So, Trump asked Javanka to cover the bond, right? Why haven’t they? Not enough cash? Or they know it’s a bad deal?
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 19, 2024
Guess we can assume the Saudis have made it pretty clear they’re not riding to the rescue, but Trump has other foreign ‘friends’…
#BrokeDonald
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them." ?? pic.twitter.com/1yV084EgTG— Aibo – Zonny (@AiboSony1) March 18, 2024
Absolutely, Agent Orange is a national security risk. pic.twitter.com/SSJe1ymWC3
— Austin Powers (@rockanroll1967) March 18, 2024
FOX NEWS: Is there any effort on the part of your team to secure this money through another country, Saudi Arabia or Russia?
HABBA: I can't speak about strategy pic.twitter.com/G0Ns1lqXJH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 20, 2024
There’s one longstanding Trump tactic that, for whatever reason, isn’t on the table just yet…
As Trump faces dwindling options to pay off a massive fine imposed as a result of losing a fraud case in New York, financial experts say filing for bankruptcy would provide a way out of his financial jam. People close to Trump say he is not considering it. https://t.co/z1wzG3jZjg
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 20, 2024
… Trump is not considering that approach, partially out of concern that it could damage his campaign to recapture the White House from President Biden in November, according to four people close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions about Trump’s finances. Even though bankruptcy could alleviate his immediate cash crunch, it also carries risks for a candidate who has marketed himself as a winning businessman — and whose greatest appeal to voters, some advisers say, is his financial success…
Trump does not have the cash to secure a bond that would delay enforcement of the $464 million judgment while he appeals, his lawyers say. No bonding company will accept real estate — which accounts for most of Trump’s wealth — as collateral. If no bond is posted by Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) could move to seize his assets, including bank accounts or properties such as Trump’s Manhattan office tower at 40 Wall Street.
“He’d rather have Letitia James show up with the sheriff at 40 Wall and make a huge stink about it than say he’s bankrupt,” one of the people close to Trump said. “He thinks about what is going to play politically well for him. Bankruptcy doesn’t play well for him, but having her try to take his properties might.”
Yet filing for bankruptcy is a maneuver Trump has used before — six times, when extricating himself from a tumultuous foray into the Atlantic City casino business decades ago. On the campaign trail, Trump in years past explained away those corporate bankruptcies, saying he used a tool many savvy investors have employed — and noting that he never had to file personally…
lol Fox basically now holding a telethon to raise $464M bond for Trump.
Hope billionaires and other Viewers Like You at least get a free tote bag https://t.co/9cHuDHSTjl— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) March 20, 2024
NotMax
Burned through that $375 million from the (overpriced) sale of the D.C. hotel right quick, didn’t ya?
sab
Billionaires are not cheap nor foolish. That is how they got to be billionaires.
They also aren’t very virtuous. Money grubbing is very much what and all they do. Even when they are charitable there is a business purpose behind it.
scav
Who among us — meaning all mere mortals — doesn’t know of someone who’s quick to talk of his newest toy but inevitably slowest to pull out their wallet when the bill comes and somehow always run a little short those weeks it’s their round. Come on minions! Tighten up those belts and look under the sofa cushions. Daddy Bigbucks can’t be expected to pay for his own misdeeds and finance his way to another self-serving tax break. Make Crime Pay Again.
sab
@scav: ?///?
ColoradoGuy
So let’s see if Elon Musk rides to the rescue. He may be as high as a kite on designer drugs, but he’s not that stupid. Nor the billionaires that swarm around Clarence Thomas. And the North Koreans don’t have that kind of cash, leaving just one Russian Tsar to lend the loot … but how do they get the money to him? New York State won’t take rubles, and a plane carrying 7 tons of gold might raise awkward questions.
piratedan
despite all of the crazy shit happening at the SCOTUS level and in various courtrooms under MAGA control, I adore the fact that the GOP is proving to be as nimble as a moose in a swamp when they have to act in the moment. There’s only so much doubling down on insanity can do. I watch the GOP driven Biden Impeachment investigation and we get Lev Parnas speaking plainly that all of their shit that they’re trying to hang on Joe and his kid started as a Russian OP and here’s the guys that were involved and oh heya Sean Hannity and Devin Nunes and Senator Graham and Senator Johnson and how you guys doing?
No one tries to challenge him because its all fucking true so they just pretend that he never spoke and trudge on with their bullshit while the Dems mock them mercilessly so that Faux News has to cut away from the carnage.
