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Posts Tagged ‘Unity’

The Growing Fissures in NATO Unity

Posted by M. C. on April 6, 2024

Nothing that a US taxpayer cash infusion won’t cure.

by Ted Snider

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-growing-fissures-in-nato-unity

nato. flags of members of north atlantic treaty organization and

Despite the damage done in Ukraine and NATO’s now apparent inability to support Ukraine’s defense against Russia strongly enough, one item in the western win column is the claim that NATO is more unified following the damage done by Donald Trump. Even aside from NATO preparing for the possible consequences of a second Trump term, that win may not be so unequivocal.

Vladimir Putin “thought NATO would fracture and divide. Instead, NATO is more united and more unified than ever—than ever before,” President Joe Biden said on February 21, 2023 and again in Europe on July 13. “I would argue NATO is stronger than it’s ever been,” he said. “President Putin’s war continues to be a strategic failure,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 8, 2023. “In fact, that alliance—NATO—is stronger and more united than it’s ever been.”

But fissures have appeared. The smaller NATO powers are mad at the larger ones, as are the middle powers, and the large NATO powers are mad at each other.

The smaller and newer NATO countries have recently raised the divisive question of “whether there are first-rank and second-rank countries in NATO.” “Are we equals or are we not equals?” asked Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas.

The Eastern European members of NATO feel passed over in two ways. First is their lack of representation in the top NATO jobs. The second is the dismissal of their more aggressive stance against Russia and their dismissal of Russian and NATO red lines.

Senior officials in the small Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were all once part of the Soviet Union, maintain that the big NATO powers in Western Europe push them off to the side because of their more aggressive position in support of Ukraine against Russia. They complain that the large Western powers “do Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia than [they] do.”

The Eastern European members of NATO have consistently seen themselves as dragging a reluctant, Western-centric NATO into the battle against Russia in defense of Ukraine. The East, led by Poland and the Czech Republic, has much more aggressively pushed for maximally arming Ukraine and dismissing the risk of escalating the war. Poland led the campaign to send tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine. The Czech Republic recently announced that it was on the verge of purchasing 300,000 artillery shells from countries outside of Europe to make up for European Union shortfalls and has said that the EU could obtain half a million more. By percentage of GDP, Estonia is the leading donor to Ukraine with Lithuania third, Latvia fifth, and Poland eighth. That is ahead of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

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Biden the Bogus Benevolent Dictator – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on December 13, 2022

Last December, Biden issued an executive order to “rebuild trust in government.” Unfortunately for Biden, he cannot also command people to have delusions about politicians being trustworthy. Biden’s executive order called for “transforming federal customer experience anBut Biden is failing as badly as Mussolini did when he promised to make the trains run on time. Social Security Administration local offices were shut for more than 600 days straight. Federal bureaucrats stayed home, “imposing hardships on millions of people who need to apply for benefits, apply for a card” and wounding “many of those in greatest need of its services,” according to the Washington Post.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/biden-the-bogus-benevolent-dictator/

by James Bovard

On July 4, President Biden declared, “Liberty is under assault … rights we assumed were protected are no longer.” Biden, however, was referring solely to a few Supreme Court decisions he deplored, not to the federal supremacy he championed for almost 50 years in the Senate and the White House.Once a president escapes the confines of the Constitution, the American people will eventually find themselves shackled.
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Though Biden took office preaching the need for “unity,” he increasingly rules like an elective dictator, relying on executive orders and dubious decrees. The Constitution is not permitted to impede the president from any action that might temporarily increase his approval ratings by one or two percentage points. Biden’s arbitrary actions are thrilling some of his supporters. Many of the protestors who denounced Trump during his presidency were not opposed to dictators per se; they simply wanted different dictates, and Biden is doing his best to satisfy their demands.

Mandates for all

On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order compelling people to wear face masks any time they were on federal property. The edict had an unwritten exemption for Washington Poohbahs. Biden went to the Lincoln Memorial a few hours after signing the order, where he posed by the statue of Abraham Lincoln; neither Lincoln nor Biden were wearing a mask. Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki scoffed at a reporter’s concern over the apparent crime: “He was celebrating a historic day in our country…. We have bigger things to worry about.”

Biden’s order inflamed legions of junior Stasi, who screamed in rage at anyone hiking in national parks without a mask. If Biden has a right to compel everyone to wear a mask on property controlled by the National Park Service, he would also have the right to dictate that people wear two masks — a policy endorsed by flip-flop king COVID Czar Anthony Fauci on Tuesdays and Thursdays but not on other days of the week.

Biden issued an executive order early last year proclaiming “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” That target would require almost tripling the amount of land under government restrictions — an area twice the size of the state of Texas. Farmers dread future decrees that could hogtie them in perpetuity. The Biden administration is also pushing to revive the Obama-era definition of wetlands that would effectively permit federal control over “virtually any wet spot — or occasionally wet spot in the country, including ditches, drains, seasonal puddle-like depressions, intermittent streams, ponds, impoundments, prairie potholes, and large ‘buffer areas’ of land adjacent to every waterway.”

