MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Refusing To Oppose US Tyranny Is Siding With It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

The world is burning and psychopaths are brandishing armageddon weapons in the name of global domination. If you are going to spend any of your remaining time on this planet fighting, it would probably be wise to spend it fighting for something that truly matters.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/refusing-to-oppose-us-tyranny-is

Caitlin Johnstone

The US and its allies are pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon. The US and its allies armed Al Qaeda in Syria. The US and its allies are carrying out a literal genocide in Yemen. The US and its allies are deliberately starving children by the thousands. Shut up about Russia and China.

Desmond Tutu said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is especially true of the unjust situation in which the largest power structure on earth oppresses and tyrannizes populations around the world to force their obedience. Refusing to take a clear stance against that power structure is siding with it.

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William Van Wagenen has a new article out with The Libertarian Institute documenting the mountains of evidence that the US and its allies were supporting Al Qaeda-tied militias in Syria from the beginning of the war, in direct contradiction of the mainstream narrative that that started later. 

This is what happened in Syria, it’s what happened in Libya, and it’s what was on track to happen in Xinjiang before Beijing said “nah” and launched its crackdown. The west isn’t mad at Beijing for committing a “genocide”, it’s mad at Beijing for preventing one.

Like so many other western propaganda operations these days, this one is predominantly about China’s Belt and Road Initiative which it plans to use to help rise above US hegemony and create a multipolar world. The actual interest in Xinjiang has been about the fact that it is a key geostrategic region that the western empire would greatly benefit from balkanizing away from China so it can’t fulfill the crucial role planned for it in the BRI.Benjamin Norton @BenjaminNortonThis map says more than any article you’ll ever see in corporate media about why Western imperialist countries (that have spent decades killing Muslims) suddenly pretend to care about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. They want to break China up and stop its Belt and Road Initiative. July 25th 20201,087 Retweets2,278 Likes

Criticize Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang all you want, but it is indisputably orders of magnitude less draconian than the US “war on terror” approach which has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since 9/11.

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Yes, China’s government is more authoritarian than yours in some ways. Also, you’re being deceived by a massive, sweeping propaganda campaign about the things China’s government does and the threat it poses to you. Both of these things are true. They do not contradict each other.

❖See the rest here

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Russia Is the Last Remaining Christian Country – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

And thus under attack by the forces of Satan

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/12/29/russia-is-the-last-remaining-christian-country/

Paul Craig Roberts

At his year-end press conference, Russian President Putin said that “a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” and he expressed his confidence that the religious denominations of the Russian Federation would have the moral fiber to resist the intrusion of the corrupted and degenerate values of the Western world.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/12/tyler-durden/a-woman-is-a-woman-man-is-a-man-putin-vows-to-protect-russia-from-wests-gender-obscurantism/

Alas, the Western World has no such moral fiber. The West has cut itself off from its past and is tottering on the premise that it can survive by acculturating its youth to disbelieve in the West. The purpose of Western education is the deracination of Western youth and their alienation from Western culture. That is what insouciant families pay taxes and tuition for.

Every year in my Christmas column I point out that the voices that connect us to the past have been demonized and cut off, leaving us in a country without a foundation. Moreover, Hollywood, TV, media, Internet, and educational systems at every level in every state are working openly or surreptitiously to rewrite the history of Western culture as a white racist enterprise that must be overthrown. The purpose of public schools has been converted to brainwashing children into a guilt complex due to the color of their skin and to installing a sense of entitlement into the minds of BIPOC children. Parents protest but ideological anti-white school boards pay no attention.

In other words, what education does in the Western world is to deracinate the white ethnicities and elevate the immigrant-invaders.

Western education has already produced a generation or more of people who have no idea who they are. “Western Civ Has To Go” was a student chant in US universities as long ago as the 1960s. For decades few graduating classes have ever read a word of Shakespeare. Indeed, their proficiency in the English language is so poor they are incapable of reading him. The literary and artistic metaphors used to convey meaning are unknown to them. The classic literature of Western civilization in which the real challenges of life are revealed are replaced by Woke and minority whining. Essentially, the educational systems produce illiterate barbarians. The smartest ones are the dumbest of all. They are the unthinking geeks who produce the police state control devices and robotics that are inherent in the digital revolution. The purpose of the digital revolution is to remove independence, purpose, and meaning from human life. We are not even going to be permitted to drive cars. Privacy is not only a disappearing value, it is becoming a non-word, a word whose meaning is incomprehensible to all but the very old.

