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"I am not a number, I am a Free Man" - No. 6
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Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
Originally posted on Truth To Power: The Flexner Report was a very useful tool commissioned by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller had made a massive fortune with Standard Oil and was setting his sights on gaining a monopoly in the drug and pharmaceutical industry. However, first he had to get rid of the competition,…
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Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
Thought these congressional goodies were banned? Wait until you see the latest National Defense Authorization Act.
It’s that time of year again, when lawmakers, Pentagon officials, and observers on the sidelines quibble over what should—and should not—be in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Two weeks after the Senate Armed Services Committee advanced their version of the 2021 NDAA, the House Armed Services Committee advanced their own NDAA. Passions have been high and policymakers have tried inserting everything from base naming requirements and stricter “Buy American” provisions to (much-needed) transparency changes.
But regardless of how the House and Senate reconcile their respective NDAA versions, there’s the lingering inevitability of hundreds of earmarks worth billions of dollars being added as the legislation moves from authorization to appropriation. Typically, the earmarks range from $100,000 for research projects to billions of dollars for unrequested weapons systems. If lawmakers are serious about fixing waste, fraud, and abuse at the Department of Defense (DoD), they’ll need to keep earmarks out of the budget. It won’t be easy for Congress, but taxpayers deserve better than pet projects and endless deficits and debt.
When the media reports DoD spending figures, it’s tempting for them to focus on the topline numbers such as the fiscal year (FY) 2020 budget of $738 billion, which amounts to nearly $6,000 for each American household. Annual DoD spending has increased roughly $200 billion over the past five years, and easily matches (or exceeds) what the U.S. was spending on Defense during the Iraq War 10-15 years ago. But in the grand scheme of things, the media often neglects the disturbing trend of Congress lavishing earmarks onto the Pentagon that were never requested by DoD. Last year, for example, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance found the FY 2020 Defense bill contained an astounding 785 earmarks totaling $16.1 billion(click here for the full list).
Unsurprisingly, the top two slots on the list were taken by the F-35 program, which has an estimated lifetime cost of $1.5 trillion. Despite well-documented dysfunctions with the F-35, lawmakers threw an extra $2 billion in taxpayer money toward the ailing program. For example, the fighter jet’s sea search mode is only capable of examining a small sliver of sea surface while pilots have been complaining about barotrauma and sinus pains while onboard.
Even the supply chain for procuring parts is out-of-whack. The Government Accountability Office notes, “to keep aircraft flying despite parts shortages, from May through November 2018 F-35 squadrons cannibalized (that is, took) parts from other aircraft at rates that were more than six times greater than the services’ objective…personnel at F-35 squadrons are pulling parts off of other aircraft that are already unable to fly instead of waiting for new parts to be delivered through the supply chain.”
Despite these well-documented problems, lawmakers are all-but-certain to request more for the program than Pentagon officials say they will need.
And if the past is any guide, the volume of earmarks will continue to increase. FY 2020’s total of 785 earmarks represented a 15.6 increase from FY 2019’s total of 679 earmarks. This doesn’t seem possible, since there’s supposedly been a ban in place on earmarks since 2011. But lawmakers have ignored the ban and just gotten sneakier, cobbling vague language into bills that doesn’t (strictly speaking) benefit their districts.
But when situations arise such as Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) securing hundreds of millions of dollars for body armor production, taxpayers can’t help but wonder if the funding serves the country, 3M (which is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota), or Rep. McCollum’s reelection bid. Body armor is undoubtedly important, but a competitive grants process (not earmarks) would be the best way to ensure money is spent wisely.
Clearly, a ban on earmarks hasn’t been enough to deter the self-serving behavior that sows mistrust of Washington, D.C. So, it’s up to lawmakers, taxpayers, and advocacy organizations to call out this behavior and hold members of Congress accountable for wasteful spending. And with the 2020 federal deficit approaching $4 trillion, it’s more important than ever to end these shenanigans. Policymakers shouldn’t let all the intrigue on Capitol Hill get in the way of discipline and accountability.
Ross Marchand is the Vice President of Policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: barotrauma, F-35, Military Earmarks, National Defense Authorization Act, sinus pains | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
(The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Public Health Services at the National Institutes of Health, CDC and NIAID Have Serious Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest)
“The initial COVID-19 panic (and the ultimate economic shut-down that will kill small businesses) was no mistake; it wasn’t an overly cautious WHO or Dr. Fauci that made the call in haste. The panic and over-reaction was planned and prepared for. Bill Gates (and his billionaire’s club [the World Economic Forum]) held an exercise called “Event 201” in preparation for a coronavirus pandemic in which he calculated 33 million deaths would occur world-wide. Anthony Fauci also predicted a pandemic would happen while Donald Trump was president. Fauci worked for Gates. Fauci (and his NIAID) also sponsored work on coronaviruses in the Wuhan laboratory with US taxpayer money. We see the actions of the WHO, Fauci, and Bill Gates – who somehow is the go-to authority on SARS COV 2 having never taken a medical course in his life. Laugh all you want but this is the New World Order attempting to take over. And they can do it. They own the media, even FOX. They even own two of the major news outlets, Reuters and the AP. They have created a false reality in which anyone that questions what they are doing is labeled a conspiracy theorist. There IS a conspiracy and you are witnessing it right now. This makes no sense at all unless you factor in an active conspiracy of disinformation and lies.” – An anonymous respondent, reacting to an important Tony Robbins video (that interviewed a handful of highly-qualified health experts who never get interviewed by Mainstream Media journalists, whose narrative, though false, misleading and corporate-controlled, appears to be sacrosanct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgP_Au5RZVw)
“The Gates Foundation and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the NIH, are both currently exploring gene-based treatments for HIV, together with other therapies … This collaboration is an ambitious step forward, harnessing the most cutting-edge scientific tools and NIH’s sizable global HIV research infrastructure to one day deliver a cure and end the global HIV pandemic.” — NIAID director Anthony S. Fauci, MD
“Bill Gates wants the entire population vaccinated with a new mRNA-based COVID19 vaccine, and he wants the lock downs to continue until this vaccine is developed. Once it is developed, only those who have a COVID19 vaccine certificate will be allowed to travel.” — Brian Shilhavy, Editor, Health Impact News (https://vaccineimpact.com/2020/who-is-controlling-the-u-s-response-to-covid19-the-white-house-or-bill-gates/)
“Moderna dispatched vaccine vials to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Md. The NIAID clinic aims to test the vaccine on about 20 to 25 healthy volunteers by late April (2020). The goal of the study will be to see if two doses of the vaccine are safe and produce a response in the immune system to fight off COVID-19 infection.” — NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, commenting on the unprecedented speed at which a potential vaccine for a global disease outbreak could be created.
