Kevin McCarthy-Another Raytheon boardmember candidate.
https://rumble.com/v1zn7yy-the-ndaa-rip-off-is-huge.html
Be seeing you
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The NDAA Rip-Off Is Huge!
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: NDAA | Leave a Comment »
Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech – or Be Destroyed – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
In totalitarian societies, wrote Hayek, truth is not something that is discovered by learning, education, self-study, research, and debate and discussion. Instead, it is “something to be laid down by authority . . .”
It isn’t just the Left. I see John Bolton is rearing his ugly head.
In Hayek’s famous 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, he warned that the intellectual and political classes of the democracies of that time were embracing some of the same ideas that inspired Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Russia: comprehensive government planning, hyper regulation of industry, nationalization, welfare statism, and collectivism in general. He did not predict that these societies would end up “in serfdom,” however, as some have mistakenly claimed. Quite the contrary. In his first chapter he clearly stated that he hoped the ideas in the book would help these countries to avoid that disastrous fate. He hoped the ideas of the book would be a roadblock on the road to serfdom.
The eleventh chapter of The Road to Serfdom is entitled “The End of Truth,” about the historical imperative in all totalitarian states throughout history to destroy freedom of speech so that the only true belief is “the social plan” imposed by the state, whatever that may be. This is achieved by relentless institutionalized lying and propaganda, coupled with harsh censorship of all contrary ideas or even questions about the propriety of forcefully imposing one single “social plan.” This is American society today, in other words, in case you haven’t noticed. (Socialism, Hayek said, has always been about substituting the plans of politicians for the plans that all of the citizens make for themselves. It’s not a matter of planning versus no planning, but who is to do the planning).
The significance of propaganda in totalitarian countries, Hayek wrote, is that “If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has power to mold . . . minds in any direction he chooses . . .” Jeff Deist, among others, has commented that America today has become a “post-persuasion society” and he is right, almost eighty years after Hayek issued this warning. The Left is no longer willing to seriously debate anything – at least for the time being while they control the universities, all three branches of government, the media, (laughingly-named) “entertainment” industries, and more. Even dopey Prince Harry publicly denounced the First Amendment in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with Hollywood Leftists like his wife shortly after divorcing himself from his family and moving to Hollywood. If you disagree with their latest version of socialist totalitarianism (“woke-ism” coupled with green hysteria and calls for worldwide central planning), then you can be canceled, smeared as a racist, a white supremacist, or even fired from your job and prevented from getting a new one.
The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda are even more profound. It is “destructive of all morals” because it “undermines one of the foundations of all morals: the sense and respect for the truth.” An avalanche of Official Lies has always been the tool of “various theoreticians of the totalitarian system,” wrote Hayek, citing Plato’s “noble lies” and “social myths” championed by the French philosopher Georges Sorel. The ends justify the lying means to totalitarians everywhere. When was the last time a “White House spokesperson” did not lie in public? (See my 1992 book, Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, with James T. Bennett).
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: free speech, Hayek, John Bolton, the left, The Road to Serfdom | Leave a Comment »
How the Mainstream Media Misses the Money Quote – Antiwar.com Original
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
The mainstream media’s money quote missed that France, one of the two most powerful members of the EU, insists that a negotiated settlement to the war addresses Russia’s security concerns about NATO at its door and weapons at its border.
Macron is no different. Tell the US one thing, tell his constituents another and keeping to himself what he really thinks.
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/12/08/how-the-mainstream-media-misses-the-money-quote/
by Ted Snider
On December 1, French President Emmanuel Macron went to Washington for the first state visit of the Biden administration. After the pageantry, presents, hand holding and flattering words of fraternity and solidarity, Macron faced the gathered press.
“We will never urge Ukrainians to make a compromise that will not be acceptable for them.” “That,” said Helene Cooper of The New York Times, “is the money quote.”
But it wasn’t the money quote by several euros. The money quote came days later when Macron was not standing shoulder to shoulder with Biden in front of an American audience, but standing on his own addressing a French audience. Macron told the French television network TF1, in an interview filmed during his visit to Washington but aired as he left, that “We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.” Then Macron made his full meaning clear: “One of the essential points we must address – as President Putin has always said – is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.”