George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It did not occur to him that soon there would be people, indeed entire countries, without a past.

European cities that survived the mass bombing of civilian cities by the British and Americans during WW II have ancient buildings, cathedrals, and narrow streets that remind people that there was a past. But not Americans. In the US everything is constantly remade. Neighborhoods are torn down and reappear as something else. I live in what was until a few years ago an old Florida community, a charming, quiet place of beauty. Today almost every house has been knocked down and the lots divided and subdivided. Everywhere massive commercial rentals have gone up that sleep 20 to 30 people despite zoning that prohibits it. A live community with a history fell victim to outside real estate speculators and developers and is now populated with holiday makers numbering 20 or more times the former population. If a person who lived here 10 years ago returned, he would not recognize the place. His house no longer exists. His neighbors’ homes no longer exist. Nothing that he remembers exists.

This happens to entire cities. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but today I cannot find my way in the city. All landmarks are gone.

Now cities are removing monuments that represented memory, street names that represented memory, school names that represented memory in order to cleanse themselves of what they have been indoctrinated to believe is a racist past.

When a governor of the state of Virginia ordered the removal and destruction of a statue of Robert E. Lee, we see not only the success of critical race theory in brainwashing a weak-minded governor of Virginia, the Virginia state legislature, and the Virginia media, but also the acquiescence to the erasure of memory. Americans have become a people without a past.

All of the Western nations no longer exist. Nations are reduced to countries without borders as there is scant limit to influx by peoples of alien languages, cultures, and behaviors. All Western nations are Towers of Babel. In Europe religious life is found only among Islamist immigrant-invaders. They are building mosques (churches) everywhere. As I often ask, how long has it been since a Christian church was built in Europe or the UK.

Even the most famous Christian cathedral of Europe–Notre Dame–is being refashioned as a multicultural shrine with street art and modern art murals creating with mood lighting “emotional spaces” in place of confessional boxes and medieval integrity of the Christian cathedral. In effect, Notre Dame, and thereby Christianity, is being vandalized and adulterated, and the Pope apparently signed off on it. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/11/27/notre-dame-to-become-a-woke-disneyland-under-leaked-renovation-plans/

So what is the West when the West is without nations, without Christianity, and without a past?

It is a nothing. And this is what the Russians and Chinese are beginning to see.

Every great family and every great civilization has some roots in sin and crimes. What the Western world has forgotten is that they also have roots in accomplishments, moral, artistic, cultural, economic, political. We should not forget that man is fallen. There are good and evil that contend for his soul. It was Christianity that gave the powerless a voice capable of challenging the voice of raw power. It was this voice, together with material interests, that produced accountable government, itself subject to a rule of law.

Today the rule of law is disappearing. The US Constitution is in tatters. Everyone has become a tyrannical dictator. Not only presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers, but also employers, school boards, university administrators, mayors, governors, airlines, restaurants, sports organizations, issue mandates that are violations of the Nuremberg Laws laid down by the United States at the WW II war crime tribunals. Now the government in Washington refuses to obey its own creation, finding that Big Pharma profits, control over citizens, and perhaps darker agendas are more important than the rule of law.

The “watchdog media” are silent on the transgression but are shrill in propagandizing the criminal agenda. In other words, there is no honest media to hold government accountable, so government does what it desires. This is the definition of tyranny.

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Mandatory Holidays Mean Less Freedom and Flexibility for Workers | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

If we really want to help workers, then, statutory holidays should be repealed. Said differently, workers should have the freedom to take their time off when they need it most.

https://mises.org/wire/mandatory-holidays-mean-less-freedom-and-flexibility-workers

Patrick Carroll

One of the things people tend to appreciate throughout the year, and especially during the Christmas season, is statutory holidays. These days off are taken for granted by many, and few people stop to think about whether they have any drawbacks. But as any good economist will tell you, everything comes with tradeoffs, and holidays are no exception. The trick, then, is to figure out where the cost lies, and who, ultimately, is paying it.

The True Cost of Statutory Holidays

At first blush, it may be tempting to assume that our employers are the ones taking the hit. After all, they are losing productive work hours from their employees. And if all else were equal, that would certainly be correct. Shareholders, ultimately, would bear the cost of this lost productivity.

