Get your 2019 Calendars…. Putin vs Trump!!

I hear that President Putin calendars are the hottest selling gift for the holiday season in Japan… too cool!! So I investigated whether our beloved Commander-In-Chafe was held in such high regard. Mmmm…. not so much as it turned out, but hurry, only 4 more calendars left on Amazon! 😀   Happy Holidays, “God save us all, every one!”

2019 Donald Trump Out of Office Countdown Wall Calendar: Two years to go (or maybe less)!

Vladimir Putin Wall Calendar for 2019, Size: 11.8×11.8 inches (30×30cm), 8 Languages (Japanese, English, Russian, etc.)

Bombarded by Telemarketers During the Holidays? Play this “On hold” Message! #Comedy #Gag #Prank

Place telemarketers on hold with this very important phone message and background music. MOFO out!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2019! Year 2018 Wrap & Big Holiday Message From Lada & Az!

Happy New Year Lada & Az, S Novym Godom!! Having been to Moscow, St Petersburg, Sochi, objectively I must say that Moscow is officially the NEW City of Lights and my beloved Paris has devolved into the city of flames!
Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” It’s clear to me that this mantle of leadership has passed onto Russia! 🙂
Thank you dear friend for all you do, keep enlightening the world with your beautiful spirit. ❤

Futurist Trendcast

Check out the enchanted Christmas and New Year in Russia, and read our BIG Holiday Message, including my BOOKS, Podcasts, & more!

Russian Troika (three lucky horses) with Ded Moroz – tradition that ushers in the New Year’s good fortune!

New Year on Red Square, Moscow

Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow

New Year festivities, Red Square

HOLIDAY MESSAGE!

Dear friends and supporters!

Lada Ray Patreon will be celebrating its first year anniversary on January 16, 2018!

Between mid-January and the end of 2018 I published almost 250 articles, reports, videos and podcasts. And I can tell you, I only warming up! Just wait and see how much more amazing, surprising and revealing stuff is coming your way next year!

Through Patreon I am developing my Predictions, Quantum Calibration, Earth Shift & Multidimensional ideas. And you, my dear Patrons, are the very first to see what comes out of my creative lab and…

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♪If It Be Your Will (Antony Hegarty’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s song)

Quite possibly the loveliest rendition of Leonard Cohen’s song! ❤

♪Antony & The Johnsons – Hope There’s Someone

Happy Holidays Everyone! 🙂

The Legal Gymnastics Behind Obamacare

12/26/2018    Gary Galles

On December 14, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Obamacare unconstitutional because its individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power,” since the tax that enforced it is now gone. Progressive leaning critics quickly called it bad jurisprudence and assured people that Obamacare remained constitutional.

However, Judge O’Connor’s ruling just saw through the hocus pocus by which Obamacare was first found constitutional. Remember how the penalties for not having insurance under the ACA plan arose? It was repeatedly and emphatically asserted to not be a tax, but a regulation (so that its costs would not be counted in ACA’s fiscal scoring). But Chief Justice Roberts’ 5-4 majority decision found the ACA constitutional only becauseit really was a tax, which Congress has the power to impose, when a regulation mandating that Americans purchase health insurance would have been unconstitutional.

Beyond that convenient but mutually inconsistent weasel-wording, two months ago, Democrats showed no concern about violating the Constitution when it suited their policy agenda. President Trump issued an executive order stopping ACA subsidy payments to 6 million people. 18 states quickly sued to reverse the order as illegal. But the attackers’ case hinged on ignoring the Constitution.

Every federal program requires two steps before spending money. Congress must both authorize it andappropriate the money for it. And the necessity of the second step could not be clearer: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” However, spending for the ACA subsidy payments was never congressionally authorized.

Instead, President Obama simply ignored the Constitution. He instructed Health and Human Services and the Treasury to divert money appropriated for other programs, but left which programs to be cut unspecified. Why? If a specified program was raided, Congress and program beneficiaries would have clear constitutional cause to stop it. So even though every possible diversion would be unconstitutional, Obama’s failure to specify where funds would come from, delegating the dirty work to cabinet members, supposedly transmuted the unavoidable unconstitutionality into legitimacy, protecting Obamacare from constitutional scrutiny long enough to make it a political fait accompli. The strategy was that the subsidies would be politically impossible to undo, even if the Court later ruled against them, because taking away what millions of people had already been given, however unconstitutionally, would intimidate opponents in Congress into authorizing that money to backfill and continue the subsidies.

Left-leaning supporters of that constitutional subterfuge joined that bandwagon. Law professor Nicolas Bagley advocated that we just ignore the Constitutional violation, because Trump’s “constitutional rhetoric is pure pretext” to sabotage the ACA. That is, we should just accept Obama’s unconstitutional gambit because Trump’s position was supposedly disingenuous. But that shows how not to interpret Constitutional law — i.e., “my opponent doesn’t really mean what he says, so my interpretation, however inconsistent with the Constitution, should be upheld” — far more than how to interpret it.

