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Unused Militaries, by Fred Reed – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

I seem to recall when NATO was freeing Libya FOR human and drug traffickers NATO forces ran low of munitions.

NATO was lucky they weren’t dealing with a real country with a real military.

http://www.unz.com/freed/unused-militaries/

For a couple of decades I covered the military for various publications, as for example the Washington Times and Harper’s, and wrote a military column for Universal Press Syndicate. I was following the time-honored principle of sensible reporters: “Ask not what you can do for journalism, but what journalism can do for you.” The military beat was a great gig, letting you fly in fighter planes and sink in submarines. But if you take the study seriously, as I did, you learn interesting things. Such as that a war with a real country, such as Russia, China, or even Iran, would be a fool’s adventure. A few points:

Unused militaries deteriorate

The US fleet has not been in a war since 1945, the air forces since 1975. nor the Army in a hard fight since Vietnam. Bombing defenseless peasants, the chief function of the American military, is not war.

In extended periods of peace, which includes the bombing of peasants, a military tends to assume that no major war will come during the careers of those now in uniform. Commanders consequently do what makes their lives easy, what they must do to get through the day and have reasonable fitness reports. This does not include pointing out inadequacies of training or equipment. Nor does it include recommending large expenditures to remedy deficiencies. Nor does it include recommending very expensive mobilization exercises that would divert money from new weapons.

Thus an armored command has enough replacement tracks for training, but not enough for tanks in hard use in extended combat. When the crunch comes, it turns out that getting more track requires a new contract with the manufacturer, who has shut down the production line. The same is true for air filters, there not being much sand at Fort Campbell but a lot in Iraq. Things as mundane as MRATs and boots are not there.in real-war quantities.

GAU-8 ammo is in short supply because theory says the F-35 will do tank busting. The Navy runs out of TLAMs early on and discovers that manufacturing cruise missiles takes time. Lots ot it.

And of course some things simply don’t work as expected. Military history buffs will remember the Mark XIV torpedo, the Mark VI exploder of WWII, and the travails of the Tinosa.

Come the war, things turn into a goat rope. FUBAR, SNAFU.

The United States cannot fight a large land war, as for example against Russia, China, or Iran. Such a war would require conscription. The public would not stand for it. America no longer enjoys the sort of patriotic unity that it did at the beginning of the war against Vietnam. It will not accept heavy casualties…

The existing fleet has never been under fire and does not think it ever will be. Most of its ships are thin-skinned, unarmored. One hit by an antiship missile would remove them from the war. This is as true of the Tico-class Aegis ships as of the newer Arleigh Burkes.

An aircraft carrier is a bladder of jet fuel wrapped around high explosives.The implications are considerable. A plunging hypersonic terminally-guided ballistic missile, piercing the flight deck and exploding in the hangar deck, would require a year in the repair yards…

Through Vietnam, America’s wars were fought by tough kids, often from rural backgrounds involving familiarity with guns and with hard physical work. I know as I grew up and went to Marine boot with them...

Today America has a military corrupted by social-justice politics. Recruits are no longer country boys who could chop cordwood. Obesity is common. The Pentagon has lowered physical standards, hidden racial problems, softened training. The officers are afraid of the large numbers of military women who are now in combat positions. One complaint about sexism and there goes the career.

In times of extended peace the officer corps decays. All second-tour officers are politicians, especially above the level of lieutenant colonel. You don’t get promoted by suggesting the the senior ranks are lying for political reasons, as by insisting that the Afghan war is being won...

The military is not ready for a real war now because its focus is always on things down the road. For example, the Navy cannot now defeat hypersonic antiship missiles but will be able to, it thinks, someday, maybe, world without end, with near-magical lasers still in development. These will funnel lots of money to Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or somebody whether they work or not. Which isn’t important since nobody really believes there will be a serious war...

Men of incalculable stupidity and likely sexual inadequacy talk about nuclear war as winnable. Dream on. Reflect: American cities cannot feed themselves. Three days without food shipments and New Yorkers would clear the supermarket shelves. A week and they would kill for cans of tuna fish. Two weeks and they would be eating each other. A very few nuclear bombs on transportation hubs would prevent distribution of food for months. Even fewer cobalt bombs, designed to produce a maximum of lingering radiation, would make the farm belts lethally radioactive for a decade.

