https://mises.org/wire/carbon-capture-pipeline-latest-bridge-nowhere
The Carbon Capture Pipeline: The Latest Bridge to Nowhere | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on June 24, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
The Truth About Ukraine’s Failing Counteroffensive And The Peace That Could Have Been
Posted by M. C. on June 24, 2023
How long will Biden be able to perpetuate a proxy war of choice that could have easily been avoided?
BY: DAVID SACKS
With each passing day, it’s becoming clear that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is failing to achieve any of its originally stated objectives. Recall: The Biden administration’s bet was that the counteroffensive would roll back Russian territorial gains, cut the land bridge to Crimea, and force Russia to the negotiating table. That is almost certainly not going to happen. On the contrary, a stalemate is more likely, or even that Russia will take more territory and win the war, as John Mearsheimer has predicted.
What are President Biden’s options now? Either escalate or admit defeat. In preparation for NATO’s Vilnius Summit, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been floating a proposal to give “Israel status” to Ukraine. This means multi-year security guarantees including weapons, ammunition, and money that would continue even if Biden loses the next election.
This is not what the American people signed up for. Many Americans supported the $100-plus billion in appropriations for Ukraine, believing it was a one-time deal to reverse Russian territorial gains. If they had been told it was the basis for an annual appropriation in a new Forever War, they would have preferred an alternative, especially if they had known that one was available.
The Peace that Could Have Been
New evidence is emerging that a peace deal was achievable at the beginning of the war. At a recent meeting with the African delegation, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly showed the draft of an outline or preliminary agreement signed by the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul in early 2022. It allegedly provided that Russia would pull back to pre-war lines if Ukraine would agree not to join NATO (but Ukraine could receive security guarantees from the West).
This document has not been publicly released yet, but no one seriously contests that it exists. The only dispute is over what happened subsequently; Ukraine contends the deal fell apart. However, the availability of a deal based on Ukrainian neutrality is consistent with previous comments from Naftali Bennett, who said among other things that a deal was attainable but rejected by the West.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Counteroffensive, proxy war, Ukraine, Vilnius Summit | Leave a Comment »
Wagner Forces Surround Russia’s Southern Military District Headquarters in Rostov: Russian Media
Posted by M. C. on June 24, 2023
Instability in Russia is not a good thing. Will China help?
Russian state-controlled media confirmed Saturday morning local time that Wagner paramilitary forces have surrounded the Russian military’s Southern Military District headquarters.
Photographs from TASS said that PMC Wagner fighters and tanks were standing “outside the Southern Military District headquarters” in Rostov-on-Don.
The New York Times later reported that the governor in the region asked residents not to leave their homes and to stay away from the area. He confirmed that the military forces belonged to Wagner.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of Russia’s feared Wagner paramilitary group, announced in a statement Saturday morning that his forces were moving into the Russian city.
“As of now, we’ve crossed the state borders in all areas,” Prigozhin said, according to Newsweek. “Border guards came towards us and hugged our fighters. Now, we’re entering Rostov. Units of the Ministry of Defense, in fact, the conscripts who were thrown to block our path, moved away.”
The rapidly changing situation in the region comes after Prigozhin accused Russia’s Ministry of Defense of attacking and killing his troops that were in Ukraine fighting against Ukrainian forces.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Wagner Forces, Yevgeny Prigozhin | Leave a Comment »
The Test Scores Just Came Out
Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2023
Although exhausting, I have no regrets about my decisions to run for president. It was a great privilege to share with so many fellow Americans a truly special moment in American history, when we all discovered how much larger our side is than any of us could have imagined.
I want to keep this momentum going. I want to keep these ideas fresh and vibrant. That’s why I decided to launch my own homeschool curriculum.
From the Tom Woods Letter:
The New York Times has a headline today that reads, “What the New, Low Test Scores for 13-Year-Olds Say About U.S. Education Now.”
It’s one of those headlines that makes the article itself almost superfluous.
The test scores in question were released today by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
American 13-year-olds received the lowest score in reading (51.2% of questions answered correctly) since 1990, and the lowest math score (54.2% answered correctly) since 2004.
Pause for a minute and suppose Apple computers were in charge of American education and the results were this bad. We would never hear the end of it. “Why, we can’t trust the private sector with something as important as education!”
But when the government runs the schools and the results look like this…silence.
