By any historical measure, it was a game-changer: the first meeting since the 7th century between a Roman Catholic Pope and a Shiite spiritual leader regarded as a “source of emulation.”
It will take a long time to assess the full implications of the immensely intriguing 50-minute face-to-face conversation, with interpreters only, between Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Sistani at his humble home in a Najaf alley near the dazzling Imam Ali shrine.
An avowedly imperfect parallel is that for the Shiite community of the faithful, Najaf is as pregnant with meaning as Jerusalem is for Christianity.
The official Vatican spin is that Pope Francis went on a carefully choreographed “pilgrimage” to Iraq under the sign of “brotherhood” – not only in terms of geopolitics but as a shield against religious sectarianism, be it Sunnis against Shiites or Muslims against Christians.
Francis went back to the main theme in an extremely frank exchange (in Italian) with the media on his plane back to Rome. Yet what’s most extraordinary is his candid assessment of Ayatollah Sistani.
The Pope stressed, “Ayatollah Sistani has a saying, I hope to recall it properly: ‘Men are either brothers by religion or equal by creation.’” Francis sees the bridging of this duality also as a cultural journey.
He qualified the meeting with Sistani as delivering a “universal message,” and praised the Grand Ayatollah as “a sage” and “a man of God”: “Listening to him, one cannot but notice it. He’s a person who carries wisdom and also prudence. He told me that for over ten years he has not received ‘people who come to visit me but have other political aims.’”
The Pope added: “He was very respectful, and I felt honored, even in the final salutations. He never stands up, but he did, to salute me, twice. A humble, and wise, man. It felt good to my soul, this meeting.”
A glimpse of the warmth was revealed in this image, absent from Western mainstream media – which, to a large extent, tried to gaslight, sabotage, ignore, black out or sectarianize the meeting, usually under barely disguised layers of “Shiite threat” propaganda.
They did that because, at the core, Francis and Sistani were delivering an anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-sectarian, and anti-occupation message, which cannot but incur the wrath of the usual suspects.
There were a few frantic attempts to portray the meeting as the Pope privileging quietist Najaf over militant Qom in the Shiite universe – or, in raw terms, Sistani over Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. That’s nonsense. For context, see the contrast between Najaf and Qom in my Persian Miniatures e-book published by Asia Times.
The Pope has recently written to Ayatollah Shirazi in Iran. Tehran keeps an ambassador in the Vatican and has collaborated for years on scientific research protocols. This pilgrimage, though, was all about Iraq. Unlike those of the West, the media of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) gave it wall-to-wall coverage.
That crucial fatwa
I have been privileged to track Ayatollah Sistani’s movements since the early 2000s, and have visited his office in Najaf several times.
In 2003, when the scarecrow du jour, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, literally blew up revered Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in front of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, Sistani pleaded for no retaliation: The American occupation machine was too powerful and Sistani saw the divide-and-rule dangers of a sectarian Sunni-Shiite war.
Yet in 2004 he single-handedly stared down the mighty occupation apparatus and the dreadful Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) when they were contemplating a bloodbath to get rid of the incandescent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, then holed up in Najaf.
In 2014, Sistani issued a fatwa conferring legitimacy upon the weaponizing of Iraqi civilians to fight ISIS/Daesh – especially as the takfiris were aiming to attack the quadruple, sacred Shi’ite sanctuaries in Iraq: Najaf, Karbala, Kazimiya and Samarra.
So it was Sistani who legitimized the birth of armed defensive groups which coalesced in the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), or Hashd a-Shaabi, later incorporated into the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
The PMUs were – and remain – an umbrella group, with some closer to Tehran than others and working under the strategic supervision of Major General Qassem Soleimani until his assassination via an American drone strike at Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
Finally, a belief in the Divine is necessary to avoid the omnipresent temptation of being drawn into utopian politics, which at its root, stems from a rejection of God. Support for utopian politics proceeds from disbelief in God, because there is only one true heaven. And, when people do not believe in and cannot aim for this true heaven, as a means of averting psychological anguish, they attempt to institute their own heaven on earth.
Russell Kirk, on page 474 of The Conservative Mind, defines conservatism as the “negation of ideology,” with there being “no simple set of formulas by which all the ills to which flesh is heir may be swept away.”
To delineate this concept, it is prudent to clarify what the “negation of ideology” does not entail. It does not deny there are superior ways of ordering society which can be procured from a careful analysis of history, prejudice and experience. As Kirk puts it, there exist “general principles of morals and of politics to which thinking men may turn.”
However, conservatism is the negation of ideology to the extent that it rejects ideology–be it communism, progressivism, white nationalism, or pro-vaccination fanaticism–as an enduring political solution or feasible cure to societal ills.
Why conservatives reject ideology
As to why conservatives rejects ideology, there are various good points in support. These include but are not limited to:
1. The impermanence of things:
On page 10 of the White Nationalist Manifesto, Greg Johnson notes that 99.9 % of all recorded animal species have gone extinct. Taking this statistic, Johnson warns:
Simply by virtue of existing, there is a 99.9 % chance that our (white) race will become extinct. If we want to be among the long-term survivors, we certainly can’t just depend upon luck (my emphasis).