Last November, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to perpetuate a national moratorium on evictions of renters. Six justices scoffed that the administration’s legal defense relied “on a decades-old statute that authorizes … measures like fumigation and pest extermination.” The court declared, “Our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” The decree (initially promulgated by President Trump) profoundly disrupted housing markets in many areas and turned struggling landlords into hostages of renters who were tacitly encouraged by the feds to cease paying their bills. Biden extended the decree even though he publicly admitted, “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster. But there are several key scholars who think that it may — and it’s worth the effort.” Biden’s standard for “constitutional” apparently includes any dictate that might conceivably be accepted by five Supreme Court justices.

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This Is What the Progressives Want To Do to Us | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on March 6, 2021

The specific aspect of Bentham’s thinking (wide-ranging thinking, I should add) that appeals to the progressive mindset is his belief that there is no natural law, natural rights, natural liberty, and natural and naturally harmonic outcomes, especially in the marketplace.

Thus, it is not hard to see how, to paraphrase F.A. Hayek, “the worst get on top” in places like Minneapolis and Portland and, increasingly, Washington, DC. The sheer ferocity of the political radicals toward an alleged infraction of their view of “justice” is out of proportion to the actual alleged offense. In this atmosphere, most people just want out, leaving the radicals even more firmly entrenched to impose even more damage to others.

https://mises.org/wire/what-progressives-want-do-us

William L. Anderson

For all of the campaign and inauguration talk about “unity” and moderation, President Joe Biden is governing like a progressive on all fronts, from cultural issues to the armed forces to the economy. Biden’s unprecedented thirty-two executive orders his first week in office provide evidence he and his party intend to expand executive governance well beyond anything this country has seen in its long history. Furthermore, all his political appointments are people who fall well to the left of any kind of recognizable political center and who share the president’s progressive ideology.

So, what do progressives believe, anyway? What do we mean by the term “progressive,” and why is it in the ascendency today? Furthermore, even though its destructive results are well known when we look at its history, progressivism seems to have taken over almost all of our political and social institutions, shutting down all dissent in the process.

In 2014 libertarian attorney and scholar James Ostrowski published a book entitled Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America, which is a worthwhile read if you wish to better understand this nebulous ideology. I heartily endorse the book (having read it myself), but will let Ostrowski speak for himself, and in this piece I will attempt to carve out a small niche of my own in writing about progressivism.

While the term “progressivism” sounds like something to describe modern, secular intellectual and political movements, it actually has its roots more than two hundred years ago in the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Anyone who has taken a course in history of economic thought is well familiar with Bentham, who influenced the English economists from Thomas Malthus to John Stuart Mill and even beyond that.

The specific aspect of Bentham’s thinking (wide-ranging thinking, I should add) that appeals to the progressive mindset is his belief that there is no natural law, natural rights, natural liberty, and natural and naturally harmonic outcomes, especially in the marketplace. This placed him in opposition to Adam Smith and also to Frédéric Bastiat, whose Economic Harmonies stood in contrast to Bentham’s world view that free market exchanges, unless they were guided by wise people in high places, would have socially harmful results over time.

Bentham’s view was that in order to provide what he called “the greatest good for the greatest number,” governing elites were to ensure that they could guide large numbers of people to act in what progressives today would call “the public interest” by setting structures of incentives—positive and negative—depending upon the situation. We can see this as a precursor of what would culminate in the Communist “experiments” that turned vast stretches of Asia and Europe into mass death zones and in the works of American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who saw people as little more than rats in a box to be properly trained by their intellectual betters.

Understand that this is not an attack on incentives; all of us rely on incentives one way or another, be it the entrepreneur’s pursuit of profit or the rewards (and punishments) we give our children to help them find direction in life. One of the most interesting applications of incentives can be seen in how British economist and social reformer Edwin Chadwick saved countless lives by changing the pay structure of delivering British prisoners to the penal colony in Australia.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, ship captains delivering prisoners from England to Australia were paid up front for each prisoner who boarded their vessels. Having already been compensated, captains had no incentives to care for their captive crew, and about half of the prisoners died during the trips. In 1862, Chadwick convinced policymakers to change the compensation to include only those prisoners who survived the long passage. Not surprisingly, the survival rate rose to 98 percent.

While Bentham’s utilitarianism was a precursor to modern progressivism, one safely can say that progressives today are less interested in laying out structures of incentives to guide human behavior than they are in simply being obeyed. To better understand that point, we need go no further than Biden’s recent cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline in the upper Midwest and his administration’s determination to cripple one of this nation’s most productive industries.

