MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

George Soros Urged Use Of Eastern European Soldiers To “Reduce The Risk Of Body-Bags For NATO Countries” In ‘New World Order’ Article | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023

“Japan should be asked to join NATO. Then we would have the beginnings of an architecture for a new world order. It is based on the United States as the remaining superpower and on open society as the organizing principle. It consists of a series of alliances, the most important of which is NATO and, through NATO, the Partnership for Peace which girds the Northern Hemisphere,” he writes.

Soros acknowledges that the NATO countries have no appetite for “body bags,” but his statement implicitly indicates that Eastern Europeans can fill this role.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/george-soros-urged-use-eastern-european-soldiers-reduce-risk-body-bags-nato-countries

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

As the war in Ukraine rages on, there is little doubt that the human cost has been enormous for Ukraine, including what is likely more than 100,000 soldiers who have died in combat operations.

However, there was one man who predicted much of what has come to pass in the battle in the east of Europe: George Soros.

The billionaire oligarch financier, often portrayed as a humanist, promoted a hard-nosed geopolitical strategy in his 1993 piece entitled “Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO.”

In the piece, he outlines how Eastern Europeans could be used as the “manpower” in coming conflicts in an effort to reduce the number of deaths in Western countries, which Soros argues the West would not politically tolerate, unlike the east of Europe.

“The United States would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder,” wrote Soros in the article.

Soros acknowledges that the NATO countries have no appetite for “body bags,” but his statement implicitly indicates that Eastern Europeans can fill this role.

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Our Naked Society | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023

The warnings raised by Packard and others have been noted though mostly ignored.Technology makes us comfortable. We are, for a lack of a better term, addicted. One of the dangers of this addiction is that we have no privacy. We are exposed to whoever may be prying into our world.The potential good that technology offers is nearly always offset by the dangers that the most evil would utilize it for.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/our-naked-society/

by Kym Robinson

pexels francesco ungaro 97509

In his 1964 book The Naked Society, Vance Packard challenged the ever increasing loss of privacy as technology and large institutions began wide spread surveillance that today has become acceptable. At the time, computer power, hidden cameras, and concealed microphones were crude gadgets compared to the technology currently in use. The intrusion into a person’s life then was nothing compared to what is acceptable today. With each generation we become comfortable and more obliging to the fact that we no longer are allowed privacy. We have all been stripped naked.

A subcommittee in the U.S. Congress to study the invasion of privacy was created due to the publishing of The Naked Society and its reception. One of the criticisms raised by Packard was the use of consumer information by corporations and the government to specifically target individuals. The concern was that data being collected would be used and then taken advantage of for self-serving and nefarious purposes. The use of computers to store such information was novel but such data would be permanently retained.

The ability to spy on individuals and to control what information they receive is the theme of most dystopian fictions. It’s also the reality in all tyrannies.  When one lives inside the bubble of a society that strips the individual bare and exposes them to prying eyes, it’s often claimed to be beneficial, as an act of benevolence. It is understood to be a necessity whether for security, safety, or health as part of a greater plan to control and protect us all from not only ourselves but the ills of the world. In the case of private actors the information can be used to enhance our shopping experiences or promote our preferences, trapping us in a spiral of self-consumption which in turn can diminish variety and hinder exploration.

The world was a different place in 1964, though many of the policies and events that occurred then still influence us all today. A cold war again has partitioned the planet as it had done previously and as such it has justified governments to manage and monitor individual’s lives accordingly. With the information released by Edward Snowden and in the Vault 7 leaks, U.S. citizens and those effected by their government are subject to surveillance and techno-controls that would have been in the past considered fantastic or Soviet.

For every argument made in defense of privacy, one will encounter scores of those challenging it, concerned about the need to protect children from predators to the frightful spectre of terrorism. The argumentation often goes that only those doing something evil would want privacy from the government, that encrypted software is a tool of criminals, and clandestine interactions are the domain of spies. Each time the call for privacy is raised it is for those who wish to remain private to defend their rights. But human decency and dignity have no place in a world of collectivist rationales.

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Complain About a Fast Food Order? Cops Could Smash Your Face In | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023

Police Chief John Porter confirmed that the police will be investigating themselves.

Is it only me that sees the humor?

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/complain-about-a-fast-food-order-cops-could-smash-your-face-in/

by Matt Agorist 

A video out of Ohio this week is causing a massive storm of controversy online after it showed a Butler Township police officer repeatedly punching a woman in the face. While the video is certainly enraging to the folks on the police accountability front it also highlights the monopoly police maintain on the use of violence.