There is a significant problem with this hope of being “long-term survivors,” a goal later used by Johnson to justify his vision for ‘whitopia’. Which is, no matter the action or precautionary measures taken, the white race–along with all other races, countries and cultures–will ultimately go extinct.
This is because, to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, everything which is contingent and comes into being must also go out of existence. If something can go out of existence and enough time is allowed for, it assuredly will go out of existence. There is no reason to believe that a contingent being can defy the fulfillment of its inherent potential for non-existence; as such, the European people cannot and will not persist forever.
To be clear, the preceding remarks are not to dismiss the importance of racial identity or even the novel achievements, inventions and ideas of men. It is to say, however, that as all things are transient, no political ideology or system can be a permanent solution to anything.
2. The limitations of temporal glory:
Ideologues tend to imagine that in the event of attaining their political objectives, they will acquire corresponding feelings of glory and happiness.
Irrespective of the specific ideology, the problem with this expectation is that temporal glory is always fleeting: no matter the greatness of the victory obtained, humans always return back to an ordinary, basal level of happiness.
In the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, E. Michael Jones refers to these inherent limitations on natural human happiness, as became apparent from the emotional hangovers of anti-Vietnam war activists:
By the time the revolutionary Jew got what he wanted it, he no longer wanted it. The Vietnam War was a classic case. In the spring of 1975, Radosh and his new wife attended a victory celebration for the Vietcong in Central Park, where they listened to Joan Baez, “the diva of the antiwar movement,” as well as “the artist who stood alongside the young Bob Dylan and epitomised the union of art and politics,” and Phil Ochs, as they sang Ochs’ anti-war anthem “I declare war is over.” A few months later, Ochs, an alcoholic wreck, committed suicide when Bob Dylan did not include him in the Rolling Thunder revue. Radosh and his wife experienced a milder form of letdown. Instead of a moment of triumph, “the end of the war,” Radosh says, “produced a great void.” It was “an occasion of deep melancholy” because the war and the draft had been “the issue that had given meaning to our lives” and now that issue was “beginning to evaporate,” and when Nixon abolished the draft, it evaporated.
3. Life is always the same:
Closely related to the above point, political circumstances, whether contributing to a moral as well as cohesive society, or an immoral and divided society–do not alter the fundamental nature of human life.
Life always follows the same essential pattern: there are happy times and sad times; there are triumphs and failures; we physically and intellectually blossom in youth, before being afflicted by old age, infirmities and ultimately, death.
For this reason, excessive stock should not be placed in ideology, or for that matter, political outcomes.
4. The true motives of ideologues:
It is well to be sceptical of ideologues, given what truly actuates their political advocacy. On page 382 of The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk captures their frequent underlying motivations, as exampled by a former marxist revolutionary from the late-19th century:
The boy who wrote Workers in the Dawn (1880), brimming with Ruskinian socialism, aspired to be “the mouthpiece of the advanced Radical party.” But social reform went the way of positivism, as Gissing came to maturity and saw the denizens of mean streets for what they were: four years later, Waymark in the The Unclassed dissects Gissing’s own youthful socialism, compounded of sentimentality and egotism. “I often amuse myself with taking to pieces my former self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism, workingman’s-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger which cried out to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing” (my emphasis).
When someone is in a state of sexual restlessness, they will commonly promote utopian politics. As such people are driven by an insatiable appetite and lack satisfaction at the individual level; at the collective level and in lieu of addressing their personal flaws, they often resort to ideology as a purported (and contrived) solution to social problems. In essence, ideologues seek to control others because they cannot control themselves.
Given this, support for ideology does not so much derive from or depend on its actual merits–again, be it communism, progressivism, white nationalism, or pro-vaccination fanaticism. Rather, the attraction to ideology more draws from the disordered psychological state of its adherents.
5. Our fallen nature:
Clearly, our fallen nature has many implications which are utterly inconsistent with the foundation and maintenance of utopias.
To give one such example, our fallen nature means that even when we understand what is right, we will in many cases choose to do evil–for reasons of convenience, selfishness, excitement, pleasure, etc. When we freely choose evil, this necessarily comes at the expense of others and the common good; an outcome which arises regardless of poverty, wealth inequality, political systems, and educational opportunities.
Because humans choose evil of their own volition, no political system can ever incubate itself against these decisions and their ramifications.
6. The human need for disruption and upheaval:
Strongly agitating against societies based on a peaceful (but purposeless) material prosperity, is the human impulse towards disruption and upheaval. Frequently, this impulse expresses itself against societies that have grown mundane and predictable, as martial values and transcendentalism cannot be indefinitely neglected. On page 79 of The True and only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, Christopher Lasch sets out how this impulse shored up popular support for the Third Reich:
In 1940, George Orwell made the same point about fascism. The Western democracies, he observed, had come to think that “human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was “psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than “comfort, safety, short-working hours, hygiene, birth control.” “Whereas socialism, and even capitalism … have said to people, ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them, ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
Religion, conservatism and the negation of ideology
In closing, there are many good arguments in favour of rejecting ideology, which contain persuasive value of themselves. Notwithstanding this, in practical terms, mere unaided reason is an insufficient justification for the conservative negation of ideology. This is because a belief in the Divine is also essential: conservatism cannot (beyond a few exceptions) be sustained in the absence of religious faith.
