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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Watch “Article: Back Off, Oh Masters of the Universe” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on August 16, 2022
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US Hails Overnight Test Of Minuteman III Ballistic Missile After Delay Over China Tensions
Posted by M. C. on August 16, 2022
Notice the government always makes a big deal when a missile launch is successful.
It makes me wonder how protected we were during 50 years of cold war. It makes me wonder how protected we are now.
BY TYLER DURDEN
In the first week of August, at a moment Chinese military drills surrounding Taiwan were kicked into high gear following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ultra-provocative visit to the self-ruled island, the White House had announced the Pentagon postponed a routine test launch of an Air Force Minuteman III nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile.
The Air Force’s initial scheduled launch date from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had been delayed, it was announced Aug.4, with the explicit reasoning being the need to avoid any unnecessary escalation of tensions with Beijing, also at a moment a USS carrier strike group was in regional waters near China.
But overnight, that test has now been carried out successfully, showcasing what the Air Force Global Strike Command Airmen has said is a major nuclear deterrent in America’s arsenal.
In a statement Tuesday the command said it “launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with a test re-entry vehicle from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Aug. 16 at 12:49 a.m. Pacific Time to demonstrate the readiness of U.S. nuclear forces and provide confidence in the lethality and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.”
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Alexander Bidenton’s Standing IRS Army
Posted by M. C. on August 16, 2022
Federal tax evasion is a felony, and felons cannot legally own firearms, nor can they vote in at least a dozen states. Biden’s standing army of tax collectors can therefore, in theory, kill three or four “deplorable birds” with one stone, so to speak. One wonders: What would Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison think of this? And what would they do about it?
The Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act” will increase inflation with hundreds of billions in additional government spending and money creation by the Fed while making supply chain problems even worse with onerous new corporate taxes, especially on energy, and myriad new “Green New Deal” environmental regulations. Increased government spending and reduced production will cause higher prices, not lower.
To collect all the new taxes for this latest election-year spending binge the administration is proposing to spend some $80 billion to more than double the number of IRS agents, hiring 87,000 new ones, 70,000 of which are reported to be armed. The Democrat party wants a standing army of armed tax collectors to enforce its will.
Americans once fought a revolution over such acts of tyranny. Among the abuses by King George III listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence were that he “sent hither Swarms of Officers [i.e., armed tax collectors/enforcers] to harass our people, and eat out their substance” and “He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, standing armies . . .” That is how King George III collected the notorious stamp tax. He sent armed soldiers into the homes of the colonists to demand that they prove they had paid the stamp taxes on all of their documents, a stamp being essentially the receipt for taxes paid. And that was just for the stamp tax. They also confiscated firearms and deprived the colonists of civil liberties. It is little wonder that the founding fathers adamantly opposed a standing army in peacetime, only allowing for two years of funding for the army in the original Constitution. “A standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen,” declared James Madison. It is “the bane of liberty,” said Elbridge Gerry. History proves that standing armies have caused “havoc, desolation, and destruction” wrote George Mason.
Jefferson’s nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, may have been a war hero but after the war, as America’s first treasury secretary, he tried to resurrect an American version of King George’s standing army of tax collectors. In the early 1790s Western Pennsylvania farmers protested the first federal tax on a commodity, a distilled spirits tax known as the whiskey tax. The farmers distilled much of their grain into alcohol and even used whiskey as a medium of exchange. They felt discriminated against since there was no similar tax on tobacco, rice, etc. and so they refused to collect and pay the tax, even tarring and feathering federal tax collectors when they showed up.
Since the whiskey tax was his idea, Hamilton talked President George Washington into getting the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to provide some 13,000 conscripts to ride into Western Pennsylvania to enforce the whiskey tax. A large standing army of tax collectors, in other words, larger than the army that defeated the British at Yorktown. George Washington himself led the army of tax collectors into Western Pennsylvania but the protesters had all but vanished when they got there. About twenty of the leaders of the tax rebellion — some of whom were elderly Revolutionary War veterans — were rounded up and “run through the snow in chains,” wrote William Hogeland in The Whiskey Rebellion. Washington apparently got bored by the whole affair and went home, leaving Hamilton in charge.
Hamilton ordered local judges to render guilty verdicts against all the men who were eventually imprisoned and, if Hamilton had his way, would have been hanged. Only two out of twenty were convicted, however, and President Washington pardoned them both, putting an end to America’s first British-style imposition of a standing army of armed tax collectors.
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Who Is Most Responsible for the Ongoing War in Ukraine?