“Deborah Birx sits on the Board of The Global Fund, which is heavily funded by Bill Gates’ organizational network … The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave The Global Fund a $750 million promissory note in 2012.“ — Journalist Jordan Schactel
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a key partner of the Global Fund, providing cash contributions, actively participating on its board and committees, and supporting the Global Fund’s advocacy, communications and fundraising efforts. The Gates Foundation has contributed US$2.24 billion to the Global Fund to date, and pledged US$760 million for the Global Fund’s Sixth Replenishment, covering 2020-2022.” – From the Global Fund’s website
“The media hacks who push the pro-vaccine propaganda and hide the truth are complicit in crimes against humanity…The entire vaccine machine is built on lies of omission and fraudulent science. billions of dollars are quietly paid out by NVICP to vaccine injured people, but the overwhelming majority of vaccine injuries are never reported. Of the thousands that are reported, only a tiny few are compensated. Therefore, the real amounts that should have been paid out to vaccine injured people is in the trillions.” – Dr William Christenson
“Fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. The CDC’s entire vaccination propaganda campaign rests on their claim that side effects from vaccination are exceedingly rare, but according to the blatantly pro-over-vaccination, and Big Pharma-funded CDC, in 2016 alone, VAERS received 59,117 vaccine adverse event reports. Among those reports were 432 vaccine-related deaths, 1,091 permanent vaccine-related disabilities, 4,132 vaccine-related hospitalizations, and 10,274 vaccine-related emergency room visits. What if these numbers actually represent less than 1% of the total as this report asserts? You multiply those numbers by 100.” – William Christenson
“The second point I could make is that in relationship to aluminum, being a nephrologist for a long time, is the potential for aluminum and central nervous system toxicity was well established by dialysis data. To think there isn’t some possible problem here is unreal.” — Dr. Weil (Pediatrician representing the Committee on Environmental Health of the Academy, testifying at the CDC’s infamous Simpsonwood conference – 2000)
“Aluminum and mercury are often simultaneously administered (ie, injected intramuscularly) to infants … However … there is absolutely no data, including animal data, about the potential for synergy, additivity, or antagonism … from the simultaneous exposure to these two (metallic) salts in vaccines.” – Dr Walt Ornstein (testifying at the Global Vaccine Safety Summit 2019)
”… vaccines like DPT contain the neurotoxin aluminum!! This vaccine adjuvant is causing huge problems … especially in vaccines such as Gardasil 9, which has the highest levels of aluminum of any vaccine. But research into its toxic effects is being suppressed. Professor Chris Exley, who is the World Expert in aluminum toxicity in living organisms, has found the link between aluminum adjuvants and autism, MS (multiple sclerosis), CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), Alzheimer’s dementia (AD) and other chronic conditions. Exley’s research funding has dried up. ‘They’ don’t want you to know that aluminum (in vaccines) is harmful and has never been tested for safety ….” – Angio Svizzera
“Our very great concern is that children worldwide are being exposed to unrecognised toxic chemicals that are silently eroding intelligence and causing disrupting behaviours, truncating future achievements, and damaging societies, perhaps most seriously in developing countries.” – Philippe Grandjean, MD, MPH
“Safety testing, which typically requires months and years for other medical products, often lasts only a few days with vaccines – not nearly long enough to spot cancers or chronic conditions like autoimmune diseass (e.g. juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis), allergic illnesses (e.g. food allergies, allergic rhinitis, eczema, asthma), or neurological and neurodevelopmental injuries (e.g. ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, epilepsy, seizure disorders, and autism). Vaccine manufacturer’s vaccine inserts that accompany every vial of mandated vaccines include warnings about these and over 400 other injuries including many serious immune, neurological, and chronic illnesses for which FDA suspects that vaccines may be the cause.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“Many of these illnesses became epidemic in American children after 1986, coterminous with the exploding vaccine schedule. For American kids born in 1986, only 12.8% had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54% among the vaccine generation (those born after 1986) in lockstep with the expanding schedule.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“The children who comprise this vaccine-injured generation are now aging out of schools that needed to build quiet rooms and autism wings, install wobble chairs, hire security guards and hike special ed spending to 25% to accommodate them. They are landing on the social safety net which they threaten to sink. … The good news for Big Pharma, of course, is that many of these vaccine-injured children have lifelong dependencies on unaffordable blockbuster drugs like insulin, Adderall, anti-psychotic drugs, Epi-Pens, asthma inhalers, and diabetes, arthritis, and anti-seizure meds made by the same companies that made the vaccines.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“An overwhelming majority of the FDA officials directly charged with licensing vaccines, and the CDC officials who effectively mandate them for children, have personal financial entanglements with vaccine manufacturers. These ‘public servants’ are often shareholders in, grant recipients from, and/or paid consultants to vaccine manufacturers, and, occasionally, even patent holders of the very vaccines they vote to approve. Those conflicts of interest motivate them to recommend ever more vaccines with minimal support from evidence-based science” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“The FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations. And the CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company; it owns 56 vaccine patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children program, which is over 40% of its total budget.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“The HHS (US Health and Human Services partners with vaccine makers to develop, approve, recommend, and pass mandates for new products and then shares profits from vaccine sales. HHS employees can personally collect up to $150,000 annually in royalties for products they work on. For example, key HHS officials collect money on every sale of Merck’s controversial HPV vaccine Gardasil, which also yields tens of millions annually for the agency in patent royalties.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“In 1986, Congress—awash in Pharma money (the pharmaceutical industry is number one for both political campaign contributions and lobbying spending on legislators over the past 20 years) enacted a law granting vaccine makers blanket immunity from liability for injuries caused by vaccines. The subsequent gold rush by pharmaceutical companies boosted the number of recommended inoculations from twelve shots of five vaccines in 1986 to 54 shots of 13 vaccines today. A billion-dollar sideline grew into the $50 billion vaccine industry behemoth.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“Since vaccines are liability-free – and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children – there is meager market incentive for companies to make them safe. The public must rely on the moral scruples of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Pfizer. But these companies have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly, even with (the many drug) products for which they can be sued for injuries. The four companies that make virtually all of the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons. Collectively they have paid over $35 billion since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science, and leaving a trail of (incurable chronic illnesses) injuries and deaths from products they knew to be dangerous and still sold under pretense of safety and efficacy.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