There are, in the main, three practical reasons forconservatism requiring this added sustenance of religious faith.
In the first place, if understood that we are directed towards a knowledge of and relationship with God–the Divine is our ultimate end–there is no potential for ideology to emerge and displace the primacy of faith.
In the second place, absent religious belief and an understanding of there being an eternal import to our actions, people are incapable of mustering the requisite moral discipline for maintaining a conservative society.
Finally, a belief in the Divine is necessary to avoid the omnipresent temptation of being drawn into utopian politics, which at its root, stems from a rejection of God. Support for utopian politics proceeds from disbelief in God, because there is only one true heaven. And, when people do not believe in and cannot aim for this true heaven, as a means of averting psychological anguish, they attempt to institute their own heaven on earth.
What the deceptive doc leaves out of his screed was that in the meantime the Texas governor “listened to the science” and imposed a statewide mask mandate in July that was obeyed by a very high percentage of the population. Masks would “limit the spread” of the virus, we were told. So everyone wore them.
But they actually did nothing to “slow the spread” of the virus.
Ron Paul has always said, politics is so much easier if you actually have a philosophy based on liberty and you stand by it.
I was interviewed on RT America’s “In Question” program about today’s lifting of the mask mandate and other Covid-related restrictions in Texas. The usual suspects – those who have made a political and monetary fortune from the year of fear-induced compliance with the most insane and destructive government edicts – are so livid at Texas Governor Gregg Abbott that it’s getting hard to maintain the previous level of enmity we have held toward him over the past year for shutting down in the first place.
With enemies like these…
CNN ran a deceptive editorial claiming that Governor Abbott’s decision to end the state-enforced mask mandate was indicative of his “delusional” view of the virus. The author, a medical doctor called Jonathan Reiner, attacked Abbott’s “premature” limited opening last April as cases began to fall. Lifting the “stay-at-home” order was tragically wrong for Texas, wrote Reiner, because come November the cases were skyrocketing again!
What the deceptive doc leaves out of his screed was that in the meantime the Texas governor “listened to the science” and imposed a statewide mask mandate in July that was obeyed by a very high percentage of the population. Masks would “limit the spread” of the virus, we were told. So everyone wore them.
But they actually did nothing to “slow the spread” of the virus.
There is no doubt that CNN’s doctor/author enthusiastically supported the wearing of face masks to halt the spread of Covid, so how does he explain the huge winter seasonal spike in virus infections in Texas? Funny, he doesn’t mention it.
Likewise, when CNN’s Dr. Reiner attacks Abbott for “allowing” indoor dining and the opening of bars (at limited capacity) he cites the most recent CDC report detailing a year-long study of the effectiveness of mask mandates and restaurant closures.
Writes Reiner, “This week, the CDC published a report of the effect of mask mandates and indoor restaurant dining. The researchers found that mandating masks was associated with a decrease in daily Covid-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation. In-restaurant dining was associated with an increase in daily Covid-19 case and death rates.”
Uh…yeah. But that’s only a very small and highly-edited part of the story. In fact, the CDC report is a bombshell – which you can bet will be hidden from all in the mainstream media – because it shows the exact opposite!
The “decrease” in cases and deaths where mask mandates were in place and restaurants were forcibly closed by authoritarian officials was statistically INSIGNIFICANT!
If such measures worked we might expect to see a significant if not massive reduction in new cases and deaths where mask mandates and restaurant closures were put in place. In fact the reduction was an infinitesimal 1.32% on average!
Compare that to all the damage done by forced masks and forced business closures! Suicides.
As the CDC itself wrote on its report, the mask mandates DO NOT slow the virus spread, full stop, but rather ““have the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19. . .”
Only the “potential.” How reassuring. Science!
Likewise, the year-long CDC study itself concluded, “[d]uring the study period, states allowed restaurants to reopen for on-premises dining in 3,076 (97.9%) U.S. counties. Changes in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates were not statistically significant 1–20 and 21–40 days after restrictions were lifted.”
Gee, thanks for destroying the life’s work and life savings of hundreds of thousands of restaurants for a result that was “not statistically significant.”
Of course for Fauci and the CDC and the rest of the medical-tyranny complex, none of us are “statistically significant” so they have run rough-shod over this country without shame for the past year.
Still, it is hard to not conclude that Abbott’s move, weak as it is and with way too many small-print details, has caused a massive short-circuiting in Sauron’s previously unimpeded advance.
