121 Comments

This just made me think of a new term: cashlighting.

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It's glorious. I'd copyright that sucker.

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That means a lot coming from you, Chris! Feel free to use liberally—let's make it a household word 😁

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can a philantropath be cashlighted? 🤔

cashlit?

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😆 No, a philanthropath would be the one doing the cashlighting. But the public is cashlit, yes.

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deletedMay 17Liked by Chris Bray
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Thank you for the heads-up, Diane!

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deletedMay 17Liked by Chris Bray
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Aww, thank you so much for your kind words as well as for bravely speaking out, Diane!

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The articles are as slick as plastic and horrifyingly effective, I'm sure. I can picture a doctor just swallowing this stuff down like soda pop. I can remember thinking that people who hate vaccines must be nut cases. These last four years have put a rapidly widening rift valley between myself now and who I used to be and all the friends I used to know. The only answer to a doctor who'd talk to you like this "Inoculation to resist" article advises would be "I refuse the injection. My reasons are my own business."

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That is wise advice.

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these assholes will soon have no work at all. Their supposed credentials will evaporate in the stark angry glares the public is increasingly casting on everything "medical." Note where the second author of the second link comes from: Department of War Studies, King’s College London. When the collective peels off the "vaccine" sticker and realizes it was covering up "made by the Pentagon," there'll be hell to pay.

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Wow. Sickening stuff. Especially that second paper on “Pre-bunking.”

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Thank you so much for this vital information!

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Oh, my.... The misinformation article is just breathtaking... I don't think those people are ever coming back, and I'm 100% certain that I'm not going back.

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The problem with that, Chris, is that we want great neologisms to become part of the language, and if she were to copyright it, no one would use it because everyone who did would have to pay her a fee.

Dick Vermeil coined and copyrighted the term, "threepeat." He's made a couple of million bucks out of it, but who uses the term anymore?

Similarly, you may have noticed that in advertising in January, The Super Bowl is always referred to as "the big game." It's for the same reason.

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I'm stealing it, lol.

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Like now. Actually he’s done it. By writing it. All that’s left to cement the deal is putting the TM next to it. Do it NOW.

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Copywriting it doesn’t mean we all can’t deploy it. As long as we have permission and I’m sure that would be okay. Right?

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Cashlighting! You have a wonderful mind and I hope I can remember it long enough to text it to somebody 😂

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Perfect word for the dystopia we're living in.

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"cashlighting"

Brilliant coinage, ma'am!

I shall use, (with attribution of course).

Thank you.

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There’s a precedent for “cashlighting”: Weimar Germany.

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

I guess this is a pretty easy sell in a world where 8 shots of a mystery cocktail, and repeated bouts of the thing the cocktail absolutely stops, means the cocktail is working, safely.

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Eight? EIGHT!?!?!?!? YOU SHOULD BE ON NUMBER NINE BY NOW, ANTI-VAXXER!

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

Also, the prices are lower than ever, because they said so.

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In Los Angeles, the price of eggs has fallen sharply from $3.00 to $7.00. That's Bidenomics, Jack!

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That is easy to explain, a dozen IS 7 eggs.

(instead of a bakers dozen it is a Biden dozen)

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social-emotional learning in real life!

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Come on man, he had 9% inflation bitch slapping him the minute he walked into to oval. We don’t know how lucky we are to have him saving us.

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

You can't mean per egg, it's for half a dozen at least, right?

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I’m reminded of the price of chocolate rations in Orwell.

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

When I question your sanity for following Ted Lieu’s social media, you find a gem like this and share it with the masses, displaying Ted Lieu’s idiocy to everyone. Thank you.

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I don't follow Ted Lieu, but every time you reply to someone on Twitter, the platform scores your reply as interest, and feeds you more of that. So every single time I type YOU FUCKING IDIOT, an angel gets its wings.

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'Blow me up, Tom' transforms into YOU FUCKING IDIOT. O well I'll take what I can get. Pls. include me in your prayer.

