Back in Mac

Successfully wasted 1 month of 2019, 11 more to go. But that means it's time to induct January 2019's representative in the Sick Phoque Club, and it's the existence of a bug in macOS 10.13 High Sierra which basically means no more administrator accounts on your machine. I found the bug when trying to change the name of the account on my MacBook Pro from Admin. If this is happening to you, click here and scroll down to the tutorial on how to fix it through Single-User Mode. It's also great for if you've just stolen a MacBook and want to make it yours, but remember: THEFT IS LIKELY A CRIMINAL OFFENCE IN YOUR JURISDICTION. ANY READER WHO STEALS A MACBOOK AND GIVES THEMSELVES ADMIN PRIVILEGES VIA SINGLE-USER MODE DOES SO AT THEIR OWN RISK AND IF CAUGHT WILL FACE THE FULL WRATH OF THE LAW AS IT APPLIES WHERE THE THEFT OCCURRED.

Draw against the Clarets

Manchester United drew 2-2 against Burnley today, with Barnes and Wood taking the away goals at 51 and 81 minutes respectively, and Pogba and Lindelof netting the home goals in the final minutes. One point per game is not enough. The Swedish dude who replaced Mourinho needs to up his game or he’ll be the next to go.

Kemal is gonna be so disappointed

Billboards are life

The icon turns 35

Sneezing chicken

Quacking truth to power

The truth about 9/11

Never forget the bloody, crying firemen who screamed about the bombs in the towers and the lobby.

Never forget the 2,300,000,000,000 dollars that was reported missing by Donald Rumsfeld the day before 9/11.

Never forget that the controller in charge of the Pentagon's budget was Dov Zakheim who lost the 2.3 trillion dollars by doing poor book keeping (lost 1.55 billion dollars, per day, for five years....)

Never forget that Dov Zakheim was also the CEO of Systems Planning Corporation in 2001  which manufactures Flight Termination Systems for commercial airliners so they can be remotely controlled by computers....

Never forget that the day after Rumsfeld mentioned missing 2.3 trillion dollars, a plane impacted the Office of Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon where the computers were kept which stored that information....over 100 budget analysts and accountants were killed and the money trail was lost.

Never forget that Larry Silverstein bought the entire WTC center lease in 2000 for a 15 million dollar bid (even though he was LOWER than other bidders).

Never forget that Larry Silverstein put a 3.5 BILLION dollar insurance policy on the towers against terrorist attacks in June 2001.....then 3 months later, both towers get hit by aircraft.

Never forget that Larry Silverstein sued his insurers (over 40 companies) to get paid double his limit, since each plane constitutes a separate attack...and never forget that Larry made 4.55 billion dollars so far, off of an initial investment of 15 million dollars.

Never forget that scientists and physicists at BYU found a type of explosive in every dust sample tested which was confirmed to be a type of Thermite. (Thermite produces liquid iron and is used to cut thick columns effectively and quietly).

Never forget that World Trade Center 7 fell at 5:20pm on 9/11 and the news tried to cover it up.....

Never forget that BBC, fox news and CNN reporters all misread scripts live on TV which announced WTC7 collapsing hours before it did.....indicating a prewritten narrative 

Never forget that WTC 7 was 47 stories tall, yet NIST said that it collapsed "at free fall acceleration for 2.25 seconds".

Never forget high school physics and the definition of static equilibrium and conservation of momentum which would make it impossible for any structure to collapse at FREE FALL acceleration (impossible with out explosives or preweakening the structure )

Never forget that NORAD was running two drills on 9/11:. Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Warrior

Never forget that these drills scrambled jets all over the country, and over the ocean and made it impossible for the pilots to intercept the hijacked jets in time once they were scrambled towards the hijackings.

Never forget that molten metal was found at ground zero days after the towers collapsed, and was also found under WTC7.  And never forget that Kerosene and office furniture doesn't burn hot enough to phase change steel from solid to liquid.

Never forget that a van was pulled over trying to leave new York city, and contained illegal explosives and very suspicious occupants from Israel who were detained for 71 days, and then this story disappeared.

If we forget these facts, our country is doomed.  We have the potential to stop evil, and the first thing we can do is stop ignoring the truth.

Look at the spacing between the C and the E

Wise words from the man who had a dream

BHA pronounced DOA

Manchester United defeated Brighton & Hove Albion 2-1, with the home side’s goals being scored by Pogba and Rashford and the grossest moment in the whole game came in the form of a Brighton goal courtesy of Gross.

