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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
You really need to know
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: made in the USA, Tecovas, work boots | Leave a Comment »
Sec. State Blinken: Nordstream Bombing ‘Offers Tremendous Opportunity’
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
Poland says “Thanks US”
While US neocons and mainstream media continue to inexplicably blame Russia for blowing up its own pipeline, US officials continue to signal their motive and the benefit they see from the sabotage. On Friday, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken said at a press conference that blowing up the pipeline presented a “tremendous opportunity” to finally end Europe’s dependence on Russian energy imports. Also today: Guess who’s personal fortune doubled during Covid?
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Kremlin Gives Positive Response to Musk’s Twitter Peace Plan
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/kremlin-gives-positive-response-to-musks-twitter-peace-plan/
The Russian government praised Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for his Ukraine war peace proposal. Musk Tweeted a four-point plan on Monday that drew stern criticisms from Western politicians and commentators.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “It is very positive that somebody like Elon Musk is looking for a peaceful way out of this situation.” He continued, “Compared to many professional diplomats, Musk is still searching for ways to achieve peace. And achieving peace without fulfilling Russia’s conditions is absolutely impossible.”
The Kremlin stopped short of endorsing Musk’s proposal. The plan called for UN-held referendums in four contested regions of Ukraine, recognition of Russia’s claim to Crimea, neutrality for Kiev, and Moscow’s agreement to respect the results of the voting in the Donbas and southern regions of Ukraine.
Musk’s plan was far less favorably received in Kiev. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany responded to Musk on Twitter, saying, “F**k off is my very diplomatic reply to you, [Elon Musk].”
Musk says he is pro-Ukraine. After Russia invaded Ukraine, SpaceX began providing the people of Ukraine with Starlink to access the internet. Musk says his company has spent $80 billion to provide the service to Kiev.
Musk is in the process of purchasing Twitter for $44 billion. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the Tesla CEO is pushing forward with the deal, months after initially making the offer.
In replies to his initial proposal, Musk Tweeted that nuclear war is a possible outcome of the war. He added his plan would be the likely result of the war, and it’s “just a question of how many die before” that outcome is reached.
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Environmental and Political Elites Are Destroying Food Production for “Climate” Goals
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
Two major future consequences of the EU agri-environmental strategies already are evident. Consumers all over the world will bear the costs of higher food prices, affecting the economic efficiency of the whole supply chain. New environmental norms imposed by agri-environmental policies on production and consumption, mainly practiced in the West, will prevent poor countries from participating in markets because they will be unable to meet these standards.
In the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, a special thematic part was dedicated to anticipating the future on earth in the winter of 2022. The visitors had the opportunity to vote for the topic they find important and want to learn more about.
The three knowledge offered choices were 1) how development of energy potential may influence climate change; 2) how improving the condition of the environment, forests, parks, and waters may reduce CO2; 3) how improving the conditions of agriculture, land, and farmers may contribute to food security and affordable food. The visitors voted by throwing a bottle cork in one of the three knowledge cylinders, and the option that won the most votes would be promoted in the museum through popular science content.
Out of eighteen visitors, only four decided to vote for the third cylinder on agriculture, and these were children and women. The rest of votes were shared almost equally between the cylinders for energy and the environment.
The ad hoc experiment I conducted revealed several important issues. How is it possible that the priority question of food security and sustainable agriculture attracted such weak attention? Developing energy and environmental potential for CO2 reduction, although of high relevance, cannot feed the world. But it attracts ecological concerns and mobilizes solidarity sentiments more than hunger in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where a significant part of the populations has only one or half a meal per day.
Making food affordable and accessible to them and dying children in Yemen and Ethiopia (where the war has been going on since 2020) obviously does not engage sentiments as strongly as information that the Earth is 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than one hundred years ago; that glaciers are melting in an enormous vastness of ice; or that polar bears are withdrawing toward the inner continent. Because of the polar bears and glaciers, international meetings of the highest importance regularly convene in Davos; the compulsory climate agreement in Paris was signed; and Greta Thunberg shouted at the United Nations General Assembly, urging radical changes in CO2 emissions.
Environmentalists share one chronic feature: they are preoccupied with the “imagined state of environmental purity and harmony” on a universal level. They associate resolving environmental problems with a larger transformative endeavor. The reduction of carbon emissions is inseparable from a series of seemingly unrelated political projects: ending capitalism and existing power structures, and completely restructuring transportation systems and industries.
It is thus not surprising that concrete places such as Yemen and Ethiopia and their particularistic problems of hunger inspire fewer public statements, and only sporadically evoke expression of concerns at the international conferences. Even in the Carnegie Museum, the knowledge cylinder that suggested improvement of food security attracted only a few curious minds.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Climate Goals, Environmental, Food Production, political elites | Leave a Comment »
An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued U.S. Dominance
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
Global Research
It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.