In most cases, however, things are not that simple. Consider, for example, a world in which there are no statutory holidays. Let’s say there’s a worker in this world who gets twenty paid holidays per year as part of their compensation. Now, let’s say the government introduces ten new statutory holidays, so every employer is now mandated to give their employees a minimum of ten days off per year. What happens?

Clearly, the employer is not going to give their worker ten additional holidays. After all, the government didn’t say it had to be ten more than what the worker was given in the past. They just said it had to be at least ten. The most likely scenario, then, is that the employer will give their worker the ten statutory holidays and ten additional holidays, so that they break even at twenty days per year.

The reason the employer will gravitate toward the same number as before is because of market forces. Time off, like salary, is part of the “price” of labor, and as such, it is determined by supply and demand. Thus, days off tend toward an equilibrium point determined by the market, just as salaries do.

The introduction of statutory holidays can therefore be likened to the introduction of a minimum wage. To the extent that the market “rate” is already higher than the mandated minimum, the new law has no effect on the level of compensation. And since almost all employers give more days off than they are required to by law, it seems clear that market forces, not statutes, are determining the total number of holidays most workers get.

The implication, then, is that the total number of holidays will gravitate toward the market “rate” regardless of whether some of those holidays are mandated or not. Thus, more statutory holidays just means fewer regular holidays. So really, the hidden cost falls entirely on the worker.

The Value of Flexibility

“Fair enough,” you might say. “But if they still break even, what’s the big deal? Isn’t the worker just as well off in either case?” The answer here is no, because while they may get the same total number of days off, their flexibility regarding when they can take those days is significantly curtailed.

Going back to the salary analogy, we’ve already established that if a worker gets paid, say, $20 per hour, a minimum wage of $10 per hour will not make any difference to their total pay. But imagine that instead of simply mandating a minimum of $10 per hour, the government also mandated how that $10 would be spent.

Clearly, this is harmful for the worker. Whereas before they could choose how they spent their entire salary, now they can only choose how they spend part of it, and the part that they can’t control will invariably be spent on things they consider less important than what they would have spent it on themselves. The same logic applies to holidays. If there are ten statutory holidays per year, that’s ten days that can no longer be allocated by the worker.

The reason that flexibility is so important is because the value of time off largely depends on when it’s taken. Imagine your kid gets sick or there is a death in the family. Those are times when days off are more important. But if half of your holidays are fixed by legislative fiat, you lose the ability to use that time when you actually need it. You are forced to “spend” those days on time that is less valuable, which means you can’t spend them when you really need them.

Vacations are also curtailed because of statutory holidays. Since the timing of the mandatory days is rigid and spread out, it’s impossible to use that time off for longer trips that take multiple consecutive days, even though that may be preferable to a series of long weekends.

Of course, if people want to take certain special days off like Thanksgiving or Christmas, they can still choose to do that. But forcing people to take certain days off against their will only pushes them away from their optimal holiday allocation, just like forcing people to spend money on certain things pushes them away from their optimal capital allocation.

If we really want to help workers, then, statutory holidays should be repealed. Said differently, workers should have the freedom to take their time off when they need it most.

Author:

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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Fauci Lied and Thousands Died… RPI Year-End Update

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/yearend?e=ff526b933a

Everybody is talking about this Ron Paul Liberty Report!
Liberty Report In the News: Fighting for You! Dear Friends:

As 2021 winds down to its last couple of days, I am writing to toot our horn a bit. You see, the Ron Paul Liberty Report has spent this year – and the previous year – in the trenches fighting what can only be described as the greatest assault on Americans’ civil liberties since slavery.

All of a sudden we saw that our house of liberty was built on sand – that the elites made billions with their boots on our necks while the rest of us suffered. Never again!

You have probably received many solicitations for end-of-year support from organizations that put their finger to the wind to see when it’s safe to come out in favor of liberty and freedom. As you know, Ron Paul has never played that game. Please make your year-end, tax-deductible donation
to the Ron Paul Institute! From the very first moment they started ramping up an authoritarian response to a virus, Ron Paul was calling their bluff. He published “The Coronavirus Hoax” on the Ron Paul Institute website in March, 2020, just as President Trump was following his malevolent covid advisors toward lockdowns and tyranny.

It certainly was not the “cautious” thing to say – and we received some nasty notes from a few supporters – but Ron Paul always speaks the truth regardless of whether it is popular at the time.

