Today's Headlines:

The Largest US Health Care Strike in History Begins:

More than 75,000 nurses, pharmacists, and other employees of the Kaiser Permanente health system walked off the job Wednesday in the largest US healthcare strike on record. The workers struck after contracts expired and their unions couldn’t reach an agreement with Kaiser on how much a new deal would increase wages and staffing. To minimize the impact on patients, Kaiser said it has brought on thousands of temporary workers to fill some vacancies but would, if needed, postpone some appointments and expand its network to retail pharmacies and, for some people, non-Kaiser hospitals.

The system serves 12.7 million members at 40 hospitals and more than 620 medical offices, mostly on the West Coast but also in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, and Virginia. Kaiser counts about 213,000 employees who aren’t physicians. The strike comes after years of medical employees being overworked, public support for unions, and other unions (notably Hollywood writers) getting wins.

Are Flags Leaving Bios?

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R, CA-20) was ousted as House speaker yesterday after the House voted 216 to 210 on a resolution from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, FL-1) to vacate the leadership role. McCarthy, who had been in the post for under nine months, became the first House speaker in US history to be removed from office.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R, NC-10) is now the interim speaker, known as speaker pro tempore (my money is on Jim Jordan getting the position). McCarthy’s exit tells the rest of the world one thing very plainly- Republicans are done funding Ukraine. Gaetz and other populist Republicans have alleged that McCarthy made a side deal to keep Ukraine funding going, whether or not this is true, I don’t know. What I do know is that between this news and Slovakia just electing a leader who has sworn to no longer fund Ukraine, the pendulum is beginning to swing. In other words, flags might be leaving bios.

Twins Stop Record 18-game Postseason Skid:

The other headline I had in mind was- Holy fuck Royce Lewis is good.

As I’m sending this, the Twins and Blue Jays are in the middle of game two. Royce Lewis has already scored again. Am I a bandwagon Twins fan now?

NCAA shrinks window for athletes to enter transfer portal:

It’s now only 45 days. I’m in a rush; no need to draw this one out.

An Update From Me:

I’ve really enjoyed writing this newsletter, and I also wanted to tell you guys that I’ve been in the works of maybe starting a business. More updates to come- thank you for the support.

Who is George Soros? Part One.

Unless you’re happy, stupid, or both, you’ve heard the name George Soros before reading this. Libtards will tell you that you’re spreading anti-semitic disinformation for pointing out the part he plays in geopolitics, your drunk Q-Anon aunt-whose-not-really-your-aunt will tell you that he’s Satan in a skinsuit, but what’s the truth? Who the fuck is this guy?

George Soros is a Hungarian-born billionaire and media-acclaimed philanthropist who has changed your life in ways many of you don’t even realize. Born in Budapest to a non-observant Jewish family, Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and moved to the United Kingdom in 1947. Soros’ early life is a point of contention because information came out around the time he became one of the richest men in the world that a thirteen-year-old Soros was summoned by Hitler’s henchman, Adolf Eichmann, to be a courier who delivered messages to the local Jewish community and confiscated their property. He admitted this in an interview over twenty years ago with 60 Minutes, and people were immediately struck by how little remorse it appeared he had over these actions (Hillary Clinton gets a feature in the interview if you want to watch the full thing).

This is where things get complicated off the bat for me. Morally, I don’t think most people reading this would have the bravery to stand up to an authoritarian government at thirteen years old, but the lengths Soros has gone to defend this interview are beyond me. If you Google this incident, you’ll find hundreds of articles suggesting that George Soros never actually did what the Nazis had told him to do, and his confession on National Television was nothing more than a mistake after a long day. With what you’ll find out later in this series about George Soros and his media reach, let’s just say that we can be pretty confident he got those articles and blogs published.

Whatever the case was, we’re talking about a thirteen-year-old kid, and using that anecdote isn’t enough to make me convinced Soros is an evil person. Hell, when I was thirteen, I was looking up #black_twerkingg on Vine.

He studied at the London School of Economics and was awarded a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1951 and then a Master, also in philosophy, in 1954. He would then go on to work at various merchant banks out of college before moving to America two years later. After saving his money for five years living in New York, Soros would start his first hedge fund in the early ’60s. He quickly became one of Wall Street’s youngest rockstars. By 1981, Institutional Investor magazine (which was a big deal at that point) called Soros the world’s greatest money manager.

This is another point where things will be getting complicated. Soros’ investing philosophy is short-term speculation. He is known for placing highly leveraged bets on currency rates and commodity prices using macroeconomic analysis. Have you seen The Big Short? Then you get the idea. This philosophy became part of why Soros became hated as quickly as he became respected. In September 1992, he borrowed billions of dollars worth of British pounds and converted them to German marks. He did this with the goal of switching the German currency back to the British pound when the pound lost its value. In case you didn’t know, any given country’s currency’s value varies daily. As I’m writing this, one US dollar Is worth 0.83 British pounds. Last year, it was worth .89 British pounds. When Soros converted this German currency back to British currency, he had basically shorted the British pound because he was exchanging such a large amount of money back. Britain had to raise their interest rate, which ignited a recession.

Five years later, he would do something very similar to Thailand. I say that this is complicated, and it is for a few reasons. To start with, I don’t like when pro-Vivek-Ramaswamy-type Republicans come at Soros for shorting currencies and then turn around and praise other Wall Street bros who place highly leveraged short-term bets that affect people negatively. Inconsistent morals that are used when it’s convenient are a sign of brain rot. There are plenty of reasons not to like Soros, but if you’re a complete believer in every single consequence of absolute capitalism (good or bad), you can’t shit on him for playing inside its parameters. Now, if you believe in capitalism but also subscribe to the idea that private equity firms should be reined in, or if you’re a socialist, George Soros making massive gains off the backs of working-class people in other countries is fair to criticize. Why the fuck wouldn’t you?

The other reason that Soros’ big financial wins are complicated is because I believe that they illustrate how much liberals have changed over the last thirty years. Back in the day, liberal economists like Paul Krugman (yes, the guy from your old economics textbook) were critics of Soros and his investment strategy. Now, the party of people who fought for worker’s rights and equality are the hedge fund kingpin’s biggest defenders. Because rather than fight for an America free of corruption or a Nation where we keep our workers here and give them fundamental rights, liberals now focus on identity politics, a few social issues, and Donald Trump. This isn’t just because in this House we believe in science…. signs lined up the wealthiest neighborhoods in your area a few years ago; it’s in the data.

Sixty-five percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 a year are now in Democratic districts. Seventy-four percent of households in Republican districts make less than six figures a year. For Pete’s sake, the Republican party that gave us hits like the CIA, both wars in Iraq, and the beginning of endless wealth inequality is now the party of the working-class.

And this is why people like Harry Sisson need Republicans to keep talking about trans kids so badly. Because if the right wing stopped engaging in fruitless debates, a dissipating middle-class America would start to pay attention, and they’d begin to feel really, really frustrated. Even Trump acknowledges this (disregard caption).

That’s not to say that debate over cultural issues isn’t very important, all I’m saying is that every day, the wealth gap between maintenance mechanics and performatively progressive tech guys gets larger. To put in perspective how silly it is to keep debates like the one around trans children at the focal point of American discourse, over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older. The direct number of civilian deaths in Iraq (since the US invasion in 2003) and Syria (since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve in 2014) total somewhere in the range of 325,641-348,985. More than 7 million people from Iraq and Syria are currently refugees, and nearly 8 million people are internally displaced in the two countries. The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty.

We are a retarded country.

Tune in tomorrow for part two, where we break apart why George Soros is responsible for our crumbling empire.