Interesting comments on public education.
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Ayn Rand ‘The Humanist Perspective”
Posted by M. C. on December 13, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Ayn Rand, Humanist | Leave a Comment »
Biden, Media Gaslight People about Inflation
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Ron Paul | Dec 11, 2023
Sadly, the increase in nominal wages gained by the recent series of strikes is unlikely to keep up with the declining real wages resulting from the Federal Reserve’s assault on the dollar’s value. This is why, contrary to the claims of many progressives, working people are the victims, not the beneficiaries, of price inflation.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/biden-media-gaslight-people-about-inflation/
President Biden recently repeated the claim that high prices are caused by greedy businesses. Biden is not alone in trying to gaslight the people into thinking price inflation is rooted in the actions of private individuals and not the fiat money system Americans have lived under since 1971. In the media we see excessive consumer spending on luxury items, for example, being blamed for continued price inflation. The fact is that increased consumer demand can only cause prices to rise in those sectors of the economy subject to the increased demand. Prices increasing across the economy are always the result of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.
Trying to minimize the harm of inflation, some people in government and media will insist that, while many prices for goods are higher than they were pre-lockdown, they are still lower than were prices in the 1990s when you consider that the quality of these goods has increased. The argument is that buyers are getting higher value today than 30 years ago. Of course, any increased quality is because of market-driven innovation. If America had a free-market monetary system, instead of central bank-controlled fiat currency, prices would drop as quality increases.
It is also important not to ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve’s devaluation of the dollar’s purchasing power creates an incentive for individuals to spend money as soon as they receive it and a disincentive for them to save. This is because the dollar will have less value a year from now than today. Therefore, high levels of spending are a rational response to an irrational fiat money system.
High prices and supply shortages were inevitable after the lockdowns. However, prices would have adjusted back more if the Federal Reserve had not pushed interest rates to zero. While the Fed has raised interest rates, it has not raised rates to anywhere near where they would likely be in a free market. In fact, rates are not at historically high levels, yet many worry the Fed’s rate increases are pushing the economy toward a recession. This shows how addicted Americans are to the Fed’s “easy money,”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden, Gaslight, inflation, Media | Leave a Comment »
Why the United States Military is Clueless When it Comes to Ukraine
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
I fear that the U.S. politicians and military leaders still fail to grasp that the “war” in Ukraine really was a special military operation. Russia did not unleash its full capabilities. The Russian General Staff, following the guidance received from President Putin, took great pains to avoid massive civilian casualties. Russia left a majority of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in place. Russia declined to destroy Ukraine and the West’s ISR platforms and satellite systems. Those actions are what you would see if Russia went on a total war footing.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/why-the-united-states-military-is-clueless-when-it-comes-to-ukraine/
The two-part Washington Post report on the failed Ukraine counter offensive was written primarily to blame Ukraine for the debacle and exonerate the United States. My analysis of those articles (here and here) highlighted astounding miscalculations and malpractice by U.S. and NATO advisors. The fundamental flaw is the U.S. military personnel are pretending to have experience that they do not have. The U.S. military is like a Driver’s Education school. They are qualified and competent to teach students how to drive a car on city streets. They can teach how to drive in reverse, how to parallel park and how to navigate getting on to a super highway. But they are not qualified to teach GT race car drivers how to be competitive at the 24 Hours of Le Mans or the Indianapolis 500.
The Ukrainian counter offensive required having trained soldiers with a mix of skill and competence similar to that required of professional race car drivers. But they were not properly trained. They got the equivalent of a driver’s education class. Guess what happens when you put those “students” in a race with professional drivers? Yep. Massive car wreck.
To extend the race car metaphor, professional drivers also have the best equipment and crew teams ready to service those vehicles if there is a problem. Ukraine was given a patchwork system of NATO tanks and personnel carriers that lacked standardization (several of us wrote about this earlier this year, including Brian Berletic, Doug MacGregor, Scott Ritter and me) and proved unreliable in combat conditions.
