[A recent] article in the Financial Times [claims] that “hurricane frequency is on the rise,” based on NOAA data. But NOAA says, “After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts.”…In other words, the graphic the Financial Times chose to show of apparently rising hurricane frequency is, in reality, a graphic showing improved hurricane detection thanks to satellites. What are the chances that Financial Times reporter Aime Williams didn’t know this? I would guess close to zero.
Anarchy simply means without rule or without rulers; in other words, people working, living, trading, communicating, traveling, and surviving peacefully without government masters and government rule. This is the only state of being that can bring about absolute freedom of the individual.
“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
~ Robert Higgs
Language is of such great importance as to be critical to the survival of mankind. While this may sound exaggerated, it is certainly not. The idea of our language, and the root systems from which our language originated, are not able to be altered at will to suit the state or any other individual or entity attempting to create a position based on the fraudulent restructuring of the meaning of words and phrases for their benefit. This is always and only done, to create confusion or to advance an agenda, and usually both. Anytime the state actors decide to control language in their favor, they are intending to steer mass opinion, and contradiction, hypocrisy, and control are the prevailing result. This has never been more apparent than with the term Anarchy, which is the absolute antithesis of state tyranny.
Anarchy simply means without rule or without rulers; in other words, people working, living, trading, communicating, traveling, and surviving peacefully without government masters and government rule. This is the only state of being that can bring about absolute freedom of the individual. The completely bastardized and fraudulent meaning that has been effectively changed, promoted, and propagandized by the state, its institutions, its dictionaries, and its media today concerning the word “anarchy,’ has had the effect thorough indoctrination and brainwashing, of appearing to the lowly ‘public’ as the exact opposite of its true meaning. This purposely induced mindset was planned and done for specific reasons, as honest and legitimate anarchists, are the enemy of state power, and therefore considered dangerous; not to the people, but to those wishing to manipulate and control the people. These are the ruling class, their politicians, their enforcers, and all government in general. These are the true and evil enemies of humanity and freedom.
The state’s new forged and illegitimate ‘definition’ of the word “anarchy,” is meant to hide the truth, confuse, and control the now ignorant collective masses. This fake definition that is used by all mainstream media and government to marginalize all promoters of freedom, is completely contrary to the actual meaning of the word. Anarchy, according to government tyrants, is said to be a state or society without laws in the midst of political and social disorder due to no government ‘control.’
Equally importantly, Khrushchev feared American aggression in Russia: the US had Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy complete with nuclear warheads. Kennedy and Khrushchev stepped back from the brink. Exchanged secret messages led to negotiations. Russia would remove its nuclear missiles if the US would remove its nuclear missiles. To feel safe removing the missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev further demanded guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba. Kennedy agreed to provide an informal promise not to invade.
What would have happened if Kennedy had not listened to Khrushchev and if the two had not secretly talked?
Did YOU know the US had Nukes on Russia’s border prior to 1962? You didn’t! How odd
This horrible war that could have been avoided, shouldn’t have been launched and could have been ended early through a negotiated settlement has reached an unimagined brink. The major parties to the war, Russia, Ukraine and the US, can continue on the path of escalation and go over the brink, or they can start to talk and to listen to each other.
Russia has been brought to the realization that there will be no negotiations with the West. Putin’s December 2021 requests for negotiations before the war and Russia’s accompanying proposal on mutual security guarantees were spurned by the US. At the start of the war, the State Department discouraged Ukraine from pursuing its interests and negotiating an end to the war in favor of continuing the war to fight for broader US interests. When a negotiated settlement was within reach, and it appeared that the war would not last much longer, the foreign minister of Turkey, the nation that hosted the promising Istanbul talks, charged that the promise of peace had been killed by “countries within NATO who want the war to continue.”
On September 21, Putin said that he “would like to make public for the first time” that “After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kiev representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kiev was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.” Russia had realized that there would likely not be a negotiated end to the war.
Russia also realized that they were no longer fighting the regional war against Ukraine they had launched. Ukraine’s response had been hijacked by the US, turning the war into a wider war between Russia and the US and NATO.
Over the past seven months, the Biden administration has pursued an increasingly escalatory policy to help Ukraine kill tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, destroy Russian military assets and even attack targets inside Russia itself. As I mentioned in my number one rated article in The National Interest published earlier today entitled “Will American Aid to Ukraine Provoke a Russian Nuclear Strike?”, Biden’s undeclared proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is increasingly likely to provoke the outbreak of an unnecessary World War Three with Russia. Such a war could cost the lives of over 200 million Americans and even more Europeans over Russia’s claim to 6.4% of the territory Ukraine controlled and 2.4 million of its citizens, many of whom have since fled, before the war in the Donbass region. Unbelievably, virtually no elected US leaders or anyone in the liberal mainstream media seems to care whether Biden’s continued policy of national suicide in fighting his undeclared proxy war against Russia in Ukraine ends up provoking a nuclear war with Russia or not. Here is a link to a video interview I gave on September 21st in response to Putin’s proclamation earlier that day that Russia would annex all occupied Ukrainian territory and that he has issued a decree ordering the mobilization of 1.2 million Russian Army reservists which would enable him to increase Russia’s troops in Ukraine by up to five to seven times.
