Free Republic

Trump is still proud of Operation Warp Speed and the vaccines it produced.

This is a result of the best practices that he wrote about in his books. In this case he was learning from and taking advice from people with long careers in vaccines instead of clowns who peddle make believe nonsense like “turbo cancers”.

The only mention of turbo cancer that you can find at oncology sites is when they tell you that it’s a stupid conspiracy theory, which explains its wild popularity in the fact optional cult.

“And they still won’t admit that the Covid ‘vaccine’ contributes to a baby bust unlike any other.”

That’s related to the fact that they aren’t crackpots who believe that “the Covid virus doesn’t exist”. And that the “real cause of Covid” was “poison fake vaccines” given out before the pandemic.

That was about the stupidest idea that the frauds at the Daily Expose ever cooked up, right? I mean what kind of fools would believe that garbage. Maybe paranoid schizophrenics who can’t tell hallucination from reality. Go figure.

“Salem is and has been “Controlled Opposition” for years. Trust them at your own peril. They are subtle Establishment propagandists disguised as Christian Conservatives.”

Probably from day one- Hugh Hewitt. Michael Medved. Erik Erickson. Ben Shapiro. Elisha Krauss.

I did read it. FNMA and FMCC repaid the funds that kept them from bankruptcy. Making it a loan, not additional government debt.

“The 2008 housing crash left Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the verge of bankruptcy, so they were put into government conservatorship. They received huge bailouts, which they have since paid back, but they remain under conservatorship today.”

Where’s the pic with Dubya nuzzling up to Big Mike Obama...

“And speaking of Dumbya, I noticed he’s gone mute again, just like he did during Obama’s tenure.”

Dubya couldn’t be happier watching Trump get lawfared unless he was doing it himself.

Plenty of early freepers identified with the Establishment GOP. The Bush crew had a field day zotting freepers who had the temerity to oppose Dubya’s love affair with illegal aliens. Wardaddy can tell you all about that. At one point it looked like they controlled what was allowed at this site. Perot and Buchanan populism, essentially a forerunner of MAGA, was another of their targets.

Conservatorship is taking charge of their management until they can be made solvent. It didn’t obligate the government to be responsible for anything that FNMA and FMCC might owe. Losses would be born by their investors.

The reason that the government would do this in the first place is to prevent a system collapse of the banking system if all of that FNMA and FMCC paper defaulted.

“part 2”

https://albertmohler.com/2023/08/23/daniel-hummel/

Albert Mohler:

There has to be kind of an Earth story here. There’s got to be an origin, and you’ve got the man in John Nelson Darby, but how does it come to this? In other words, this is not a natural reading of Scripture. That was one of the first responses of people say in the Reformed world hearing dispensationalism. No one would read the Bible and just come to that. Instead, it kind of fits that 19th century idea that there’s this overarching structure that’s invisible until you see it. Then, you see it and you can’t not see it. How did that happen?

Daniel Hummel:

Yeah, and Darby would insist he is doing, I guess, a plain reading of the Scripture or a straight reading of Scripture, and, of course, dispensationalists would as well. He started as an Anglican priest, and there’s nothing really remarkable in his first few years. This is in the 1820s. He develops a very strong critique of the Anglican Church, in particularly the Church of Ireland that in the most basic form that the Church has been totally compromised by the effort to extend British imperial influence across the globe. He sees the Church as just entirely entwined in worldly interests.

He develops a very strong sense that the Church’s purpose in the world is entirely Heavenly or otherworldly, and he brings what some theologians, and I go along with them, call essentially a dualism to the text, to the Bible, and ends up reading all the Bible, and particularly the prophetic portions, as either relating to Heaven or Earth. There are two peoples of God that relate to Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly people are the Church and the Earthly people is the Nation of Israel. Once you start putting that lens over the Bible, you start developing inconsistencies that you have to smooth out and you start developing distinctive teachings about the fulfillment of prophecy, hidden weeks and parentheses and all other types of things to smooth it out.

Later theologians come along and try to bring some order to that, but really Darby’s original interest, which might surprise people who think of just the end time scenario as the totality of dispensationalism, was really you could say an ecclesiological concern about the Church and the sort of fallen nature, the apostate nature of the Church. Anyway, that drives his reading of the Bible, but once you apply that dualism across the entire Bible, you have a lot of things you have to account for that develop into this system.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, the Plymouth Brethren angle of this is certainly the manifestation of that kind of, again, primitivist impulse in ecclesiology. You see that on both sides of the Atlantic, the Campbellite Restorationist movement, the Churches of Christ. Again, simplicity and the restoration of a lost simplicity. Again, what makes it different is that there’s no way that dispensationalism can be defined as simple, and so that’s the irony here, the anomaly in my mind. I can understand the purity effort and appreciate it and the Restorationists’ concern, but how you get from that to the complexity of dispensationlism, it’s still a leap in my mind.