“Defense Intellectuals,” usually stupid enough that they ought to live in trees, chatter about escalation dominance and the intimidation factor and airtight missile defense. They are nuts. What they really need is a codpiece and a subscription to Pornhub Premium.

This is why it is a really, really, bad idea to have a psychopathic cockatoo, two loon Christians, and a pathologically aggressive momma’s boy in a position to start a war.

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The White Supremacy Hoax – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/thomas-woods/the-white-supremacy-hoax/

By

Tom Woods Show

We are supposed to believe that “white supremacy” is on the rise.

Tucker Carlson, who is sometimes wrong and sometimes right, says this is a myth. This is one of those cases when he’s right.

I’m scanning the headlines, and cannot actually seem to find anyone advocating legal racial subordination, or separate facilities by race, or special benefits available only to whites and not to nonwhites.

The existence of affirmative action would appear to suggest something like the opposite: I don’t recall affirmative action in apartheid South Africa, for example, which was what a white supremacist social order actually looks like.

The Donald Trump phenomenon is supposed to prove the existence of “white supremacy,” but Columbia University’s Musa al-Gharbi ran the numbers, and as he explained on episode #1159 of the Tom Woods Show, “racists” and “white supremacists” did not get Trump elected.

If “white supremacy” were truly gaining traction, the very accusation of being in favor of it wouldn’t destroy people’s careers and social standing, would it?

Anyway, my colleague Bob Murphy and I took up the topic in a recent episode of our weekly podcast Contra Krugman. I was shocked at how outraged the normally mild-mannered Bob became during the discussion.

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Don’t Give Politicians Credit for a Growing Economy | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

“It is hardly possible to misrepresent in a more thorough way the fundamental facts of economics. The average standard of living is in this country higher than in any other country of the world, not because the American statesmen and politicians are superior to the foreign statesmen and politicians, but because the per-head quota of capital invested is in America higher than in other countries. Average output per man-hour is in this country higher than in other countries…… because the American plants are equipped with more efficient tools and machines.”

https://mises.org/wire/dont-give-politicians-credit-growing-economy

“One of the amazing phenomena of the present election campaign is the way in which speakers and writers refer to the state of business and to the economic condition of the nation. They praise the administration for the prosperity and for the high standard of living of the average citizen ‘You never had it so good,’ they say, and, ‘Don’t let them take it away.’”

The above statement sounds like something Republicans say in supporting Donald Trump for reelection. The White House proclaims the successes of the Trump economy while those who side with the Democrats say that Obama should also be given credit for any current economic successes. Both sides give presidents too much credit for our standard of living.

However, the quote above comes from a speech that Ludwig von Mises gave in October 1952. As with so much of Mises’ work, this speech is timeless. Much of this talk, “Capital Supply and American Prosperity,” applies to current events.

It’s true that government policy affects the economy. And Trump should get credit if any of his policies have reduced the governmental burden on our businesses. But the fundamental reason wages in the U.S. are higher than in most countries is not because of marginal policy changes. Our economic well-being is largely due to our capital accumulation, not the benevolence of our elected officials.

In this speech, Mises hammers away at this point, “It is implied that the increase in the quantity and the improvement in the quality of products available for consumption are achievements of a paternal government. The incomes of the individual citizens are viewed as handouts graciously bestowed upon them by a benevolent bureaucracy.”

This statement reminds me of the recent Democratic debates where the candidates were each trying to outdo one another with promises of new programs of federal largesse. They seem to believe that all of our economic problems are due to ungenerous government officials. The current federal budget deficits demonstrate the fallacy of this position.

Mises continues,

“It is hardly possible to misrepresent in a more thorough way the fundamental facts of economics. The average standard of living is in this country higher than in any other country of the world, not because the American statesmen and politicians are superior to the foreign statesmen and politicians, but because the per-head quota of capital invested is in America higher than in other countries. Average output per man-hour is in this country higher than in other countries…… because the American plants are equipped with more efficient tools and machines.”

That’s right. Our economic prosperity is due to our capital accumulation. And why do American businesses have so much capital? “Capital is more plentiful in America than it is in other countries because up to now the institutions and laws of the United States put fewer obstacles in the way of big-scale capital accumulation than did those foreign countries.”

But why did this happen in the U.S.? How do we account for our economic prosperity? The answer: capitalism.