Texas, the largest and most dynamic state in the US, has all but abandoned Fauci and the fear-mongers. Has strayed off the reservation. Has dared join South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Florida’s Ron DiSantis. This is a death blow to the tyranny regime.
Fauci was interviewed, looking as if he’d ingested a can of botulism-ridden tuna, warning that Abbott was “putting aside all public health measures” in a move that was “quite risky.”
Much of the opprobrium Abbott has earned with his sudden decision to “open” Texas could have been easily avoided. Had he stood on principle from the beginning he would not have had to constantly explain his seeming shifting with the winds.
For example, if Abbott had any philosophical grounding beyond desire for higher office. he could have taken the Ron Paul path and simply stood for principle, in the face of ridicule and attack. If he had from the beginning, as did South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, simply stated that he does not have the moral or legal authority to close businesses down, to pick who is “essential” and who is “non-essential,” he would not have had to endlessly explain his flip-flops to the hostile media.
He could have explained his steadfast position in the context of a philosophy grounded in liberty.
But he did not, and it appears at this time that such moral weakness has brought about the end of his political career. Ron Paul has always said, politics is so much easier if you actually have a philosophy based on liberty and you stand by it.
Nevertheless, the “fall” of Texas from the constellation of the Covidian Cult may well be a death blow to the miserable year of public health tyranny. My unscientific survey of Lake Jackson and Brazoria in this first day of post-mask mandate did not reveal a dramatic tilt toward liberty. But still the first chink chink chinking away at the Berlin Wall were also relatively insignificant. But liberty was then, as now, an idea whose time had come.
As an aside, I am making a nuanced argument here. I am not commenting on the use of masks where required, though I have strong opinions on that as well. Instead, I am writing about masks worn in other situations, such as hiking a trial or driving a car. And when those masks are worn by healthy young males, it is because fathers have acquiesced to woke fatherhood and thoroughly shirked their vital role of raising men.
Wokeness didn’t rise out of a miasmic ether in 2020. No, the vile, virulent ideology was birthed in Marxism 150 years ago, slowly morphing and marching for decades through social institutions. One of the institutions infected and sickened by this intellectual virus is the family, especially the role of the father. To watch mainstream media and other forms of progressive entertainment, or spy the latest slogans zoomed from classrooms, is to witness the father indicted and his role diminished. Since this attack has occurred over time, the gross changes each decade are hidden by the net changes each year. Nevertheless, the overall transformation has been dramatic and is easily evident today. Consider the MASK. Yes, the COVID mask.
As an aside, I am making a nuanced argument here. I am not commenting on the use of masks where required, though I have strong opinions on that as well. Instead, I am writing about masks worn in other situations, such as hiking a trial or driving a car. And when those masks are worn by healthy young males, it is because fathers have acquiesced to woke fatherhood and thoroughly shirked their vital role of raising men.
Fear
Maybe your son wears a mask hiking because he is fearful. But fearful of what? A virus that is less risky than the least of all trail-related activities? If that is the case, and your son cowers in fear, you need to tell him that it is the role of males to face their fears. Tell him to stand up and, frankly, be a man. No one else can do so with authority – that is the role of the father.
Significance
Maybe you son wears a mask in the parking lot because he believes doing so saves lives – as if he is that significant. But he is not. And he needs to hear that from you, his father. His mask is saving no one – even Fauci, in an unpoliticized moment, admitted as much. So wearing a mask while fumbling for car keys it is not an act of self-sacrifice, where your son suffers, bravely protecting others. Not even close. And it is your role as the father to correct your son when he views himself in such an inflated manner.
Importance
OK, you got me here. Yes, your son and his mask are important, but only because an intrusive and overreaching state needs unvarying and persistent tangible displays of submission. The mask is now the most obvious symbol of obedience, and when worn by young adults and children, it is akin to the red badges worn by members of the various Young Pioneers organizations in communist countries. So, if your son removed his mask, as he should, he would challenge the state and reaffirm his dignity as an acting individual. Isn’t that what you, the father, want for him? Or would you rather he spends his life signally to others his subservience to the state?
You, the father
Wokeness in its various strains has slowly and continuously subverted the role of the father. Today, fathers believe they have little to say with regard to their sons – as if their words have no value. This is because for a generation or so, when social movements, the media, or government schools championed a cause, though that cause was against the values of the father, the father was told he must remain silent – most did. And now that father’s son is a father himself, even further removed from the institution of fatherhood.
Fathers, help your sons become men. However, in order to do so, you must also remove your mask as defined above. You are also a son, and this article applies to you in that role as well. Together, we can all stand tall, fathers and sons, and denounce wokeness and reclaim liberty and agency in our lives. It is something we all admit, at least privately, we truly want to do.
Jim Fedako [send him mail] is a business analyst and homeschooling father of seven who lives in the wilds of Sunbury, OH.
The Facts:Jonas F Ludvigsson, a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute is quitting his work on covid-19 because of harassment from people who dislike what he discovered.
Reflect On:Why are scientists, journalists and doctors who present information that opposes what we hear in the mainstream censored, ridiculed, harassed and never given any air time?
