I am glad the NATO US taxpayers provide the lifeline to is doing such important work. This couldn’t be pathetic attempt to schmooze and keep France compliant, could it?
A French bakery product has been given a special status by the United Nations.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) granted a heritage recognition to the French baguette by placing it on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The “Artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread” was the official addition to the list.
UNESCO’s director general, Audrey Azoulay, told CNN the bread product’s newly recognized status honors “tradition,” “craftsmanship” and makes sure that the “artisanal way of baking” is “passed on to the next generation.”
“It’s kind of a way of life” Azoulay said. “There is always a boulangerie nearby, you can go and buy fresh affordable bread and you meet people, meet with bakers, it’s a very important element of social cohesion.”
“This will make people realize that this regular baguette that they know very well, is something precious,” she said. “It comes from history and it has character and it’s important to made the public aware of this, to be proud of it.”
The baguette’s nomination, which was drafted by France, pointed out that baguettes “generate modes of consumption and social practices that differentiate them from other types of bread, such as daily visits to bakeries to purchase the loaves and specific display racks to match their long shape.”
The only reason Assange’s case doesn’t have more support currently is because so much of the public has been deceived into believing that what’s happening is not the unconscionable persecution of a journalist for telling the truth, but rather the righteous prosecution of a sinister Russian agent who has broken laws and endangered lives.
The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. This sudden jolt of mainstream support comes as news breaks that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been personally pushing the US government to bring the Assange case to a close.
The Guardian’s participation in this letter is particularly noteworthy, given the leading role that publication has played in manufacturing public support for his persecution in the first place. If The Guardian really wants to help end the persecution of the heroic WikiLeaks founder, the best way to do that would be to retract those many smears, spin jobs and outright lies, and to formally apologize for publishing them.
This is after all the same Guardian which published the transparently ridiculous and completely invalidated 2018 report that Trump lackey Paul Manafort had met secretly with Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, not once but multiple times. Not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate this claim despite the embassy being one of the most heavily surveilled buildings on the planet at the time, and the Robert Mueller investigation, whose expansive scope would obviously have included such meetings, reported absolutely nothing to corroborate it. It was a bogus story which all accused parties have forcefully denied and no serious person believes is true, yet to this day it still sits on The Guardian’s website without retraction of any kind.
This is the same Guardian which ran an article in 2018 titled “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride”, arguing that Assange looked ridiculous for continuing his political asylum in the embassy because “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US.” The article was authored by the odious James Ball, whose article begins: “According to Debrett’s, the arbiters of etiquette since 1769: ‘Visitors, like fish, stink in three days.’ Given this, it’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like, more than five-and-a-half years after Julian Assange moved himself into the confines of the small flat in Knightsbridge, just across the road from Harrods.”
Five major mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, have issued a letter calling the US Administration to drop the charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been a political prisoner in the UK since 2019. Also today: Twitter announced an end to its Covid “misinformation” policy…and the White House freaks out. Also: More demands from global welfare queens in Ukraine.
“We spent seven hours with Dr. Fauci—this is a man who single-handedly wrecked the U.S. economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science’—and over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry said.
Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry recently had a chance to question Anthony Fauci in a suit involving censorship of dissident scientists.
And what do you know: Fauci just can’t seem to remember anything.
“We spent seven hours with Dr. Fauci—this is a man who single-handedly wrecked the U.S. economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science’—and over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry said.
“It was extremely troubling to realize that this is a man who advises presidents of the United States and yet couldn’t recall information he put out, information he discussed, press conferences he held dealing with the COVID-19 response,” he added.
The Epoch Times reports, “Landry declined to provide more details about the deposition until it is made public, which will happen at a future date. But he said officials would be able to take some of what they learned to advance their case.”
Jenin Younes, a lawyer and Tom Woods Show guest who is also representing the plaintiffs, noted that Fauci claimed not to be especially worried about the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for “focused protection” of the vulnerable instead of lockdowns, even though Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health wrote to Fauci urging a “devastating public takedown of its premises,” and even though Fauci attacked it on several occasions.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki is scheduled to be deposed on December 8.
One of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (and also a party to the lawsuit), Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, recently joined me on the Tom Woods Show to discuss the premise behind the case as well as a Soho Forum debate on lockdowns that Jay recently won. (Oxford-style debates have objective winners, because the audience is polled before and after the debate.)