There is a perverse, irrational, and historically unsupportable ideology which has infested the leaders of both major political parties in our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., causing neoconservative Republicans and liberal internationalists to form an unholy alliance in support of fighting this never-ending war against Russia in Ukraine which is leading America down the primrose path toward a nuclear apocalypse. These U.S. leaders have proven incredibly ignorant and naive, opting to willfully blind themselves and bury their heads in the sand when it comes to the existential threats we face from the Sino-Russian military alliance which has recently achieved supremacy over the U.S. both in terms of nuclear weapons as well as nation-ending super-EMP weapons, which the U.S. does not possess and has no plans to develop. They seem blissfully unaware that the Russian Federation and Communist China could destroy our great nation within a matter of minutes while beating their chest about the need to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan, nations that do not constitute vital national interests and with which the U.S. has no security commitments.
Newly elected British Prime Minister Liz Truss exemplified this collective insanity and insatiable lust for war with Russia when asked whether she would use Britain’s nuclear weapons even if it meant global annihilation and she unthinkingly responded by saying, “Yes, I would” even though she was given no context to the question. Her answer implied that, as British Prime Minister, engaging in a full nuclear exchange with Russia which would destroy the U.K. would be her first consideration rather than a last resort.
Former President Trump has proven to be the most outspoken voice of U.S. national security interests, peace and sanity in both major U.S. political parties. At a rally on January 30th, Trump declared, “Joe Biden’s weakness and incompetence is creating a very real risk of World War III,” the former president said. “Washington is obsessing over how to protect Ukraine‘s border. But the most important border in the world right now for us is not Ukraine‘s border,” he said. “It’s America’s border and we do nothing about it.” “The first duty of the American president is to defend the American border,”
Another person outsmarted a state government trying to confiscate firearms via a gun buyback program with merely a 3D printer and PLA filament.
A man named “Kem” printed 110 firearms on a $200 printer he got for Christmas and turned them into a gun buyback program held at the Utica Police Department in Oneida County, New York.
“I 3D-printed a bunch of lower receivers and frames for different kinds of firearms,” Kem told local media WKTV.
He drove six hours across the state to turn in the firearms he printed in August, collecting a whopping $21,000 from the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
“And it ended with the guy and a lady from the budget office finally coming around with the 42 gift cards and counting them in front of me … $21,000 in $500 gift cards,” Kim added.
WKTV contacted the state Attorney General’s Office about 3D-printed firearms, though there was no response to that question besides it being a ‘big success and that the program, in general, keeps New York families safe.’
“I’m sure handing over $21,000 in gift cards to some punk kid after getting a bunch of plastic junk was a rousing success,” laughed Kem.
The Brazilian firefighter, union leader, evangelical and ex-Congressman Cabo Daciolo was once embraced by the left, but is now vilified by them as a “hater” of LGBTs. Many vital lessons are here.
Former firefighter, union leader and Brazilian presidential candidate Cabo Daciolo gestures during the presidential debate ahead of the October 7, 2018 general election, on September 26, 2018. This year Daciolo is a candidate for the Brazllian Senate for the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) (Photo by NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP via Getty Images)
I published a short essay this week in Portuguese about an evangelical pastor, firefighter, union leader, and former Congressman in Brazil named Cabo Daciolo. The reaction to it in Brazil made me conclude it would be quite worthwhile to translate it into English and publish it here, as the lessons I believe it conveys — about the growing problems faced by left-wing political movements, how politics is often used as a substitute for more meaningful connections to community and to one another, and how we judge one another as human beings — are universal or, at the very least, just as applicable to the context of American and Western politics as they are to Brazilian politics. First, some context is necessary for non-Brazilian readers to understand the essay:
Cabo Daciolo became a nationally famous figure in Brazil in 2011 when, at the age of 35, he led a strike by the firefighters union of Rio de Janeiro. The striking workers demanded better pay, benefits and other worker protections (at the time, the minimum salary was the equivalent of US$ 190/month; the union was demanding an increase to US$ 400/month). He was one of the leaders of his union and attracted a great deal of media attention because he is telegenic, handsome, quite charismatic, and a naturally skilled orator who cut an impressive figure both on the street and in interviews. The strike ended up soliciting a great deal of public sympathy in support of firefighters. He spent nine days in jail for having led a union occupation of the Rio State Legislature.
