Undersecretary of State George W. Ball in the White House Cabinet Room, 1966. / Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.
This is an account of another American who, like Daniel Ellsberg, did the right thing at the right time in the middle of a war. But unlike Ellsberg’s, his act of courage did not make the headlines, and he suffered little for it. His name is George W. Ball. He was a Midwestern lawyer who did not politically support John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign and did not serve bravely or endure violence during World War II. But he had played a key role in the American postwar rebuilding of Europe and was appointed early in 1961 as an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy Administration. His main task was to deal with international economic and agricultural affairs.
Ball had directed the American postwar bombing survey in London at the end of the war. He understood, as the survey had shown, that the intense daytime bombing of German cities had not destroyed morale, as had been assumed, but had increased citizen support for the Nazi regime—and perhaps extended the duration of the war. Ball would later be the only senior Kennedy Administration official who directly warned the president of the dangers of committing American soldiers to the Vietnam War, as had been recommended by his generals. In his 2000 book Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, A.J. Langguth, who covered the war for the New York Times, recounted Ball’s gutsy warning in late 1961 to the president: “If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.”
In a 1982 memoir, Ball recalled Kennedy’s irritated response: “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Back in his office, Ball told an aide, “We’re heading hell-bent into a mess and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Either everybody else is crazy or I am.”…
I don’t subscribe to Hersch’s site so you can’t see the rest. That may change.
“In household consumption, “Policy measures – such as renewable support schemes, grants and preferential loans for housing retrofits and heat pump installations, alongside campaigns to encourage behavioural change – all played a part in moderating gas demand,” according to the analysts.”
Paid for with printed Euros? When inflation accelerates even more maybe homeowners can sell the heat pumps.
According to the IEA’s quarterly gas market report, natural gas consumption in OECD Europe saw its steepest decline in history last year.
The IEA said the estimated 13% drop in demand was driven by changes in the energy mix, economic activity, weather, and consumer behavior.
It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the decline will be permanent.
Europe’s natural gas demand fell by the most on record last year, with the decline equivalent to the gas volumes required to supply more than 40 million homes, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a commentary on Tuesday.
Natural gas consumption in OECD Europe fell by an estimated 13% in 2022, its steepest decline in absolute terms in history, IEA said in its quarterly gas report at the end of February. Demand in Europe fell amid mild winter weather and demand reduction in industry due to high prices.
Significant changes in the energy mix, economic activity, weather, and consumer behavior were responsible for the dramatic shift in natural gas consumption in Europe last year, IEA’s analysts Peter Zeniewski, Gergely Molnar, and Paul Hugues wrote in the commentary.
Record additions of solar and wind power helped lower gas demand, but record-high gas prices in the summer of 2022 also led to a lot of industry curtailments and lower consumption by industries and businesses, according to the IEA.
Yet, the extent to which the high prices will lead to permanent reductions in demand in gas-intensive industrial sectors remains unclear, the IEA’s analysts say.
“Still further back in history, Benjamin Rush—one of the founding fathers of the United States and the man officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the “father of American psychiatry”—made early contributions to the weaponization of psychiatry by inventing a number of mental disorders to pathologize dissent. The most notable of these made-up disorders was “anarchia,” a type of madness Rush defined as “an excess of the passion for liberty,” which “could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” and “threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States.”
“Still further back in history, Benjamin Rush—one of the founding fathers of the United States and the man officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the “father of American psychiatry”—made early contributions to the weaponization of psychiatry by inventing a number of mental disorders to pathologize dissent. The most notable of these made-up disorders was “anarchia,” a type of madness Rush defined as “an excess of the passion for liberty,” which “could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” and “threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States.”
It is telling that one of the considered ‘founders’ of this country, one who was recognized as the Father of American psychiatry, one who signed the Declaration of Independence, and one of the ‘leaders’ in the ‘ratification’ of the Constitution, did not want anyone to have any “excess of passion for liberty.” That is real rule-negation anarchy, as evidenced in his mental disorder description he called “anarchia.” If that is not a complete, total, and ludicrous contradiction, nothing is. But then, he is just stating the obvious truth, that was and is, that all people should be ruled, and not take it upon themselves to seek too much freedom. Of course, that was the intent of the Constitutional Convention in the first place, so none should have been surprised. The talk of freedom for all people, was just that; political talk, lies, and doublespeak.
And how did this ‘founder’ treat (prescribe) for those who wanted “too” much freedom? He chose darkness, solitary confinement, standing erect for days at a time, sleep deprivation, total bodily immobilization, and other torture techniques. This led to one or more of his apprentices and colleagues to continue and expand his heinous techniques, including Samuel Cartwright’s invention of the idiotic ‘disorder’ he named “drapetomania, or the disease causing negroes (slaves) to run away.” This is the essence of the American system today, with current ‘prescriptions’ being to censor speech, eradicate dissent, shame disobedience by using division, create concentration camps for non-compliance with government orders, and to destroy any ability to voice opinion against the State.
