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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The 2009 “What if…” Speech
Posted by M. C. on November 30, 2023
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Carry The Torch of Liberty With A Heart of Thanksgiving
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
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Who really owns the United States?
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
Walter Block
There is also more than just a little bit of hypocrisy involved in this left wing land recognition movement. If the native peoples really own it in total, all others should either depart (back to Europe? Back to Africa? Back to Asia?) and/or start paying rent to the rightful owners. Has anything of this sort, on a serious basis, been placed on the table by any of these advocates? If so, not by too many of them;
Nowadays, it is common, when introducing an event, to say something along the lines of: “We are grateful to the XYZ Indian Tribe for allowing us to hold this gathering on what is really their land.” Universities, bastions of the left, have been particularly intent upon engaging in this practice. For example, Northwestern University offered this “expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory you reside on, and a way of honoring the Indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial.” Here is another instance: “Princeton (University) seeks to build relationships with Native American and Indigenous communities and nations through academic pursuits, partnerships, historical recognitions, community service and enrollment efforts. These communities and nations include the Lenni-Lenape people, who consider the land on which the University stands part of their ancient homeland.”
Do the American Indians really own the entire country based upon homesteading, mixing their labor with the land? Not at all. There are now some 350 million people in the country, and there are still vast areas of it that have never so much as been touched by human feet, let alone homesteaded as farms, factories or residences. Before the white man came to the continent the best estimate is that there were only 2-3 million native persons in existence (the lowest estimate is less than one million; the highest, 18 million). It is difficult to see how they, alone, could have accomplished any such task.
There is a continuum issue heavily involved in homesteading. How intensively must the land be homesteaded, and for how long, before it can be clearly stated that ownership has been attained? Experts aver that it must be more intense, and less acreage attained for any given amount of effort, east of the Mississippi rather than west of it. Why? This is due to the fact that area off the Atlantic is far more fertile, on average, than in most of the west. Thus, a family of four would rationally invest in the homesteading of less acreage in the east than in the west.
Not only is there a continuum in terms of how intensively must be the homesteading, and the duration thereof in order to attain ownership, but, also, the degree of property rights after the fact. Consider many Indian tribes in the Midwest of the United States.
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How to find your soul mate
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
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Separate Tech and State
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
by Ron Paul
Big tech censorship is a problem created by big government. The solution lies not with giving government more power but with separating tech and state.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/separate-tech-and-state-2/
Some libertarians dismiss concerns over social media companies’ suppression of news and opinions that contradict select agendas by pointing out that these platforms are private companies, not part of the government. There are two problems with this argument. First, there is nothing unlibertarian about criticizing private businesses or using peaceful and voluntary means, such as boycotts, to persuade businesses to change their practices.
The second and most significant reason the “they are private companies” argument does not hold water is the tech companies’ censorship has often been done at the “request” of government officials. The extent of government involvement with online censorship was revealed in emails between government and employees of various tech companies. In these emails the government officials addressed employees of these “private companies” as though these employees were the government officials’ subordinates.
Government officials using their authority to silence American citizens is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Yet some conservative elected officials and writers think the solution to the problem of big tech censorship is giving government more power over technology companies. These pro-regulation conservatives ignore the fact that it would be just as unconstitutional if a conservative administration was telling tech companies who they must allow to access their platforms as it is when progressives order social media companies to deplatform certain individuals. Furthermore, since the average government official’s political views are closer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than to Marjorie Taylor Greene, giving government more power over social media companies is likely to lead to more online censorship of conservatives.
Instead of giving government more power over social media, defenders of free speech should work to separate tech and state. An excellent place to start is pushing for passage of the Free Speech Protection Act. Unlike other legislation, such as the PATRIOT Act and the Affordable Care Act, this bill is accurately named.
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The Resilience of Property Rights
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
In 2018, the WEF tweeted a video of predictions for 2030 that included, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” Five years on, we can see that there’s still a long way to go for that prediction to come true.
The resilience of property rights is perhaps best demonstrated by the lengths that totalitarian regimes have to go to undo them.
In 2016, the goofballs at the World Economic Forum (WEF) published an article of fantastical utopianism. Ida Auken, a socialist member of the Danish parliament, wrote that in the year 2030, she lived in a city where nobody owned anything and everybody was happy. Private ownership has been abolished, everything we used to pay for is now free, green energy powers everything—it’s exactly the kind of nonsense you’d expect from a Danish socialist.
In 2018, the WEF tweeted a video of predictions for 2030 that included, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” Five years on, we can see that there’s still a long way to go for that prediction to come true.