In this prescient March 2020 article he wrote: Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. Did he call this whole thing or what? Governments use “crises” to frighten the people into submitting their liberties to the “authorities” in exchange for protections that governments never deliver. And how well did the government protect us from illness and death from this coronavirus? About as well as it protected us against a terror attack on 9/11. Help RPI Continue to Grow! Senator Rand Paul said it best as a guest on a recent episode of the Ron Paul Institute’s Ron Paul Liberty Report: I would venture to say that thousands of people die in our country every month now because [Fauci] has deemphasized the idea that there are therapeutics. The mainstream media is doing a great job amplifying Sen. Paul’s Liberty Report statements – of course with the intention of ridiculing the Senator.

But we’re past that. Their game is up.

We’ve travelled down this road together these past two years. Dr. Paul and I scouring the media every morning to try and bring the latest bit of truth to our growing viewership. As the mainstream media loses viewers by the millions, the Ron Paul Liberty Report GAINS viewers by the millions!

Our influence is growing thanks to your generous support. But we cannot continue to produce a top-quality news and analysis program every day without you. Behind the camera there are so many expenses that we must meet if we are to continue.

And we are not just the Ron Paul Liberty Report! This year the Ron Paul Institute held two sold-out conferences, in Houston and Washington, DC, including speakers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Rep. Thomas Massie! We also held our second Ron Paul Scholars Seminar – a foreign policy boot camp for a terrific group of upper division undergrads and grad students! And don’t forget the thousand-plus articles we publish each year!

Without the Ron Paul Institute and the Liberty Report who would be left to tell the unvarnished truth? 

Time is running out to get all the tax credit for your donation to the Ron Paul Institute –  501(c)3 Charity – for 2021! Please act NOW before midnight on December 31st to keep the Ron Paul Institute and Liberty Report alive and growing in 2022.

The bad guys are not giving in. They are not giving up. We can stop them in 2022…but we need your help!

Please take a moment and make a stand for peace and liberty NOW!

Hope to see all of you at a future Ron Paul Institute event in 2022!
Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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Oh No! Biden Checks His To-Do List And Realizes He Totally Forgot To Shut Down The Virus

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C.—According to sources, Biden is just kicking himself after looking at his to-do list for 2021 and realizing he forgot to shut down the virus. 

“Ah, dadgummit!” Biden exclaimed to a nearby potted plant while slapping his forehead. “I knew I was forgetting something! That’s too bad because it was otherwise a flawless year for me!” 

Health experts say COVID deaths surged all through 2021 and cases are currently skyrocketing because Biden misplaced his small spiral-bound notebook where he keeps track of all the items on his to-do list. “We all forget—It happens to the best of us,” said Dr. Fauci. “I’m sure he’ll put this item at the top of his list for next year.”

White House insiders say that instead Biden decided there is no federal government solution to the virus and happily crossed the item off his list in time for the new year. 

RED ALERT: this is not a joke. Elon Musk sat down with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, EIC Kyle Mann, and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle for an in-depth interview on wokeness, Elizabeth Warren, the Metaverse, and how the left is killing comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvGnw1sHh9M

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Watch “Fauci’s Amazing Golden Parachute – Will He Jump?” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

Thanks to a FOIA request we now know that Biden’s covid czar Anthony Fauci will, when he retires, enjoy the highest pension in US history! He will be pulling in more than $350K for his 50+ years of “public service.” But according to Fauci he has no plans of leaving: in a recent interview he said that him retiring now, before covid is defeated, would be like the US leaving in the middle of World War II. How’s that for megalomania? Also today: lockdowns were the worst policy failure in history and even a government-funded study proves it.

https://youtu.be/LtVAea4oucs

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How the Endless Boosters Will Destroy Immune Function

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

How the Endless Boosters Will Destroy Immune Function

By Joseph Mercola

Mercola.com

A number of medical experts, scientists and published studies now warn that the COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Pfizer Shot Reprograms Both Arms of Your Immune System

A paper1 posted May 6, 2021, on the preprint server medRxiv reported that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion.

While they confirmed the jab “induced effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants,” the shot “also modulated the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and nonspecific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli.”

In other words, we’re looking at a horrible tradeoff. You may get some protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but you’re weakening your overall immune function, which opens the door wide to all sorts of other health problems, from bacterial, fungal and viral infections to cancer and autoimmunity.

