NEW YORK, NY — After the devastating reports came out that star New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers had suffered what is suspected to be a season-ending injury to his Achilles tendon, experts immediately expressed belief that the injury was a result of Rodgers being unvaccinated.
“Taking the vaccine would have likely prevented this,” said Dr. Arthur MacArthur, a sports physician who has never treated Rodgers. “Research that we just came up with a few moments ago indicates there is a new COVID-19 variant that specifically attacks tendons and ligaments, particularly in the ankle. So Aaron Rodgers, due to his unvaccinated state, clearly came down with a sudden case of what we are referring to, as of right now, ‘COVID ankle.'”
The excitement around the Jets had grown to a fevered pitch this offseason after the team acquired Rodgers, a Super Bowl winner and 4-time MVP, from Green Bay. The Jets made the move against the advice of members of the scientific community, who argued Rodgers’s mere unvaccinated presence would likely result in the death of the entire team. “He has not been vaccinated against the virus everyone has received protection from,” said one concerned scientist. “This obviously puts the protected people at severe risk from the person who isn’t protected. It’s science.”
At publishing time, the Jets vowed to press onward, despite the setback. “We lost the guy who gave us any realistic chance of having a great season,” said Head Coach Robert Saleh. “But at least we won’t have to spend all day, every day around someone who dares to be unvaccinated.”
Why has the eurozone lagged the United States and other developed economies in recent years? The enormous stimulus packages, including the 2009 Growth and Job Plan, the Juncker Plan, the New Green Deal, and the Europe Next Generation, are proving that central planning only delivers poor growth, elevated debt, and now high inflation.
If there is a lesson for the United States and the rest of the world, it is that massive central planning does not deliver growth and that governments do not lead economic development and innovation. The eurozone would benefit from a supply-side, bottom-up approach to the economy. Unfortunately, it is doubling down on central planning.
The eurozone economic figures show the risk of stagflation, and the short-term impact is clear in Germany and France, but it extends to the rest of the countries.
Why has the eurozone lagged the United States and other developed economies in recent years? The enormous stimulus packages, including the 2009 Growth and Job Plan, the Juncker Plan, the New Green Deal, and the Europe Next Generation, are proving that central planning only delivers poor growth, elevated debt, and now high inflation.
The ECB’s latest figures show that monetary aggregates are starting to moderate, but inflation remains high and, in the latest print, is rising.
Consensus estimates of GDP growth in 2023 stand at 0.6% with inflation above 5%, according to Bloomberg, and it is important to remember that core inflation continues to be three times higher than the target of price stability.
Lagarde’s inflation messages seem clear, but the ECB’s target must be met. and interest rate increases are here to stay, although the market estimates that the ECB will start lowering interest rates by 2024. The problem is that the eurozone is only betting on rate hikes to moderate inflation, while governments continue to spend billions of euros on so-called Next Generation Funds and deficits that mean more inflation or taxes in the future.
We should not be surprised that credit in the eurozone is falling along with monetary aggregates. The entire burden of monetary normalization is falling on the productive sector, families, and businesses, while many governments continue to increase deficit spending.
The figures for growth in the eurozone are very poor, but they are even worse when we take into account that Ireland’s progress, as shown by Eurostat, almost entirely explains the most recent upward revision. What does the eurozone do? Instead of incentivizing the economic freedom model, it subsidizes the intervened ones.
The economy is expected to grow slightly in 2023, plagued by high inflation, rising interest rates, and lower exports. The Next Generation funds have no discernible marginal or multiplier effect.
The weak state of manufacturing and service indices confirms this fear. PMIs show a widespread negative trend in new orders and investment.
RTX, one of the largest weapons firms in the US, is currently being sued alongside Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics for “aiding and abetting war crimes and extrajudicial killings” by selling weapons to the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the victims of two coalition bombings in Yemen — one for a wedding in 2015 and another for a funeral in 2016.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), in October 2015, the Al-Sanabani family was readying to celebrate a relative’s wedding when a coalition jet bombed the area, killing 43 Yemenis, including 13 women and 16 children. A year later, coalition jets dropped a US-manufactured GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb on a crowded funeral, killing over 100.
The lawsuit alleges that western-manufactured bombs have killed over 25,000 civilians since the beginning of the NATO-backed war nearly eight years ago.
US weapons maker RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, scrubbed a multibillion deal with Saudi firm Scopa Defense earlier this year over “concerns” that the latter was pursuing business with sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies, according to people familiar with the deal that spoke with the Wall Street Journal(WSJ).