In 2023, Carol Roth wrote a book called You Will Own Nothing, in which she takes the WEF a little too seriously and pulls together stray facts from around the global economy to allege that “World War F” is on the horizon, “a financial world war where you are ‘F’d.’”
Roth is a hyperactive Twitter user, and her book reads like an amalgamation of Twitter threads, so it can sometimes be difficult to keep the argument straight. Right off the bat, for example, the reader is told that there are three aggressors in World War F: “government and government-related forces (think Congress and the Federal Reserve),” “bad actors and elite power-grabbers (think the World Economic Forum and big business),” and “Big Tech.” These aren’t really distinct categories, as government contains bad actors and power-grabbers, and Big Tech is part of big business.
Regardless, there’s a group of elites out there who want to prevent you from owning stuff, according to Roth. As evidence, she points to government overreach during the Covid pandemic, high levels of government and individual debt, poor monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, the potential adoption of central-bank digital currencies, and the proliferation of ESG investing, among other economic problems.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Ida Auken, Property Rights, totalitarian regimes, WEF, You Will Own Nothing | Leave a Comment »
The Sulphurous Attraction of Nikki Haley Leads Back to Big Brother and the Globalists
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/
Friends,
Leading MAGA pundit and former Donald Trump administration official Steve Bannon calls them “the Keebler Elves.” I prefer the term “Munchkins,” or maybe “the Five Dwarfs”—No, it’s now just four dwarfs with Tim Scott bowing out: they are the Republican candidates participating in the charade, AKA “the GOP debates,” and desperately hoping—grasping—striving to displace Donald Trump as the frontrunner to oppose brain-dead Joe Biden in the 2024 election.
The Never Trumpers, the Establishment “conservative” think tanks and their journals and groupies, many among the Republican congressional leadership and office holders, have, for the past year, frantically beat the drums for someone—anyone—who could credibly challenge Trump, someone with the bona fides and a glossy resume, someone who could rein in rising MAGA populist traditionalism which threatens the once thought unassailable perch of the Managerial globalists.
At first, spearheaded by the powerful Murdoch media outlets, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News, the buzz among them was centered on Ron DeSantis. DeSantis would be the “giant killer.” DeSantis, it was argued, could enunciate the major popular Trumpian themes, even at times apparently go around to the Donald’s right, but without the verbal and personality “baggage” (according to them). And even more importantly, although he could sound a lot like a church deacon version of Trump, the Florida governor would not in reality threaten the essential control by the elites, at least not like Trump would.
But somewhere along the trail to Neverland, DeSantis fell flat, in no way denting President Trump’s unsurmountable lead in the polls. And the elite makers and shakers began to cast about looking for a new giant killer.
And their increasingly desperate gaze settled upon none other than the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, nee’ Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, perhaps the most ambitious and the most flagrant political chameleon the American nation has extruded in many a year.
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Flip-flop Fauci Flips Again, Changes Tune on “Vaccine” Mandates
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
by Selwyn Duke
The bottom line is that the Covid response was always largely driven by politics and, Miltimore avers, so is Fauci’s recent vax-mandate flip-flop.
The public’s fear has abated and their faith in health authorities has cratered, Miltimore points out, and their tolerance for mandates has thus been expended. I’ll add that the establishment also no longer needs to use Covid to drive a hated rival (Trump) from office.
Miltimore concludes saying that the issue isn’t what is best, but is, to quote Thomas Sowell, “who shall decide what is best?” It’s just a shame, he then states, that it took Fauci so long to realize he’s not the one to decide.
“There should be more mandates, there really should be.” So said Dr. Anthony Fauci in July 2021 while speaking to CNN host Jake Tapper. It wouldn’t be the last time, either, Joe Biden’s Covid point man would advise that Americans be compelled to take the then-new and largely untested coronavirus “vaccines.”
This had an effect, too: More than two million Americans lost their jobs after balking at the experimental shots. Many multiples of that number submitted to the coercion, and some would later suffer serious side effects — including, in certain cases, death.
But now Fauci, (in)famous for flipping more than a gymnast, has changed his tune on mandates. In fact, points out the Washington Examiner’s Jon Miltimore, the ex-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and current Georgetown University professor is now a big proponent of “choice.”
Oh, it’s not that Covid has receded as a reality (only as a boogeyman). Why, “New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show COVID-19 cases are again rising in some parts of the country,” relates Miltimore.
“The CDC’s map indicates that several states are experiencing a ‘substantial increase’ in cases (more than 20%), including Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Nebraska, which saw a 57.3% spike from the previous week,” he continues.
