MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

‘Racist’ Trump Supporters Should Lose Their Vote, Says NBC. Guess Who Decides They’re ‘Racist’? — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

Yet nowhere in any of Trump’s numerous campaign utterances or even Tweets has he ever singled out America’s White population as the intended sole beneficiary of his plans to remake the U.S. economy. In fact, just the opposite.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/24/racist-trump-supporters-should-lose-their-vote-says-nbc-guess-who-decides-theyre-racist/

Robert Bridge

 

Once again, the mainstream media is pushing the repugnant race card, suggesting that Trump supporters are a bunch of knuckle-dragging xenophobes whose only reason for wanting a wall on the Mexican border is because they suffer an aversion to people with different skin color than them.

What exactly do White Americans – who opened the floodgates to immigration in 1965 – need to do these days to prove they are not natural born racists? Cancel their monthly subscription to Town and Country? Stop walking their dogs, which are, of course, four-legged vehicles of “racial segregation,” or stop attending their evening yoga class, the unsuspecting breeding grounds for white supremacists? Somehow I suspect that even if White people took to burning effigies of Ku Klux Klan members on their manicured front lawns that would not even put a stop to the ugly rumors. Let’s just face it, the only thing that will finally stop the slanderous slurs is if all White Americans publicly denounce their support of the biggest race-hater of them all, Donald J. Trump. And should they refuse the itinerant Liberal Inquisition will be only too happy to do it for them.

Just ask Noah Berlatsky, occasional columnist for MSNBC, whose latest piece was crowned with the zinger of a headline, ‘Trump voters motivated by racism may be violating the Constitution. Can they be stopped?’ Nice leading question there, but the premise that precedes it, that Trump voters are “motivated by racism,” is just one more election-season deceit.

Berlatsky’s article opens with the conclusion that Donald Trump “ran an openly racist campaign for president,” and that his popular rallying slogan “Make America Great Again” is actually code that can be translated into “America was greater when white people’s power was more sweeping and more secure.” Yet nowhere in any of Trump’s numerous campaign utterances or even Tweets has he ever singled out America’s White population as the intended sole beneficiary of his plans to remake the U.S. economy. In fact, just the opposite. As Trump has made it his goal to return some of the shine to America’s industrial Rustbelt, threatening companies with penalties and public scorn if they relocate their production operations overseas, the unemployment rate among Blacks now stands at 5.9%, down from 7.5% at the start of his presidency. At the same time, the employment rate among Hispanics is at historic highs.

At this point, the Democrats will invariably mention Trump’s promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, a promise that arguably won the real estate developer the White House in 2016. Yet Trump, the Democrats argue, is an unrepentant racist because he admitted to an unsavory truth that even Hispanics living in America agree with: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump was not arguing, of course, that all Mexicans are rapists or criminals. He was arguing that of the many who do make it across the border a disproportionate number do fit the description.

At this point, it needs to be asked why the Democrats deign to show so much care and compassion for those illegals breaching America’s border on a daily basis, at the very same time Democratic strongholds, like California and New York, are already bursting at the seams with tent cities and grinding poverty. Suffice it to consider a comment by a British tourist to San Francisco, the one-time crown gem of the increasingly tarnished, Democratic-controlled Golden State: “I can’t understand how anyone can live in a place where their everyday trip to get groceries or go to work includes a multitude of beggars asking for spare change or a meal.”

Considering that the Democrats can’t even take care of their own burgeoning problems in their primary constituencies, what is the real motivation behind their proposals to open the U.S. border and abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)? After all, these are the very same people who screamed ‘not in my backyard!’ when Trump threatened to send all apprehended illegals to the so-called ‘sanctuary cities’. Nancy Pelosi skirted the periphery of racism when she called the idea “disrespectful.”

Would their sham benevolence have anything to do with securing more Democratic voters, or guaranteeing that the Republican Party eventually goes the way of the dinosaurs? Was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo motivated by pure compassion when he signed legislation granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, who may now cast a ‘legal’ vote under New York’s notoriously loose voting laws? Now Democrats are demanding the elimination Voter ID rules, declaring them racist against minorities. This is one of the ways Berlatsky proposes to end so-called “racist voting” now purportedly contaminating U.S. politics.

It’s no secret that Hispanic Americans traditionally vote Democratic, and if that tendency were to change tomorrow you can bet that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi would be camped out daily at the Mexican border, demanding the necessary funds to finish the project.

In the final analysis, the Democrat’s groundless assertion that Trump supporters are kneejerk racists disintegrates when it is remembered that up to 10 million former Obama supporters – many of them White – switched allegiances to the Trump camp in the 2016 presidential election. Are we really expected to believe that all of those Americans suddenly became hardcore racists with the arrival of the evil ‘orange man’ and his pledge to build a wall? That sounds highly unlikely. The far more logical explanation for this massive change in political sentiment is that Trump’s plan to remedy America’s dangerously porous borders, thereby enhancing the security of all Americans, regardless of skin color, was a welcomed idea across the board.

Nevertheless, the real danger is that the Democrats, entranced by the cult of political correctness and an out-of-control cancel culture, will attempt by some extreme measures to identify and ban so-called ‘racist Trump supporters’ who are just regular Americans looking for a leader who will provide them with a well-guarded country that protects the rights of all its citizens regardless of skin color. Banning undesirable Trump voters from the ballet box may eventually become as easy as censoring right-leaning Twitter users.