Another major flaw that sabotaged the Ukrainian attack at the outset was the lack of air power. No NATO army in history has successfully attacked a heavily defended position without the benefit of fixed and rotary wing aircraft providing close air support to troops on the ground. Russia controlled the air, not Ukraine and certainly not NATO. And Russia had something critical that Ukraine did not — first-class air defense and drone capabilities.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: US military, Why the United States Military is Clueless When it Comes to Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
What Just Happened?
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
“All these idiots whose ‘identity’ is literally a ‘protected class’ are not protesting anything. Their whole victim act is sponsored, enabled & signal boosted by every powerful institution. The entire elaborate charade amounts to power petitioning itself.” —Aimee Terese on X
And now, an even bigger question looms: with Wokery unraveling on campus, will it now also unravel the Party of Chaos — and its ability to act as Globalism’s fifth column undermining our country? Personally, I think it is indeed the beginning of the end of all that, especially the disgraced intellectual class of America’s ability to play along for mere social status brownie points.
James Howard Kunstler
If you haven’t discerned this yet, the Party of Chaos — Globalism’s “fifth column” in America — lost ground badly in early December even as the country supposedly enters its annual Christmastime coma. You know what a fifth column is? I will explain: it is a subversive enemy force operating inside a nation to sabotage its interests. The Party of Chaos, of course, is the party of “Joe Biden” the fictitious “president” euchered in plain sight to that position via flagrant chicanery in the 2020 Super Tuesday primary and then the free-for-all fraud-o-rama of the general election that year.
This subversive Party of Chaos (with Marxist characteristics), has worked overtime for years to mindfuck Americans into destroying their own country. Just think of the absurdities you are asked to swallow daily and the punishments meted out for opposing them. It all came to an interesting inflection point lately with the three presidents of exalted universities failing spectacularly to cover their asses in congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.
At issue was why, after years of grandstanding on the oppression of victim groups, and censoring, silencing, cancelling, and crucifying alternate opinions, they gave their students and faculty a pass in recent weeks on yelling for the extermination of Jews. Wow, did that business disorder the whole Woke cosmography! I’ll tell you why:
My people, the Jews, including a major chunk of the intellectual class, assumed leadership in the Woke crusade because the Holocaust of the 1940s established us as the world’s premier oppressed victim group. That badge of honor stuck for decades. Seventy percent of American Jews vote for the Party of Chaos, which used to be the Party of Civil Rights, which used to be synonymous with truth and justice. Thus, for decades, we American Jews were able to feel marinated in virtue.
Incidentally, the reason American Jews went all in for the Civil Rights movement was because after the big war and all its horrors they felt a victory for expanded tolerance and acceptance in America — the defeat of “Jim Crow” in particular — could only be a good thing for Jews, who, by the way, had demonstrated that a former “out” group could succeed spectacularly in 20th century America if permitted to try, which suggested that other “out” groups could too, and ought to be allowed to try. For Jews, America turned out to be the promised land, and one can easily see how that rhetoric jibed so well with Martin Luther King and his followers in the 1960s.
But the Civil Rights crusade is history now and American intellectuals, Jews especially, appear to be secretly disillusioned and rather ashamed at the less than satisfactory results, such as intractable black poverty and crime. Successful American Jews have been out of their own ghettos for decades, and they have no desire to live adjacent to any black ghetto if they can help it — though they would never dare admit it. However, they flocked to and flourished in the ghetto of elite academia, where they could make a good living in the commerce of ideas, luxuriate in enhanced social status (especially at Ivy League schools), with the bonus of fabulously easy work requirements (two classes a week and then summers off, what a deal!).
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: fifth column, Party of Chaos, Wokery | Leave a Comment »
Canadian Human Rights Commission Labels Christmas Celebration “Discrimination Grounded In Colonialism”
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Tyler Durden
Trudeau’s “Happy Holiday” present to Canada.
The cancerous spread of woke ideology into every facet of society and government is more obvious in some places compared to others, but every so often the movement crosses a line and sparks considerable opposition. In the US, the social justice movement seems to have hit a few snags; numerous companies adopting and promoting ESG related propaganda have been pummeled with successful boycotts, losing billions in profits and in stock value. Overall public sentiment is quickly turning against major universities as a root source of woke beliefs. And, government officials pandering to the extreme left are confronted with increasing vitriol from the populace.
