Those of us who favor free enterprise, limited government, property rights, and free trade can no longer support Donald Trump in his quest to win the presidency in 2024.
Full disclosure: In 2015, I set up two groups in support of Trump. One, Libertarians for Trump, garnered some 5,000 signatures. That’s not much, but it is significant for the very small libertarian community. The second, Scholars for Trump, which was limited to people with Ph.Ds. and other such advanced degrees, had about 250 sign-ons. We did this to obviate the charge that only rednecks, clutching their “guns and Bibles” in flyover country, would support this man.
Why our support for the Donald? It had little to do with him personally or public-policy-wise. Our main fear was that virago, Hillary. There are no absolutes in politics. Voting is always a relative matter. Trump would certainly be preferable to Godzilla. Imagine a Joe Biden who is not senile. The horror.
From a personal point of view, I was not all that put off by Trump’s obvious obnoxiousness. I’m from Brooklyn; he was raised in nearby Queens. With the exception of Staten Island, everyone in the Big Apple is personally detestable. No big deal then, and even now.
Why, then, turn against him at present? It is simple. There are now far better alternatives around. Within the Republican Party, there are Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Larry Hogan, Asa Hutchinson, Rand Paul, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse, Rick Scott, Tim Scott, Chris Sununu, and Glenn Youngkin. That’s quite a lineup. Who needs a blustering liar?
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been TheTimes’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Literally the only reason mainstream westerners are fine with the US empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia is because most don’t understand it, and those who do understand it don’t think very hard about it. They avoid contemplating what nuclear war is and what it would mean.
Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right.
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So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures?
It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries.
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The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.”
One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying.
From 1979 to 2001, FBI Counterintelligence Supervisory Agent Robert Hanssen was a highly paid Russian agent, sending bag-loads of secrets to Moscow. He was finally arrested in February 2001. Less than a month later, Chinese intelligence allegedly recruited a former CIA officer, Alexander Ma, who applied to work for the FBI and became a highly paid mole for China.
A key reason for the dangerous and damaging security breaches is the total lack of accountability within the FBI and intelligence community. After NSA Director Mike Rogers, a 3-star admiral, lost hundreds of millions of top secret documents and most of the agency’s cyberweapons, he paid no price, keeping his stars, job and salary intact.
The revelation that President Biden had stacks of classified documents stashed in his garage — alongside jugs of anti-freeze and piles of cleaning rags — comes as little surprise. For several years I have been working on a new book, “SpyFail,” that examines the collapse of the country’s counterintelligence and security operations. And by far, no administration has had a more disastrous record than those of Barack Obama and Biden. For years, insiders at the hyper-secret National Security Agency were able to walk out the door with more than half a billion pages of documents classified higher than top secret, some dealing with nuclear weapons and many of which ended up in Russia. And that was after the supposed crackdown following the million or so documents removed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also on Obama and Biden’s watch.
Still another NSA insiderwas able to steal nearly all of the agency’s highly dangerous cyberweapons — the tech equivalent of loose nukes — and put them up for auction on the internet in 2016. Eventually, the weapons ended up in Russia and North Korea, where they were used to cause a worldwide cyber pandemic that shut down hospitals and medical facilities all over the world, including in the US, thus turning our own weapons against us.
North Korean intelligence secretly attacked Sony Pictures at the behest of Kim Jong Un, stealing millions of confidential documents and unreleased films.
It was the worst cyberattack in world history, yet the NSA didn’t have a clue as to how to stop it.
Instead, it was a young American on vacation in London who luckily discovered a temporary “kill switch.” And although the cyber thief left many clues, the counterintelligence agents have never come close to catching him. As a result, he continued to sell the NSA’s cyberweapons to whatever government or terrorist would pay for them.
And then there were the foreign moles under Obama/Biden. At the same time the FBI counterspies were hunting under every rock for non-existent Russian spies within the Donald Trump campaign, they completely missed two top foreign moles within Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Both were secretly working for the government of the United Arab Emirates with orders to insert themselves into Clinton’s inner-circle, collect intelligence, and pass on pro-UAE influence. And thanks to millions of dollars in dirty money passed to Clinton’s campaign, they were enormously successful. For a demand of $2 million dollars, Clinton even allowed the spies to host her and former President Bill Clinton at the private home of one of the spies, along with another party for her in Las Vegas. “Had a terrific meeting with my Big Sister H,” the spy wrote to his spymaster, using a code for Hillary. “You will be most delighted!”
FBI Counterintelligence Supervisory Agent Robert Hanssen was actually a highly paid Russian agent, sending bag-loads of secrets to Moscow.Shutterstock
Another is that if you really open your eyes, you’ll notice that the world is crackling with so much radiant beauty and wonder that even if we were to lose it all tomorrow, it would have been enough.