After the injection, innate immune cells had a markedly decreased response to toll-like receptors 4, 7 and 8 (TLR4, TLR7, TLR8) ligands, while cytokine responses induced by fungi were stronger. According to the authors, defects in TLR7 have previously been linked to an increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in young males.

People who were “fully vaccinated,” having received two doses of the Pfizer shot, also produced significantly less interferon upon stimulation, and this can hamper the initial innate immune response against the virus.

Repeated Vaccinations and the Risk of Autoimmunity

Pathogenic infections and cancer are but two potential outcomes of this kind of reprogramming. Previous research, for example, has linked defects in the immune system to a higher risk of autoimmune diseases. What’s more, it’s been shown that antigens in vaccines, specifically, can induce this kind of immune system dysfunction.2 As reported in the paper in question:3

“Repeated immunization with antigen causes systemic autoimmunity in mice otherwise not prone to spontaneous autoimmune diseases. Overstimulation of CD4+ T cells led to the development of autoantibody-inducing CD4+ T (aiCD4+ T) cell which had undergone T cell receptor (TCR) revision and was capable of inducing autoantibodies.

The aiCD4+ T cell was induced by de novo TCR revision but not by cross-reaction, and subsequently overstimulated CD8+ T cells, driving them to become antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL).

These CTLs could be further matured by antigen cross-presentation, after which they caused autoimmune tissue injury akin to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host’s immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization with antigen, to the levels that surpass system’s self-organized criticality.”

Fast-forward to mid-May 2021, when a study4 in the Journal of Clinical Investigations reported that “SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce broad CD4+ T cell responses that recognize SARS-CoV-2 variants and HCoV-NL63.” HCoV-NL63 is a human coronavirus associated with the common cold.

See the rest here

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Did Joe Biden just end the pandemic? — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2021

No, he didn’t make good on his campaign promise to “shut down the virus,” but by seemingly admitting defeat against Covid-19, Biden has opened a clear path to ending onerous pandemic restrictions and returning to normality.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/544625-biden-pandemic-federal-solution/

Graham Dockery

Graham Dockeryis an Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.

President Joe Biden admitted on Monday that “there is no federal solution” to the Covid-19 pandemic. The statement paves the way for his mandates to be scrapped, but don’t expect liberals to go along willingly.

Speaking during a teleconference with governors, Biden followed this statement up by declaring that the pandemic “gets solved at the state level,” before shuffling onto a helicopter and departing for his home state of Delaware. 

NOW – Biden departs to Delaware beach house after telling governors there is “no federal solution” on COVID and it should be “solved at the state level.”pic.twitter.com/Ux9RtPmb8m— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 27, 2021

Delegating responsibility to the states was essentially the approach of Donald Trump, and a return to this policy represents a complete reversal of Biden’s campaign-trail promise to use the might of the federal government to “shut down the virus.” Far from shutting down the deadly pathogen, Biden has presided over more Covid-19 deaths than his predecessor and a current daily caseload higher than at any point since his inauguration.

Biden will be hammered for this failure by Republicans, but it’s as much a triumph of nature as a failure of government. The Omicron variant driving the latest surge in cases is highly transmissible, and early studies suggest that vaccines may be ineffective at stopping its spread. Likewise, areas of the country with strict masking and ‘vaccine passport’ requirements are experiencing unprecedented surges in transmission.

Against bureaucracy, Omicron is winning.

See the rest here

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The Company Ink? – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2021

Milbank isn’t exactly an ace dot connector – even when the dots are of his own making. Seven years ago he gave us A true Obama scandal sounding like an apoplectic schoolmarm over the scoop of CIA double dealing. He wanted to rap the man on the street’s knuckles with a ruler for yawning at a “scandal” that had been getting moldy for ten years.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/12/tim-hartnett/829835-2/

By Tim Hartnett

“Democracy” may not be the unruly, confusing, rough and tumble thing to grade that some people think it is. The Center for Systematic Peace is sitting back judging the institution for us all on a 10 point scale. It turns out to be more like competitive diving, gymnastics and ice-skating than your average Joe realized.

Dana Milbank sees his country slipping into the clutches of Tonya Harding democracy. He’ll take nothing less than Thornton Melon democracy. The Washington Post scribe demands the perfect 10’s Rodney Dangerfield got using three diving boards performing a Triple Lindy in the film Back to School. It’d be nice if WP editors were just as demanding in their copy. The WP creates a new glade every day pulping Canadian conifers. And after putting print on them they’re still pulp.