Posted by M. C. on August 16, 2022
The Ukrainian war’s long roots stretch back to the pre-1914 protectionist era. Protectionism led to the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, countless wars in the Middle East, and the Ukrainian war. In effect, protectionism before 1914 caused a hundred years’ war. At least 150 million lives have been lost in this tragic hundred years’ war.
The only way to prevent war is to remove its root cause. If the twentieth century can teach us anything, it is that protectionism and socialism cause war. Eliminating government intervention in the economy is the key to preventing war. As Ludwig von Mises advises, “there is but one system that makes for durable peace: a free market economy.”
https://mises.org/wire/who-most-responsible-ongoing-war-ukraine
John Mearsheimer recently gave an important lecture on the Ukrainian war. He warns that “the United States is now effectively at war with Russia.” Mearsheimer argues, “The United States is principally responsible.” Alexander Stubb contends in a reply to Mearsheimer, “The only place to blame is the Kremlin, Putin, and Russia.”
Commentators who play the blame game over Ukraine do not understand the cause of war in the modern world. The Ukrainian war is the latest chapter in an ongoing hundred years’ war that began in 1914. Those who fail to realize this cannot understand the cause of the war nor how to end it and prevent future wars.
All of the governments entangled in the Ukrainian war share responsibility. Government intervention in the free market economy is the fundamental cause of all modern wars, including the Ukrainian war. All of the governments involved have systematically intervened with the free market economy for decades. Thus they are all to blame for this war.
Protectionism, Imperialism, and War
To fully understand the Ukrainian war, it is necessary to understand what caused the First World War.1 Many historians agree that a “fresh wave of territorial imperialism” after 1880 resulted in the First World War.2 But most historians cannot explain what caused the frenzy of imperialism from 1880 to 1914. The answer is protectionism.
In July 1879, Otto von Bismarck introduced a new tariff in Germany.3 As economists stress, a tariff benefits domestic producers at the expense of two groups: 1) domestic consumers and 2) foreign producers. A tariff impairs business in foreign nations, and foreigners naturally resent this.4
Bismarck’s tariff was a great mistake. However, as Ludwig von Mises emphasizes, “even if all other nations cling to protection, a nation best serves its own welfare by free trade.”5 Rather than embracing free trade, Germany’s neighbors foolishly raised their tariffs. As the table below illustrates, “all the large countries (except the United Kingdom) had very protective trade policies in 1913.”6
What does protectionism have to do with imperialism? A nation cannot profit from an empire in a world of free trade. By contrast, a protectionist nation can benefit from an empire.7 Consequently, protectionist governments are impelled to violent territorial expansion. The return of protectionism after 1880 started a new wave of territorial imperialism that culminated in the First World War.
Consequences of the First World War
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: first world war, John Mearsheimer, protectionism, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
CBS Wanted To Do Critical Reporting On Ukraine’s Government But Ukraine’s Government Said No
Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2022
You can’t have it both ways. Either you want the mass media to serve as war propagandists or you want them to tell the truth. You cannot hold both of those positions simultaneously. They are mutually exclusive. And many actually want the former.
Following objections from the Ukrainian government, CBS News has removed a short documentary which had reported concerns from numerous sources that a large amount of the supplies being sent to Ukraine aren’t making it to the front lines.
The Ukrainian government has listed its objections to the report on a government website, naming Ukrainian officials who objected to it and explaining why each of the CBS news sources it dislikes should be discounted. After the report was taken down and the Twitter post about it removed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said this was a good start but still not enough.
“Welcome first step, but it is not enough,” Kuleba tweeted. “You have misled a huge audience by sharing unsubstantiated claims and damaging trust in supplies of vital military aid to a nation resisting aggression and genocide. There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why.”
CBS Removes Documentary on Ukraine Military Aid After Pressure from Ukrainian Government #Ukraine‘s FM called for investigation into the documentary, which found that most military aid wasn’t making it to the frontlines by Dave DeCamp
#cbsnews https://news.antiwar.com/2022/08/08/cbs-removes-documentary-on-ukraine-military-aid-after-pressure-from-ukrainian-government/…
7:42 PM · Aug 8, 2022·Twitter Web App
The CBS News article about the documentary was renamed, from “Why military aid to Ukraine doesn’t always get to the front lines: ‘Like 30% of it reaches its final destination’” to the far milder “Why military aid in Ukraine may not always get to the front lines.” An editor’s note on the new version of the article explicitly admits to taking advisement on its changes from the Ukrainian government, reading as follows:
“This article has been updated to reflect changes since the CBS Reports documentary ‘Arming Ukraine’ was filmed, and the documentary is also being updated. Jonas Ohman says the delivery has significantly improved since filming with CBS in late April. The government of Ukraine notes that U.S. defense attaché Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kyiv in August 2022 for arms control and monitoring.”
