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The Pentagon Is Behind Pelosi’s Trip

Posted by M. C. on August 5, 2022

by Jacob G. Hornberger

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court. 

Joe Biden wanted to make it clear that the Pentagon was opposed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, a trip that was obviously intended to gin up a crisis with Red China. 

The notion that the Pentagon opposed Pelosi’s trip is sheer nonsense. In my opinion, there is no possibility whatsoever that any member of Congress, and especially the Speaker of the House, would ever buck the Pentagon on anything. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — i.e., the national-security branch of the federal government — own and control Congress — lock, stock, and barrel, just as they own and control the president and the Supreme Court. 

This is not a new phenomenon. Once the federal government was converted to a national-security state, everyone in Washington knew that there was a new sheriff in town, one that wielded omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including the power of assassination. Given the overwhelming power of the new national-security branch of the government, the other three branches went into passive-and-support mode, especially after the Kennedy assassination in 1963. 

But this phenomenon clearly existed prior to that assassination. That was reflected by the term that President Eisenhower initially planned to use — “the military-industrial-congressional complex” — in the warning he issued to the American people in his Farewell Address in 1961.

Longtime readers of my blog know that for the past few years, I have been recommending a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is professor of international law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and who served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Everyone in America should read Glennon’s book. It is a true eye-opener as to how the federal government is run, especially in foreign affairs.

Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: The national-security establishment is in charge of the federal government. But it permits the other three branches to have the appearance that they are actually in control. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA don’t care about appearances. It’s fine by them that Americans maintain the belief that the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. What matters to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA is that actual power of being in charge. 

If Glennon is right — and I have no doubt that he is — then there is a good possibility that it was the Pentagon that put Pelosi up to making her trip or at least quietly supported it, even while creating the false appearance that Pelosi was acting against the wishes of the U.S. military establishment.

Why would the Pentagon do such a thing? For the same reason the national-security establishment has been ginning up crises around the world practically since its inception. The more crises, the better, because then Americans get afraid and get convinced that a national-security state is necessary to keep them safe. More crises mean more power, influence, and tax-funded largess for the national-security establishment. 

That’s what their old Cold War racket was all about — a perpetual crisis ostensibly based on a supposed international conspiracy supposedly based in Moscow in which the Reds were coming to get us. The more they made Americans afraid of the supposed communist threat to take over America, the more Americans supported them with power and warfare largess.

As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, President Kennedy, having achieved a gigantic breakthrough after the Cuban Missile Crisis, decided to put an end to their Cold War racket and to move our nation in a totally different direction. He is the only president to have done so. No president since Kennedy has dared to take on the national-security establishment. Kennedy’s different vision for America’s future was why they needed to eliminate him and elevate Vice President Johnson, who had the same Cold War mindset as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

When they lost their perpetual Cold War racket, they turned to deadly and destructive interventionism in the Middle East, knowing that that would produce a new crisis, one that would be based on terrorist blowback. The initial blowback — e.g., the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and the attack on the USS Cole — was not sufficient to produce a gigantic crisis. But the 9/11 attacks did prove to be sufficient. At that point, the national-security establishment had a new, big, perpetual crisis, one based on “terrorism.” They were now off to the races again. That’s when they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people and wreaking massive destruction in those two countries — and producing what seemed to be a perpetual crisis based on a never-ending supply of new terrorists. 

But they knew that their war on terrorism might ultimately begin to fizzle. The rather ho-hum reaction among many Americans to their assassination of 71-year-old al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this week reflects the fizzling out of their war on terrorism. They need another big terrorist attack on American soil to get it ramped up again.

But it is now clear that they never gave up hope of restoring Russia and China as renewed official enemies. That’s what the Pentagon’s use of NATO to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact was all about. The Pentagon knew that if NATO ultimately threatened to absorb Ukraine, it could get Russia to react, which Russia ultimately did with its invasion of Ukraine.  

But clearly that’s not enough for these people. They need to ramp up another Cold War crisis with Red China, which would enable them to reinvigorate their old Cold War anti-communist crusade. That would enable them to trot out all of their old anti-communist mantras. That’s what President Trump’s trade war against China was all about. That’s also what Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is all about. U.S. officials are dead-set on ginning up another crisis in that part of the world against another of their old Cold War official enemies. Don’t be surprised about additional crises involving North Korea, Cuba, and maybe even Vietnam.

