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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Trump CO Judge Donated to ‘Anti-1/6’ Activist Group
Posted by M. C. on December 22, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anti-1/6, Judge, Trump | Leave a Comment »
Why Trump is right about North Korea
Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2023
At least he is interested in breaking with the past and facing reality about nukes
Donald Trump’s foreign policy mistakes were many, but on the North’s nuclear challenge he has been farsighted compared to most foreign policy analysts. That continues with his reported willingness to deal with the DPRK as it is, not how everyone wishes it were. North Korea is a nuclear state. It is time to confront that reality.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/donald-trump-north-korea/
With opinion polls showing Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden in the 2024 race, Washington policymakers are contemplating the possibility of another Trump administration.
No doubt there would be dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy. Including, it appears, in Washington’s approach to North Korea.
As Politico reported: “Donald Trump is considering a plan to let the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea keep its nuclear weapons and offer its regime financial incentives to stop making new bombs, according to three people briefed on his thinking.”
This would overturn decades of international insistence that the North eschew nuclear weapons, commonly called CVID: complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement/denuclearization. Until now, questioning this policy triggered wild wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments among Korea-watchers.
The conventional wisdom is that Washington must stand firm — until the end of time, or beyond, if necessary — despite the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang has enough fissile material to make at least 45-55 weapons, and perhaps twice that number, though estimates vary widely.
Moreover, the DPRK continues to add nukes. One controversial study warned that the North could amass as many as 242 weapons in the next few years, which would place it ahead of Israel, Pakistan, India, and the United Kingdom.
Virtually no one believes that Pyongyang will denuclearize. Only South Africa, with just six weapons (and another being constructed), has eliminated an existing arsenal. Almost certainly disarming the DPRK would require either defeat or collapse of the Kim dynasty. Regarding North Korea, fantasy has seemingly become policy.
However, it appears that Trump is prepared to overturn conventional wisdom when it comes to Pyongyang — again. After threatening war in 2017, he turned to summitry with Kim Jong-un, a switch widely denounced in Washington. Distrust of Trump as a negotiator was pervasive, with the greatest fear that he would succeed and agree to something other than CVID. After the 2019 Hanoi summit collapsed without a deal, Kim appears to have decided that Trump was unwilling to agree to sanctions relief without a commitment to full denuclearization. The former then ended his dialogue with the US (and South Korea).
Biden continues to insist on CVID, instructing the DPRK not to conduct another nuclear test. Despite his proposals for contact, which at times came perilously close to begging, Kim has refused to talk. Rather, the latter is expanding North Korea’s nuclear capability, testing ballistic missiles, launching satellites, developing submarine-launched and tactical weapons, and threatening first use of nukes.
These efforts may now be aided by Russia, which is relying on the North to provide artillery shells and perhaps more for the Ukraine war.
The future looks no better. Last year after the Supreme People’s Assembly enshrined the North’s nuclear status in law, Kim declared that “As long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth, and imperialism and the anti-North Korean maneuvers of the US and its followers remain, our road to strengthening our nuclear force will never end.”
This policy, he added, is “irreversible.” He is likely strengthening his nuclear deterrent to prepare for talks with Washington — presumably offering to trade nuclear limits for sanctions relief.
Policymakers almost uniformly reject this course since arms control won’t deliver denuclearization, Washington’s preferred outcome. However, the result still would be better, likely far better, than Pyongyang continuing to augment its stockpile and replacing Pakistan as a global Nukes ‘R Us. However, that doesn’t matter to critics.
Some simply insist that the North cannot have nuclear weapons. Of course, it shouldn’t have them, but successive U.S. presidents repeating that point have left North Korea as an undisputed nuclear state.
Another argument is that dropping CVID would undermine the nonproliferation regime. However, the DPRK’s possession of nuclear weapons, not America’s recognition of that reality, poses the real nonproliferation challenge.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Denuclearization, Kim Jong-un, North Korea, Trump | Leave a Comment »
Why They Hated Kennedy, and Why They Killed Him
Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2023
Equally important, the Cold War brought ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess flowing into the coffers of the “defense” industry, along with the ever-increasing power and influence of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA within the overall federal structure.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough, one that threatened not only the ever-increasing power, money, and influence of the national-security branch, but also its very existence. Kennedy came to realize that the Cold War was just one great big racket — and a highly dangerous one at that.