Clearly, the Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the mistake of branding Trump supports “deplorables” – to quote Hillary Clinton – and have only worsened their present position by calling these same voters, many of them former Obama supporters, “racist.” Such a gross simplification and misunderstanding of the current American political realities goes far at explaining why the Democrats stand very little chance of beating Trump at the ballot box.

 

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal

Be seeing you

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Your Range Will Vary – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

The last electric car I test-drove was the VW eGolf, basically a Golf with an electric powertrain. It, too, delivered about 20 percent less than the advertised range.

This would be a scandal  – a prosecution  – if we were dealing with non-electric cars.

That is because the goal is to exterminate the internal combustion engine no matter that there is no practical replacement on the horizon.

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2020/01/28/your-range-will-vary/

By

eric

Volkswagen got fined billions – and its executives and engineers were criminally prosecuted – for “cheating” on government emissions certification tests that involved differences of much less than 1 percent. Why is it that electric cars are allowed to cheat the public by double digits when it comes to what they claim about their range on a full charge vs. what they actually deliver?

As a car journalist – someone who regularly test drives new cars, including electric cars – I have known for some time that the range delivered by EVs in real-world driving is always much less than advertised.

About 15-20 percent less.

Other car journalists – at Jalopnik, which is owned by the SJW media conglomerate Huffington Post and so presumably not “anti-EV” – recently confirmed this.

They did a same-day/same-conditions real-world road test of six-brand new EVs and found them lacking. Not one of them came close to delivering on their promised maximum range, including the sainted Tesla Model 3.

Five of them went about 20-25 percent less-far than advertised, indicating it’s not a problem with one specific EV or the way that particular EV was driven.

It’s a general problem – and the same government that practically nailed VW to a cross over almost unmeasurable differences in exhaust emissions that would never have been noticed – certainly not by VW owners – had it not been for an inquisition worthy of Torquemada determined to find something – anything – is interestingly indifferent to this very noticeable cheating.

We’ll get to the motivation for that shortly.

Meanwhile, these scandalous disparities between what’s touted and what’s delivered – according to Jalopnik:

The $69,850 to start Jaguar iPACE (Jaguar’s first electric car) travelled 25 percent less-far-than-advertised.

The $68,895 Mercedes’ EQC 400 (Mercedes’ first all-electrioc car) went 24 percent less-far-than-advertised.

The Audi eTron delivered 19 percent less-than-advertised range.

And the sainted Tesla 3? It only went 78 percent as far as advertised.

Kia’s Niro hybrid was the least range-gyppy of the bunch. It went 90 percent as far-as-advertised.

The last electric car I test-drove was the VW eGolf, basically a Golf with an electric powertrain. It, too, delivered about 20 percent less than the advertised range.

This would be a scandal  – a prosecution  – if we were dealing with non-electric cars.

In fact, the government has zealously hounded several car companies over much smaller advertised vs. real-world mileage discrepancies. Hyundai, for instance, was  recently socked with a fine of $41.2 million over a difference of about 4 miles-per-gallon in advertised vs. actual range.

Which is a lot less a difference than the Range Disparity that comes standard with every EV.   

Where’s the Feds? Where’s the EPA?…

But why the indifference to this fraudulence?

The answer to that should be obvious by now. EVs – like automated cars (which are also uniformly electric) are being given a pass when it comes to offenses that would otherwise result in inquisitions because they serve a purpose – and that purpose is not to stave off the “climate crisis.”

It is to wrest from Americans affordable, autonomous mobility.

If you can’t see that by now, it’s time to see an eye doctor.

Be seeing you

Exterminate

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Uncomfortable Truths and the Horror of the “Greater Good” – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

In order for the state to gain the long-term loyalty of the people, indoctrination is required.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/gary-d-barnett/uncomfortable-truths-and-the-horror-of-the-greater-good/

By

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.

~ Adolf Hitler (1938). “Adolf Hitler from Speeches 1933-1938”

Collectivism is not a new idea, but it is one that now consumes America, and since collectivism is based upon the destruction of individual intellect in favor of group sameness, it must be squashed at every turn if freedom is truly sought. Nationalism is a belief that one’s nation is superior to all others, and that group devotion to the State is paramount. These are obviously similar terms, with differences only at the extreme margin, but both require a single-minded belief in the false assumption of the “greater good.” It has been said by many, but any acceptance or adherence to the dishonest concept of the greater good will simply lead to the greater evil.

While there are differences to be sure, when one compares the beliefs and actions of Nazi Germany to today’s United States, there are stark similarities. This is a very disturbing revelation, and one that should be examined. For my purposes here, this is not specifically about any particular past or current ruler or president, it is much more than that, because it is concerning society at large, and how an entire nation can be easily manipulated to accept slavery in the name of safety, and in doing so, also accept the inevitable carnage and tyranny that comes with such weakness of mind.

