As with many other empires in the annals of history that have collapsed, arrogance and hubris often precede the fall. The American and Western elite thought they had an eternal license to wreak havoc for their own selfish gain. Their economic plunder and weaponry are now turning on their own heads. And it’s long overdue.
The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have made the stronger.
Russia’s economy is performing strongly, according to recent forecasts from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The outcome defies earlier predictions by the United States and its European allies which held that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees and force it to submissively “Cry Uncle”.
When the conflict in Ukraine escalated 16 months ago (after eight years of NATO-sponsored aggression using the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime), various Western politicians and pundits were relishing the prospect of the Russian economy collapsing from “Total War” launched against its international banking and trade.
Well, it didn’t turn out like that. Far from it. As the World Bank noted above, the Western sanctions have simply helped Russia boost alternative markets in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe. A principal earner for Russia is energy exports of oil and gas. Increased sales to Asia have maintained revenues despite the loss of European markets due to Western sanctions.
The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have actually made the latter stronger.
Michael Hudson, an American global economics analyst, points out: “The sanctions have obliged Russia to become self-sufficient in food production, manufacturing production and consumer goods.”
Hudson also notes that the U.S. geopolitical strategy is to use sanctions in order to make its supposed European allies more dependent and subservient to Washington.
Another respected commentator, Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian geoeconomics professor, likened the use of Western sanctions to the self-destructive behavior of “self-harm”. The United States and European Union, he says, have “handed over a huge market to the rest of the world”.
Every federal employee with a badge and gun seems to think he’s a law unto himself.
We have recently received allegations that an Internal Revenue Service Agent provided a false name to an Ohio taxpayer as part of a deception to gain entry into the taxpayer’s home to confront her about delinquent tax filings. When the taxpayer rightfully objected to the agent’s tactics, the IRS agent insisted that he “can …go into anyone’s house at any time” as an IRS agent.”
We have seen for some time how off-the-rails the FBI has become, a danger to a free society. More and more evidence now shows it’s not just the FBI. Every federal employee with a badge and gun seems to think he’s a law unto himself. This week the spotlight is on the IRS, and the Congress has to step up and rein the agency in.
While Matt Taibbi was testifying before Congress on the administration’s extensive censoring of social media content, the IRS appeared at his door, ostensibly to question him about his taxes, but obviously to intimidate him for showing up government censorship.
Mr. Taibbi has told Mr. Jordan’s committee that an IRS agent showed up at his personal residence in New Jersey on March 9. That happens to be the same day Mr. Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about what he learned about Twitter. The taxman left a note instructing Mr. Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. Mr. Taibbi was told in a call with the agent that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had been rejected owing to concerns over identity theft.
Mr. Taibbi has provided the committee with documentation showing his 2018 return had been electronically accepted, and he says the IRS never notified him or his accountants of a problem after he filed that 2018 return more than four-and-a-half years ago.
He says the IRS initially rejected his 2021 return, which he later refiled, and it was rejected again — even though Mr. Taibbi says his accountants refiled it with an IRS-provided pin number. Mr. Taibbi notes that in neither case was the issue “monetary,” and that the IRS owes him a “considerable” sum.
The bigger question is when did the IRS start to dispatch agents for surprise house calls? Typically, when the IRS challenges some part of a tax return, it sends a dunning letter. Or it might seek more information from the taxpayer or tax preparer. If the IRS wants to audit a return, it schedules a meeting at the agent’s office. It doesn’t drop by unannounced.
But that was just the beginning of a series of outrageous actions.
We have recently received allegations that an Internal Revenue Service Agent provided a false name to an Ohio taxpayer as part of a deception to gain entry into the taxpayer’s home to confront her about delinquent tax filings. When the taxpayer rightfully objected to the agent’s tactics, the IRS agent insisted that he “can …go into anyone’s house at any time” as an IRS agent.”
Yet, according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura never gave a dime to any terrorist groups, while the only “terrorist” he actually had any contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him when he was 16-years-old and convinced him to produce gift cards with small amounts of cash on them. The FBI agent told Ventura not to tell anyone about their ‘intimate online relationship,’ including his family, according to The Intercept.
Earlier this month, the FBI announced the arrest of 18-year-old Mateo Ventura of Wakefield, Massachusetts, over allegations that he provided financial support to ISIS. According to the DOJ’s press release, Ventura was indicted for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”
Yet, according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura never gave a dime to any terrorist groups, while the only “terrorist” he actually had any contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him when he was 16-years-old and convinced him to produce gift cards with small amounts of cash on them. The FBI agent told Ventura not to tell anyone about their ‘intimate online relationship,’ including his family, according toThe Intercept.
Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI. -The Intercept
Whats more, Ventura’s father, Paul, told the outlet that his son suffered from childhood developmental issues which were so bad that he was forced to leave school due to constant bullying from other students.
“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” said Ventura. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.“
In short, instead of an actual terrorist – or terrorist adjacent, Ventura’s case is yet another example of the FBI grooming a mentally unfit young man to commit a crime that would not have other wise occurred.
“There is still significant use of informants and undercover agents in FBI investigations who aren’t just gathering information about potential crimes but are actively suggesting ideas for crimes or making it easier for people to do the things that they claim they want to do,” said Naz Ahmad, acting director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, or CLEAR, project at the City University of New York School of Law. “There are documented cases where the government has provided people everything that they needed to execute a plot. Informants and undercover agents have often been used as a tool in these investigations to prod things along.”
In 2021, Paul Ventura said that armed FBI agents visited his home to inform him that his son had been browsing websites “he should be looking at,” and connected the father with who the FBI said was a counselor – who Paul says had no knowledge of his son’s ongoing communications with the undercover FBI agent.
“Two years ago, the FBI came to my house and they took his computer and said he’s on these sites he shouldn’t be on. We said OK, and he wasn’t arrested at that time or anything. I didn’t hear from them again after that, but I guess over time things escalated,” said Paul. “I wasn’t home a lot because I work, and he wasn’t at school because of the bullying. Instead of them telling me that he’s doing what he’s doing online and to take his computer away, they let him keep doing it.”
In their case against Ventura, the government reveals that the boy began communicating with the undercover FBI agent when he was 16-years-old, and told the agent of his desire to make “hijrah,” which means to migrate to territories under ISIS control. Yet, by the time the discussion happened, ISIS had been largely eliminated throughout Iraq and Syria. The DOJ says that the undercover FBI agent impersonated an ISIS member by using broken English, who then encouraged Ventura to pursue his ISIS dreams, and then told the boy not to tell anyone about their conversations.
By every standard, she’s a “loyal American.” However, she’s not by any means stupid. Recently, she’s come to realise that her loyalty is not to the government of her country, but to the concept that her country was founded on. She’s leaving for what people always leave for: better opportunities, greater freedom, and an escape from the fear that her home country’s direction will not end well.
And yet, she’ll be going alone, with few of her peers believing she is making the right choice.
For anyone who is questioning whether to make an exit, the question should not be, “Can I survive this if I remain here?” It should be, “Is there a better future elsewhere?”
Throughout history, there have been periods when people who were otherwise quite settled in their towns and villages, pulled up stakes and headed elsewhere.
During the decline of Rome, many of those who had been the net producers chose to move north and live amongst the barbarians, as life amongst them, although less sophisticated than in Rome, offered more freedom and opportunity. Certainly, it must have been a difficult decision, but for many, it proved to be for the best.
In the 17th century, the Pilgrims also sought greater freedom. Initially, they attempted a socialistic approach to farming (from each according to his ability; to each according to his need), and most died as a result of this faulty logic. In desperation, those remaining opted for a change to a free-market system. The following year, the resultant productivity led them to hold the first Thanksgiving.
The Amish, too, sought greater freedom and found it in America. In the 19th century, many other Europeans moved across the ocean to America in search of a more fruitful way of life.
Since that time, many Americans have moved within the US. Farmers from Oklahoma went west out of desperation when their crops failed due to a prolonged drought. By contrast, millions of Americans moved out to suburbia in the 1950s, following the dream of a house with a white picket fence, away from the crime, smog, and crowding that had taken over the cities.
Some of these people travelled a long way; some travelled less than fifty miles. Some went out of desperation; some relocated due to the promise of upward mobility. What they had in common is that they all made their moves because the grass appeared greener elsewhere.
Historically, such people have always been praised for their gumption. But history is hindsight. At the time when they made their moves, there were many, many people who remained behind, urging those exiting not to go. Again historically, those who remained behind have always ended up as the forgotten ones, as they did not have the fortitude to make the change. They did not go forth to build the next new neighbourhood or new country.
It should be said that the majority rarely leave a neighbourhood (both in the village sense and the country sense). Most remain behind and become casualties of the decline. A dying city (Detroit in the US? Bradford in the UK?) never completely empties out. Many people remain behind, clinging to whatever scraps are tossed to them.
Japanese leaders chose war rather than capitulation, even though some of them, including Admiral IsorokuYamamoto, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, suspected that their country could not win a war against the United States.
It has become increasingly apparent that any notion of U.S. “strategic ambiguity” with respect to Taiwan is dead. Both the Joe Biden administration’s rhetoric and U.S. military deployments in the western Pacific indicate that the United States will come to Taiwan’s defense if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses force against the island. The logic underlying this more confrontational stance is that it will deter Beijing from taking rash actions. It is far more likely to produce a potentially catastrophic military collision between the United States and China.
The reliability and credibility of any U.S. security assurances to Taipei are based on the assumption that U.S. forces would prevail if fighting broke out. However, it is most unclear whether that would be the case. Simulations run by the Pentagon and think tanks in recent years have produced mixed results. Some of them indicate that the United States would lose such a war; others point to a hard-fought U.S. victory. Both scenarios entail a horrific cost in lives and treasure. Looming in the background is the worry that either country might conclude that an escalation to the use of nuclear weapons was necessary to avoid a humiliating defeat.
The Pentagon and its supporters increasingly focus on ways to strengthen the U.S. military presence in the western Pacific to maximize the credibility of deterrence. A recent article by Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (ret.) and Bradley Bowman is typical. They recommend five steps to prevent defeat: enhancing the ability to strike attacking PRC forces; strengthening Taiwan’s ability to defend itself; bolstering the survivability of forward deployed U.S. units; improving the capabilities of U.S. and allied forces to fight together; and building more cyber resilient infrastructure to support military mobility.
Such analyses focus on only one element of deterrence—the balance of military forces. Even with that narrow focus, U.S. prospects are not bright. Over the past two decades, the PRC has dedicated itself to an extraordinarily ambitious military modernization program. The focus of that effort has been on air and naval weapons systems that would make a U.S. intervention to defend Taiwan prohibitively problematic and costly. Beijing may already have achieved that capability. If not, it is just a few years away.
The FBI conducted a halfhearted inquiry, at best. Now we know why.
In perhaps the most alarming portion of D’Antuono’s testimony, he revealed that the FBI does not have a complete account of cell phone use in the area on January 5, data that would easily result in tracking the perpetrator’s identity. In what Revolver News’ Darren Beattie described as “the dog ate the geofencing data” excuse, D’Antuono claimed data from one provider was “corrupted” and unusable.
It remains the greatest unsolved mystery related to the events of January 6: Who placed pipe bombs near the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee the night before?
Shortly before the joint session of Congress convened at 1 p.m. to debate the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote, a woman on her way to do some laundry looked down and spotted a device in an alley adjacent to the RNC building. Karlin Younger ran to notify security guards, who then called police. Law enforcement conducted a search of the area and located another device outside the DNC building.
Panic quickly ensued. “I just had to evacuate my office because of a pipe bomb reported outside,” Representative Elaine Luria (D-Va.) tweeted at 1:46 p.m. “I don’t recognize our country today and the members of Congress who have supported this anarchy do not deserve to represent their fellow Americans.”
“I’m sheltering in place in my office,” Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) tweeted at the same time. “The building next door has been evacuated. I can’t believe I have to write this.”
The media immediately suggested the explosives had been planted by someone loyal to the president; the New York Timesnoted in its breaking report that the bombs were found “just a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol, which Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed on Wednesday afternoon.”
Federal authorities promised a full-throated investigation. During a press conference on January 12, 2021, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin and Washington FBI Field Office chief Steven D’Antuono emphasized the seriousness of the pipe bomb threat. “They were real devices. They had explosive ignitors,” Sherwin told reporters. D’Antuono announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identity and arrest of the perpetrator. The FBI, D’Antuono warned, was “looking at all angles, every tool, every rock is being unturned” in pursuit of the bomber.
A few months later, D’Antuono made another desperate plea for the public’s help in his investigation and doubled the reward. “We know it can be a difficult decision to report information about family, friends, or coworkers but this is about protecting human life. We need your help to identify the individual responsible for placing these pipe bombs to ensure that they will not harm themselves or anyone else.”
But despite sophisticated surveillance tools including geofence warrants that were at D’Antuono’s disposal—methods the FBI continues to use to this day in its ongoing manhunt for January 6 protesters—the trail went cold. So, too, did the national news media’s interest in the story. The January 6 Select Committee completely ignored the pipe bomb threats, relegating the story to two mentions buried deep in the final report’s appendix.
D’Antuono’s bluster notwithstanding, his office conducted a halfhearted inquiry at best. And now the public knows why. During an interview with the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, D’Antuono disputed claims the bombs were planted to divert law enforcement presence away from the Capitol just before protesters assembled outside the building, a view commonly shared at the time.
Not only did the FBI fail to identify the individual, D’Antuono admitted the FBI does not even know the “gender” of the bomber. He also backtracked on numerous public statements insisting the devices were viable, indeed, deadly. Pressed by Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) to explain how the bombs were operable considering the use of a one-hour kitchen timer attached to the metal tube, D’Antuono admitted that they couldn’t have detonated during January 6. “I don’t know when they were supposed to go off. Maybe they weren’t supposed to go off.”
In perhaps the most alarming portion of D’Antuono’s testimony, he revealed that the FBI does not have a complete account of cell phone use in the area on January 5, data that would easily result in tracking the perpetrator’s identity. In what Revolver News’ Darren Beattie described as “the dog ate the geofencing data” excuse, D’Antuono claimed data from one provider was “corrupted” and unusable.
China’s banking sector is the largest in the world holding over $50 Trillion in assets. That fact alone may have something to do with the deluge of visiting Tzars from the US as our banks implode sitting on less than 5% Net Equity!
Still: The US and EU continue to buy Russian resources DESPITE sanctions and demonizing. The US and EU are dependent on China – despite their sucking up naysayers – pinky swearing otherwise. The US and EU continue to demonize Russia and China in the public Platform – while continuing trade out of FEAR.
It has come to the attention of ‘those who find it interesting’ that the lab meat Bill Gates grows and advocates is genetically modified ‘immortalized cells’. These cells are specifically designated for research purposes only and even in that context the outcome of related studies are said to be ‘compromised’. Lancet. Yet, apparently, it is just these cancerous immortalized cells that Bill Gates has been using in his and likely others ‘fake meat’ product.
Apparently the problem arose when it was discovered that normal cells don’t reproduce forever – they have a designated lifespan’. The Fake Meat is predicated on fake cells because they can be manipulated and reproduce forever – because they are Fake. But if this is a fake cultured cell then it isn’t really a cell at all! IS IT?
It is a bioengineered nucleus.
I liken the fakery department to its roots – Flowers! Flowers became nonseasonal – a year round enjoyment! But to manufacture these GMO ‘flowers’ their cell structure had to be severely mutated. This human created cell however, could not reproduce scent. Thus all such GMO flowers are devoid of ‘scent’.
Such is the Fake Meat Market. It may look and taste like something aboriginal, but it has no scent. And more importantly – it has no nutritional value. Farmed Fish have NO Nutritional value. Farmed Chickens – pigs – cows lose their nutritional value as they don’t develop normally. That development is what is passed to you – consumer.
The Danish Government has bent to the Slavic sorcerers and is going to euthanize over 200,000 cows to reduce farting gas. And semi-normal people nod like bauble dolls in agreement.
Today, the esteemed fake programmer, biologist, medical doctor, farmer, rancher, lab expert, climate Tzar – Bill Gates arrived in China – as did Blinken. Gates is scheduled to meet with Xi Jinping, while Blinken will meet with one of Jinping’s lower associates with no fanfare. Gates claims this is the first visit to China since 2019 when the CoVid Pandemic was orchestrated. What will Gates provide this time?
The meetings come on the heels of CSIS discussing ways and means of preemptively sanctioning China for invading Taiwan. Punishment ‘before’ the anticipated maybe crime. A threat?
The CEO meetings descending in droves with China Leaders also includes the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, who has been a witness in the Virgin Island Lawsuit brought against JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon via the Epstein scandal. His visit also coincides with Gates last visit in 2019… months before the Pandemic Was Levied. Coincidental?
Elon Musk met with Jinping as he also paid a snap visit to China to oversee his factory in Shanghai. Citigroup CEO was in China. Goldman Sachs CEO. Apple CEO, Intel CEO, Blackstone, and General Motors have all descended on China in the last month. Desperate to shore relations despite the Pentagon and NGO insanity.
As a direct result of these visits – the bank CEO’s released a common statement that China’s Economic Growth Outlook has been raised to 6.4%. In other words, Xi Jinping is pissed about the negative prediction news and wants positive prediction news – and banks will pay China for that privilege.
SPD Silicon Valley Bank, declared insolvency and was absorbed by First Citizens Bank. They bought a negative equity of $8 billion. Before the insolvency, SPD Silicon was a 50/50 joint venture with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank.
China’s banking sector is the largest in the world holding over $50 Trillion in assets. That fact alone may have something to do with the deluge of visiting Tzars from the US as our banks implode sitting on less than 5% Net Equity!
“Modern states are powerful things, vast machines built of human components that act according to their own logic and towards their own ends.” — Eugypius on Substack
As a Jewish American, and a connoisseur of my people’s folklore, I bring to your attention the troublesome figure of the dybbuk (dih-bik), a disembodied demon that, because of its sins, wanders restlessly among us and can enter the flesh of a living person, who will then afflict and torment the community until properly exorcised by a minyan of rabbis garbed in white burial shrouds wielding sacred oaths.
Thus, I give you Andrew Weissmann, Esq., attorney at law, the American chiefdybbuk, on the scene for decades now, sowing mischief and woe, leading an unholy host of fellow dybbukim calling itself Lawfare to infest the courts and meddle in elections. Think: Michael Sussmann, an imp of RussiaGate; Michael Bromwich, former DOJ Inspector General (!) and then advisor to one Christine Blasey Ford (remember her?); David Laufman, erstwhile DOJ counter-intel goblin and Blasey Ford “beach friend” errand boy; Marc Elias, engineer extraordinaire of ballot harvesting operations in the 2020 election and many related pranks; Dan Goldman, lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment against Donald J. Trump…dybbuks all!
The dybbuk Weissmann is best known, of course, for directing the Special Counsel’s “Russian Collusion” campaign (2017 – 2019) in the mental absence of its nominal chief, Robert Mueller, an endeavor that, in the end, could not find any instance of then-President Trump colluding with said Russians — but did, via a firehose of media leaks, succeed in casting a Trump derangement spell over half the US population. Dybbuk Weissmann lately haunts the MSNBC cable news channel as a “legal analyst.”
And yet, this shape-shifting fiend turns up again now in the Biden family global bribery matter, of all things. See if you can follow the convoluted tale coming out of Dybbuk Central a.k.a. Ukraine and the FBI. You may already know that in May, 2014, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-vice president Joe Biden, was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian natgas company Burisma, where he was paid $80,000-a-month for his expertise (he had none) in the global gas industry. As it happened, at exactly the same time Veep Joe Biden was appointed as then-President Barack Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the CIA, that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
By and by, Ukraine elected a new American-friendly president, Petro Poroshenko. Burisma was owned by an oligarch name of Mykola Zlochevsky. Apparently, the $80-K-a-month for Hunter Biden was not enough. The friendly American veep, Joe Biden, pressed Burisma’s Zlochevsky to provide $5-million payment each to Hunter and himself for additional Biden family services in Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko had a political confidant and fixer (problem solver) named Oleksandr Onyshchenko, then a member of Ukraine’s parliament. In the 2015-16 time-frame, Onyshchenko conveyed a message to Zlochevsky that paying large sums of money to the Bidens might not be a good idea. Somehow, Onyshchenko’s complaints about the Bidens’ grift operation made it into the leading Kiev newspaper. As we all know, in November, 2016, Donald Trump was elected US President. Catastrophe! Freak-out in the US embassy in Kiev!
December, 2016, American Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, sent panicky emails to the folks back home about Onyshschenko’s allegations of Biden bribery. One of the recipients was a CIA agent implanted in the National Security Council name of Eric Ciaramella, later known as the Ukraine Phone Call Whistleblower.
Now, you may recall that in the summer of 2019, the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop, one John Paul Mac Isaac, came into possession of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden — under law, being left 90-days after repairs were made — and seeing its startling contents, tried to give it to the FBI, but was rebuffed. By then, CIA agent Eric Ciaramella had blown his whistle over a phone call Mr. Trump made to new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky inquiring about the Bidens’ doings there. Later that fall, with impeachment proceedings started against President Trump, FBI agents came back at Mr. Mac Isaac and took the computer into the agency’s possession.
Consider that FBI Director Christopher Wray must have known about the laptop coming into his HQ and what it contained — and known that throughout the impeachment and Senate trial proceedings of Mr. Trump, And, of course, Mr. Wray did not volunteer any of this evidence about the Bidens to Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys. Nor did then-Attorney General William Barr, Mr. Wray’s superior. Odd, a little bit?
Dan Ellsberg has never rested on his laurels. Those who take seriously the danger of nuclear war are also deeply indebted to him for his The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). That unique book is even more important today than when first published.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity honored the late Dan Ellsberg with our annual award for fearless integrity on April 11, 2023. It was clear that Dan summoned much of his remaining strength to leave an unambiguous message to people of conscience as to why they should blow the whistle on government lies, as he did, but NOW, not later.
The private ceremony was filmed by a friend of Dan and Patricia. Dan saved his parting plea for the last three minutes. Those wishing to go directly to that segment can start at minute 19:32. Dan’s words speak for themselves; I have transcribed them below.
Two things: we did not turn against the Vietnam war because of lies. We were used to that and had never objected before. Nor did we turn against the war because it was not winnable. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had said the war was winnable if only the president would do more murder, cross more international boundaries going into China and North Vietnam, than he was willing to do. All was ‘winnable’; it was the president who decided that opting for stalemate, however bloody and escalating, was preferable to him to getting out, to losing, or to pursuing an absolutely vain effort proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of escalating to the north.
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And that is happening right now in Ukraine.
So people did not break with the war because it was lied about; they did not go to prison because it was unwinnable, but because it was wrong. And they all knew it was wrong, that these lies were about crimes and sins and evil that should stop immediately – murder, not just your ordinary lies about cost overruns but lies that were killing people.
And, thus, I’ve said to very many people since then, Do not do what I did. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait till the bombs are falling and thousands more have died. Act like Katharine Gun; act like I wish I had done in 1964, when I knew that people were being lied to death. Put out documents to that effect before the war, right at the time, at whatever cost to oneself, at whatever risk, which is not even comparable to the massacres that were actually ongoing or in process. [Emphasis added]
Do what I wish I had done in ’64, not what I waited till 69 and 71 to do. Act like Katharine Gun and Ed Snowden and Tom Drake, Bill Binney, and many others on the list of Sam Adams awardees, in particular, Ed Snowden and Julian Assange.
Below is the Sam Adams Award citation for this year’s awardee, Daniel Ellsberg:
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity
Presented this 11th day of April 2023 in the Berkeley Hills of California by admirers of the integrity of former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
Know all ye by these presents that Daniel Ellsberg is hereby awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity.
Mentor, Mensch, “Most Dangerous Man,” Friend: We honor Dan for setting the standard in exposing government lies and – although he himself never worked for an intelligence agency – for giving unflinching support to intelligence officials who blow the whistle.
Earlier Awardees: From Katharine Gun (2003) to Daniel Hale (2023); from Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) to Sy Hersh (2017) – all took courage from Dan and from one another. Ed Snowden (2013), having watched the “Justice” system abuse Tom Drake (2011), decided he had to go abroad in order to expose “turnkey tyranny.” And, citing the patriotic example of Bill Binney (2015), Ed declared: “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.”
Poetic Justice: CIA analyst Sam Adams, for whom this award is named, proved in 1967 that the US Army in Saigon was falsifying the number of armed insurgents in the South. Adams’s count was almost double the 299,000 Gen. William Westmoreland insisted on for political purposes.
However, rent control, which forcibly lowers rents below what willing tenants would offer, takes away that right and much of the value of the landlords’ properties in the process. That is theft, enforced by government guns rather than robbers’ guns. Worse, rent control directly violates the central role of government—the protection of citizens’ existing property rights—as John Locke explained long ago, echoed by America’s founders.
As reported by Reason, Colorado—one of thirty-one states that had banned its local governments from imposing rent control—is considering repealing that ban. Recent efforts to allow or impose similar controls have also taken place in New York, California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Minnesota. However, there is a good reason that most states still ban the local imposition of rent control laws.
The key reason is that the primary advantage of local determination in a federal system—allowing people mistreated by one government body to better protect themselves by “voting with their feet” to less abusive jurisdictions—does not apply to rent control laws. That is because neither selling nor moving allows owners of rental property to escape the imposed burdens.
In many circumstances, voting with your feet favors local governance. It is generally less costly to leave a local government jurisdiction whose benefits are not worth the cost than it is to leave a similarly bad state government jurisdiction, which is less costly to leave than to leave the United States entirely. The enhanced exit option may better protect citizens’ rights against abuse. For instance, residents who view state sales and income taxes as not giving them their money’s worth in benefits can avoid those burdens by going to another state with lower tax rates or better services. However, the same is not true of rent control, whether imposed locally or at the state level.
Owners of rent-controlled properties can move away. However, if they maintain ownership of their property, they are still forced to bear the burden of reduced earnings caused by rent control. If they sell their property, they bear the burden of reduced rental income in the form of a lower sales price that capitalizes the lower revenues the property will generate. Consequently, even selling your property and leaving the jurisdiction provide no escape.
MCViewPoint 