“The CDC takes funding from industry… It is outrageous that industry is apparently allowed to punish the CDC if the agency conducts research that has potential to cut into profits.” — Jerome R. Hoffman, MD – UCLA Professor of Medicine
“…there is no data that shows that vaccines only have protective effects. It is time to change our perception of vaccines. Vaccines are not merely a protective tool against a specific disease, they affect the immune system broadly. In spite of protecting against the diseases, DTP-vaccinated children had fivefold higher mortality than children who didn’t receive the vaccine.” — Dr. C. Stabell Benn, M.D. Ph.D. Professor in Global Health University of Southern Denmark
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical (and vaccine) industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – Arnold Seymour Relman, MD (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
(The American Academy of Pediatrics derives a majority of its outside contributions – estimated at more than $25 million per year – from pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines. The pediatricians that the AAP represents derive the majority of their annual revenues from the administration of vaccines to their pediatric patients.) — J.B. Handley
“The majority of studies that authorities point to as proof that vaccines do not cause autism have been published in a journal called Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. As we know, the AAP is a trade union for pediatricians.” – J.B. Handley
“You’d be amazed at the number of physicians who don’t know what’s in a vaccine. They’ll say, well, there’s the bacteria, the virus you want to vaccinate against, and then there’s a little immune stimulant in there to help stimulate the immunity so they react against those viral antigens. They don’t know about these other chemicals in there like aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde, special proteins, special lipids that are known to be brain toxic, that are known to induce autoimmunity in the brain. They’re not aware of that. They don’t know that MSG is in a lot of vaccines―monosodium glutamate, a brain excitotoxin. They’re not aware of what’s in the vaccine they’re giving! — Russell Blaylock, MD
“Most physicians haven’t got a clue about vaccines. Physicians are undeservedly endowed with a mantle of authority and therefore most of their patients think vaccines are simple, safe and effective. And therefore there is nothing much to know about vaccines except that they somehow illicit an immune response and magical antibodies will protect the inoculated patient for life. Total ignorance. But that’s what ‘The Snake’ tells physicians starting in medical school; and, since medical school (and nursing school) professors are also undeservedly endowed with a mantle of authority, both of whose healthcare professional group believed it from the start. Until they get bit.” – Anonymous Anti-Over-Vaccination activist parent
“The vaccine manufacturers, the Center for Disease Control, the FDA, and the various medical associations have failed miserably in their duty to protect our children….As a full-time professional research scientist for 50 years, and as a researcher in the field of autism for 45 years, I have been shocked and chagrined by the medical establishment’s ongoing efforts to trivialize the solid and compelling evidence that faulty vaccination policies are the root cause of the epidemic.…Mercury, one of the most toxic substances known, is used as a preservative in many vaccines. Some infants have had 125 times the maximum allowable limit of mercury injected … in one day, in vaccines.” — Dr. Bernard Rimland, Director, Autism Research Institute and editor of Autism Research Review International, issued in a statement on July 14, 2003: “The Autism Epidemic Is Real, And Excessive Vaccinations Are the Cause”
“The really sad thing is the amount of doctors I’ve spoken to who say to me, ‘Del, I know that vaccines are causing autism, but I won’t say it on camera because the pharmaceutical industry will destroy my career just like they did to Andy Wakefield.’” — Del Bigtree, Producer of “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe“
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CDC, Conflicts of Interest, Global Fund, Moderna, National Institutes of Health, NIAID, Robert F. Kennedy, Vaccinology, Virology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/02/some-conspiracy-theories-are-for-real/
Philip Giraldi
What is the best way to debunk a conspiracy theory? Call it a conspiracy theory, a label which in and of itself implies disbelief. The only problem with that is there have been many actual conspiracies both historically and currently and many of them are not in the least theoretical in nature. Conspiracies of several kinds brought about American participation in both world wars. And however one feels about President Donald Trump, it must be conceded that he has been the victim of a number of conspiracies, first to deny him the GOP nomination, then to insure that he be defeated in the presidential election, and subsequently to completely delegitimize his presidency.
Prior to Trump there have been numerous conspiracy “theories,” many of which have been quite plausible. The “suicide” of Defense Secretary James Forrestal comes to mind, followed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which has been credibly credited to both Cuba and Israel. And then there is 9/11, perhaps the greatest conspiracy theory of all. Israel clearly knew it was coming, witness the Five Dancing Shlomos cavorting and filming themselves in New Jersey as the twin towers went down. Also the Saudis might have played a role in funding and even directing the alleged hijackers. And we have also had the conspiracy by the neocons to fabricate information about Iraq’s WMDs and the ongoing conspiracy by the same players to depict Iran as a threat to the United States.
Given the multiple crises currently being experienced in the United States it is perhaps inevitable that speculation about conspiracies is at its highest level ever. To the average American it is incomprehensible how the country has become so screwed up because the political and economic elite is fundamentally incompetent, so the search for a scapegoat must go on.