While Trump wants to have someone else pony up his fine money, the fact that he doesn’t have it and the means that people would normally use to launder it to him are under observation makes it a mite tricky to receive it from his fellow fascists overseas.
Plus the party is incredibly cash poor right now and they keep nominating crazy people and saying shit as public policy that makes us all wonder how long have they been off their meds since they’re going after recreational sex, imposition of a church state and going full fascist. Even the media (NYT and WaPo) are having a hard time trying to normalize all of this shit because anyone else paying attention makes them question just what drugs they’re on.
Chetan Murthy
Over at dailykos, someone writes to warn us to not count our chickens just quite yet …. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/20/2230577/-TFG-will-make-bond-but-not-yet?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Basically, it’s only natural that anybody willing to put up the $$ will demand eye-watering compensation and surety, and that TFG will wait on that until the literal last minute. So sometime Sunday is when we’ll find out if he can actually assemble the bond or not: until then, what we’re seeing is still theatrics. I tend to agree with this assessment: I suspect TFG has the wealth to pay the bond, but it’s tied up in N different properties. Some bond insurer could take those properties (literally take ownership) and give him the bond, with the codicil that TFG can get back the properties if he repays the bond within N Days/weeks/months/etc. I imagine something like how the repo market works in finance: you borrow money by staking some instruments (bonds/stocks); those instruments are pledged in a non-repudiable manner so that the counterparty can unilaterally take them if you don’t pay up. That means that they’re actually not accessible to other creditors if you go bankrupt — that’s how close they are to being really owned by the counterparty already.
Anyway, it’s only a few days, so we’ll see what happens. Of course, he might get the $$ from some foreign government. Gotta wonder if that’s what Manafort is there for.
sab
@piratedan: Nimble moose! I have seen moose in the wild. Large, potentially scary but they are not nimble. Could be but can’t be bothered unless you threaten baby moose.
lgerard
I think what O’Leary was suggesting by the Supreme Court getting involved is that Clarence Thomas call on his Dear Friends Club to put up the cash
sab
@ColoradoGuy: Musk has no money anymore.
mrmoshpotato
Aww, brokeass, Soviet shitpile mobster conman! Awwwww!
mrmoshpotato
@sab: Sad!
sab
4 am. Why am I up? Old or on the autism spectrum.
ETA Dog woke me up two hours ago because she had to pee. She went back to bed. Why am I up?
Betty Cracker
@sab: I am also awake thanks to a dog. He stepped on my head. Rude!
satby
@Betty Cracker: @sab: Well, no dogs anymore and the cats aren’t allowed in my bedroom, so I don’t know what my excuse is.
I hope they’ve got tfg, Manafort, and all the international contacts under such tight surveillance between our spooks and our allies that when *somebody* tries to trade more secrets for cash they get him red handed. Smith supposedly already has evidence of that, but fresh evidence and a new charge might help wake a few more “patriots” up.
satby
@Chetan Murthy: The only flaw in your reasoning is the likelihood that his properties are mortgaged to the hilt; he lost the case due to lying on the valuations in the first place. He may very well come up with the bond, but he’s going through some pain right now to do it.
And am I the only one who think it’s weird that a Fox mouthpiece would openly suggest that tfg would try to get it from a foreign country like that’s a normal, ok thing??
sab
@Betty Cracker: My dog just whined. Cats routinely step on my head while I am sleeping. I want to force them to revert to a feral life (outside our house) but my husband says No! because he likes all of the obnoxious litle critters.
We have five cats. I love two of them. I am okay with most of them. But two are slashy little monsters.
Splitting Image
What’s twenty quid to the bloody Midland bank?
The Thin Black Duke
@satby: Once you get people to believe that 2+2=5, they’ll believe anything. In the GOP universe, Rationality has left the building.
Quadrillipede
I for one, were I a squillionaire, would be perfectly happy to throw money at a disaster of a human being who has screwed every single person who ever made a deal with him, and then live with the global public knowing that I tried (and failed) to help end democracy in the US (and probably also the rest of the world).
It’s a much better use of the money than setting it on fire, and there’s just no downside to that investment whatsoever.