And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/engineered-food-poverty-crisis-secure-continued-us-dominance/5790815
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.
According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.
Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.
Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.
Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.
Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.
The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.
US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.
It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.
In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.
It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Antonio Guterres, Engineered Food, Poverty Crisis, U.S. Dominance | Leave a Comment »
Truss exposes the current instability of Western democracies
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
The turmoil in British politics can lead to disastrous consequences. It also mirrors the current state of the wider West
https://www.rt.com/news/563968-liz-truss-crises-uk/
Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.
Even fervent believers in the stability of Western democracies must surely have had their faith shaken last week by the extraordinary economic and political crises created by the newly-minted UK prime minister, Liz Truss.
In the week after the prime minister’s hand-picked chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, handed down a ‘mini-budget’ on September 23, the English pound crashed; the government bond market took a dive; interest and mortgage rates rose; some mortgage markets shut down; the Bank of England staged a highly unusual fiscal intervention to prevent the collapse of major pension funds; and the IMF criticized Truss in a manner usually reserved for the leaders of debt-ridden banana republics.
The global importance of these events and the ongoing economic and political disruption that they will inevitably cause should not be underestimated. Political commentator Alastair Campbell, formerly Tony Blair’s chief of staff, accurately described last week as “the week that everything changed.”
What led to the UK economic crisis?
Quite simply, the fact that the Truss mini-budget provided for billions of pounds worth of unfunded and uncosted tax cuts – including, most provocatively, a cut in the 45% top level income tax rate – caused the financial markets to register a serious vote of no confidence in the Truss government, with all the attendant consequences that followed.
Incidentally, the events of last week show where real power ultimately lies in the West – and it is definitely not with politicians.
Truss’s mini-budget is, of course, a product of the crude neo-liberal economic ideology that she so fanatically believes in, and which proved decisive in attracting the 80,000 or so Thatcher-worshipping members of the Tory party that anointed Truss prime minister only a few weeks ago.
Faced with an economic disaster entirely of her own making – one of her first acts as prime minister was to sack the head of the Treasury – Truss simply doubled down, and retreated petulantly to her Downing Street bunker.
She did emerge briefly late last week to do a round of disastrous radio interviews with regional BBC stations – in which Truss continued to robotically tout the benefits of ‘trickle-down economics’, and (unsuccessfully) tried to blame the economic crisis entirely on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the conflict in Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of commentators in the UK – irrespective of their political affiliations – have been strongly critical of the Truss mini-budget and the prime minister herself. Even Daily Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard accused Truss of having “embarked on a course of sheer madness.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Kwasi Kwarteng, Liz Truss, mini-budget | Leave a Comment »
All of Us Are in Danger: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition
Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2022
You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.
What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.
By John & Nisha Whitehead
“If you can’t say ‘F@#k’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k’ the government.’”— Lenny Bruce, comedian
Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.
In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.
Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.
Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.
Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”
It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.
It’s been almost a decade since the government tried to make a seditious conspiracy charge stick—against a small Christian militia accused of plotting to kill a police officer and attack attendees at his funeral in order to start a civil war—and it lost the case.
Although the government was able to show that the Hutaree had strong anti-government views, the judge ruled in U.S. v. Stone that “[O]ffensive speech and a conspiracy to do something other than forcibly resist a positive show of authority by the Federal Government is not enough to sustain a charge of seditious conspiracy.”
Whether or not prosecutors are able to prove their case that Rhodes and his followers intended to actually overthrow the government, the blowback will be felt far and wide by anyone whose political views can be labeled “anti-government.”
All of us are in danger.
In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anti-Government Speech, secessionists | Leave a Comment »
The People Who Engineered Record Inflation Want To Control Cryptocurrency
Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2022
The Federal Reserve’s most important payment system, FedACH, which processes over 50 million transactions per day, still takes 2-3 days for payments to clear. It’s so outdated, it’s as if they’re still sending satchels full of cash via Pony Express.
It’s also ridiculous that the people who have failed in every possible aspect of their responsibility think that they’re qualified to administer a brand new financial system.
These Central Banks failed to anticipate inflation. They failed to recognize it. They failed to do anything about it for more than a year. And now they’re hellbent on causing a recession.
They’ve pretty much been a complete disaster. Yet now they want to be in charge of crypto too. Are these people serious??
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, OCT 05, 2022 – 06:30 AM
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
On the First of May in the year 1716, a swashbuckling Scottish entrepreneur was making this pitch of his lifetime to the head of the French government in Paris.
The entrepreneur’s name was John Law. By all accounts he was incredibly charismatic and had a flamboyant, larger than life personality. He was something like Adam Neumann, formerly of WeWork… the kind of person who could talk anyone into anything.
