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Doug Casey on How Governments Use Global Crises to Take More Control

Posted by M. C. on April 1, 2023

An internationally accepted vax certificate will amount to a world government passport. It will probably be tied in with a Social Credit rating such as the one used by China. Naturally, that will be linked to everyone’s digital currency account with the central bank.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-how-governments-use-global-crises-to-take-more-control/

by Doug Casey

International Man: Throughout history, governments have used crises—real or imagined—to eliminate freedoms, expand the power of the State, and justify all sorts of things the populace would never accept in normal times.

After World War II, Winston Churchill famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.

This was when he and other leaders came together to form the United Nations, which they probably could not have created without the crisis of WWII.

Ever since, it seems that each new supposed crisis causes a further centralization of global power.

The War on (Some) Drugs, the War on Terror, the COVID hysteria, and the so-called climate crisis have all ratcheted up the centralization of power on a global scale.

What do you make of this trend?

Doug Casey: It makes sense that Rahm Emanuel, a sleazy Obama apparatchik, would have stolen the phrase from Churchill. But the statement is quite correct, regardless of the source. Government lives on crisis. As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State,” and there’s no crisis like a war. But any kind of crisis can work.

Whenever you have a crisis—whether it’s a military, political, economic, financial, or social crisis—the mob calls for strong leaders to kiss it and make it better.

This plays perfectly into the hands of the kind of people who work for the State. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a psychological flaw in humans, stemming from the fact that we’re pack animals.

Pack animals want leaders.

I’m not sure how we solve this problem other than delegitimizing the idea of the State and defanging it as much as possible. And stop lauding, even apotheosizing, its employees. But as long as the State exists, its basic impetus is to seek out crises. Crises benefit the State as an institution but also the people who work for it.

International Man: The COVID hysteria took the cynical concept of “never let a crisis go to waste” to a whole different level. Never before had the edicts of an unaccountable global institution like the World Health Organization (WHO) affected so many people in such drastic ways.

It seems the average person not only has to worry about local and federal bureaucrats affecting their well-being but also global ones.

What’s your take on this?

Doug Casey: Over the last century, the reach of the State has moved from a local, to a national, to now an international level. This is what the concept of globalism is all about.

The good news is that the bigger and more complex anything gets—including the movement towards globalism—the more inefficient, corrupt, and unwieldy it becomes. So perhaps the idea of globalism is getting big enough to self-destruct.

In the meantime, some of globalism’s and the State’s most effective minions are NGOs (non-governmental organizations). They are generally supported by private giving, often in estate planning. When people die, they often want to do something for the benefit of humanity. That’s an understandable emotion, although charity generally causes at least as many problems as it cures. I explain that in a previous conversation. Rich people particularly want to virtue signal since today’s society infuses them with guilt for their money. That, plus they naturally want shelter from taxes. So they give money to all kinds of NGOs. There are many thousands of them.

NGOs are almost universally collectivist and Statist in philosophy and have strong political agendas, although they disguise overtly political objectives with “feel-good” rhetoric. Who could possibly be against agitating for world peace or fighting poverty? However, many amount to scams, few accomplish anything meaningful, and they almost all work closely with the government. Few of them produce anything but commercials, lobbying campaigns, and fat incomes for their insiders.

Critical thinkers can help pull the rug out from under NGOs by never giving them a penny and challenging their actions.

Speaking of globalism, NGOs, and a trend toward world government, I have to mention that vaccine passports are a definite step in that direction. There will undoubtedly be a UN organization formed to standardize vax passports because, right now, there is a myriad of vaccine passports issued by various governments on different criteria in different formats.

An internationally accepted vax certificate will amount to a world government passport. It will probably be tied in with a Social Credit rating such as the one used by China. Naturally, that will be linked to everyone’s digital currency account with the central bank. It will become an international ID document in much the same way that driver’s licenses are effectively internal passports within the US. You’ll be nobody, and do nothing, without it.

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Perpetual Debt, As A Way of Life, Is Coming To An End

Posted by M. C. on April 1, 2023

https://rumble.com/v2fnl62-perpetual-debt-as-a-way-of-life-is-coming-to-an-end.html

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Dailywire Article-UN: Risk Of Nuclear War At Record High. Please Engage In Peace Talks, Russia And Ukraine.

Posted by M. C. on April 1, 2023

https://www.dailywire.com/news/un-risk-of-nuclear-war-at-record-high-please-engage-in-peace-talks-russia-and-ukraine

By  Tim Meads

Ukraine-Russia Bomb
(OLGA Zhukovskaya via Getty Images)

Well, folks, don’t look now, but the “risk of a nuclear weapon being used is currently higher than at any time since the depths of the cold war,” according to the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu.

The war in Ukraine — obviously — is what is driving that risk. Based on reports made during the UN’s security council on Friday, that war isn’t ending any time soon — as if there were any doubt of that. Americans should know it is not going to end any time soon, our commander-in-chief has said that our tax dollars and equipment will be supporting Ukraine in its battle against Russia for “as long as it takes” — whatever that means. The Swamp wants this war to continue — and so it will.

