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The G-7 Squawks But They’ve Already Lost the War Against Russia

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

By Tom Luongo

Gold Goats ‘n Guns

In desperation I expect a false flag provocation to force the Russians into a move or simply justify the Davos pulling us into their next war, i.e. another virus or chemical weapons attack this time blamed on Putin.

The G-7 Squawks But They’ve Already Lost the War Against Russia

So, the G-7 leaders are in agreement, more war with Russia. Without actually saying exactly that, that was the main takeaway from he meeting of the most feckless leaders in the world.

They also pledged $600 billion they don’t have to fund global infrastructure projects to ‘combat China’s Belt and Road Initiative.’ One wonders where all this money and, in the case of Europe, energy is going to come from to fund all of this.

But the question I’ve had from the beginning of this obvious war of attrition the West wants to impose on Russia is the following: Do we have the stamina, in terms of real production capacity, to cash these checks our leaders are writing?

A major report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), one of the oldest military think tanks in the UK emphatically said not in anyone’s wildest dreams. Alex Mercouris of The Duran did an amazing job of breaking down what RUSI thought about NATO’s ability to wage war vs. Russia’s current military tempo, days before this idea caught fire.

In short, the gulf between NATO’s annual munition production and weekly consumption by the UAF is staggeringly vast.

I told you at the outset of this war that Russia was absolutely engaged in a war of attrition against the West, hoping NATO would take the bait of a ground war in Ukraine.  I didn’t have numbers to back this up, only the inference because of what I understood about Putin and his previous maneuvers against the West.

What’s obvious to me is the neocons and neoliberals controlling the West think they can turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, but what if Putin thinks he can turn Ukraine into a quagmire for them?

Russia is not capable of conquering Europe. But he doesn’t need to to defeat them. He just needs to create a version of this map:

I knew that Putin wouldn’t commit Russia to this conflict if it couldn’t sustain fighting it.  I also knew that the West would LIE OUTRAGEOUSLY about the level of corruption within the Russian society to play on the biases of marginally-informed American armchair generals. 

See the rest here

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Lincoln’s Repudiation of the Declaration of Independence

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

Lincoln’s Repudiation of the Declaration of Independence

By Thomas DiLorenzo

Perhaps the biggest falsehood ever pedaled about Abraham Lincoln is that he was devoted to the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Exactly the opposite is true; he repudiated every one of the main principles of the Declaration with his words and, more importantly, his actions.  In our time the odd and ahistorical writings of Harry Jaffa and his “Straussian” cult followers have been the primary means of spreading this enormous falsehood.  (Jaffa was neither a historian nor a philosopher but a supposed expert in “rhetoric” who spent his career writing books instructing Americans about the allegedly “real meaning” of historical documents in writings that were often either void of historical facts or flatly contradicted by them).

Contrary to what every American is taught beginning with elementary school (or sooner), Lincoln did not believe that all men are created equal.  He repeatedly denied this for his entire adult life, even announcing during one of the Lincoln/Douglas debates that “I as much as any man want the superior position” to belong to the white race.  He was proud to be a white supremacist’s white supremacist. “Before, after, and during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in public and in private, Lincoln used the N-word,” wrote Lerone Bennett, Jr. in Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, p. 97.

While in the Illinois legislature Lincoln supported the Illinois black codes which deprived free blacks of citizenship.  He supported the 1848 amendment to the Illinois constitution that forbade blacks from emigrating into the state.  He was the “manager” of the Illinois Colonization Society that used tax dollars to deport the small number of free blacks that lived in the state.  Until his dying day he plotted to deport all the black people out of America (See Colonization after Emancipation by Philip Magness and Sebastian Page).

Lincoln invented a bizarre new theory of the American founding to “justify” his destruction of the voluntary union of the founding fathers that was initiated by the Declaration of Independence – their declaration of secession from the British empire.  As summarized by legal/constitutional scholar James Ostrowski, Lincoln’s absurd theory was that:

  • No state may ever secede from the union for any reason.
  • If any state secedes, the federal government shall invade such state with sufficient military force to suppress the secession.
  • The federal government may require all states to raise militias to suppress the secession of their sister states.
  • After suppressing secession the federal government may rule by martial law until such time as the state(s) accepts federal supremacy.
  • The federal government may force the states to adopt new state constitutions imposed on them at gunpoint by military authorities.
  • The president may, on his own authority and without consulting any other branch of government, suspend the Bill of Rights and the writ of habeas corpus.

No state would ever have ratified the Constitution if this – Lincoln’s ridiculous and tyrannical new theory – is what the citizens of the states thought the Constitution said.

See the rest here

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A ‘New Compact’ With Saudi Arabia Is a Terrible Idea

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

We should make sure that the U.S. is never again in a position where it is expected to support another Saudi war.