Rabbits on the grass beside the bus interchange

Not to mention being the wrong star sign - it’s only Capricorn

BLOGGER WON’T LET ME UPLOAD PHOTOS

I had a really good post for you but the photo wouldn’t upload because the Picasa Web API was deprecated or something. But in their defence, that’s not what Disseminators of the Truth is supposed to be about anyway.

Let’s put a shit pie in its place!

Former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai has been the most corrupt and dishonest FCC chairman we’ve ever seen. But allies of Big Cable have controlled the key oversight committees in Congress, so he’s gotten away with it. But on Election Day, almost 40 opponents of net neutrality were defeated, and now lawmakers who support Internet freedom control the key committees in charge of scrutinizing the FCC. An organisation called Fight for the Future is rallying every corner of the Internet to demand Congress launch a full investigation into Ajit Pai NOW and force him to respond under oath about his corrupt relationship with Big Cable and lies to the American people. If they can raise $5,000, they can amp up their campaign with online ads. Click here to chip in.

Pai has accumulated a shocking list of corrupt and questionable deeds that require further investigation. He based the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality on misleading data cherry-picked by Comcast and others that has been widely debunked. He lied to the media about a cyberattack on his agency to distract from an overwhelming public backlash to his plan. And he allowed millions of bogus comments to flood the FCC system, and still refuses to hand over public information to journalists trying to learn what went wrong.

The new Congress can drag Pai into a hearing room and force him to answer questions about all of this questionable behavior. Exposing even one of these lies could be the undoing of the FCC’s net neutrality repeal, which is already facing a wave of lawsuits. But Comcast and their ilk, who are almost certainly implicated in some if not all of Pai’s misdeeds, will be fighting an investigation tooth and nail. And the House won’t launch an inquiry unless they’re convinced Americans believe it’s a priority.

FFTF are mounting the public pressure and it’s getting attention. Now it’s time to amp it up with an ad campaign to get Congress to investigate Ajit Pai and hold him accountable for his lies. Click here to chip in.

No bows, no glory

Rashford takes out the Spurs 1-0

That’s right, Marcus Rashford scored the only goal in Manchester United’s away game against Tottenham Hotspur Sunday night (local time), netting them 3 Premiership points and placing them 6th at 41, the same level as the Spurs’ rivals Arsenal.

Give it up for Charb

Rodeo Must Die

Anti-rodeo protesters were gathered outside an event in Whangarei yesterday with signs shaped like tombstones. The signs read 'rest in peace' in memory of the animals which died last year taking part in the sport. Apollo Taito from Direct Animal Action says the New Zealand Government's review of rodeo practices isn't moving quickly enough. "We're just really frustrated and angry because it's taking a really long time for the Government to respond to the nature of rodeo." Mr Taito says action needs to be taken to ban the worst aspects of the sport. "We'll stand there with signs saying 'rest in peace', just dedicated to the animals that have passed away due to the cruel practise of rodeo." Four animals reportedly died in the previous year. One of those was covered up, activists say - the death of a horse at an event in Gisborne in December, shortly after a bull was put down after its leg was snapped. The bull's death was widely reported, but the horse's death wasn't. RODEO IS JUST STUPID ANYWAY. ALL IT IS IS A RETARDED EXCUSE TO GET ON A BUCKING BULL JUST TO GET THROWN OFF. IT'S NOT JUST ANIMALS GETTING HURT OR KILLED, IT'S ALSO THE PEOPLE TAKING PART. AND THOSE THAT DO SURVIVE WILL RACK UP HUGE HOSPITAL BILLS IF THEY'RE UNFORTUNATE ENOUGH TO BE SITUATED IN POST-OBAMACARE AMERICA.

In case you haven’t noticed by now

FOR THOSE WHO STILL DON’T GET IT AFTER TWO YEARS

Sad noot indeed

Wearing that foil like a boss

They should also do yellow vests in tinfoil.

Slugged by the salt

Apple is life!

And around two thirds of that NZ$400 was money I had set aside for gender transition-related expenses (stuff like a deed poll of name change and getting ID issued in my new name). But hey, at least this Apple fanboy's got her priorities straight.

Como Chameleon

And that’s Newcastle beaten

Manchester United won their away game against Newcastle United 2-0 on Thursday night (local time), with Lukaku and Rashford scoring the goals in the second half.