One of the most obvious likenesses between the general populations of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and the U.S. today was the rampant nationalism and belief of exceptionalism held by the Nazis then, and the American masses now. In Hitler’s national socialist party rule, all of Germany came together as one in support of the nation-state, with a full belief that they were the exceptional people. In the U.S. today, the fascist and socialistic oligarchy that is in place is dependent on national unity, which has been brought about by extreme fear mongering, little different than in Nazi Germany. One of the most prevalent underpinnings of the population in America today is the national feeling of being exceptional to those in other lands. Those in Nazi Germany were taught to be afraid of mixing with other races, especially the Jewish people, and felt exceptional to them. Americans today have similar feelings about the Muslims in the Middle East. They are afraid of this purposely structured and false “terrorist” threat, and feel superior to the people that are a manufactured enemy.

In order for the state to gain the long-term loyalty of the people, indoctrination is required. In Germany under Hitler, the government, specifically the Reich Ministry of Education, took control of the education system in 1934 in order to indoctrinate the youth. The goal was to produce strength so as to build a population that would be willing and able to war, and that would always fully support the state. Later, the creation of the National Socialist Teacher’s League, with mandated affiliation in order to teach, was established. Grades suffered, and dumbing down became evident, but the goals of the state were met so that all children were brainwashed from a very young age to support the state and become good citizens. In the United States, this same process of mandated state-controlled education had begun much earlier, but was done incrementally over a longer time. Similar results were sought, but American students were to be schooled just enough to make them good workers and citizens, and this plan was also designed to advance loyalty to the nation-state. The indoctrination of German and American children has much in common, and the results show less individualism, less intellect, and more nationalism. Both countries were successful in their efforts to control the general population by controlling the minds of the children through brainwashing techniques.

The Germany of the early and mid-twentieth century desired to be the controlling power, and also had a national feeling of superiority over much of the rest of the world. Has not the United States desired and obtained the title of world super-power, and do not Americans also now believe that they are exceptional to most of those in the rest of the world? This is no accident. Germany wanted to spread Nazism and the U.S. claims to spread democracy. Both Nazism and democracy are socialistic in nature, and the efforts to advance both require extreme force, control, murder, and war.

The belief in Germany at the time was that the few could be sacrificed for the many; in other words, the individual should be sacrificed for the greater good of society or nation. Generally speaking, both the Germany of old and America today hold this same position. It is one that demands tyrannical rule and a loss of freedom instead of individual rights. This thinking is completely incompatible with liberty.

My purpose here is not to declare that America today is the same as Nazi Germany. The two situations are certainly different in many ways, but at the same time, the similarities are astounding. The German government attempted to gain world power, and was a barbarous regime bent on total control. In the process, millions of innocent victims fell to the Third Reich through aggressive means and world war. German citizens while mostly held hostage, did support many of the state’s crimes, and did so with nationalistic fervor. When put in these simple terms, Americans looking in the mirror should become very disturbed.

The United States became the world’s leading power long ago due to continuous aggressive war, to the buildup of the largest and most aggressive military and deadly weaponry on planet earth, and for the building and occupation of over 800 bases on foreign soil. In the process, the U.S. has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths of innocent men, women, and children around the world just since the defeat of Germany in WWII. So how could any claim to be different or exceptional with a record of slaughter of this magnitude?

Tyranny is nurtured by national pride and false ego. This leads to more power over the individual, and therefore over society as a whole. This causes perpetual war to be waged in order to control the masses by fear. By eliminating the power structure, wars will cease, and individual liberty can flourish. Tearing down the government will eliminate tyrannical rule, and once again place the individual in a position of importance instead of allowing the evil that is the greater good.

Sometimes things are not as they seem, reality is not so clear, and egotistical views come back to haunt the soul. The mirror is our friend, for accepting truth, and improving self brings peace.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Coronavirus: A Contrived Pandemic? Caused by a Gene Mutation or by a Meteorological Phenomenon? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

I would bet this is another Plum Island/Kenema Hospital research scenario gone bad. gone bad.

How would the US know so soon about the particular virus and it’s epicenter? We knew what the Chinese were researching and/or we were doing it also and/or in partnership with China and/or in competition with China.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/bill-sardi/coronavirus-a-contrived-pandemic-caused-by-a-gene-mutation-or-by-a-meteorological-phenomenon/

By

In October of 2019 a researcher at Johns-Hopkins Center for Health Security predicted 65 million people could die of coronavirus worldwide within 18 months under the right circumstances.

By December 31, China was reporting its first case of a mutated coronavirus infection.  It took only one day for the US Centers for Disease Control to identify a seafood market in Wuhan, China as the epicenter of the outbreak.

A Reuters news report claims the newly mutated coronavirus wasn’t identified until January 10 and hospitals in Wuhan didn’t have testing kits till January 20, with testing prior that date taking 3-5 days because they had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing.  So how did the CDC all the way in the U.S. so quickly identify Wuhan as the hub of a coronavirus outbreak?

Of interest, Wuhan is the location for China’s Institute of Virology.  Authorities are calling this a coincidence.

One wonders if the current epidemic isn’t actually a contrived and pre-planned reality drill to see how the world would handle such a pandemic?  All the usual suspects participated in the drill planning, pharmaceutical company executives, the World Bank, public health authorities, news media execs, and representatives for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Why did the Johns-Hopkins doctor pick a mutated coronaviral pandemic instead of some other virus?