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If I had , I dunno , maybe $5000 for each time I called either a journalist or a politician a fucking idiot I would be rich. Not sure how I magically make that happen , but I’m willing to give it some thought. Or maybe Ted could pay me for NOT doing it. ?

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This tweet, like any and all other narratives, is not designed to fool you or me.

I often feel like I am at 5 year old birthday party entertained by the worst magician ever; bunny ears peeking out of the sleeve...

I get why the kids clap, they are kids, but then I watch the adults fall over themselves in amazement and I shake my head.

Ironically, amazement is the only thing I share in common with "the crowd".

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If Churchill were alive:

Never in history have so many been so fooled by so little...

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Take the Steele dossier or pee pee tape for example. How many people did you see have a TDS meltdown over all of the absolute confirming "evidence" that they never saw a hint of?

For two years Rachael Maddow was like:

This just in, confidential informants have confirmed the existence of rumors! Wait, we were now getting now getting more info...! People familiar with the matter ware now confirming the existence of allegations too! That is double confirmation! It doesn't get better than that people!"

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Adam Schiff said he had all the evidence too. Where is he now? Oh yeah, possibly being rewarded with a US Senate seat.

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

Groceries cost 50% more than 3 years ago, government says inflation is currently just a smidge over 3% if you exclude rent, gas and groceries, and I just got a 3% raise. Happy days are here again!

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See, a 3% raise is more! Huge win!

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It's gonna take a lot of fortification to drag Biden's corpse across the 270 electoral vote threshold, unless they toss Donald of Orange in the clink and run Nimarata against him.

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It's posts like this one that make sure I recommend this substack. Chris, you're work is marvelous. Thank you.

At some point the lies are going to crash around our ankles like a Missouri gully-washer rain.

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“At some point the lies are going to crash around our ankles…”

Oh, if only that were true. The Libs have created another self-licking ice cream cone: The liars run propaganda mills (aka “universities”) who turn out believers by the busload, who never question the Holy Marxian Scripture, who go on to spread the Evil Word to the next generation. Their jobs, of course, pay crap wages but their school loans get forgiven so the perpetual motion machine lumbers on.

The only long term solution that doesn’t involve violence or abrogating the Bill of Rights is basing school loans on projected income of each degree program. On that basis, the humanities programs get flushed, and STEM and other practical degrees expand.

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The humanities should have been flushed LONG ago! That would also keep the majority of idiots out of college.

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Since universities are ruthless about departments paying their own way, it would have disemployed the AH professors too.

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May 17·edited May 17Liked by Chris Bray

https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500

That's in constant dollars. The Dow and S&P really are skyrocketing in value. It's not just inflation.

We decoupled the markets from the real economy a long time ago, mostly because of short term algorithmic and derivatives trading. Ever seen the Big Short? That's the entire stock market now. Tax ultra-short term (less than 1 month say) capital gains at 80% and this problem will disappear. But tha would deflate the market by God-knows how much, so it will never happen.

Like it or not, we're on this economic train until it derails now.

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I spent about a decade in the residential investment property business (2003-2012 or so). The Big Short was a very funny movie to me, since the things the bankers were saying in that movie were the same things I and many other real estate brokers were saying: "this doesn't make any sense." It was like watching that decade of my life, but as seen through the lens of high-finance and investment banking. Most of your peon agents that sit in open houses didn't have a clue, but the brokers that manage the agencies? We all knew. And there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it because 1) no one would listen and 2) NAR came down like a ton of bricks on anyone who dared raise any red flags.

The friends I had in commercial told amazing stories. That end has always been the Wild West. There's fraud (like what Trump did -- which is totally endemic) and then there's FRAUD (think Enron). If the article is correct about the overstatement of income streams by 5%, the cap rates are all fictions. The plus side is that the vast majority of people have absolutely no financial exposure to commercial real estate. The urban office building market could utterly collapse and it wouldn't matter a hill of beans to 90% of all Americans. What made the mortgage derivatives so dangerous was that more than half of all all Americans have a mortgage.