Over-koala-fied

The truth about debt

The legitimacy of a given social order rests on the legitimacy of its debts. Even in ancient times this was so. In traditional cultures, debt in a broad sense—gifts to be reciprocated, memories of help rendered, obligations not yet fulfilled—was a glue that held society together. Everybody at one time or another owed something to someone else. Repayment of debt was inseparable from the meeting of social obligations; it resonated with the principles of fairness and gratitude. The moral associations of making good on one’s debts are still with us today, informing the logic of austerity as well as the legal code. A good country, or a good person, is supposed to make every effort to repay debts. Accordingly, if a country like Jamaica or Greece, or a municipality like Baltimore or Detroit, has insufficient revenue to make its debt payments, it is morally compelled to privatize public assets, slash pensions and salaries, liquidate natural resources, and cut public services so it can use the savings to pay creditors. Such a prescription takes for granted the legitimacy of its debts. Today a burgeoning debt resistance movement draws from the realization that many of these debts are not fair. Most obviously unfair are loans involving illegal or deceptive practices—the kind that were rampant in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. From sneaky balloon interest hikes on mortgages, to loans deliberately made to unqualified borrowers, to incomprehensible financial products peddled to local governments that were kept ignorant about their risks, these practices resulted in billions of dollars of extra costs for citizens and public institutions alike. A movement is arising to challenge these debts. In Europe, the International Citizen debt Audit Network (ICAN) promotes “citizen debt audits,” in which activists examine the books of municipalities and other public institutions to determine which debts were incurred through fraudulent, unjust, or illegal means. They then try to persuade the government or institution to contest or renegotiate those debts. In 2012, towns in France declared they would refuse to pay part of their debt obligations to the bailed-out bank Dexia, claiming its deceptive practices resulted in interest rate jumps to as high as 13 percent. Meanwhile, in the United States, the city of Baltimore filed a class-action lawsuit to recover losses incurred through the Libor rate-fixing scandal, losses that could amount to billions of dollars. And Libor is just the tip of the iceberg. In a time of rampant financial lawbreaking, who knows what citizen audits might uncover? Furthermore, at a time when the law itself is so subject to manipulation by financial interests, why should resistance be limited to debts that involved lawbreaking? After all, the 2008 crash resulted from a deep systemic corruption in which “risky” derivative products turned out to be risk-free—not on their own merits, but because of government and Federal Reserve bailouts that amounted to a de facto guarantee. The perpetrators of these “financial instruments of mass destruction” (as Warren Buffett labeled them) were rewarded while homeowners, other borrowers, and taxpayers were left with collapsed asset values and higher debts. This is part of a context of unjust economic, political, or social conditions that compels the debtor to go into debt. When that injustice is pervasive, aren’t all or most debts illegitimate? In many countries, declining real wages and reduced public services virtually compel citizens to go into debt just to maintain their standard of living. Is debt legitimate when it is systemically foisted on the vast majority of people and nations? If it isn’t, then resistance to illegitimate debt has profound political consequences. This feeling of pervasive, systemic unfairness is palpable in the so-called developing world and in increasing swathes of the rest. African and Latin American nations, southern and Eastern Europe, communities of color, students, homeowners with mortgages, municipalities, the unemployed - the list of those who strain under enormous debt through no fault of their own is endless. They share the perception that their debts are somehow unfair, illegitimate, even if there is no legal basis for that perception. Hence the slogan that is spreading among debt activists and resisters everywhere: “Don’t owe. Won’t pay.” Challenges to these debts cannot be based on appeals to the letter of the law alone when the laws are biased in favor of creditors. There is, however, a legal principle for challenging otherwise legal debts: the principle of “odious debt.” Originally signifying debt incurred on behalf of a nation by its leaders that does not actually benefit the nation, the concept can be extended into a powerful tool for systemic change. Odious debt was a key concept in recent debt audits on the national level, most notably that of Ecuador in 2008 that led to its defaulting on billions of dollars of its foreign debt. Nothing terrible happened to it, setting a dangerous precedent (from the creditors’ point of view). Greece’s Truth Commission on Public Debt is auditing all of that nation’s sovereign debt with the same possibility in mind. Other nations are likely taking notice because their debts, which are obviously unpayable, condemn them to an eternity of austerity, wage cuts, natural resource liquidation, privatization, etc., for the privilege of staying in debt (and remaining part of the global financial system). In most cases, the debts are never paid off. According to a report