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Watch “Clip: What Having Privilege Actually Means” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2022

Permanent Children

https://youtu.be/Prw_eXbfeB4

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Pentagon Stockpiles “Uncomfortably Low” Amid Ukraine Transfers, Officials Admit

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2022

If the pentagram didn’t leave $billions in deadly all over the Middle East…

Tyler Durden's Photo\

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/pentagon-stockpiles-uncomfortably-low-amid-ukraine-transfers-officials-admit

BY TYLER DURDEN

“It is not at the level we would like to go into combat,” a US defense official told The Wall Street Journal of the Pentagon’s fast depleting stockpiles due to unprecedented defense aid to Ukraine, and stressed in particular that artillery ammunition is now “uncomfortably low”.

What’s more is that the shortfall will likely last into the future, given the norm is for new purchases and then manufacturers supplying the weapons to take a process of years.

“The U.S. has during the past six months supplied Ukraine with 16 U.S. rocket launchers, known as Himars, thousands of guns, drones, missiles and other equipment. Much of that, including ammunition, has come directly from U.S. inventory, depleting stockpiles intended for unexpected threats, defense officials say,” the report spells out.

In total so far, the US has pledged to send about $13 billion in arms to Ukraine after only six months of conflict. Given the alarm over Washington’s own dwindling stockpiles, the DoD is now opting to send 105mm rounds to Ukraine instead of the 155mm guided ‘smart’ artillery shells.

In early July, a senior US defense official told reporters in a briefing that the Ukrainian army was at that point firing about 3,000 155mm shells per day:

The revelation came amid questioning on the latest tranche of weapons and ammunition being sent to Ukraine, including, for the first time 1,000 guided 155mm ‘smart’ shells.

The official said despite the high usage rate, Ukrainian forces still have “substantial stores” of 155mm rounds and are far from running out with more rounds on the way. The U.S. and NATO allies have donated hundreds of thousands of 155mm rounds to Ukraine.

But already at this point it seems the Pentagon is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the rate of these ‘donations’.

The Wall Street Journal report indicated further that the US Army has requested of Congress another $500 million per year to enhance its own ammo factories. It remains that the biggest winner in all of this is the big defense contractors and manufacturers. 

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Meanwhile, other NATO allies are facing this same problem and worry, especially ‘neutral’ Germany which has dramatically shifted its historic stance on not sending weapons into foreign conflict zones. A number of German politicians have warned that Berlin should not be sharing weapons from its own arsenal, given that “Unfortunately, the situation here is such that we have an absolute deficit in our own stocks,” according to the recent words of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

Speaking to German media agency ZDF, she said: “However, Germany must also think in the medium term. Due to the German arms problem, the armaments industry had to dedicatedly produce material for the Ukraine.”

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IRS Army

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2022

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America’s Perpetual Foreign-Policy Crises

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2022

Make no mistake about it: If China invades Taiwan, U.S. officials will play the innocent, just as they have done with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And they will then have three big crises — Russia,  China, and the “war on terrorism” — to justify their permanent existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess.

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. 

An interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that oftentimes the crises are ginned up by the national-security establishment itself. Once the crisis materializes, the Pentagon and the CIA play the innocent. “We had nothing to do with ginning up this crisis,” they cry. “We are totally innocent.” 

After the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and the CIA were desperately in need of a crisis that could replace the Cold War crisis, which they were convinced would last forever. That’s when they began going into the Middle East and killing people. When that massive killing spree, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, ended up producing terrorist blowback, the national-security establishment had its new crisis — terrorism, which replaced communism as America’s big official enemy. 

The “war on terrorism” replaced the Cold War’s “war on communism.” Americans began fearing the terrorists (and the Muslims) almost as much as they feared the Reds. With the new crisis, the national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors, was assured of continued existence and ever-expanding taxpayer-funded largess.

Notwithstanding the ostensible end of the Cold War, however, the Pentagon and the CIA never lost hope of reestablishing Russia as an official enemy. But the challenge was: How to make Russia an official enemy again and how to get another ongoing crisis environment with Russia to keep the U.S. national-security establishment in high cotton?

See the rest here

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Watch “Iraq and Libya Imploding – Another ‘Successful’ US Intervention!” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2022

First Afghanistan imploded and now it appears Iraq and Libya are about to follow suit. Syria simmers. The fruits of US interventionism are everywhere the same: chaos and death, not the promised “triumph of peace and democracy.” Also today: Facebook exec admits FBI pushed the company to censor “the laptop from hell.”

Twice as long as Vietnam and still going…same result.