There are a number of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus currently making the rounds. Those libertarians and contrarians who choose to believe that the virus is actually a flu being exploited to strip them of their liberties are convinced that many in the government and media have conspired to sell what is essentially a fraud. One such snake oil salesman persists in using an analogy, that since more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than by the coronavirus it would be more appropriate to ban cars than to require the wearing of face masks.
Another theory making the rounds accuses Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates of trying to take over the world’s healthcare system through the introduction of a vaccine to control the coronavirus, which he presumably created in the first place. The fallacy in many of the virus “conspiracies” that relate to a totalitarian regime or a crazy billionaire using a faux disease to generate fear so as to gain control of the citizenry is that it gives far too much credit to any government’s or individual’s ability to pull off a fraud of that magnitude. It would require people a whole lot smarter than the tag team of Trump-Pompeo or even Gates to convince the world and thousands of doctors and scientists that they should lock down entire countries over something completely phony.
Other coronavirus theories include that the virus was developed in the U.S., was exported to China by a traitorous American scientist, weaponized in Wuhan and then unleashed on the West as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and democracy. That would mean that we are already at war with China, or at least we should be. Then there is the largely accepted theory that the virus was created in Wuhan and escaped from the lab. Since that time Beijing has been engaging in a cover-up, which is the conspiracy. It is a theme favored by the White House, which has not yet decided what to do about it beyond assigning funny “Yellow Peril” names to the disease so everyone in MAGA hats will have something to chuckle about leading up to the November election.
But all kidding aside, there are some conspiracy theories that are more worth considering than others. One would be the role of George Soros and the so-called Open Society Foundations that he controls and funds in the unrest that is sweeping across the United States. The allegations against Soros are admittedly thin on evidence, but conspiracy mongers would point out that that is the mark of a really well-planned conspiracy, similar to what the 89 year-old Hungarian Jewish billionaire has been engaging in for a long time. The current round of claims about Open Society and Soros have generated as many as 500,000 tweets a day as well as nearly 70,000 Facebook posts per month, mostly from political conservatives.
The allegations tend to fall into two broad categories. First, that Soros hires protester/thugs and transports them to demonstrations where they are supplied with bricks and incendiaries to turn the gatherings into riots. Second, that Open Society is funding and otherwise enabling the destabilizing flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
Soros and his supporters, many of whom are Jewish because they think they see anti-Semitism in the attacks on the Hungarian, claim to support democratization and free trade worldwide. He is, in effect, one of the world’s leading globalists. Soros claims to be a “force for good” as the cliché goes, but is it completely credible that his $32 billion foundation does not operate behind the scenes to influence developments in ways that are certainly not democratic?
Indeed, Soros accumulated his vast fortune through vulture capitalism. He made over $1 billion in 1992 by selling short $10 billion in British pounds sterling, leading to the media dubbing him “the man who broke the bank of England.” He has been accused of similar currency manipulation in both Europe and Asia. In 1999, New York Times economist Paul Krugman wrote of him that “Nobody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit.”
Far from a passive bystander giving helpful advice to democracy groups, Soros was heavily involved with the restructuring of former communist regimes in eastern Europe and had a hand in the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, both of which were supported by the U.S. government and were intended to threaten Russia’s regional security.
Soros particularly hates President Vladimir Putin and Russia. He revealed that he is far from a benevolent figure fighting for justice in his March Financial Times op-ed (behind a pay wall) entitled “Europe Must Stand With Turkey Over Putin’s War Crimes in Syria.”
The op-ed is full of errors of fact and is basically a call for aggression against a Russia that he describes as engaged in bombing schools and hospitals. It starts with, “Since the beginning of its intervention in Syria in September 2015, Russia has not only sought to keep in place its most faithful Arab ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It has also wanted to regain the regional and global influence that it lost since the fall of the Soviet Union.” First of all, Russia did not “intervene” in Syria. It was invited there by the country’s legitimate government to provide assistance against various groups, some of which were linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State, that were seeking to overthrow President al-Assad.
And apart from Soros, few actual experts on Russia would claim that it is seeking to recreate the “influence” of the Soviet Union. Moscow does not have the resources to do so and has evinced no desire to pursue the sort of global agenda that was characteristic of the Soviet state.
There then follows a complete flight into hyperbole with: “Vladimir Putin has sought to use the turmoil in the Middle East to erase international norms and advances in international humanitarian law made since the second world war. In fact, creating the humanitarian disaster that has turned almost 6 million Syrians into refugees has not been a byproduct of the Russian president’s strategy in Syria. It has been one of his central goals.” Note that none of Soros’s assertions are supported by fact.
The Soros op-ed also included a bit of reminiscence, describing how, “In 2014, I urged Europe to wake up to the threat that Russia was posing to its strategic interests.” The op-ed reveals Soros as neither conciliatory nor “diplomatic,” a clear sign that he picks his enemies based on ideological considerations that also drive his choices on how to frame his ventures. Given all of that, why is it unimaginable that George Soros is engaged in a conspiracy, that he is clandestinely behind at least some of the mayhem of Antifa and Black Lives Matter as well as the flood of illegal immigration that have together perhaps fatally destabilized the United States?
© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Conspiracy Theories, coronavirus, Dancing Shlomos, George Soros, James Forrestal, John F. kennedy, Open Society Foundations, WMD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
Maxwell’s life story is one that forces more people to come face to face with the kind of corruption that we hate to admit to ourselves about our governments and leadership.
But we must admit these crimes or ourselves be complicit in them. The saddest part of this whole thing is the lengths our media will go to as paid white washers of the truth in order to continue enjoying their proximity to power.
We’ll find out soon why Maxwell effectively turned herself in and to whom. But I doubt someone of her capabilities and connections did so to willingly put her head in the hangman’s noose.