CBS News does not say why it has taken so long for this report to come out, why it didn’t check to see if anything had changed in the last few months during a rapidly unfolding war before releasing its report, or why it felt its claims were good enough to air before Kyiv raised its objections but not after.
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Government Surveillance Doesn’t Stop at Your Bank’s Door
Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2022
Warrantless surveillance may be novel for technology and media companies, but it is nothing new when it comes to the government’s surveillance of Americans’ financial activity.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/government-surveillance-doesnt-stop-banks-door
By Jennifer J. Schulp and Norbert Michel
This article appeared in New York Daily News on August 11, 2022.
Modern life is full of sharing mundane information with others. Your cellphone company knows where you’ve been, your home security system knows your visitors, and your bank knows your spending habits.
And it’s often not just your service providers that know. Law enforcement has used many of these treasure troves of information without first obtaining a warrant. This warrantless surveillance — which prompted a recent hearing by the House Committee on the Judiciary — may be novel for technology and media companies, but it is nothing new when it comes to the government’s surveillance of Americans’ financial activity.
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) requires financial institutions to assist federal agencies in detecting and preventing money laundering and other crimes. It does this in a number of ways, including by enlisting financial institutions to report certain customer activities to the government.
One report is a “currency transaction report,” which is filed for any deposit, withdrawal or other transaction involving currency of more than $10,000. That means if you deposit more than $10,000 in cash, your bank must tell the government. And it’s illegal to try to avoid the report by breaking a transaction into smaller increments.
Warrantless surveillance may be novel for technology and media companies, but it is nothing new when it comes to the government’s surveillance of Americans’ financial activity.
Financial institutions also must file “suspicious activity reports” on transactions suspected to be related to illegal activity. The government requires these reports be kept confidential, including from the customer implicated.
These obligations don’t just apply to banks; they also apply to a host of entities including currency exchanges, money transmission businesses, broker‐dealers, casinos, pawnbrokers, travel agencies and car dealerships. In 2019, more than 20 million reports were filed by more than 97,000 entities.
As Rep. Jerrold Nadler put it: “The easy availability of personal data to the government poses significant risks to minorities, to those with unpopular views, to our system of justice, and ultimately, to the stability of our democracy itself.” While the government’s interest in stopping crime is certainly an important one, the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment already balances that interest with an individual’s interest in privacy by requiring the government to obtain a warrant to access a person’s documents and information.
The BSA fails to achieve the Fourth Amendment’s balance, and the Supreme Court is partly to blame. Several cases in the 1970s established what is known as the “third‐party doctrine,” which essentially exempts information that has been provided to a third party, like a bank, from the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Under that doctrine, since such information is no longer “private,” the government can access it from the third party.
Although the Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality — when the government required less reporting from financial institutions — several justices were concerned about the BSA’s privacy intrusions. Two justices cautioned in California Bankers Association vs. Shulz that significantly extending the reporting requirements would be problematic, explaining that “[f]inancial transactions can reveal much about a person’s activities, associations and beliefs. At some point, governmental intrusion upon these areas would implicate legitimate expectations of privacy.” Other justices thought that the BSA had already crossed the constitutional line. Justice Thurgood Marshall was clear: “By compelling an otherwise unwilling bank to photocopy the checks of its customers the government has as much of a hand in seizing those checks as if it had forced a private person to break into the customer’s home or office and photocopy the checks there.”
The scope of the BSA’s surveillance has greatly expanded since then through additional regulatory requirements and the increasing use of intermediaries in routine financial transactions. Some current Supreme Court justices, including Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor, have recognized that today’s reliance on technology requires revisiting the third‐party doctrine. As Gorsuch explained, “just because you have to entrust a third party with your data doesn’t necessarily mean that you should lose all Fourth Amendment protections in it.”
Even without a Supreme Court condemnation of the BSA, though, Congress should step up to prohibit this type of government surveillance. While not without its problems, the Stored Communications Act prohibits an end‐run around the Fourth Amendment for data collected by internet service providers. The bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, introduced in the Senate, would prohibit law enforcement from purchasing individuals’ data. Congress should apply the same logic to financial data.
Catching criminals is a worthy goal (even if it’s questionable how much the BSA contributes to that effort), but the Fourth Amendment already balances privacy with law enforcement needs by requiring the government to get a warrant. The same rules should apply under the BSA.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bank Secrecy Act, currency transaction report, Government Surveillance, suspicious activity report | Leave a Comment »
WEF’s “Global Intelligence Collecting AI” to Erase Ideas from the Internet
Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2022
For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.
