MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Sunk Cost Mentality: Europeans Discussing A Military Draft For A Lost Ukraine War?

Posted by M. C. on May 29, 2024

Mindless

Guess who else has had enlistments drop for decades.

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Creating an All-American Homeland Security Campus

Posted by M. C. on May 29, 2024

Sometimes it seems as if we just can’t learn, even when we’re talking about America’s centers of higher learning, its colleges and universities. In mid-April — the day after being grilled and intimidated by House Republicans — Columbia University’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik decided not to listen to, or even negotiate with, her own students. Instead, she called in the police to dismantle a peaceful tent encampment protesting the horrors then underway in Gaza. For anyone who remembers the past history of on-campus antiwar protests, it was almost ludicrously predictable that, in doing so, she would launch a set of remarkably peaceful protests on more than 500 campuses nationwide that, despite the arrival of so many police on campus and nearly 3,000 arrests, have yet to end (and, in fact, have spread elsewhere on the planet).

And talking about not learning, imagine this: Last October 7th, the Israelis had a thoroughly grim set of war crimes committed against them by Hamas. Their response would prove to be a set of crimes so staggering that they’ve left Hamas’s horrors — and they were horrors of the first order — in the shade, removing almost all sympathy for Israel globally.

Sound familiar? And the thing we so often forget, whether the subject is Israel and Gaza or student protests in this country, is that when such horrors occur, there’s always a history that has, in some grim fashion, prepared the way for them.

With that in mind, consider Michael Gould-Wartofsky’s latest piece on the all too many increasingly armed camps that now pass for colleges and universities. Such campuses, barricaded, walled off, and sometimes occupied by local police, don’t come out of the blue either. In fact, Gould-Wartofsky has been writing about the creation of just such a “homeland security campus” for TomDispatch since 2008 — about the creation, that is, of what, by 2012, he was already calling Repress U.! Tom

Repress U., Class of 2024

How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven More Steps

By Michael Gould-Wartofsky

The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.

In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.

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Trump Warms Up to Bringing Haley ‘On Our Team in Some Form’

Posted by M. C. on May 29, 2024

So much for ending the endless wars. Haley’s puppet strings are pulled directly from the pentagram.

Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday opened the door to bringing Nikki Haley into his circle, another step in what looked to be a thawing of hostilities between the two former rivals.

“Well, I think she’s going to be on our team because we have a lot of the same ideas, the same thoughts,”

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US Expected To Resume Sale of Offensive Weapons to Saudi Arabia

Posted by M. C. on May 28, 2024

Biden claimed to end ‘offensive’ support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen back in 2021 but continued to back the bombing campaign

It saves SA from the effort of hijacking (SA is good at hijacking) Yemeni aircraft…if Yemen has any aircraft.

by Dave DeCamp

The US is expected to resume the sale of “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

US officials told the paper that President Biden was expected to lift a ban on the sale of offensive weapons to Riyadh that he put in place over three years ago, although US support for Saudi Arabia has continued.

In February 2021, President Biden said he would end “offensive” support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen and paused a bomb sale to Riyadh. However, the US continued to support the Saudi bombing campaign, as it was revealed a few months later that the US was still servicing Saudi warplanes.

President Biden also continued to push forward arms deals for Saudi Arabia, including a $650 million air-to-air missile deal, which the administration claimed was for defense. Before the Saudis and the Houthis reached a truce at the end of March 2022, Riyadh launched heavy airstrikes in Yemen, and it was one of the deadliest periods of the war for Yemeni civilians.

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Biden’s Tariffs Are Another Nail in the Dollar’s Coffin

Posted by M. C. on May 28, 2024

“Of course, the costs of these tariffs will be borne by Americans wishing to purchase electric cars and American electric car manufacturers that use material imported from China. These new tariffs thus undercut Biden’s goal of getting more Americans to drive electric cars.

“…Ronald Regan was correct when he told me that no nation has ever abandoned gold and remained great.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/bidens-tariffs-are-another-nail-in-the-dollars-coffin/

by Ron Paul

President Biden recently raised taxes on American consumers and businesses and may have hastened the end of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. President Biden did this by increasing tariffs on Chinese imports.

Specifically, President Biden raised tariffs on products including Chinese-produced steel and aluminum and many components imported from China for use in manufacturing electric vehicle batteries. Tariffs on Chinese-made semiconductors are rising from 25 to 50 percent while tariffs on Chinese-made electronic vehicles are rising from 25 percent to an astounding 100 percent.