I see a plea bargain, no trial, no evidence presented.
https://tomluongo.me/2020/07/04/maxwell-didnt-kill-herself-by-getting-arrested/
Ghislaine Maxwell was caught in New Hampshire. Jeffrey Epstein’s partner-in-crime is now in U.S. custody in the darkest of all places, the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
The first thing on everyone’s mind should be, “Which faction actually has her and how long will she survive?”
I can’t answer those questions but it doesn’t hurt to run out a few scenarios, all of which, at this point, are pure speculation. When Epstein was arrested the same questions hung in the air.
Was this the Deep State getting a hold of him to shut him up? Was this Donald Trump trying to tie up a ‘loose end?’ Or was Trump and new Attorney General William Barr putting operational tempo on their opponents forcing Epstein into a potentially explosive situation?
The raid on Epstein’s home was conducted under the auspice of an indictment filed in the SDNY, a place “where the worst crimes in the world…go unpunished,” as I noted recently in a piece about Trump and Barr going after U.S. Attorney there Geoffrey Berman.
Trump and Barr took another shot at getting someone less controlled by the Deep State in charge of the SDNY and it looks like, for now, that they missed the mark.
With Berman gone, but in such a way as to allow his hand-picked assistant, Audrey Strauss, to take over, rather than anyone picked by Barr and Trump, this arrest seems way out of place.
Now, Strauss, a woman who prosecuted legendary mobster and one of Trump’s mentors, Roy Cohn, has to be considered suspect. Because the furor over Berman’s removal died down immediately after she was put in place.
And she’s in charge of the fate of the most important person in the world at the moment, Ghislaine Maxwell. Because Maxwell knows everything. If Epstein was the CEO of their international blackmail operation, Maxwell was the COO, in charge of the day-to-day operations.
Strauss’s indictment dog and pony show announcing Maxwell’s arrest focused on all the salacious bits pertaining to the indictment which only covers the period from 1995 to 1997.
It neatly avoided any of the real implications of Maxwell’s apprehension, the systematic entrapment and blackmailing of major political and economic figures the world over.
L’affair Epstein is the big one with the potential to uncover decades of endemic corruption that is truly global in nature. So, while we all joke about the Clinton body count, the truth is that there were plenty of people who wanted him dead.
And those same people today want Ghislaine Maxwell dead.
The problem, of course, with analyzing this situation is that all theories about who those people might be are entirely reasonable.
Logic dictates that Trump is not one of those people, despite the pictures and the old society page quotes from Trump linking him to Epstein. And we know this simply because after Epstein died in prison he disappeared from the news cycle.
If there was any real truth to Trump’s deeper involvement with Epstein that information would have already come out and Trump would no longer be president.
The man who led the raid on Epstein’s home was Geoffrey Berman.
The man slow-rolling the investigation into Epstein? Berman.
The guy William Barr fired for not actively pursuing DoJ priorities pertaining to Epstein and Joe Biden while pursuing frivolous complaints about Donald Trump? Berman.
The guy who refused to resign to force Trump to fire him and block a recess appointment to his job at the SDNY? Berman.
And the histrionics surrounding Barr’s removing Berman died down the minute his hand-picked (plucked from retirement) assistant was given the job.
Forgive me for not feeling comfortable with Maxwell’s future relationship with oxygen.
If anything, what’s happening here is that Trump and Barr keep pushing the tempo against the people who are trying to remove him from office by any means necessary.
Maxwell’s arrest could be a dare to them to kill her too to protect themselves, again. It’s also, in my opinion, a signal that Trump isn’t going down without a fight and that he may be at the point where he’s willing to burn the entire rotten edifice down on his way out the door.
Because at this point it should be clear to everyone that if Trump loses this November he and his family will be hounded into oblivion. Anything he’s accomplished as president, some of which is very good, in trying to reform and remake the judiciary and federal agencies, will be undone within days of his leaving office.
Trump has nothing left to lose at this point. So, why not pull the trigger on arresting Maxwell, forcing the SDNY’s hand and try to force out into the open the evidence Berman sat on in relation to Epstein?
With each and every move Trump makes, there is a series of firewalls and roadblocks erected to thwart any real movement on the endemic corruption.
And the frustrating part is not being able to truly parse who has the upper hand in all of this. At a minimum, ending the Epstein/Maxwell blackmail operation is a good thing.
Exposing even some of their dealings to scrutiny and forcing some conversation about them is also an unmitigated good thing. Whether this can all be turned on its head to burn Donald Trump is, frankly, irrelevant.
Because at this point there is now a large enough group of people reporting on the various parts of this story that it won’t simply go gently into that good night.
The most troubling thing about this story is that Maxwell was found in New Hampshire, removing herself from French protection.
Patrick Henningsen at 21st Century Wire traces down some of the threads linking Maxwell to Prince Andrew who refuses to cooperate with the FBI.
The answer to that question may very well have something to do with her friend Prince Andrew, who has been in a six-month standoff with the FBI who have wanted to interview him over his relations with Epstein and to answer to victims’ accusations of under-age sexual abuse. Could Maxwell have been summoned by the powers that be in order to provide a buffer against any further overtures by authorities towards the British Royal Family?
And why would she do this? Because, one she’s the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a British media tycoon with close ties and connections to British intelligence. And two, she considers Prince Andrew a close friend who, according to a November report from The Telegraph would corroborate Andrew’s denial he ever had sex with an underage girl.
Tracing another British connection, given that Chief Cabinet Secretary and National Security Director Sir Mark Sedwill was fired by Boris Johnson just before the Brexit extension deadline passed this week, could this be a counter to Sedwill’s removal given his deep ties to British Intelligence and his staunch opposition to Brexit?
If so, then Maxwell giving herself up serves a few of Trump’s purposes. Remember, that I believe the meeting between Trump and Queen Elizabeth last year, which was fought virulently by the Remain crowd at the time, created a new alliance between Trump, Johnson and the Queen to rescue the U.K. from the hands of globalists like Sedwill, Theresa May and Tony Blair.