This gets at the core problem with what Cook and Indyk are proposing: the closer relationship with Saudi Arabia that they want would be a destabilizing and destructive one. It would fuel regional rivalries and keep the U.S. ensnared in conflicts that have nothing to do with American security.

By Daniel Larison
Eunomia

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/a-new-compact-with-saudi-arabia-is

Steven Cook and Martin Indyk urge Biden to bind the U.S. even more tightly to Saudi Arabia:

Biden should instead consider a more fundamental reconceptualization of the bilateral relationship. What both countries need is a new compact that focuses on countering a major strategic threat they both face: Iran’s nuclear program.

Cook and Indyk’s article is a fairly standard rehash of familiar pro-Saudi claims. While they propose a “new compact” between our governments, the ideas in their article are very old and largely outdated. They assert that the “benefits of reconciliation are self-evident,” but this hasn’t been true for years. If the benefits were so self-evident, they wouldn’t need to be justifying closer ties with Riyadh, and the truth is that the benefits to the United States are nowhere to be found.

Even if the Saudi government increased oil production, any increase it can deliver won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, and the Saudi government makes its oil production decisions based on what it perceives to be in its own interests and not as a favor to America. Whatever benefits there are from the relationship, the Saudi government is the one receiving virtually all of them. It is not self-evident at all what the U.S. gets for its trouble, and except for inertia and the pleading of certain interest groups it is hard to see why the U.S. continues to align itself so closely with such an awful state. It would be one thing if someone could demonstrate what the U.S. stands to gain by continuing it, to say nothing of deepening it, but the possible rewards are never specified.

The authors imagine what this “reconciliation” would do: “The pariah would be transformed into a partner.” One problem with this is that Saudi Arabia was never treated as a pariah (quite the opposite), and it has proven itself to be a mostly useless and increasingly pernicious “partner.” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj turns their statement around on them in his response:

Maybe Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be a partner and maybe Iran shouldn’t be a pariah and maybe the US shouldn’t be lording the nature of its relationships with regional powers in ways that create regional imbalances and instability.

This gets at the core problem with what Cook and Indyk are proposing: the closer relationship with Saudi Arabia that they want would be a destabilizing and destructive one. It would fuel regional rivalries and keep the U.S. ensnared in conflicts that have nothing to do with American security. A “more stable Middle Eastern order” will not exist if the U.S. does what the authors want, and by increasing the commitment to Saudi Arabia they guarantee that the U.S. will end up fighting and supporting wars that it could otherwise easily avoid and oppose.

We have already seen in Yemen what indulging the Saudi government does to regional stability. The Saudi government has proven that selling them weapons for “self-defense” has just enabled them to wage an unnecessary and atrocious war against their neighbor. Our government should stop providing them with the means to engage in more aggression in the future, not least because their use of U.S.-made weapons in their war crimes implicates the U.S. in those atrocities. The current truce in Yemen is holding, and that’s good news for the people of Yemen, but we should make sure that the U.S. is never again in a position where it is expected to support another Saudi war, whether it is in Yemen or anywhere else.

Read the Whole Article

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The People Crafting U.S. Policy Aren’t in America

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

Again, the American people aren’t expected to think at all, only to stay in line and keep the money flowing.

This is the sad state of foreign policy in America, and it happens right out in the open.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-people-crafting-u-s-policy-arent-in-america/

by Joseph Solis-Mullen 

In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired U.S. Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy.

Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only really in trouble because he hadn’t fulfilled the pro forma legal requirements for those lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign agent or government.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), under which such activities are regulated, includes several exceptions that allow for such activities without declaring a conflict of interest. Think tanks, a misnomer if ever there was one, operate under an “academic exception” that allows for engagement in “bona fide religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits or the fine arts.”

Anyone who has ever picked up one of the many deadly dull social science journals where actual, bona fide empirical academic work is done knows this constitutes perhaps a fraction of what think tanks almost daily churn out.

See the rest here

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General Voicemail

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

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They don’t dare tell you what today really means

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

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

Independence Day is coming up, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.

In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”

Zzzzzzzz.

The real principles were more like the following.

(1) No legislation without representation.

The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government.

This is why a Supreme Court ordering localities around is anti-American in the truest sense. It is the opposite principle from the one the American colonists stood for.

(2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.

(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality.

The Parliament’s view, on the other hand, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional. In other words: if they say it’s constitutional, that makes it constitutional, even if that means the constitution changes from one day to the next.

So the colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution.

Sound familiar?

So let’s recap: Independence Day is about local self-government, secession, and strict construction. Not exactly the themes you learned in school.

And not even what you’ll learn in graduate school.