What Happened: A letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden” has found that “Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.”
It was published by Jonas F Ludvigsson a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute.
The study also showed that “fewer than 10 preschool teachers and 20 schoolteachers in Sweden received intensive care for Covid-19 up until June 30, 2020 (20 per 103,596 school teachers, which is equal to 19 per 100,000). As compared with other occupations (excluding health care workers), this corresponded to sex- and age-adjusted relative risks of 1.10 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.49 to 2.49) among preschool teachers and 0.43 (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.68) among schoolteachers.
In a Karolinska Institute press release, Ludvigsson indicated he was hopeful about the results. “It is very gratifying that serious COVID-19, defined here as needing treatment in an intensive care unit, is so rare among children despite schools being open during the pandemic,” he said. “The next step will be to follow up the children who were treated in an intensive care unit for COVID-19 to see if they have recovered fully. My gut feeling is that children who have been seriously ill because of MIS-C seem to recover fully eventually.”
The Swedish government has said that it will strengthen laws on academic freedom after a leading Swedish academic announced that he was quitting his work on covid-19 because of an onslaught of intimidating comments from people who disagreed or disliked his research findings….After the letter’s publication he was bombarded with angry messages through social media and email criticising the study and inferring that it and Ludvigsson were representative of the country’s covid-19 containment strategy.
The experience has taken its toll on Ludvigsson. He told the journal of the Swedish Medical Association (Lakartidningen) that for a week he woke up at 3 am every night and could not get back to sleep and that he had now lost his appetite for covid-19—both when it comes to speaking out and researching. He has decided to quit researching and debating covid-19.
He is trying to put the experience behind him and has said that he will not talk to the media about what happened. However, he told The BMJ that, although the findings were published in a research letter, this was “an actual study” that underwent formal external peer review, including statistical peer review, and the manuscript was revised four times before it was published.
Intimidation and threats against academics have risen with the growth of social media, and uncertainties and diverse opinions about covid-19 have added to the situation. In response, Sweden is planning to provide increased support for academic freedom through an amendment to its Higher Education Act.
Matilda Ernkrans, Sweden’s minister for higher education and research, told The BMJ, “It is deeply concerning when academics are threatened to the extent that they don’t have the courage to keep on doing their job. This is not a new phenomenon, but we have seen an increase of threats against academics related to research on the coronavirus. When people are silenced, it’s a threat against the freedom of speech and our democracy. “To strengthen academic freedom, the Swedish government has proposed a new amendment that points out that education and research must be protected to enable people to freely discover, research, and share knowledge.”
Ole Petter Ottersen, president of the Karolinska Institute, told The BMJ that he found the increase in threats and harassment towards researchers very worrying.
“A tough debate and a diversity of opinions based on facts and evidence are necessary elements of science and public discourse, but hateful and scornful accusations and personal attacks cannot be tolerated. We already see that researchers retreat from the public debate after being threatened or harassed, and in my own institution a leading researcher just decided to give up his covid-19 research for the same reason,” he added, referring to Ludvigsson.
Given that the Karolinska Institute seems to be the focus here as well, I thought I’d mention that professor Anna-Mia Elkström, an epidemiologist from the Institute and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight COVID as have died of COVID directly. You can read more about that story here.
Why This Is Important: Censorship of opinions, evidence, data, science and information is a big problem today, this is no secret. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden once said that “The Problem with fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee. But rather because we, as participants, as citizens, as users of these services, (need to) help each other…We point out what is fake, we point out what is true – the answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.”
Snowden, like many others, especially those of us in the field of alternative media are quite aware of the fact that censorship and the close relationship big tech companies have with governments is due to their goal “to dominate the conversation and information…They’re trying to make you change your behaviour.” (source) We’ve talked about this here at CE since our inception in 2009, that the job of mainstream media, and “fact-checkers” these days, in our opinion, seems to be perception control. This is especially true when it comes to major global events, ones that seem to benefit the rich and powerful. The world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the covid pandemic began, for example.
As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? -Edward Snowden (source)
The Polish Government recently announced that it will be taking steps to make censorship by big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter completely illegal, comparing it to their experience during the communist era. The Prime Minister said that “Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently.”
The point is, it’s perfectly fine to disagree with one another, that’s healthy, and open debate is healthy especially during the times we are living in. What seems to be so off-putting to many is that debate is being discouraged. People are being urged not to do their own research, and any evidence or opinion that goes against what we hear from mainstream media is being completely ignored, censored or ridiculed to the point where people whose only source of information is mainstream news seem to be completely in the dark regarding important information and research.
In order to keep the military budget elevated, sustain industry, and confine D.C. to a violent foreign policy, the public must be fed a constant stream of fear-inducing pretexts. Such pretexts, which must be carefully crafted and promoted, effectively serve as advertising to sell the public on the need for war-related production (p. 134).