Wuhan ghost-town

I write this report on January 29, 2020.  The 11-million city of Wuhan, China is gripped by the coronavirus.  Quarantines are in place.  Fear of the spread of the virus is omnipresent.  The weather is wintery.  The temperate chilly, 44° Fahrenheit/7° Celsius.  Cloudy skies will predominate over the next few days.  The UV index in Wuhan goes unreported by news media.  On a scale of 1 (lowest)-10 (highest), the UV index in Wuhan is ~3-4 at the height of the crisis.  Wuhan is 30.5928° North latitude and it is unlikely for its residents to obtain enough sunlight to produce sufficient amounts of vitamin in winter months.

One study (2012) reveals vitamin D deficiency in China is rampant (percentage of vitamin D deficiency among Beijing and Shanghai adults of 69.2%).

Wuhan is now a ghost town. There are photo images of an empty city park, train travelers with warm clothing that blocks any chance of sunlight/skin exposure, video of the empty streets in Wuhan, and more ghost town video footage.  The virus appears to spread internationally by air travel, but not spread outward from destinations of infected travelers.

News reports concede this “deadly” coronavirus is just a new strain of a familiar virus which in the past has been called SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).  It’s genetic makeup is 96% identical to the coronavirus found in bats.

Viral mutations

Slight changes of the mutation rate can determine whether or not some virus infections are rapidly cleared by the host immune system.

RNA viruses (like the coronavirus) are susceptible to damage from oxidation which can affect their rate of mutation.  This has been demonstrated in mice deficient in the trace mineral selenium.  China is known to be a “low selenium” country by the World Health Organization.

But fast-mutation rates mean any potential epidemic would peter-out due to rapid mutation rates.

RNA viruses (like the coronavirus) have high mutation rates—up to a million times higher than their hosts—and these high rates are correlated with enhanced virulence.  However, their mutation rates are almost disastrously high, and a small increase in mutation rate can cause RNA viruses to go locally extinct. Their mutation rates are said to be an exploitable Achilles’ heel.

Mutation or lack of sunshine vitamin D?

A report published in 2004 in BMC Evolutionary Biology (abridged) said this:

The estimated mutation rates in the SARS-Coronavirus using multiple strategies were not unusual among coronaviruses and moderate compared to those in other RNA viruses. All estimates of mutation rates led to the inference that the SARS-Coronavirus could have been with humans in the spring of 2002 without causing a severe epidemic.  The earliest confirmed case of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) occurred in November, 2002.  The SARS-Coronavirus will likely be with humans for years to come.  On the other hand, if the pathogen (particularly the genes coding for major antigens) evolves rapidly, an effective strategy to prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV must be the top-priority, and an effective vaccine program may be problematic.  In comparison to other coronaviruses, this rate is lower than that in the mouse hepatitis virus, similar to that in the transmissible gastroenteritis virus, but higher than that in the infectious bronchitis virus.  The estimated mutation rate is at the same order of magnitude as in other RNA viruses.  The SARS-CoV is not an unusual coronavirus or RNA virus in terms of its speed of nucleotide changes. One possible scenario is that the SARS-CoV had already infected some people in the spring of 2002 but failed to cause serious epidemics; its spread was however suppressed in the summer (similar to the summer of 2003), and re-emerged around November to cause the epidemic in 2003.

If that isn’t confirmation that coronavirus is always with us but due to geo-meteorological changes (the earth shifting away from the sun in winter) then I don’t know what is.

In 1981 R. Edgar Hope-Simpson proposed that seasonal flu epidemics are associated with a lack of solar radiation in winter months.  John J. Cannell MD convincingly proposes the lack of sunshine vitamin D in winter explains virtually all of the factors involved in seasonal viral epidemics including why these epidemics spread so rapidly in the past despite the lack of modern transportation, why a second-wave of the epidemic so low, why intentional inoculation of healthy individuals does not cause illness in all volunteers, and why flu-related mortality is not significantly affected by vaccination.

Vaccine on the way

A news report says researchers have already produced a vaccine from an isolated “unknown” virus from the first case reported in Hong Kong.  The fastest way to get a vaccine developed and approved is to create an imagined pandemic that elevates the urgency of its development and gets government to cover the R&D cost.  Two companies are said to be developing the world’s first coronavirus vaccines.

Given such a global pandemic from a mutated coronavirus was estimated to cause $570-billion of economic losses should it occur, it would cost just ~$9 billion to provide 30-days of vitamin D pills to 3 billion people in Asia (calculated at 10-cents per pill).

Be seeing you

Plum Island Animal Disease Center – Orient, New York ...

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Rep. Jones introduces bill to keep S.C. Guard home from undeclared wars | News | golaurens.com

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

South Carolina rebelling again, thank goodness.

http://www.golaurens.com/news/rep-jones-introduces-bill-to-keep-s-c-guard-home/article_3a988e9c-4148-11ea-87f0-f77b72d52912.html

BOISE, Idaho – A bipartisan group of Afghanistan and Iraq war era veterans praised S.C. State Rep. Stewart Jones (SC-14) on Monday for introducing legislation requiring that South Carolina’s National Guard units cannot be deployed for foreign combat or combat support duties unless Congress has formally adopted a declaration of war as provided by the U.S. Constitution.