This connoisseur, of rule by the people his column is constantly sneering at, picks an odd source to launch his tirade: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”  The title is a quote from Barabara F. Walter, a political science professor at UC San Diego, whose real clout comes out of serving on the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force. An organization notorious for being mobbed up, abetting coup d’états, facilitating assassinations, faking news, using torture, destroying historical documents, arranging kidnappings and encyclopedia length ventures in skullduggery is what he relies on to warn us of the perils to democracy. I can hardly wait for his column citing Elizabeth Bathory as the authority on prevention of child abuse.

Other than events at the Capitol January 6 nothing specific is described in the article. One rowdy day is a kind of weak omen to use scaring people on the streets of America out of their wits. It gets tiresome reminding the holy media-academic synod how the crime rate has soared in the last 18 months. Pain inside the beltway is all they find genuine – geographically distant wounds are lame excuses for whining.

“By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States,” we hear after he quotes a member of it doing just that. It gets richer though – if this guy does any digging he doesn’t share results with readers. Later he says:

“Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.”

Dr. Monty Marshall, who is the director of the CSP, informed me in a phone conversation that his organization was originated and is funded by the CIA. Milbank’s idea of living up to the Post motto – “democracy dies in darkness” – is telling the public who the CIA finds “helpful” without telling them who the informers are. Does he even know?  One call worked for me. The CSP turns out to be a spigot at the end of an agitprop pipe running from Langley. They get their dope from the finest experts money can make into Charley McCarthys.

Jeff Bezos landed a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency himself in 2014. That’s chicken feed to him but – as many a career criminal knows – greenbacks are not the only valuable things The Company pays off with. Milbank isn’t exactly an ace dot connector – even when the dots are of his own making. Seven years ago he gave us A true Obama scandal sounding like an apoplectic schoolmarm over the scoop of CIA double dealing. He wanted to rap the man on the street’s knuckles with a ruler for yawning at a “scandal” that had been getting moldy for ten years.

Meanwhile, the bottom line in every shrill screed over democracy’s impending doom is the need for a media instability task force – mass access to both the mics and speakers of mass communication being the number 1 threat they find to “democracy.” Civil war looms on the horizon if people who don’t realize the CIA is talking to itself out loud don’t get to preach to us – with “Amen” the mandatory response.

The CSP’s home page begins its rhetorical trek to the democratic promised land with the slogan: “Democracy cannot be defended by force; it is enforced through accountability.” How do you go about getting accountability without any ultimate resort to instruments of force? Once you solve that one the need for government is eliminated altogether. That government’s themselves are the hardest things on Earth to hold accountable may have something to do with the amounts of forceful capability they tend to amass. Being nothing less than a tentacle of government themselves explains the CSP’s strange construction of the word “enforced.”

This, from the CSP’s mission statement, makes it sound like a comprehensive large scale operation:

“The Center continually monitors political behavior in each of the world’s major states, that is, all those with current populations greater than 500,000 (167 countries in 2014) and reports on emerging issues and persisting conditions related to the problems of political violence and “state failure.””

They are based in Vienna, Va., but provide a contact number starting with a 202 (DC) area code. My first call got a recorded message. Later the director got back to me. When I tried again several times for follow up the call cut off after one ring. Dr. Marshall’s office obviously has no receptionist. It operates off his cell phone…hitting the red button when an unwelcome number is on the screen. Their headquarters, at 426 Center St. N. in Vienna, doesn’t sound like it houses much. Is it even manned?

Both Marshall and Milbank direct us to the “Polity data set” that’s supposed to elaborate how the US got knocked down 5 pegs on the ten point scale in five years. The link is above; try making sense of it. If there is any straightforward description of criteria I couldn’t find it. The closest we get to anything coherent comes from the so-called “Regime Narratives.” Like the rest of the site “RN” contains tables and graphs. If you have the idle time to try and take on the fool’s errand of decoding one, go ahead. The actual “narratives” are selective news summaries from recent events. If you were in a coma for the last half decade they might be slightly informative.

The problem, we learn from this highly regarded non-profit, turns out to be the same one we’ve been hearing about from Silicon Valley, Academia, major media and other shrill voices for years. Opinions, and especially facts, that circulate on laptops and cell phones without the benefit of editing from the high-priesthood. The possibility that anyone sermonizing from a conventional pulpit – ranging from national media, a political stump or to a college classroom – bears any responsibility for violent unrest gets no consideration.