The biggest mistake the American people have ever made — even bigger than having adopted the socialism of a welfare state and the federal income tax to fund it — was to permit the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. So long as that conversion is permitted to stand, Americans will continue to live lives that are besieged by crises. To get our nation back on the right road — the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world — it is necessary to restore our founding government system of a limited-government republic, which necessarily means the dismantling and termination of the national-security establishment. 

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Watch “Why Brittney Griner’s Arrest Should Cause Us to Examine the Drug War Here” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on August 5, 2022

Why should basketball star Brittney Griner’s arrest in Russia cause us to examine the drug war here at home? Join FFF president Jacob G. Hornberger and Citadel professor Richard M. Ebeling, as they discuss this incident.

Discussion starts @ 06:00

https://youtu.be/kB1OcyN3v0M

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“The Science” changed twice in a week

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/expertclass?e=fa1aba8cd8

You remember when the health establishment warned us not to eat eggs, which in fact are some of the best things you can eat.

You remember when they urged us to consume 11 servings of grains per day. (It’s now six to eight, but that awful food pyramid is still largely unchanged.)

Now you’ll say: Woods, nobody’s perfect. Science is an ever-evolving search for the truth. Give them time, and they’ll get it right.

If that’s what we were dealing with, that would be one thing. As more research is done and more information comes to light, it’s to be expected that we’ll adjust our views. I get that.

But apart from how unreasonably long it seems to take for a faulty health conclusion to be reversed, and how dogmatically the health establishment insists on things it couldn’t possibly have known with the requisite degree of certainty (since, after all, they later turn out to be false), something more seems to be at work.

As with other parts of academia, health research gets skewed by funding sources, and by a pro-consensus bias that makes it difficult to impossible for dissident paradigms to get published, funded, or even acknowledged at all.

Work in support of the existing consensus, meanwhile, is not scrutinized as thoroughly as it should be.

Recent case in point: the past 16 years of Alzheimer’s research may have been directed down a dead end, thanks to the uncritical acceptance of crucial papers by Sylvain Lesné.

Neuroscientist Matthew Schrag recently pointed out multiple examples of faulty data in Lesné’s papers; they are cases of “shockingly blatant” image tampering, according to Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky. 

Lesné’s research supported the dominant so-called amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, and Schrag, speaking to Science magazine, amplified one of the points I just made here: supporters of the reigning hypothesis were much too uncritical of research that supported their view, and were not the noble exemplars of pure “science,” unaffected by anything other than strict reliance on the data, that we read about in fairy tales.

Then, too, we’re now learning that the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression, upon which many people based their therapeutic regimens, may turn out to have been b.s. all along.

Covid research is a fiasco unto itself. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya says that having Anthony Fauci as “de facto head of covid policy and also in charge of billions of dollars for government grants to scientists is also a conflict of interest.”

My point is this:

“Public health” officials give lousy health advice.

Lots of economists nowadays give lousy economic advice.

Most historians teach their political agenda rather than history.

One “expert” class after another has to be viewed with skepticism, to put it mildly.

How are we supposed to navigate a world in which ideologues are trying to colonize our children’s minds, official “health” recommendations are sometimes downright moronic (remember Michelle Obama’s school lunches, drawn out of the nutritional consensus of 1977?), economists gaslight you about inflation and the Federal Reserve, and the list just goes on and on?

Not to mention, these people aren’t exactly sitting there quietly publishing studies.
 
These are the people who came for your job, who destroyed the value of your money, who are coming for your cheap energy, who are making food harder to produce – these people, in other words, don’t just write articles. They take action.
 
We can’t just write articles, either.
 
Time for our side to take action.

Our doors close tomorrow:

http://www.TomSchoolOfLife.com
Tom Woods

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Europe Has Lost The Energy War

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2022

Is Russia weaponising the flow of gas in its tug of war with Europe? Of course it is. But Europeans started this game.

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by Thomas Fazi via UnHerd.com,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europe-has-lost-energy-war

After a decade of financial austerity, is Europe now on the brink of a new age of energy austerity? The city of Hanover has recently introduced strict energy-saving rules that include cutting off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms, banning mobile air conditioners, fan heaters or radiators, switching off public fountains, and stopping illuminating major buildings such as the town hall at night.