While the decision to eliminate President Kennedy undoubtedly took place after his resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was without a doubt solidified when Kennedy ambushed his enemies within the U.S. national-security establishment with his Peace Speech at American University on June 10, 1963. With his Peace Speech, JFK was upsetting the Cold War apple cart that the Pentagon and the CIA were convinced would last forever.
What was so significant about that speech?
After the end of World War II, the U.S. government was converted from its founding system of a limited-government republic to a governmental structure called a national-security state. The justification for this radical change, which was accomplished without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment, was that the United States now faced an enemy that was said to be even more threatening than Nazi Germany. That new enemy was “godless communism” as well as a supposed international communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world — a conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia — yes, that Russia!
With the conversion to a national-security state, the U.S. government acquired many of the same totalitarian powers that were being wielded by the totalitarian communist states, such as the Soviet Union and Red China — powers that had been prohibited when the government was a limited-government republic. Such powers included state-sponsored assassinations, torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, and coups.
Equally important, the Cold War brought ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess flowing into the coffers of the “defense” industry, along with the ever-increasing power and influence of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA within the overall federal structure. Over time, the national-security branch of the federal government would become the most powerful branch, the one to which the other three would inevitably defer.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough, one that threatened not only the ever-increasing power, money, and influence of the national-security branch, but also its very existence. Kennedy came to realize that the Cold War was just one great big racket — and a highly dangerous one at that.
That danger was manifested during the Cuban Missile Crisis. U.S. officials and their loyalists in the mainstream press have always maintained that the crisis was brought on by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Not so! It was brought on by the Pentagon and the CIA. It was those two entities that brought the world to within an inch of all-out nuclear war.
The Soviets and the Cubans knew that the Pentagon and the CIA wanted to invade Cuba and effect a regime-change operation there, one that would oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power and replace him with another pro-U.S. dictator, similar to Fulgencio Batista, the corrupt pro-U.S. brute that ruled Cuba before the revolutionaries ousted him in 1959.
That was why the Soviets installed those nuclear missiles in Cuba — to deter U.S. officials from attacking or, if deterrence failed, to enable Soviet and Cuban forces to defend themselves from a U.S. attack.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, cold war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy, NSA, Pentagon | Leave a Comment »
President Biden Is Wrong. Military Spending Does Not Produce Wealth
Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2023
One thing that did take off in the US economy together with the surge in military spending was the amount of public debt.
https://mises.org/wire/president-biden-wrong-military-spending-does-not-produce-wealth
So far, the White House has justified its unwavering support for Ukraine on lofty grounds such as defending democracy and freedom—both in Ukraine and in the West. However, with the American public—who bears the cost of the war in Ukraine—turning against it, several Republican lawmakers questioning its purpose and affordability, and elections approaching, the Biden administration has changed the messaging on the war. Its new line is that sending weapons to Ukraine is actually an investment in American industry, strengthening the economy and creating new jobs.
Joe Biden’s new argument fits well into the flawed Keynesian logic of “Bidenomics” in which economic prosperity is built upon generous public spending for infrastructure, semiconductors, and clean energy rather than on free markets. It is not only unethical to think that a country should use foreign wars and human suffering to give a boost to its economy, but also obviously wrong from an economic point of view. One cannot increase wealth by making gifts—which is what United States military aid to Ukraine is anyway. Moreover, if military spending and wars are so good for the economy, then the US economy should be thriving after the trillions of US dollars spent for this purpose over the last two decades. In reality, the opposite seems to be true.
A Boost to US Manufacturing?
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and socialism seemed defeated, the world moved to a “unipolar” phase with the US as uncontested leader, raising big expectations for a long period of global peace and prosperity. Instead of being drastically cut, however, the excessive spending on military in the US—larger than those of the next ten largest militaries combined—was kept almost flat at about $300 billion for a decade. After the 9/11 attacks and as the US got involved in countless wars and military operations, the defense budget swelled to more than $800 billion by 2023.