//
Quadrillipede
Looking forward to the next round of “DJT has us just where he wants us this time for sure…”
satby
@The Thin Black Duke: Agree for most of them. But his initial attraction was his (fake) successful businessman persona, and each successive blow to that has peeled a little support away. They can buy “fake news, unfair prosecution”, but not having the $$ to pay a bond when you’re a billionaire who testified he keeps $400 mil, give or take, in cash on hand?? Yeah, that leaves a mark on the marks.
satby
Heather Cox Richardson recaps yesterday’s House hearing for us:
Geminid
An Al Jazeera article about the holiday of Nowruz told me that as many as 300 million people celebrate the Persian New Year. I knew about the ~85 million Iranians, but not about tbe others in countries like Kazakhstan, Turkiye and Iraq.
Kurdish people celebrate Nowruz. It is an ancient Zoroastrian tradition and while most Kurds practice Islam, they say they are descended from the Medians who partnered with their Persian cousins to create the Persian-Median empire 2600 years ago. Zoroastrianism was the religion of the ancient Persians and Medians, and a few Iranians still practice it.
sanjeevs
WSJ has this story
The 6 billion is nuts. Truth Social’s total revenue is $5m in total over 3 years.
For comparison, Reddit will IPO at a similar valuation and it has annual revenues of over $800m.
Jay
@sanjeevs:
pump and dump scam.
BellyCat
@sanjeevs: Are the rubes gullible enough to buy soon-to-be-worthless stock to save Dear Leader? (Rhetorical question, I realize)
Quadrillipede
Ooh, I just found an article entitled The Golden Age of Both-Siderism is Upon Us, which I think quite a few here would agree with:
Princess
@sanjeevs: I find this confusing and I must be missing something. How do you drive up the value of a stock that isn’t publicly traded? Is it a liquid asset or not? Assuming it is, I guess he could pledge his own shares, if he has enough of them. I wonder if he does -/ how much of the company he owns. He’s not a guy who usually bets using his own money. I personally would not take a pledge of worthless shares as collateral. If he has to sell them to raise the funds, the share price will collapse, and he’ll owe big capital gains.
Tony Jay
BellyCat
@Tony Jay: Guatemalan Intelligence doing yeoman’s work. Why is cancel culture silencing them? LOL
Soprano2
@lgerard: I think he’s suggesting that they somehow intervene to stop the court from requiring TFG to post the bond. They think he should be able to appeal without it. It tells you something about how they view the Supreme Court.
TBone
@lgerard: good eye.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/leonard-leo-billion-donation-real-problem.html
Soprano2
@satby: No, you’re not the only one. Talk about a national security risk….😱😱
BellyCat
Not unreasonably given its current posture.
Geminid
@Geminid: I have a few branches I was going to toss into the woods, but now I think I’ll make a small fire and jump over it. That’s a Nowruz tradition.
I’ll have to wait until tomorrow evening when it starts to rain. We have a ban on open burning in effect because it’s been so dry and windy.
Ken
@Chetan Murthy: A flaw with that theory is:
Trump never saw an agreement he couldn’t repudiate, or at least tie up in court until the other party gave up.
TBone
@Ken: all those disclaimer clauses add up 🤣
LiminalOwl
@Geminid: Northampton (anbout 45 minutes away from us) had a Nowruz celebration yesterday. It sounded lovely, but we were too tired to go anywhere (as is usual in the evenings these days). I was especially interested because of recently reading The Stationery Shop for a book club.
And a high-school classmate told me his family was Zoroastrians. Yes, Iranian emigrés.
BellyCat
A patriot as fine and upstanding as Mitch McConnell. // (Asshole…)
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Princess: I can’t help but think that the undertone to the Truth Social buyout offer is that the prospective buyers wouldn’t be investing in the social platform so much as they’d be investing in a second Trump presidency, and the returns would come in the form of extraordinary largesse and favors from the Trump Administration at the taxpayer’s expense. I don’t think first-generation plutocrats who amassed their own fortunes (however crookedly) would trust that logic, but it might make sense to second-generation or later plutocrats who inherited their fortunes; Trump being a second-generation plutocrat himself, plus a narcissist, I imagine he’d consider that logic to be unassailable.
And of course, it all depends on him winning. My gut says the chances of that have dropped in the past year from two-in-five to one-in-three, but he’s entirely dependent on that now. Getting a temporary cash infusion to stave off the judgment is just buying time until he has access to Fort Knox as his own personal piggy bank (assuming he wins).
It’s like the story of the horse thief who staved off execution by promising the king that he’d teach the horse to sing in a year. “It buys me a year. Maybe by then I’ll be dead, or the horse will be dead, or the king will be dead. And even if none of those things happen, just maybe the horse will sing.”