Meanwhile, several countries across Europe are considering dimming or switching off public lights, and even adopting “energy curfews”with early closures for businesses and public offices. And more drastic measures are under consideration — including gas rationing for energy-intensive industries such as steel and agriculture.

These measures are part of an EU-wide Gas Demand Reduction Plan, ominously titled Save Gas for a Safe Winter, to reduce gas use in Europe by 15% until next spring. Among the proposals is a provision that officials in Brussels impose fines for non-compliance if they decide the crisis is escalating dangerously.

All of this comes amid growing fears that dwindling Russian gas supplies may plunge Europe into an energy crisis this winter. Overall, Russian gas exports to the EU are at about a third of last year’s levels, falling steadily since the invasion of Ukraine. While several European countries have been reducing their Russian gas imports, Russia itself has been reducing gas flows to Europe through Nord Stream 1, the continent’s biggest pipeline, citing mainly technical issues. Just the other day, citing equipment repair, Russia announced yet another reduction in the amount of natural gas flowing through Nord Stream 1, which is now operating at only 20% capacity.

This has caused natural gas spot prices to surge to levels not seen since early March; they are now almost 10 times higher than they were two years ago. In most countries, electricity prices have risen accordingly. Soaring energy prices are already fuelling record inflation — currently close to 9% and rising in the EU — squeezing people’s spending power, plunging thousands into poverty, and placing a huge burden on industry.

This is especially true for Germany, which is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas imports. Indeed, the country’s industrial production has been contracting for over three months. Astonishingly, 16% of industrial German companies have reduced production or partially stopped their activities due to rising energy prices. This helps explain why last month Germany became the first country to escalate its warning over gas supplies to the “alert level”.

The combined effect of rising prices, lagging demand (both internally and abroad, as China goes back into lockdown) and falling production and investment is already causing economic growth on the continent to grind to a halt. While institutions such as the European Commission and the IMF, despite significant downward revisions, still predict real GDP in the EU to be around 2.5% this year, several analysts consider even these far-from-rosy predictions to be overly optimistic. Carsten Brzeski, Chief Eurozone Economist at ING bank, for example, foresees a recession at the end of the year as high prices sap purchasing power.

To make matters worse, the ECB’s recent decision to raise interest rates will do little or nothing to curb inflation caused by supply-side factors, but will almost certainly further depress economic activity, making it harder for states to mobilise resources needed to cushion the effects of the energy crisis. And as for the ECB’s recently launched Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), aimed at helping countries in financial distress, it may only be activated for those countries judged to be “fiscally sustainable” (a questionable concept in itself), even though the current polycrisis is inevitably bound to put a strain on the public finances of European countries.

Furthermore, even though the EU has sensibly — for once! — proposed to keep the EU’s fiscal rules suspended for another year, several countries, led by Germany, have announced their intention to embrace austerity once again. “For Germany, it’s clear: we will not make use of the general escape clause,” said the German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, arguing that the priority now had to be fighting inflation. “We will return to the debt brake. We have to stop the addiction to ever more indebtedness.” For this, he added, “we have to get out of our expansionary fiscal policies, and out of the debts, so that the central bank has the space to fight inflation with its means”.

In other words, Germany seems intent on once again plunging the continent even deeper into recession through utterly self-defeating austerity, just as it did in the wake of the financial crisis. Europe is already heading for a stagflationary scenario — a situation where high inflation is associated with low or negative growth. Austerity would simply make a bad situation even worse.

If things are bad now, however, it goes without saying that a further decrease in Russian gas flows, which still account for 40% of the EU’s gas imports — not to mention a full stop — would have utterly catastrophic consequences, especially if that were to happen during the winter, when demand for gas it at its highest. Energy, after all, is literally the lifeblood of the economy. It’s what keeps our houses lit and warm (or cool), and our cars, industries, supermarkets and electronic gadgets running. Without it, civilisation literally comes to a halt.