“What begot modern industrialization and the unprecedented improvement in material conditions that it brought about was neither capital previously accumulated nor previously assembled technological knowledge…. the early pioneers of capitalism started with scanty capital and scanty technological experience. At the outset of industrialization was the philosophy of private enterprise and initiative, and the practical application of this ideology made the capital swell and the technological know-how advance and ripen.

“One must stress this point because its neglect misleads the statesmen of all backward nations in their plans for economic improvement. They think that industrialization means machines and textbooks of technology. In fact, it means economic freedom that creates both capital and technological knowledge.” (Italics added for emphasis.)

Mises also provides us with a stern warning that we face dire consequences if we destroy the engine of capital accumulation:

“The main problem for this country is: will the United States follow the course of the economic policies adopted by almost all foreign nations, even by many of those which had been foremost in the evolution of capitalism. Up to now in this country the amount of savings and formation of new capital still exceeds the amount of dissaving and decumulation of capital. Will this last?”

Mises provides us with the answer: “One must substitute sound economic ideas for fables and illusions.” We must influence public opinion. We must promote capitalism. We must explain the necessity of having economic freedom and free enterprise. In short, we must popularize Misesian ideas.

But what about income inequality? Won’t some people suffer under capitalism? Again, Mises provides us with an answer to this question.

“There are, of course, also Americans whose material conditions appear unsatisfactory when compared with those of the great majority of the nation. Some authors of novels and plays would have us believe that their gloomy descriptions of the lot of this unfortunate minority is representative of the fate of the common man under capitalism. They are mistaken. The plight of these wretched Americans is rather representative of conditions as they prevailed everywhere in the pre-capitalistic ages and still prevail in the countries which were either not at all or only superficially touched by capitalism. What is wrong with these people is that they have not yet been integrated into the frame of capitalist production. Their penury is a remnant of the past. The progressive accumulation of new capital and the expansion of big-scale production will eradicate it by the same methods by means of which it has already improved the standard of living of the immense majority, viz., by raising the per-head quota of capital invested and thereby the marginal productivity of labor.”

Yes, a capitalist society will have income inequality. In order to help the poor we must build and maintain institutions that promote capital formation. Redistributionist solutions to reduce income inequality will continue to destroy capital formation trapping more people in poverty.

This wonderful essay, “Capital Supply and American Prosperity,” can be found in one of my favorite short books, Mises’ Planning for Freedom: Let the Market System Work . If you haven’t read this compilation of essays, I recommend that you add it to your reading list.

 

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BREAKING: Bolton Accuses Trump of Lying About His Firing

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

Who Cares!

Bolton is Gone!

Hallelujah!!!

BREAKING: Bolton Accuses Trump of Lying About His Ouster

President Donald Trump said on Twitter that he had fired John Bolton, his national security advisor, in a stunning announcement on Tuesday that apparently took Bolton himself by surprise.

“I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House,” Trump wrote on Twitter, citing disagreements over policy.

Bolton offered a different story in his own tweet, claiming that he had offered on Monday night to resign but Trump brushed him off.

“I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow,’” Bolton wrote…

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John Bolton's zeal for regime change extends to Latin ...

 

 

 

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9/11 Senate Hearing: No Mention of Radical Islam, Climate Change Is Major Threat

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

The PC UK ignored things also…and for a long time.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/09/9-11-senate-hearing-no-radical-islam-threat-is-climate-change/#

by Robert Kraychik

No mention of radical Islam was made by any senators during Monday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing — uniquely held at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, NY — days before the 18th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Post-9/11 domestic instances of Islamic terrorism were also ignored, including but not limited to the attacks in Chattanooga, Fort Hood, Orlando, and San Bernardino. The only references to ideological dimensions of Islamic terrorism were made by former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who referred to “jihadi terrorists” in three instances.

Chertoff was joined by Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson, two former directors of the Department of Homeland Security in testifying before the committee, professedly on matters of national security.

“Climate change poses an existential threat” to America and Earth, declared Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He linked “climate change” to 9/11 in his opening remarks, calling on DHS to prioritize halting the ostensible phenomenon:…

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Not really

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

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Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. … “What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler

Government propaganda minister is NPR CEO.

Before next commercial free presentation let us mention our “contributors” – what they do, their products, where they are located and their hours.

https://original.antiwar.com/edward_curtin/2019/09/09/will-npr-now-officially-change-its-name-to-national-propaganda-radio/

Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to “court the compatible left.” He knew that drawing liberals and leftists into the CIA’s orbit was the key to efficient propaganda. Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world. The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.

Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review. By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more. Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve, that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives, many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.

So again it is morning in America this September 6, 2019, and the headline from National Public Radio announces the glad tidings that NPR has named a new CEO. His name is John Lansing, and the headline says he is a “veteran media executive.” We are meant to be reassured. It goes on to say that Mr. Lansing, 62, is currently the chief executive of the government agency, The U.S. Agency for Global Media, that oversees Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, among others. We are furthermore reassured by NPR that Lansing “made his mark in his current job with stirring defenses of journalism, free from government interference.” The announcement goes on to say:

Lansing has earned an advanced degree in political agility. At the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Lansing championed a free press even as leaders of many nations move against it.

‘Governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on the free flow of information; silencing dialogue and dissent; and distorting reality,’ Lansing said in a speech he delivered in May to the Media for Democracy Forum. ‘The result, I believe, is a war on truth.’

He continued: ‘Citizens in countries from Russia to China, from Iran to North Korea, have been victimized for decades. But now we’re seeing authoritarian regimes expanding around the globe, with media repression in places like Turkey and Venezuela, Cambodia and Vietnam.’

So we are reassured that the new head of NPR, the chief of all U.S. propaganda, is a champion of a free press. Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning, by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden, by exposing the US government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job the American mainstream “free press” failed to do. What NPR failed to do. Perhaps they will ask him if he objects to the way his own government “interfered” in the lives of these three courageous people who revealed truths that every citizen of a free country is entitled to. Perhaps they will ask him if the US government’s persecution of these truthtellers is what he means by there being “a war on truth.” Perhaps they will ask him if he thinks the Obama and Trump administrations have been “distorting reality” and waging a war on truth.

Perhaps not. Of course not…

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Operation Mockingbird (FakeNews Express) - YouTube

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The Pentagon Wants to Use DARPA to Police Internet News – Rolling Stone

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

Just how many ways to control US are enough?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/darpa-fake-news-internet-censorship-879671/

The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?

The Pentagon is using a moral panic over “fake news” to gain influence over the domestic news landscape

 

If there’s a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of America, I can’t remember it. But we’re getting there:

From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.

One of the Pentagon’s most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing “custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.”

Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like LifeLog, a program to “gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.”

DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called “SemaFor” and an image analysis program called “MediFor,” ostensibly designed to prevent the use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies to help private Internet providers sift through content.

It’s the latest in a string of stories about new methods of control over information flow that should, but for some reason do not, horrify every working journalist.

From the Senate dragging Internet providers to the Hill to demand strategies against the sowing of “discord,” to tales of hundreds of Facebook sites zapped for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” following advice by government-connected groups like the Atlantic Council, it’s been clear the future of the information landscape is going to involve elaborate new forms of algorithmic regulation…

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9/11 Truth: Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. … “What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler

https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-good-people-become-silent-about-documentable-facts-disprove-official-white-house-conspiracy-theories-about-911/5688109

“It is my firm belief that 9/11 skeptics—and true skeptics of any paradigm-shifting and taboo subject—who publicly expose lies and ‘naked emperors’ are heroes …They have suffered the ridicule and wrath of those emperors, their minions, and the just plain frightened…In our American society, many of our authority figures routinely lie to us, but nonetheless, many citizens continue to look to them for truth and safety—especially when fear is heightened.

This strong tendency to believe and obey authority is another obstacle with which skeptics of the official 9/11 account must contend…By unquestioningly believing and obeying authority, we make very bad decisions, which often negatively affect others. This can be equally true for the four human proclivities studied by social psychologists: doublethink, cognitive dissonance, conformity, and groupthink.” – Frances Shure, clinical psychologist and early skeptic of the official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory that two hi-jacked commercial jet planes caused three concrete, steel-reinforced towers to explode into fine dust and collapse into their own footprints in less than 12 seconds.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth … For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” — Patrick Henry – March 23, 1775

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. … “What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. … Propaganda must always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”– Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi “Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment”

“We’ll know that our disinformation campaign has worked when everything the American public believes is false.” — William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director at his first staff meeting, 1981

