What will be the consequences of the meeting between Presidents Biden, President Obrador of Mexico, and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada? FFF president Jacob G. Hornberger and Citadel Professor Richard M. Ebeling discuss.
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Watch “Cross Border Crises” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on January 13, 2023
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Tech for Me, but Not for Thee: Psalm 8 Meets Transhumanism – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 13, 2023
We’re now learning about multiple labs around the world looking into altering the DNA of viruses so that they can better infiltrate and influence the bodies of human beings. I speak here of the newly infamous “gain of function” research. Yet, at the same time, we’re being told that collecting firewood (or, Gaia forbid – coal!) to heat hearth and home is an act of selfishness – at best. Nothing funny about the logic of the “elites” there, eh?
By Jeff Krinock
I wrote to the late, great Becky Akers about a year before her too-early passing early in 2022. I wanted to share with her my horror upon learning that an “academic” had just published a book suggesting that all of humanity should be eliminated in the cause of saving the environment. Eliminated. I was familiar enough with Becky’s own work to know that she would drop her jaw (as I did) upon finding yet another ostensibly educated person pronouncing her way out of our “scientific world” right back into the realm of (supposedly discredited) metaphysical decisions. The professor in question – I won’t here give her name or the title of her book so as to avoid granting her one scintilla of publicity – decided it was her place to pontificate regarding humanity-ending decisions. The kinds of decisions that belonged, during sane eras, to God Almighty. Bring to an end all of mankind? Hey – why not? She has a PhD, right?
Returning to sanity, for a moment. About man and his role in life, death, and the environment, one of my favorite Psalms says this:
“You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.”
It’s certainly true that in our era, just like the “academic” about whom Becky and I marveled, there are now teeming millions of our fellow human beings currently bowing to elements of nature (or, the earth, or to Gaia, or “the environment” – pick the name of your idol). These folks willingly worship and revere that which is neither eternal nor divine.
So it’s almost confusing to read straightforward words, from God, no less, about man exercising “dominion”. Really? We’re to prevail upon nature, upon the environment, that false god so widely revered, venerated, and even downright worshipped in our day? Needless to say, unlike our unnamed “academic”, the Psalm says not one word suggesting collective suicide in behalf of the environment, in some sort of macabre twisting of God’s mandate to assert dominion. (As an aside, I’ll note that those turning nature and the environment into false gods do so apparently ignorant of the most basic teachings provided by any decent Sunday School: Bad things come to idolaters. Really bad things.)
Sure, there might be room for a tad bit of confusion as to who, exactly, exercises dominion over nature, given that the Psalmist uses metonymy to define his subject: “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor.”
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A Government by Experts – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
As an example, the U.S. Tax Code, enacted by Congress, runs to 2,600 pages. It is an indecipherable monstrosity. But the IRS’s own regulations — written by IRS bureaucrats, not by Congress — run to 9,000 pages. And the IRS’s interpretations of its own regulations run to 70,000 pages. This is Wilson’s government by experts.
BATF is an administrative agency run by so-called experts. When it attempted to outlaw modified rifles by declaring them to be machine guns, the 5th Circuit reminded BATF that it is not Congress.
US court is slow on the draw.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/andrew-p-napolitano/a-government-by-experts/
I have often thought that after Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson was our worst president. By worst is meant least faithful to the Constitution and most destructive of personal liberty.
With the exception of Lincoln’s dictatorship — during which the federal government used violence to crush the states’ natural right to secede from a compact they had voluntarily joined, and instead brought about the systematic murder of 750,000 persons — America from its founding to the early part of the 20th century more or less enjoyed the James Madison model for the federal government.
Under this model, the federal government could only legislate, regulate, spend and govern in the 16 discrete areas of human behavior that the Constitution delegated to it. All other areas of human behavior were left free to individual choices or governance by the states.
From and after Wilson’s presidency, the Madisonian model was replaced by the Wilsonian one. Under this model, the feds could legislate, regulate, spend and govern in any areas of human behavior for which there was a national political will, except for those areas that are expressly prohibited to them by the Constitution.