While those on the left claim the Constitution for their assertions against Judge O’Connor’s ruling, their allegiance would be far more convincing if they didn’t turn themselves inside out to evade a clear constitutional mandate when it suited them, just two months earlier. And winning in newspapers’ editorial headlines today is not the same as constitutional justification.

The left’s skewed and inconsistent claims bring all such arguments into question, as their partisans always reverse-engineer arguments that would make their wishes constitutional, even when they clearly are not. And when claims of constitutional allegiance are just convenient cover for desired policies, rather than requiring adherence even when many who rule us find it inconvenient, we need to remember that the point of the Constitution was to make them our servants, not the other way around. And that means that the Constitution is not what they say it is, just because they say so.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read.

Quote of the day

What I have seen cannot become your experience unless you see it. And it is the experience of truth that delivers you from ignorance, from bondage, from misery. It is not the belief that delivers you, it is truth.

Jesus says, “Truth liberates.” But how to attain to truth? It is not a question of belief, but a question of meditativeness. And what is meditation? Meditation is emptying your mind completely of all belief, ideology, concept, thought. Only in an empty mind, when there is no dust left on the mirror, truth reflects. That reflection is a benediction.

-Rajneesh

 

Good People Doing Good Things — Choose Love (and others)

Wonderful charity, thx for sharing! ❤

Filosofa's Word

Perhaps my favourite Christmas gift this year was from my daughter to Miss Goose and I together.  When we first opened it, we were a bit puzzled, for there was a white t-shirt with the words “Choose Love” on it in black lettering, and a piece of paper that appeared to be an invoice for:

Hot Food	x2	$8.00
Sleeping Bag	x1	$26.00
Waterproof Tent	x1	$26.00
Snug Pack	x1	$10.00
Arrival Bundle	x1	$30.00
Total	$100.00

My first reaction was, “You bought us a tent?  You want us to move out?”  But as she explained, as I understood what my wonderful daughter had done, tears came.  She donated this money in mine and Natasha’s names, to be spent on the above items for a refugee in need.  My daughter has a heart of pure gold.

So this evening, as I pondered my ‘good people’ post, I thought to…

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This tiny corner of Rhode Island shows us the future of Social Security

Simon Black    February 5, 2018    Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit gave us an interesting glimpse of the future last week when it ruled on an obscure case involving government pension obligations.

Ever since the mid-1990s, police officers and fire fighters in the town of Cranston, Rhode Island had been promised state pension benefits upon retirement.

But, facing critical budget shortfalls over the last several years that the Rhode Island government called “fiscal peril,” the state legislature voted to unilaterally reduce public employees’ pension benefits.

Even more, these cuts were retroactive, i.e. they didn’t just apply to new employees.

The changes were applied across the board; workers who had spent their entire careers being promised certain retirement benefits ended up having their pensions cut as well.

Even the court acknowledged that these changes “substantially reduced the value of public employee pensions provided by the Rhode Island system.”

So, naturally, a number of municipal employee unions sued.

And the case of Cranston’s police and fire fighter unions made it all the way to federal court.

The unions’ argument was that the government of Rhode Island was contractually bound to pay benefits– these benefits had been enshrined in long-standing state legislation, and they should be enforced just like any other contract.

The state government disagreed.

In their view, the legislature should be able to change laws, even retroactively, whenever it suits them.

Last week the First Circuit Court issued a final ruling and sided with the state of Rhode Island: the government has no obligation to honor its promises.

News like this will never make major headlines.

But here at Sovereign Man our team pays very close attention to these obscure court cases because they often set very dangerous precedents.

This one certainly does. Because Social Security is in even WORSE condition that the State of Rhode Island’s perilous pension system.

We talk about this a lot in our regular conversations.

According to the Board of Trustees for Social Security (which includes the US Treasury Secretary, the US Secretary for Health & Human Services, and the US Secretary of Labor), the Social Security trust funds “become depleted and unable to pay scheduled benefits in full on a timely basis in 2034.”

Once again– that’s the Treasury Secretary of the United States saying that Social Security will run out of money in 16 years.

You’d think this would be shouted from the rooftops, especially given how long it takes to save for retirement.

Yet instead the news is ignored or flat-out rejected by people who simply want to believe either that it’s not a problem, or that the government has some magical solution.

The First Circuit just showed us what the solution is: cutting benefits.

And now the government has legal precedent to do so.

They can retroactively slash whatever benefit they want in their sole discretion regardless of what legislation exists, or what promises have been made in the past.

Let’s be smart about this: the clock is ticking. Sixteen years may seem like a lifetime away, but with respect to retirement, it’s nothing.

Securing a comfortable retirement takes decades of careful planning, and a lot of folks are going to have to catch up.

Fortunately there are a lot of options available, but you’re going to have to take deliberate action.

For example, you could set up a more robust structure to help you put away even more money for retirement and invest in safer, more lucrative assets that are outside the mainstream.