This is why if Europe’s energy supplies are unable to meet demand, the consequences would be almost unimaginable:

See the rest here

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Doug Casey on How COVID Lockdowns Will Become Climate Lockdowns

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2022

People who can’t see that the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror were really just stupid scams are totally on board with new scams, the wars on the virus and climate change. They’re the same people making the same phony do-gooder arguments. 

by Doug Casey

International Man: The COVID lockdowns established a terrible precedent.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued what they call a “dire warning.” They say there will be a 5% increase in carbon emissions as global economies reopen after the COVID shutdowns and that it will be “anything but sustainable” for the environment. This implies that the shutdowns have been good for the environment and that returning to normal is bad.

There has also been a flood of articles in the mainstream media advocating for the use of lockdowns to address so-called climate change.

Do you think that the COVID lockdowns could become climate change lockdowns?

Doug Casey: Without exception, almost everything they say in these articles is either an overt and intentional lie or just factually incorrect. Things that are controversial at best are presented as incontrovertible facts.

Let me first reiterate a few facts about COVID.

It’s hard to be sure because everything about it has become highly politicized, but COVID itself seems no more serious than the Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, or Swine Flu that have come and gone in recent decades and is not even remotely comparable to the Spanish Flu of 1918.

The numbers show that COVID is a risk for people over 70, the obese, and the sick—but a medical non-problem for everyone else. That’s why the average age of decedents is 80, even though it appears that everyone who dies with the virus in their system is reported as a statistic—even if they die of an auto accident or a heart attack. People with zero symptoms are, nonetheless, listed as “cases” if they fail the overly sensitive and very expensive PCR test.

We might ask: “What’s behind this insane flu hysteria—which is radically restructuring the world’s political and economic landscapes? And why now?” It seems very oddly coincidental with a few other phenomena.

One is that the world is on the cusp of a fantastically devastating depression due to the insane creation of currency units all over the world by central banks. Is the phony COVID hysteria—and, yes, I believe it’s 80% phony—being used as an excuse for the coming collapse, a way to recuse those responsible for the insane economic policies causing the depression? In other words, is the COVID hysteria an artificially constructed force majeure used to distract from the real cause of the Greater Depression?

See the rest here

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How British Efforts to Enforce Equality Have Led to a Woke Totalitarianism

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2022

These roles have caused inefficiencies within each industry, taking money and resources away from what needs to be done in order to pour it down the endless drain of bureaucracy. Instead of prioritising efforts to what serves the customer the best, organizations and companies are forced to prioritised what is politically correct.

https://mises.org/wire/how-british-efforts-enforce-equality-have-led-woke-totalitarianism

Jess Gill

From the Equal Pay Act 1970 to the Equality Act 2010, there has been a wave of legalization in Britain to turn the state into some omniscient being that can determine the intentions of an employer. While these pieces of legislation did not enforce direct quotas onto businesses, they have increased inefficiencies through the increase in human resources roles for companies and organizations to cover their own backs.

These pieces of anti-discrimination legislation assumes that the state can determine the intentions of an employer. There are many reasons why an employer may not hire somebody or give an employee higher pay. However, the government cannot possibly know their reasoning. This leads to employers overcompensating in order to escape the government punishing them for employing whoever they wish.

Lew Rockwell encapsulates this perfectly:

Imagine that the government appoints a party planner who says that you can invite or not invite whoever you want, provided that one consideration is not part of the mix: you must not decline to invite someone on the grounds of hair color. Now, it may never have occurred to you to think along these lines. But now you have to. You notice that you have no redheads attending the party, much to your alarm.

What if this fact is taken as evidence that you are discriminating? Will it? You can’t know for sure. You think again: even if no redheads are coming, this is surely not the reason why you are not inviting them. There are other factors, too many factors to name. In any case, how can the state’s party planner know what your motivations are? Isn’t it astounding that a government agency would presume to read your mind, know your heart, and discern your innermost emotions and motives?

Truly this is totalitarian.

Over the past decades, those who believe that equality of outcome must be due to discrimination has come to the mainstream. Modern day feminists demand the abolition of the gender pay gap as if it is due to sexism. The Black Lives Matter movement has led to critical race theory becoming mainstream, an ideology which believes that any race inequality must be due to racism. These demands are an attack on private property and free enterprise.

