Stuff that doesn't really fit in either "Examples of" thread....

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
This is the way
If muck wants to do something good for people, how about building a few thousand apartment building across the country and charging reasonable prices, strictly for low income working people? Every rich prick in the country should be doing the same thing, if they actually give a fuck about people.
 

HGCC

Well-Known Member
If muck wants to do something good for people, how about building a few thousand apartment building across the country and charging reasonable prices, strictly for low income working people? Every rich prick in the country should be doing the same thing, if they actually give a fuck about people.
???

Well...probably not gonna happen. They would not be rich if they didn't exploit people. It is somewhat baked in. It isnt even something they pay lip service to anymore.

The hand wringing needs to stop and action should be taken. Words aren't working and won't, they don't have the ability to make an impact. If they keep asking nicely to not get bent over it's never going to happen.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
China imposes export controls on rare minerals used to make semiconductor chips
The Chinese government on Monday announced new limits on the exportation of two rare metals necessary for the production of semiconductors and electric vehicles.

Beginning Aug. 1., the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said exports of the metals germanium and gallium will be allowed only if exporters secure licenses from the ministry, a move it called essential to “protect national security and interests.”

Although the ministry did not go into detail about the reasons for the new restrictions, an editorial in the state-owned China Daily following the announcement blasted the Netherlands for its export controls on semiconductor components.

The editorial also noted that the U.S. is home to the largest germanium mines in the world but “seldom exploits them.” Russia, Belgium and Canada also produce germanium, while Russia, Ukraine, Japan and South Korea also produce gallium.

China leads the world in total production of both metals. The country produces about 650,000 kilograms of gallium per year, about 94 percent of global production. The nation has been dramatically increasing production since 2019, when environmental measures curtailed the use of similar metals.

The U.S., by contrast, has no current domestic source of the metal, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. China was also the largest germanium producer as of 2021, producing about 95 metric tons.

The announcement marks the latest in an ongoing back-and-forth between China and the U.S.
President Biden has pledged to ramp up the American transition to renewable energy, but the U.S. lacks domestic sources for many of the minerals necessary for the transition. In May, Beijing barred products made by American chip manufacturer Micron Technology from use in key infrastructure projects, claiming the U.S. company’s products presented a cybersecurity risk.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to take her first trip as secretary to China this week, with Yellen reportedly seeking to assuage economic and trade tensions between Beijing and Washington.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment?
Every country should pay its sovereign debt. Default, we are told, is not an option. But has anyone told China?

The United States pays interest on approximately $850 billion in debt held by the People’s Republic of China. China, however, is currently in default on its sovereign debt held by American bondholders.

Successive U.S. administrations have chosen to sidestep this fact, allowing business and trade with China to proceed as normal. Now that the relationship with China has soured and the People’s Republic of China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the U.S. and Western security, policymakers should revisit this appalling failure of justice.

Some history is in order. Before 1949, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) issued a large volume of long-term sovereign gold-denominated bonds, secured by Chinese tax revenues, to private investors and governments for the construction of infrastructure and financing of governmental activities. Put simply, the China we know today would not have been possible absent these bond offerings.

In 1938, during its conflict with Japan, the ROC defaulted on its sovereign debt. After the military victory of the communists, the ROC government fled to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China was eventually recognized internationally as the successor government of China. Under well-established international law, the “successor government” doctrine holds that the current government of China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, is responsible for repayment of the defaulted bonds.

A private group of American citizens holds a large quantity of these gold-denominated bonds. This citizen-led group, the American Bondholders Foundation, serves as trustee with power of attorney for some 20,000 bondholders, whose bonds are valued at well over $1 trillion.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tough negotiation stance on the return of Hong Kong to China led to a British settlement agreement on these same Chinese bonds in 1987. Thatcher said that for China to have access to UK capital markets, it had to honor the defaulted Chinese sovereign debt held by British subjects. Faced with that stark choice, China agreed.

Unfortunately, the U.S. failed to take such a common-sense stance. To this day, China has had access to U.S. capital markets while openly rejecting its sovereign debt obligations to American bondholders.