A number of our readers, for example, are safely earning double-digit returns in secured, asset-backed lending deals with their properly structured IRA and 401(k) vehicles.

Here are a couple of options to consider.

This problem is completely solvable. But you’re going to have to solve it for yourself. You can’t rely on the government to fix it.

The First Circuit Court affirmed last week without a doubt that government promises aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

TRUMP’S WALL, AND THE “GREAT” WALLS OF HISTORY

President Donald Trump is pushing for a wall to be built built to prevent immigration through the southern border of the United States. It was a signature issue of his successful campaign to become president and has stated that he is willing to shutdown the federal government in order to get what he wants. Indeed, a large majority of Americans are opposed to paying taxes in order to provide welfare and free education for foreigners, but is a wall the right solution?

As I have already pointed out, much of the desire of central Americans to come to the US is because of our own War on Drugs. That policy increases the price of illicit drugs and encourages the development of drug cartels to safeguard the transport of drugs from the production countries such as Bolivia, Columbia, and Mexico into the United States. Safeguarding the drugs for the drug cartels results in them using extreme bullying and violence on the local populations along the route, including the police and governments. The only way to prevent this asylum-seeking traffic is to end the war on drugs.

Looking beyond the motivation of immigration, let us take a look at walls. Typically, they are a signature piece of civilization. Walls are the key part of “permanent” societies. Archeologists and anthropologists study the remainder of walls in order to interpret what societies were, what they did, how they lived, and what they valued. In the modern context, walls and room size are a measure of our standard of living as bigger rooms and taller walls are a sign of success and improvement whereas sleeping in the rafters in a small cabin on the American plains is a sign of relative impoverishment. Having a big corner office with big windows is a sign of accomplishment, whereas the cubicle and the open office concept is the equivalent of eating your Christmas dinner at the child’s table.

In contrast to these walls, we have historically important governmental walls that archeologists and historians also study and write about.  These walls have the exact opposite connotation. They are symbolic of isolation and decline — they are supposedly a last-ditch effort to “save” a civilization from the marauding horde of savage people. In reality they have never worked and only contribute to the decline of various empires because of cost and the resulting isolation. This is the type of wall that President Donald Trump wants to build.

The first historic wall was the Great Wall of China. Spanning more than five thousand miles from east to west in northern China, the Great Wall is one of the most marvelous structures of early human civilization. It is often taught that the wall was built to prevent the invasion of Mongol hordes, but the actual purpose was to prevent immigration and trade and to help consolidate the Chinese Empire. Eventually there were invasions and wars, but they were more about pent up demand for immigration and trade then they were about territorial expansion.

The second historical wall is Hadrian’s Wall. This wall was built across northern England by the late Roman Emperor Hadrian shortly after he came to power in 117 AD. We typically learn that the wall was built by Hadrian to prevent invasion by various barbarous tribes to the north.  We do know that Hadrian built the wall because of his policy of defense and consolidation, rather than continual expansion so his wall marks a historical turning point towards the demise of Rome. There were already various rebellions in the Empire, including England and this new policy was designed for dealing with this new reality of decline.

There are various theories why the wall was built, including the prevention of invasion, but some scholars are dubious that preventing invasion was a cost-effective priority. More likely, the reason for the wall was to regulate immigration, to prevent smuggling and cattle theft, and to collect custom fees on trade. Therefore, the wall provided the Roman legion in northern England with something to do and also a means of generating government revenue to feed and fund the troops.

The third historical wall in the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. At the end of World War II Germany and Berlin remained divided into zones of control by the Soviet Union, Briton, France, and the United States. The three allied zones were consolidated into West Germany and West Berlin while the Soviet zones became East Germany and East Berlin. The problem with this arrangement was that while all of Germany was devastated by WWII, West Germany would soon become one of the fastest growing economies of the world, thanks in no small part to the policies of the liberal economist Ludwig Erhard, a friend of Ludwig von Mises. He eliminated price controls, deregulated the economy and enacted effective monetary reform. Meanwhile in East Germany the economies of the Soviet zones quickly fell behind.

As a consequence of the diverging economic performance, Germans from the eastern zones began migrating to the western zone for jobs, opportunity and freedom.  This migration was intolerable to the communists as the most visible sign of the failures of socialism and the successes of free market capitalism. In response East Germany began to build the Berlin Wall and the Soviet controlled states began constructing the Iron Curtain to prevent migration of eastern Europeans into western Europe. These barriers were fairly successful in preventing migration and many people were shot and killed trying to escape Communism for life in capitalist Europe.  Then in 1989 the German people— East and West —tore down the war and signaling the failure of communism.

I know that most people do not really care about the practicalities of a  wall, some may be wondering why the Congress doesn’t just give him the funds and so they can get on with the holidays without all the drama of a government shutdown. The proper view of government walls argues against such apathy and, more importantly it should wake us up to the larger picture that the United States is a modern empire. We need to all think about what can be done to prevent us from making the same mistakes as China, Rome, and the Soviet Union.