In 2022, RTX and Scopa signed a memorandum of understanding to build a factory in the kingdom for air defense systems to protect Riyadh from airstrikes. The plan reportedly called for installing radars and multiple air defense systems with an investment of $25 billion in the kingdom and $17 worth of sales.
Image source: Breaking Defense
The owner of Scopa, Mohamed Alajlan, told the WSJ that his company has no deals with sanctioned Russian companies and that any deals with Chinese firms “are limited to securing raw materials such as copper or rubber for use in producing ammunition and armored vehicles.”
“We don’t work with any companies that have international sanctions,” Alajlan told the WSJ, adding that the decision by RTX to scrub the deal was “rushed, illogical, and even irrational.”
Alajlan, who also chairs the Saudi-Chinese Business Council, is the heir of a prominent Saudi family that for decades has imported Chinese textiles to the kingdom.
According to the WSJ, the “unease” over Scopa’s alleged ties to sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies “was a deciding factor for an advisory board of retired US military officers to resign from the Saudi company.” Furthermore, the daily claims Scopa fired its chief executive “who had raised the sanctions concerns with his company’s owner and US officials.”
In the past decade, the censorship industrial complex has gained considerable momentum and institutional support. Elite support for censorship is so entrenched that the Harvard Kennedy School published a commentary in September 2022 titled, “Mis- and disinformation studies are too big to fail.”
In the past decade, the growth of the Internet and social media has brought with it a dramatic uptick in populist sentiment. Legacy institutions have declared war against populism, referring to its claims as “misinformation” or “disinformation” and calling on the government or government-adjacent actors (herein referred to as “the censors”) to clamp down on such claims as they spread across the Internet like wildfire. The censors rarely decline these opportunities to silence criticism, justifying the censorship as a matter of “national security.”
More than other Western nations, the United States champions freedom of speech. But it has frequently failed in its aspirations, beginning in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts. There are countless examples since then of the US failing to adhere to its core value system, too many to recount in one brief article.
The Internet Lets Claims Spread Like Wildfire
Beginning with the Arab Spring in 2010, the extent to which social media could foster grassroots campaigns against perceived tyranny or injustice became increasingly apparent. Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, has commented on such phenomena at length in his book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium.
The nation-state correctly perceives in revolutions a threat to its existing foundations and deploys various methods to crush dissent. Western nations do not typically deploy the military against the masses or declare martial law. The US has taken a different but directionally similar approach, whereby law enforcement and intelligence agencies form cozy partnerships with private actors, such as social media platforms, financial institutions, and other digital intermediaries.
After the Great Recession, populist movements, like Occupy Wall Street on the Left and the Tea Party movement on the Right, garnered dramatic support across Western nations. As with most populist movements, a significant number of the activists embraced ideas branded as “conspiracy theories” by the established order. Rather than examining these allegations, the established order preferred to label the entire movement “crazy” or “conspiratorial.”
Since the movements began, there has been a significant convergence of Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party thought leaders. It is no coincidence that, despite their different politial affiliations, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger often sound like Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino, and Donald Trump when it comes to criticizing the government and legacy institutions. Each of these men has been personally targeted by the censorship industrial complex.
The Twitter Files Expose the Censorship Racket
On March 9, 2023, Michael Shellenberger delivered his testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which he titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex.” In sixty-eight pages, Michael Shellenberger outlines how “Americans taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite.” He also discusses how the Twitter Files documents “have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring Americans citizens, often without their knowledge.”
Nor is there any realistic way to shove her offstage for a replacement. The appointed veep switcheroo gambit — shoehorning Gavin Newsom in there and then elevating him as Kamala quits — looks un-sellable. He’s turned California into a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of flash-mob thievery, car-jacking, medical lunacy, and wildfire mismanagement. The videos of California mayhem play on social media 24/7. He’d never get confirmed by Congress.
“If a politician does a ‘favor’ for a crime boss, and the crime boss pays the politician’s wife, it’s still bribery. If the crime boss pays the politician’s crackhead son on account of the favor, it’s still bribery.” — Jeff Childers, the Coffee & Covid blog
Just as a janky investment can turn catastrophically ruinous in the finance world, “Joe Biden” has transmuted from an asset to a liability for the Party of Chaos as we enter the season when things get real. Just weeks ago, the phantasm in the White House could do nothing wrong, despite doing absolutely everything wrong in the thirty-two months he’s haunted the Oval Office. But now, an odor of rot and sulfur trails his every bumbling misstep while his maunderings from the podium set off alarms in party HQ. What to do, indeed…?