Moreover, the statistics indicate that during September and October, Covid accounted for an average of more than 100 dead Americans a day. (This, however, is a surely inflated number. Note here that a source at a major medical examiner’s office told me a few months ago that only one to two percent of the “Covid” deaths evaluated at the office were actually caused by Covid.) Yet this doesn’t explain Fauci’s and authorities’ change in attitude; after all, the numbers have been exaggerated all along, as even government officials and The New York Times finally admitted. Yet the reality is that now there simply is no talk of reinstituting draconian measures.
Just consider the vacillating doctor’s latest prescriptions. As Miltimore writes:
While speaking to ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week earlier this fall, Fauci was asked who should be taking the new COVID booster.
“I believe we should give the choice to people that are not in the high-risk groups, to have the vaccine available for them,” Fauci replied.
Choice is the key word here. It’s a stark contrast to Fauci’s previous support of the White House’s vaccine mandate that required private companies to demand vaccination as a condition of employment.
“We know that mandates work,” Fauci told Wolf Blitzer in October 2021. “So, although you’d like people to do it on their own accord, sometimes mandates actually can help in that regard.”
Fauci’s new position isn’t just that low-risk people should get to choose, however, as his statement might imply. Fauci would subsequently imply that even high-risk people should be given a choice.
“Make [the vaccine] available to everyone, but certainly recommend it to high-risk people,” Fauci told Karl.
Do realize that Fauci’s devotion to Covid vax mandates was so extreme that he even said in August 2021 that he believes “mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea.” This is despite the fact the coronavirus posed virtually no threat to children. Consider, for example, that a study out of Germany — a Montana-size country with 83 million people — found that during 15 months of the pandemic, not even one healthy child died of Covid.
In contrast, a researcher predicted in 2021 that for every child “saved” by the Covid shots, 117 would be killed by them. What’s more, nine researchers from establishment institutions (e.g., Harvard) estimated last year that for college students, the shots were up to 98 times as dangerous as the disease itself. In other words, Fauci’s vax-mandate insistence was malpractice.
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Capitalism: True and False
Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023
“The 2020 Covid-19 response may be an example of how billionaires dominate politics, NGOs, and the field of medicine. , , The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profits soar. In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion.”
“Let’s do everything we can to expose these evil billionaires who use Marxism to overthrow the genuine free market. Read Hanne Herland’s The Billionaire World and learn the truth about them!
Hanne Nabintu Herland’s The Billionaire World: How Marxism serves the Elite (2023) is a vital book that will help you understand what is going on in the world today. It will also help you to defend capitalism against objections that are all-too-common today. Herland distinguishes two kinds of capitalism: real and fake. The real kind is a voluntary society, in which people trade goods and services with each other, and everybody benefits. The fake kind is one in which a few greedy billionaires use the state to gain power and privileges for themselves. These billionaires are willing to enslave humanity to gain their nefarious ends.
Here is what Herland says about them:
“In the West, the ultra-rich own almost everything. Private investment corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Capital World, Fidelity Management, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street represent capital owners who own media companies, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the military complex, and the food industry. They also fund politicians and exert strong influence over political decision makers as well as government funds and assets.
These investment companies have become so powerful that they control most of the world’s capital. Whichever industry you take a look at, you easily find many of the top shareholders, decision makers and names among the ten leading institutional investors. Most of the companies that we perceive as competing brands are actually owned by the same company; for example The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.
These mastodonte companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for. They are the rulers of social media, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and most of the entertainment business.”
This domination leads to a totalitarian control over people:
“To an employee, this economic entanglement has vast implications. In order to keep their job and be able to put food on the table, journalists and editors alike have to exhibit their willingness to agree with the narrative being pushed. If they object to the politically correct groupthink, they’re out. The desired narrative is structured to produce the highest possible capital gain for the news business’ super-rich owners, with the blessing of media leaders, government officials, leading politicians, and the academic elite.”
People usually think of Marxism as the enemy of the super-rich, but in fact the billionaires and the Marxists are allied to overthrow Western civilization:
“This is a point the book ponders over. It would have been close to impossible for the billionaire class to succeed without the weakening of the Western social culture.
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War is Always Justified
Posted by M. C. on November 27, 2023
I repeat: for there to be peace, people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.
If I am on a side, it is the side of peace.
I just heard someone say, “One war crime does not justify another.” My reflex as a peace advocate is to agree with that statement, but something gives me pause. It starts with a grammatical issue but it doesn’t end there.