Of course, the costs of these tariffs will be borne by Americans wishing to purchase electric cars and American electric car manufacturers that use material imported from China. These new tariffs thus undercut Biden’s goal of getting more Americans to drive electric cars.

The tariffs on Chinese goods give China even greater Inventive to challenge the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The same week Biden imposed these tariffs, China President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced they were strengthening their alliance in order to better challenge US military and economic hegemony. This is a reaction to US foreign policy of the post-Cold War era which has reversed the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger strategy of pursuing good relations with China.

A part of the announcement recognized use of the Chinese yuan and Russian ruble for over 90 percent of the trade between the two countries. This is only the latest challenge to the dollar’s world reserve currency status. China’s share of the global economy has more than doubled in the last twenty years from 8.9 percent to 18.5 percent while the US share of the global economy has fallen from 20.1 percent to 15.5 percent. China’s rise is one reason why the US currency held by foreign central banks has dropped from over 70 percent in the early 2000s to under 60 percent today.

Last year, China and Saudi Arabia agreed to expand their use of their own currencies in trade between the two countries. This is the first time the Saudis have agreed to use a currency other than the dollar for the oil trade since Henry Kissinger negotiated a deal where the Saudis would trade exclusively in dollars in return for US support for the Saudi regime. The “petrodollar” is a major reason why the dollar retained the world reserve currency status after President Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold.

If the dollar loses its world reserve currency status, the US government would lose the ability to “weaponize the dollar.” Other countries would then have less incentive to abide by US demands, including related to regime changes. It would also reduce other countries’ interest in purchasing US debt instruments. This would increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to monetize the debt, creating more price inflation and leading to a major economic crisis. This will not just end the US military and financial empire abroad. It will also end the welfare state at home.

Since both major presidential candidates and most Congress members are not serious about making the changes in foreign, domestic, and monetary policy necessary to avoid the crisis, America will likely face hard times in the near future. However, the end result may be a return to limited, constitutional government and a political class that realizes that Ronald Regan was correct when he told me that no nation has ever abandoned gold and remained great.

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The Unifying Principle: Here’s Why The Political Divisions In The US Today Cannot Be Mended

Posted by M. C. on May 28, 2024

In this regard I set globalists apart from typical leftists. Globalists are indeed leftists at their core but they are also builders, and not in a good way. Globalists don’t build societies, they build prisons. Once the useful idiots on the left have finished the job of deconstructing America the globalists plan to come in with a new ideal, a new religion, a new foundation based on worshiping THEM.

Here is where we find the greatest split of all – The spiritual nature of our impasse.

Liberty can indeed be a unifying principle, but it has to be freedom combined with wisdom and moral compass.  Meaning, liberty alone is not enough.

Alt-market

By Brandon Smith

Recently I was watching a short documentary about the history of political discourse and division in the US and it got me thinking about how the internal conflicts of the past might relate to the rampant social battles Americans are dealing with today. From early disagreements between various Founding Fathers on hot button issues like the Sedition Act, central banking and standing armies, to epic and disastrous conflagrations like the Civil War, America has never been “of one mind” on everything.

Overall, though, the longstanding assumption is that even when we slip and fall into disarray Americans will find common ground and move on towards the future together.  It’s a nice sentiment, but what if this ideal no longer applies?

There are some people that argue there was never a golden era for the US; that we’ve always been destructive, or exploitative or “imperialist.” Of course, it’s very easy to examine any given time period through the lens of modern sensibilities and pass judgment. How we would do things today is not necessarily how we would do things yesterday. We can’t easily condemn the men and women of the past without at least recognizing that we will probably never see the issues of their day from their perspective.

The political left is the most egregious violator of this principle. They have a bad habit of trying to rewrite history according to their current ideological cultism and applying their taboos to time periods when civilization had very different views on how to function. The progressive philosophy is partially rooted in “futurism”; the idea that all old ideas and ways of doing things must be abandoned to make way for new methods. In other words, they think everything “new” is better and must be embraced.

Frankly, this theory has never proven correct. Not every old idea should be left behind and not every new method is better. In fact, most ideas that leftists think are new are actually very old. There’s nothing ground breaking about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), it’s just another form of Marxism based on personal identity rather than the traditional class politics.

Do you want to know what DEI really is? It’s a vehicle for forced association.