As of five minutes ago, “JB” was still pretending to run for reelection, which, of course, was a bamboozle that only the Wokester rank-and-file, hoaxed into an epic psychotic rapture, might swallow. The “president’s” stage managers run a “campaign committee” on next-to-zero contributions, you see, but all it really does is send out millions of algo-concocted, drivel-filled emails five times a day to keep the big pretend going while the DC Blob desperately looks for a way out.
Ever since the fabled Laptop from Hell entered stage left, the un-raptured of the land have been exposed to gales of evidence that “Joe Biden” ran a family influence-peddling racket as veep, and that it likely has something to do with the extravagant mess spawned in Ukraine. The crude and lawless labors of the DOJ and the FBI to cover all that up have been failing lately as a harsh music of blown whistles ominously cleaves the dank night air over the Potomac swamp.
The coming House impeachment inquiry, with its extraordinary subpoena powers, can easily un-confuse these matters as Rep Comer (R-KY) goes after the Biden family bank records. The equation is pretty straightforward: Millions of dollars rattling around the coffers of “Joe” and Jill, and Jim and Frank, and the Biden kids and grand-kids divided by the low six-figure salaries of a senator and vice-president, times, say, the $20 to $50-million inflows of revenue (for no discernible services rendered) from Ukraine, Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Gawd-knows how many other entities arguably hostile to the USA’s interests through Hunter Biden’s multitudinous shell companies. It’s called money-laundering.
Joe Biden has just shuttered more businesses and made it harder for people to earn a living—as well as made criminals out of honest, hard-working Americans. Virtually everything Biden does ruins someone’s business or life.
1. It makes it a crime to sell a personal firearm for more money than one paid for the gun.
2. It makes it a crime for an individual to sell personal firearms “in their original packaging.”
3. With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made it a crime for an American citizen to sell his own personal property—a firearm—at a gun show.
It was one of the largest and most intense attacks against the Second Amendment in modern times. The Neocon Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, called the Tennessee legislature back to Nashville for a special session with the specific intent on coercing its Republican members to pass the most draconian Red Flag gun confiscation law ever proposed.
Lee knew what his GOP colleagues would be subjected to during the special session. He absolutely knew it. In fact, he was counting on it.
Gun-grabber Bill Lee had three months before the special session began to threaten and bribe the GOP majority to pass his Marxist gun control bills. And you know that he used every political trick in the book to get his way. But the Republican legislature held firm. That, in and of itself, demands our respect for these stalwart Tennessee legislators.
But there is much more.
As soon as the special session began, the “Mob Squad”—these are the anti-Second Amendment radical leftists who have zero appreciation or use for our Constitution and Bill of Rights and who are rabid purveyors of mob rule (the Mob Squad also composes the majority of the “woke” agenda, the “green” energy/climate change agenda and the forced vaccination agenda)—descended on Nashville like a plague of locusts. They hassled, harangued and hammered the GOP legislators for the entire session. They behaved like bullies. But that is the way every Mob Squad behaves.
One of the highlights of Mob Squad stupidity and duplicity was when one of the Squad members was interviewed by a reporter and she screamed, “They are trampling our First Amendment rights.” This was after a committee chairman was forced to clear the chamber because of the rude, unruly and obnoxious behavior of the Squad.
When I read the report, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Here is a would-be tyrant doing her best to deny Tennessee citizens of their Second Amendment rights, screaming about how her First Amendment rights were denied. But I doubt that the poor useful idiot ever made the connection.
But it would get worse still: The mainstream media—local, State and national—used their respective bully pulpits to pressure, coerce and intimidate the Republican legislature into submission. The media treated the event like a pack of bloodthirsty wolves feasting on helpless prey.
BUT THEY FAILED!
In the end, not only did the Tennessee legislature refuse to enact Bill Lee’s Marxist Red Flag gun confiscation bill but they did not pass a single gun control bill of any kind.
Pro-Second Amendment freedomists around the country should send the Republican legislators in Tennessee a hearty Thank You.
Tuesday’s tense standoff marked the latest turn in a session Republican Gov. Bill Lee initially organized in response to a shooter opening fire at The Covenant School in Nashville, killing three young children and three adults. Lee had hoped to convince fellow Republicans to pass legislation to limit dangerous people from accessing guns [Red Flag laws], but the proposal never gained enough support. Some Republicans said they didn’t think a session was even needed and tried to adjourn from the outset last Monday.
While we can take great encouragement from the courageous Liberty convictions of the Tennessee State legislature, it is with great angst that we see how our Marxist would-be tyrant and liberty-hating president has signed an Executive Order that took a huge bite out of our Second and Fourth Amendment liberties.