“Image of the World Trade Center’s South Tower as it explodes, from top to bottom, into fine dust and severed steel columns. Within the next 12 seconds much of the tower blows away and the rest collapses into its own footprint into a relatively small pile of debris. The arrow points to one of the exploding “squibs” from one of the multitude of pre-planted demolition charges that are intended to section all the massive steel 110 story columns (4 inches thick at their bases) which allowed the building to fall straight down rather than falling sideways and causing damage to adjacent structures or people. This image is typical of what it looks like when standard controlled demolitions take down high-rise buildings in the most cost-effective manner possible. In the 100 year history of skyscrapers, the only tall buildings that have ever fallen down without controlled demolitions (allegedly) were the 3 World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 – and they all happened on 9/11/2001!. ” (Check out www.ae911truth.org for everything you need to know about the many anomalies that conclusively disprove the “official”, CIA-, Pentagon- White House- Mainstream Media-approved conspiracy theories about what happened of 9/11.)

***

The question posited by the title of this article, explores the dilemma faced by truth-seekers who have the facts that totally refute the Big Lies about 9/11/2001 about which the mainstream media, their elected representatives in Congress, their presidents and the Deep State refuse to debate.

These “9/11 Truthers” have been unfairly labeled “conspiracy theorists” (a pejorative term invented by the CIA after the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 raised all sorts of skepticism doubting the official story blaming “the single shooter”).

This courageous group of truth-seekers have been attempting to inform and enlighten individuals and institutions that have chosen to disregard and/or disbelieve the overwhelmingly documentable evidence that proves that pre-planted controlled demolition charges – and not airplanes – pulverized into fine dust the three WTC towers on 9/11/01.

The corollary of course is that the three towers could not have bee demolished by anybody other than insiders using explosives.

Given that the alleged planes that allegedly hit 2 of the towers were commercial planes (that of course contained no explosives), no other conclusion can be drawn than that the explosives that brought down the three skyscrapers had been pre-planted in the manner of classical controlled demolitions, which are the only way that concrete, steel-reinforced, high-rise buildings can be efficiently demolished.

It is obvious to many folks who were alive and aware in the era of the assassinations of the 1960s (the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King) that 9/11/01 was a false flag operation that has seriously (and intentionally, according to the Project for the New American Century – google it) destabilized the Middle East and the world and justified the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course the rapid passage of the Patriot Act by the bamboozled US Congress ensured that the United States took another step closer to becoming an armed police state, by seriously curtailing the civil liberties of its citizens.

That series of programmed events started a state of perpetual US-led wars in the Mideast (wars that only benefited our one ally in the area [Israel]. It also ensured the lucrative future of America’s military-industrial-congressional complex and global weapons manufacturers.

These self-perpetuating – and ultimately bankrupting – wars have destroyed and are continuing to destroy the physical and psychological well-being of the tens of thousands of duped patriot soldiers (and their families) as well as the millions of unarmed innocents that were victimized by the lethal, often indiscriminate weaponry of our military. Also victimized forever were their cultures, their religions, their economies and the very planet that militarism is making uninhabitable.

And, it must be mentioned, our illegal and ill-advised military aggressions have raised up billions of mortal enemies all around the world whose enmity and justified desire for revenge will never be quenched until “the Great Satan” is finally beaten.

The dilemma raised by the title question, “Why Do Good People Remain Silent”, has been faced throughout the history of the world by a multitude of truth-seekers and truth-tellers long before the events of 9/11. A short list of American examples that have shaped world history was enumerated in the previous two Duty to Warn columns, which are available at (See this).

The “bamboozle quote” from Carl Sagan above should help any thinking person to understand one of the psychological reasons why both human and inhuman entities (such as corporations and the corporate-controlled press) so readily accept – and even promote – Big Lies; and then, when the truth comes out that thoroughly refutes the lies, these entities refuse to admit that they have been bamboozled.

One expects major corporate media networks like ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal (not to mention the Duluth News-Tribune) to refuse to admit that they are shills for the Deep State or their corporate advertisers or just being duped by them, but even the more honorable BBC, PBS, NPR and MPR do the same by continuously using the phrase “terrorist attacks on 9/11” instead of telling the truth. Perhaps, if one could only get through to these unaccountable and unreachable talking heads, they might at least claim that they were unaware of what is blatantly obvious to most unbiased observers.