Ken
Twenty, or even ten, years ago, it would have been weird. Now it’s normal for Fox, and for a large chunk of the Republican party.
Meanwhile, their Biden impeachment case is that he somehow profited from his son’s business dealings with foreign countries.
Ken
I was thinking it couldn’t possibly work that way with commercial real estate, but I guess James might stage such an event for press purposes. What would be the real activity involved in the seizure, though? Papers delivered to the Trump corporate offices, with copies to the court?
Eyeroller
@Geminid: The largest number of Zoroastrians are the Parsis of India. Their name means “Persians” and they are the descendants of religious refugees as Islam spread through Persia. The most famous Parsi was probably Freddy Mercury, though he was born in Zanzibar to Parsi parents.
Sanjeevs
@Princess: It’s not an IPO ( which would invite SEC scrutiny )
Instead a publicly traded shell company (SPAC), Digital World Acquisition will purchase Truth Social.
BellyCat
@Ken: A press event for the ages would involve the relocation of a gold toilet to a public bathroom in Times Square.
hueyplong
Seems like the thing they’re begging for now (rich foreigners giving Trump a shitload of money he didn’t earn) is what the GOP congress has invented and is trying to sell about the Bidens.
This shit literally doesn’t have to make sense. Apparently, it’s best if it doesn’t.
Princess
@Sanjeevs: Ah, so it’s the price of the shell company that has skyrocketed. Thanks. I wonder how much of that he owns.
moonbat
To me the reason that no one with real money, foreign or domestic, have ridden to the rescue yet is that they don’t think Trump will win re-election. Despite our media’s desperate attempts to keep the horse race narrative alive, the smart money thinks he’s toast. Because there is no doubt that he’d sell the bust of Lincoln in the Oval Office given the chance.
Betty
@Princess: So no one investigates a shell company suddenly worth that much money?
BellyCat
@Betty: Investor’s Business Daily sheds some light on this. The vote is tomorrow. More questions raised than answered though. Seems like a Hail Mary attempt.
Baud
Remember when Obama said Citizens United would allow foreign actors to influence US elections and Alito shook his head?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Quadrillipede
All signs point toward “yes”. Surely a more patient investor would be looking for a younger, less overtly demented, more transactional kakistocrat. Maybe one that isn’t a stone-cold loser rinsed in loser stink, deep into advanced stages of losing…
BellyCat
@Baud: Alito was just disagreeing with Obama’s word choice. Alito felt that “allow” should have been more accurately stated as “require”.
Geminid
@LiminalOwl: I read about the about small Iranian Zoroastrian community that survived the Muslim conquest of Persia. I was a little surprised the Isamic Republic did not eradicate them, but I guess they have been around so long the other Iranians are used to them. And unlike the Bahais, they’re not exactly heretics because Zoroastrianism predates Islam.
The Druze are another non-Muslim minority that survived in the middle of a Muslim area. There are about 150,000 Druze living in Israel, even more in Syra, and the most in Lebanon. It’s a closed community that has not accepted converts since the a generation after its founding in Cairo, 1000 years ago. When the authorities in Cairo cracked down the Druse fled to the mountains of the Levant and kept to themselves; fierce hillbillies with a syncretic religion which they are very secretive about.
There is also a small, ~4000 member community of Samaritans living in Israel and the West Bank. A couple years ago, someone published a Samaritan cookbook featuring various combinations of chickpeas, yoghurt and bread.
Baud
@Geminid:
How good of them.
Tony Jay
@BellyCat:
They time-share on the bugs with Liberian Special Investigations and Bureau Sexy of the French Foreign Service.
NotMax
@Geminid
Trivia:
Iconic disc jockey Casey Kasem was Druze.
Soprano2
@Geminid: The Iranian boyfriend I had when I was a freshman in college told me he thought having the new year start in the middle of winter was dumb, and that having it start at the beginning of spring like they did in Iran was more logical. I couldn’t disagree with that.
Soprano2
Probably. If she’s smart she won’t do anything that he can stage as some kind of persecution.