Can you say “Non-intervention”?

https://youtu.be/UfT1u5_QuH8

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The End is Nearing: A World Slowly/Openly Turning Away from the USD

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2022

By Matthew Piepenburg
Gold Switzerland

As more nations turn away from the West (and the USD) and closer to the East (i.e., Russia) to meet their energy needs, how will they find the Rubles or Yuan to buy their oil, gas and other commodities? After all, in the new, post-sanction, multi-FX importing model described above, Turkey can’t just buy Russian oil in Lira; it needs to first settle the trade in Rubles.

So, again, what currency will Turkey use?

With the USD losing influence, it would be the understatement of the year to say that we live in interesting times, for we certainly do.

But despite the inevitable attacks of appearing sensational, un-American or just plain cynical, I feel a more appropriate phrase boils down to this:

“We live in dishonest times.”

Below, I bluntly address the “Fed pivot debate,” the “inflation debate” and the USD’s slow global decline in the setting of a now multi-FX new normal in which gold’s historical bull market has yet to even begin.

These views are not based on biased politics, but honest economics, which for some odd reason, ought to still matter.

Let’s dig in.

The New Normal: Open Dishonesty

I recently authored a report showcasing a string cite of empirically open lies which now pass for reality on everything from the CPI inflation scale to the Cleveland Fed’s +1 real interest rate myth, or from official unemployment data to the now comical (revised) definition of a recession.

But a more recent lie from on high comes directly from the highest of all, U.S. President Joe Biden.

Earlier this month, Biden waddled to his podium and prompt-read to the world that the US just saw 0% inflation for the month of July.

Oh dear…

It’s sad when our national leadership lacks basic economic, math or even ethical skills, but then again, and in all fairness to a President in open (and in fact sad) cognitive decline, Biden is by no means the first President, red or blue, to just plain fib for a living.

A History of Fibbing

We all remember Clinton’s promise that allowing China into the WTO would be good for working class Americans, despite millions of them seeing their jobs off-shored to Asia seconds thereafter.

And let us not forget that little war in Iraq and those invisible weapons of mass destruction.

Nor should we ignore both Bush and Obama’s (as well as Geithner’s, Bernanke’s and Paulson’s) assurance that a multi-billion-dollar bailout (quasi-nationalization) of the TBTF banks and years of printing inflationary money (Wall St. socialism) out of thin air was, “a sacrifice of free market principles” needed to “save the free market economy.”

In reality, however, we haven’t seen a single minute of free market price discovery since QE1.

See the rest here

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The Totally Not-Political FBI Pressures Facebook

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2022

By Tom Woods

What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Two items for you today.

(1) Although the Big Tech platforms don’t exactly seem like they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into suppressing unpopular opinions, we keep learning about ways the federal government has been pressuring them to do so.

We found out quite recently that the federal government pressured Twitter to drop Alex Berenson, for example.

The latest case came just the other day, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan asked him about the Hunter Biden laptop story, and we found out that the FBI had approached Facebook cautioning it against allowing the free dissemination of what it of course called Russian propaganda.

Zuckerberg said:

“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that there is about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.

“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that.”

What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.

Zuckerberg went on: “We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country — it’s a very, very impressive law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”

You think there’s the tiniest chance that the FBI is a political organization?

One favorable development has come from all this, at least: the right side of the ideological divide has rapidly shed its superstitious reverence for agencies like the FBI.

(2) On another note: in case you missed episode 2183 of the Tom Woods Show, I had a chance to speak to Mikkel Thorup, an expert on international relocation and expat issues, having visited 100 countries himself and lived in nine, and an expat himself for over 20 years.

I myself am too much of a homebody to leave the U.S., but I know for a fact that more of my readers than ever are considering their international options, whether that’s outright relocation or measures short of that, like second citizenships and the like.

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Whose war is the US fighting in Syria, and why?

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2022

American troops have been exchanging fire with alleged Iran-backed militas all week. The timing is curious, and dangerous.

Written by
Daniel Larison

U.S. forces in Syria have been carrying out strikes against “Iran-backed” militias this week in response to a recent drone attack on the American base at Tanf and rocket attacks at two other bases in northeastern Syria.

The first U.S. strike this week came in response to an August 15 attack, and that was quickly followed up by another hit. These airstrikes reportedly targeted bunkers used by the militias and killed between six and 10 people.

A later militia strike at bases in Deir al-Zour resulted in three U.S. troops suffering minor injuries, and the U.S. responded to that with Apache attack helicopters on Wednesday, reportedly resulting in casualties. It remains to be seen if the clashes will continue, but there has already been considerable escalation in just a few days. 

Keeping American troops in Syria has been a serious mistake that multiple administrations have failed to correct. The longer that U.S. forces illegally remain in that country, the more likely it is that one of these clashes will result in casualties that could have been avoided. The Biden administration may be reluctant to withdraw troops from another country after what happened during the Afghanistan withdrawal, but their continued presence in Syria makes them targets and does nothing to make the United States more secure. 