by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, since 1970 Jamaica has borrowed $18.5 billion and paid back $19.8 billion, yet still owes $7.8 billion. In the same period, the Philippines borrowed $110 billion, has paid back $125 billion, and owes $45 billion. These are not isolated examples. Essentially what is happening here is that money—in the form of labor power and natural resources—is being extracted from these countries. More goes out than comes in, thanks to the fact that all these loans bear interest. What debts are “odious”? Some examples are obvious, such as loans to build the infamous Bataan Nuclear Power Plant from which Westinghouse and Marcos cronies profited enormously but which never produced any electricity, or the military expenditures of juntas in El Salvador or Greece. But what about the huge amount of debt that financed large-scale, centralized development projects? Neoliberal ideology says those are to the great benefit of a nation, but now it is becoming apparent that the main beneficiaries were corporations from the same nations that were doing the lending. Moreover, the bulk of this development is geared toward enabling the recipient to generate foreign exchange by opening up its petroleum, minerals, timber, or other resources to exploitation, or by converting subsistence agriculture to commodity agribusiness, or by making its labor force available to global capital. The foreign exchange generated is required to make loan payments, but the people don’t necessarily benefit. Might we not say, then, that most debt owed by the “developing” world is odious, born of colonial and imperial relationships? The same might be said for municipal, household, and personal debt. Tax laws, financial deregulation, and economic globalization have siphoned money into the hands of corporations and the very rich, forcing everyone else to borrow in order to meet basic needs. Municipalities and regional governments now must borrow to provide the services that tax revenues once funded before industry fled to the places of least regulation and lowest wages in the global “race to the bottom.” Students now must borrow to attend universities that were once heavily subsidized by government. Stagnant wages force families to borrow just to live. The rising tide of debt cannot be explained by a rising tide of laziness or irresponsibility. The debt is systemic and inescapable. It isn’t fair, and people know it. As the concept of illegitimate debts spreads, the moral compulsion to repay them will wane, and new forms of debt resistance will emerge. Indeed, they already are in places most affected by the economic crisis, such as Spain, where a strong anti-eviction movement challenges the legitimacy of mortgage debt and has just gotten an activist elected mayor of Barcelona. As the recent drama in Greece has shown us, though, isolated acts of resistance are easily crushed. Standing alone, Greece faced a stark choice: either capitulate to the European institutions and enact austerity measures even more punishing than those its people rejected in the referendum or suffer the sudden destruction of its banks. Since the latter would entail a humanitarian catastrophe, the Syriza government chose to capitulate. Nonetheless, Greece rendered the world an important service by making the fact of debt slavery plain, as well as revealing the power of undemocratic institutions such as the European Central Bank to dictate domestic economic policy. Besides direct resistance, people are finding ways to live outside the conventional financial system and, in the process, prefigure what might replace it. Complementary currencies, time banks, direct-to-consumer farm cooperatives, legal aid cooperatives, gift economy networks, tool libraries, medical cooperatives, child care cooperatives, and other forms of economic cooperation are proliferating in Greece and Spain, in many cases recalling traditional forms of communalism that still exist in societies that aren’t fully modernized. Debt is a potent rallying issue because of its ubiquity and its psychological gravity. Unlike climate change, which is easy to relegate to theoretical importance when, after all, the supermarkets are still full of food and the air conditioner is still running, debt affects the lives of growing numbers of people directly and undeniably: a yoke, a burden, a constant constraint on their freedom. Three-quarters of Americans carry some form of debt. Student debt stands at more than $1.3 trillion in the United States and averages more than $33,000 per graduating student. Municipalities around the country are cutting services to the bone, laying off employees, and slashing pensions. Why? To make payments on their debts. The same is true of entire nations, as creditors—and the financial markets that drive them—tighten their death grip on southern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the rest of the world. Most people need little persuading that debt has become a tyrant over their lives. What is harder for them to see, though, is that they could ever be free of their debts, which are often described as “inescapable” or “crushing.” That is why even the most modest challenges to debt legitimacy, such as the aforementioned citizen audits, have revolutionary implications. They cast into question the certainty of debt. If one debt can be nullified, maybe all of them can—not only for nations but for municipalities, school districts, hospitals, and people too. That’s why the European authorities made such a humiliating example of Greece—they needed to maintain the principle of inviolability of debt. That’s