America’s security force can and will escalate violence to the point of beating a defenseless woman—over a dispute about cheese.

Butler Township Police Chief John Porter held a presser this week to discuss the video which was taken on Jan. 16. He pointed out that the officer who did the punching has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an internal investigation.

“The administrative investigation will include interviews and statements from any and all possible witnesses, including any other officers that were involved,” he said. “If improper conduct is found as a result of the investigation, the findings will include a recommendation for disciplinary action.”

According to police, the woman in the video—also known as the victim of police brutality—received an incorrect order while inside a Mcdonald’s. The woman, Latinka Hancock, attempted to dispute her order about the amount of cheese on her Big Mac. Instead of providing customer service, McDonald’s employees provided a 911 call.

Having given up on receiving the correct order, Hancock was already in the parking lot about to leave when officer Tim Zellers and Sgt. Todd Stanley detained her.

Instead of allowing the woman to leave—as no crime had been committed—the video shows police escalated to violence instead. Zellers is seen to the left of Hancock aiming a taser at her face just before Stanley begins waylaying on the woman’s face in a seemingly unprovoked rage.

“According to her attorney…as Hancock was leaving the restaurant, Butler Township police officers confronted her and during the incident she was punched repeatedly in the head, sending her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a head injury,” Ryan Julison, the media contact for Hancock’s attorney, told The Daily Beast.

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Donald Trump Should Enter Retirement

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023

We should all wish him well, provided he does not continue to undermine all the good he has accomplished.

https://open.substack.com/pub/walterblock/p/donald-trump-should-enter-retirement?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Luis Rivera

By Walter E. Block

Those of us who favor free enterprise, limited government, property rights, and free trade can no longer support Donald Trump in his quest to win the presidency in 2024.

Full disclosure: In 2015, I set up two groups in support of Trump. One, Libertarians for Trump, garnered some 5,000 signatures. That’s not much, but it is significant for the very small libertarian community. The second, Scholars for Trump, which was limited to people with Ph.Ds. and other such advanced degrees, had about 250 sign-ons. We did this to obviate the charge that only rednecks, clutching their “guns and Bibles” in flyover country, would support this man.

Why our support for the Donald? It had little to do with him personally or public-policy-wise. Our main fear was that virago, Hillary. There are no absolutes in politics. Voting is always a relative matter. Trump would certainly be preferable to Godzilla. Imagine a Joe Biden who is not senile. The horror.

From a personal point of view, I was not all that put off by Trump’s obvious obnoxiousness. I’m from Brooklyn; he was raised in nearby Queens. With the exception of Staten Island, everyone in the Big Apple is personally detestable. No big deal then, and even now.

Why, then, turn against him at present? It is simple. There are now far better alternatives around. Within the Republican Party, there are Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Larry Hogan, Asa Hutchinson, Rand Paul, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse, Rick Scott, Tim Scott, Chris Sununu, and Glenn Youngkin. That’s quite a lineup. Who needs a blustering liar?

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The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth – Edward Curtin

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2023

Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. 

https://edwardcurtin.com/the-new-york-times-is-orwells-ministry-of-truth/

Edward Curtin

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.”  Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners.  So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted.  Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion?  They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.”  No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.”  U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

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Let’s Nuke The World Over Who Governs Crimea: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2023

Literally the only reason mainstream westerners are fine with the US empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia is because most don’t understand it, and those who do understand it don’t think very hard about it. They avoid contemplating what nuclear war is and what it would mean.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/lets-nuke-the-world-over-who-governs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right.

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So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures?

It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries.

❖

The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.”

One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying.

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With no accountability, how can US intelligence community keep us safe?

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2023

From 1979 to 2001, FBI Counterintelligence Supervisory Agent Robert Hanssen was a highly paid Russian agent, sending bag-loads of secrets to Moscow. He was finally arrested in February 2001. Less than a month later, Chinese intelligence allegedly recruited a former CIA officer, Alexander Ma, who applied to work for the FBI and became a highly paid mole for China. 