The only beings on earth that perform the act of justifying are human beings. “War crimes” do not perform that act. What the statement intends to say is something like, “One cannot legitimately use one war crime to justify another.” But what is this “legitimate”? A substitute for justifiable. One cannot justifiably use one war crime to justify another. We are on the brink of an infinite regress that seeks to convert the subjective act of justifying something into an objective property, as if one could filter all acts through a moral sieve that separates them into two categories, the wrong and the right.
Seen this way, the statement about justifying war crimes is exactly wrong. People do indeed use one war crime to justify another. With the exception of crimes of passion, which people typically justify in retrospect, all wars and most violence begins with justification. The heinous acts of the other side are high-octane fuel for the justification engine.
In the objective sense of an ethical principle, we can argue whether this or that war was justified. But in terms of the rhetorical act of the human being called justifying, all wars are justified. Someone is justifying them.
This is why, as I have argued over the past month, we must exit the conversation about what is justified if there is ever going to be an end to the violence in the Holy Land.
The word just comes from the Latin justus — upright, equitable, lawful, right, proper. To justify literally means to make it right. To take something self-interested or indeterminate and make it into something right, that is justification. It is much easier to override the heart’s repulsion and harm others when aided by a story in which it is right.
Both sides in the Gaza conflict believe they are right. Hamas and the Israeli government both justify acts of carnage. So it has always been, and so it shall ever be. To end it, we have to appeal to something outside of what is justified, who is right, and who is wrong.
Force me to speak in terms of right and wrong, and I would say, yes, it is wrong to kill 4500 children in a bombing campaign. I would say it is wrong to kidnap and murder innocent festival-goers and children in a kibbutz. I do not mean to establish the two sides as equivalent here. I understand well the assymetrical dynamics of oppressor and oppressed. If forced to, I could tell you which side I think is wronger or righter than the other. I am fully capable of understanding each side’s logic and adjudge one or the other more valid. But like many of you, I am sick of being asked to pitch my tent in one camp or another.
I am unwillng to do that, and it is not because, sheltered by my circumstances and privilege, I have the luxury of not taking sides. I am unwilling because I want to see the violence end, and that means that people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.
I repeat: for there to be peace, people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.
If I am on a side, it is the side of peace.
I know I am not alone there. In fact many people who do not enjoy the shelter of circumstance and privilege are saying something similar. I already shared the video “In my name, I want no vengeance” by Michal Helav, whose only son was murdered by Hamas. There are many others. Here are a few examples from the article, “Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge.”
- In a eulogy for her brother Hayim, an anti-occupation activist who was murdered in Kibbutz Holit, Noi Katsman called on her country “not to use our deaths and our pain to cause the death and pain of other people or other families. I demand that we stop the circle of pain, and understand that the only way [forward] is freedom and equal rights. Peace, brotherhood, and security for all human beings.”
- Ziv Stahl, executive director of the human rights organization Yesh Din, and a survivor of the hellfire in Kfar Aza, also came out strongly against Israel’s assault on Gaza in an article in Haaretz. “I have no need for revenge, nothing will return those who are gone,” she wrote. “Indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and the killing of civilians uninvolved with these horrible crimes are no solution.”
- Yotam Kipnis, whose father was murdered in the Hamas attack, said in his eulogy: “Do not write my father’s name on a [military] shell. He wouldn’t have wanted that. Don’t say, ‘God will avenge his blood.’ Say, ‘May his memory be for a blessing.’”
- Maoz Inon, whose parents were murdered on Oct. 7, wrote in Al Jazeera: “My parents were people of peace … Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life. It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite … We must break the cycle.”
- When Yonatan Ziegen, the son of Vivian Silver, was asked by a journalist what his mother — who is thought to have been kidnapped — would think about what Israel is doing in Gaza now, he replied: “She would be mortified. Because you can’t cure dead babies with more dead babies. We need peace. That’s what she was working for all her life … Pain is pain.”
I am in awe of the courage of these people. It is not easy to speak against the howls of a bloodthirsty mob — and the bloodthirsty inner mob that wants to relieve the grief for a moment by converting it into hate. I was on a call a few weeks ago with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. “If you speak out, they slap you down,” one said. They were afraid to say anything publicly, afraid to protest, and trying to think of more indirect forms of peace action.
In times of conflict, the advocate for peace draws more hatred than even the enemy. The enemy by his existence validates the drama that affirms the partisan’s role and identity (and, in the case of a nation, an agenda of domination or conquest). The more abhorrent the enemy’s acts, the better. But the peace advocate undermines that drama and the roles and justifications that it creates.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Gaza, justify, war, war crime | Leave a Comment »
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