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Space Force General Admits She’d Prioritize Gender Surgery Access Over Qualified Officers

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2023

Space Force veteran Lt. Col Matt Lohmeier — who was relieved of command after he said on a conservative podcast that Marxism was infiltrating the U.S. military — argued in a tweet that Burt had actually done what he was fired for doing.

“I was once fired from command in the @SpaceForceDoD for allegedly ‘being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity.’ That allegation was totally false,” he said. “Lt. Gen. Burt here demonstrates what being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity really looks like.”

This person is in command of nukes floating over your head. Feeling safer?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/space-force-general-admits-shed-prioritize-gender-surgery-access-over-qualified-officers

By  Virginia Kruta

United States Space Force Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt admitted during a recent Department of Defense (DoD) LGBTQ+ PRIDE event that she would allow access to “gender-affirming care” to take priority over qualifications when assigning officers.

Burt referenced several states that have passed laws banning transgender surgeries — and in some cases, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — for minors, and said that while she would normally consider job performance and qualifications before selecting officers for certain jobs, she had to also consider whether her troops and their families would feel safe in those assignments.

“Transformational cultural change requires leadership from the top, and we do not have time to wait,” Burt began. “Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level. That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.”

“When I look at potential candidates, say for Squadron command, I strive to match the right person to the right job,” she continued, adding, “I consider their job performance and relevant experience first. However, I also look at their personal circumstances, and their family is also an important factor. If a good match for a job does not feel safe being themselves and performing at their highest potential at a given location, or if their family could be denied critical health care due to the laws in that state, I am compelled to consider a different candidate, perhaps less qualified.”

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Inflation

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

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Licensing Laws Deepen South Africa’s Electricity Crisis | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

The Electricity Regulation Act of 2006 is a textbook example of licensing laws that ultimately serve incumbents at the expense of not only prospective competitors but also customers who can benefit from innovations made by these competitors. In the case of South Africa’s electricity crisis, licensing laws are making South Africa’s electricity crisis unnecessarily more difficult to solve because NERSA has the last word on who can compete and how competitors can compete in the electricity market.

https://mises.org/wire/licensing-laws-deepen-south-africas-electricity-crisis

Since 2007, South Africa has been experiencing an electricity crisis. Eskom (a South African state-owned company) cannot produce enough electricity to meet increasing demand, so Eskom has implemented rolling blackouts, which is also called “load shedding” by the South African government. Rolling blackouts involve Eskom periodically and intentionally stopping the delivery of electricity to certain parts of South Africa to avoid a total blackout.

The severity of rolling blackouts increases as Eskom’s capacity to produce electricity decreases, and the severity of the rolling blackouts are categorized into stages—where “stage 1” is the least severe and “stage 8” is the most severe for now. Energy experts and even government officials have suggested solutions but to no avail because the South African government ignores them.

In this piece, I argue two points. First, I argue that South Africa’s electricity licensing laws need to be eliminated or amended. Second, I argue that those same licensing laws prevent effective and affordable electricity supply solutions from being implemented, deepening South Africa’s electricity crisis.

Here are some facts about South Africa’s electricity crisis. According to data from Statistics South Africa, Eskom’s yearly average electricity production share is 94 percent, and South Africa’s electricity production decreased by 11 percent while Eskom’s electricity production decreased by 18 percent since the beginning of the rolling blackouts in 2007.

The decrease in South Africa’s electricity production is attributed to Eskom’s aging infrastructure and corruption. According to data from EskomSePush, South Africa experienced 311 days (over seven thousand hours) of rolling blackouts in 2022. Rolling blackouts have negatively affected businesses and livelihoods to the point where businesses have experienced significant decreases in profits and also had to cut jobs as a consequence. On the lighter side—and I say this sarcastically—the rolling blackouts have assisted South Africa in beating its climate goals, since less production in electricity leads to less emissions of greenhouse gasses.

