Tag: politics

White House directs agencies to prep for mass firings ahead of potential shutdown

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The White House budget office indicated Wednesday that mass firings could be on the table in the event of a government shutdown as Congress faces a stalemate on negotiations in the days leading up to the government funding deadline.

A memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reviewed by The Hill indicates agencies are directed to “use this opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” under three conditions.

The conditions include discretionary funding lapses Oct. 1, if another source of funding isn’t available and if the programs, projects, or activities are not “consistent with the president’s priorities.” In order to consider firing, all conditions must be met.

Agencies were also directed to revise RIFs once a shutdown ends to retain the “minimal number” of employees needed to function, according to the memo, and a plan must be submitted to the OMB.

The memo essentially directs agencies to permanently fire some federal employees that otherwise would be furloughed during a shutdown but then return to work once Congress reopens the government.

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Good time to can Bondi and Patel as well. ABN

Our Ruling Class: Lessons from Mosca, Machiavelli, and Attila the Hun — Laurent Guyénot

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To understand how Israel has gained a near-total control over the American ruling class today, we must understand Israel of course, but we must also study the principles by which any ruling class operates. The perfect book for that is The Ruling Class, by Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941). Mosca begins by establishing the following law (p. 50):

In all societies, from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies, two classes of people appear: a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first…

No matter what their internal divergences are, the ruling class is bonded by a high degree of solidarity: “the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority” (p. 54).

It follows that the main object of political science must be the study of various types of ruling classes. Mosca, p. 336: “We must patiently seek out the constant traits that various ruling classes possess and the variable traits with which the remote causes of their integration and dissolution, which contemporaries almost always fail to notice, are bound up.” Historians and journalists remain at the surface of historical events when they ascribe them to the decisions of heads of states, who are only, as a rule, the public faces of a ruling class, and sometimes not the main decision-makers.

A ruling class can be overthrown, either by a foreign conquest, by a coup d’état, by a revolution, or in more subtle ways that are not always immediately perceptible by the ruled. But any change of regime, even if provoked by popular uprising, leads to the formation of a new ruling class.

All this may seem quite obvious, but reading Mosca and pursuing this line of thought has modified my perspective on political regimes, on the illusion of Democracy, and on what Israel is up to.

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Liberal vs Conservative

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My sense is conservatives have always been fundamentally live and let live, you do your thing, I’ll do mine, while liberals tend more to be activists for moral-sounding causes; and once they are activists they will also be ideologues and their whole thing becomes a religion.

This is a fundamental difference that shows very loudly in politics, as the chart above illustrates.

The activist left always wants to get into your head and make you be like them.

Historically and practically much of the fervor of the left comes from Jews who invented and them became fanatical about communism.

Today the same energies have morphed into woke stuff, previously PC stuff, now also Antifa stuff.

The common theme is they want to get into your head and make you be like them (often while robbing you blind).

There are few political happenings today that do not succumb to these energies.

There are also few interpersonal happenings today that do not succumb to these energies.

USA was built on the presumption that it was and would be a nation of White Christians who shared strong moral fiber and wanted to work together to build the nation.

USA today is no longer that and many of its non-Christian, non-Whites hate what they are not, and do activist shit against it relentlessly. ABN

Huckabee in Israel

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I do not have a sophisticated understanding of Huckabee’s theology but have read it is called Dispensational Christianity, which was crystalized by the dubious Scofield Reference Bible in USA.

Whatever the case, Huckabee’s obeisance does not seem appropriate to me, especially while Israel’s savage assault on Gaza is ongoing and he is representing USA.

I know it is too much to ask of any mainstream prominent American, but it would be good if at least a few of them openly recognized that both USA and Israel had to have had foreknowledge of the 10/07 attack and that Israel clearly delayed reacting to it and was responsible for the majority of Israelis killed that day. This profoundly undermines the ersatz ‘moral basis’ of the slaughter and starvation of so many Gazan women, children and civilians.

I am fine with religion and government mixing on abstract and some practical levels, but Huckabee is taking this much too far into dangerous intellectual and theological territory. ABN

‘If you take away religion, I think you get something in its place which is worse than what was there before’ — Musk

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I am posting this because it concerns religion and because Musk is saying it. I am not a Musk fanboy but I do recognize he is a powerful member of a somewhat amorphous faction of the American elite, and by extension the Western elite in general.

X is much better than Twitter and seems to have more actual free speech than any other major platform. The algorithm can be dicey and is not everything it could be but it is still pretty good by internet standards to date.

Notice that in the space of one week Japan’s PM resigned due to popular opposition to his open borders policy and that Nepal’s PM resigned over the banning of social media and corruption.

The voices of the people matter. The elite will always be with us and will always be affected by what the public thinks.

Musk is volatile and caused himself significant damage when he exploded over Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Nevertheless, I like a lot of what he says and does, including his hatred of the woke mind-virus and the little bit he says above about religion.

It’s best to support the elite when they are doing good and oppose them mainly when they are not. ABN