The money quote was that, despite the display of solidarity, there was a canyon between the leader of the US and the leader of the loyal European opposition. The canyon was so wide that it included disagreement over the causes and solutions of the war. Biden and Macron both “strongly condemn Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.” But for Biden, in the beginning, that war was wholly unprovoked, and, in the end, the settlement must reflect that and protect core US values. For Macron, though the war was illegal, Russia had legitimate security concerns that NATO had been pushing, and the settlement must reflect that too.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Emmanuel Macron, mainstream media, Money Quote, Ukrainians | Leave a Comment »
The Right to Discriminate
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
The non-government school explanation of Pearl Harbor, property rights and discrimination
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GoFlo6ptWfw&feature=share
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Discriminate, Pearl Harbor, Property Rights | Leave a Comment »
Hakeem Jeffries: How Crude Identity Politics Glorifies Status-Quo-Protecting Politicians
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Hakeem Jeffries, identity politics | Leave a Comment »
Doug Casey on the Struggle Between the Powerful Forces of Centralization and Decentralization
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
As HL Mencken quipped, an election is just an advance auction on stolen goods.
by Doug Casey
International Man: We’re seeing several disturbing trends converge: currency debasement, increased surveillance, and more travel restrictions.
It seems governments everywhere—and the WEF elite behind them—are waging an all-out war on ordinary people worldwide.
What do you make of this trend, and where is it headed?
Doug Casey: Well, as I said earlier, the World Economic Forum is actually an informal United Nations, which is bad enough.
It’s populated by people who like the idea of powerful government in general, and a powerful world government in particular. When you look at history, you find that there are people who arise from seemingly nowhere and are able to put themselves in positions of huge influence and power. In today’s world, that usually happens through elections. But Bismarck, Napoleon, Mao, Kissinger, Schwab, Gates, and most others didn’t come up through elections for what they’re worth. They came up through force of personality, cleverness, and connections. Elections are essentially an Americanism.
Incidentally, I don’t believe in elections or “democracy” as means for determining who your boss is and who controls you. Elections have rarely been more than popularity contests at best, and more often, mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. As HL Mencken quipped, an election is just an advance auction on stolen goods. Now, more than ever, they’re just rubber stamps for political operators who are adept at using the media and other forms of influence to get the hoi polloi to robotically legitimize their rulers.
Manipulating public opinion has become a fine art using electronic media. It’s especially effective in getting the bottom half of society—let’s call them marginal citizens—who aren’t famous for researching issues or thinking critically, to vote one way or another. Voting can make sense if the voters are virtuous, independent thinkers, at least 21 years old, and property owners. Many today are none of these things. That’s why elections are meaningless shams, more now than ever. They do nothing but legitimize power junkies.
Where is this trend going? As the economy and the dollar deteriorate further, people are likely to look for a strong leader, someone who will promise to make things better if he’s given enough power.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: centralization, Decentralization | Leave a Comment »
Budapest Wine Cellar
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
Daytime drinking…
I was deep diving not long ago among actual physical photos for an old shot to be scanned and included in the print edition of a magazine interview with me about my old days in Budapest and I wanted to offer it up. Perhaps showing a life lived. The desperation of desolation. Maybe even a cautionary tale.
And the deep, slumbering wells of memory re-populated the active cells of the brain.
Daniel McAdams – This is Your World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe
I am in front of the Hungarian Parliament in 1993-4, when the winter froze to the bone. We were sixthousandmiles from home and no way back for Christmas. We were broke.
There was a rustic tavern on the southeast side of Castle Hill near the bank of the Danube where you could drop in from the arctic during Christmas shopping for some fried pork and cold beer. It was almost hewn into the hill, as I recall. On the outer edge beyond the tourist zone. There were no Americans there. On the poor side. The smoke in the windowless establishment was Cancer itself rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the coming bounty, but the warmth was a rescue from the deep cold.