It would take another generation before the courts fully caught up to this, during which they gradually permitted Congress basically to write any law, regulate any behavior, spend any money, tax any event and intrude upon any relationship so long as it did not confront an express constitutional prohibition.
The Constitution itself — which Madison designed both to establish the federal government and to limit it — has been a dismal failure as an instrument of limitation. Madison himself wrote that only an external structure — external to the Constitution — could be relied upon to keep the federal government in its place.
He was referring to the power of the states to nullify acts of the federal government that the states determined were outside its constitutional authority. He was also referring to the natural right that individuals and political subdivisions have to leave the government, called secession. Just as the 13 colonies seceded from Great Britain, Madison argued, individuals can reject the government, smaller subdivisions can leave larger ones, and states can leave the feds.
In his masterpiece “Democracy: The God That Failed,” Hans-Hermann Hoppe articulates the truism that one is not truly free if one cannot leave the government. This applies to persons as well as to political subdivisions. The forced retention of persons under the government’s monopolistic jurisdiction is totalitarian.
Without the threat of nullification and secession, there is no effective restraint on the feds.
Now back to Wilson. His governmental sins were many — World War I, the Espionage Act, the federal income tax, the popular election of U.S. Senators, the Federal Reserve and his government by experts, known today as the administrative state.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Government Experts, U.S. Tax Code | Leave a Comment »
Ukraine Is Shedding Blood for ‘NATO Mission’: Ukrainian Defense Minister – News From Antiwar.com
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
“Those people” over there are expendable. More politically expendable than US sons and daughters, for now.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said last week that Ukraine is “shedding blood” for a “NATO mission” in candid remarks about the relationship between Kyiv and the Western military alliance.
“At the NATO Summit in Madrid (in June 2022), it was clearly delineated that over the coming decade, the main threat to the alliance would be the Russian Federation. Today, Ukraine is eliminating this threat,” Reznikov said in an interview on Ukrainian TV last week.
“We are carrying out NATO’s mission today. They aren’t shedding their blood. We’re shedding ours. That’s why they’re required to supply us with weapons,” he added.
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Too Late? — Pentagon Overturns Military Vaccine Mandate
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
Too late for those with a now modified genetic structure.
https://rumble.com/v24xk3c-too-late-pentagon-overturns-military-vaccine-mandate.html
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The Constitution Is Largely Ignored — But It’s Still There If The People Really Want It
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
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What foreign policy elites really think about you – Responsible Statecraft
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
“If public opinion doesn’t match up with the Washington program then it must be wrong, misunderstood, or worse, irrelevant.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/01/06/what-foreign-policy-elites-really-think-about-you/
Written by
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Tell us, Washington, how do you really feel about American public opinion?
For years now, Beltway establishmentarians have been trying desperately to countermand the idea that they are in fact, elites: out of touch, impervious to what regular Americans want and need, and slaves to conventional foreign policy doctrine and dogma.
But it is wartime again, and that’s when the masks slip. It began with the steady stream of Eliot Cohen and Anne Applebaum columns from the start of the Russian invasion, all demanding that Americans see the war in Ukraine as our fight, a struggle for democracy, the liberal world order. If Americans do not have the stomach for it, there is something wrong with us, a moral failing.
These ham-fisted approaches befit the neoconservatives who wield them, as they did the same in the Global War on Terror, and to a great extent, worked to keep the Iraq War going for almost a decade and the war in Afghanistan shambling on for a full 20 years.
In addition to the destruction of two countries, trillions of dollars, a massive refugee crisis, a new generation of U.S. veterans dependent on lifetime assistance, and countless dead and wounded, these “elites” are in great part responsible for the mistrust of Washington that has eaten away at the culture and politics here to the core.
Poll after poll show a plunging lack of faith in American institutions, including the once-vaunted military. That’s what going to war based on lies, distortions, and rhetorical bullying will do to an already strained and tribalized society. Add a financial collapse (2008) that Washington addressed with an unprecedented bank bailout, while homeowners and workers struggled to survive, and you have the basis for major populist movements — on the left, and the right.