It would seem that Canadians are also hitting their limit these days when it comes to the far-left, and it took a thinly veiled attack on Christmas to do it.
Part of the ongoing invasion of the woke movement involves regular attempts to undermine Christian holidays as “problematic” and archaic. Leftists argue that increasing diversity (mostly through open border policies or illegal immigration) requires increasing inclusion at the national level. Meaning, it is not for immigrants to adapt to the west, the west must adapt to them. National celebrations like Christmas are therefore a representation of “discrimination” because they are being given preference over minority holidays.
This was the message given by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) in a paper published under the radar in October. The treatise on “Religious Intolerance” was then condemned in a motion unanimously adopted on Nov. 30 by the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the Canadian Parliament. The paper cited Christianity’s two biggest holy days (Christmas and Easter) as examples of “present-day systemic religious discrimination” linked to colonialism because they are statutory holidays in Canada.
The CHRC was established by the Canadian government in 1977 and claims to be an “independent” watchdog. It is empowered under the Canadian Human Rights Act to investigate and to settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services within federal jurisdiction. The group is similar to the ACLU in that its momentum is ever to the deepest reaches of the political left. Their ideological positions carry weight in the higher echelons of government; for example, their paper attacking Christmas has since been avidly defended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The woke all-or-nothing argument against state recognized religious holidays is built on a host of illogical demands. First and foremost, Canada is a majority Christian nation, with 53.3% of the population identifying as Christian, 34.6% identifying as non-affiliated, and around 12% identifying with several other faiths. The next largest religious group in Canada is Muslim, representing only 5% of the religious population.
But what about that 34% of people who are non-affiliated? Do they feel discriminated against by national Christmas celebrations? No, not really.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Canadian Human Rights, Christmas, Colonialism, discrimination | Leave a Comment »
US-Made Munitions Used In Israel’s White Phosphorous Attacks On Lebanon; WaPo
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
by Tyler Durden
#Napalm by any other name#
War crimes are OK if you are helping a “friend”.
The Israeli army used US-manufactured white phosphorous shells in a brutal attack on south Lebanon in October, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing an analysis of shell fragments found in the southern Lebanese village of Al-Dhahira.
A Washington Post journalist came across the remnants of three 155-millimeter artillery shells near the border. Production codes found on the shells indicate that they were made by ammunition depots in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1989 and 1992.
Residents told the journalist that the shells in question “incinerated at least four homes.” Nine people were injured in the white phosphorous attack, which reportedly took place on October 16, including three who were hospitalized.
Photos and videos verified by Amnesty International show the white phosphorus falling on Al-Dhahira on October 16. “Israeli forces continued to shell the town with white phosphorus munitions for hours,” trapping residents in their homes until 7:00 AM the next day, locals told the Washington Post, adding that they now refer to that evening as the “black night.”
Israel has used white phosphorous on southern Lebanon over 60 times since the war began in October, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). “The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon’s southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023,” Amnesty International said on October 31st, adding that the October 16 attack must be immediately investigated as a war crime.
Israel claimed its use of the banned munitions was in line with international law, given that they used them to create “smokescreens” and not for targeting, according to an army statement.
However, the October 16 white phosphorous attack took place at night, when “smoke would have little practical use … and [when] there were no Israeli troops on the Lebanese side of the border to mask with smokescreens,” Washington Post said.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Israel, US-Made, WaPo, White phosphorous | Leave a Comment »
New Orleans Restaurants Under Attack
Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2023
The next time you hear that a private restaurant has not passed the review of a government agency, do not blithely assume there is something wrong with the former. It may well be due to the failure of the latter.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/139704332
The headline practically screamed: “30 New Orleans area restaurants fail health inspection, some for bugs or dirty kitchens.” Undoubtedly, many people in the Crescent City as a result reduced their take outs from these eateries, several of them world famous, and also decreased eating out in them. If so, they did so in favor of grocery stores, which now seemed relatively more reliable, health-wise. This might be somewhat of an exaggeration, since the story allowed that “… more than 16 … don’t have food safety certificates to ensure their kitchens meet health standards.” As far as we know, they were perfectly clean, but merely lacked proper government certification thereof. Should the local citizenry be worried?