Eskom’s domination in South Africa’s electricity market is no accident. Legislation has given Eskom unique privileges and protection from outside competition ever since its inception in 1922. Anton Eberhard writes:

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Britain Poses as Uncle Sam’s War Enforcer in Return for Much-Needed Trade Deal

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

Laughably, Biden referred to his meeting with Sunak as akin to the first encounter between Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the White House to plan the D-Day invasion of Europe. The arrogance and delusional distortion of history are astounding.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/06/11/britain-poses-as-uncle-sam-war-enforcer-in-return-for-much-needed-trade-deal/

Finian Cunningham

Reality check: warmongering Britain and the U.S. are leading the world to the abyss.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to Washington last week cap-in-hand hawking a nefarious deal. Post-Brexit Britain is seeking a much-coveted bilateral trade pact with the United States, and to avail of Uncle Sam’s favor the British are offering to step up its role as provocateur-in-chief in the proxy war against Russia.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Sunak hailed the usual platitudes about their nations’ “special relationship” during the British premier’s two-day trip to Washington. Sunak added a new unctuous epithet, referring to the U.S. and Britain as the world’s “indispensable alliance”.

Topping their agenda in the White House summit was the conflict in Ukraine, Russia, China and trade issues.

Biden and Sunak unveiled an “Atlantic Declaration” promising closer cooperation on economics, security, military and artificial intelligence between the United States and Britain.

But crucially missing from the U.S. side was any concrete commitment to a new bilateral trade deal. When Britain left the European Union in 2020, the historic departure from that trade bloc was calculatedly made with the aspiration of securing an alternative special trading arrangement with the United States.

The Conservative government made the securing of a U.S.-UK trade pact a commitment to British voters at the last general election in 2019. Nearly four years on, however, London is no closer to tying itself to the American raft after cutting itself loose from the EU. That drifting situation has caused unprecedented economic and political turmoil in Britain.

Sunak is the third British prime minister that Biden has had dealings with as president, reflecting the unstable politics in Britain provoked by its post-Brexit tribulations.

Securing a trade agreement with the United States is a priority need for London. As Washington under the Biden administration adopts more protectionist economic policies, Britain is keen to obtain concessions for accessing the American economy.

This fraught juncture is what makes London’s role as Washington’s global henchman more dangerous than usual. In order to win economic favors, Britain is more disposed than ever to escalate U.S. imperial hostilities toward Russia and China. Those hostilities are impelled by Washington’s own imperial decline as the once presumed “sole superpower” and “global hegemon”.

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Why JFK Was Deemed a Threat to National Security

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

What would have happened if Kennedy had lived? The national-security establishment would have immediately become irrelevant and immaterial. They would have been left twiddling their thumbs, with nothing to do. Remember, after all, that the supposed threat from the Russian Reds was why the federal government was converted to a national-security state in the first place. Peaceful coexistence with the communist world would have meant no more justification for a national-security state. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would have been dismantled and America’s founding system of a limited-government republic would have been restored.

Why JFK Was Deemed a Threat to National Security

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Three days ago — June 10 — was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile. 

For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security state. 

The difference was day and night.

With a limited-government republic, there was openness and transparency in governmental operations. Moreover, there was only a relatively small, basic military force. No Pentagon, no vast military-industrial complex, no CIA, no NSA, and no empire of foreign military bases. Governmental powers were limited and tightly constrained. No power to assassinate, kidnap, torture, or indefinitely detain people. No power to initiate coups or regime-change operations in foreign countries. No power of mass secret surveillance. 

With a national-security state, dark-side secrecy became everything. “National security” became the two most important words in the American political lexicon. A large, permanent military establishment, along with the CIA and the NSA, came into existence. This vast national-security establishment vested itself with omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including assassination, torture, coups, secret surveillance, kidnapping, and indefinite detention. It established a vast empire of military bases, both foreign and domestic, and initiated a program of regime change in foreign nations. Foreign wars in faraway lands, such as Korea and Vietnam, became the norm.

The Cold War was actually one great big racket, one that became a cash cow for the vast military-intelligence complex and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. This enormous racket was justified under the rubric of keeping America safe from a supposed vast communist conspiracy that supposedly was based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia!

There was no possibility whatsoever of a peaceful resolution of the forever war between the United States and Russia, U.S. oficials said. There could never be peaceful coexistence, they maintained. The war against the Russian Reds, U.S. national-security officials held, was a war to the death. That was why the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Kennedy that the United States initiate a surprise nuclear attack against the Russians, a recommendation that Kennedy indignantly rejected.