The quotes from Hitler and Goebbels could have easily been made by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Allen Dulles’ CIA and right-wing politicians like the odious politicians during the McCarthy, leftist witch-hunt era, not to mention any number of the pro-militarization, pro-war, pseudo-patriotic “my country right or wrong” types that profitably occupy Wall Street, War Street and Washington, DC.

Those realities should help us understand how the misleaders of militarily powerful empires are able to manipulate the “Good Germans” of every nationality into believing Big Lies.

Anyone who isn’t a 9/11 Skeptic or a Boeing 737 Skeptic or a Vaccine Safety Skeptic isn’t Paying Attention (or has been Duped by or is a Shill for Corporate Power).

Clinical psychologist Frances Shure, who was an early skeptic of the official White House conspiracy theories has experienced her share of criticism from those who tend to implicitly trust their leaders. Her story, in a 9-part series on the subject, discusses the psychological background about how public opinion and beliefs can be manipulated. The series can be found here.

It is painful being an artificially demeaned and unfairly criticized “conspiracy theorist” about 9/11. Even though the 9/11 Truth-tellers have the scientific truth behind them, they have been mistreated by the mass media as a despised out-group for the past 18 years.

Being a 9/11 truth-teller is like being a black-listed anti-fascist author, writer or musician during Hitler’s thousand-year Reich or during the proto-fascist American McCarthy era of the 1950s.

One has to sympathize with Galileo who was persecuted by the authoritarian church when he proved that the earth revolved around the sun when 99.9% of the world believed that the sun revolved around the earth – because it said so in the bible.

I personally empathize with the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis who proved in the mid-1800s that washing or sterilizing one’s hands before delivering a baby resulted in a dramatic decrease in post-delivery deaths of new mothers from “child-bed fever”. 99.9% of physicians at the time often delivered babies between performing autopsies without washing their hands. His discovery never caught on with the profession, although midwives understood the wisdom and washed their hands prior to deliveries. The midwive’s patients had 10 times fewer deaths from infection than the doctor’s patients. Dr Semmelweis, just like many other dissident physicians to follow, was ostracized by his arrogant and ignorant profession for promoting such a radical notion and, labeled as being mentally ill, died in disgrace in a mental institution a few years later.

Cognitive Dissonance and 9/11

One major psychological factor that helps explain why the Cheney/Bush White House’s official conspiracy theory has become so ingrained is the concept of cognitive dissonance. A good YouTube discussion of the title question – by a number of psychologist colleagues of Frances Shure – can be seen here. I highly recommend watching it.

I wrote a Duty to Warn column devoted to the subject of cognitive dissonance in 2013. It has been archived here.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:

“Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological or emotional discomfort felt when one is confronted with new information or a new reality that contradicts one’s deeply held beliefs.

“When there are conflicting, mutually exclusive beliefs, intelligent, open-minded and thoughtful people that have not been victimized by significant psychological trauma during their upbringing, are usually willing to change their minds by re-evaluating their prior stances, looking carefully and honestly at the new evidence, reassessing the credibility of both positions and then making a decision to adopt or reject the new information, depending on the evidence before them.

“Close-minded, distracted, uninformed, addicted, ignorant, too-busy, overly obedient, uber-patriotic, co-opted or radically conservative people may not have the time, inclination, intelligence or political will (or courage) to look at the available new evidence that runs contrary to their old, ingrained beliefs. Therefore, they may unconsciously or reflexively reject the new information, even if the evidence is overwhelmingly and provably true.”

Not too many people that live in punitive, militarized empires have the courage to do what the whistle-blowing boy did when he saw that his emperor had no clothes on. Not too many people want to be truth-tellers in a nation whose governmental bodies imprison, expel, black-lists or bans truth-tellers and their stories and suppresses every truth that threatens national security and corporate security or profitability.

Hitler got his timid or privileged “Good Germans” – who lived outside the concentration camps – to believe the Big Lie that “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“work makes one free” even inside a concentration camp) and that his dictatorship would last a thousand years. Citizens of supposedly democratic societies like America’s are told that “The Truth Shall Make You Free”, that “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword” and that “The Arc of History Bends Towards Justice”. Don’t believe it, unless lots of courageous citizen take action and demand justice. Otherwise, those noble thought are just cunning lies to calm the people.