The drive of American rule and politics, and of this Fascist ‘republic,’ has always been to create and enforce obedience by the entirety of the population to all State mandates, illegal laws, and immoral demands. In order to achieve such a heinous coup, the first step was to build a ‘free’ system of ‘public’ (government) schooling to indoctrinate and dumb down society, to build fake ‘patriotism,’ by promoting love of State, (idiocy) to steal most all assets under the guise of creating ‘equality,’ to control all aspects of every part of life, and then to create constant fear so that the State would forever be the savior. All this was allowed voluntarily by the vast majority of this now defunct and totalitarian State called ‘America.’
Blind obedience in my opinion, is not a natural state of humanity, although it seems so at times.
The new approach has “balanced that tension very well between let’s make sure we have what we need for national security access to space and, as best we can, help to foster and take advantage of growth in the commercial market,” Thompson said.
The one thing we can count on is a universe size opportunity for the right people to pocket your taxes while making no one but themselves safer.
Ukraine’s use of commercial satellites to help repel the Russian invasion has bolstered the U.S. Space Force’s interest in exploiting the capabilities of the private sector to develop new technologies for fighting a war in space.
But the possible reliance on private companies, and the revolution in technology that has made satellites smaller and more powerful, is forcing the Defense Department to wrestle with difficult questions about what to do if those privately owned satellites are targeted by an adversary.
White House and Pentagon officials have been trying to determine what the policy should be since a top Russian official said in October that Russia could target the growing fleet of commercial satellites if they are used to help Ukraine.
Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for nonproliferation and arms, called the growth of privately operated satellites “an extremely dangerous trend that goes beyond the harmless use of outer-space technologies and has become apparent during the latest developments in Ukraine.”
He warned that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”
In response, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated earlier comments from her counterpart at the Pentagon that “any attack on U.S. infrastructure will be met with a response, as you’ve heard from my colleague, in a time and manner of our choosing.”
But what that response will be is unknown, as officials from a number of agencies try to lay out a policy framework on how to react if a commercial company is targeted.
In a recent interview, Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s vice chief of operations, said that while expanding the partnership with the commercial space industry is one of his top priorities, it has also led to a host of unanswered questions.
“The Ukraine conflict has brought it to the forefront,” he said. “First, commercial companies are thinking very clearly and carefully about, can we be involved? Should we be involved? What are the implications of being involved? … And on our side, it’s exactly the same thing. Should we depend on commercial services? Where can we depend on commercial services?”
The Pentagon has long relied on the private sector, he said. But the proliferation of small satellites has created a more resilient system that has provided real-time imagery of the Ukraine battlefield from space, allowing nations to track troop movements, assess damage and share intelligence. Communication systems, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, has kept the internet up and running at a time when Ukraine’s infrastructure has been decimated.
This is the outskirts of Cerrik, in south-central Albania. 1996. In the middle of the US-instigated civil war in Albania.
(I was living in Hungary at the time).
The day before this photograph was taken, anti-communist Albanian President Sali Berisha’s security team was ambushed in Cerrik and most (I think nine or 12) of them were assassinated from the rooftops of the communist-era panel houses. It was a bloody massacre.
We in the British Helsinki Group (perhaps stupidly) traveled to the scene of the crime the next day to report on what really happened. The tension was so unbelievably high in that small village, which had been known as a very strongly pro-communist outpost. We read the press reports from the Albanian pro-government media but the mainstream US media told us it was all a lie. No one was killed. It was just propaganda from Berisha’s thugs.
So we hired a taxi in the middle of the civil war to take us to the place we heard a horrific massacre had occurred at the hands of the remnants of the pro-Hoxha forces in Albania. Communism was not dead.
Thirty seconds after the above photograph was taken, which depicts Hoxha the leader of the Albanian Communist Party, signifying their triumph over the forces of the anti-communist President Berisha, the killers of the President’s security team deployed wildly from dense trees on each side of the road with AK-47s in our faces. Ready for more trophies.
So, the government of the United States, while decrying “fake news,” was itself creating fake news to foist on people turning to Twitter for unfiltered news.
Of particular interest on the list is a section called “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” interpreted by the The Intercept as “a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.” Here’s how The Intercept described the contents of that disturbing part of the procurement request:
United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is “gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos,” according to contracts with the federal government reviewed by The Intercept.
In what many would attribute to the likely behavior of rogue regimes targeting the United States, the activities that SOCOM is carrying on overseas include “hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda,” the Intercept article reports.
The information revealed in the report is taken from a procurement document published by the Department of Defense, a sort of wish list of technological tools the Pentagon is looking to secretly deploy throughout the world.
Of particular interest on the list is a section called “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” interpreted by the The Intercept as “a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.” Here’s how The Intercept described the contents of that disturbing part of the procurement request:
The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”
While you’d be surprised to see SOCOM — an organization comprised of elite military units renowned for their ability to work secretly and under the cover of darkness — allowing its disinformation designs to be obtained and publicized by The Intercept, the Pentagon has been hiding it in plain sight for years now.