A key reason for the dangerous and damaging security breaches is the total lack of accountability within the FBI and intelligence community. After NSA Director Mike Rogers, a 3-star admiral, lost hundreds of millions of top secret documents and most of the agency’s cyberweapons, he paid no price, keeping his stars, job and salary intact.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/21/with-no-accountability-how-can-us-intelligence-community-keep-us-safe/

By 

James Bamford

The revelation that President Biden had stacks of classified documents stashed in his garage — alongside jugs of anti-freeze and piles of cleaning rags — comes as little surprise.  For several years I have been working on a new book, “SpyFail,” that examines the collapse of the country’s counterintelligence and security operations. And by far, no administration has had a more disastrous record than those of Barack Obama and Biden. For years, insiders at the hyper-secret National Security Agency were able to walk out the door with more than half a billion pages of documents classified higher than top secret, some dealing with nuclear weapons and many of which ended up in Russia. And that was after the supposed crackdown following the million or so documents removed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also on Obama and Biden’s watch.  

Still another NSA insider was able to steal nearly all of the agency’s highly dangerous cyberweapons — the tech equivalent of loose nukes — and put them up for auction on the internet in 2016. Eventually, the weapons ended up in Russia and North Korea, where they were used to cause a worldwide cyber pandemic that shut down hospitals and medical facilities all over the world, including in the US, thus turning our own weapons against us.

Kim Jong Un and family
North Korean intelligence secretly attacked Sony Pictures at the behest of Kim Jong Un, stealing millions of confidential documents and unreleased films.

It was the worst cyberattack in world history, yet the NSA didn’t have a clue as to how to stop it.

Instead, it was a young American on vacation in London who luckily discovered a temporary “kill switch.” And although the cyber thief left many clues, the counterintelligence agents have never come close to catching him. As a result, he continued to sell the NSA’s cyberweapons to whatever government or terrorist would pay for them.  

And then there were the foreign moles under Obama/Biden. At the same time the FBI counterspies were hunting under every rock for non-existent Russian spies within the Donald Trump campaign, they completely missed two top foreign moles within Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Both were secretly working for the government of the United Arab Emirates with orders to insert themselves into Clinton’s inner-circle, collect intelligence, and pass on pro-UAE influence. And thanks to millions of dollars in dirty money passed to Clinton’s campaign, they were enormously successful. For a demand of $2 million dollars, Clinton even allowed the spies to host her and former President Bill Clinton at the private home of one of the spies, along with another party for her in Las Vegas. “Had a terrific meeting with my Big Sister H,” the spy wrote to his spymaster, using a code for Hillary. “You will be most delighted!”

FBI Counterintelligence Supervisory Agent Robert Hanssen was actually a highly paid Russian agent, sending bag-loads of secrets to Moscow.Shutterstock

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There Is Always Hope, And There Is Always Wonder

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2023

Another is that if you really open your eyes, you’ll notice that the world is crackling with so much radiant beauty and wonder that even if we were to lose it all tomorrow, it would have been enough. 

Caitlin Johnstone

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/there-is-always-hope-and-there-is?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

I often hear talk of how depressing it is to learn the truth about what’s really going on in our society and in our world, including in the comments sections of the places my own writings appear. I’m always being asked for advice on how to keep going on when everything seems so dismal.

This blog has largely functioned as a space where I document the ongoing expansion of my own awareness and understanding of the world and all its ills, an education which I suspect will continue for as long as I have a functioning brain. But to be honest in the six plus years I’ve been working at this project I’ve never once experienced a moment of the despair and depression I hear people talking about, and it’s never once occurred to me to give up or stop fighting.

When people ask me how I keep my head up and keep plugging away day after day I usually say something about the importance of inner work, healing old traumas and purging the many illusions which distort our perception of reality. And to a certain extent that’s true; such work gives you a foundation of inner peace from which to function and a clarity of perspective that makes it much easier to see through the bullshit. How anyone manages to engage with this stuff from day to day without a rigorous discipline of inner work and self-examination I’ll never know.

But upon reflection I think equanimity when dealing with harsh truths also comes from a much simpler foundation: that there is always hope, and that there is always wonder.

Hopelessness, when it comes to the fate of humanity, is an irrational position. The belief that we’re all inevitably going to destroy ourselves or keep marching into the depths of dystopia to the beat of the propaganda drum assumes a level of knowledge that nobody can possibly have. Nobody could possibly have enough information to draw that conclusion with any degree of confidence, and believing that you have is actually a bit arrogant.

You don’t know what the future holds for our species, what unpredictable sociological, technological, environmental or situational surprises lie in wait that could cause a radical deviation from the norm. Not only do you not know what the future holds, you don’t even know what the present holds. You don’t know what latent potentials might exist within humanity which could one day be unlocked. You don’t know what reality is ultimately made of or what unknown forces may have been driving this human adventure. Only by crunching the possible down to the teeny, tiny confining bandwidth of the known can you proclaim that our situation is hopeless.