Daniel Hummel:

Yeah, and that’s part of what I tried to fill in the gaps is there’s a more surface level reading of this history that really draws a straight line from John Nelson Darby to people like Cyrus Scofield and then Dallas Seminary for something like that. That’s just not how it developed. Darby was a pretty marginal figure, particularly in American Christianity, but even in British Christianity. He does travel around the United States for a number of years.

He spent seven years in the United States in the 1860s and ’70s, but really what is the key to his growing influence or his ideas’ growing influence in the U.S. is a set of other Brethren who are much better at popularizing his teachings. There’s a number of them. His main editor was a guy named William Kelly who is very popular among American Christians, and there’s another sort of more devotional writer named C.H. Mackintosh who was a very prominent Brethren who people like Dwight Moody cited as very influential in their thinking. Darby’s ideas sort of trickle in in the 1860s and 1870s in the United States, and no one in the U.S. takes it full… swallows the whole thing full.

This is to Darby’s great torture that no Americans want to adopt his whole system, particularly these Americans who are adopting his system are all pastors more or less. The Brethren don’t believe in a clergy class, and so if Darby had his way, people would leave their denominations and join the Brethren and reject the idea of a clergy. That doesn’t happen, but there are key leaders in the United States who do adopt both the ecclesiology part for particular reasons having to do with the 1860s and ’70s, and the eschatology part because it seems to be making sense of a lot of what’s happening in the world as well. Darby doesn’t get his way. I think it’s actually a sort of disservice to both Darby and the people that follow him to draw that straight line.

more at the link

https://albertmohler.com/2023/08/23/daniel-hummel/

Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, holds a conversation with Daniel Hummel, author of the 2023 book ‘The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism’.

There’s a video and transcript at the link. Here’s how the conversation begins:

Albert Mohler:

I think most people who know about evangelical Christianity in the United States, and for that matter, the vast majority of evangelicals, are at least familiar with dispensationalism, whether they have a name for it or not. I think they would assume that it had always been part of the evangelical landscape. You really do a masterful job in this book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation, but you really have to tell a story that I think most evangelicals don’t really know.

Daniel Hummel:

Yeah, and it’s a story that is at least 200 years old. It goes all the way back. It doesn’t even start in the United States, but it’s one that I think, as you mentioned, most people, most even Americans that aren’t part of the evangelical world, know something about the teaching of a rapture, at least in the basic form that there’s a teaching that suddenly all the true believers will be disappeared into Heaven, translate into Heaven, and that this will kick off an end time scenario that will lead to all types of wars and the rise of an Antichrist and everything else. That’s a very popularized version of this history, of this dispensationalism, this theology, but it’s so much more than that, and as someone who grew up in the world of dispensationalism, I knew there was a lot more to it. In the book, I start all the way back in the 1830s with a Anglo-Irish cleric named John Nelson Darby, and then we take it from there.

Albert Mohler:

As an historical theologian, you say all the way back in 200 years.

Daniel Hummel:

Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

To a historical theologian, that’s not very far back, and that actually is, I think, the most surprising part of the story is that there’s virtually nothing like dispensational Christianity in the United States in any previous era. You’ve got a lot of eschatological expectation, you’ve got a lot of eschatological speculation, but nothing like this as a system.

Daniel Hummel:

That’s right, and there are definitely, I think, in a less fine-grained version of the story, people would point to groups like the Millerites in the 1840s as a predecessor, and I talk about them as well. Really, what Henry Miller was doing in, or sorry, Willie Miller was doing in that in his prediction of the end times was a version of sort of chiliasm or millenarianism, but it didn’t have the underpinnings of dispensationalism.

If you talk to dispensationalists, they will tell you that there’s a much older history to dispensationalism, and I try to be sympathetic at least in some of the parts of what they’re trying to say there. As far as I see it, and I think I’m not alone among historians, Darby in the 1830s and 1840s is really the figure who brings together a number of teachings to create the embryonic form of a system of theology that we end up calling dispensationalism.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, the theologian in me wants to stipulate upfront that there are systems and there are systems, and most systems are rather fundamental and simple. You could take Covenant Theology as an example. There’s a very simple and direct apprehension of Covenant Theology, Old Covenant, New Covenant, continuity, discontinuity. When you talk about dispensationalism, you’re talking about a system that actually kind of rivals medieval Thomistic thought in its complexity. What’s amazing to me is that there were so many conservative Christians who gave themselves to becoming more or less self-taught and conference-taught experts in this system.