Jay’s eyes have been opened since 2020 about how the health establishment operates. “I was naive,” he confessed to me in our interview.
Also, a quick reminder that I’m holding an event in Orlando — my Practical Liberty Summit — in January for all those of you who already have plenty of libertarian theory in your brains, but who’d now like to take action. Everything from how to win in a blue state, how to undo propaganda in people’s minds, how to finance real estate without the bank, how to get physically fit without falling into destructive myths, plus plenty of business and marketing advice, and a lot more.
All practical, no theory.
Plus, entertainment from the great Doc Dixon, the magician who sawed me in half at my 2000th episode event and who fooled Penn & Teller on their “Fool Us” television program.
The event is free for my School of Life members, and open for a fee to non-members:
If the move goes forward, untested law students will arrive at law school less prepared for the rigors involved, and will have less experience studying for the ultimate test in a few years; the barexam.
An arm of the American Bar Association voted on Nov. 18 to end the longstanding requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) – a standardized test which gauges one’s logical reasoning skills, rather than a strictly knowledge-based test such as the SAT, GRE, and MCAT.
The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted in an overwhelming majority to do away with the testing mandate, voting against the objections of nearly 60 law school deans who warned that the move could actually harm the goal of diversifying the legal profession.
If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional for a career that notoriously demands a lot of standardized knowledge, WSJ reports.
The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.
The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first. -WSJ
As the Journal further notes, however, dropping the LSAT is likely to disproportionately harm students from less privileged backgrounds. According to the 60 law school deans – which include Berkeley and Loyola University – by removing the test, admissions will focus more on GPA and other factors that are even less objective.
According to the letter, the LSAT “index score can help identify students who are capable of performing at a satisfactory level, even though their grades alone and other indicia would not so indicate,” adding that this applies particularly to students from “less advantaged backgrounds and underrepresented groups.”
“Getting rid of the LSAT will just make the application process more subjective,” said Campus Reform‘s Tahmineh Dehbozorgi in an appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“For a lot of minorities, including myself, this is a way we can overcome a lot of barriers and biases that exist in the admission process,” she continued.
If the move goes forward, untested law students will arrive at law school less prepared for the rigors involved, and will have less experience studying for the ultimate test in a few years; the barexam.
In history books as well as in politics every story is shaped by where one chooses to begin the tale. The current fighting in Ukraine, which many observers believe to already be what might be considered the opening phase of World War 3, is just such a development. Did the seeds of conflict arise subsequent to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 after having received a commitment from the United States and its allies not to advance the West’s military alliance NATO into Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton, who intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.
Since that time NATO has continued its expansion at the expense of Russian national security interests. Ukraine, as one of the largest of the former Soviet republics, soon became the focal point for potential conflict. The US interfered openly in Ukrainian politics, featuring frequent visits by relentlessly hawkish Senator John McCain and State Department monster Victoria Nuland as well as the investment of a reported $5 billion to destabilize the situation, bringing about regime change to remove the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich and replace it with a regime friendly to America and its European allies. When this occurred it inevitably led to a proposed invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, a move which Moscow repeatedly warned would constitute an existential threat to Russia itself.
Finally, Moscow tried assiduously to negotiate a solution to the developing Ukraine crisis in 2020-2021 but the US and its allies were not interested, allowing the corrupt Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky to refuse any accommodation. So Russia itself has perceived that it has been misled or even lied to repeatedly by the US and its allies. It has been particularly vexed by the looting of its natural resources by mostly Western oligarchs operating under protection afforded by the feckless President Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1999, a puppet installed and sustained through US and European interference in the Russian elections. Just when Russia was on its knees, perhaps intentionally, there arrived on the scene in 1999 former KGB officer Vladimir Putin who, as Prime Minister and later president, proceeded to clean house. Ever since that time, Putin has very carefully explained himself and what he has been doing, making clear that he is no enemy of the West but rather a partner in a relationship that respects the interests and cultures of all players in a global economy that maximizes freedom and individuality.
Given the danger of dramatic escalation of the current situation in Ukraine, with talk coming from both sides about the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons, an October 27th speech made by President Vladimir Putin at the 19th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, held near Moscow, should be required reading for the Joe Bidens and Jens Stoltenbergs of this world. The theme of the meeting was A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone. The four day-long session included 111 academics, politicians, diplomats and economists from Russia and 40 foreign countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the United States. In his speech, Putin laid out his vision of a multipolar world in which there is no concept of a politically hegemonic “rules based world order” which substitutes “rules for international law.” And, he observed, the rules have themselves been regularly dictated by one country or group of countries. Putin instead urged a transition into a willingness to accept that all countries have interests and rights that should be respected.