One day I decided I had to know what my fellow Columbia Ph.D. students thought Independence Day was all about.

What could these left-liberals be celebrating? They don’t favor local self-government, which is what the war was all about. They don’t favor strict construction of the Constitution, while the colonists were insisting on precisely that, in a British context. And they certainly don’t favor secession.

So what the heck did they think it was all about?

Only one person answered me: “There was a distance involved.”

So the problem was that the ruling class was too far away?

“Come on, men, we must continue making sacrifices so that we may someday have exploiters who live close by!”

Some rallying cry that would have been.

This was a student at what at that time was the #2 academic department in the country for American history.

Don’t let people with fancy credentials intimidate you. If there’s one lesson of the past two years, it’s that.

Now before you go set off explosives, it is my duty as your host to alert you that today our friends at Rocket Languages are taking 60% off just the next 88 foreign-language courses they sell.

I know one of the two co-founders, and we own and love two of their courses. Instead of being a sucker who pays full price, enjoy another benefit of knowing Woods:

http://www.tomwoods.com/rocket

Tom Woods

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Raytheon Unveils New Rent-Seeking Missile

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

With more than $27 billion in annual defense contracts (higher than the budget of NASA), plus a former Air Force general, a retired Joint Chiefs vice chair, and an ex-deputy SecDef on its board, Raytheon was already a lucrative rent-seeker inside the Beltway. But company leaders say the new missile will secure the company’s future against the unlikely possibility of Congress coming to its senses and scaling back America’s overseas quagmires.

Revolver News

America’s formidable military arsenal became even more so this week, as Raytheon Technologies revealed a brand-new rent-seeking missile.

The rent-seeking missile represents a revolutionary breakthrough in stealth technology, capable of blowing up the budget of an entire country before its taxpayers even notice something is wrong.

“People used to point and laugh when Congress would buy dozens of worthless tanks just to prop up General Dynamics,” said Senator and fanatical war hawk Lindsey Graham. “With this new missile, we’ll bankrupt our country before China can even blink.”

As befits its cutting-edge nature, the rent-seeking missile doesn’t come cheap: Each missile will cost $480 million—two hundred and forty times the price of a Tomahawk missile. But Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes says the number was arrived at after careful thought.

“I just looked up the most expensive house in the D.C. area and multiplied it by ten, LOL,” Hayes told Revolver. “F*** it, next time I’m just gonna say it costs a billion dollars. How many of these dumb congressmen do you suppose know how many zeroes there are in a billion?”

The missile’s design is the product of a more than a decade of work from the finest panderers and parasites in the greater D.C. area. Each missile broadcasts a powerful signal into the subconscious of senior administration officials. The signal makes officials extremely vulnerable to implausible suggestions like “Bashar Assad just did a gas attack on civilians for absolute no reason in a war he was winning,” and convinces them that the best response to such suggestions is to wildly fire dozens of missiles at obscure air bases nobody has heard of. These missiles will have to be replaced, ensuring a steady stream of income that Raytheon can spend on more lobbying and de facto bribes for politicians.

Besides the direct cost per missile, each rent-seeker will also automatically contribute an additional $5 million in aid to Ukraine and $10,000 to the bank account of each retired U.S. general currently working as a consultant.

“Come on, don’t you care about Ukraine?” said Kremer. “Ukraine Ukraine Kyiv Putler Ukraine.”

Experts say the rent-seeking missile’s reveal is likely a response to the People’s Republic of China, which recently revealed it has built an N-bomb capable of striking anywhere in the United States. The rent-seeking missile’s dramatic cost, they noted, will guarantee that America’s military budget remains far ahead of China’s, regardless of its effectiveness. The missile is also a deadlier weapon: While the N-bomb has to actually explode to devastate a city with its 250-decibel n-word, the rent-seeking missile causes the vast majority of its damage before being fired at all. The fact that the damage is inflicted on the U.S. rather than other countries did not seem to perturb members of Congress.

Read the Whole Article

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The Pentagon is finally acknowledging the damage nuclear testing did to the Armed Forces

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

Between this, burn pits and decades of cancer causing polluted water at Camp LeJune we get a clear picture of the Pentagram’s regard for grunts.

I suspect many “Atomic Veterans” did not need this announcement. Makes you wonder who has killed more US soldiers.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/the-pentagon-is-finally-acknowledging-the-damage-nuclear-testing-did-to-the-armed-forces/

Hundreds of thousands of service members who participated in the creation and expansion of the American nuclear arsenal might receive a new medal from the Pentagon. It’s the first real acknowledgement of how severe the impact of those tests were on the military.

A June 29 memo officially designated the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency as overseer of the new honor. The “Atomic Veterans Medal” as being colloquially known as would be given, at the Department of Defense’s discretion to some of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who worked in non-combat nuclear tests. 