And if you’ve done a lot of work exploring your inner dimensions you’ve probably got at least an inkling that there is much, much more to humanity than that tiny confining bandwidth. You’ve probably become at least somewhat aware that there’s a whole lot more going on inside you than you would gather from conventional narratives about the human experience. Speaking solely for myself I’ve discovered capabilities and potentials within me that were totally unpredicted by anything I’ve ever heard or read about our species and what makes us tick, some so strange and unexpected that I don’t generally feel comfortable even talking about them. I’ve no reason to believe such strange unseen potentialities are unique to me, or even rare, or even something that doesn’t exist within each and every one of us.

So from my point of view hopelessness is an illogical position, born of arrogance, sloppy thinking, and a lack of curiosity about one’s own inner processes. Hopelessness is the baseless and irrational shrinking of possibilities down to the spectrum of what’s known. That’s one reason despair never enters here.

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Predictions Are All Wet – The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2023

It was predicted for years that we in Sunny Cal were in for a Thousand Year Drought.

https://spectator.org/predictions-are-all-wet/

by BEN STEIN

January 11, 2023, 2:46 PM

It’s Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. It’s been raining like mad insanity for about a week now and this follows several weeks of occasional rain. It was predicted for years that we in Sunny Cal were in for a Thousand Year Drought. We were doomed to a prehistoric era of scarcity.

Now we have historic rain, night and day. And we are “predicted” to have nothing but rain for at least a month.

Thus goeth predictions. I can well recall in the ’60s when it was not just a prediction but a CERTAINTY that we were headed for a new Ice Age. It could not be avoided because of man-made pollution.

I can recall when “intellectuals” predicted, no, “promised” that Japan would be the dominant world power for the next century.

In 1957, it was “predicted” that Soviet Russia would be the dominant power on this earth as soon as Sputnik went up.

None of these things has happened. Not even close.

Now the Left is predicting, no, guaranteeing, that we will be a Nazi-style racist/fascist dictatorship of white trash rulers unless we keep the Left in power forever.

Predictions are not worth a lot.

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Pentagon Can’t Account for $220 Billion of Gear Given to Contractors

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2023

The Pentagon failed a fifth consecutive audit in November, when it could only account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Nevertheless, the military received $858 billion—a 10 percent budget increase—in the omnibus bill passed late last year.

https://reason.com/2023/01/18/pentagon-cant-account-for-220-billion-of-gear-given-to-contractors/

ERIC BOEHM

Auditors say the Pentagon cannot account for 0 billion worth of government-owned gear provided to military contractors—and the actual total is likely much higher.

(Photo by Specna Arms on Unsplash)

Auditors say the Pentagon cannot account for $220 billion worth of government-owned gear provided to military contractors—and the actual total is likely much higher.

In a report released Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) slammed the Pentagon’s handling of so-called “government-furnished property” (GFP) that has been passed off to contractors with little oversight. The GAO notes that auditors have asked for decades that the Pentagon develop a plan to account for that gear and equipment—which can include “ammunition, missiles, torpedoes,” and component parts for those items—to little avail. In 2001, the Pentagon said it would address the issue by 2005. In 2020, it said the process would be complete by 2026.

Perhaps someday we’ll know how much taxpayer-funded military gear has been handed out to contractors. For now, the GAO notes that the $220 billion estimate is “likely significantly understated.” That figure is based on a 2014 report, but in 2016 the Army told auditors that the actual figure is “unknown and that actual quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect.”

The Pentagon failed a fifth consecutive audit in November, when it could only account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Nevertheless, the military received $858 billion—a 10 percent budget increase—in the omnibus bill passed late last year.

The amount of taxpayer-funded military gear that’s been handed out to contractors is a relatively small sum compared to the Pentagon’s astronomical budget and gordian accounting issues. Even so, it serves as an illustrative example of the broader accountability problems within the most expensive portion of the federal discretionary budget.

“DOD’s lack of accountability over government property in the possession of contractors has been reported by auditors as far back as 1981,” the new GAO report states. “These long-standing issues affect the accounting for and reporting of GFP and are one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements.”

It can also serve as a litmus test for the seriousness of would-be fiscal conservatives who are calling for spending cuts.

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has vowed to roll back discretionary spending to 2022 levels—effectively undoing the omnibus bill passed in December. But some are already indicating that they would like to exempt the Pentagon from that belt-tightening.

“During negotiations, cuts to defense were never discussed,” Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas) said in a statement posted to his office’s Twitter account last week. “Spending cuts should focus on non-defense discretionary spending.”

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