The more discerning of us have to be forgiven for asking: Who do you trust more: the restaurants themselves, or the government health inspectors? The former can lose money from dirtiness, the latter cannot, at least not, personally, for failing to make accurate assessments.
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What is the solution to this conundrum? The course of action emanating from this present quarter is to substitute private certification agencies for the ones perpetrated by government. Is this the ravings of a radical free market advocate such as myself? Is this a mirage, something just plain crazy that can never be implemented? Yes and no. As to the former, this appellation certainly fits me. I hold an endowed chair in free enterprise economics at a local university. As to the latter, it is no concoction in my fevered brain. Rather, capitalist certification agencies are to be found all throughout the modern economy. Let us count some of the ways.
But, before I do, let me explain the difference between licensing and certification. In both cases, a test must be passed. But with the former, if you do not pass the exam, you may not legally engage in the industry. For example, if you fail the bar exam, you cannot work as a lawyer. If you do not pass the medical examination, and worked in the capacity of a physician anyway, you are a criminal and can be incarcerated. In sharp contrast, if you do not score high enough in the exam for Certified Public Accountant, you can still keep financial books for your clients; it would only be illegal to pass yourself off as a CPA.
Where else besides accounting is certification, not licensing, in operation? One aspect is brand names. McDonalds, Walmart, Microsoft, Toyota, and thousands of other companies large and small, stand by their wares and offerings. They are in effect insuring their customers that what they purchase from them is of a certain quality.
Another example is testing laboratories.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: licensing, New Orleans, private certification, Restaurants | Leave a Comment »
Why David Brooks, the Atlantic and the New York Times are Irrelevant
Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2023
The Atlantic slimes Substack, I slap back.
(this is an old piece but few subscribers have read it, and since the mainstream has started throwing shade onto Substack…..
“Brooks is irrelevant,” I snapped to a email friend who sent me David Brooks’ recent self-congratulatory snooze-fest “Why Conservatism is Dead Because it Doesn’t Listen To Me”, in The Atlantic. “Furthermore,” I continued, “The New York Times is irrelevant, and all its columnists are irrelevant because they just are.”
Remember Time Magazine? A few short decades ago, it was the dominant magazine in the world. Ten million copies a week sold for real money. Pages and pages of advertising. Now, it’s a joke edited by a woman who I used to report for and who, trust me, is a bear of limited brain. And that fate is soon coming for the Atlantic, the Times and most other broadsheets. They are, as someone clever (Sarah Hoyt) recently said, barking orders at platoons of invisible foot soldiers, their world hollowing out beneath them.
One of my last editors informed me “we are gatekeepers,” to my stunned silence. This was a charming woman, who I adored, but who had never done anything but copy edit her way to editorship, had virtually no life experience, and as far as I could see, no real interests, other than her career and Holt Renfrew. Honey, I grew up in Westmount and there were a whole lotta women who thought they were gatekeepers too. Their world? Vanished without a trace. This goes for almost anyone dug into the current “mainstream” of the culture, wrapped up in a plush packet, filled with velvet and down and praise for lo these many years. None of them has any idea of how real life is lived.
To a man or woman, right and left, they are all scathing of the messy unwashed populists thronging the streets of the world fit to be tied by their lives being foreshortened with every single year that passes. Like Brooks, they flatter themselves with droning graduate level synopses of conservative (or liberal) thought over the ages, compare it to Trump’s syntax and cry ‘Civilization is DEAD!”
Never mind the badly dressed, snorting barely-humans at the barricades. They have no beef, no complaint, just shut up. They are anathema, human garbage who dare to rebel against the ferocious incompetence of their so-called leaders who have assumed police power over every aspect of their lives. Brooks et al are part of the New Class, a group identified by William F, Buckley’s National Review sometime in the 70’s, forgive me for not bothering to check, I have just plodded my way through several thousand words of basic conservative thought history, which I rather hoped I’d read for the last time, the last time I was plodding through the virtues of Locke and Montesquiou and Burke.