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exactly. Starting in 2008, I researched and wrote drafts for a book I then abandoned (because it was too depressing) about the financial industry fraud. During and after Occupy - 2011-2013 - I spent a good couple years trying to help hundreds of homeowners in LA save their homes from the foreclosure bulldozers. I was taught how to forensically audit the deeds of trust. Learned firsthand how well planned and premeditated this whole shitshow had been. Entirely intentional. All the relevant laws, BK laws especially, had been changed in such a way to enable all the sheer theft. It was absolutely horrendous to watch families go through it. I even started filming a documentary about it all: IBGYBG -- I'll be gone, you'll be gone. I learned there's no justice at all in this country. Jamie Dimon still runs JPMorgan. 🙄

We managed to save three families' homes out of the hundreds we tried to help -- despite the clear bank-created FRAUD, as you say -- back dating, broken chain of title, white-out to change APR, and on and on -- on the deeds of trust and other documents. Lawyers abandoned them to the machine ... wouldn't take the cases because they knew the court system had been rigged against the homeowners.

In hindsight, it prepped me for the covid FRAUD.

The issue now is the derivatives looming mushroom cloud ... another preplanned carefully law-laid trap? So it seems:

https://ellenbrown.substack.com/p/the-great-taking-how-they-can-own

"Cede & Co. is now the owner of record of all of our stocks, bonds, digitized securities, mortgages, and more; and it is seriously under-capitalized, holding capital of only $3.5 billion, clearly not enough to satisfy all the potential derivative claims. Webb thinks this is intentional."

And Jamie Dimon is still a criminal. https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/05/jpmorgan-chase-and-its-regulators-are-hiding-dark-trading-secrets-at-the-largest-and-riskiest-u-s-bank/

"provide extensive and meaningful details on exactly what this recidivist criminal bank did to warrant almost a half billion dollars in trading fines."

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

Just like GEN Eric ‘I patronize Soldiers’ Shinsecki improved morale with Black Berets, and increased the readiness and fitness of the US Army by lowering the APFT standards.

Ted needs to go suck it.

Do you think these clowns actually believe what they are saying or do the simply hold us citizens in such utter contempt that they believe we will buy what they are saying?

This is what moral and societal collapse looks like.

bsn

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Well we’re all deplorables with white rural rage syndrome, so my guess is that it’s the utter contempt thing.

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I'm only mildly pissed off today. I'm sorry if I'm letting the side down.

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I gotcha covered.

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To be honest, most everybody I know peripherally only looks at the headlines. If it won’t fit on a bumper sticker, it doesn’t seem to come out of their mouth. That’s why they are peripherally ignored.

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It is much more 'Brave New World' than 1984. We are way too titilated, distracted, intoxicated, and manipulated to have clear-headed thoughts. Stoned Newspeak watching PornHub.

Who has the time to pay attention with all of this effort to capture our attention in other areas?

bsn

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May 18Liked by Chris Bray

👍 There’s a scene in BNW where someone is looking out a window at a road-building crew of Triple Epsilons, and the truck operator hits a wrong lever, whereupon the cauldron of incandescent molten rock spills out and instantly smokes the T-E workers. No notice is taken, other than the foreman calling the office for another crew.

The elites look at 80%+ of America as T-Es. The Sackler family of Purdue Pharma pushed OxyContin for decades and has paid only ≈$9B to states which spent many times that on drug treatment for Oxy addicts. Even now, they have a case pending before SCOTUS to preserve $10B+ of wealth plundered from Purdue after the scrutiny began.

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I’m 100% with the “hold us in utter contempt” option.

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May 17Liked by Chris Bray

And this is one of Biden’s top economic advisors and he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. We are doomed if this jerk is representative of “the best and the brightest”.

https://youtu.be/1Fj0zRmEWYc?si=0vJfgmLHpaYACagy

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May 17·edited May 17

Now THAT is truly sad. And ominous.