While Biden has been banging the war drums, Putin has been chatting with its neighbors and new BFF Belarus. Now, reports indicate that Russia will be stationing non-strategic nuclear weapons within Belarus territory. According to the UN, those will be in place for aerial use by July.

For its part, Russia denies such accusations.

“We are pursuing cooperation with Belarus without violating obligations,” Russian ambassador and Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia said on Friday. “We are not transferring nuclear weapons. We are talking about the retrofitting of airplanes and training teams in the construction of a storage facility on the territory of Belarus.”

Yet he did make sure to note that Russia would respond to any “provocative measures” as it saw fit, while adding, “A nuclear war cannot be won.”

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Racing to Multipolarity – The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on April 1, 2023

The sanctions on Russia have had the unintended consequence of more firmly coupling Russia and China, a geopolitical shift away from unipolarity.

Unintended consequences seems to be a US specialty.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/racing-to-multipolarity/

Ted Snider

TOPSHOT-RUSSIA-CHINA-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY

(Photo by SERGEI KARPUKHIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)

Ted Snider

Mar 27, 202312:00 PM

In a quest to maintain its hegemony in a unipolar world, American foreign policy strategy has sought to weaken a Russia that it sees as an “acute threat” and to confront and contain a China that it sees as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”

The immediate challenge is Russia, the theory goes, but the long-term challenge is China. It is not strategically optimal to fight both superpowers at once. Russia has to be weakened so China can be confronted in its challenge to the U.S.-led unipolar world.

The attempt to weaken Russia in the war in Ukraine, though, may be having the ironic effect of strengthening China’s role in an emerging multipolar world.

An unprecedented sanctions regime was intended to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and to prevent it from executing that invasion. It has not only failed to accomplish that goal; it also has had the unintended consequence of pushing Russia closer to China. Sealing Russia off from western markets forced Russia to look east to China, India, the Eurasian community, and a global community of sanctioned nations. So the sanctions regime has in fact hastened the advent of multipolarity, as well as strengthened China’s position abroad.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are “in constant communication.” And on March 20, Xi arrived in Russia for talks that are aimed, in part, to “reaffirm the special nature of the Russia-China partnership.”

On December 13, Xi promised that China “will work with Russia to extend strong mutual support on issues concerning each other’s core interests, and deepen practical cooperation in trade, agriculture, connectivity and other areas.” A week later, Xi said that China is “ready to build up strategic cooperation with Russia, providing each other with development opportunities and remaining global partners for the benefit of our countries…” The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that “Any attempt to stop China and Russia from marching forward is doomed to fail” and that “China and Russia will deepen exchanges at all levels, and promote China-Russia relations and cooperation in all areas to a higher level…”

Russian-Chinese trade has increased dramatically. In his recent address to the Federal Assembly, Putin said that “the Russian economy has embarked on a new growth cycle. Experts believe that it will rely on a fundamentally new model and structure. New, promising global markets, including the Asia-Pacific, are taking precedence…” He promised that Russia “will expand promising foreign economic ties and build new logistics corridors. … This will, in part, allow us to considerably expand our ties with Southeast Asian markets.”

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Should Public Schools Ban “Ruby Bridges”? – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on April 1, 2023

Therefore, why not do with education what our ancestors did with religion? Why not separate school and state, just as they separated church and state? In other words, let’s throw the state out of school. End compulsory-attendance laws and school taxes. Sell off the school buildings. End state involvement in education entirely, just as our ancestors did with religion.

https://www.fff.org/2023/03/30/should-public-schools-ban-ruby-bridges/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

A public school in Florida has banned the showing of a Disney movie entitled Ruby Bridges. The movie depicts the horrific ordeal of a 6-year-old Black girl named Ruby Bridges when she integrated public schools in New Orleans in 1960. 

The film has long been shown in Florida public schools as a way to teach children about Black experiences in the South. However, after an outraged parent filed a complaint against the showing of the film, it was banned at a Northshore Elementary School in Pinellas County, Florida. The mother felt that the use of racial slurs in the movie and scenes of white people threatening Ruby “might result in students learning that white people hate Black people.”

Not surprisingly, the matter has turned into a huge controversy, with both sides digging in. One side is saying that the ban is part of a nationwide trend to ban material in public schools that tells the truth about the Black experience. The other side is saying that children shouldn’t be subjected to what they consider are slanted views on race.

How should the controversy be resolved? Actually, there is no way to resolve the controversy in a way that will make everyone happy. That’s because of the system of public schools itself. 

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, public schools are government schools. The state owns and operates them. Children are there by compulsion. That’s what mandatory-attendance laws are all about. Funding is also by coercion. That’s what school taxes are all about.

Given such, which side should win? Regardless of one’s answer to that question, inevitably it will be the politically stronger group that prevails, which usually means the majority. Even if that group loses in the short term, it will run a slate of school-board candidates in the next election and win the battle in the long run. One side or another will be very unhappy with the outcome.