See the rest here

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Inflation Reduction Act: Another DC Lie

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2022

The bill also spends 80 billion dollars on the IRS. Supposedly this will help collect more revenue from “rich tax cheats.” While supporters of increasing the IRS’s ability to harass taxpayers claim their target is the rich, these new powers will actually be used against middle-class taxpayers and small businesses that cannot afford legions of tax accountants and attorneys and thus are likely to simply pay the agency whatever it demands.

written by ron paul

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/august/01/inflation-reduction-act-another-dc-lie/

The Affordable Care Act, No Child Left Behind, and the USA PATRIOT Act received new competition for the title of Most Inappropriately Named Bill when Senate Democrats unveiled the Inflation Reduction Act. This bill will not only increase inflation, it will also increase government spending and taxes.

Inflation is the act of money creation by the Federal Reserve. High prices are one adverse effect of inflation, along with bubbles and the bursting of bubbles. One reason the Federal Reserve increases the money supply is to keep interest rates low, thus enabling the federal government to run large deficits without incurring unmanageable interest payments.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act increases government spending. For example, the bill authorizes spending hundreds of billions of dollars on energy and fighting climate change. Much of this is subsidies for renewable energy — in other words green corporate welfare. Government programs subsidizing certain industries take resources out of the hands of investors and entrepreneurs, who allocate resources in accordance with the wants and needs of consumers, and give the resources to the government, where resources are allocated according to the agendas of politicians and bureaucrats. When government takes resources out of the market, it also disrupts the price system through which entrepreneurs, investors, workers, and consumers discover the true value of goods and services. Thus, “green energy” programs will lead to increased cronyism and waste.

The bill also extends the “temporary” increase in Obamacare subsidies passed as part of covid relief. This will further increase health care prices. Increasing prices is a strange way to eliminate price inflation. The only way to decrease health care costs without diminishing health care quality is by putting patients back in charge of the health care dollar.

The bill’s authors claim the legislation fights inflation by reducing the deficit via tax increases on the rich and a new 15 percent minimum corporate tax. Tax increases won’t reduce the deficit if, as is going to be the case, Congress continues increasing spending. Increasing taxes on “the rich” and corporations also reduces investments, slowing the economy and thus increasing demand for government programs. This leads to increasing government spending and debt. While there is never a good time to raise taxes, the absolute worst time for tax increases is when, as is the case today, the economy is both suffering from price inflation and, despite the gaslighting coming from the Biden administration and its apologists, is in a recession.

The bill also spends 80 billion dollars on the IRS. Supposedly this will help collect more revenue from “rich tax cheats.” While supporters of increasing the IRS’s ability to harass taxpayers claim their target is the rich, these new powers will actually be used against middle-class taxpayers and small businesses that cannot afford legions of tax accountants and attorneys and thus are likely to simply pay the agency whatever it demands.

Increasing spending and taxes will increase the pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, thus increasing inflation. If Congress was serious about ending inflation, it would cut spending — starting with overseas militarism and corporate welfare. A Congress that took inflation seriously would also take the first step toward restoring a free-market monetary system by passing Audit the Fed and legalizing competition in currency.


Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Watch “McAdams: The U.S. Should Abandon “Foreign Policy” Altogether” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on August 1, 2022

RPI’s Daniel McAdams tells students at the 2022 Mises University that foreign policy is central planning at its worst. Government spends billions on corrupt foreign leaders like Zelensky and Americans bear the financial burden and the existential risk.

https://youtu.be/WaNGMA5JKYQ

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Will PS Audio abandon traditional power supplies?

Posted by M. C. on July 31, 2022

Another MCViewPoint Public Service Announcement.

SMPS or Switch Mode Power Supplies are all the rage today. Is PS Audio joining the crowd?

Switch mode power supplies are popular because they are small and cheap to make. It all fits on a chip. Most wall warts are SMPS. Schiit Audio advertises their wall wart is a linear PS which is the traditional design. If your AC is crap (flickering lights, line noise), linear is the way to go but aftermarket units (SBooster, Shanti, Swagmanlab) tend to be pricey. I have replaced a couple wall warts with IFI Ipower wall warts which claims to use noise cancellation technology with no mention of being linear. My AC mains is decent so I can make no claims of obvious benefit. I figure all the little stuff adds up, especially with headphones. Furman power supply and ferrite cores on the AC plug wires. Cheap.

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Talking About Stoicism 185 Migraine and Stoicism

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2022

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