According to President Biden’s argument, this huge investment in the defense industry should have led to a manufacturing revival. This was certainly not the case. US manufacturing experienced a nightmare between 2000 and 2010 when the number of jobs, which had been relatively stable at about eighteen million since 1965, declined by one-third to below twelve million while output in the sector as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) dropped too (Figure 1). This was not due to productivity gains and automation but to the loss of competitiveness brought about by the financial and real estate bubbles, which drove US costs up. American companies accelerated offshoring while jobs shifted to services, construction, and the financial sector.
Figure 1: Employment and value added in manufacturing
picture1.png
Source: “All Employees, Manufacturing (MANEMP)“ and “Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP (VAPGDPMA),” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, last updated October 1, 2023, and January 1, 2023. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Current Employment Statistics,” last updated November 14, 2023, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, “GDP by Industry,” last updated November 30, 2023.
More and Better Paid Jobs?
As American manufacturing declined, well-paying jobs for people with lower skills also disappeared, reducing work incentives. Together with an exponential increase in social welfare programs and government intervention in the economy, the decline in these work incentives has contributed to a steady decline in the participation of Americans in the labor market. Both the labor force participation and employment rates have been falling for almost three decades now (Figure 2). Although mainstream pundits blame the long-term decline in labor market participation on demographic shifts, this cannot be the main explanation as shown by the very low and falling participation rate of prime-age men. Only Italy, among developed countries, experienced a larger decline than the US in the labor market participation of 25- to 54-year-old men since 1990.
Figure 2: Labor force participation and employment
picture2.png
Source: “Labor Force Participation Rate (CIVPART),” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, last updated October 1, 2023. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Current Employment Statistics,” last updated November 14, 2023.
Also, wages and incomes took a hit from slowing productivity growth and the decline in manufacturing. The average wage of low-skilled high school graduates fell not only in real terms, but also in nominal terms by about 10 percent from 1990 to 2022. Despite some ups and downs, average real wages in the US have kept about the same purchasing power over the last four decades, barely increasing by less than 10 percent.
Ailing Productivity Growth and Investment
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bidenomics, Military Spending, President Biden, wealth | 1 Comment »
Doug Casey on Anarchy and Voluntaryism
Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2023
by Doug Casey
Even under the worst circumstances, even if the Mafia controlled the United States, I can’t believe Tony Soprano or Al Capone would try to steal 40% of people’s income from them every year.
Remember you don’t get the best and the brightest going into government. There are two kinds of people. You’ve got people that like to control physical reality—things. And people that like to control other people. That second group, those who like to lord it over their fellows, are drawn to government and politics.
You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian. I don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. The reason is that anything that has a monopoly of force is extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the state comes out of a barrel of a gun.”
There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other, either voluntarily or coercively. And the State is pure institutionalized coercion. It’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, for a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible, in oxcart days, for bureaucrats to order things around. Today it’s ridiculous.
Everything that needs doing can and will be done by the market, by entrepreneurs who fill the needs of other people for a profit. The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.
People have a misconception about anarchists. That they’re these violent people, running around in black capes with little round bombs. This is nonsense. Of course there are violent anarchists. There are violent dentists. There are violent Christians. Violence, however, has nothing to do with anarchism. Anarchism is simply a belief that a ruler isn’t necessary, that society organizes itself, that individuals own themselves, and the State is actually counterproductive.
It’s always been a battle between the individual and the collective. I’m on the side of the individual.
I simply don’t believe anyone has a right to initiate aggression against anyone else. Is that an unreasonable belief?
Let me put it this way. Since government is institutionalized coercion—a very dangerous thing—it should do nothing but protect people in its bailiwick from physical coercion.
What does that imply? It implies a police force to protect you from coercion within its boundaries, an army to protect you from coercion from outsiders, and a court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to coercion.
I could live happily with a government that did just those things. Unfortunately the US Government is only marginally competent in providing services in those three areas. Instead, it tries to do everything else.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: anarchists, Anarchy, coercion, Doug Casey on Anarchy and Voluntaryism, Libertarian | Leave a Comment »
RFK Jr. on Bioweapons and Medical Malfeasance
Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2023
Shi Zhengli is one of the PhDs. Known as “Bat Woman,” she is the primary gain-of-function (GOF) researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the recipient of multiple NIH grants. Another PhD is Lili Kuo. She proved you could weaponize animal pathogens by manipulating them to jump species.