I often hear talk of how depressing it is to learn the truth about what’s really going on in our society and in our world, including in the comments sections of the places my own writings appear. I’m always being asked for advice on how to keep going on when everything seems so dismal.
This blog has largely functioned as a space where I document the ongoing expansion of my own awareness and understanding of the world and all its ills, an education which I suspect will continue for as long as I have a functioning brain. But to be honest in the six plus years I’ve been working at this project I’ve never once experienced a moment of the despair and depression I hear people talking about, and it’s never once occurred to me to give up or stop fighting.
When people ask me how I keep my head up and keep plugging away day after day I usually say something about the importance of inner work, healing old traumas and purging the many illusions which distort our perception of reality. And to a certain extent that’s true; such work gives you a foundation of inner peace from which to function and a clarity of perspective that makes it much easier to see through the bullshit. How anyone manages to engage with this stuff from day to day without a rigorous discipline of inner work and self-examination I’ll never know.
But upon reflection I think equanimity when dealing with harsh truths also comes from a much simpler foundation: that there is always hope, and that there is always wonder.
Hopelessness, when it comes to the fate of humanity, is an irrational position. The belief that we’re all inevitably going to destroy ourselves or keep marching into the depths of dystopia to the beat of the propaganda drum assumes a level of knowledge that nobody can possibly have. Nobody could possibly have enough information to draw that conclusion with any degree of confidence, and believing that you have is actually a bit arrogant.
You don’t know what the future holds for our species, what unpredictable sociological, technological, environmental or situational surprises lie in wait that could cause a radical deviation from the norm. Not only do you not know what the future holds, you don’t even know what the present holds. You don’t know what latent potentials might exist within humanity which could one day be unlocked. You don’t know what reality is ultimately made of or what unknown forces may have been driving this human adventure. Only by crunching the possible down to the teeny, tiny confining bandwidth of the known can you proclaim that our situation is hopeless.
And if you’ve done a lot of work exploring your inner dimensions you’ve probably got at least an inkling that there is much, much more to humanity than that tiny confining bandwidth. You’ve probably become at least somewhat aware that there’s a whole lot more going on inside you than you would gather from conventional narratives about the human experience. Speaking solely for myself I’ve discovered capabilities and potentials within me that were totally unpredicted by anything I’ve ever heard or read about our species and what makes us tick, some so strange and unexpected that I don’t generally feel comfortable even talking about them. I’ve no reason to believe such strange unseen potentialities are unique to me, or even rare, or even something that doesn’t exist within each and every one of us.
So from my point of view hopelessness is an illogical position, born of arrogance, sloppy thinking, and a lack of curiosity about one’s own inner processes. Hopelessness is the baseless and irrational shrinking of possibilities down to the spectrum of what’s known. That’s one reason despair never enters here.
It’s Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. It’s been raining like mad insanity for about a week now and this follows several weeks of occasional rain. It was predicted for years that we in Sunny Cal were in for a Thousand Year Drought. We were doomed to a prehistoric era of scarcity.
Now we have historic rain, night and day. And we are “predicted” to have nothing but rain for at least a month.
Thus goeth predictions. I can well recall in the ’60s when it was not just a prediction but a CERTAINTY that we were headed for a new Ice Age. It could not be avoided because of man-made pollution.
I can recall when “intellectuals” predicted, no, “promised” that Japan would be the dominant world power for the next century.
In 1957, it was “predicted” that Soviet Russia would be the dominant power on this earth as soon as Sputnik went up.
None of these things has happened. Not even close.
Now the Left is predicting, no, guaranteeing, that we will be a Nazi-style racist/fascist dictatorship of white trash rulers unless we keep the Left in power forever.
The Pentagon failed a fifth consecutive audit in November, when it could only account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Nevertheless, the military received $858 billion—a 10 percent budget increase—in the omnibus bill passed late last year.
Auditors say the Pentagon cannot account for $220 billion worth of government-owned gear provided to military contractors—and the actual total is likely much higher.
In a report released Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) slammed the Pentagon’s handling of so-called “government-furnished property” (GFP) that has been passed off to contractors with little oversight. The GAO notes that auditors have asked for decades that the Pentagon develop a plan to account for that gear and equipment—which can include “ammunition, missiles, torpedoes,” and component parts for those items—to little avail. In 2001, the Pentagon said it would address the issue by 2005. In 2020, it said the process would be complete by 2026.
Perhaps someday we’ll know how much taxpayer-funded military gear has been handed out to contractors. For now, the GAO notes that the $220 billion estimate is “likely significantly understated.” That figure is based on a 2014 report, but in 2016 the Army told auditors that the actual figure is “unknown and that actual quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect.”
The Pentagon failed a fifth consecutive audit in November, when it could only account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Nevertheless, the military received $858 billion—a 10 percent budget increase—in the omnibus bill passed late last year.