And I’m sure you, dear reader, being brighter than the average American, realize that spending on education has not been cut, as most people inexplicably think, but instead has skyrocketed.
Note, too, that no matter how low the scores go, the American church — the public school — never suffers. The faithful’s confidence in it never wavers, and their intolerance for heretics never subsides.
Well, for all you heretics reading this:
I remember as a kid that Independence Day — which is creeping up on us — was always for me a warning sign that the resumption of school would be upon me before I knew it.
So now is an opportune moment to share something Ron Paul wrote ten years ago this fall:
During my presidential campaigns people used to ask how I could keep up such a punishing schedule. And believe me, it was quite a schedule. I’d be campaigning in Iowa in the morning and debating in New Hampshire at night. I’d do radio, television, public speeches – and that was just before lunch.
But you know what I used to tell people? You energize me, I would say.
To speak to such large, energetic crowds – and filled with so many young people! – who cared as deeply as I do about war, the Fed, Austrian economics, the Constitution, and so much else, was deeply moving for me.
The people in those audiences hadn’t learned those things in their classrooms. If anything, they learned the opposite of what they were cheering in my speeches. That means they figured these things out for themselves, despite overwhelming pressure to believe the opposite, and despite never being exposed to them in their official studies.…
Join the curriculum through the link below and I throw in some special goodies:
https://www.RonPaulHomeschool.com
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: homeschool, National Assessment of Educational Progress, Test Scores | Leave a Comment »
Biden Crashes Down the Stairs of U.S.-China Reset
Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2023
A day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in a high-profile attempt to mend frayed relations, Biden kicked those efforts in the teeth by telling a crowd in California that Chinese President Xi was a dictator.
But here’s the deplorable rub: the United States is agreement incapable, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has caustically noted. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also recently lamented the complete dearth of American political integrity, at least for the past few generations.
Forked-tongued American politicians should be repudiated until Washington actually begins to behave as a law-abiding entity.
Joe Biden’s penchant for tripping over his feet – and verbally – couldn’t have happened at a most unfortunate moment. Mocking China’s president as a “dictator” just when his administration attempted a big reset in U.S.-China relations has to rank as one of Biden’s clumsiest gaffes.
A day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in a high-profile attempt to mend frayed relations, Biden kicked those efforts in the teeth by telling a crowd in California that Chinese President Xi was a dictator.
Beijing responded furiously, denouncing the American president’s “extreme” disrespect and lack of etiquette. China’s anger is no doubt reinforced because it showed magnanimity in receiving Blinken and affording him a top-level diplomatic meeting with President Xi Jinping.
Biden’s latest gaffe is made all the more absurd because he was referring to the incident of a Chinese weather balloon that had strayed over U.S. territory in February, which Biden ordered an F-16 fighter jet to shoot down with a sidewinder missile. Biden is still claiming that it was a Chinese spy balloon even though the Washington Post had reported earlier that it was a meteorological aircraft blown off course whose errant trans-Pacific course was being monitored in real-time by the Americans.
That crass overreaction by Biden resorting to a military attack over a balloon sent U.S.-China relations into a further tailspin. Blinken canceled a visit to Beijing in February in what was a cheap protest stunt against an alleged Chinese breach of U.S. national security. His trip last weekend was meant to signal a new reset in relations. There was much talk during the U.S. diplomat’s visit about improving communications between Washington and Beijing to avoid a military confrontation.
Then there came the crash, bang, wallop from Biden’s strange outburst insulting his Chinese counterpart.
During the California fundraising foray this week, Biden claimed that Xi knew nothing about the “spy balloon”, implying that he was being kept in the dark by Chinese intelligence officials as befitting a hapless “dictator”.
In reality, it looks like Biden is the one who is hopelessly benighted. Ordering the shoot-down of an errant balloon with million-dollar air-to-air missiles and to continue insisting that it was a spy vehicle shows an abject lack of judgment. Could anyone trust a balloon-popping commander-in-chief who has access to grabbing the nuclear football? This is Doctor Strangelove’s twilight stuff. All the more frightening because it’s real life, not a movie.
But on top of that, Biden then goes on to gratuitously insult the Chinese leader.