So, this attempt by Berman and Strauss to make the Epstein case all about Prince Andrew’s involvement is to destroy what’s left of the British royal family and undermine the U.K. government at a time when the odds of a No-Deal Brexit are rising significantly.
This would track, then, with the time line of Barr firing Berman to protect the crown while Trump has been on the warpath against Germany and the EU is deep into its next stage of evolution, ramming debt mutualization and fiscal integration consolidated under the ECB and the European Commission.
It’s murky, convoluted and probably wrong, but since Maxwell/Epstein’s operations were designed from the ground up to procure this exact type of leverage it has to be considered.
Ultimately, the crimes here are monstrous. Getting to the truth of them is only scratching the surface of this story, which goes much deeper.
Maxwell’s life story is one that forces more people to come face to face with the kind of corruption that we hate to admit to ourselves about our governments and leadership.
But we must admit these crimes or ourselves be complicit in them. The saddest part of this whole thing is the lengths our media will go to as paid white washers of the truth in order to continue enjoying their proximity to power.
We’ll find out soon why Maxwell effectively turned herself in and to whom. But I doubt someone of her capabilities and connections did so to willingly put her head in the hangman’s noose.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Audrey Strauss, Clinton, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Southern District of New York | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/laurence-m-vance/a-double-whammy/
“Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry” ~ Acts 17:16
Many Christians recently received a double whammy of blasphemy and idolatry because the Fourth of July fell on a Saturday this year.
Most churches—and especially conservative, evangelical churches—usually have some kind of a patriotic service on the Sunday before the Fourth of July. If you have the misfortune of attending, there you will see the church building and the grounds around the church decorated with American flags, hear special prayers for the troops and government officials, see military personnel wearing their uniforms to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, see veterans recognized, read the church bulletin with an American flag on the cover, see men wearing cross and flag lapel pins, and sing hymns of worship to the state.
What happened this year is that some churches moved their patriotic services to Sunday July fifth since that is only one day removed from the fourth. But not being content with just one Sunday of blasphemy and idolatry, some churches also had in addition a mini patriotic service on the Sunday before the Fourth of July, hence the double whammy.
This may have consisted of just one hymn of worship to the state to open the service or the choir singing just a medley of patriotic songs rather than the whole service being devoted to singing hymns of worship to the state. The extra American flags may have been put up already.
What ended up happening in some cases is that the church didn’t announce that its patriotic service was being moved. Therefore, Christians who didn’t want to engage in corporate worship of the state who stayed home on the Sunday before the Fourth of July like they normally do were shocked to see idolatry and blasphemy on full display on July fifth when they weren’t expecting it. Their double whammy was different. They missed what probably would have been a normal church service and then had to unexpectedly sit through a patriotic service. Unless, of course, they got up and went back home or did something more spiritual like go to a park or the beach.
If the Apostle Paul were here today, he would see most of the churches wholly given to idolatry; that is, if they were open.
Some churches are still closed because they have the fear of the coronavirus instead of the fear of the Lord. Many churches that are open are what I call CDC churches because they consider all of the CDC guidelines to be the gospel truth: mask wearing, social distancing, etc.
But even in churches that no longer do these things and perhaps even never did any of these things, blasphemy and idolatry was still on full display during their patriotic services.
What makes patriotic services worse this year is that even though we are living through the greatest power grab, the greatest violation of civil liberties, and the greatest destruction of property rights by government at all levels (federal, state, county, city) in all of American history, most churches are still singing hymns of worship to the state and talking about how free America is while our freedoms are disappearing right before our eyes.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CDC churches, Civil Liberties, Fourth of July, patriotic service, Property Rights | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2020
That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Co., so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers’ cost on non-British tea.
https://dailyreckoning.com/was-the-american-revolution-a-mistake-2/
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: American Revolution, Colonial taxation, Continentals, Declaration Of Independence, hyperinflation, price control, tax burden | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2020
“Instead of revealing the “will of the people,”
election results are often only a one-day
snapshot of transient mass delusions.”
James Bovard
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Election Day, mass delusion, will of the people | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 4, 2020
Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967, “Nothing so diminishes
democracy as secrecy.” But the pandemic response by federal, state, and
local officials remains shrouded in secrecy. We may have seen only the
tip of the iceberg of boondoggles and blunders in government responses
to the pandemic.
https://jimbovard.com/blog/2020/07/02/independence-day-in-the-midst-of-dictatorship/
How many Americans will greet July 4th Day with gratitude that their governor is no longer compelling them to “shelter in place” or “stay at home” so they can celebrate their freedom? Most of the media is ignoring the fact that this Independence Day is occurring under the most dictatorial restrictions of the modern era. But anyone who values their liberty must recognize the Great Political Unleashing that has occurred this year makes a mockery of the Founding Fathers’ intentions.
Earlier this year, more than 300 million Americans were constrained by “stay-at-home” decrees by governors and mayors. These restrictions were justified by mortality predictions from COVID-19 that turned out to be wildly exaggerated. But most of the media has presumed that the dictates were legitimate because they were supposedly based on “science and data” – regardless of pervasive wrongheaded forecasts.
The Centers for Disease Control estimated last week that 24 million Americans may have been infected with COVID – making a mockery of lockdowns designed to force citizens to pay any price for the slightest potential reduction in infections.
Do America’s politicians and media have any special suggestions on how the tens of millions of people who lost their jobs due to the shutdowns should celebrate Independence Day? How should small business owners who have been bankrupted mark July 4th?
Governors across the nation earlier this year proved that the Bill of Rights is a parchment barrier that can be easily shredded by invoking their emergency powers. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer prohibited “all public and private gatherings of any size” (prohibiting people from visiting friends) and also prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting in stores after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity.
Many Michigan counties have less than a handful of COVID cases and few if any fatalities. But their economies have been obliterated by Whitmer’s statewide decrees, which have driven unemployment up to 24 percent. Two weeks ago, Whitmer railed that legislators’ “attempts to take away my authority” were “irresponsible, dangerous and foolish.”