also why hundreds of billions of dollars were used to bail out the creditors who made bad loans in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, but not a penny was spent bailing out the debtors. Not only does debt have the potential to be a rallying point of near-universal appeal, it also happens to be a unique political pressure point. That’s because the results of mass debt resistance would be catastrophic for the financial system. The Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 demonstrated that the system is so highly leveraged and so tightly interconnected that even a small disruption can cascade into a massive systemic crisis. Moreover, “won’t pay” is a form of protest easily accessible to the atomized digital citizen who has been sundered from most forms of political association; arguably, it is the only form of digital action that has much real-world impact. No street protests are necessary, no confrontations with riot police, to stop payment on a credit card or student loan. The financial system is vulnerable to a few million mouse clicks. Herein lies a resolution to the dilemma posed by Silvia Federici in the South Atlantic Quarterly: “Instead of work, exploitation, and above all ‘bosses,’ so prominent in the world of smoke stacks, we now have debtors confronting not an employer but a bank and confronting it alone, not as part of a collective body and collective relation, as was the case with wage workers.” So let’s organize and spread awareness. We needn’t confront the banks, the bond markets, or the financial system alone. What should be the ultimate goal of the debt resistance movement? The systemic nature of the debt problem implies that none of the policy proposals that are realistic or reachable in the present political environment are worth pursuing. Reducing rates on student loans, offering mortgage relief, reining in payday lending, or reducing debt in the Global South might be politically feasible, but by mitigating the worst abuses of the system, they make that system slightly more tolerable and imply that the problem is not the system—we just need to fix these abuses. Conventional redistributive strategies, such as higher marginal income tax rates, also face limitations, mostly because they don’t address the deep root of the debt crisis: the slowdown of economic growth worldwide, or, as a Marxist would put it, the falling return on capital. More and more economists are joining a distinguished lineage that includes Herman Daly, E.F. Schumacher, and even (though this is little known) John Maynard Keynes to argue that we are nearing the end of growth—primarily, but not only, for ecological reasons. When growth stalls, lending opportunities disappear. Since money is essentially lent into existence, debt levels increase faster than the supply of money required to service them. The result, as Thomas Piketty described so clearly, is rising indebtedness and concentration of wealth. The aforementioned policy proposals have a further defect as well: They are so moderate they have little potential to inspire a mass popular movement. Reduced interest rates or other incremental reforms are not going to arouse an apathetic and disillusioned citizenry. Recall the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s: Widely decried as naïve and unrealistic by establishment liberals, it generated a vocal and committed movement that contributed to the climate of opinion behind the START agreements of the Reagan era. The economic reform movements need something equally simple, graspable, and appealing. What about the cancellation of all student debt? What about a jubilee, a fresh start for mortgage debtors, student debtors, and debtor nations? The problem is that canceling the debts means erasing the assets upon which our entire financial system depends. These assets are at the basis of your pension fund, the solvency of your bank, and grandma’s savings account. Indeed, a savings account is nothing other than a debt owed you by your bank. To prevent chaos, some entity has to buy the debts for cash, and then cancel those debts (in full or in part, or perhaps just reduce the interest rate to zero). Fortunately, there are deeper and more elegant alternatives to conventional redistributive strategies. I’ll mention two of the most promising: “positive money” and negative-interest currency. Both of these entail a fundamental change in the way money is created. Positive money refers to money created directly without debt by the government, which can be given directly to debtors for debt repayment or used to purchase debts from creditors and then cancel them. Negative-interest currency (which I describe in depth in Sacred Economics) entails a liquidity fee on bank reserves, essentially taxing wealth at its source. It enables zero-interest lending, reduces wealth concentration, and allows a financial system to function in the absence of growth. Radical proposals such as these bear in common a recognition that money, like property and debt, is a sociopolitical construct. It is a social agreement mediated by symbols: numbers on slips of paper, bits in computers. It is not an immutable feature of reality to which we can but adapt. The agreements that we call money and debt can be changed. To do so, however, will require a movement that contests the immutability of the current system and explores alternatives to it.

OUR GOAL FOR 2019

No more Macron!

We have decided on the final induction into the Sick Phoque Club for 2018. The inductee for December 2018 is Emmanuel Macron. Why him? Google the phrase “yellow vest” for more.