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  • #16
    Re: The Violence thread

    I get the gist of what he's saying although the financial details go over my head.

    Immunity Must Be Overruled for Police & Prosecutors to Save Everyone
    Posted Jun 5, 2020 by Martin Armstrong


    Once upon a time, we use to live in an honorable society. All systems move toward corruption and they inevitably move to protect their own agents. Ben Franklin wanted to create a legal system based upon the Scottish model where judges were nominated by lawyers and not politicians. He lost that argument and we have been paying dearly ever since. People see these protests and blame the blacks. They are ignorant of what is taking place in our legal system. It is not just about the blacks. The entire system has become so corrupt and this is why the United States has more people in prison than any other nation in the world including Russia. If you simply drive on federal property and forget your drivers’ license, you must serve 30 days in prison. A prosecutor will not get credit for a conviction in the Feds UNLESS you go to prison! Does that mean that Americans are the worst criminals on the planet? Or simply does it mean that it is time to change the system.

    Proprietorial abuse is NOT limited to blacks. New York City specializes in prosecuting anyone who competes against the New York bankers. When I asked a lawyer why no New York banker has EVER been criminally prosecuted, he laughed and said, “You don’t shit where you eat!”

    This was the prosecutor on my case — Richard D. Owens. We are heading into a civil war because the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors can do anything whatsoever. They can even knowingly seek the death penalty for people they know are innocent because the government should always be above the law.

    In my case, under the direction of Owens, they seized Princeton Economics solely because my lawyers gave them one week to return the money they stole or we would file suit, which would end the takeover of Republic National Bank by HSBC.

    They seized everything when we were NEVER in default and our clients were supporting us against the banks. The bank was illegally trading in or accounts and tried to claim that their own staff was assisting me from hiding losses they created. The problem was that we bought portfolios, but we were not managing them. We had to repay the note regardless of the performance. The allegation made no sense. We had issued notes buying the portfolios at their original cost with generally 10 years to repay covering their losses which were about 40%.

    When the prosecutors finally figured out that the bank lied, they summoned me to a private reverse proffer session where Richard D. Owens admitted they knew I had never stolen anything. Yet he added, they would not drop the charges. They wanted me to plead to a conspiracy with Edmond Safra who was dead. I refused. To prevent me from helping our clients in suing the banks, they then imposed a gag order on me to prevent me from assisting my clients for LIFE!.

    They used the charge of contempt without any description of a crime or any specific order to produce anything to purge the contempt, which is unconstitutional, but law means nothing in New York City. Clients even offered to put up the $1.3 million in cash to end the contempt and the court denied it, resulting in my lawyers simply saying this was just to prevent a trial making it impossible to produce anything. This was all just to protect the bank.

    What is blatantly obvious is that $1 billion in our notes were sold to the bank to hide our profit. HSBC then redeemed our notes for $606 million, pocketing about $400 profit in foreign exchange so they could hide that from the public.

    Because of this immunity that the Supreme Court has bestowed on police and prosecutors, there is ABSOLUTELY nothing you can do to defend yourself whatsoever regardless of your race, religion, or gender. Equal protection of the law does not exist! They are above the law and police have been abusing their position routinely. A friend who knew someone involved at HSBC commented it was a deal “too good to pass up,” which has always stuck in my throat wondering how much was paid back in bribes. Any of the major firms that compete against the bankers in New York are charged in New York, destroyed, and their bones are picked over by the New York bankers – i.e. Drexel Burnham (Philadelphia) and REVCO (Chicago). When a New Yorker is involved, MF Global, they are never charged.

    Until the Supreme Court abolishes this unreasonable immunity, why should we ever expect this tension to subside? The protests are far better off in front of the Supreme Court for until that law is changed, there will NEVER be any reform. They have charged the three officers involved in Floyd’s death. That will not create lasting reform until the law no longer protects them.

    Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

    Comment


    • #17
      Re: The Violence thread

      Brilliant talk discussing among other things why we are so easily manipulated into "Us vs Them" thinking, and how quickly that thinking can be changed into "We're all Us."

      Dr. Robert Sapolsky: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst:


      Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

      Comment


      • #18
        Re: The Violence thread

        Please forgive me but,
        The DNC want to beat Trump...............the virus has not even taken him down..............thus Strangly we have all this "Unrest".
        Yes the police miss handled his arrest, but it would not take 3-4 police officers to arrest me.

        A mixture of bordom, SJW & late night looting etc.........

        The DNC will milk this for all its worth, sadly for them it will die down & Trump will use it against them.