Daniel Hummel:

That’s right, and created a whole sort of Bible institute network of schools to at least in part teach this system as well. That complexity, the intricate nature of the system, that’s one part of the whole story, I think, does trace back to someone like Darby, who was a very intellectual person, someone who wrote millions and millions of words, someone who wrote hundreds of books on all parts of theology. We know him… If you don’t know him for dispensationalism, he is the originator of the Plymouth Brethren movement, and then the exclusive Brethren sect within that. He was just a prodigious person who was very complicated in his thinking, and so as people tried to popularize his teachings and then adopt them in later generations, that intricate complexity traveled along with them.

more at the link

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are stockholder owned corporations.

So it’s not at all surprising that their debt isn’t on the government’s books.

It’s the usual word salad babble of a goldbug site.

A valid national debt problem tossed in a bin with a lot of nonsense.

“The publisher of NR and I often met for breakfast on Saturday.”

Would that have been William Rusher? I met him at a small NR event in Orange County CA in the early 1990s. I brought up the serious immigration problem already impacting SoCal and received a blank look of complete disinterest in return.

This was in the heat of the Prop 187 campaign and there is no way that the NR crew couldn’t have been aware of it. But like the RNC leadership they couldn’t care less about the transformation of the country that was occurring with California being ground zero.

“I once shook Bill Buckley’s hand. It was an honor meeting him. I was a NR subscriber for 25 years.”

I had the chance to meet Buckley too... I was impressed at the time but that faded as the years passed. I subscribed to NR from 1977 until maybe 1991. By then most of the writers that I respected had left or been cut loose.

What’s interesting to ponder is that in all of the years that I read NR, Buckley never wrote one article of substance. He basically acted as a host for the writers who made the magazine important.

I’ve heard that the really important presence at NR had been his sister, Priscilla Buckley, who acted as managing editor. The decline of NR paralleled her retirement from that role.

A critique of Bill Buckley by Paul Gottfried that praises Buckley's early role in creating the post WWII conservative movement but which also recognizes his later collaboration with neoconservatism.

Evidently you didn’t read or didn’t understand the report that you posted.

Table 2 lists all of the eligible collateral and the haircuts that the DTC assigns to each.

Interest Bearing U.S. Treasury Security haircuts are listed at 2%, 3%, 4% and 6% as their time to maturity moves from less than 2yrs to 2-5yrs to 5-10yrs to over 10yrs.

There is nothing in the rest of the eligible collateral listed in Table 2 that matches it. Treasury paper has the lowest haircut of everything listed. Which is exactly what is to be expected from the world’s safest place to park money.

Next time you should try finding a citation that actually supports your own claim, it usually works better that way.

Thanks. Ethan Allen was definitely an interesting character. I’ll have to give it a listen.

I jumped over to the wiki piece on him and this amused me considering our current controversies:

“He was also called to court in Salisbury for inoculating himself against smallpox, a procedure that required the sanction of the town selectmen”

I knew that like Tom Paine he was an 18th Century atheist and not shy about advertising it. Allen was descended from Puritans, a heritage shared by the Transcendentalists of Boston. They were the woke Hollywood elite of their era.

“In these years, Allen recovered from Thomas Young’s widow, who was living in Albany, the manuscript that he and Young had worked on in his youth and began to develop it into the work that was published in 1785 as Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. The work was a typical Allen polemic, but its target was religious, not political. Specifically targeted against Christianity, it was an unbridled attack against the Bible, established churches, and the powers of the priesthood. As a replacement for organized religion, he espoused a mixture of deism, Spinoza’s naturalist views, and precursors of Transcendentalism, with man acting as a free agent within the natural world. While historians disagree over the exact authorship of the work, the writing contains clear indications of Allen’s style.”

Do you have a link to this DTCC “20% haircut” ruling?

The DTCC is a clearing house that settles trades in the financial markets. It’s an infrastructure company owned by the banks and brokers who need it for settling trades.

That “20% haircut ruling” sounds like you think that they are passing out financial advice which doesn’t fit what the DTCC does.

Interest payments on bonds held by the Fed revert to the Treasury. The Fed doesn’t get to keep it.

So tell us what you think money managers consider a safer investment than US Treasury paper.

“We have checks and balances in the U.S. Not much Trump 1.0 could have done about the budget.
Just my two cents...”

Correct. Presidents can only veto the entire budget.

There is no line item veto. And when Nixon tried having his cabinet officers impound appropriated funds, Congress removed that option too.