Lest anyone wonder about the age of these bonds, it is irrelevant. What matters is that this is a sovereign obligation. As recently as 2010 the German government made its last payment for reparations from World War I. In 2015 Great Britain made payments on bonds issuances that dated from the 18th Century.

The Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have a unique opportunity to enforce the well-established international rule that governments must honor their debts. Like the UK did in 1987, the U.S. must view the repayment of China’s sovereign debt as essential to its national security interests. In doing so, the U.S. government should undertake one or both of two actions currently being discussed by members of Congress.

The first would be to acquire the Chinese bonds held by the ABF and utilize them to offset (partially or in whole) the $850+ billion of U.S. Treasuries owned by China (reducing up to $95 million in daily interest paid to China). This would lower the national debt and put the U.S. in a better financial position globally.

The second would be to pass legislation that requires China to abide by international norms and rules of finance, trade and commerce. This would include abiding by the transparency rules of capital markets and exchanges and ending its practices of exclusionary settlement, discriminatory payments, selective default, and rejection of the successor government doctrine of settled international law. If China fails to meet those obligations, it would be barred, together with its state-controlled entities, from access to all U.S. dollar-denominated bond markets and exchanges.

This, again, is just common sense and would be the very thing the Chinese government would do if the situation were reversed.

Over the last two decades, there has been recurrent bipartisan support in Congress for bondholders to address China’s default with several congressional resolutions. Despite this, successive U.S. administrations have been silent on this issue, choosing to kick this can down the road, assuming that China would eventually liberalize and embrace Western norms and values.

This failure to act needs to end now.

Given that relations with China have deteriorated and there is bipartisan agreement on the threat from China, this matter can finally be acted upon by both Congress and the Biden administration. Getting settlement on this defaulted debt is not only right and just for the bondholders but, if done correctly, could also be a huge win for the U.S. taxpayer.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
"Fuck! Where the hell did I put that baggie, I just got it?"

Powder that prompted brief evacuation at White House found to be cocaine
A preliminary field test of a suspicious white power found at the White House late Sunday came back positive for cocaine.
The discovery of the powder in a “work area” caused a brief evacuation of the White House Sunday night followed by a visit from the D.C. fire department, the Secret Service said.

“On Sunday evening, the White House complex went into a precautionary closure as officers from the Secret Service Uniformed Division investigated an unknown item found inside a work area,” said Anthony Guglielimi, chief of communications for the United States Secret Service, in an email to The Hill.

“The DC Fire Department was called to evaluate and quickly determined the item to be non-hazardous. The item was sent for further evaluation and an investigation into the cause and manner of how it entered the White House is pending.”

In a radio dispatch shared online, a D.C. firefighter can be heard saying, “We have a yellow bar staying cocaine hydrochloride.” The short broadcast, timestamped 8:49 p.m. on July 2, was posted on a website called openmhz.com that allows people to listen to both live and archived radio dispatches from fire and police departments.

An official familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Washington Post that the dispatch came from the White House on Sunday night.
President Joe Biden was not in the White House on Sunday night, having left for Camp David on Friday.
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
"Fuck! Where the hell did I put that baggie, I just got it?"

Powder that prompted brief evacuation at White House found to be cocaine
A preliminary field test of a suspicious white power found at the White House late Sunday came back positive for cocaine.
The discovery of the powder in a “work area” caused a brief evacuation of the White House Sunday night followed by a visit from the D.C. fire department, the Secret Service said.

“On Sunday evening, the White House complex went into a precautionary closure as officers from the Secret Service Uniformed Division investigated an unknown item found inside a work area,” said Anthony Guglielimi, chief of communications for the United States Secret Service, in an email to The Hill.

“The DC Fire Department was called to evaluate and quickly determined the item to be non-hazardous. The item was sent for further evaluation and an investigation into the cause and manner of how it entered the White House is pending.”

In a radio dispatch shared online, a D.C. firefighter can be heard saying, “We have a yellow bar staying cocaine hydrochloride.” The short broadcast, timestamped 8:49 p.m. on July 2, was posted on a website called openmhz.com that allows people to listen to both live and archived radio dispatches from fire and police departments.

