Israeli Healthcare, does it work?

Interior Assuta Hospital, Tel Aviv, Israel
Assuta Hospital, Tel Aviv, Israel

Over the last week and a half I’ve had a pretty good experience with the Israeli state healthcare system. I’m fully aware it has failings, but I think the topic for tomorrow’s Forest Talk podcast will be when and why government should be in healthcare.

I’ve lived in the UK and used the British National Health system and private medicine in the UK. I’ve paid for health insurance in the US and used doctors there. Israel’s system of a hybrid private and public system is the best I’ve come across so far.

Any specific questions? Leave me a comment here.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

010 Podcast discovers Jihadi books in Australia from July 23 2005

Shire Network News Archive
Shire Network News Archive
010 Podcast discovers Jihadi books in Australia from July 23 2005
/

In this week’s edition of Shire Network News, the official podcast of Silent Running, a report from Our Man in London on the latest bombings, Ted Lapkin from the Australian/Israel Jewish Affairs Committee on the sale of books advocating Jihad in Muslim bookstores in Australia, the Full of Crap Report from Laurence Simon, and an interview with a right-wing Jewish woman who edits a major New Zealand student magazine on why classical liberalism is “the new black”.

You can now subscribe to Shire Network News on Apple iTunes, although whether that remains the case after Apple hear what Lair says about them this week remains to be seen.

Under “Genres”, select “Podcasts”, type the word “Shire” in the left-hand panel just above the message “Search all podcasts”, and click the magnifying glass icon. You should then be taken to a screen where you can subscribe to SNN.

If for some reason that doesn’t work, click on “Advanced” on the top of the screen and then select “Subscribe to Podcast” and enter this into the panel: http://tuatara.blogmatrix.com/index.xml

Don’t forget to vote for this program at Podcast Alley.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

Fighting the Modians at Patreon, PayPal and Mastercard

Beach Sunset Tel Aviv

The business model of Silicon Valley is to reap outsized profits by achieving a (temporary) monopoly. This is the premise behind Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Instead of competition persisting over time, all the competition takes place in the startup phase, and the winner of this phase reaps all the profit. As a side effect, it creates a perfect environment for Modians to take charge, once the winner is declared. The effect is enhanced by the little-known (outside of Silicon Valley) truth that the best technology does *not* often win. Usually, it’s the best marketing.

David Boxenhorn, on Facebook

I watched YouTuber Law’s latest update on the letter he’s putting together about the deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad (and all the rest) by Patreon. His intention is to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in the US rather than bringing a suit against any of the tech companies directly. That’s probably a smart legal plan (he knows much more than I do) but he will be fighting huge entrenched interests. His videos are below but I’ll sum them up: he’s building an ad hoc team of (highly skilled) volunteers and he thinks he has enough case law and evidence to get the FTC to start an investigation which would have much more power and weight than a collection of law suits. It would also be financed by government money.

If you haven’t already read Mundia and Modia, you may well want to.

I wanted to put some broader context around this and that’s why I quoted David at the start on how Silicon Valley and modern Tech business works. This all feeds into and flows from David’s thesis of Mundia and Modia. It also links up with the law suit I’m supporting by JPB Liberty against Google and Facebook for banning many different crypto based technologies from advertising on their platforms about a year ago.

The Federal Trade Commission is part of government. As such it will staffed by modians, people who are far removed from objective criteria of success in business or success in a technical and engineering field. This is a hugely important thing to remember when dealing with them.

Patreon, PayPal, Mastercard have all achieved a degree of market dominance in their fields. There might have been better technical competition but these guys are mammoths. As such the objective business criteria for their ongoing success are far removed from the day to day operations of the companies. Mostly their staff can do whatever they want: riding a wave of profitability they inherited from early engineering skills, excellent marketing and a healthy dose of luck. This will carry them along for a while.

The FTC is going to be staffed (especially considering Mundia Modia thinking and following 8 years of Obama) via the revolving door system between big business and the US government. Massive lobbying money has completely corrupted Washington DC. It is into this quagmire that YouTuberLaw’s letter will be sent.

As we’ve seen this week with the massive layoffs across Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, in some parts of the tech world easy profitability is going away. My belief is the entire advertising supported business model is stretched very thin and the numbers upon which Google and Facebook have grown are being understood to be grossly inflated. Everything downstream from them (and that includes “businesses” like Huffpo and Buzzfeed) which rely on web traffic and eyeballs flowing from social media sites will start to feel pain.

There has been a recent uptick in linking the brands of online advertising with the nature of user generated content it appears alongside. Today this is a modian idea to drive forward their “social justice” agenda but it was first done a few decades ago by figures like Mary Whitehouse in the UK and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the US. It has been taken to new levels of effectiveness by the far-left today. Thinking this would help them fight against online competitors for your attention, the mainstream media (M5M) thought they’d ride the wave, they’re also getting caught in the destructive tsunami now too.

The promise of digital advertising was that it can be much more targeted, if that’s really coming true, every advertising based business, even Facebook and Google, the two most capable targeted advertising delivery systems, will do themselves out of business because advertising just shouldn’t be as big an industry as it is today and the entire media world that is built around it is probably a house of cards.

So returning back to the financial deplatforming of non-advertising supported media endeavours (like Sargon of Akkad, Alex Jones, Milo and even myself): advertising supported media is going to change dramatically. I still can’t see the future but I can tell the status quo is changing very fast. Everything that can be done to stop payment systems which bypass the advertising support model from capture by the far-left, cultural marxists must be done which is why I wish YouTuberLaw and JPB Liberty both every success in shaking up these industries.


My video with Andrew Hamilton explaining the JPB Liberty law suit:

YouTuberLaw videos, two updated:

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

009 Podcast blames West for anticipated anti-Podcast backlash from July 18 2005

Shire Network News Archive
Shire Network News Archive
009 Podcast blames West for anticipated anti-Podcast backlash from July 18 2005
/

In this week’s edition of Shire Network News, the official podcast of Silent Running, the Guardian’s “sassy” new trainee journalist, Dilpazier Aslam; the coming global Caliphate; blogger Scott Burgess weilds Google like a crusader sword; John Hawkins on why it’s possible to make gas from mustard; the War Room fact checks ABC on links between Saddam Hussein and terrorism; we have the London Report from Andrew Ian Dodge; we interview Thomas Haidon from the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terror on the Muslim response to the London bombings; the regular Full of Crap Report from uber funny blogger Laurence Simon; and an interview with blogger “Cyrus” who runs “Christian Hate”, devoted to combating modern Christian anti-zionism in general and the politicisation of the British charity Christian Aid in particular’ also mentioned by “Cyrus” are blogger/journalists Melanie Phillips and Stephen Pollard.

You can now subscribe to Shire Network News on Apple iTunes, although whether that remains the case after Apple hear what Lair says about them this week remains to be seen.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

Podcast goes from Covington Catholic school to Indigenous Jewish Israel

Indigenous Jew Podcast art
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
BrianofLondon's Forest Talks
Podcast goes from Covington Catholic school to Indigenous Jewish Israel
/

The Hebrew Israelites seem to be the group that kicked the whole Covington Catholic schoolmess off but who are they? That leads onto the whole discussion of why Judaism and Jews are indigenous to Israel and what Jewish indigenous identity is all about!

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.