Learning, Freedom, Faith and Character-The pillars of Hillsdale College. One of only two, last I knew, that doesn’t accept federal money (that Freedom thing!). The other being Grove City College. The discussion of the American education system being based on the Prussian military system @25:00 is interesting.
Also there is a private, non-profit, Christian based school in the planning stages using a Hillsdale curriculum. The project needs your help:
The Founding Board of ECCA (Erie PA area) cordially invites parents and future students to attend our informational meeting! We’ll have a brief presentation followed by an opportunity for Q&A. Take that next step for your children’s future – NOW is the time! https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vfu-gqT0uEtdCJ1X_O4pmKAD0e_tyPrJ5
More and more people are realizing the absurdity of “getting rid of fossil fuels,” and don’t find the idea of “eating the bugs” as appetizing. We work to bring home the bacon, not the insects. The ideas of “woke capitalism” and “climate finance” are crushing our standard of living and many U.S. states are now fighting back against it.
Another point of difference distinguishes free market aspirations from ideology. The myth of the free market is not utopian. It does not suggest the possibility of a perfect world but rather acknowledges scarcity as a starting point and always existing condition. Socialism, on the other hand, imagines endless bounty and suggests that the only barrier to achieving it is the capitalist order. Marxism is likewise religious and utopian in character.
I’ll begin with a provocative thesis: socialism is ideological and free market thinking, while involving myth, is nonideological. I will show why socialism is ideological and why free market thinking involves myth but is nonideological by defining the terms myth and ideology and distinguishing them from each other.
The term “myth” has several connotations. The most common connotation today is that myth represents false belief. Thus, we see many uses of the term myth in which some myth or other is figured as something to be debunked. We can point to hundreds of titles in which the word myth signifies a belief that is mistaken and which the article or book aims to overthrow with evidence and reasoning. When entering “the myth of” into the search field on Amazon.com, for example, titles beginning with phrase are suggested, including The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Mate; The Myth of American Inequality, by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund et al.; The Myth of Closure, by Pauline Boss, and so on. Running the same search in an internet search engine yields similar results but includes articles on the myth of this or that, including a recent article by American Pravda (the New York Times), entitled “They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election—and Reaped the Rewards,” referring to the Congresspersons who sought to block the supposedly legitimate results of the 2020 election.
But one will also find, in both searches, titles like The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus; The Myth of Eternal Return, by Mircea Eliade; The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, by Douglas Frame; and others. Or in a search engine one finds discussions of various Greek myths in encyclopedias and on YouTube. Clearly, these latter uses of the term myth are different from the usage in the debunking books and articles. Myth in this other sense draws on a different meaning. The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is not an argument against the myth itself. Rather, myth in this sense connotes a kind of tale that conveys a truth, an aspiration, or a means of making sense of experience. It is a structuring device for seeing order, patterns, possibilities, probable outcomes, and so on. Myth in this sense also includes lessons to be learned and kept in mind when crafting a life or life mission. The myth of Icarus is a tale about human hubris, for example. The story of the Garden of Eden is generally understood in such terms—as a myth about seeking to be like God. The sinking of the Titanic has been seen in terms of such Greek myths as Icarus and other tales of human hubris.
It is this latter sense of myth that I use here—of myth as a means by which we structure experience, find meaning, and craft the trajectories of our lives.
U.S. — Interest in Drag Queen Story Hour has declined drastically across the country after several libraries chose to more accurately name them “Man-Wearing-Lingerie-Wants-To-Spend-Time-With-Your-Kids Hour.”
“We are absolutely baffled as to why no one wants to come to ‘Man-Wearing-Lingerie-Wants-To-Spend-Time-With-Your-Kids Hour’ all of a sudden,” said Brandie Schmuts, a former Drag Queen Story Hour host. “Just yesterday we were told how brave, beautiful and important it is to spend quality time with small children at libraries, and now we aren’t invited anywhere. What gives?”
According to sources, local parents have expressed their concerns and hesitancy to support these story hours after suddenly realizing they involve grown men in lingerie spending time with little kids. “My eyes are opened,” said concerned parent Hank Richards. “My alarm bells started going off when the library changed the name of this event. It seems super creepy now.”
“We’re still out here doing the same thing we’ve always done,” continued Brandie Schmuts. “We’re getting a bunch of men to dress up in skimpy, sexualized women’s clothing to share with the most innocent, young, and impressionable minds why half-naked grown men speaking to children is a good thing, actually.”