The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were buoyed in part by a continuing skepticism of the ongoing wars and of the elites at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, which had become as self-serving and disconnected from American interests as they were.
You would have thought they had learned their lesson.
But the war in Ukraine has given them new purpose and in that vein, to both patronize and ignore the wants and needs of the American public. A new commentary by Gian Gentile and Raphael S. Cohen, deputy director of the Rand Corporation’s Army Research Division, and Air Force Strategy and Doctrine Program, respectively, says it all. Clearly written for Beltway practitioners and politicians, the takeaway from “The Myth of America’s Ukraine Fatigue” is clear: don’t mind the polls, or even American public opinion. Ukraine’s (and in effect, Washington’s) long war will go on no matter what the hoi polloi is thinking, or feeling.
In war, from a purely political perspective, it’s usually safer for politicians to stay the course.
Perhaps this is why democracies’ track records of playing the long game in armed conflicts is actually pretty good. From the ancient Athenians during the Peloponnesian War on through to the present day, democracies have not usually been the fickle, shrinking violets their detractors make them out to be. In the United States, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were all eventually deeply unpopular. Yet the United States fought for three years in Korea, almost nine years in Iraq (before going back in after the initial withdrawal), and almost 20 years in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. All these campaigns involved significantly more investment of American blood and treasure than the U.S. commitment to Ukraine has demanded thus far.
The authors are referring to a number of recent polls that would appear to show that Americans’ unconditional support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion has its limits and in some cases, may be flagging. To start, Cohen and Gentile say that isn’t true, that Americans support Ukrainian sovereignty and the fight for it. Absolutely. What the authors don’t say is that the polls indicate that Americans are also concerned about a protracted war that could lead to more death and a direct U.S. confrontation with the Russians. That they are less enthusiastic about supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes,” and have shown a growing interest in negotiations to end the war sooner than later, even if that ultimately means concessions for both sides.
Instead of recognizing the nuance and giving credit to Americans for understanding the implications of another long war (whether they are directly involved on the ground or not), the authors blame the media for hyping up what they believe is the negative messaging from the surveys. Furthermore, they suggest that — citing the cases of Vietnam and our recent wars — conflicts will go on (and rightly so!) no matter where public opinion is at.
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Of Two Minds – Who Would Benefit from a Severe Global Recession?
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
As painful as this liquidation and repricing of risk is for borrowers and lenders, those without debt, those with cash and those with essential skills that are in demand regardless of boom or bust will all benefit.
Charles Hugh Smith
As painful as this liquidation and repricing of risk is for borrowers and lenders, those without debt, those with cash and those with essential skills that are in demand regardless of boom or bust will all benefit.
Who would benefit from a severe global recession? The typical answer is “no one,” as a drop in economic activity is assumed to hurt everyone. But it’s not quite that simple; there are silver linings for some in all those dark clouds.
When demand for energy plummets, the price of oil tends to drop dramatically. There are several reasons for this:
1. Price is set on the margins so a modest decline in demand can trigger an outsized drop in price. In the 2008-09 timeframe, oil fell from $147/barrel to the $30s on a modest decline in demand.
2. While oil producers always announce production cuts to maintain high process, they are under pressure to offset plummeting income by pumping more oil, not less.
3. Speculative capital floods into oil when prices are rising and exits when prices are dropping. This financialization of the energy markets exacerbates price movements up and down.
Dramatic declines in oil hurt producers and benefit consumers. As demand for goods and services declines, suppliers and retailers must trim prices and profit margins to maintain market share. This deflationary pressure benefits consumers.
As marginal businesses close their doors and marginal renters move out of high-cost rentals, landlords must reduce rents to avoid the eventual result of mass vacancies, i.e. bankruptcy. Reductions in rents benefit consumers.