I had never heard of Christian Sorensen, author of Understanding the War Industry, before I was sent his new book for review. However, when I saw on the back cover that he was termed “the Seymour Melman of the 21st century,” I was intrigued. I first learned of Melman from Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods, who has written this description of him:
Seymour Melman (1917–2004). Melman was a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. In a scholarly career that yielded a great many books and articles, he focused much of his energy on the economics of the warfare and military-oriented state. In large part, Melman’s work amounted to an extended analysis, in light of Bastiat’s insight, of the costs, not only of modern American wars, but also of the defense establishment itself.
Sorensen mentions Melman’s 1970 book Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War on the first page of his preface, and describes it thusly: “In that book, Melman analyzed how the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces coordinated and administered the businesses that make weapons of war” (p. ix). Sorsenson contends that “in the fifty years since Pentagon Capitalism hit the press, the playing field has changed” (p. ix). The military industrial complex (MIC) mentioned by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address—which Sorensen views as “an insulated war-promoting configuration comprised of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces; industry, the corporations that develop and sell goods and services to the U.S. and allied government; and the U.S. Congress, which implements policies and authorizes the funding for the Pentagon”(p. x)—“has demonstrably further penetrated the institutions of U.S. government” (pp. ix-x). Sorensen sees the change from Melman’s time as this: “War corporations—the industrial part of the MIC—now hold the most power in the trifecta. The Pentagon no longer controls the U.S. war industry. Industry runs the show. Industry employs expansive, sometimes pernicious, operations in order to dominate political processes and military functions” (p. x). Sorensen goes on to quote Melman several times in the book.
All I know about Sorensen is what is stated on the book’s back cover: “Christian Sorensen is a researcher and author focused on the U.S. war industry. His academic background is in translation and international relations. A military veteran, he contributes frequently to independent media outlets.”
Like Melman, Sorensen is a man of the left, and what he considers to be capitalism is anything but. But as Woods said of Melman: “Although Melman was associated with the left, a fact that may account for libertarian neglect of his thought, his analysis of the warfare state is not only compatible with, but at times is absolutely identical to, the libertarian view, and deserves wider dissemination.” Consequently, although anything that Sorensen says about the Green New Deal or increased government intervention should be dismissed, his assault on the U.S. war industry should be embraced wholeheartedly.
Understanding the War Industry contains twelve chapters, each of which are divided into sections and concluded with scores of endnotes, many of them very detailed and informative. All of the chapter sections are indicated in the comprehensive table of contents. (The “Acronyms & Initialisms” promised in the table of contents at the end of the book is not there.) The book also contains an index, although its page number is missing in the table of contents.
In Man, Economy, and State, Murray Rothbard expounds the principles of economics by reconstructing an economy from the ground up. Following the practice of classical economists, he opens the book by imagining Robinson Crusoe alone on an island. After identifying the operative laws that apply even to isolated individuals, Rothbard’s second chapter considers Crusoe on an island with one other person, introducing the concept of direct exchange, or the barter economy. In the third and fourth chapters, Rothbard considers the origins of money and prices in an economy of indirect exchange.
For a treatise on price theory, Rothbard recognizes the need to explain the origins of money prices, as Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises did before him. In The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises built on Menger’s original explanation for the origin of money by formulating the regression theorem. When considering price changes back through time, Mises theorized, we must naturally come to points of origin and departure. Paper dollars today have no commodity foundation, but we can easily identify the point at which they were disconnected from specie. Going further back, we may not be able to identify empirically the moment at which specie, or any other commodity, was first used as a medium of indirect exchange, but we can logically deduce that such a moment must have occurred as primitive economies grew increasingly complex.
Mises’s theorem offered a number of important insights for price theorists. Perhaps the chief insight is that even though modern money may have no commodity base, the origins of any money could only have been a commodity with some original value in use. No new media of exchange can undermine this history. Even cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, can be traced back to a point at which they were first exchanged for dollars. Dollar prices then trace back to a point of disconnect from a commodity foundation, and those prices trace further to a point of original indirect exchange. Another insight derived from the regression theorem is that money prices depend on exchange. This may seem like an obvious truism, but in the early twentieth-century debates over socialism, the necessity of market exchange highlighted the crucial distinction between technical calculation (What do we need to build a given item?) and economic calculation (What should we build given the resources available?).
In chapter 2 of Man, Economy, and State, before Rothbard summarizes Mises’s insights about the origins of money prices, he considers the origins of property rights. With a citation of John Locke, Rothbard asserts the principle of self-ownership and argues that the original appropriation of property comes from mixing labor with yet-unowned resources, such as clearing land for cultivation. Only after establishing a basis for property rights, does Rothbard turn to considerations of exchange and money prices.