“As veterans, we strongly support the U.S. taking strong military action when necessary to defend American lives and interests,” said former Idaho Army National Guard Sgt. Dan McKnight, founder of BringOurTroopsHome.US, who served 18 months in Afghanistan. “We thank Rep. Jones for acting to ensure that when South Carolina’s men and women in uniform are involved, it’s done the right way, the way the Constitution provides.

“Rep. Jones’ bill simply says that before ordering South Carolina’s National Guard personnel to leave their families and do their job, Congress should first accept responsibility in the comforts here at home of doing their job. We shouldn’t ask National Guard personnel to have the courage to put their boots on the ground, unless Congress at least has the courage first to put their names on the line.”

Rep. Jones, a Republican, represents South Carolina’s 14th district (Greenwood and Laurens counties).

McKnight said Jones’ legislation is based on what’s been dubbed “Defend the Guard” legislation, first introduced last year in West Virginia by state Del. Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock County, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy who served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

Nothing in HB 4728 would prevent the governor from mobilizing the National Guard to respond to a natural disaster or maintain civil order.

McKnight’s group in November organized a bipartisan conference in Washington, D.C., of lawmakers who plan to introduce the same bill in multiple state legislatures this year, hoping to exercise the powers of state governments under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to check and balance the power of the federal government to use state-based National Guard troops for long-term combat deployments.

Be seeing you

National Guard of the United States - Wikipedia

Defending US…U.S.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Pentagon Now Says 50 Suffered Brain Injuries in January 8 Iran Missile Attack – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

There was advanced warning, troops were in bunkers, why the injuries?

Could it be that if no one was hurt it would harder to justify reprisal, didn’t fit the plan?

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/01/28/pentagon-now-says-50-suffered-brain-injuries-in-january-8-iran-missile-attack/

Starting with the official declaration that there were “no casualties,” the number of people suffering traumatic brain injuries in January 8’s missile attack against Iraq’s Ayn al-Asad base has continued to grow, and the Pentagon now says 50 soldiers were injured.

This is an increase from the 34 injured reported just days. The Pentagon says that 15 of the 50 were diagnosed since they made the 34 announcement. They say it is not unusual for concussion symptoms to take awhile to present.

Of the 50, the Pentagon says 31 of them were treated within Iraq and have returned to duty already, while 18 others were sent to Germany for further evaluation and treatment. Another was sent to Germany for unrelated reasons and got symptoms while there.

The mounting casualties have been an issue in no small part because President Trump insisted there were no injuries, and then derided the reports as just “headaches.” Veterans groups were deeply critical, as brain injuries are rapidly growing, and the military has struggled to treat them.

Be seeing you

115th Congress passed more laws than before, but of ...

Brain Dead

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

We’re in the same situation now, except Trump is no Nixon. He’s listening to lying Saudis and Likudists and picking a fight with Iran, which should be our closest ally in the region. He’s on the right path where immigration is concerned, and when and if that is finally restricted, we can start rebuilding harmony among our communities, particularly in the inner cities. But I’m not holding my breath.

https://www.takimag.com/article/youth-is-wasted-on-the-dumb/

Taki

I write this from the once-upon-a-time small alpine village of Gstaad, Switzerland, now a mecca of the nouveaux riches and vulgar, snow and manners having gone with the wind. Global warming is still a maybe, as far as I’m concerned, but the visual evidence right here in the Alps is undeniable. The glacier I used to ski on almost year-round has disappeared, and man-made snow is pumped out daily in its place. The reason I’m reluctant to believe the climate Cassandras is because their prophetic gifts have been very wrong in the past—Prince Charles predicted the end of the world some time ago, but he’s still flying private around the globe twenty years on—and that Swedish teenager who accuses us of killing her future is a publicity freak of Meghan Markle proportions.

In my own little way I do what I can against global warming: I drive a tiny mini, use a sailboat rather than those polluting stinkers favored by Arabs, and occasionally charter only propeller planes when flying around Europe. Never mind. More depressing than the disappearing white stuff are the manners of the people who warn us nonstop about global warming. Never have I met a ruder kind: young, usually bearded where both sexes are concerned, and, like all annoying types, holier-than-thou.

Mind you, some of us oldies think that the hot air emanating from the climate warriors, the LGBTQ crowd, and their allies who encourage them to protest at the drop of a hat is the real cause of the snow’s disappearance. My son, who as a teenager used to lean left, has finally seen the light and annoys the ritzy-glitzy youngsters he runs into these days by asking them what pronoun they go under. What’s undeniable is that we have produced a generation of young people who pride themselves on being eternal pessimists. Life will deliver less, is their message. A wry smile is my reaction when I hear this stuff. I grew up during the last world war—something these darlings see on TV and in the movies, and it traumatizes them at times.

“Had I lived my life in the grip of social media, I’d probably be an inmate in an insane asylum by now.”

Like many others of my age group, memory serves where the almost daily bombing during the war is concerned. My family’s house north of Athens was near a small airport used by the Greek royal family that the occupying Germans had taken over to park their fighters. Although my German nanny and my parents had forbidden it, our favorite game was running out during an air raid in order to catch the silver foil Allied bombardiers would dump in order to confuse the primitive radars of German antiaircraft guns. It sounds more dangerous than it was. Three years of bombings and not a single casualty. Today’s youth have no such luck. They’re being bombed daily with exaggeration, intolerance, untruths, and outright falsehoods by Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, with millions of casualties.