An official familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Washington Post that the dispatch came from the White House on Sunday night.
President Joe Biden was not in the White House on Sunday night, having left for Camp David on Friday.
1688493303629.jpeg
 

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
It was in Hunter’s briefcase!
I'm sure that will be said...They can't blame Joe, though, after calling him sleepy for this long.
I'd love to be able to say it was planted, but it actually looks kind of bad to me, i think this will hurt the administration, the best they can hope for is "Biden picks coke fiend aid." headlines. Just hope it's a minor aid, and not someone with any notoriety.
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
I'm sure that will be said...They can't blame Joe, though, after calling him sleepy for this long.
I'd love to be able to say it was planted, but it actually looks kind of bad to me, i think this will hurt the administration, the best they can hope for is "Biden picks coke fiend aid." headlines. Just hope it's a minor aid, and not someone with any notoriety.
It’s amazing what will hurt an administration. Hunter’s laptop seems to be perceived as worse than that man stalling the pandemic response or cravenly kowtowing to Kim.

1688502682691.gif
 

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
It’s amazing what will hurt an administration. Hunter’s laptop seems to be perceived as worse than that man stalling the pandemic response or cravenly kowtowing to Kim.

View attachment 5305048
Any reasonable person has to realize that trump is a filthy piece of shit con man, with no morals, ethics, or conscience.
Biden is 100 times the man trump ever could have been.
Biden is also not perfect, and makes mistakes like anyone else. This seems to be a pretty big error in judgement about someone in the Whitehouse.
I'm not sure if Biden made it, or someone Biden picked made it, but it was made, a bag of coke doesn't spontaneously generate in an inopportune place on it's own.
At the very least, pick discreet addicts.
 

Lucky Luke

Well-Known Member
China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment?
Every country should pay its sovereign debt. Default, we are told, is not an option. But has anyone told China?

The United States pays interest on approximately $850 billion in debt held by the People’s Republic of China. China, however, is currently in default on its sovereign debt held by American bondholders.

Successive U.S. administrations have chosen to sidestep this fact, allowing business and trade with China to proceed as normal. Now that the relationship with China has soured and the People’s Republic of China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the U.S. and Western security, policymakers should revisit this appalling failure of justice.

Some history is in order. Before 1949, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) issued a large volume of long-term sovereign gold-denominated bonds, secured by Chinese tax revenues, to private investors and governments for the construction of infrastructure and financing of governmental activities. Put simply, the China we know today would not have been possible absent these bond offerings.

In 1938, during its conflict with Japan, the ROC defaulted on its sovereign debt. After the military victory of the communists, the ROC government fled to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China was eventually recognized internationally as the successor government of China. Under well-established international law, the “successor government” doctrine holds that the current government of China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, is responsible for repayment of the defaulted bonds.


Did you want the Republic of China to pay or China? If China paid it for the ROC would then One China be true?
 

printer

Well-Known Member
Senators reintroduce bill to prevent US president from leaving NATO
A bipartisan pair of senators reintroduced a bill Wednesday that would prohibit any U.S. president from withdrawing from NATO without Senate approval or an act of Congress.

“NATO serves as an essential military alliance that protects shared national interests and enhances America’s international presence,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in a statement released as NATO leaders, including President Biden, meet in Europe. “Any decision to leave the alliance should be rigorously debated and considered by the U.S. Congress with the input of the American people.”

Rubio reintroduced the bill alongside Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.); the two serve together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and are longtime advocates of the alliance.

The bill has been reintroduced in multiple sessions of Congress, including when concerns rose over former President Trump’s reported threats to withdraw from the alliance.

The bill’s reintroduction comes on the last day of a NATO summit in Lithuania, where conversations regarding Ukraine joining the group have been a hot topic.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine and Finland’s accession and Sweden’s pending accession into NATO all underscore the same thing: NATO is stronger than ever,” Kaine said. “I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan bill to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to NATO and ensure any U.S. president can’t unilaterally decide to leave the alliance without congressional approval.”

If the president tries to leave NATO without Senate approval or an act of Congress, the bill would prohibit funding to do so and allow congressional legal counsel to challenge any administration’s attempt in court.
The bill has eight Democratic co-sponsors.
 
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