That’s what happens when you have a state educational system. What gets taught inevitably become politicized. The majority view prevails over the minority view. The minority is expected to accept the will of the majority.

The same thing would happen, of course, if the state ran the churches. There would be heated battles, for example, on whether a particular public church should take the Catholic position on communion or the Protestant position on communion. The side that has the most voters would likely be the winner. The losing side would just have to put up with it. 

Fortunately, our ancestors understood the wisdom of separating church and state, which depoliticized religious issues. Today, people who favor the Catholic position on communion (as well as other Catholic principles) attend Catholic church. Those who favor Protestant positions attend Protestant churches. Everyone is happy. While there might be intellectual disputes over the respective positions, even within a church itself, they rarely reach the level of nasty discourse that characterizes the disputes in state schools. That’s because people are free to simply vote with their feet and go to another church.

Therefore, why not do with education what our ancestors did with religion? Why not separate school and state, just as they separated church and state? In other words, let’s throw the state out of school. End compulsory-attendance laws and school taxes. Sell off the school buildings. End state involvement in education entirely, just as our ancestors did with religion.

See the rest here

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This Women’s History Month, Celebrate the Resolve of Jeannette Rankin – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2023

“As expected, Jeannette Rankin remained a staunch advocate for peace until her death at the age of 92 in 1973. At a sp(r)y 87 years old she led her group, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, on an anti-Vietnam War march in Washington DC holding her banner, “End the war in Vietnam and social crisis at home!””

https://original.antiwar.com/Derek_Wheeler/2023/03/30/this-womens-history-month-celebrate-the-resolve-of-jeannette-rankin/

by Derek Wheeler

Do we have a shortage of female heroes in this country? Are virtuous women that scarce? Or is it simply that Women’s History Month, by eliminating women from the conversation who don’t fit the narrative of the State Department and the Pentagon, failed to achieve its goal? Why would Secretary of State Antony Blinken post his admiration for a group of women who have killed (estimating conservatively) millions of people? Why wouldn’t he instead promote women like Jeannette Rankin and the ideas for which she stood? Probably because she would have defied and vehemently opposed every foreign policy decision he’s ever made.

Jeannette Rankin is a true American hero who lived her life based on the principles of pacifism. Although I may not agree with her views on social welfare, she was clearly sincere in her motives, and she was unwavering in her antiwar stance and belief that everyone has a right to vote in a democracy.

By 1910, a thirty-year old Rankin had joined the suffrage movement, lobbying for legislation to give women a say in how they’re governed by giving them a vote. In 1914 her and other suffragettes were successful in her home state of Montana. Unfortunately, a few months prior to this success, the Great War had broken out in Europe, and she knew that the United States was at risk of becoming entangled in the conflict.

She ran for Congress (with the help of funding from her brother, Wellington) on a platform of nationwide suffrage, protection of children, and neutrality in the European war. It was these policies that propelled her to Washington as the first ever female member of Congress. This was so unprecedented, the establishment had no idea how to proceed. While they debated on whether or not it was appropriate to admit a woman into legislature, President Woodrow Wilson began to beat the war drums.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Citing the Zimmermann Telegram – a leaked diplomatic cable sent by Germany to Mexico proposing a military alliance against the United States – the president said:

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

[Editor’s Note: This article previously mentioned the sinking of the RMS Lusitania as the proximate cause of the U.S. declaration of war. This was incorrect. We apologize for the oversight.]

(How many times are we supposed to allow them to take us to war in order to make democracy safe?)

Jeannette Rankin didn’t buy it. 

See the rest here

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Tablet’s Grand Opus on the Anti-Disinformation Complex

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2023

Interview with Jacob Siegel, author of “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century”

More unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender.

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/tablets-grand-opus-on-the-anti-disinformation?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Matt Taibbi

Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

Siegel threads together all the disparate strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a first great test case, the rise of a public-private “counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of things like elections, amid many other things.

He concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. 

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“NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence”

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2023

Professor Richard Sakwa

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Here’s How We Protect U.S. Troops in Syria… | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2023

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/heres-how-we-protect-u-s-troops-in-syria/

by Ron Paul

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Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on U.S. troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a U.S. base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a U.S. counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the U.S. retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of U.S. sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 U.S. troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One U.S. contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans.

What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued U.S. occupation of Syria and Iraq.

Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China. U.S. policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s. U.S. switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace.

Then the U.S. invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate.

So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying—Washington’s modus operandi—actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the U.S. has resisted for years: peace in the region. Should we be surprised that the continued U.S. occupation is not welcome in the Middle East?

The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for U.S. multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the U.S. is so unpopular in the Middle East?

How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine that Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

The end of the U.S. occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the U.S. military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the U.S. military cannot meet its recruitment goals?

Here’s an easy way to protect U.S. forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!

This article was originally featured at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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The Twitter Files Are Bearing Fruit — RFK, Jr. Is Doing Something About It

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2023

https://rumble.com/v2fcuby-the-twitter-files-are-bearing-fruit-rfk-jr.-is-doing-something-about-it.html

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