Matt McIrvin
@moonbat: Or they figure that even if he does win, he’s too unreliable and dishonest to deal with. His fanatic supporters, however, have no such concern.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/ancient-but-small-in-number-zoroastrians-confront-depletion-of-their-faith
I had a gamer acquaintance who painted a beautiful Achaemenid Persion army in 25mm. He really got into the period in all it’s forms to include the religion. He eventually dropped out of the hobby, sold the army but I have no idea if the religion stuck with him.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: During the Lebanon Civil War I recall Western media calling the Druze a Muslim group, but now they’re usually described as something else entirely. Maybe they just figured that if they’re not Christian or Jewish they must be Muslim.
catclub
putting in a comment to get -reregistered on new computer
catclub
The ‘worth’ is the stock price times the number of shares outstanding. Since it is a place where you can explicitly bet that Trump is a huge winner, lots of gullible rubes have done just that and bought shares and they went up. So no.
The stock going up is also a bet that the trnasaction happens. If it does not, the value of the stocks falls back to the offer price which was $10/share.
I do not know the stock price now. Maybe $40?
It was up to $90 at some point.
moonbat
@Matt McIrvin: Oh I don’t think anyone had any illusions about his honesty. And he’s so easy to manipulate he’s the perfect candidate for puppet dictator. They just don’t think he’s getting back in there.
different-church-lady
We find your offer acceptable.
Geminid
@NotMax: More trivia: Lawrence Welk, Tom Daschle and Bob Denver were Volga Deutsch.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Druze are Arab speakers which may account for the confusion. Their religion is said to combine elements similar to Greek Pythagorean mysticism, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.
different-church-lady
@sanjeevs: Pretty sure you can’t pay bail with stocks either.
TBone
@BellyCat: asshole that has $1.6 billion that we know about. Many more secret funds is my wager. Who TF is gonna bail out Rump at the last possible minute is anyone’s guess.
different-church-lady
@sab: First rule of pets and children: never let them outnumber you.
different-church-lady
@BellyCat: The only way to stop a good guy with a billion dollars is a bad guy with a billion dollars.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: We were talking about large scale battery storage last week, and yesterday I saw this article on the Electrek news site:
According to Wood MacKenzie and the American Clean Power Association, the US battery storage sector saw 4,235 megawatts (MW) installed in the 4th Quarter of last year, a 100% increase from the previous quarter.
Electrek also has new articles about advances in battery technology and battery recycling.
Kay
Republicans have now been promising a replacement for Obamacare for 14 years. The people who were infants when they began promising it are now high school freshman.
Trump still says it at rallies.
Quadrillipede
@Kay: He just needs two more weeks!
Kay
Democrats should take a little of their massive war chest and find someone really creative to do a great, fresh campaign supporting Social Security. Alongside the Biden and Congressional campaigns, but apart from them. A “special”. It’s just a great issue for us.
Also- the GOP proposal completely privatizes Medicare – turns it into a voucher where one buys insurance with everyone else, which is going to dramatically increase costs for everyone else because adding 50 million heavy users of healthcare to the existing system will just shift costs to younger people.
Kay
If you want to bring out people between 30 and 45 tell them the GOP wants them to pick up the bill for senior citizens health care with Medicare privatization. They’ll blow the doors off.
Kay
The campaign could touch on the history. I bet very few young people know Democrats invented the social safety net. We’ve never bragged about it enough. Start bragging.
sab
@different-church-lady:Lol. I cannot remember a year when we didn’t break both rules. Husband just went off to walk the dog of his (oldest) 40 year old child who is out of town.
sab
@Kay: We do warn them that Social Security is the only thing that keeps us from moving in to their homes. But you are right. The Dems don’t take enough credit for its existence.
ETA My parents were wealthy. Mom used to complain that she couldn’t start to save any year until Dad’s earnings went over the Social Security tax cut-off. I would annoyingly remind her that for most people that never happened.
A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)
@Splitting Image: MP reference FTW
SFAW
@Quadrillipede:
Sounds like he used to be a software developer.
SFAW
@Kay:
So it’s because of Dems that there are so many moochers allowed to live semi-comfortably in the US, rather than earning their keep? Make American Geriatrics Answer for their crimes/laziness!!
Bex
yellowdog
@moonbat: They certainly won’t get paid back if he wins. He’ll just cancel the debt. If TIFG is returned to office he will be unsuppable against his enemie.
WaterGirl
@piratedan: I want to marry that comment.
Queen of Lurkers
@Soprano2: New Year used to be celebrated in the spring only a few hundred years ago. It changed in the mid-18th century after Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian.
https://libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/colonialresearch/calendar#:~:text=The%20Julian%20Calendar%20was%20replaced,the%20month%20of%20September%201752.
Ancien Regime
2 ways:
1. Have someone buy a few shares from the company at a very high valuation that you then multiply by the total number of outstanding shares to get a hypothetical valuation.