Having achieved a “breakthrough” after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had decided that he was going to lead America in an entirely different direction from that of the national-security establishment. In his Peace Speech, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet against what had now become his enemy — the national-security establishment. Kennedy essentially declared an end to the Cold War racket and announced that henceforth Russia and the United States would live in peaceful coexistence. He declared an end to to the extreme anti-Russia hostility that the national-security establishment had inculcated in the American people, and he even praised the Soviet Union.

The very next night — June 11 — Kennedy delivered a nation-wide speech expressing support for the civil-rights movement, which the national-security establishment was convinced was controlled by the Russian Reds. That’s why the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King and used blackmail with the aim of inducing him to commit suicide.

Kennedy then followed up his words with actions.

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Unmasking The CDC’s Medical CIA

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/unmasking-cdcs-medical-cia

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by Lloyd Billingsley via American Greatness,

The swampy origins and foreign interests of the Epidemic Intelligence Services of the CDC need to be exposed…

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is departing at the end of June and Joe Biden has tapped former North Carolina health boss Dr. Mandy Cohen to replace her. More important than the identity of the CDC director is what goes on behind the scenes, and hints have been emerging. 

In April of 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021 White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier was stepping down.

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky neglected to mention Messonnier’s series of telebriefings in early 2020, conducted on January 17, January 24, January 29, January 30, February 3, February 5, February 12, February 25, and March 10.

In these sessions, not shown to the public, Messonnier warned that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from the “Wuhan market” and the highly contagious new virus would “gain a foothold” in the United States. According to Messonnier, many people would be infected, and there was “no immunity.” Some reporters were curious about people traveling to the United States from Wuhan.

“That’s something I’m not at liberty to talk about today,” Messonnier said in the February 5 briefing, without revealing why that was so, or who was laying down the rules. On January 24, reporters who asked about China were told, “CDC has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China.” There was information “from China” but Messonnier wasn’t giving it out.

“I think we should be clear to compliment the Chinese,” Messonnier said, “on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” And so on, a veritable recitation of China’s talking points, but there was more to it.

In May of 2021, Walensky also failed to mention that “true hero” Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.

“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.”

In practice, as Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS functions as a “medical CIA,” a support network for the CDC in government, academia, and media. For example, EIS veteran Lawrence Altman became a medical writer for the New York Times and in 2010 rendered a worshipful account of the intelligence service.

In 1995, after completing her residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Nancy Messonnier went straight into the EIS. She shows up in the 2013 EIS conference report as a co-author of two studies on vaccine effectiveness, one in Burkina Faso and one in Washington, “among adolescents vaccinated with acellular pertussis vaccines.”

Messonnier’s Wikipedia profile shows the EIS officer in a jacket emblazoned with medals. According to the site, she was born Nancy Ellen Rosenstein, sister of Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who launched the investigation of President Trump for allegedly colluding with Russia. 

Messonnier’s connection to Rosenstein, and her experience with the EIS, did not emerge at the outset of 2020. By October, the EIS did briefly expose itself. 

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Examing the Foreign Policy Establishment’s ‘British Connection’

Posted by M. C. on June 14, 2023

Of course, apart from world encompassing imperialist frameworks and Russophobia, the British also introduced their American counterparts to the central banking and government propaganda apparatuses necessary to expanding Washington’s cheaply won contiguous land empire of the nineteenth century abroad in the twentieth. Having adopted these methods, Washington could, when Britain’s strength was finally exhausted, “Pick up the torch of empire from our [Britain’s] still cooling fingers.”8

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/examing-the-foreign-policy-establishments-british-connection/

by Joseph Solis-Mullen

cecil rhodes

In 1877, before he had made his fortune via the founding of De Beers Consolidated Mines and the British South Africa Company, the imperialist par excellence Cecil Rhodes had dictated a part of his will thusly: “[To make provision] for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world.” This was to include, “The ultimate recovery of the United States of America.”1

This grandiose vision was pragmatically tempered in the final version of his will (1902), which instead set up an eponymous scholarship, the stated intention of which was to, “promote unity among English speaking nations.” Thus was the Rhodes Scholarship, which sees a handful of America’s future leaders shipped off to Oxford each year, conceived of and brought into being.2

Just looking over a list of some of those selected, the influence of British thinking on American grand strategy in the century that followed becomes all too explicable: From Stanley Hornbeck, special advisor to FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the longest serving Secretary of State in U.S. history, to J. William Fullbright, senator and longest tenured Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1945-1974), to JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Walt Rostow, LBJ’s National Security Advisor: these men were among the most influential hands steering U.S. foreign policy from the 1930s onward.