Unlike the tidy European and American tourists on the Castle Hill, these were working class Hungarians who liked to drink and liked to smoke. I felt at home among them and I spoke to them in their language (with a strange Miscolc accent – which is another story) as I ordered a soup and a dish of fried pork and deep, dark Hungarian beer, Dreher Bak. It is likely that I began with a large Hungarian szilva palinka – plum brandy – as it was normally the first thing a sensible person turned to when partially frozen. But it well could have been an herbal liquor like Unicum, which softened the mind as it brought one steadily back from the grip of the snow devil. The lusty plates of fried pork arrived as I dabbed it all with bread that moved in a basket from table to table, acquiring, among other things, cigarette ashes as it passed from customer to customer. Most Americans would not accept this. It did not bother me at all.
____
On Vörösmarty tér in the old part of Budapest there was always the Karácsonyi Vásár – the Christmas market. As we anticipated our yearly trip “home” to US, we also punctuated our shopping with stops for forralt bor – hot spiced wine – to keep warm in a world where the ice air crystalized the night. The cold was shocking, breaking through all manner of preparation. Hot red wine, sweetened and steeped in cinnamon and cloves, was available for a dollar a pour. It was an infusion of Christmas, deep into the soul as it burned from the inside. The warmth was anticipation of the arrival of our Lord Jesus Christ. Dicsőség az Istennek. Glory to God.
Our gifts to family in California in those days were brown homespun beeswax candles and tinned pork liver pate. I don’t think, in retrospect, they were very well-received.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Budapest, Castle Hill, Hungarian | Leave a Comment »
New Twitter Bombshell: ‘Former’ FBI Agent Caught Removing Files Before ‘Twitter Papers’ Release!
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
The “former” FBI Agent at the center of the bogus “Russiagate” operation was brought on by Twitter’s previous management, where he played a key role in suppressing the Hunter Biden bombshell. Musk decided to release the internal communications of “old” Twitter around the censorship and that same “former” FBI agent was caught red-handed removing the evidence before it could be released!
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Remembering Rose Wilder Lane | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022
Months after The Discovery of Freedom appeared, she wrote an angry postcard to a political commentator in which she criticized Social Security. In response, the FBI dispatched police officers to her home to question her about her “subversion.” To one officer’s questioning, she angrily replied, “I’m as subversive as hell!”—and demanded an apology from J. Edgar Hoover. (The FBI continued to surveil her, however.)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/remembering-rose-wilder-lane/
It was on this day in 1886 that the journalist and author Rose Wilder Lane was born in a little house on the prairie that she and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, would later make famous. A brilliant, moody, and independent spirit, Rose was eventually to become one of the most important voices of American liberty, and in 1943, published The Discovery of Freedom, a pathbreaking book that helped spark the revival of interest in free markets and individualism in the later 20th century.
Ironic, then, that she started out as a socialist.
Lane grew up hating the life on the farm, and decided at an early age to become a journalist and traveler. In the 1920s, she went to Europe to report on the Red Cross’s efforts to help refugees in the wake of World War I, but during her travels, she was horrified by what she witnessed in the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik chiefs had begun confiscating food and forcing the people of Armenia and Georgia into manual labor to get it back. “We intend to redistribute it to the neediest,” one Soviet soldier told her. “We will see that they are the most needy by making them work for it.” After witnessing collectivism in action, Rose returned to the United States prepared to rethink everything she thought she had known about economics and politics.
In 1926, she arrived back at her parents’ farm, and dove into works on politics and history. In a letter to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whom she had met in Paris, Lane described how her studies opened her eyes to the uniqueness of American freedom. America was criticized for “its lack of form,” she wrote. But now she saw that formlessness—in other words, its social and economic fluidity—as a great blessing: “It’s exactly stability which America discards.… Is it possible for a civilization to be wholly dynamic? Wholly a vibration, a becoming, a force existing in itself, without direction, without an object for its verb? A civilization always becoming, never being, never never having the stability, the form, which is the beginning of death?”