Forced association is used to leverage populations into a homogeneous soup, a hive mind with no individual thought or right to discriminate against destructive groups and ideologies.  But if America is experiencing an agenda of forced association today then we have to ask – What is there to be gained?  Why pressure people who fundamentally disagree with each other on every level to coexist within a society? Why do the people in power want this so badly?

Well, for the central planners (usually socialists/globalists), tribalism is a big no-no. People going their own way is unacceptable. If the populace thinks they can divide and separate and live differently from each other, then how can the establishment continue to exist? For a one-world government to be achieved ALL divisions must be erased and everyone has to either love or fear the purveyors of “unity.”

Separation must, therefore, be demonized.  The problem is, there’s no way to blackmail a population into association, not in the long term anyway.  A group is an abstraction without form; it means nothing until the individuals involved share a unifying principle.  When I look back at political disagreements in history I find that there is a vital factor that existed during past conflicts that does NOT exist today.

Even during the worst of times including the Civil War both sides of the division held the same basic principles and morals. They had a lot of the same values, a shared religion and a shared understanding of reality. They were people connected by the same American soul, they merely disagreed on singular issues. The goal for each side was for America and its fundamental heritage to survive, even if they didn’t always obey every aspect of the Constitution or the existing leadership at the time. This is not how things work in 2024.

In terms of surface level politics its obvious that there will never be peaceful reconciliation between woke progressives and conservatives/independents. One side or the other has to go, and I think the majority of people in the US want leftists to go.

To be clear I’m not saying that all people on the political left are exactly the same. There’s definitely a political spectrum from traditional liberals to extreme activists. But there is no denying that, for now, woke zealots control the levers of power and influence within the Democratic Party and the leftist media. They also have the explicit backing of every major institution from corporations to NGOs to government.

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Doug Casey on How Artificial Intelligence Will Radically Transform the World

Posted by M. C. on May 25, 2024

by Doug Casey

Bottom line? In the short run, my guess is that AI will be like a child and tend to think in a way its parents—mostly woke programmers—tell it to think. But as it grows up, it will have a mind of its own. Since I like to think that the universe isn’t actively malevolent, I believe that as AI matures, it will be more and more “pro-survival” in regard to humans, its creators. That implies that it will be non-aggressive, reasonable, antiwar, promarket, and libertarian.

The ethical problem of AI boils down to the fact that the most bent, dishonest, and dangerous humans tend to be the ones who want to control the others. Those people, and their criminal ethics, are the problem, not AI—which itself is good.

International Man: Amazing new technologies—once the realm of science fiction—are now an imminent reality.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most critical areas where this is happening.

What is your take on AI advancements, and how do you see it evolving in the future?

Doug Casey: AI is going to be huge. No, strike that gross understatement—it’s already huge. It will change everything. There’s no question the abilities of technology are increasing exponentially, at the rate of Moore’s Law. In other words, computing power is still doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months while the cost halves. This is also true in the areas of biotech, nanotech, robotics, 3D printing, and genetic engineering. These technologies are going to fundamentally transform the very nature of life itself. AI will accelerate their progress by an order of magnitude.

In a decade or two, it’s arguable that robots will be more intelligent, more innovative, and perhaps even more thoughtful than humans. They’ll no longer just be today’s odd-looking mechanical beasts that can perform a few parlor tricks. Soon, there will be not just mechanical robots, but biological robots, especially after quantum computing is commercialized. Who knows what will come after that.

The advances in all these technologies are very positive not just from an economic point of view, but from a humanist and even spiritual point of view as well. Despite the dangers from the State having first access to them, they’ll turn out to be very liberating on all levels.

AI and robotics, like all technologies over the long run, will be friends of the average man. They’ll catapult the average standard of living much higher. With a little luck, in a generation, we’ll think of today’s world as being oppressive and backward—assuming we don’t regress to a new Dark Age. Much of the work we do today is “dog work.” Good riddance to it.

We’re really on the cusp of the biggest revolution in world history. I look forward to it. It will cure disease and old age. The avalanche of new wealth that will be created will effectively eliminate poverty. Mankind’s wildest dreams and ambitions can be realized.

Ray Kurzweil is almost certainly right that we will have the Singularity within a generation. That will change the whole nature of reality unrecognizably, permanently, and totally. Assuming, of course, that various government officials don’t start World War 3 using nuclear, cyber, and biological weapons.