Maryland politicians’ COVID crackdown destroyed more than 400,000 jobs, leading almost one-fifth of the state’s workforce to file for unemployment. Even the Washington Post recognized that Maryland’s COVID “restrictions have crippled the economy and paralyzed daily life since mid-March.” At the time that Gov. Larry Hogan imposed a mandatory “stay-at-home” order for all Marylanders, roughly a thousand Marylanders had tested positive for COVID and eighteen had died from the virus.
Despite the shutdown, the number of people testing positive soared to 68,000 along with more than 3,100 deaths. Ravaging Maryland’s economy failed to stop COVID’s spread but inflicted collateral damage that will hobble the state for many years and probably permanently blight thousands of lives.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned the state’s four million residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel. Six Oregon counties had only one confirmed COVID case as of last month, and most of the state has minimal infections. But schools, businesses, and other activities were slammed shut by government edict. Almost 400,000 Oregonians have lost their jobs after Brown’s shutdown.
In May, a circuit judge ruled that Brown’s pervasive restrictions were “not required for public safety when plaintiffs can continue to utilize social distancing and safety protocols.” But the Oregon Supreme Court, stacked with the governor’s appointees, quickly overturned that ruling.
The media and many politicians heaped derision on people who publicly protested against the lockdowns that were destroying their livelihoods. But after a Minneapolis policeman brutally killed George Floyd, politicians cheered as mass protests exploded in cities across the nation. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sent police to disperse attendees at an Orthodox Jewish funeral for violating his restrictions on public gatherings but endorsed mass protests against police brutality.
Twelve hundred health professionals signed a letter declaring, “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky for covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.” Any tattered remnant of credibility retained by public health officialdom was shattered when they declared that supporting protests against police brutality “should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”
Who knew that COVID-19 only infects “deplorables” and reactionaries?
At the same time that politicians joined and cheered mass protests against the police, many states continue effectively outlawing religious services. Would church services be permitted to resume if parishioners promised to cuss the police? The “experts” might also permit a vast rally to confer sainthood upon Anthony Fauci, the media’s favorite lockdown hysteria monger.
The pandemic pried open authoritarian Pandora’s Boxes at all levels of government. Trump’s Justice Department asked Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic. Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, warned, “You could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.” The same type of pre-arrest power could be exercised to detain anyone suspected of being infected or failing to obey lockdown orders. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most principled members of the Senate, tweeted in response to the news of the power grab: “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”
Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967, “Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.” But the pandemic response by federal, state, and local officials remains shrouded in secrecy. We may have seen only the tip of the iceberg of boondoggles and blunders in government responses to the pandemic.
What did federal, state, and local politicians and health officials know, and when did they know that many of the restrictions they imposed were unnecessary, if not counterproductive? How many states covertly adjusted their formulas or data standards to justify perpetuating lockdowns? How many states have lied or covered up their policies on sending COVID patients to nursing homes, a catastrophe that killed thousands of elderly?
Many locales have canceled their fireworks in order to avoid tempting people from gathering to enjoy the show. The Maryland Office of Tourism offered residents consolation prizes – the opportunity to tune in online and watch a “virtual pet parade” or see a “virtual Independence Day Tour” of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Maybe the National Endowment for Humanities could supplement those performances by posting on YouTube some videos of 1960s children celebrating the Fourth of July by waving sparklers in the air – behavior which might provoke a SWAT raid nowadays.
All that was necessary to raze limits on political power was wild-eyed extrapolations of potential infection rates. The last few months have established the prerogative of governors and other officials to slap on a tourniquet and cut off the economic blood supply for as long as they claim necessary. The ease with which politicians have captured boundless power should be chilling to anyone who is not a fan of Mussolini. And many governors appear itching to reimpose restrictions based on any uptick in infections elsewhere in the nation.
The Great Pandemic Follies of 2020 have been based on the illusion that government could make life risk-free. But the advocates of shutdowns, lockdowns, and endless prohibitions ignore the risk of dictatorship. That was what our forefathers fought against almost 250 years ago, and their sacrifices and courage should inspire today’s Americans to take far less guff from their rulers.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Centers for Disease Control, covid-19, Gretchen Whitmer, July 4th, lockdowns, stay at home | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 4, 2020
He began with the simplest theorem of economics, scarcity — “at zero price, there is greater demand than supply” — and applied it to a key economic resource, which is arguably the central economic resource: accurate knowledge. For 400 pages, he mined his unregistered claim for all it was worth. It turned out to be the mother lode. Why? Because knowledge is widely regarded as a free good. Even when it is not so regarded, it is regarded as a good that ought to be free. Sowell showed in ten cogent, carefully argued chapters that accurate knowledge is never free.
https://www.garynorth.com/public/21054.cfm
Thomas Sowell turned 90 on June 30.
He received a wonderful birthday present. His publisher released his latest book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. If you want to treat him to a nice present — book royalties — order a copy here. Think of it as a gift to yourself.
I first encountered his name in 1967, when I was writing the chapter on Marx’s economics in my first book, Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968).
Sowell had written an article for the American Economic Review in 1960. I did not know at the time that he had written it while he was in graduate school, which is unheard of for any author of an AER article. He received his Ph.D. in 1968, the year my book was published. I also did not know that Sowell was a Marxist. In 1960, the year the article was published, he got a job as a summer intern in a federal bureaucracy. He began to abandon his Marxism.
I was not overly impressed by the article. I cited it in a footnote:
Thomas Sowell, “Marx’s ‘Increasing Misery Doctrine’,” American Economic Review, L (1960), pp. 111-20. Sowell argues that Marx did hold to the absolute increasing misery doctrine before 1850 or so, but in the context of this chapter, I have tried to indicate that he also wrote in terms of it after 1850.
Little did I suspect what was to come.