Daciolo, 2011, leading a firefighters’ strike (Photo: Guto Maia/Agência Estado)
All of this, for obvious reasons, catapulted Daciolo into overnight political stardom: someone who denounced with great force and charisma the exploitation of workers by the corporate and oligarchical elite, not as an academic theorist like so many leftist leaders, but someone who lived that exploitation. The Brazilian left was delirious with glee over the potential to recruit as a political leader not yet another of their endless horde of highly educated, effete college professors who speak eloquently about “workers” as an abstraction, but an actual worker who naturally exudes a working-class posture and speech because that is what he is. Daciolo is not someone play-acting as a defender of the “working class” but someone whose entire life was and is shaped by a working-class life. And he often expressed his defense of workers’ rights in religious terms, citing with great conviction the Gospels and other religious principles to justify the need to provide workers with a minimally decent standard of living. Imagining a more valuable gift to the left than he was virtually impossible.
Daciolo, for obvious reasons, was recruited by many political parties to run for office. He ended up joining PSOL, a left-wing party that was founded in 2004 by disgruntled members of Lula’s Workers Party (PT) who complained that PT had become both corrupt and neoliberal: doing business with the very establishment forces it claimed to oppose. PSOL was, in essence, a left-wing party designed to oppose the hegemony of PT and Lula from the working-class left (as it happens, today is Election Day in Brazil, and most polls show Lula with a large lead to regain the presidency from Bolsonaro after being term-limited out of office in 2010; during the 2018 campaign, Lula was barred from running due to his 2017 imprisonment on corruption charges as he was preparing to run against Bolsonaro, but those convictions were reversed in 2020 when our reporting showed that Lula’s conviction was the by-product of judicial and prosecutorial corruption, enabling Lula to seek the presidency this year).
In 2014, Daciolo — still riding high on his national fame from having led the firefighter strike — ran for a seat in the national Congress on the PSOL line and was easily elected. But soon after his election, serious tensions began to arise between him and the leftist party he had joined, largely over social issues. Daciolo, like millions of workers throughout Brazil, is deeply religious. Though Brazil is still the country with the world’s largest Catholic population, Daciolo is entrenched in the rapidly growing evangelical sector. He is so devoted to his religious practice that he became an evangelical pastor. And that led him to embrace a wide range of views that were not only in conflict with the left-wing party he had joined but made him deeply anathema to it.
At the time when social justice issues began to assume much greater importance among the Brazilian left at the expense of working-class politics (following in the footsteps of the American left), Daciolo remained steadfastly opposed to same-sex marriage and the legalization of abortion. The animus toward Daciolo from the left over those heresies was intensified when Daciolo began supporting police officers in controversies where much of the left was denouncing the police as racist and genocidal; one case in particular, which resulted in the torture and death of a resident of one of Rio’s favelas, split Daciolo and the left with great hostility. But the final straw occurred in 2015, just one year after he was elected with PSOL, when the party voted overwhelmingly to expel him due to Daciolo’s support for a Constitutional amendment that would include in the Constitution the phrase that “all power emanates from God.”
The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.
This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.
That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.
Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.
The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.
The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers – would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.
German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.
As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.
Cui bono?
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.
Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to rabid US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.
It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.
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n December 5, 1936, history was made in Moscow when the Eighth Congress of Soviets approved and Joseph Stalin signed the Soviet Constitution of 1936.
Also known as the “Stalin Constitution,” the document was hailed by Soviet leaders as “the most democratic in the world.” It was indeed a revolutionary document — and not even primarily because of its openly socialist ideology. What made it so striking was that it granted more rights — civic, political, and personal — than almost any Western constitution did (or does today, for that matter). Forget the universal right to vote, the five freedoms granted in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, or the right to privacy; the Soviet Constitution guaranteed all of that and more. There was the right to “rest and leisure,” “the right to maintenance in old age and also in the case of sickness or loss of capacity to work,” and the ”right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with its quantity and quality.”
Despite this new, egalitarian Constitution, the next two years were notable for its escalation of terror and Stalin’s campaign “to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a threat.” Over 750,000 people were executed and more than a million were put in the Gulag (a system of forced labor camps). This period became known as the Great Purge. In subsequent decades, many more millions of people were killed in famines caused by an utterly inefficient state-run economy, while others were killed for expressing dissenting views. Citizens had no right to protest the government, join a union that was not controlled by the state, or even leave the state without express permission from the government.
All of this was done in the name of creating a better society; and it was done despite the lofty, rights-centered language of their new Constitution. In other words, despite enshrining utopia into law, the USSR ended up being one of the worst and most repressive countries in history.
The question, therefore, must be asked: how could this happen? How could the terror and brutality of the Soviet Union happen under such a seemingly progressive and forward-looking Constitution?
The answer is surprisingly simple — and also instructive for our own times.
The Purpose of a Constitution
The horrors of the USSR were able to take place, despite all of the rights included in their Constitution, for two reasons.
The first reason is that the framework the USSR Constitution outlined — and the structures it put in place — did not prevent the centralization of power. In fact, it actually did the opposite by maintaining the absolute power of the Communist Party, while also granting the government jurisdiction over basically every area of life.
However, the creation of systems designed to keep total power out of the hands of any group is both the purpose and the sign of a strong constitution. It ensures that even if some people would like to violate the rights of others — whether it be for personal gain or ideological reasons — they will not be able to because there are checks on the amount of power any individual or body can accumulate.