It’s unclear exactly who will receive the new Atomic Veterans Commemorative Service Medal. These “Atomic Veterans” could number more than 600,000 according to advocates, although the conservative number of potential honorees is at least 225,000. As Military.com noted, veteran groups are pushing for eligibility to go to troops who, for instance, were involved in radioactive clean up in the 1970s. Per the new memo, the veterans must have served between 1945-1992, and meet certain criteria. These “radiation-exposed veterans” might be directly involved in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, involved in the clean up of a weapon or nuclear accident, or been exposed to radiation from the two bombs used in World War II. 

The move comes after years of advocacy and pressure from veterans for recognition of both their work and the negative health impacts it caused them. Despite how important the nuclear arsenal is to the United States’ military power, and the massive testing and expansion of its nuclear program in the 1950s and 1960s, the military was wary to acknowledge the health damage posed by radiation and nuclear tests. The Pentagon has also been averse to acknowledging the harm Agent Orange and burn pits have done to soldiers.

As for the new medals themselves, the DoD memo describes a 4.45 cm in diameter gold disc, showing an eagle on a laurel, with an atom above and “atomic” and “veteran” written to each side. The back will read “awarded for unique service in support of nuclear deterrence,” which does not quite fit with what some of the eligibility categories entail. As many of these veterans have already died, the medal will be given to family members. 

Service members exposed to radiation are eligible to some compensation through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was originally passed in 1990 and also covers civilians exposed to radioactive winds or who worked in mining radioactive ore. That was extended for another two years in June by President Joe Biden. 

It’s unclear when the first medal will be given to atomic veterans, or how many will be among the first recipients.

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Ever Vigilant – Happy Independence Day

Posted by M. C. on July 4, 2022

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To Avoid Civil War, Learn to Tolerate Different Laws in Different States

Posted by M. C. on July 3, 2022

Moreover, decentralizing abortion policy in this way actually works to defuse national conflict. This is becoming even more important as cultural divides in the United States are clearly accelerating and become more entrenched.

This is not a problem, however, if we relearn that rather than employ federal coercion to “solve” the world’s problems, it’s perhaps better to tolerate others doing things differently in other parts of the world. On the other hand, if Americans can’t shake the idea that the regime must force one way of life on everyone, we can expect national political divides to grow ever more bitter. 

https://mises.org/wire/avoid-civil-war-learn-tolerate-different-laws-different-states

Ryan McMaken

Most commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—which overturns Roe v. Wade—has focused on the decision’s effect on the legality of abortion in various states. That’s an important issue. It may be, however, that the Dobbs decision’s effect on political decentralization in the United States is a far bigger deal.

After all, the ruling isn’t so much about abortion as it is about the federal government’s role in abortion. State governments are free to make abortion 100 percent legal within their own borders. Some states have already done so. The court’s ruling limits only the federal government’s prerogatives over abortion law, and this has the potential to lead to many other limitations on federal power as well. In this way, Dobbs is a victory for those seeking to limit federal power. 

The decentralization is all to the good, and there’s nothing novel about it. Historically, state laws in the US have varied broadly on a variety of topics from alcohol consumption to divorce. This was also true of abortion before Roe v. Wade. 

Moreover, decentralizing abortion policy in this way actually works to defuse national conflict. This is becoming even more important as cultural divides in the United States are clearly accelerating and become more entrenched. Rather than fight with increasing alarm and aggression over who controls the federal government—and thus who imposes the winner’s preferences on everyone else—people in different states will have more choices in choosing whether to live under proabortion or antiabortion regimes. In other words, decentralization forces policymakers to behave as they should in a confederation of states: they must tolerate people doing things differently across state lines.  This will be essential in avoiding disaster, and laissez-faire liberals (i.e., “classical liberals”) have long supported decentralization as a key in avoiding dangerous political conflicts. Ludwig von Mises, for example, supported decentralization because, as he put it, it “is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil … wars.”

The Impulse to Use Federal Power to Force Policy on Everyone

Law has never been uniform across state lines in the United States, although this was not for a lack of trying on the part of the federal government. As the power of the federal government grew throughout the twentieth century, the central government repeatedly sought to make policy uniform and put it under the control of federal courts and regulatory agencies. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state and local matter only. Before the drug war, the federal government did not dictate to states what plants they should let their citizens consume. Before the Volstead Act, “dry” states and “wet” states had far different policies on alcohol sales. Some states had lenient divorce laws. Some did not. Some states allowed gambling. Even immigration was once the domain of state government. Although some federal law enforcement agents existed in the nineteenth century, “law and order” was overwhelmingly a state and local matter prior to the rise of agencies like the FBI. 

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