What Lane was describing was the dynamism of a free society, in which individuals are free to discover their own paths—both metaphorically and literally. In her book Give Me Liberty, published in 1936, Lane would explain how the freedom to choose enabled people to establish their own rules of social interaction, and accomplish their own purposes, without being dictated to by the state. She used a simple illustration, comparing the way people leave a theater at the end of a show to the way in which a teacher maintains order in a classroom. “No crowd leaves a theater with any efficiency,” she wrote, “yet we usually reach the sidewalk without a fight.” By contrast, any classroom instructor “knows that order cannot be maintained without regulation, supervision, and discipline.” That distinction underlined the difference between two kinds of societies: that in which people are at liberty to pursue their own goals, and that in which an authority figure controls people’s behavior in order to accomplish some single collective goal that they themselves might not share. Years later, the economist F.A. Hayek would label this the difference between “spontaneous” and “constructed” orders. Simply put, people don’t need an authority figure to tell them how to live—or, as Lane liked to put it, the very idea of Authority with a capital “A,” whether it be in the form of socialism, Nazism, or anything else, is fallacious: wealth, social harmony, and other blessings are not created by kings, dictators, or presidents. They are the result of individual initiative. And if that initiative is stifled by government intervention, the results can be wasteful, foolhardy, or even catastrophic.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Dorothy Thompson, Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom | Leave a Comment »
I Don’t Want A Sci-Fi Future – by Caitlin Johnstone
Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2022
I don’t desire a future for humanity like the ones imagined by our culturally designated future-imaginers. I don’t want humans living in Elon Musk Mars colonies or Jeff Bezos space cylinders. I don’t want us to fly out into the stars, to disappear into virtual reality universes, or to move away from our humanness by becoming cybernetic organisms.
Not yet anyway. Not for a long time. Not until we’ve done what we need to do here first.
Have you ever noticed that most books, shows and movies set in the future tend to depict a humanity that’s more technologically advanced than our own, but thinks and behaves in basically the same way? In the average sci-fi story people are still waging wars, still fighting, conquering, subjugating, toiling and surviving just like today, except they’re doing it out in space surrounded by a bunch of aliens (who are also oddly entangled in the same egoic patternings as humans in the 21st century).
In this common vision for the future, we have mastered space travel but still haven’t mastered basic psychological health. Our technology has enabled us to kill, enslave, manipulate and exploit among the stars so that we are no longer confined to killing, enslaving, manipulating and exploiting down here.
This tendency is partly due to the limits of imagination; it’s easy to imagine more advanced versions of our own technology, but trying to imagine a mindframe that’s very different from your own is like trying to imagine being twice as intelligent as you are. Trying to imagine living in a conscious civilization while your own civilization is deeply unconscious is like a dream character trying to imagine life outside the dream. It’s not hard to extrapolate upon existing patterns, but envisioning the complete dissolution of patterns can be much more difficult.
This tendency is also due to the fact that science fiction writers are telling stories for an immature civilization full of restless minds who would be easily bored by tales of a peaceful future without any major problems. But that’s the kind of future that I want for humanity. A peaceful one without any major problems. One that wouldn’t make a good Hollywood blockbuster.
And it’s actually kind of a problem that the future which humanity is mentally pointing itself toward is one in which all our restlessness and dysfunction persists. Our steps into the future will be guided by our collective vision for it, and when those visions are about space colonization, virtual reality and transhumanism, our collective compass is going to be skewed toward dysfunction.
Right now for example most human innovation goes toward generating profits and/or military dominance, which puts us on a trajectory toward more and more technologically advanced personal doodads to buy at the store and more and more ways of killing large numbers of people at a time. It doesn’t put us on a trajectory toward finding ways to make sure everyone has enough, to helping people have more leisure time, to helping humanity move in harmony with our ecosystem. All of those innovations would do infinitely more to create a more pleasant future for humanity than spaceships and laser guns, but our systems do not give rise to them, because they are not profitable and don’t help increase a government’s military power.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Sci-Fi Future | Leave a Comment »
MCViewPoint 