The New Class for those who haven’t done the plodding is that modern caste of brahmins and mandarin bureaucrats who simply know better and who clip a bit of every dollar in the economy until those dollars reach those people who produce the product as 40% of what’s left. Every career politician, bureaucrat, contract worker, academic, consultant, union head, etc etc etc. The people my industrialist father used to call parasites.
Anyway to get to the part where Brooks says conservatism is dead, despite the three billion strong furious anti-government populists simmering in their houses, getting ready to take power, because damn, this is coming whether Brooks likes it or not. Turns out he doesn’t actually have an argument. He just devolves into Trump frenzy.
Let me count the risibilities:
1. Conservatism ended with Mitt Romney in 2012. (I died laughing at that one – the vulture capitalist is the true conservative.)
2. Populists are spiritually sick because they don’t listen to the New Class anymore. (Do you ever ever ask yourself why?)
3. We know better. We can cite Burke.
4. All of life is seen as an incessant class struggle between oligarchic elites and the common volk (well yeah)
5. A lot of my friends are trying to reclaim the GOP and make it a conservative party once again. I cheer them on (ie listen you common volk who can’t cite Burke)
6. He makes the usual charge of racism at Americans complaining about people and criminals flooding across the southern border, calling it a rejection of “pluralism”.
Because Brooks never leaves his leafy bower, he has no idea how people live anymore.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: brahmins, Conservatism, David Brooks, gatekeepers, mandarin, New York Times, The Atlantic | Leave a Comment »
30 Population Control Quotes That Show That The Elite Truly Believe That Humans Are A Plague Upon The Earth
Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2023
Posted byMadge Waggy
5. CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
18. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class”
Of course Attenborough and Rockefeller are in the list.
There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that the world is facing and that something desperately needs to be done about it. They truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that we will literally destroy the planet if we are left to our own devices. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to the lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about the exploding population, we will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote abortion for babies that are “not wanted” because they would be “too much of a burden” on society. Anything that reduces the human population in any way is a good thing for those that believe in this philosophy. This twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of the most prominent websites in the world, and it is being taught at nearly all of the most important colleges and universities on the planet. The people promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by trying to reduce the size of the human population. In fact, many of them are entirely convinced that we are in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet, and that if humanity does not willingly choose to embrace population control soon, then a solution will have to be “forced” upon them.
Yes, I know that all of this may sound like something out of a science fiction novel. But there are a whole lot of people out there that are absolutely obsessed with this stuff, and many of them are in very prominent positions around the globe.
The following are 30 population control quotes which show that the elite truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that a great culling is necessary…
1. UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”
2. Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of “The Population Bomb”: “To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied”
3. Paul Ehrlich again, this time on the size of families: “Nobody, in my view, has the right to have 12 children or even three unless the second pregnancy is twins”
4. Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First: “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Attenborough, Margaret Sanger, overpopulation, Planned Parenthood, population control, Rockefeller, Ted Turner | Leave a Comment »
Netanyahu Says He Appreciates US Veto of UN Gaza Ceasefire Resolution
Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2023
The US is facing global backlash for being the only member of the UN Security Council to vote against the resolution
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said he appreciated the US vetoing a UN Security Council resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and vowed to continue his war in the besieged enclave, which has killed at least 18,000 Palestinians.
“Other countries must also understand that it’s impossible to support the elimination of Hamas on one side and on the other to call for the end of the war, which will prevent the elimination of Hamas,” Netanyahu said.
“Therefore, Israel will continue our just war to eliminate Hamas and achieve the war’s other objectives that we set,” he added.
The US is facing global backlash and criticism from fellow UN Security Council members for being the only one to vote against the ceasefire resolution as Israel is killing civilians at a historic pace.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken Rejects Idea of Gaza Ceasefire Despite Massive Child Casualties, Ceasefire, Hamas, UN | Leave a Comment »
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