        Comment


        • #19
          Re: The Violence thread

          A lot of entities are milking this for all it's worth and the timing couldn't be better for them, but that doesn't erase the fact that racial injustice is real and terrible, and solutions are long overdue. The lockdown and destroyed economy have fueled the rage. In places where the police and protesters threw out the Antifa scum and general troublemakers, the protests continue, nonviolently. The police here have been walking with the protestors, protecting them. This feels like the beginnings of a real movement, not something that is going to blow over for the next news cycle.

          I think Trump blew it big time. His actions and rhetoric have long given the impression that his only tool is a hammer, and that seems to be the case now. A president needs to be able to rise above partisianship, no matter how foul. A president needs to be able to unify, inspire, lead. He ain't doing that. He knows how to bully and bluster but when that doesn't work he's got nothing to fall back on except threats of force. When protesters are protesting systemic violence, that's like pouring gasoline on the fire.

          If he wins in 2020, I think he will be crippled in negotiations with congress, other leaders and heads of state who have figured out his play book. Even if he's right and they're wrong, he won't be able to negotiate with people who have gotten tired of being treated like nails.

          A lot of people who voted for Trump are diehard true believers who will vote for him again no matter what. A lot more, I suspect, are disappointed if not outright disgusted. His winning margin in 2016 was so narrow, I don't think he can win again if he loses enough of those votes now. But Biden is just terrible! Both the 2-party system and the financial system are rotten to the core, and people are seeing this. Both systems have failed us and both systems are teetering on the verge of collapse. If ever there was a time when a third party candidate could galvanize voters and pull off a win, this is it.

          Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

          Comment


          • #20
            Re: The Violence thread

            Short talk on social violence, and how a violent society can become a peaceful society:


            Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

            Comment


            • #21
              Re: The Violence thread

              Originally posted by shiny! View Post
              Brilliant talk discussing among other things why we are so easily manipulated into "Us vs Them" thinking, and how quickly that thinking can be changed into "We're all Us."

              Dr. Robert Sapolsky: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst:

              thanks for posting this. fascinating and fun.

              Comment


              • #22
                Re: The Violence thread

                Originally posted by shiny! View Post
                A lot of entities are milking this for all it's worth and the timing couldn't be better for them, but that doesn't erase the fact that racial injustice is real and terrible, and solutions are long overdue. The lockdown and destroyed economy have fueled the rage. In places where the police and protesters threw out the Antifa scum and general troublemakers, the protests continue, nonviolently. The police here have been walking with the protestors, protecting them. This feels like the beginnings of a real movement, not something that is going to blow over for the next news cycle.

                I think Trump blew it big time. His actions and rhetoric have long given the impression that his only tool is a hammer, and that seems to be the case now. A president needs to be able to rise above partisianship, no matter how foul. A president needs to be able to unify, inspire, lead. He ain't doing that. He knows how to bully and bluster but when that doesn't work he's got nothing to fall back on except threats of force. When protesters are protesting systemic violence, that's like pouring gasoline on the fire.

                If he wins in 2020, I think he will be crippled in negotiations with congress, other leaders and heads of state who have figured out his play book. Even if he's right and they're wrong, he won't be able to negotiate with people who have gotten tired of being treated like nails.

                A lot of people who voted for Trump are diehard true believers who will vote for him again no matter what. A lot more, I suspect, are disappointed if not outright disgusted. His winning margin in 2016 was so narrow, I don't think he can win again if he loses enough of those votes now. But Biden is just terrible! Both the 2-party system and the financial system are rotten to the core, and people are seeing this. Both systems have failed us and both systems are teetering on the verge of collapse. If ever there was a time when a third party candidate could galvanize voters and pull off a win, this is it.
                according to polling data 90% of republicans will vote for trump no matter what, because we have become a hyper-partisan society. .a 3rd party will just ensure trump's re-election. it's hard to think of a candidate less inspiring than biden, but this is our alternative. trump's big man theory says the leader is everything. maybe a more communitarian administration doesn't need a big man.

                Comment


                • #23
                  Re: The Violence thread

                  Originally posted by jk View Post
                  according to polling data 90% of republicans will vote for trump no matter what, because we have become a hyper-partisan society. .a 3rd party will just ensure trump's re-election. it's hard to think of a candidate less inspiring than biden, but this is our alternative. trump's big man theory says the leader is everything. maybe a more communitarian administration doesn't need a big man.
                  The Democrats do best when they run a serious policy wonk as their Presidential candidate. Such as a Clinton (Bill, not the other one) or an Obama. Biden should be one given his years in the Senate and Veep. But he just does not come across as such. Maybe he will hit his stride as the campaign heats up? Maybe he just needs to avoid making a big mistake instead?

