim Dotcom, etc. That is because we have virtually no military and depend on the U.S. to protect us. It is why we are getting off-sides with China even though China is our largest trading partner. We are kind-of fucked in this regard. I think we need to push back against the U.S. to stay neutral, but this government wont be doing that.
The media was locked-up by the last Labour government who paid only certain media companies based on (unwritten) favorable coverage of the government. But all the people I know were wise to what was happening. Hardly anybody I know watches the news anymore. Lots of people listen to underground radio like Reality Check Radio (which can't get a license... funny that) or to podcasts like Joe Rogan.
COVID woke up tons of people. There is quite a resistance movement and liberty is on the rise.
And where I live, amongst farms, people are very independent and libertarian minded. And the people next door matter FAR more than the people in some city far away who think they are running the show.
I agree the "news ... tends to be the bad stuff", true everywhere.
I did not mean to suggest the USA has more respect for property than NZ, but rather the goal is to find a place that does respect property. I would not have guessed NZ is better than the USA in this regard. Your examples suggest NZ may have slight superiority in some regards.
We agree on this: "the people next door matter FAR more than the people in some city far away ..."