Biden’s loose tongue and legs at this frail stage in his half-century political career are beyond parody. Falling on the stairs of Air Force One and tripping over podiums is an embarrassing routine spectacle for this president.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Antony Blinken, China Reset, Dictator, President Xi | Leave a Comment »
Trudeau Adds Parental Proponents of Traditional Family Values to His Enemies List
Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2023
In His Rainbow Railway Speech PM Elevates LGBTQ2S+ Doctrines as a Core Element of Canada’s Immigration Policies
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
In its many variations, the Rainbow Flag is pre-empting the status of Canada’s official flag. Indeed, since the days of the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy in February of 2022, the use of the Red Maple Leaf Flag has become a symbol of patriotic determination. The All-Red Maple Leaf Flag has been widely adopted by many foes of woke extremism as a fitting marker of the sovereignty and inclusiveness integral to Canada’s nationhood. The refusal to subordinate the Canadian Flag to the increasing ubiquitousness of the Pride Flag signifies a rejection of the “post-national” perversities pushed by globalist Trudeau and his billionaire bosses.
This assertion of the principles of a just and inclusive nation stands in stark contrast to the discriminatory prejudices deeply ingrained in the ultra-woke obsessions of Justin Trudeau. There is no place in the symbolism of the Pride Flag to afford a place of dignity for people that adhere to religious traditions and to the pre-eminence of the family over the claims of the state in the raising of children. Moreover, the supposedly inclusive spirit of LBTQ2S+ effectively excludes any safe space for heterosexual people including caucasian men and especially those that are Christians.
The mobilization of Muslims in the West against trans-fixated governments and schools is a major subject in its own right that deserves careful attention.
Source: Anthony J. Hall
Once again Justin Trudeau has run to the front of the class to continue his hectoring lectures.
Last year he was haranguing us about the imagined glories of the Covid Vaccine gene altering injection procedures with all their many thousands of “adverse effects” including death.
This year he is lashing out at those who don’t share his sexual orientations and aggressive prejudices. One of these prejudices favours the stories told by drag queens over the policies proposed by truckers and their expert advisers. Once again those who don’t go along with Trudeau’s divisive and sometimes lethal B.S are dismissed as a hateful fringe minority that shouldn’t be tolerated.
From Trudeau’s bigoted perspective the millions of naysayers he is facing are “far-right” extremists trying to stifle children from being themselves. He makes no allowance for the fact that many of his detractors are not contesting the right of consenting adults to interact sexually and domestically however they might choose to do so. The real problem arises with the massive push currently underway to radically transform schooling as we have known it. How did it happen that those pushing hardest for this change– Trudeau is a good example– want to put Drag Queen Story Hour at the core of the new kind of pedagogical agenda.
The cry of protest against this assault on the safety and security of our children during their most impressionable years is becoming ever more clear: LEAVE OUR KIDS ALONE.
Educators should go back to the basics and protect children so that they can be free to be kids. Give them plenty of space to explore their own inner urges in their own ways under the guardianship and guidance of their parents.
In a society dominated by many rich and powerful figures that really are engaged in trying to normalize pedophilia, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be pushed into weaponizing our schools to make them instruments for the ruination of child-family relations.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Canada, Enemies List, traditional family, Truckers’ Freedom Convoy, Trudeau | Leave a Comment »
TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters
Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2023
Other burdens on people’s freedom include economic regulation, trade barriers through sanctions and tariffs, the militarization of local police departments, and the corruption of the news media. It’s said that the first casualty of war is truth. (Noninterventionist Sen. Hiram Johnson said that in 1917.) War and government lying go hand in hand.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-foreign-policy-matters/
In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn’t matter to other people too — just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They’re cut from the same cloth.
This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that “war is the health of the state,” he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.
I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, “No foreign politics.” He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water’s edge only when policy stops at the water’s edge, which he favored.
War naturally repulses individuals because — obviously — it kills and disables people, most atrociously, noncombatants. It’s so obviously repulsive that many soldiers have to be turned into killers during training. Another count against war is that it encourages a self-destructive, indiscriminate, and collective hatred of foreigners and even local individuals who are invidiously identified with the designated “enemy.” (Russian athletes and even long-dead Russian composers are targets of hostility these days.)
But those who understand that full individual liberty is a necessity — and not a mere luxury — include another count in the indictment against war. It inevitably fosters the general growth of government power, which then infects all aspects of life and society. That doesn’t happen all at once, but it sets in motion a deadly process that menaces everything in its path unless it is stopped. Few things approach war fever in this regard. (A pandemic and a major economic crisis can have similar effects.)
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Foreign Policy, Hiram Johnson, Libertarians, war | Leave a Comment »
Demonizing Men with False Data on Sexual Abuse | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on June 22, 2023
A great deal of emotion surrounds sexual abuse, which can cloud memories and lead either to exaggeration due to outrage or silence due to shame. The issue has also been weaponized by those with political agendas; the motives can include winning elections, gaining research grants or status, pushing an ideology, or getting revenge on an ex. The list is long.
https://mises.org/wire/demonizing-men-false-data-sexual-abuse
There is a sea change in how society views false accusations of sexual abuse. And it’s about time.
The lawsuit John C. Depp, II v. Amber Laura Heard (2022) points to this transformation. Depp and Heard sued each other for defamation with “actual malice” over public accusations of domestic violence (DV) during their marriage; Heard also sued Depp’s attorney for making false statements. Unlike an earlier case brought by Depp in the United Kingdom, the American jury found unanimously in his favor and he was awarded $5 million in punitive damages and $10 million in compensatory ones, although the punitive damages were later reduced to $350,000 due to Virginia state law. Heard was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages from the attorney and $0 in punitive damages from Depp. A settlement was later reached.
Depp’s powerful testimony about the deep pain he’d experienced from the defamation almost certainly contributed to the jury’s large compensatory damages. At the end of four days on the stand, Depp was asked what he had lost due to Heard’s allegations. He answered, “Nothing less than everything.” After the verdict, he declared, “The jury has given me back my life.”
In a later interview, Depp commented on a rarely considered consequence of false accusations of sexual abuse—the effect on his loved ones. “Six years ago [when Heard’s allegations went public], my life, the life of my children, the lives of those closest to me, and also, the lives of the people who for many, many years have supported and believed in me were forever changed,” said Depp. The person falsely accused is not the only victim.
False accusations have ruined innocent lives, largely because the data which directs current law and policy has been weaponized for use in gender warfare. A lot of what passes for data and research amounts to a smear campaign against men. This is especially true of white men who bear the brunt of a double “privilege”—that is, they are both male and white. (Add the word “straight” and you have the trifecta of social-justice-warrior villains.) The #MeToo movement, with its demand to always believe the woman, is just one example of this weaponization; the corollary of “always believe the woman,” of course, is “always find the accused man guilty.” This is not only antimale, but also anti-Western jurisprudence. After all, if the man is automatically guilty, why even have an investigation or trial? Dispense with due process; go directly to imprisonment to save taxpayers money.
Casting men as abusers is essential to reconstructing society in the image of express social justice. If men as a class are natural abusers and women as a class are naturally abused, then a justice system based on individual rights makes no sense; differing systems of justice must address the different classes that are based on identity. Traditional marriage and family become sources of cruelty and danger. Every man should be approached with suspicion by every woman.
This vicious and divisive approach to social relations has been propped up by data and studies, most of which issue from ideologically biased academia or institutes. The statistics must be reopened with fresh eyes. Better yet, they should be replaced by honest research.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Raytheon CEO Explains Why China Has US Military By The Balls
Posted by M. C. on June 22, 2023
This is hilarious. The boss of Raytheon, one of the US top weapons manufacturers, says the company has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling . . . is impossible”. We need China to fight China… Actually good news, makes war less likely.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/raytheon-ceo-china-has-us-military-balls
BY TYLER DURDEN
Raytheon Chief Executive Greg Hayes admitted last week that Beijing effectively has the US military’s supply chain by the balls thanks to its reliance on rare earths and other materials which come from, or are processed in, China.
According to Hayes, Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China,” because of which “decoupling … is impossible.“
“We can de-risk but not decouple,” he told the Financial Times, adding that he thinks this is the case “for everybody.”
“Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” Hayes continued, adding “If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”
Hayes’ comments underline the difficulties facing western manufacturers amid growing friction between China and the US and its allies.
Beijing in February imposed new sanctions on both Raytheon and US defence peer Lockheed Martin for supplying weapons to Taiwan. Hayes has also been placed under sanctions.
The sanctions have had little commercial impact as the groups are not allowed to sell military equipment to China. Raytheon, however, has a substantial commercial aerospace business in the country through its engine subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney, and aviation systems and cabin equipment specialist Collins Aerospace. It has about 2,000 direct employees in China. -FT
Hayes said that the company is looking “to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.“
That said, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand makes a solid point – that this makes war with China “less likely.”
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
MCViewPoint 