No wonder they’re all so angry. Had I lived my life in the grip of social media, I’d probably be an inmate in an insane asylum by now, or convicted of having raped that pachyderm Lena Dunham. Abused, trolled, bullied, incapable of having a relationship, today’s youth have rap stars as heroes, and that includes the ghastly Kardashians and Hiltons. Social media is now the echo chamber where one hears nothing but one’s own prejudices fed back to them. Their inner voice tells them that it’s all the fault of the oldies, people like myself who don’t care about the future. Bad, bad Taki.

Yet when communism collapsed thirty years ago, the world rejoiced for the values communism had denied the people under it: free speech, respect, and tolerance. The irony is that three decades later, newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, TV networks, and movements like #MeToo want to revert to the kind of control practiced by communist dictators. The Donald promised to drain the swamp, but the swamp seems to be winning with help from the above-mentioned unmentionables, and from the zombielike people attached to their machines who shout at others on the internet. You know the type: those with a not-my-president, hands-over-the-ears reaction to democratically elected officials.

Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon went over the heads of the so-called elite and the Eastern establishment and told the American people that America would not be humiliated by North Vietnam. He called on the silent majority of Americans to back him, and they sure did. The polls went through the roof. One of my most pleasant memories was watching New York construction hard hats attack and beat the crap out of effete Harvard types for burning the American flag on Fifth Avenue. Irish cops looked on with smiles on their faces. Well, we all know how that ended. The swamp brought down a great president who had won 49 states.

We’re in the same situation now, except Trump is no Nixon. He’s listening to lying Saudis and Likudists and picking a fight with Iran, which should be our closest ally in the region. He’s on the right path where immigration is concerned, and when and if that is finally restricted, we can start rebuilding harmony among our communities, particularly in the inner cities. But I’m not holding my breath.

Be seeing you

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Tyrants With Pens – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

I find it strange that today’s writers resemble dictators of the past in their unwillingness to accept opinions contrary to their own.

https://www.takimag.com/article/tyrants-with-pens/

Taki

Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the Ethiopian mini-Napoleon Mengistu—were rather good writers who could form better-than-average sentences that said that power grew out of the barrel of a gun? I read this in a Big Bagel weekly that was once known for its wit but is now so blinded by hate against The Donald that it’s turned into a rag, surpassed in venom only by The New York Times and CNN. I knew that Mussolini was a scribbler of notes because he wrote the editorials of his newspaper Il Popolo before he took power. “Inequality and discipline, these are the substitutes for the cries of Equality and Liberty,” wrote Il Duce. That’s telling them, Benito—them being all those American Times hacks like the lachrymose Roger Cohen and the lugubrious Paul Krugman, who as I write are undergoing nonstop colonoscopies in order to cleanse their brains of depression following the British election. Professor Klinghoffer, who is administering the procedure in his Austrian clinic, told me that the more he studies the Cohen-Krugman gray matter, the closer he’s getting to proving his theory that only people who have shit for brains can work for The New York Times.

Mind you, one never knows why some people write well and others bludgeon sentences like those men and women at The New York Times. I suppose hate for the Orange Man clouds their noggins, but then how come a monster like Stalin could write like the proverbial dream? Hitler put down “writer” as his occupation while starving and unemployed in Vienna. The two good dictators, Franco and Salazar, kept their scribbling to a minimum, as good dictators should. But I still find it amazing that Stalin loved books and plays and befriended playwrights and offered valid criticisms to prominent writers. And, when not reading or offering advice and criticism, murdered anywhere from 30 to 100 million innocent human beings.

“I find it strange that today’s writers resemble dictators of the past in their unwillingness to accept opinions contrary to their own.”

I find it strange that today’s writers resemble dictators of the past in their unwillingness to accept opinions contrary to their own. Especially in America, where different views from those of the academe or the media are strictly verboten, and we the people have to view the world through a similar lens as they do—or else. It is probably the greatest irony ever: We fought a seventy-year battle against a totalitarian system that prohibited free speech, and having won it, we adopted the very system we defeated and imposed it on ourselves. The easiest way of shutting down free speech is by using the R-word. Call someone a racist and all doors close, and needless to say no smug progressive, no arch feminist, no super-woke riffraff has failed to use it at the slightest disagreement. It’s the easiest way to impose one’s opinion since the advent of the Colt 45.

Actually we live in an age where people want to cancel other people out, to disappear them. No one ever feared Torquemada or Savonarola as much as they fear the Twitter mob today. The ultra-woke protect their sensibilities with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and crying rooms. Freedom-loving folk like yours truly are seen as freaks and fascists, long past our sell-by date. Tarzan, too, is a goner. He just got canceled back in Westchester County, N.Y. A school was planning to perform a Disney version of the jungle classic, but it was nixed after two parents blasted the play as imperialist. A white man as the king of the jungle in Africa, that’s like singing “Springtime for Hitler” for real.

Basically it is the mainstream media in America and the BBC in the U.K. that has pushed our culture way to the left. There was a time not so long ago when a Puccini opera like Turandot did not need to mask what today is considered racist, Ping, Pang, and Pong changed to Jim, Bob, and Bill, Chinese costumes into black suits, effeminate Asian men ordered not to prance around on stage. Opera is accused of a racist, sexist past. All I can say is where is Don Giovanni to run all these crapulous woke bums who come up with such crap through and through with his sword once and for all? Some bloody Chinese woman was recently screaming her head off against poor old Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. What is next, outlawing history?