Even friendly scholars, happy to acknowledge the value of Rothbard’s treatise, often consider this passage an unwarranted deviation from value-free economic analysis. Rothbard, they claim, is importing libertarian ethical theory into his economic analysis. John Egger, for example, accuses Rothbard of putting on his “political scientist hat,” arguing that “the ethics adopted by . . . Rothbard cannot be derived from Austrian-school principles and are not necessary to Austrian economic analysis.”1
Even sympathetic Austrians rarely pay much attention to Rothbard’s explanation for the origin of property rights except to occasionally dismiss it as a libertarian deviation from scientific analysis, but I believe Rothbard is offering underappreciated economic insights. Mises recognized that money prices depended on exchange, and he saw the need to explain the origins of monetary exchange. Rothbard took Mises’s idea a step further, recognizing that the prerequisite for market exchange is private property and the origin of property norms is therefore just as relevant to economic analysis as the origins of money and monetary exchange. “Before we examine the exchange process,” Rothbard writes in no unclear terms, “it must be considered that, in order for a person to exchange anything, he must first possess it, or own it.”2
Critical readers might object that we cannot take it for granted that property rights originate in the way that Rothbard describes. Governments, of course, can establish property rights, even if in violation of Lockean ethics, that suffice to provide the conditions for market exchange. But such considerations would be inappropriate for Rothbard’s second chapter, as he is considering an unhampered market economy—one in which governments, as yet, play no role. For markets to exist sans government, then, private property norms must emerge spontaneously.
To this last point, Rothbard never asserts that the Lockean rule of first appropriation is the proper means of establishing property rights (though he certainly believed that and made genuinely ethical arguments along those lines in other works, such as The Ethics of Liberty). In Man, Economy, and State, he simply considers the way property norms could logically emerge in an unhampered market.
Man in a “free, unhampered market … may exchange any type of factor … for any type of factor,” Rothbard writes, but “it is clear that gifts and exchanges as a source of property must eventually be resolved into: self-ownership, appropriation of unused nature-given factors, and production of capital and consumers’ goods, as the ultimate sources of acquiring property in a free economic system” (emphasis in original).3
Rothbard’s argument follows a similar logical structure to Mises’s regression theorem, and in fact even extends the continuum of exchange that Mises outlines. When constructing his theorem, Mises views the end point of his analysis as modern monetary prices, and his point of origin is that moment when a commodity was first used as a medium for indirect exchange. Rothbard has the same end point in mind, but realizing that property rights are (1) necessary for exchange and (2) not a given for any society and therefore warrant explaining, he finds the origins of money prices in the original emergence of private property norms.
Of course, people can provide alternative theories for the origin of private property, but the mere fact that Rothbard recognizes the need to explain property norms is itself a valuable contribution to economics that continues to go unappreciated. The most obvious objection people might offer to counter Rothbard’s theory is no different than the alternative explanation to Mises’s and Menger’s theories for the origins of money: the state must construct property rights and introduce money, thus creating markets.
But as historians and anthropologists learn more about prehistory (the history of man prior to documentary evidence), the statist theories for both property rights and money crumble. Yale political scientist James C. Scott, for example, notes that evidence for the domestication of plants precedes the formation of the earliest states, arguing that states could not exist without a taxable base (grain, most commonly), and the domestication of plants and primitive commerce preceded state formation. Although he doesn’t address property rights directly, Scott notes that the formation of early states “required a host of products that originated in other ecological zones: timber, firewood, leather, obsidian, copper, tin, gold and silver, and honey,” which they obtained through long-distance trade of “pottery, cloth, grain, and artisanal products.”4
Recognizing that economic exchange preceded the state, both Rothbard and Mises raised valid considerations for the origins of money, exchange, and property norms. In offering their theories, they were in fact engaging in a common exercise among classical economists known as “conjectural history.” In the absence of empirical historical evidence, classical thinkers such as Adam Smith and Turgot speculated on the origins of observable, modern institutions based on assumptions about human nature. Although speculative, this method of history was not unscientific. The test of a good theory was that it explained more of what we can observe (both in terms of present society and extant evidence) and omitted less. Historians today who deal with areas of history that have scant documentary evidence, such as Africanists, still engage in conjectural history (even if they may not be aware of its roots in classical political economy).
In this light, Rothbard’s explication for the origins of property norms is not a value-laden prescription for how societies should establish private property rights. Instead, Rothbard is recognizing that early societies must have established some system of private property rights, which individuals recognized reciprocally with respect to each other, and he provides a theory for how this system most likely emerged. It is not an uncontestable idea (no scientific theory is), but scholars dismissing it as a libertarian sidestep from proper economic analysis fail to understand the important economic contribution Rothbard was actually making.
1. John B. Egger, “Comment: Efficiency Is Not a Substitute for Ethics,” in Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium: Exploration of Austrian Themes (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979), p. 119.
2. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, with Power and Market, 2d scholar’s ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), p. 91.
4. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 68–92, 125. Although Scott does not address the question of property rights or exchange, he does reference the role of exchange prior to the establishment of the state
In the wake of February’s tragic power outages in Texas, during which 4.5 million households suffered service interruptions, partisans on both sides have been quick to interpret the events as confirmation of their preferred energy policies. With news images of helicopters deicing frozen turbines, conservatives lambasted Texas’s increasing reliance on wind power as the villain in the story.