Marginal homeowners and absentee landlords slide into insolvency and are either forced to sell their homes and real estate or their lenders foreclose on their mortgages and sell the lender-owned properties to reduce their losses. These forced sales reduce the price of these assets, benefiting those with cash who can now afford to buy assets that were unaffordable in the pre-recession bubble.
A deep recession also shifts global capital flows.
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Using Ukraine as a Bloodied Pawn – Antiwar.com Original
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
The goal in Afghanistan then, as it is in Ukraine now, was simply to harass and bleed Washington’s adversary. Then, as now, there was little concern about the impact on the beleaguered inhabitants in the country serving as an arena for a proxy war – and surprisingly little concern about the wider geo-political ramifications.
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Galen_Carpenter/2023/01/10/using-ukraine-as-a-bloodied-pawn/
U.S. and NATO officials routinely contend that assisting Ukraine in its war against Russia is a moral as well as a strategic imperative. Ukraine is supposedly on the frontlines of a global struggle between democracy and freedom on one side and brutal authoritarianism on the other. That justification lacks credibility for two reasons. First, Ukraine itself is a corrupt, repressive autocracy, not a freedom-loving democracy, even if one uses the most flexible, expansive definition of “democracy.” Second, the Russia-Ukraine war is a nasty turf fight over mundane stakes, not part of an existential global confrontation between good and evil.
It is hard to determine how much Western political leaders and their media mouthpieces actually believe their own moralistic propaganda. Some likely have drunk the Kool Aid, but others clearly have more practical (and less savory) reasons for wanting Washington to wage a proxy war against Russia. First and foremost, the financial benefits to the military-industrial complex are enormous. The United States has already provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv, and a major portion of those funds are going to pay for Ukraine’s purchases (now or in the near future) of weapons systems from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or other manufacturers. Those firms also will benefit from the destruction of weapons already provided to Kyiv, since US stockpiles supposedly must be replenished. The usual collection of hawks already are sounding alarms that the arsenals of the United States and its NATO allies have become significantly depleted.
However, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin may have inadvertently disclosed a broader, ignoble motive for the proxy war. An April 2022 statement that he issued in Poland at the end of his stealth visit to Kyiv emphasized that Washington’s goal was not merely to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, but to “weaken Russia” to the point that it could no longer pose a threat to any other country. Achieving such an objective would indisputably require a prolonged war in Ukraine – regardless of the consequences to the Ukrainian people.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: A crack in the edifice of tyrannical coercion materialized a few days ago when SecDef Lloyd Austin declared his intention to vax-up the whole military. General David Berger, NATO, Pawn, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
We’ve Been Dominated By Narrative Control Since The Dawn Of Civilization
Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2023
From the dawn of civilization, we have been ruled by manipulators. Those who rise to the top of our current civilization have the same qualities as those who rose to the top of the kingdoms and empires of old. People who are just a little bit more clever than the rest, and just unprincipled enough to use that to their advantage.
The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he’d learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.
That was when propaganda as we know it today came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I.
But that wasn’t the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.
Back when humans were a nomadic hunter-gatherer species, there was no need for tribal leaders to impose mental narratives over their tribe in order to keep them moving and behaving in the way they wanted. The animal needs of food, drink, and safety were enough to keep those small societies moving, hunting, foraging, reproducing, and fighting wherever it was necessary; they would have done those things even without the existence of language, and our evolutionary ancestors probably did exactly that for millions of years before the behavior of speech first emerged in humans.
That all changed with the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Once humans began learning to trick the Earth’s biosphere into making the food appear next to them, they became capable of sticking around in one place without starving, and civilizations began to emerge. Where as hunter-gatherers humans were only organizing in groups of a few dozen, with the ability to settle and build things we began congregating in villages and cities of hundreds or thousands.
Once you’re dealing with human groups of that size with sustenance coming from farmlands and livestock, the animal impulses of hunger, thirst and safety are no longer complex enough to determine the way those humans are going to be behaving from day to day.
Copious amounts of language will now be needed. Agreements. Protocols. Rules. Etiquette. How is the civilization planned out? How are decisions made? Who does the work? How are resources allocated? How are children conceived and raised?
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