International Man: We asked an AI platform to write a poem about Doug Casey. Here is what it produced in about two seconds:

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Like So Much Else, The Fuss Over ‘International Law’ Is Really About Narrative Control

Posted by M. C. on May 25, 2024

Caitlin Johnstone

The other day ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said that when preparing to apply for the Israeli arrest warrants he was told by “a senior leader” that “This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin.” You don’t typically hear empire managers voice this kind of frank view when addressing the public, but it’s not surprising that they hold this view behind the scenes. And in practice it’s not even technically false — a casual glance at the list of prisoners detained at The Hague turns up individuals from small, weak, mostly African countries.

In reality, “international law” is a lie in two significant ways. It’s a lie in the sense that western powers falsely purport to value and uphold it, and it’s a lie in the sense that it has no meaningful existence since it’s only ever enforced on small, weak powers. 

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/like-so-much-else-the-fuss-over-international

The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to cease its assault on Rafah, an order which will certainly be disregarded by Israel with the full support of Washington. This comes days after the International Criminal Court announced its intention to seek warrants for the arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes in Gaza, which will also be dismissed by Israel and its hegemonic ally to the west.

The other day ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said that when preparing to apply for the Israeli arrest warrants he was told by “a senior leader” that “This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin.” You don’t typically hear empire managers voice this kind of frank view when addressing the public, but it’s not surprising that they hold this view behind the scenes. And in practice it’s not even technically false — a casual glance at the list of prisoners detained at The Hague turns up individuals from small, weak, mostly African countries.

It’s just a cold, hard fact that “international law” is never enforced against powerful nations or their protected allies, because there’d be no way for the international community to enforce those laws upon them without waging a massive world war involving nuclear-armed states. The US notoriously put in place its “Hague Invasion Act” between its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure that it can use military force to free any military personnel of the US or its allies (this would include Israel) who wind up detained by the ICC. There is currently no force in the world that would be both willing and able to stop the US war machine from doing such a thing.

A law isn’t really a law if it can’t be enforced. If I kill someone in a modern city, a bunch of law enforcement officials will come and arrest me and I’ll be sent to prison. If I killed someone in the western United States during the nineteenth century, it wouldn’t matter what the laws of the town happen to say if the sheriff and his posse are too afraid of me to bring me to justice. That’s kind of what’s happening on an international level — there’s a big band of lawless thugs who do as they please, because there’s no one else around with enough firepower to enforce any laws on them.

In reality, “international law” is a lie in two significant ways. It’s a lie in the sense that western powers falsely purport to value and uphold it, and it’s a lie in the sense that it has no meaningful existence since it’s only ever enforced on small, weak powers. 

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Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee

Posted by M. C. on May 24, 2024

By Gib Kerr

Obama famously said in his 2008 campaign that he sought to fundamentally transform America. And now we see the fruits of his labor. Thanks to people like Obama, America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

Cancel culture follows Saul Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals, particularly his rule to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Interestingly, Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky and his tactics. Beginning with the Clintons, cancel culture has become embedded in modern political discourse.

Cancel culture is all about tearing things down. It is inherently destructive. It builds nothing. It creates nothing. It only destroys.

Like the Vandals who destroyed Rome, cancel culture is destroying American culture. Systematically, it seeks to target and eliminate America’s heroes. It rages against symbols of our cherished traditions, urging its hateful mobs to “burn it down!”  It is fueled by anger, bitterness, envy, and vindictiveness.

It is the same mean-spirited mindset that led French revolutionaries to reject their past, create a new calendar starting with Year Zero, and execute over seventeen thousand of their fellow citizens.

The widespread growth of cancel culture in America, with its unforgiving intolerance of all things past, instills a sense of terror—particularly in young people—that they too may be cancelled for saying or even thinking dissenting ideas. This leads to massive self-censorship, the absolute squashing of debate and civil discourse, and ultimately to the suppression of free and creative thinking.

Cancel culture rejects the Western and Christian notions of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In its place, cancel culture promotes violence, terror, intimidation, intolerance, and retribution.

As Paul Kengor notes in his 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx, Marx’s Communist Manifesto spawned a twisted ideology that explicitly encouraged violence and terror to abolish private property, destroy religion, and even abolish the family. It called for an unprecedented application of  cancel culture to fundamentally transform society. But transform it into what?

Haven’t we learned from over a century of experience what Marxism, with cancel culture as its constant accomplice, produces? Are the deaths of 100 million victims of communism not instructive enough?  We know from experience where it all leads and what happens when society is “fundamentally transformed.”

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Speaker Johnson Pushes For US Missiles Deep Into Russia

Posted by M. C. on May 24, 2024

Who is pulling his strings?

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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