RFK Jr asserts: a “bioweapons agenda has become a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.” He writes:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has authored a new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. Skyhorse Publishing released it two weeks ago including several pages of high praise for it by Naomi Wolf, Tucker Carlson, Peter McCullough MD, Dr. Joseph Mercola, David Stockman, and Alan Dershowitz, among others. His earlier book on this subject, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, published November 16, 2021.
Bobbie’s new book on bioweapons research stands on its own. It is an alarming and shocking read.
The book has 444 pages of text with 3,517 endnotes! Along with a Glossary and Index, it has a section titled “Cast of Characters” introducing 84 of the most noteworthy people discussed in the book. They include 32 PhDs, 14 MDs, 3 people with both MD and PhD degrees, and 2 U.S. Presidents (Nixon and Eisenhower).
Shi Zhengli is one of the PhDs. Known as “Bat Woman,” she is the primary gain-of-function (GOF) researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the recipient of multiple NIH grants. Another PhD is Lili Kuo. She proved you could weaponize animal pathogens by manipulating them to jump species. Two of the MDs in the Cast are, notably, Anthony Fauci, the now retired Head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); and Kurt Blome, Nazi deputy surgeon general and bioweapons developer, before becoming a CIA scientist! Li-Meng Yah is one of the MD, PhDs. He is a Hong Kong University virologist who investigated the new COVID pneumonia circulating in Wuhan and claimed the Chinese government was hiding information.
Bobbie begins this book by noting menacing features of government and a rising technocracy that President Eisenhower warned us against, with Dr. Anthony Fauci and billionaire Bill Gates becoming the faces of the COVID-19 pandemic response. He writes: “I expose them as frontmen for a much larger enterprise: a military/medical-industrial complex driven by elements within the CIA and Pentagon.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bat Woman, Bioweapons, Gain-of-function, Medical Malfeasance, RFK Jr., Wuhan | Leave a Comment »
The Uvalde Massacre Shows the Uselessness of Gun Control and Police Protection – Chronicles
Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2023
June 7, 2022By Walter Block
Horrid news. Despicable. A teen gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. About the only good thing in this occurrence is that this mass murderer was himself killed in this revolting event, and will no longer be around to plague civilized society. May the name of Salvador Ramos forever live in infamy. What could these two teachers, to say nothing of these 9- and 10-year-old children have ever done to deserve having their lives snuffed out by this monster?
The usual suspects are now calling for stricter gun controls. According to that sage, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” But disarming America would be a violation of the rights of millions of Americans who protect themselves from thugs and marauders under the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
In any case, if this evil person had wanted to perpetrate mayhem with a knife or a baseball bat, he might not have been able to murder quite as many helpless school children as he did, but with a little effort he could have shed almost as much misery. Are we to ban knives, baseball bats, and for that matter chairs, bows and arrows, steel-plated boots, rat poison, and all other implements which can be used to murder young kids? What about cars? On crowded sidewalks, they have been even more efficient means of destruction than rifles. Progressives also exaggerate the seriousness of this dastardly act in Texas: many more children are shot to death in Chicago, a city with very strict gun controls.
Several points about the situation in Uvalde are worth considering before politicians use the event to justify new gun-control measures:
- Robb Elementary School was a gun-free zone. Why? The feminists who have taken over teachers’ unions feel compelled to engage in this sort of virtue signaling. Yet in other public places, politicians, judges, and civil servants are protected by gun-wielding guards. Pretty much every government building is defended in this way. But not school children, it would appear.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Gun Control, gun-free zone, police, Rahm Emanuel, Robb Elementary, Uvalde | Leave a Comment »
The Terror Watchlist Prepared the Way to Tyranny
Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2023
So what is the list for?
It expands the security bureaucracy. The list has grown from 120,000 to two million, seventeen times larger than its original figure. Is this in response to terrorists events? You name the events.