American democracy may be tottering on some kind of brink. Plenty of developments on our streets make the case. All the screeching about violent upheaval isn’t entirely unfounded. But how can people who find events on Capital grounds January 6 to be the only ones that count expect to be counted on as reliable sources? Establishment voices are muttering to themselves like guys in rags who have been carrying incomprehensible signs in Lafayette Park for 20 years. DC old-timers might wonder: are our informing classes coming to resemble hosed down, suited up versions of Sky King?

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Biden’s War against Fossil Fuels Is a War against Ordinary People | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2021

President Biden’s insistence on squelching fossil fuel production before intermittent sources are sufficient to fill the gap is unconscionable. If the coming winter is harsh, the resulting hardships suffered by Americans and others around the world will be a humanitarian crisis that could have been avoided by a rational and compassionate energy policy.

https://mises.org/wire/bidens-war-against-fossil-fuels-war-against-ordinary-people

Mark Hendrickson

A few months ago, I wrote about President Biden’s anti–fossil fuel policies. Among other steps designed to restrict domestic production of oil and natural gas, the president canceled completion of the Keystone XL pipeline, banned drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and greatly curtailed the issuance of leases for companies to develop fossil fuel resources underneath public lands and waters.

Since then, the prices of gasoline, oil, and natural gas have risen smartly. As noted by one source, the last time natural gas prices were this high, “One-third of American households already had difficulty … adequately heating and cooling their homes—and one-fifth of households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay energy bills.” Bank of America is predicting that the price of a barrel of oil may rise to $120 this winter, inflicting additional hardships on the poorest Americans.

Globally, many countries are already in the midst of a full-blown energy crisis. There are critical shortages of fossil fuels at a time when energy from so-called renewable sources (more accurately, “intermittent” energy sources) have fallen far short of expectations. In Brazil, China, India, Europe, and other countries, energy shortages have led to factories cutting production, blackouts in which traffic lights are inoperative, nonfunctioning elevators in high-rise apartment buildings, vital ventilation systems not working in hospitals, etc. Britain is facing the possibility of more than ten thousand deaths this winter due to cold weather in homes where families can’t pay the elevated energy prices that would provide adequate heat.

Surely, with so many people at home and around the world needing more energy so badly, the Biden administration would ease off its aggressive restrictions on fossil fuel production here in the United States, wouldn’t it? Alas, no. Instead, Team Biden has doubled down on its antienergy policies.

Examples:

Team Biden left the recent United Nations climate gathering in Glasgow pleased that a plan has been put into place for the world’s major banks to restrict investment in companies that produce fossil fuels. The president also designated 1.7 million acres of federal land in Utah as a “national monument,” thereby putting that acreage off-limits to oil and gas exploration. The administration also is reportedly considering the possible shutdown of another major pipeline, the Enbridge 5, which moves a half million barrels of oil per day through Canada and Michigan. Biden’s recent nominee to be the country’s next comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, is on record as stating, “[W]e want [America’s small oil and gas companies] to go bankrupt.”

Perhaps most egregious of all, when asked by a Bloomberg interviewer what her plan was “to increase oil production in America,” Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, responded with a belly laugh. She then evaded the question by saying that she didn’t have a magic wand to make the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries increase production. (Of course, she doesn’t. She is the secretary of energy for the United States, not for foreign countries.) In other words, Granholm has no intention to undo the Biden-imposed impediments to domestic oil production.

Cynically, the president called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil companies that have raised prices. Well, of course oil companies have raised prices. That is what happens in a market when supply doesn’t meet demand. And what is a major reason why supply isn’t meeting demand? The president’s own antiproduction policies.

Even more cynically, the only action the president has taken to try to lower domestic gasoline prices has been to dip into our national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That stockpile was created to be available in the case of a national emergency. A “national emergency” would be something like war or weather or terror-related ruptures of vital fuel pipelines. The “emergency” that the president has today is his own plummeting popularity polls.

President Biden’s insistence on squelching fossil fuel production before intermittent sources are sufficient to fill the gap is unconscionable. If the coming winter is harsh, the resulting hardships suffered by Americans and others around the world will be a humanitarian crisis that could have been avoided by a rational and compassionate energy policy.

Author:

Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is adjunct professor of economics at Grove City College. 

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