There is no Sowell theorem in economic theory. There is no Sowell movement. Nobody has publicly identified himself as a Sowellist. Then why do I regard him as the greatest living economist? This:
1. He applies simple but fundamental concepts of economics to real-world problems, which are often problems that are not widely perceived as being heavily influenced by economic categories.2. He relies exclusively on verbal communications, not graphs or equations, to explain these concepts and their applications. This keeps his expositions firmly within the realm of historical cause and effect.
3. He never begins his economic analyses with this phrase: “Let us assume. . . .” The only time he ever uses “let us assume,” is when it is followed by “for the sake of argument,” which is in preparation for a lambasting of some conventional political assumption.
4. He writes in well-honed English that is the product of over 30 years of writing newspaper columns: clear, precise, and rhetorically persuasive — in short, efficient.
5. He is the most creative economist in our era — or perhaps in any era — in implementing the division of labor in his writing. He hires astoundingly productive research assistants, and then he incorporates their remarkable but diverse discoveries into a single coherent narrative.
6. He is a better historian than he is an economist. Other economists have made observations similar to his. But no other historian matches him in his chosen specialty: economic motivations that have prompted the international migration and subsequent economic successes of modern racial, national, and religious groups.
7. His commitment to discovering historical applications of economic theory, which keeps his theories from straying into the realm of irrelevant mathematical precision, where most academic economists prefer to dwell in safety — preferably tenured safety.
8. He does not suffer fools gladly. He takes no prisoners.
9. He writes editorials with such regularity that he warrants a permanent Drudge Report link. This volume of output, written under the pressure of deadlines, gives him ample opportunities to make wrong-headed, off-the-cuff statements. He has kept these to a minimum, usually confined to areas in which he claims no expertise.
Features 1-7 are guaranteed to keep him from winning a Nobel Prize.
He was not an overnight sensation. It was two decades between that article on Marx and his breakthrough book. In 1974, he hit conceptual pay dirt. He began working on a project that resulted in a specialized monograph. He began with the simplest theorem of economics, scarcity — “at zero price, there is greater demand than supply” — and applied it to a key economic resource, which is arguably the central economic resource: accurate knowledge. For 400 pages, he mined his unregistered claim for all it was worth. It turned out to be the mother lode. Why? Because knowledge is widely regarded as a free good. Even when it is not so regarded, it is regarded as a good that ought to be free. Sowell showed in ten cogent, carefully argued chapters that accurate knowledge is never free. Any attempt by the state to make knowledge free will backfire, he argued. The digital counter-culture’s slogan — “information wants to be free” — is nonsense. It is a variant of the ancient quest of something for nothing, which always ends badly.
Then he hit publishing pay dirt. The manuscript was accepted by Basic Books, the leading publisher of academic books on the Right. It published Knowledge and Decisions in 1980. I regard that book as the most important one-volume monograph in economics that I have ever read. I thought so in 1980, and I still do. Why? Because there are so many areas of life in which we have ignored or discounted the cost of accurate and applicable information. Unless you have given a great deal of thought to this, you have missed most of them.
Also in 1980, he went on the payroll of the Hoover Institution. Hoover decided to trade a guaranteed salary in exchange for Sowell’s future output. This was a deal for Hoover comparable to Red Auerbach’s trade in 1956 of Cliff Hagen and “Easy” Ed McCauley for a newly drafted and untried rookie, Bill Russell.
In 1986, I offered to pay him $3,500 to fly an hour to Los Angeles, give a speech, and fly back to Palo Alto. That was worth about $7,300 in today’s money. That was over three times what I had ever offered anyone to speak at one of my conferences. I knew that he normally asked $10,000 per speech. So, I tried the old trick I use when dealing with used car salesmen. I sent him the check. He sent it back, but he thanked me for making the offer. He thereby proved to me that his time was an economic good. At zero price, there was way too much demand for my budget. He clearly placed a high price on his time. Over the next quarter century, he justified this price in terms of the value of his output.
I must now issue a warning. Four of his books, which were written for his academic peers, are second rate. Why do I say this? Because they violated the criteria that I apply to his later work. They are unclear, without rhetorical power, dishwater dull, made no impact on the economics profession, and sank without a trace. First is his monograph, Say’s Law, published by Princeton University Press in 1972. Second is Classical Economics Reconsidered (1974), also published by Princeton University Press. It was much better than Say’s Law, because it was 90 pages shorter. Third, there is his book on Marxism, published in 1985. As of today, you can buy a hardcover used copy of his book on Marxism on Amazon. You can pay $191.37, $318.18, or $318.20, plus $3.99 for shipping. Don’t.
His original economic textbook, Economics (1971), was unmemorable. It had a lot of graphs, which conveyed no useful theoretical knowledge beyond the text, and which made reading the book far more laborious. It was a conventional textbook. It was therefore boring. Its main benefit was that it was short: 340 pages, not the standard 1,000 pages of a college-level textbook. It therefore had this advantage: it is better to bore captive collegiate readers out of their skulls for 340 pages than for 1,000. The proof of how mediocre his textbook was is this: his 2004 non-textbook, Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy. It was written for a non-captive audience: readers who are not enrolled in college. It contains no graphs or equations. It is intensely real-world focused, as are all of the books that he wrote for the general public.
This is his great contribution. With a few exceptions, which I regard as youthful indiscretions, he has written for the general public. No Nobel Prize for him!
There is one other thing. Sowell, in his dust jacket photos, has always looked at least ten years younger than he is. I like to think they were Photoshopped, but Photoshop is too recent. This has annoyed me for over three decades. (My solution: I never put my photo on my dust jackets. I don’t want to be reminded.)
[I published this on March 9, 2013.]
If you want evidence of my evaluation, watch this interview. It was recorded in December 2018, when Sowell was 88. It is on a topic that is a hot topic these days: economic inequality. He talks about his youthful dalliance with Marxism, and what cured him.
For an assessment of his career written by an Austrian School economist and a mainstream free market economist, go here.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: demand, Economics, Knowledge and Decisions, Scarcity, supply, Thomas Sowell | Leave a Comment »