“Many were fed up with Mr. Xi … and his ‘Zero-Covid’ policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country,” writes the Times in pacific unselfawareness.
“Right-wing conspiracy theorists with ties to anti-Xi opposition elements spread baseless rumours, deny science, and endanger lives” – strangely not how the New York Times chose to caption this image.
Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves with virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists.
China Protests Break Out as Covid Cases Surge and Lockdowns Persist is a lead headline in today’s New York Times: “Strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets,” we read in the article that follows. Western anti-lockdown protesters are fascists and conspiracy theorists; Chinese anti-lockdown protesters, on the other hand, are ordinary people who are just fighting the power:
“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers.
Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger challenge for the government.
Some demonstrators went so far as to call for the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. Many were fed up with Mr. Xi, who in October secured a precedent-defying third term as the party’s general secretary, and his “zero-Covid” policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country.
Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.
The Chinese government on Monday blamed “forces with ulterior motives” for linking a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region to strict Covid measures, a key driver as the protests spread across the country.
In much the same way, the New York Times blamed shadowy political actors with ties to Trump for anti-lockdown protests in 2020.
Outside China, the rest of the world has adapted to the virus and is near normalcy. Take soccer’s premier event, the World Cup. Thousands of people from across the globe have assembled in Qatar and are cheering on their teams, shoulder-to-shoulder, without masks, in packed stadiums.
China’s approach won praise during the beginning of the pandemic, and there is no doubt it has saved lives. But now that approach looks increasingly outdated. Almost three years after the coronavirus emerged, the contrast between China and the rest of the world couldn’t be starker.
Emphasis mine, because it’s probably the most amazing line in the whole piece. Here we have America’s foremost propaganda outlet, trying desperately to accuse China of unjust dictatorial repression, for the crime of implementing in a more organised and coherent way the very same Zero Covid policies that Times journalists spent nearly two years supporting. What’s actually wrong with the harsh Chinese lockdowns? Well, say the Times, who can’t say anything else – they’ve become unfashionable.
Harvard and UNC should be free to discriminate to their hearts’ content on the basis of race or sex or whatever other criteria they choose. But they should not see a red penny of any tax money or other statist privileges, since, under the libertarian legal code, there should be a full and complete separation of government and education. If they want to discriminate, let them do so on their own dime. Private people and fully private institutions should be free to discriminate all they wish. That is what free association is all about. But government is constitutionally forbidden to do any such thing.
What with the Supreme Court’s hearing of the Students for Fair Admission case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, racial discrimination is now in the news. Like two contending (intellectual) armies, liberals and conservatives have staked out different positions.
In the view of those on the right side of the political economic spectrum, matters are simple and straightforward: discrimination is wrong. Period. Stated Supreme Court justice John Roberts: “The way to end racial discrimination is to end racial discrimination.”
The perspective of the left side of the aisle is a bit more complex: discrimination is justified, but only if it helps the downtrodden: women, blacks, the “differently abled,” gays, etc. One gets the impression, reading between the lines (although none of them, yet, has come out and exactly said this) that if the freshman intake of Harvard and UNC entirely consisted of these groups, and thus entirely excluded white males and Asians of both sexes (unless they were handicapped, of course), that would be just fine and dandy.
What, in sharp contrast to both of these viewpoints, is the libertarian position on all of this? It too is simple: discrimination, of whatever type or variety, should be legal.
Libertarianism is a theory of just law. There are three foundational principles of this philosophy, which must be mentioned in the present context. One, the non-aggression principle: No one has the right to threaten or use violence against anyone else; thus, murder, rape, theft, kidnapping should be illegal. Two, property rights are based on initial homesteading of virgin territory, à la John Locke, and any subsequent voluntary interaction — “legitimate title transfer,” in the words of Robert Nozick, such as buying, selling, lending, gift-giving. Three, free association: No one should be compelled to associate with anyone else. This latter explains libertarian opposition to the 1964 so-called Civil Rights Act: Woolworth’s was obligated to serve customers it wished to exclude.
MCViewPoint 