Which of course brings me to Meghan and Harry Markle. Some nonentity who goes by the name of Afua wrote that Brexit was the culprit behind their leaving: “It emboldened people who advocated for a national identity and a return to the imperial past.” Now she tells us, who knew? Actually, Meghan and Harry Markle are now free to focus on abortions for men who have transitioned to be women and other such causes. Yippee! And I can focus on Reza Aslan’s nose. He’s the CNN hack who said about a young white Catholic boy who was waiting for a bus when he was attacked by a group of minority thugs, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face?” The boy was wearing a MAGA cap. Aslan has the most punchable nose ever, and I’d love to show you how punchable, if I can ever find the bum among the garbage he hangs out with.

Be seeing you

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Establishment Doesn’t Fear Trump, And It Doesn’t Fear Bernie. It Fears You. – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

If enough people decide that the status quo isn’t working for them and begin rising up to force it to change, there’s not really anything the establishment can do to stop them. Right now the only thing keeping people from rising up in this way is the fact that they’ve been successfully propagandized not to, and the propagandists intend to keep it that way.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/01/27/the-establishment-doesnt-fear-trump-and-it-doesnt-fear-bernie-it-fears-you/

During the George W Bush administration it was popular in conspiracy circles to speculate that events might be orchestrated which would allow the Bush family to complete a coup against the US Constitution and hold on to power indefinitely.

Such paranoia and suspicion of government power in the wake of the extraordinary post-9/11 advancements in Orwellian surveillance programs and unprecedented military expansionism were perfectly understandable, but predictions that the younger Bush would not cede power at the end of his second term proved incorrect. In today’s hysterical Trump-centric political environment we now see mainstream voices in mainstream outlets openly advancing the same conspiratorial speculations about the current administration, and those will prove incorrect as well.

What these paranoid presidential prognostications get wrong is not their extreme suspicion of government, but their assumption that America’s real power structures require a certain president to be in place in order to advance depraved totalitarian agendas. As anyone paying attention knows, intense suspicion of the US government is the only sane position that anyone can possibly have; the error is in assuming that there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the same agendas carry forward from one presidential administration to the next.

In a sense, the conspiracy theories about a Bush coup were actually correct: the Bush administration didn’t truly end. All of its imperialist, power-serving agendas remained in place and were expanded under the apparent oversight of the following administration. The same thing happened after the Obama administration, and the same thing–whether in 2021 or 2025–will happen after the Trump administration. The disturbing fact of the matter is that if you ignore election dates and just look at the numbers and raw data of US government behavior over the years, you can’t really tell who is president or which political party is in power at any given point in time.

The mechanism which ensures the perpetuation of the same policies from administration to administration used to be referred to by analysts as the “deep state”, back before Trump and his supporters hijacked that term and began using it to essentially mean something like “Democrats and anyone who doesn’t like Trump”. Originally the term deep state referred not to one political party, nor to some shadowy cabal of Illuminati or Satanists or reptilians, but to the simple and undeniable fact that unelected power structures exist and tend to influence America’s official elected government. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory, it was a concept used in political analysis to describe how US government agencies and plutocrats form loose alliances with each other and with official Washington to influence government policy and behavior.

It is inevitable that such a permanent second government would exist in the current iteration of the United States, if you think about it. It’s impossible to have a globe-spanning empire of the sort America now has without long-term plans spanning years or decades for securing control of world resources, undermining rivals, securing more compliant allies, and ensuring military and economic hegemony. If the US were a normal nation which simply minded its own affairs, a permanent government wouldn’t be necessary. But because it isn’t, one is.

I very seldom use the term deep state anymore, because its meaning in mainstream discourse has been completely corrupted. Now when I want to point to America’s permanent unelected power structures I usually use the word “oligarchy” or “empire”, or simply “establishment”.

This is why I haven’t been especially focused on the US presidential race, despite the Democratic primaries hitting fever pitch intensity. While I believe the race can be a useful tool for forcing establishment propagandists to expose themselves (virulent “never Trump” neocon Bret Stephens just came out in support of Trump if the Democratic nominee is anyone to the left of Pete Buttigeig, for example), the result of the 2020 election isn’t going to change a whole hell of a lot.

This might be a bit offensive to both Trump supporters and Sanders supporters, but it’s true.

Whenever I point out that the current administration has been advancing many longstanding agendas of the CIA and neoconservative war pigs–agendas like military expansionism, imprisoning Assange, regime change interventionism in Iran and Venezuela, and reigniting the Cold War–his supporters always come in saying “If he’s working for the establishment how come the establishment is working so hard to get rid of him, huh?”

Well, for starters, they’re not. Nobody who can count Senate seats believes Trump will be removed from office in the current impeachment sideshow, and everyone who understood Russiagate knew it was going to dead-end at nothing. If they really wanted Trump gone they wouldn’t be pussyfooting around with a bunch of kayfabe combat that they know will never hurt him. Obviously he wasn’t the preferred 2016 choice of certain factions within the establishment, but there are mechanisms in place to ensure that the empire can tick right along with a less-than-ideal president in the White House.