Trying to temper this knee-jerk reaction, Reason.com columnist Ron Bailey argued that “[m]ost of the shortfall in electric power generation during the current cold snap is the result of natural gas and coal powered plants going offline.” And Paul Krugman for his part declared that it was a “malicious falsehood” to blame wind and solar power for what happened in Texas, as it was primarily a failure of natural gas.
In this article I’ll lay out the basic facts of which power sources stepped up to the plate during the crisis. Contrary to what you would have known from reading Ron Bailey (let alone Paul Krugman), when the Texas freeze hit, electricity from natural gas skyrocketed while wind output fell off a cliff. The people arguing that wind wasn’t to blame mean it in the same way Jimmy Olson wasn’t to blame when General Zod took over: wind is so useless nobody serious ever thought it might help in a crisis.
Krugman on Texas Electricity
In his February 18 column titled “Texas, Land of Wind and Lies,” Krugman declared that
Republican politicians and right-wing media … have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead: the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark …
In contrast to this dirty rotten lie from the right-wingers, Krugman instead explains:
A power grid poorly prepared to deal with extreme cold suffered multiple points of failure. The biggest problems appear to have come in the delivery of natural gas, which normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity, as wellheads and pipelines froze.
A bit later in the article Krugman admits that wind was involved as well, but minimizes its role in this way:
It’s true that the state generates a lot of electricity from wind, although it’s a small fraction of the total. But that’s not because Texas—Texas!—is run by environmental crazies. It’s because these days wind turbines are a cost-effective energy source wherever there’s a lot of wind, and one thing Texas has is a lot of wind.
It’s also true that extreme cold forced some of the state’s insufficiently winterized wind turbines to shut down, but this was happening to Texas energy sources across the board, with the worst problems involving natural gas.
Incidentally, there are literally no numbers in Krugman’s article (except for numerals referring to dates), which is a signal that he’s pulling a fast one on his readers. From his qualitative (not quantitative) description, most people would have assumed that when the unusually cold weather hit Texas last month, electricity generation from various sources was down across the board, but that it mostly fell from natural gas, while the drop in wind was insignificant. As I’ll show in the next section, this is utterly false.
What Really Happened During Texas’s Power Crisis
Had I not seen the analysis from my former colleagues at the Institute for Energy Research (see their articles here and here), I might have believed the spin that the Texas crisis was really a failure of fossil fuels rather than renewables. Yet as we’ll see, the actual numbers tell a much different story from what most Americans probably “learned” from the media discussion.
The simplest way for me to communicate the relevant information is through three infographics, generated from the Energy Information Administration’s handy tool that shows the source mix for daily energy generation by state.
Before showing the numbers, I need to make an important clarification: the demand for electricity soared to unprecedented levels during the freeze. In particular, on February 14, peak demand on the electric grid surpassed sixty-nine gigawatts, breaking the previous winter record of (almost) sixty-six gigawatts set in 2018. It was in the early hours of the following morning (February 15) that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) implemented rolling blackouts to prevent the entire grid from collapsing. So to be clear, the issue wasn’t that supply in an absolute sense fell, but rather that demand soared. (Texas typically uses more electricity in the summer to keep things cool, rather than in the winter to keep things warm.)
With that context in place, here are the stats for electricity output from various sources on February 15, 2021:
Already we see something interesting. Of the total amount of electricity delivered on this first day of blackouts, 65 percent came from natural gas, while only 6 percent came from wind and 2 percent from solar.
But in fairness, maybe what guys like Krugman meant is that this is much lower than what we normally could expect from natural gas. (Remember Krugman had said that natural gas “normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity.”)
To test this possibility, we can look at the situation one year prior, on February 15, 2020:
Now, this is interesting. A year earlier, during a normal mid-February day, natural gas “only” supplied 43 percent of the total electricity, whereas wind accounted for 28 percent and solar was the same at 2 percent. Remember how Krugman said wind was only a “small fraction” of Texas generation? Overall for the year 2020, wind produced 22 percent of Texas’s electricity, a higher share than coal.
Yet besides the proportions, also look at the absolute quantity of electricity generated: on Feb. 15, 2020, natural gas produced 398,130 megawatt hours (compared to 759,708 MWh during the recent freeze), while wind produced 264,024 MWh (compared to 73,395 MWh during the freeze).
To sum up, compared with the same date a year earlier, during the first day of the blackouts in Texas, electricity from natural gas was 91 percent higher, while electricity from wind was 72 percent lower.
To reiterate the clarification I gave earlier, part of the confusion here is that electricity demand in February isn’t normally as high as it was because of the freeze. So to test whether natural gas is the culprit, we can compare the generation from various sources during the freeze to the situation back during the summer. For example, let’s look at how things stood on August 15, 2020:
Stanford University Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is featured in Newsweek Magazine condemning the lockdowns across the United States to fight the virus, calling them the biggest mistake ever made by public health authorities. A new study released by none other than the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ironically appears to bolster Dr. Bhattacharya’s claim. Is the truth starting to seep out from the Berlin Wall of lies? CDC report cited in this episode: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/w…