Later architects of U.S. policy to pass through Oxford via the program include Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of Policy Planning for George W. Bush (2001-2003), Joseph Nye, chair of the National Intelligence Council and Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton3 (1993-1995), Strobe Talbot, Deputy Secretary of State and lead architect of Clinton’s Russia and NATO expansion policies (1994-2001), Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor (2013-2017), Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense under Obama (2015-2017), and arguably the worst U.S. Ambassador to Russia ever, Michael McFaul (2012-2014).

As an aside, given the catastrophic performance of these later figures it is worth noting that apart from absorbing British principles of imperial strategy—the work of the Oxonian Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) clearly having influenced that of the foundational American realist Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943), who in turn greatly influenced John Foster Dulles (Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1953-1959)—American policy architects seem to have also imbibed the abiding British suspicion of the Russians, as well as their tactics for dealing with the “barbarians,” as the aforementioned ex-Ambassador McFaul described them on Twitter a week ago.

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It’s Taxing

Posted by M. C. on June 13, 2023

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“Our Trophies”: Russia Shows Off Captured Leopard Tank, Bradley Vehicles – With Engines Still Running

Posted by M. C. on June 13, 2023

But the US says it will not be deterred in its commitment to keep supplying miliary hardware to Ukraine. US state-backed Voice of America reported Monday, “The United States is providing up to $325 million in additional military aid for Ukraine, a U.S. defense official tells VOA.”

More and more media outlets throughout the morning have confirmed the new Russian MoD footage as authentic:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/our-trophies-russia-shows-captured-leopard-tank-bradley-vehicles-engines-still-running

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) says its troops have captured NATO-supplied armor in the Zaporizhia region, some of which appear to have been hastily abandoned by fleeing Ukrainian soldiers.

The MoD released footage of Russian troops inspecting a German-made Leopard 2 main battle tank and US-produced Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which are said to be still intact, some with engines still running. The Russian military declared that the Western-supplied heavy armored vehicles are “our trophies“. WATCH the official Russian military footage below:

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To Reach Peace, Teach Peace

Posted by M. C. on June 13, 2023

The problem is not limited to the laity. A Catholic priest once told me that in seminary he spent exactly one afternoon learning about “Just War,” one afternoon in seven years, and he never learned anything about nonviolence. Some priests think nonviolence is a Quaker thing or a “60s” thing or a sign of the feminization of the Church.

To Reach Peace, Teach Peace

By Ellen Finnigan

This is the story behind my new class Bread Alone: A Contemplative Study of The Hunger Games for Christians, how it came to be, and why Christian parents might want to enroll in it, alongside their teenage children, this summer.

In The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace (1993), the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote: “An essential component of a spirituality for peacemaking is an ethic for dealing with conflict in a sinful world. The Christian tradition possesses two ways to address conflict: nonviolence and just war…Throughout history there has been a shifting relation between the two streams of the tradition which always remain in tension.”

If there is any tension between these two streams of the tradition, it exists only in the most erudite circles of the Church, in my opinion. While teaching ancient literature to high school freshmen at a classical Catholic school for ten years, I discussed themes of war, violence, and murder with my students on a weekly basis: Their ideas, perspectives, and assumptions could hardly be distinguished from those of the most worldly secular humanists. It wasn’t their fault: There was no “tension” in their minds about the two traditions because they didn’t know anything about them.

The problem is not limited to kids. Most adults cannot tell you the criteria of the “Just War” doctrine. Some Catholics can tell you that such a doctrine exists — but that’s it. Back when the The Hunger Games films were first released, I noticed something curious about Catholic reviews (which I wrote about at LRC here). To summarize: Catholic film critics “saw very little about the central human problem of war in this wildly popular film that was, in the words of its Roman Catholic author, written about war, and after a decade of living under a government that is perpetually waging war.” It was a massive blindspot.

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