                  As an outsider looking in, for the second election in a row I'm wondering how it can be that a great nation with 331 million people can't produce just two really qualified and inspiring candidates. Unbelievable.

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    Re: The Violence thread

                    Originally posted by GRG55 View Post
                    As an outsider looking in, for the second election in a row I'm wondering how it can be that a great nation with 331 million people can't produce just two really qualified and inspiring candidates. Unbelievable.
                    it says that there's something profoundly wrong with our political system, we are in the midst of a tumultuous transition, howe and strauss's 4th turning if you will. we can at least hope we come out with something better, but there is no guarantee.

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Re: The Violence thread

                      Originally posted by jk View Post
                      thanks for posting this. fascinating and fun.
                      Glad you enjoyed it. This talk is basically a Cliff Notes of his Stanford lecture series (which I've been watching) and his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

                      He's a great teacher. He'll be discussing various subjects like stress, hormones and brain chemistry, game theory, natural selection, baboons, pair bonding vs tournament species, and I'm just bopping along, not really wondering where he's going with all this because he makes it so interesting when suddenly... BOOM! He ties all these subjects together and the conclusion is so obvious. And at that moment I realize I'll never see the world the same way again.

                      Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        Re: The Violence thread

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          Re: The Violence thread



                          Why We Engage in Tribalism, Nationalism, and Scapegoating


                          Robert Sapolsky reveals the biological basis for our most unfortunate traits—and insists change is possible.


                          Robert Sapolsky.
                          (Photo: Thompson McClellan Photography)

                          A couple of weeks ago, at a speech before a friendly audience, President Donald Trump likened immigrants to poisonous snakes. To biologist and behavioral scientist Robert Sapolsky, it was a revolting but revealing remark.

                          "That's a textbook dehumanization of 'them,' he said. "If you get to the point where citing 'thems' causes your followers to activate neurons in the insular cortex—the part of the brain that responds to viscerally disgusting things—you've finished most of your to-do list for your genocide."

                          That sort of sharply stated, science-based analysis has made Sapolsky a popular and influential writer and thinker. A MacArthur fellow, he is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, and the author of several books, including the 2017 best-seller Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

                          Sapolsky has spent much of his career in Kenya, studying baboons (among other primates), and he uses that knowledge to put human behavior into a broader perspective. In a recent telephone interview, he discussed the biological basis of our current political fault lines.
                          Let's talk about tribalism. First of all, is that an accurate term for the sorting into opposing camps that's going on today?
                          Absolutely, in a very primate kind of way. The easiest symbols that we grab onto in deciding if someone is an "us" or a "them" are visceral ones. Being disgusted by someone's personal behavior—the way 'they' do stuff—is a much easier entree to hating them than disagreeing with their views on the trade deficit.

                          Primates are hard-wired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds. Our views about things are driven by implicit (unconscious) processes. It's depressing as hell. A hormone like oxytocin makes you nicer to "us" and crappier to "them." What hormones are good at is magnifying things that are already there. That tells you that 'us and them' is a fundamental fault line in our brains.

                          That's depressing, but the key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into "us" and "them," it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an "us" and who is a "them" at any given moment.

                          True, but there's a lot of research suggesting our various identities are lining up more and more, with liberals and conservatives shopping at different stores, watching different movies and television shows, etc. Isn't that a dangerous trend?

                          I agree. The percentage of people who have friends with different political viewpoints is decreasing. The odds of you marrying someone with a different political orientation are also down. I think that reflects the ways in which social media, etc. have made this such a polarizing atmosphere.

                          We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us. For example, devout religious belief is not a predictor of extremism. Devout religious observance isn't either. But devout religious observance in a group setting is. Studies show that support for terrorism in majority Muslim countries is unrelated to how often you pray, or how devout you are about food prohibitions. But it is related to how often you pray in a mosque. The same is also true of right-wing Jewish extremists in Israel. When sacred values are re-affirmed in groups—that's when things get scary.
                          We're also seeing the rise of nationalism all around the world, and with that has come an increased tolerance for autocratic leaders. This is often explained as a reaction to globalization: If McDonald's is everywhere, people feel a threat to their national identity, and they feel a need to affirm it in a strong, even belligerent way. Do you agree?

                          Globalization has meant people living in places they didn't use to live in—which means people are living around people they didn't use to have to live around. In principle, that can be great and heartbreaking—contact with others leads us to realize we're all siblings under the skin. But we know it does anything but that.