The amount of taxpayer-funded military gear that’s been handed out to contractors is a relatively small sum compared to the Pentagon’s astronomical budget and gordian accounting issues. Even so, it serves as an illustrative example of the broader accountability problems within the most expensive portion of the federal discretionary budget.
“DOD’s lack of accountability over government property in the possession of contractors has been reported by auditors as far back as 1981,” the new GAO report states. “These long-standing issues affect the accounting for and reporting of GFP and are one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements.”
It can also serve as a litmus test for the seriousness of would-be fiscal conservatives who are calling for spending cuts.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has vowed to roll back discretionary spending to 2022 levels—effectively undoing the omnibus bill passed in December. But some are already indicating that they would like to exempt the Pentagon from that belt-tightening.
“During negotiations, cuts to defense were never discussed,” Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas) said in a statement posted to his office’s Twitter account last week. “Spending cuts should focus on non-defense discretionary spending.”
There is that final moment of holding hands. It is sudden, shocking, yet inexorable. And your heart thenceforth will continue to daily break into a million pieces…for the rest of your life.
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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces her resignation (Bloomberg Markets and Finance/YouTube)
On Thursday, Dan Flynn reported the news in his daily must-read Spectator A.M. morning newsletter…
Jacinda Ardern, the control-freak prime minister of New Zealand who transformed one of the freest countries on the planet to an Orwellian one during the COVID crisis, announced on Wednesday her resignation effective sometime in the next few weeks. Her absence from the World Economic Forum to go around now makes sense.
Ardern has been a darling of the global socialist set for five-plus years since getting herself elected PM in New Zealand, which was predictable. She was a young, pretty, emotive leftist dripping with unrealistic idealism, and they latched onto her as though she was a white female Barack Obama from Down Under.
Which is why she graced the covers of Vogue and Time without ever really doing anything other than spouting progressive pieties and emoting charismatically for the cameras.
An insignificant, if breathtakingly beautiful nation like New Zealand was the perfect venue for the kind of heroine worship the international press loaded onto her; after all, New Zealand more or less runs itself, so it would be impossible for her to do damage sufficient to break the spell, right?
Wrong.
Ardern quit because the voters in New Zealand were increasingly enthusiastic about the prospect of firing her and her party is on the electoral ropes. And why?
If you think people here in America ran out of patience with the rough-and-tumble of Donald Trump’s time in office, it was nothing compared to the five years Ardern has run New Zealand.
There was a volcanic eruption on White Island, in the Bay of Plenty off the coast of the country’s north island in December of 2019, which killed 22 tourists and guides caught in the volcano’s crater when it blasted out a cloud of steam. Ardern’s government filed charges against 10 organizations and three people in the wake of those deaths, wiping out a popular tourism engine for the town of Whakatane probably forever. There’s a Netflix documentary about the eruption that is fairly hair-raising, but it obscures something that is a basic truth — anyone with a brain knows that walking into the crater of an active volcano is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and that’s what makes it so thrilling.
It’s a perfect case of “assumption of risk,” which is a long-standing tenet within the common law, but the emotive leftist Kiwi PM wasn’t having any of that. It’s more than three years later, and setting foot on the island still isn’t permitted.
Perhaps that reaction was defensible. But then there was Ardern’s reaction to the March 2019 atrocities in Christchurch, when a xenophobic loon shot up a couple of mosques in that town, killing 51 people and injuring another 40. Ardern showed up to comfort the victims, quickly donning a headscarf — not that doing so was over the top or anything — and called it a “spontaneous” gesture of respect for Islam.
And then immediately after, she pushed through an “assault weapons” ban, and then launched a campaign against online “hate speech.”
You might be starting to get the picture here. If it’s beginning to sound like Gretchen Whitmer on steroids, we’re just getting rolling.
I forgot to mention when Ardern really began tugging at the heartstrings of the global socialist media. That came in 2018, when she showed off her then-3-month-old baby at the United Nations. It turned out that she wasn’t married to the father of said child; something which was passed off as a perfectly normal circumstance for the leader of a country to be in. Ardern said that a marriage to her “partner” Clarke Gayford, a TV news anchor, was in the offing, but kept putting it off.
In fact, she closed her remarks at Wednesday’s resignation by telling Gayford, “Let’s finally get married!” How touching.
In fact, Ardern said she had to put off the wedding because of COVID. Everybody in New Zealand had to put their lives on hold because of COVID.
Let me rephrase that: Everybody in New Zealand had to put their lives on hold because of Jacinda Ardern’s insane overreaction to COVID.
She shut down the country’s borders in early 2020 when New Zealand had a grand total of 25 deaths among a population of five million. Those borders didn’t reopen until August of last year. She also instituted sweeping mask and vaccine mandates, locking the country down to such an onerous extent that the global media held her out as a model for international virus policy.
“Stay local,” she said, a concerned Karen look on her face. “Do not congregate. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubbles.”