An "economic advisor"?

We are REALLY in trouble!

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Can't we just secede now? 🙏🤞

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May 18Liked by Chris Bray

Hmmmm. A whole country.

Just for sane people.

I know where we could pick up a really, really good constitution. Cheap.

Nobody using it right now.

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My thoughts exactly! We will have to run any straggler idiots out on a rail to keep our new country sane. I think I've got a copy of the Declaration of Independence around here somewhere, to go with the cheap Constitution.

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OTOH, there is a certain mental peace in knowing the laws of the Universe still apply. In this case, it’s GIGO: Elect/hire idiots and you get idiotic policies and disasters. There’s a symmetry of input and output.

The same was true under Trump: Lower taxes plus decreased regulation (cut 2 regs for each new one) and you get the best economy in 18 yrs.

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Our market is much better. In our market, 2+2=5, comrade!

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By October, 2+2 will equal 645, at the very least.

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Gee, I’m sure that all the homeless people who I see on the streets, all the people frequenting those overwhelmed food pantries, and those people without healthcare because they lack money are my hallucinations; there seems to be a Mississippi of cash for the wars, politicians, and corporations, but for the little people, it’s as wet as Death Valley.

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May 18Liked by Chris Bray

Years ago I sat in on a cyber security briefing. On the subject of phishing several in the audience expressed shock that anyone could be stupid enough to take the bait. The speaker explained that the stupidity of the bait is core to the the strategy. He likened it to the old scam using the mail to send letters from the wealthy Nigerian who just needed a sponsor with a bank account to score a huge reward. Stupid? Yes, but there are plenty of stupid people. The scammer only needs a small hit rate to succeed, and its important to focus on the stupid. You don't want to invest time and effort into a mark who will eventually wake up. These tweets are effective to reach the intended audience. They don't need to convince a majority. They need to get under the margin of fraud in just a few districts and states.

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Prices are insane.

If you bought a pound of sirloin steak in inflation adjusted dollars, beginning in the 1930’s you would pay about $4.00-$4.50/lb. In the 1950’s we see $5-6/lb. In the 80’s we are back to $4.50, and in the the ‘90s and 2000’s we are below $7.00/lb. $5-6.70 -lb. Even in 2020 we were at $6.64-lb. Now according to national beef price index from the Fed it’s $11.62/lb for choice sirloin. Inflation is not 4% or 5%. It’s much higher. Housing prices are crazy in popular areas. Gasoline is twice what we paid 5 years ago. Healthcare is crazy. Prices for self-pay ambulatory surgery center time are twice as high as they were 10 years ago.

If you have investments some of them are doing well. We aren’t in the mania stage so there’s more room to run. Probably 3ish years for stocks, 1.5-2 years for real estate. That assumes we ding have a huge global

Disaster in the interim. Then we are going to have a BIG crash. Not a good time to take on leverage.,

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703613

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2021/11/03/the-price-of-steak-the-year-you-were-born/

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Grocery stores have turned into extortion rackets.

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The graph seems to show that in 2000 US consumer debt was at $200 Billion and by early 2010 US consumer debt was a little over $300 Billion but in spring of 2010 US consumer debt more than doubled almost instantly to some $650 Billion. It dipped a bit but then rose steadily to about $850 Billion by 2020 then dipped somewhat until 2022 when it rose to what looks like a fragile plateau at $950 Billion today. Thank you for this important graph. I have been following some YouTube channels whose creators are giving some anecdotal evidence which jibes with this graph. One man does walkabouts in his affluent-looking southern California neighbourhood talking about real estate prices and saying everybody he knows is maxed out on credit and basically broke. There is another gentleman who did a walk-through of downtown L.A. showing that the entire street is solid closed stores covered with filth and tagging and he declared that most of this catastrophe had happened since Biden took office – in only 3 years! That seems like an exact match to the catastrophic rise in consumer debt shown on the graph. This looks like the brink of collapse.

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