This will also hold true if Sanders miraculously makes his way through another rigged primary, and then through whatever sabotage gets thrown his way in the general election. Sure he might be able to sign a few somewhat beneficial executive orders and we probably wouldn’t see him flirting with an Iran war, but US imperialism will march on more or less unimpeded and his popular progressive domestic policies would require congress to successfully implement. At best he’d be a mild reformer who uses the bully pulpit to help spread awareness while being narrative managed on all sides by the billionaire media, and any changes he manages to squeak through which inconvenience the establishment at all will be reversed by a subsequent administration.

Obviously the establishment would rather have someone in the White House who doesn’t constantly put an ugly face on the empire by accidentally exposing its mechanics all the time as Trump does, and obviously it would rather have an incompetent oaf like Trump in office than someone who actively points out the evils of oligarchy and imperialism like Sanders. But the establishment which runs the US-centralized empire is not afraid of Trump, and it is not afraid of Sanders. It’s afraid of you.

The unelected power establishment has ways of ensuring its dominance amid the comings and goings of America’s official elected government; they are perfectly capable of dealing with one man being a less than ideal steward of the empire. What they absolutely cannot deal with, at all, is the prospect of ordinary people finally rising up and using the power of their numbers to force real change. That is what they are really fighting against when they try to sabotage populist candidates: not the candidates themselves, but populism itself.

You wouldn’t know it from reading the billionaire media, but the Yellow Vests protests in France are still going on and have remained widespread for more than a year now. This lack of coverage is partially due to the fact that establishment narrative managers are responsible for conveying the idea that the only governments whose citizens dislike them are those which haven’t been absorbed into the imperial blob like China and Iran. But it’s also because the propagandists don’t want us getting any ideas.

The reason the propagandists work so hard to manufacture the consent of the governed is because they absolutely do require that consent. If enough people decide that the status quo isn’t working for them and begin rising up to force it to change, there’s not really anything the establishment can do to stop them. Right now the only thing keeping people from rising up in this way is the fact that they’ve been successfully propagandized not to, and the propagandists intend to keep it that way.

But eyes are beginning to open. If real change is coming, it will come from there. Not from electing anyone president, but from a large-scale awakening to the reality of our situation. The only thing standing in the way is a thin layer of narrative fluff.

________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

‘Nobody ever gets points for saying anything good about Russia’: Stephen Cohen says, as Rep. Schiff spreads ignorance about Putin — RT World News

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

According to the researcher, Putin’s chief ambition is “to rebuild Russia from the disaster into which it fell in the 1990s” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last thing Putin wants is instability. He’s trying to build economy at home and economic relations with countries abroad because he sees that as a way to modernize Russia.

The Russia researcher said that Moscow is currently focused on ties with China, but Putin would like to have good trade relations with Europe and the US as well.

https://www.rt.com/news/479380-stephen-cohen-schiff-putin/

US Congress heavyweights like Adam Schiff deeply misunderstand Russia but keep on bashing Moscow because it has become “politically advantageous” in Washington, Russia researcher Stephen Cohen said.

“Being highly-critical of Russia is good politics in the United States,” Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, told the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate in an interview, uploaded online on Monday.

Nobody ever gets any points for saying anything good about Russia – and only rarely for advocating any kind of partnership with Russia.

Cohen said that “politically it’s advantageous to a lot of people to bash Russia,” and even some of the “progressive” Democratic Party candidates in the 2020 presidential race employ rhetoric, which is hostile toward Moscow.

It has become an American way of life to blame Russia when things go wrong. Of course, sometimes Russia is to blame, but not all the time. And yet that’s become part of our discourse.

The US Democratic Party’s lead impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has invoked Russia a lot during the trial in the Senate. Democrats want to oust President Donald Trump because they believe he briefly suspended military aid to Ukraine while trying to pressure Kiev into investigating the dealings of his chief 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Sending weapons to Ukraine serves America’s “abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism,” Schiff argued.

Cohen, however, said that shipping weapons to Kiev would effectively amount to the US turning its back on Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to resolve the conflict with Russia through peaceful means. Instead, he thinks Washington should focus on encouraging the neighbors to negotiate.

“If Zelensky had full American backing for his peace talks with Putin – that would help him a lot.”

Speaking on the Senate floor, Schiff accused Moscow of trying to undermine the faith in democracy and government institutions around the globe.

Cohen argued that the congressman misunderstands what Russian President Vladimir Putin actually “sees as his own historical mission,” and it is almost the opposite of what Schiff attributes to him.

According to the researcher, Putin’s chief ambition is “to rebuild Russia from the disaster into which it fell in the 1990s” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last thing Putin wants is instability. He’s trying to build economy at home and economic relations with countries abroad because he sees that as a way to modernize Russia.

The Russia researcher said that Moscow is currently focused on ties with China, but Putin would like to have good trade relations with Europe and the US as well.

“The notion that he wants to foster discord in the very countries, with which he wants what he calls ‘modernizing trade relations’ is just ignorance on the part of Adam Schiff. Because Schiff runs his mouth a lot about Russia, we get to hear the kind of ignorance… that dominates a large segment of policy-makers in Washington.”

Be seeing you

image020.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »