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Hey! What Is That On Your Collar?
Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2023
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The Woke Plot
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
3. Being woke is easier than actually paying workers.
When people complain about woke culture, they usually think about universities. They are sick of fake courses, demands for diversity, constant complaints of oppression, and the like. What we need to realize is that the situation is much worse than that. Woke culture in universities is just one part of an insidious plot to make our entire society woke.
Dr. Paul Alexander writes on May 9, ““’When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
‘As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, ‘clustered’ racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed ‘America’s Class,’ to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
‘When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A ‘significant backlog’ of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force ‘clustered’ candidates from ‘underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.”
The entire defense establishment has become woke, and this has become a means of spreading the American Empire. Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.
In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.
It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’.
Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.
Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.”
Wokeness has spread to the business world as well. Michael Rectenwald offers an outstanding analysis: “Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy.
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Egypt Rejects US Requests To Block Russian Military Flights
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
We need to give them more “free” stuff…then they would be “friend”. Just like SA.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/egypt-rejects-us-requests-block-russian-military-flights
BY TYLER DURDEN
Washington is trying to pressure Egypt into closing its airspace for all Russian military flights, but the regional US ally isn’t having it, which also awkwardly comes following a recent Pentagon leak showing Cairo planned to supply Moscow with rockets.
“Egypt has ignored U.S. requests to close its airspace to Russian military flights, American and Egyptian officials said, testing the limits of Washington’s ability to choke off Moscow’s supplies ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive,” The Wall Street Journal reports Friday.
“The U.S. and Ukraine persuaded countries including Turkey, Jordan and Iraq to cut access for at least some Russian military planes last year after the invasion of Ukraine, forcing Moscow’s aircraft to fly 2,000 extra miles and up to five hours further to reach strategic bases in Syria,” the report continues.
Washington’s concern is that Russia has likely been using Egyptian airspace to transport weapons from its arms depots elsewhere in the Middle East – for example in Syria where since 2015 it’s had a significant military build-up, particularly focused along the coast.
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Doug Casey on the Growing Wave of Corporations Committing Suicide
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
The founders of great corporations wouldn’t have put up with this bizarre nonsense. They were entrepreneurs with ethics and courage. But corporate suits are just managers who don’t want to jeopardize their gigantic salaries and huge stock options by running counter to whatever seems to be the fashionable meme of the month.
I’m not a church-going person, but previous ideas of what was morally right and wrong were handed down to Americans by their religion, Christianity. That’s changed now. The new religion is Greenism and Wokeism. Those things are now setting the moral tenor of society. This trend is in motion and still accelerating.
International Man: Recently, several large corporations have made self-destructive moves.
A prominent example is the Bud Light marketing fiasco which saw year-over-year sales plummet 17%. As a result, Bud Light’s parent company lost nearly $5 billion in market cap around the same time.
It should have been obvious that Bud Light’s marketing program featuring a trans activist wouldn’t go over well with its customers. Yet, they went ahead anyways.
What is your take on this?
Doug Casey: It’s shocking that a tiny percentage of the population has such an outsize influence in all areas of life. LGBTQ+ wield power not just in academia and the media but in business and corporations.
What’s amazing is not only the tiny number of people LGB-whatever represents but the fact that many or most of them are highly neurotic. Some of them appear to be psychotic. They have severe psychological problems, yet they’re being held up as models to influence other people. The fact that the suits who run major corporations go along with the ridiculous charade proves that not only do they have extremely bad judgment, but they’re despicable cowards.
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TGIF: Ducking Hayek
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
Mises’s fundamental point, which logically precedes Hayek’s later addition, was that without real, honest market prices for all inputs, the economic calculation required for rational and efficient mass production would be impossible. And, he went on, you can’t have honest market prices without private ownership and markets in resources and producer goods. (The Marxists sought the abolition of private property.) Flourishing and even life itself thus depend on prices and their prerequisites — prices that cannot be ascertained or even generated except in the market…
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-ducking-hayek/
May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market order. It’s well-suited to the information age.
One of Hayek’s best-known articles was published in 1945 in the American Economic Review: “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order). He got right to the point:
What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions….
This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces…. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind … and can never be so given.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Austrian school, F. A. Hayek, Socialism | Leave a Comment »
Alarming Surge In Gun Shop Robberies As Democrats Fail To Enforce Law And Order
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
When accountability for bad behavior is removed from society, it emboldens criminals. And now these criminals are robbing gun stores and arming themselves with guns while the Biden administration is adamant about disarming law-abiding citizens.
Some say… We’re living in a clown world.
I remember an article from several years ago where ATF data showed gun crime surged when some city, in VA I think, offered a gun buy back program.
BY TYLER DURDEN
Progressive district attorneys’ failure to enforce law and order has resulted in a surge of smash-and-grab thefts across American cities run by Democrats. The rise in thefts, particularly at retail stores, has become a significant problem for the retail industry, amounting to $100 billion in shrinkage in 2022. Even more concerning is that organized criminal gangs now target gun stores instead of clothing, jewelry, and pharmacy stores.
Diving into Bloomberg data, the story count for “gun shop robbery” in all US news media stories soared to a record high in the fourth quarter of 2022, with data going back to 2013. The surge even surpassed levels during the early virus pandemic.
As of late, a series of gun store robberies in the Mid-Atlantic area have alarmed gun shop owners, local police, state police, and federal agencies. These shops are located in the Washington-Baltimore metro area, where Democrats have been in control for decades.
On April 30, two gun stores, one just outside the Capital Beltway in Fairfax County, Virginia, and another one in Rockville, Maryland, about an hour north, were targeted by what some in the firearm industry have described as criminal organized gangs.
One of the owners of Engage Armament in Rockville told FOX 5 that he believes the suspects that targeted his shop and Dominion Defense in Fairfax were part of the same gang.
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Terri Schiavo: A Libertarian Analysis
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
What about quality of life? How does dignity enter into our analysis? Life after death? The sanctity of life? Federalism? None of these are relevant to the libertarian analysis put forth above. All that matters is that this adult “child” not be abused; or, more technically, that the rights and responsibilities of homesteading children be upheld. And if they are, then whoever is at first control of her must maintain her; if he refuses, her guardianship reverts to the second closest party, her parents. If they will not homestead her, then perhaps her siblings. If not them, then anyone who wishes to take up this burden.
https://walterblock.substack.com/p/terri-schiavo?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
WALTER BLOCK
THE CASE OF TERRI SCHIAVO is almost as controversial as it is tragic.
1 In 1990 Mrs. Schiavo, who reached her 40th year in 2005, fell victim to brain damage. She has been in a vegetative state ever since, kept alive not under her own power, but aided by a welter of feeding tubes and other paraphernalia of modern medicine. The controversy? Her husband Michael is adamant that the doctors pull the plug on Terri, and her parents are just as determined to keep her alive. Earlier court decisions in Florida where all parties reside were in favor of the husband’s position, whereupon in 2003 Jeb Bush, Governor of that state prevailed upon the state legislature to pass “Terri’s Law.” This enabled the Governor to override these judicial findings and keep her alive. However, on 9/30/04 the Florida Supreme Court unanimously found this law invalid and ordered all life support systems to be disconnected. Who is in the right in this heart breaking medical controversy? According to the legal philosophy now prevailing, a spouse has the final say regarding the well being of an incompetent mate, even superceding those of her parents, unless he is himself incompetent, or guilty of malfeasance. In the present case, the fact that Michael Schiavo has involved himself with another woman after his wife fell ill, and despite the claim of his in-laws that he is motivated in his decision by money stemming from a medical malpractice suit, the Supreme Court of Florida made no such finding. They ruled on the basis that he was the proper guardian, and in effect took his word that his wife either would have preferred death to her present predicament, or had previously indicated this preference to him. How would this case be decided under the libertarian legal code? In order to apply such a code to the Schiavo case, we will have to take a detour and examine this philosophy in some detail. In this John Lockean perspective, rights to control persons and also real property are all based upon homesteading. Let us start with the relatively simple case of rights inland, and then move on to the more complex issue of rights to control persons. In this philosopher’s famous phrase,
2 one “mixes one’s labor” with virgin land and in this way comes to own it. There are only two alternative options to this one; all others are but combinations and permutations of these. First, we can all own 1/n of every acre of the earth. This can be dismissed, out of hand, as impractical. A half dozen or so friends have enough trouble figuring out which restaurant and movie to attend. Requiring accord on the part of 6 billion people as to the use of each square inch of the earth’s surface would be at worst an exercise in socialism on a world scale,
3 and at best a recipe for endless committee meetings. Nothing would or could get done, and most of the population would die. Second alternative: the Jones’, or the state, or the Aryans, or any one particular individual owns the entire earth, or various people own small parts of it, not based on their labor that they have mixed with it, but rather on the basis of some other criterion: claim, or royalty, or democracy, or beauty, or some such irrelevant consideration. One problem with any such scheme is conflicting ownership claims. Many people can say they own this or that acreage, and there is no clear way ahead to determining who is correct. How would this work for human bodies? Let us start at the beginning. The parents are in effect the owners of the baby. He came from their flesh, after all. This would be as clear an analogue to land homesteading as it is possible to derive in this very different area. Of course, they do not own the baby, as the slave master owns the slave. Slavery is illegal in the libertarian society.
4 Rather, they own the right to keep raising the infant, as long as they keep doing so, in a manner that does not involve child abuse. In other words, the homesteader in this case may keep homesteading, as long as his homesteading is not illegitimate. How, then, do newborns eventually gain control and full ownership over themselves?
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Understanding The Highly Complex World Of Western China Analysis
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
Okay, so are you with me so far? Remember, this is very advanced stuff, so feel free to read back and review as much as you need.
Former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby was interviewed on The National Review’s Charles CW Cooke Podcast, where he provided some very high-level analysis on the tensions around China, Taiwan, and the United States.
I will here attempt to explain some of Colby’s comments for the benefit of the average reader, because Colby has been studying these things for many years and his commentary can be a bit advanced and esoteric for the casual punditry consumer.
“The analogy I use is… Taiwan is like a man with a cut in the ocean, and China is like a great white shark, and America is like a man in a boat,” Colby said in the interview.
“The problem is once that great white shark starts moving, you got no time,” added Colby. “You’re done. You know, if you’re not already by the side of the boat, right? Because it’s a great white shark.”
Now bear with me if Colby’s incisive observations went a bit over your head here, but if we break it down I’m confident that we can all catch up to this man’s towering intellect enough to catch a glimpse of his understanding on the matter.
What Colby appears to be saying — and please correct me of you think I’m reading this wrong — is that China is like a Great White Shark, which as we all know is an extremely dangerous aquatic predator with a voracious appetite, capable of gulping down a human being in a few swift bites.
Now, try to imagine being in a situation where you’re out there in the ocean, and there’s a Great White Shark right there with you in the water. And to make matters worse, you’re bleeding — a problem not only due to the wound from whence the blood is emanating, but also because sharks can smell blood in the water! That would be pretty bad, right?
Okay, so are you with me so far? Remember, this is very advanced stuff, so feel free to read back and review as much as you need.
Now, imagine you’re in that situation with the cut and the shark, and there’s a boat that you can go to to get away from the shark. You’d want to hop aboard that vessel as swiftly as possible, don’t you think? I know I would!
So to put it all together, what the esteemed Elbridge Colby is telling us is that China is analogous to the Great White Shark which is eyeing the bleeding man in the water, and the man can be compared to Taiwan, and the United States of America is comparable to the boat that is coming to the rescue of the man.
Make sense? If you’re still struggling to comprehend Colby’s scalpel-like geopolitical analysis, don’t worry, because I’ve obtained this helpful infographic to further illuminate your understanding:
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Progressives Want to Eliminate Wealthy Entrepreneurs but Need the Wealth They Create | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2023
The zero-sum mindset that fuels envy will only be diminished when societies promote economic freedom to afford more opportunities to generate wealth. When people are free to prosper, they become less likely to engender a zero-sum approach to development and more appreciative of success because it’s now a greater possibility. Rather than wealth redistribution, the solution to envy is progress powered by economic freedom.
https://mises.org/wire/progressives-want-eliminate-wealthy-entrepreneurs-need-wealth-they-create
Being perceived as anti–working class is a cardinal sin in American politics. Working-class people are seen as the unappreciated engine of American growth. Hillary Clinton discovered this lesson when she was criticized for calling Donald Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” But interestingly, expressing contempt for the upper class is quite tolerable.
Rich people are frequently ridiculed by comedians and depicted as snobs in popular culture. Shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Simpsons present affluent characters in an unflattering light. Such characters are seldom portrayed as virtuous entrepreneurs who are rewarded for delivering value. Usually, viewers are led to think that the rich are the source of all social ills.
Typically, negative depictions of working class or poor people would evoke controversy, but upward classism is tolerated. Sociologist Rainer Zitelmann has written extensively on upward classism and the rich in public opinion. Zitelmann’s research covers how rich people are viewed in Western countries, and his findings are unsurprising.
According to the results of Zitelmann’s study, rich people, like other minority groups, are often scapegoats who are blamed for social malaise. However, he observes that the perception of the wealthy is determined by education. In Germany, England, and America, better-educated people have a more favorable view of the rich. A possible explanation is that educated people have higher incomes and are connected to the rich, so their views are more realistic and less tainted by stereotypes.
Their education also makes it easier for them to appreciate the significance of the rich in creating value for society. Social enviers, by contrast, have warped perceptions of the rich. Zitelmann documents that such people assign negative traits to the wealthy. Because their views are shaped by a zero-sum mentality, envious people think that when some gain others must lose.
Ordinary people benefit tremendously from the inventions of the ambitious and intellectually gifted. The ingenuity of oilman John Davis Rockefeller made the American economy more productive in the nineteenth century, and today our lives are made more convenient by the efficiencies of tech companies like Amazon and Google. Without the traits of the rich, we would lack modern innovations.
But unfortunately, most people don’t differentiate the progressive rich who accumulate wealth by delivering value for society from those who increase their wealth by relying on government subsidies or political connections. Hence, we are primarily concerned with the value creators and their attributes that culminate in the formation of dynamic businesses.
In undertaking his study, Zitelmann found that the rich are high in conscientiousness and openness to experiences. Other studies assert that rich people have a great propensity for risk. Most rich people are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs suffer from high failure rates, so this indicates that people who excel in business are not just competent but also perseverant.
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Justice Is…Bovine? Herd Of Cows Helps Round Up Criminal In North Carolina
Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2023
Well that tells us something. I wish someone can tell us what.
Police in North Carolina got a helping hoof this week when a herd of cattle aided in the roundup of a suspect on the run.
Police in the town of Boone, in the western part of the state, pulled the suspect over during a routine traffic stop. The suspect fled the scene, and police were unable to track him down. Fortunately, the cattle were not pleased to have the suspect in their pasture and led police directly to him.
Police recounted the incident in a news release on their Facebook page. On May 9, police pulled the suspect over as part of a routine traffic stop. The suspect fled and led Boone police and Watauga County Sheriff’s deputies on a street chase. The suspect was driving erratically, so police could not get close to him. The suspect pulled off the highway near an intersection in nearby Deep Gap and fled into undeveloped land.
It was then that the cows came in. “Apparently cows do not want suspected criminals loitering in their pasture and quickly assisted our officers by leading them directly to where the suspect was hiding,” the release said. “The cows communicated with the officers as best they could and finally just had the officers follow them to the suspect’s location.”
The suspect was charged with 1 count of Felony Fleeing/Eluding Arrest with a Motor Vehicle, Driving with a Revoked License, and Disorderly Conduct. A $20,000 bond was set ahead of his court date. The press release thanked the officers, and the cows, for their assistance.
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