At publishing time, the Drag Queens tried switching their story hour name again to either “Grown-Men-In-Thongs-Twerk-For-Justice-On-Your-Kids Hour’ or “Confused-Men-Sexually-Confuse-And-Scar-Your-Children-For-Life Hour,” but everyone was still too bigoted to let them within 500 yards of the schools.
Since he apparently understands the Armageddon possibilities, is it too late for Biden to overcome his Administrative State handlers and stop the situation by cutting off aid to Ukraine and twisting Zelenskyy’s arm hard enough that he’ll pledge not to join NATO?
I’m not a Trump fan — and I’m not fond of Biden either. In fact, following the advice of U.S. founding father James Madison – – – “All men having power ought to be mistrusted” – – – I mistrust all of ’em.
So, with that disclaimer in mind, would there be a war in Ukraine if Trump had been sworn in instead of Biden? I know you probably don’t want to, but the first thing is to try to understand the Russian perspective. The question is, when it comes to NATO, is Putin paranoid?
To save you the trouble of reading “Is Putin Paranoid,” yes, he almost certainly is. And while you may not agree with them, the Russians have their reasons.
In a nut shell, in 1990 when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III and others — with the equivalent of a gentleman’s hand-shake — promised the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachov that “NATO would not take even one step closer to Russia’s western border, NATO was 1,000 miles west of Russia’s largest city, St. Petersburg. NATO is now less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg.
Also keep in mind, NATO is run by the only country in history to use nuclear weapons on population centers, having dropped one on Hiroshima and another, three days later, on Nagasaki.
Further, after a CIA engineered Ukranian coup, spearheaded by U.S. operative Victoria Nuland, ousted Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych, it became clear that the CIA planned to get Ukraine into NATO. That would put NATO missiles directly on Ukraine’s border with Russia and only 5 minutes travel time to Moscow.
That would automatically put Russian nuclear forces in “ launch on warn” mode, meaning no time to straighten out any mistakes or glitches. That means no brakes on Russia’s retaliation nukes and pretty much the end of the world.
I don’t care how evil the MIC ((Military-Industrial Complex) propaganda machine has convinced you Putin is, if only in the interest of self-preservation, that possibility alone has to give him sleepless nights.
And there are the American HIMARS rocket systems recently delivered to Russian neighbor Poland that could reportedly launch nuclear tipped missiles.
So, yes, he’s almost certainly paranoid.
It seems Mr. Biden understands the situation – – –
The “1962 Crisis” Biden refers to is the Cuban Missile Crisis when “we” came very close to wiping out all life on earth. So, why doesn’t he do something about it?
For example, once you understand, it’s clear this whole mess could have been quite easily avoided in the first place. And, while not nearly as easily, probably still wound-down even now.
Respected Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter put it something like this: “To avoid the whole Ukraine Fiasco, all Ukraine had to do was to agree not to join NATO.”
“Lots of people don’t know what happened yesterday. To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship. Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight. One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump.“
Aren’t we still recovering from those two mysterious semiconductor factory fires?
“Lots of people don’t know what happened yesterday. To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship. Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight. One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump. Although American semiconductor exporters had to apply for licenses during the Trump years, licenses were approved within a month.
With the new Biden sanctions, all American suppliers of IP blocks, components, and services departed overnight – thus cutting off all service [to China]. Long story short, every advanced node semiconductor company is currently facing comprehensive supply cut-off, resignations from all American staff, and immediate operations paralysis. This is what annihilation looks like: China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry was reduced to zero overnight. Complete collapse. No chance of survival.”
The Biden administration intensified its war on China last week when it detonated a thermonuclear bomb at the heart of Beijing’s booming technology industry. In an effort to block China’s access to crucial semiconductor technology, Team Biden announced onerous new export rules aimed at a “comprehensive supply cut-off” of essential semiconductor technology which– according to one analyst– led to an “immediate operations paralysis.” The terror unleashed by the announcement was aptly summarized in a thread posted at Jordan Schneider’s Twitter account from a translated thread at @lidangzzz (See above quote)
Naturally, the Chinese government was blindsided by the draconian new rules which include “all Chinese advanced computing chip design companies”and will undoubtedly “ensure the elimination of all American products and technologies from the entire ecosystem.” The new sanctions regime will likely inflict significant damage on China’s thriving technology industry while causing considerable harm to US partners who were not consulted on the matter. But while the announcement was a complete surprise, it does fit with the much more extensive list of hostile US actions towards China in the last few months. Some of these include:
While in no way exhaustive, the list should give the reader some sense of the uptick in belligerence that is presently aimed at Beijing. Hectoring China has become a full-time job which is not entirely unexpected as US-China “containment” policy dates back as far as the Cold War. What’s different now –as Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy indicates– is that the US sees itself in the midst of a “great power struggle” in which the primary enemy is China who is regarded as “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order.” (NSS) In other words, the Biden administration is admitting that we are at war with China and that we must use any means necessary to prevail in that conflict. As foreign policy analyst Andre Damon recently noted, the NSS is not a strategy for the defense of the Republic but a “blueprint for World War 3”.