In December, The Intercept revealed some very troubling tactics used by SOCOM to manipulate social media:
SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.
So, the government of the United States, while decrying “fake news,” was itself creating fake news to foist on people turning to Twitter for unfiltered news.
Just so it’s clear and there’s no misplaced worry that the document is somehow less sinister than The Intercept’s depiction of it, here’s one a paragraph from the “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO)” section that should remove all doubt about the purpose for the procurement. MISO will seek for technologies to:
influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels … seeking a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.
And these few paragraphs from the document are no less unnerving:
The same Democratic minority staff that trashed the First Amendment in last week’s Twitter Files hearings put something amazing in writing in a parallel case
The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI’s judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial. Lastly, when they invoke common constitutional rights, make a note that their activities exist in an uncovered carve-out. This is the playbook, and we all better get used to it.
Racket readers may recall that in November, shortly before the Twitter Files began, I ran an interview with Steve Friend, a onetime FBI agent who lost his career after blowing the whistle on the Bureau.
Friend refused to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to put local agents across the country in charge of J6 cases that were really being run out of the Washington office, a plan that made one Washington-based case look like a national map full of domestic terror cases popping up everywhere. He also objected to heavy-handed tactics like the use of S.W.A.T. teams for a suspect communicating voluntarily through an attorney, and the questioning of people in connection with J6 in cases where the state had little to no evidence. From that story:
Friend didn’t think the interview was warranted, and worried the feds showing up at someone’s door without cause “might do more harm than good” in a part of the country where government was unpopular already. He sucked it up and did the “knock and talk” anyway.
“I said, ‘Hey, were you at the Capitol?’” Friend recalls. “And he said, ‘No, that was my son’s funeral that day. I wasn’t there.’”
He shakes his head. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I can’t believe I just made this guy relive that. And for what? Even if he’d admitted to being there, if he said, ‘I was there, I don’t wanna talk about it,’ I couldn’t even charge that.”
But even though Friend had reservations about some of the cases, his main concern was procedural — that by playing bureaucratic games with who was running these investigations, and putting locals nominally in charge of cases where they were really in supporting roles, they put all of the court cases in jeopardy. “A lot of these guys are bad dudes, and they should go to jail,” he said, about the Oath Keepers. But if “we didn’t follow our rules… we set ourselves up to get crushed at trial,” adding, “I want to win.”
A little over a week ago, the same Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government that organized the Twitter Files hearings privately heard testimony from Steve and two other FBI whistleblowers. The Democratic Party response to Steve and his colleagues was eerily similar to tactics pulled out against myself and Mike Shellenberger:
— Mike and I were not real journalists, they said, but “so-called journalists.” Steve and his fellow agents “are not, in fact, whistleblowers,” according to the minority report, and “do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower,” according to the New York Times.
— I was told by Florida’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that “being a Republican witness certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity”; Democratic Party sources told the Times that Steve and fellow agents Garret O’Boyle and George Hill “have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility”;
— Democratic questioners in our case asked us about our opinions on Russian interference, and one said openly that failing to agree with them on that issue disqualified us from the “nuanced convo”; Steve, George, and Garrett were repeatedly quizzed about their attitudes toward various right-wing movements, suggesting that their opinions about these matters made them ineligible to offer procedural complaints. Friend, for instance, was asked about statements by “Three Percenters”:
Q: (Quoting from flyer) “Remember this, it comes straight from our Declaration of Independence, that whenever any form ofgovernment becomes destructive, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish it. That is why you are here. For massive change to occurmassive action must be taken. Patriots, we are the lifeblood of this great nation, and it’s time we prove that.” Do you have an opinion about this statement?
Friend: It seems like First Amendment-protected activity.
— Michael and I were repeatedly quizzed about money we may have made during the Twitter Files period, with Wasserman-Schultz going so far as to harangue my about my Twitter followers tripling and to ask us if we were paid for our testimony; Committee Democrats accused Friend of having “profited, and is profiting, from making his allegations about the FBI public”;
One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.
“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.
China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.
“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”
One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.
Committing to war with China over Taiwan
The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.
Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.
What do Madonna, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian have in common? Yes, they are all famous, but that’s not it. Rather, it is the fact that they have all been the subject of lawsuits against them for their endorsement of crypto currency.
It would appear that the plaintiffs lost money in their investments, and they blame these celebrities for misinforming them. If justice were to prevail, those wasting the courts’ time in this manner should be severely penalized for bringing frivolous lawsuits; at the very least, they ought to be compelled to pay the legal costs of these high profile defendants.
Endorsing something is merely giving an opinion, and doing so is part and parcel of free speech. Now that this right is under attack by wokist cancellers, it is more important than ever that we defend, to the utmost, what few free speech rights are left to us.
Penalizing endorsers is open to all sorts of reductios ad absurdum. Who else gives of their opinions, for a fee, and whose implicit advice might upon occasion, backfire.
Perhaps the most mistaken endorsers are the meteorologists.
MCViewPoint 