For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied.
The preliminary injunction against federal censorship of social-media users has survived the Biden administration’s appeal and, despite a 10-day hold, will essentially continue. Next stop: the Supreme Court.
The latest ruling, 78 pages long, by a panel of Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, affirmed the core of District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 preliminary order, but the revised order has two big differences. The appellate judges exempted some defendants and narrowed Judge Doughty’s list of prohibited actions to just one modified but broad prohibition. We’ll have to see how that works out, but the court has certainly admonished Biden officials for censoring Americans’ speech by systematically leaning — sometimes very heavily — on the social-media companies.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which represented some of the plaintiffs, commented, “Today’s order should stop that conduct.”
Recall that Judge Doughty’s ruling in the suit filed by Missouri and Louisiana on behalf of its residents, along with several private individuals, including COVID-19 dissident Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. Doughty had agreed that the plaintiffs had shown that the federal government, through repeated contacts with social-media personnel, had perpetrated “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” He likened the Biden administration’s efforts to “an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”
The upshot of the ruling is that when the government “suggests” to Facebook or X that certain posted material is, well, unhelpful, concerning, or even dangerously misleading, it constitutes implicit censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Why? Because some government officials are in a position to punish (through antitrust action, civil-liability rules, or regulation) uncooperative parties. Therefore, even recommendations or pleas to remove or suppress posts necessarily carry a veiled threat. In the present case, the appellate judges write, the threats were sometimes stark naked.
It is well-established in law that what the government may not do directly — say, block expression — it may not do indirectly, such as by pressuring private companies to in effect censor.
The judges’ panel recapped the findings:
For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.
Enter this lawsuit. The Plaintiffs—three doctors, a news website, a healthcare activist, and two states—had posts and stories removed or downgraded by the platforms. Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Plaintiffs maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private communications and legal threats.
The judges pointed out in great detail that the “platforms were apparently eager to stay in the officials’ good graces” and did not just wait for suggestions about stifling dissent. That sounds like the Stockholm syndrome. But their efforts to please their overseers weren’t always enough: “The officials were often unsatisfied. They continued to press the platforms on the topic of misinformation throughout 2021.” A powerful thirst can be hard to quench.
The House returned to session this week after the summer recess and only has until the end of the month — two weeks — to pass the 12 funding bills necessary to avoid a government shutdown.
In lieu of a long-term spending bill, the White House has urged lawmakers to pass a continuing resolution, a stopgap measure which would maintain current funding levels until a larger agreement is reached. In addition to the money needed to keep the government running, President Joe Biden’s $25 billion supplemental spending request for Ukraine also hangs in the balance.
The House Freedom Caucus, the roughly 50-member bloc of Republicans, has voiced strong opposition to a stopgap measure. In August, the group released a list of demands that would be necessary for them to approve the spending bills on the table. Included in the group’s statement from last month — which required the support of 80 percent of its members — is a rejection of “any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Senate Republican leadership have endorsed legislation that ties Ukraine-related assistance with increased disaster relief funding in an emergency spending package.
Last Thursday, Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy was considering attaching the disaster relief to a continuing resolution while omitting aid to Ukraine from the short-term spending bill, setting up a potential showdown with the White House and Senate.
McCarthy has sent mixed signals about his position on Ukraine aid since saying that there would be no “blank check” for Kyiv prior to ascending to the speakership. By deciding to separate Ukraine aid from the stopgap funding bill and reportedly instead tying it to controversial immigration policies, McCarthy has leaned closer to the right flank of his party on this question.
This maneuver may open the door for more debate over funding for Ukraine, though the group is not necessarily in agreement over what precisely “no blank check” means.
A spokesperson for freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), for example, told Responsible Statecraft in an email that the congresswoman does not and never will support any aid package to Ukraine.
Other Republicans who are not formally a part of the Freedom Caucus, have made similar statements. Prior to the midterm elections, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), said that if the GOP were to win the House, “not another penny” would go to Ukraine. And Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has introduced legislation that would cut off all funding to Kyiv.
Others have called for the conditioning of aid. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), one member of the Freedom Caucus who in the past consistently supported unconditional support for Kyiv, has changed his tune in response to the stalled counteroffensive.
“I’ll be blunt, it’s failed,” Harris said at a town hall meeting last month. “I’m not sure it’s winnable anymore.” Asked in an interview following the town hall about what this analysis meant for his support for the next tranche of funding, Harris said, “If there is humanitarian monies, nonmilitary monies, or military monies without an inspector general, I’m not supporting it.”
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