                          For the book, I looked at the literature on what circumstances set people up for making intergroup tensions worse. It turns out having some of "them" move in down the block is not a great recipe for everyone learning that they're more similar than different. Rather, it's a great circumstance for rubbing elbows and getting visceral senses of threat going.
                          What globalization has done is allowed all sorts of places that are feeling economically and culturally precarious to have local scapegoats—people that look a whole lot different. It would take a lot more work to figure out it's their fault if they happened to look and eat and pray the same way you do. If all of those things are different, you're three-quarters of the way home toward getting a scapegoat.

                          So if you're looking for someone to blame, you've got somebody right down the street! That wouldn't have been true in the past.

                          Scapegoating is an incredibly mammalian thing to do. Why is that? Because it makes you feel better! It's a horrifyingly effective stress-reduction mechanism.

                          If you have a rat that has just gotten a shock, one of the best ways to decrease its stress hormones is to make it easy for it to turn around and bite another rat. Roughly 50 percent of baboon aggression is "displacement aggression"—somebody taking out their bad day on somebody smaller. It's a defining feature of social organisms in pain.

                          We write a lot in Pacific Standard about economic and social inequality, but until I read Behave, it never occurred to me to compare humans with other animals in this respect. You argue that humans have far more inequality than any other species. Any idea why that is?

                          Because of our psychological sophistication. A low-ranking non-human primate may they get beat up when somebody is in a bad mood, or get the crummiest place to sit when it's raining. Or they'll find something good to eat, and someone (of a higher rank) will take it away from them. But that's basically it. They don't have societal constructs that lead them to think it's their own damn fault.

                          Humans can be driving down the freeway, and the driver in front of you can signal your lack of socioeconomic success (via their more expensive automobile). Humans can sit at home, watch an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and feel diminished. And all of that plays out in terms of whether your kid gets a decent education, or whether they'll make it home from school safely.

                          When you look at the links between low socioeconomic status and poor health in Westernized humans, it has nothing to do with access to health care, and only a tiny amount to do with lifestyle risk factors. It's the psychological impact of being poor. A person's subjective socioeconomic status is the best predictor of their health.

                          In other words, it's not being poor (that puts your health at risk)—it's feeling poor. The most reliable way to make somebody feel poor is to rub their nose in it, which can entail everything from not making eye contact to not having the police believe them.

                          You write that you don't really believe in free will, but we nevertheless have an obligation to try to understand our behavior and make things better. Isn't that something of a contradiction?

                          I'm realizing how incredibly hard it is to articulate how an absence of free will is compatible with change.

                          Gaining new knowledge, having new experiences, being inspired by someone's example—these are biological phenomena. They leave biological traces.

                          There are all sorts of neuro-pathways that analyze the world in terms of cause and effect. The knowledge that one person—or a bunch of high school students—really can make a difference can be inspiring. That means certain pathways have been facilitated, and as a result of that, certain behaviors become more likely. Pathways to efficacy can also be weakened if you find out you have no control in a certain domain. Learning to be helpless is also biological.

                          So the fact free will is largely illusory does not mean the way we react to the world is static and unchanging.

                          Absolutely not. There's a vast difference between a biologically determined universe and fatalism.

                          Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            Re: The Violence thread

                            What a great find Shiny. My favorite bit:

                            "If you get to the point where citing 'thems' causes your followers to activate neurons in the insular cortex...you've finished most of your to-do list for your genocide."

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Re: The Violence thread



                              Meet the New Left, they come in peace

                              Last edited by Mega; June 17, 2020, 08:24 AM.

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                Re: The Violence thread

                                Originally posted by thriftyandboringinohio View Post
                                What a great find Shiny. My favorite bit:

                                "If you get to the point where citing 'thems' causes your followers to activate neurons in the insular cortex...you've finished most of your to-do list for your genocide."
                                He does get right to the point. It both frustrates and frightens me, because if it wasn't for Trump's scapegoating tendencies I'd probably vote for him, just because of certain policy issues that I prefer to the Dems. But I can't do it. My fear is if he were to get a 2nd term, he would take it as a vindication for his worst impulses and let fly without restraint. Can't vote for Biden, either. Unless someone offers me a candidate who, at a minimum, has a working frontal cortex, I'm sitting this one out.

                                If you liked this interview, I posted some talks by Sapolsky earlier up in the thread. I think you'll find them well worth your time.
                                Last edited by shiny!; June 17, 2020, 10:54 AM.

                                Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

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