The list enables the FBI to pressure people into becoming informants and false witnesses in frame ups by threatening to add them to the terror list,
The list allows authorities to punish and to silence truth-tellers who expose the official narratives for the lies that they are.
Paul Craig Roberts
Did you know that there are 2,000,000 names on the Federal government’s terror watchlist? The National Security Council claims most are not Americans, but the Department of Homeland Security admits that there have been tens of thousands of Americans who have been treated like terrorists. It does not occur to the National Security council that there are no terrorist events corresponding to two million terrorists. If there truly were two million terrorists, the US would be in chaos.
So what is the list for?
It expands the security bureaucracy. The list has grown from 120,000 to two million, seventeen times larger than its original figure. Is this in response to terrorists events? You name the events.
The list enables the FBI to pressure people into becoming informants and false witnesses in frame ups by threatening to add them to the terror list,
The list allows authorities to punish and to silence truth-tellers who expose the official narratives for the lies that they are.
You can add your own explanations.
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A Preemptive Strike Against an Orwellian Future
Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2023
That’s precisely why the US government stopped the publication of this information. They threatened the MIT researchers with federal prison if they proceeded under the pretext that the US government considered cryptography a military munition. Those who distributed it would be treated no differently than arms traffickers.
“If I disappear, make sure this gets out.”
That’s what Mark Miller, a young student at Yale, told his closest friends.
He knew what he was sitting on had revolutionary potential and that powerful people had disappeared others for much less.
Miller was steadfast. He wanted to get this information out, even if it was over his dead body.
In 1977, a group of brilliant researchers at MIT made an astonishing discovery—public-key cryptography.
It was a mathematical system for encrypting information so that only the intended recipient could read it. It would otherwise take millions of years for the world’s most powerful supercomputers to crack.
Cryptography, or the practice of encoding information, is as old as civilization.
One of the oldest known cryptography uses dates back to around 600 BC when the ancient Spartans would pass encrypted messages on thin papyrus sheets. To decrypt the message, the recipient could wrap the papyrus around a scytale (a cylinder of varying dimensions).
The words written on the papyrus itself were gibberish. But you could decrypt the message if you had the right scytale. This is how the Spartans sent and received secret military plans.
Today, computers allow for radically more sophisticated cryptography.
That’s why the discovery of public-key cryptography was a development of historical significance.
Never before had unbreakable cryptography been available to the average person. It had always been a government monopoly, and they didn’t want to give it up.
The MIT researchers broke that monopoly in 1977.
The average person could now use public-key cryptography to preserve the privacy of their communications from anyone, including the world’s most powerful governments.
Public-key cryptography altered the status quo between the rulers and the ruled. It was similar to the invention of gunpowder or the printing press.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: cryptography, MIT, Orwellian, public-key cryptography | Leave a Comment »
Clarence The Angel Takes Gavin Newsom To Florida To Show Him What California Would Look Like If He’d Never Been Born
Posted by M. C. on December 17, 2023
TAMPA, FL — Fresh off the case of George Bailey, Clarence the Angel embarked on a new mission over the weekend to show California Governor Gavin Newsom what California could be like if he’d never been born.
“I just picked him up and flew him over to Florida,” Clarence explained. “Easiest job I’ve ever had.”
Earlier in the day, residents had observed Newsom wandering the streets of San Francisco, muttering to himself about the futility of life. “I was supposed to be President! I was supposed to be the guy!” cried out Newsom. “Instead, I’ve spent my days toiling away in California — and now, looking around at this crummy little state, what do I have to show for it? What has it all been for??”
It was then that Clarence the Angel descended to Gavin Newsom’s side, arriving to visibly show Newsom the fruits of his life’s work. “You’re going to be given a great gift, Gavin – to see what California would look like if you had never been born!” exclaimed Clarence as they arrived in Florida. “Look at the unvarnished beauty of nature, walk the streets free of feces, see the livelihoods unruined, hear the laughter of children allowed to live! You see Gavin, each man’s life touches so many other lives. See all the wonderful things that don’t exist because of you? It really is a wonderful life here in Florida, isn’t it?”
At publishing time, Newsom had reportedly taken the vision to heart, renewing his vow to become President so he could make Florida look just like California.
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