2. Estimate the valuation based on market “analysis” done by the company or its bankers or consultants hired to give you the number you want.
Neither of these result in anything realistic, and the numbers thrown around by the WSJ and others are absurdities. Even if the estimates reflect current market conditions, the price will crash once Trump sells any significant number of shares. Which he’s not supposed to do for six months after the IPO, though that’s waiveable by the company.
Within a year, Trump Social will be worth $100M or less, and it’s very unlikely Trump can take out more than a couple of hundred million between now and then, since there’s a finite supply of MAGA morons with money.
Note that buying Truth Social shares is about the worst way possible for a billionaire to funnel money to Trump, since public stock transactions are extremely transparent and unusual price moves are investigated by various state and federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, particularly when the case is high visibility. Deliberately paying an above-market price in order to bail out a major shareholder would violate numerous laws, many of them enforceable by people who hate Trump. That’s not going to happen.
This is a pump and dump scam, similar to various other Trump schemes. It won’t end well for the small money investors, but Trump won’t make billions at it because he’s not very good at cheating investors at scale. Not even Enron-level good, and those people were certifiable morons.
Eyeroller
@Queen of Lurkers: It’s been variable (as is noted in your link) — the Julian calendar initially moved the date to 1 January. But historically sometime in spring or near the beginning of spring was widespread in Europe as well as other areas. I was amused by the “double dating” in England, comparable to the “double units” we use in the US. Caesar seems to have chosen 1 January in part due to introducing several additional days to the previous year to sync up with the tropical (solar) year.
Googling around for the reason for 1 January led me to the question being asked at Quora. Every answer had something wrong in it, most notably when several said that Julius Caesar was concerned about Easter falling in the right season. Do people not even think for a second when they write stuff like that? Apparently not.
Uncle Cosmo
My guess (and it’s not much more than a SWAG) is that the surviving community stays pretty much to itself and doesn’t threaten the Islamic Republic at all. Look back at the treatment of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which IIUC was less onerous than national minorities in Christian states until a couple centuries ago: They were not allowed significant weaponry and had to pay a special tax in lieu of providing troops to the Sultan, and there were certain restrictions (e.g., the village church could not be larger or taller than the local mosque). But other than that…
Mmm, don’t think that pertains. Islam claims descent through the Old and New Testaments, which are considered partial but incomplete revelations compared with that set forth in the Koran. Abraham, Moses, and Jesus are prophets but Mohammed is the Seal of the Prophets, i.e., the transcriber of Allah’s last and final revelation. Once conquered by the forces of Islam. pagans were effectively given the choice of “convert or die,” whereas Jews and Christians are considered “People of the Book” and were allowed to continue practicing their religion so long as they didn’t get “uppity” about it. In particular any Muslim who converted to a different religion risked execution. This suited the Jews just fine, as they strongly discourage any Gentile from trying to become a Jew, but Christianity is inherently proselytizing (Matthew 28:19 – “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”), and any of the faithful actively trying to “win souls for Christ” in a Muslim country would quickly find themselves in mortal peril.
IMO you’d have to squint rather hard to toss Zoroastrianism in with the Abrahamic faiths; it seems rather that the old faith hunkers down and doesn’t threaten the primacy of Islam in the state and the authorities therefore choose to look the other way. But as always, I could be wrong…:^D
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: Does have a certain logic.
Misterpuff
@Princess: Well you drive up the price of the spac Digital World Acquisition from the initial spac price of $10/share to $40 and intice the suckers to approve the merger with Trump’s Truth Social holding company.
Upon merger, Trump will have bazillions of shares that will have a value, now he’s probably locked in to a holding time before he can sell, but he may convince some one to foot his current bills with a promise of the shares.
Still once he cashes in that stock will plummet and the other shareholders will take the hit as well as the leinholder on the pledged shares.
chopper
@Geminid:
being volga deutsch myself i had no idea bob denver was part of the tribe
wu ming
@Uncle Cosmo: As the early caliphates rapidly expanded and took in large populations with preexisting organized religious traditions, pragmatic Islamic governments often proclaimed them People of the Book even when they had no connection to the Abrahamic traditions. Both the Zoroastrians in Persia and Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains in India fell under this category at times.
It’s one thing to force small bands of pagans to convert at swordpoint, but vast urbanized populations are easier to creatively categorize, leave in place, and tax, lest one provokes rebellion.
The Lodger
@Princess: I just want to know how to short this stock.