Without a body of dissenters, whistle-blowers and courageous people of conscience (like the multitude of banned 9/11 truth-seekers and antiwar, anti-globalist, anti-fascist activists) that are willing to go up against the conscienceless, the profiteers, the globalists, the fascists, the militarists, the racists, the corporate polluters, the economic exploiters, the bankers and the sociopathic corporations those exploiters will continue to grow in power, wealth and influence – fouling our planetary nest as they go. I would hate to see them succeed.

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Dr Kohls writes regularly about a variety of issues that includes corporatism, globalism, militarism, economic oppression, racism and fascism. He is a member of Medical Professionals for 911 Truth. Besides the website for Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth (www.ae911truth.org) the following websites are excellent: this and this.

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The Orange Car Guy – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

Cars – and driving them, when it’s us doing it – are disliked by people like Obama because they run counter to the control of everything that is their heart’s most fervent desire…

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2019/09/07/the-orange-car-guy/

By

eric

Some people are single issue voters; if a candidate is in line with them on guns, for instance, they’ll support that candidate even if on other topics they’re as far apart as a Chevette and a Corvette.

This brings us to Trump.

If you care about cars, he’s your guy. He may not be a Car Guy, per se – but he’s the only guy who isn’t an obvious enemy of Car Guys.

Like his predecessor, for instance.

Barack Obama – after his anointed successor  lost the election – had his regulatory apparat fatwa a near-doubling of federal mandatory minimum gas mileage requirements (CAFE) out of pure spite, to punish the filthy deplorables who didn’t elect her – and who continued to express their lack of interest in high-mileage-uber-alles cars by not buying the ones which were – and still are – available.

Like the Toyota Prius hybrid, for instance.

Great gas mileage – but not much fun. Can’t do much with it – other than get good gas mileage. Many people want more than that.

So it’s not that high-mileage vehicles like the Prius aren’t being offered because the car companies want to deny Americans high-mileage cars in favor of “gas guzzlers” – the lie behind the CAFE reg.

The truth is people just aren’t buying them much. . . because they’re not much fun and can’t do very much, besides get good gas mileage. A Prius can’t tow . . . anything. It doesn’t go off-road or get to 60 in five seconds or even eight.

Toyota sells about 1,500 Priuii per month. Ford sells about 60,000 F-150 trucks per month.

Not a typo.

The purpose of nearly doubling the CAFE fatwa from about 35 MPG to nearly 50 MPG – and in just five years’ time; the fatwa goes into effect in 2025 – wasn’t to make the industry produce cars that get great gas mileage; the industry already does.

It was to regulate out of existence the ones that don’t – which are the cars most Americans (and all American Car Guys) are very much interested in buying despite their not averaging 50 MPG.

It’s exactly as if the government spewed a fatwa tripling the cost of cheeseburgers to “nudge” people toward soy burgers.

No outright ban on large cars, V8 SUVs and pick-ups. Too obvious – and much too clumsy. People might object such a direct approach. The coercive utopians are far more clever than they used to be…

Cars – and driving them, when it’s us doing it – are disliked by people like Obama because they run counter to the control of everything that is their heart’s most fervent desire – although this is always couched in oily euphemisms about “discussions” and “communities” and other such politcial brummagemisms.

It’s insufferable. Makes one want to – as Mencken once put it – raise the Jolly Roger and slit throats.

You and I aren’t part of the “discussion” – the terms of which (and so the outcome) have already been decided. The “community” means those elitists like Obama, who just bought a $14 million dollar compound adjacent to the Kennedy compound – how big is this joint’s “carbon footprint”? – who regard those not in their “community” as the help, at best.

But no outright ban.

It would still be perfectly legal to build them – even if they didn’t average close to 50 MPG, as demanded by the federal fatwa.

Just prohibitively expensive – because of a tripling of the fines imposed on them for “noncompliance.”

Also fatwa’d by the Car-Hater who preceded the Orange Man.

Which would result in what was wanted – a de facto ban on the kinds of cars that Car Guys like by making them too expensive to build, except in small handfuls for very rich people . . . like Barack Obama.

Well, the Orange Man is fighting this…

He may not be a Car Guy, but he is without question the best friend anyone who gives a damn about cars and driving has had in the White House since Calvin Coolidge (a most under-rated president).

He deserves the support, therefore, of everyone who still gives a damn about cars and driving and the freedom (such as remains) embodied by both, which is on the knife’s edge of being taken away for good.

Be seeing you

Kennedy compound listed for $38M - YouTube

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