Indeed, so containment alone will no longer suffice. What is required is increasingly provocative actions that will help to isolate, vilify and, ultimately, weaken China so that it becomes a “responsible stakeholder” in the “rules-based system”. In other words, Biden seeks a compliant vassal who will click his heels and do as he is told.
MEP Christine Anderson Blows up on the Vaccine Agenda: “I Will Not Inject a Poisonous Substance into My Body”
“‘The vulnerable group among those who should be given priority to take this updated vaccine are pregnant women.’ I have never heard anything more despicable than that! Because the point is this — they do not know what this vaccine does to the unborn child. They simply have no clue.”
As The Washington Post reported in 2019, various government regulations and fees, such as “impact fees,” which are the same regardless of the size of the unit, “incentivize developers to build big.” The Post continues, “if zoning allows no more than two units per acre, the incentive will be to build the biggest, most expensive units possible.”
The average square footage in new single-family houses has been declining since 2015. House sizes tend to fall just during recessionary periods. It happened from 2008 to 2009, from 2001 to 2002, and from 1990 to 1991.
But even with strong economic-growth numbers well into 2019, it looks like demand for houses of historically large size may have finally peaked even before the 2020 recession and our current economic malaise. (Square footage in new multifamily construction has also increased.)
According to Census Bureau data, the average size of new houses in 2021 was 2,480 square feet. That’s down 7 percent from the 2015 peak of 2,687.
2015’s average, by the way, was an all-time high and represented decades of near-relentless growth in house sizes in the United States since the Second World War. Indeed, in the 48 years from 1973 to 2015, the average size of new houses increased by 62 percent from 1,660 to 2,687 square feet. At the same time, the quality of housing also increased substantially in everything from insulation, to roofing materials, to windows, and to the size and availability of garages.
Source: Department of Labor, US Census Bureau, HUD.1
Meanwhile, the size of American households during this period decreased 16 percent from 3.01 to 2.51 people.
Source: US Census Bureau
Yet, even with that 7 percent decline in house size since 2015, the average new home in America as of 2021 was still well over 50 percent larger than they were in the 1960s. Home size isn’t exactly falling off a cliff. US homes, on a square-foot-per-person basis, remain quite large by historical standards. Since 1973, square footage per person in new houses has nearly doubled, rising from 503 square feet per person in 1973 to 988 square feet person in 2021. By this measure, new house size actually increased from 2020 to 2021.
Source: US Census Bureau
This continued drive upward in new home size can be attributed in part to the persistence of easy money over the past decade. Even as homes continued to stay big—and thus stay comparatively expensive—it was not difficult to find buyers for them. Continually falling mortgage rates to historical lows below even 3 percent in many cases meant buyers could simply borrow more money to buy big houses.
But we may have finally hit the wall on home size. In recent months we’re finally starting to see evidence of falling home sales and falling home prices. It’s only now, with mortgage rates surging, inflation soaring, and real wages falling—and thus home price affordability falling—that there are now good reasons for builders to think “wow, maybe we need to build some smaller, less costly homes.” There are many reasons to think that they won’t, and that for-purchase homes will simply become less affordable. But it’s not the fault of the builders.
This wouldn’t be a problem in a mostly-free market in which builders could easily adjust their products to meet the market where it’s at. In a flexible and generally free market, builders would flock to build homes at a price level at which a large segment of the population could afford to buy those houses. But that’s not the sort of economy we live in. Rather, real estate and housing development are highly regulated industries at both the federal level and at the local level. Thanks to this, it is becoming more and more difficult for builders to build smaller houses at a time when millions of potential first-time home buyers would gladly snatch them up.
How Government Policy Led to a Codification of Larger, More Expensive Houses
MCViewPoint 