Naughty GETTR posts? Say bye-bye to your TWITTER account
By Igor Chudov
Igor’s Newsletter
The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.
So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.
To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.
By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.
What is this about? What’s new?
The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.
So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.
This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: AI, Global Intelligence, Inbal Goldberger, WEF | Leave a Comment »
Can Trump and Putin Avert Cold War II?
Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2022
That was 2017. Now the question is can we stop the MIC from starting a nuclear WW III.
January 2, 2017
by Linda
In retaliation for the hacking of John Podesta and the DNC, Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and ordered closure of their country houses on Long Island and Maryland’s Eastern shore.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that 35 U.S. diplomats would be expelled. But Vladimir Putin stepped in, declined to retaliate at all, and invited the U.S. diplomats in Moscow and their children to the Christmas and New Year’s party at the Kremlin.
“A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger,” reads Proverbs 15:1. “Great move,” tweeted President-elect Trump, “I always knew he was very smart!”
Among our Russophobes, one can almost hear the gnashing of teeth.
Clearly, Putin believes the Trump presidency offers Russia the prospect of a better relationship with the United States. He appears to want this, and most Americans seem to want the same. After all, Hillary Clinton, who accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet,” lost.
Is then a Cold War II between Russia and the U.S. avoidable?
That question raises several others.
Who is more responsible for both great powers having reached this level of animosity and acrimony, 25 years after Ronald Reagan walked arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev through Red Square? And what are the causes of the emerging Cold War II?
Comes the retort: Putin has put nuclear-capable missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.
True, but who began this escalation?
George W. Bush was the one who trashed Richard Nixon’s ABM Treaty and Obama put anti-missile missiles in Poland. After invading Iraq, George W. Bush moved NATO into the Baltic States in violation of a commitment given to Gorbachev by his father to not move NATO into Eastern Europe if the Red Army withdrew.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, says John McCain.
Russia did, after Georgia invaded its breakaway province of South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. Putin threw the Georgians out, occupied part of Georgia, and then withdrew.
Russia, it is said, has supported Syria’s Bashar Assad, bombed U.S.-backed rebels and participated in the Aleppo slaughter.
But who started this horrific civil war in Syria?
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Was it not our Gulf allies, Turkey, and ourselves by backing an insurgency against a regime that had been Russia’s ally for decades and hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean?
Did we not exercise the same right of assisting a beleaguered ally when we sent 500,000 troops to aid South Vietnam against a Viet Cong insurgency supported by Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow?
That’s what allies do.
The unanswered question: Why did we support the overthrow of Assad when the likely successor regime would have been Islamist and murderously hostile toward Syria’s Christians?
Russia, we are told, committed aggression against Ukraine by invading Crimea.
But Russia did not invade Crimea. To secure their Black Sea naval base, Russia executed a bloodless coup, but only after the U.S. backed the overthrow of the pro-Russian elected government in Kiev.
Crimea had belonged to Moscow from the time of Catherine the Great in the 18th century, and the Russia-Ukraine relationship dates back to before the Crusades. When did this become a vital interest of the USA?
As for Putin’s backing of secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, he is standing by kinfolk left behind when his country broke apart. Russians live in many of the 14 former Soviet republics that are now independent nations.
Has Putin no right to be concerned about his lost countrymen?
Unlike America’s elites, Putin is an ethnonationalist in a time when tribalism is shoving aside transnationalism as the force of the future.
Russia, it is said, is supporting right-wing and anti-EU parties. But has not our National Endowment for Democracy backed regime change in the Balkans as well as in former Soviet republics?
We appear to be denouncing Putin for what we did first.
Moreover, the populist, nationalist, anti-EU and secessionist parties in Europe have arisen on their own and are advancing through free elections.
Sovereignty, independence, a restoration of national identity, all appear to be more important to these parties than what they regard as an excessively supervised existence in the soft-dictatorship of the EU.
In the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, the single-party dictatorship and the free society, we prevailed.
But in the new struggle we are in, the ethnonational state seems ascendant over the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual “universal nation” whose avatar is Barack Obama.
Putin does not seek to destroy or conquer us or Europe. He wants Russia, and her interests, and her rights as a great power to be respected.
He is not mucking around in our front yard; we are in his.
The worst mistake President Trump could make would be to let the Russophobes grab the wheel and steer us into another Cold War that could be as costly as the first, and might not end as peacefully.
Reagan’s outstretched hand to Gorbachev worked. Trump has nothing to lose by extending his to Vladimir Putin, and much perhaps to win.
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Watch “Talking About Stoicism 187 Let Your Mind be Your Fortress” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022
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