Bottom line: The risk to U.S. forces in Syria is increasing, and there are no discernible benefits from keeping them where they are that justify taking that risk. Contrary to what Biden has said, the U.S. is still at war in Syria, but it shouldn’t be and it doesn’t have to be.

What caused this latest eruption of fighting?

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Orange Apologia?

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2022

By Eric Peters

Eric Peters Autos

The real damage that has been done is psychological. The population has been put on notice that the government is now the servant of the drug pushers – i.e., the pharmaceutical cartels – and will use its power to all-but-bayonet-point the populace into taking the drugs pushed by these cartels. Not just these drugs. 

But – so far – all indications are that he is just the Orange Man. Not only hasn’t he apologized for fronting for the drug pushers – for taking personal credit for pushing their drugs – he continues to push them, without apology.

This is unforgivable.

Whatever your opinion of Alex Jones, the opinion he expressed the other day about the Orange Man is difficult to argue with – because it’s always hard to argue with someone when they’re right.

What Alex said was that Orange Man must repudiate the “vaccines” he was either duped into “warp speeding” into existence or was complicit in “warp speeding” into existence. If he repudiates them, it will be more believable that he was merely duped, which is understandable and forgivable.

We all err, after all.

But that is not what makes us human.

A human being, when he realizes he erred – especially when his error has resulted in harm – is mortified that he erred. He owns up to his error and does all he can to repair the harm caused, beginning with an admission and an apology to those who have been harmed.

This goes for all men, by the way – not just the Orange Man. All the men – and women – who blithely lined up to get the shots are just as guilty of having erred. Some, of worse – as in the case of those who wished harm upon those of us who didn’t blithely line up for the shots. Who didn’t just trust the Orange Man – or any men. Not the men (and women) pushing these drugs, at any rate.

It is incontestable that much harm has been done by these drugs styled “vaccines,” which are no such thing as they do not prevent the person injected with them from either getting or spreading the Dread Sickness they were told they would not get and could not spread.

The harm done is not merely physical, either – though that must not be minimized as thousands of people – at the least – have literally been put six feet under by them, according to the most conservative data accrued by the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System (VAERS) and that is likely a very small portion of the total, as hinted at by the data accruing about a large uptick in “all cause” deaths of people in the prime of life, that correlates with the “rollout” of the “vaccines.”

There is also the life-long damage done to those who developed myocarditis or pericarditis – a now admitted-to “adverse effect” of these drugs that the people who were injected with them were never advised of as a possibility by their doctors – who (per the TeeVee line) asked no questions about these drugs, themselves, thus becoming the willing dupes of those pushing them.

But this is merely the physical toll.

The real damage that has been done is psychological. The population has been put on notice that the government is now the servant of the drug pushers – i.e., the pharmaceutical cartels – and will use its power to all-but-bayonet-point the populace into taking the drugs pushed by these cartels. Not just these drugs. For if it is established (as it has been) that the government has both the right and the power to compel anyone to take a drug they do not wish to take then the precedent has been set for the pushing of other drugs. If you disbelieve that such a thing could and ever would happen, consider the income tax, which – when it became law – the populace was told would never affect them. Just the “rich.”

Read the Whole Article

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Ford Hikes Mustang Mach-E Price By As Much As $8,000

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2022

While some argued that the price hikes came days before the Act was signed by President Biden, and therefore weren’t definitive proof that Ford was just price gouging the government’s latest handouts, we think that argument has now officially been put to rest, with Ford now also increasing Mustang Mach-E EV prices between $3,000 and $8,100, depending on Model.

If you think this is new news, you haven’t been paying attention for the last 20 years.

Ford Hikes Mustang Mach-E Price By As Much As $8,000

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ford-hikes-mustang-mach-e-price-much-8000

It was just days ago we wrote about how Ford was hiking the price of its F-150 EV by almost exactly the same amount offered as an EV subsidy in the Biden administration’s new “Inflation Reduction Act”.

While some argued that the price hikes came days before the Act was signed by President Biden, and therefore weren’t definitive proof that Ford was just price gouging the government’s latest handouts, we think that argument has now officially been put to rest, with Ford now also increasing Mustang Mach-E EV prices between $3,000 and $8,100, depending on Model.

The company is “also increasing shipping costs by $200 on all models,” according to Automotive News’ Michael Martinez. 

The company says the new price reflects “significant material cost increases, continued strain on key supply chains, and rapidly evolving market conditions,” according to The Verge. They provided a breakdown of the increases by model type:

  • Select RWD Standard Range: $46,895 ($43,895)
  • Select eAWD Standard Range: $49,595
  • California Route 1 eAWD Extended Range: $63,575 ($52,450)
  • Premium RWD Standard Range: $54,975 ($48,775)
  • Premium eAWD Standard Range: $57,675
  • GT Extended Range: $69,895 ($61,995)

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