And John Law’s pitch that day was to launch an entirely new financial system.
King Louis XIV had just died eight months before, leaving France in terrible financial ruin. Decades of endless wars, palaces, and profligate spending had bankrupted the French government.
The situation was so dire, in fact, that there was hardly any gold left in the French treasury. So the new head regent of the government, Duke Philippe II of Orleans, was desperate for a solution.
Law made him a bold proposal: the Duke would provide Law with a special banking license. And in exchange, Law would create a new system of paper money that would bring more gold into France and help pay off the crippling national debt.
Philippe agreed. And, only a few weeks later, John Law’s new Banque Generale Privee was in business.
It turned out that people loved the idea of paper money. And within a year, his paper bank notes were circulating widely throughout the French economy, and the government even accepted them for tax payments.
Law made his paper money even more valuable in late 1717, after he had taken control of the Mississippi Company.
The French Mississippi Company was something like the Dutch East India Company; it was a private enterprise that had received a royal monopoly over all the land and resources in France’s American colonies.
Almost immediately after securing rights to the monopoly, Law offered shares of the Mississippi Company to the public; it was like a giant IPO.
But Law sweetened the deal by allowing people to pay up to 75% of the share price using his bank’s paper money.
The Mississippi Company IPO was a smashing success. It was so popular that Law was offered bribes, sex, and political favors from French nobles in exchange for the opportunity to buy a few extra shares.
The famous philosopher Voltaire was eye witness to this, and wrote, “I myself saw him pass through the galleries of the Palais-Royal followed by dukes and peers, Marshalls of France, bishops of the Church.”
And at first the share price soared. Bear in mind the Mississippi Company had zero activity. Hardly anyone was living in France’s southern colonies in America, and there was virtually no trade or commerce going on.
The government even tried deporting criminals to America, trying to increase the population of the colonies. They offered hundreds of acres of land for free to anyone who would go. Yet economic activity still failed to transpire.
Eventually the French public realized the truth; there would be no gold, no gems, and no riches coming from the Mississippi Company. And the stock price began to quickly collapse.
Law tried to prop up the stock price by creating more paper money (backed by absolutely nothing), and using that new money to buy shares of the Mississippi Company.
But all he ended up doing was creating inflation; with so much new paper money circulating in the economy, prices everywhere rose.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Central Banks, cryptocurrency, FedACH, inflation, John Law | Leave a Comment »
An Ancient Warning: Criminal Trespass Is the State’s Essential Feature
Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2022
https://mises.org/wire/ancient-warning-criminal-trespass-states-essential-feature
Whether one takes the Hebrew as literal history or as archetypal fable, there’s no escaping the warnings given to those who reject the private law society. Those warnings are that there is one vile and destructive alternative to the peaceful resolution of conflict by market actors. That vile alternative is what we call the state.
In the eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, we are introduced to the scene of a nationwide rejection of private law in exchange for a form of rule that the people of Israel had observed in all the pagan nations that surrounded them. In their defense, their prophet, Samuel, had selected leading judges in a direct affront to the methods that Yahweh—Israel’s god—had clearly prescribed. The selection process had to emerge from the sphere of exchange, where honest dealers who had the competence and character to win over their fellow citizens through their personal uprightness would be exalted in unanimity. These people would then serve as arbiters in what Hans-Hermann Hoppe has described as private courts.
Instead of utilizing this market-centered selection mechanism, Samuel took the expedient path and simply lifted his own sons to the role. In doing so, they would move throughout the land of Israel from town to town, deciding difficult cases. These cases included every offense from the improper building of walls on a neighbor’s property all the way up to capital offenses. Rather than conducting themselves with impartiality, Samuel’s sons were incompetent and greedy for bribes, and they were not held in check by their fellow countrymen. Rather than demanding that the prophet denounce these crooks and replace them through the righteous process that Yahweh had prescribed, the people also erred by looking to power and not righteous actions in the market for the solution to judgment.
The rejection of this method wasn’t a rejection of Samuel or his sons. Rather, it was a personal rejection of Yahweh himself as sovereign ruler and arbiter of justice and righteousness. The people petulantly complained to the prophet and to the Lord to give them the state. And they were given it … good and hard.
Even so, they were warned about the nature of the state before it was inaugurated through the reign of the tall and handsome yet moronic and worthless donkey retriever named Saul. However, Yahweh didn’t speak of the personal flaws of the kings themselves. Rather, he warned his people that by rejecting Him and his market-generated path toward justice, they were wishing for a monstrous institution that was—and is—established in criminal trespass.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: 1 Samuel, Criminal Trespass, the State | Leave a Comment »
CIA plot led to huge blast in Siberian gas pipeline
Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2022
By Alec Russell in Washington 28 February 2004
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas…
See paywall blocked article here
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