Perhaps there is no greater article of faith among American progressives than that the oil and gas industries are creating a “climate crisis” that supposedly will engulf the planet and make life unlivable. Not surprisingly, the Keystone project has been in the cross hairs of American environmentalists for a long time, since much of the oil to be transported comes from Canadian tar sands. Declares the New Yorker in support of the cancellation:

In the spring of 2011, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen helped orient the pipeline as a climate-related fight, pointing to the massive amounts of carbon contained in the Canadian tar-sand deposits and making the case that, if they were fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the climate.

Hansen’s predictions over the past three decades are reminiscent of those of economists who have predicted ten of the last two recessions, but it is the rare journalist who actually goes beyond being a mouthpiece for the climate change cult, so we are supposed to believe that if the Keystone project were to continue and the Canadian tar sands were further exploited, the result would be rising temperatures that would make the planet unlivable. (Whether or not the tar sands are economically viable, given current energy prices, is another matter, but Biden didn’t nix the pipeline because he believed the project to be uneconomical, but rather because the environmentalist constituency that dominates his government hates any fuels that originate in the ground.)

During his campaign, Biden made his displeasure about oil and natural gas known and vowed to “phase out” the industry (read that, cripple one of the most productive industries in our economy and certainly one of the most indispensable industries at that) and replace fuels with electricity that comes primarily through wind power and solar panels. Again, we see the progressive mindset at work.

First, and most important, even if Biden were successful in completely ending all “fossil” fuel use by 2035—a date that seems to be in vogue with progressive politicians and “woke” corporations like General Motors—it is doubtful that such a move would have any significant (or even insignificant) effect upon the world’s climate.

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Contact William L. Anderson

William L. Anderson is a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.

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“Unity” | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2021

DeSantis told Dr. Fauci he trusted his own state health authorities over financially incentivized federal officials. The conclusion of the conference call went like this:

  How much do you stand to earn from these vaccines, Dr. Fauci? And, Joe, if you continue with this course of action, I will authorize the state National Guard to protect the movement of Floridians,” DeSantis said.

“Address me as Mr. President or President Biden,” Biden said.

“I will not, and you can go fuck yourself,” DeSantis said before hanging up.

Hmmm. Now, that got right to the point, didn’t it?  And consider this was not just Citizen Joe Blow mouthing off to alleged President Joe B, but the governor of a populous state. And what if it suggests a trend?

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/unity/

James Howard Kunstler

In their latest act of degeneracy disguised as virtue, the Progressive Wokesters of Washington failed again to nail that old orange coonskin to the wall. Rather, they only embarrassed themselves in the effort, even as far as submitting faked evidence. You’d think there would be some penalty for dishonoring Congress like that, but Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has for now just skated for submitting doctored Twitter posts to the court of senators.

Watch now as some Wokeness-inflamed DC prosecutor is enlisted by the Lawfare beagles to charge former President Trump with a catalog of crimes under the city’s ordinary statutes. They’ll get a conviction pronto in a local DC court for sure — considering the town’s demographics — and then the appeals will drag on well into the next ice age. In the meantime, as long as he remains healthy, and evades assassin’s bullets, Mr. Trump will go after his antagonists in Congress like a mad dog toward the 2022 midterm. Mr. Swalwell had better learn to code. Or maybe his talents are more attuned to hackery.

The impeachment loss, which was predetermined by simple math, seems to have only driven Nancy Pelosi crazier, perhaps because there are no more traps she can lay for the ex-president, or maybe because her managers’ strategy was revealed to be so shamelessly dishonest. Now she must turn her attention to the Woke agenda, which, she may sense, will only accelerate a cratering US economy — things like the inane Green New Deal and open borders and disabling what’s left of the American oil industry. Good luck with your to-do list, Nance!

Mr. Biden, rumored to be president — or at least regarding himself as such — has been proclaiming the wish to “unite” the warring tribes of America. He may say so, but he doesn’t really mean it, not one little bit, and everybody knows it. Every executive order he’s issued his first month on-the-job is designed as much as a slap in the face to more than half the country as it is an actual policy goal. He’s only succeeded in demonstrating that Progressive Wokery is a badly manufactured pseudo-reality based on vengeance fantasies and the wish to coerce the people who didn’t vote for him — who probably outnumbered the ones that did, a galling authentic reality.

This played out dramatically last week in a telephone parley between Mr. Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the governor’s refusal to lockdown his state. The world-famous Dr. Fauci was also on the call, in which Mr. Biden threatened to curtail American citizens travel to Florida by road and air — since an offshoot of Covid-19 policy has been to drive a huge demographic exodus from the economically failing states of New York, Illinois, and California down there. He also threatened to withhold federal funding to Florida and deny the state access to Covid-19 vaccines. Dr. Fauci chimed in, “Governor, do you want to be responsible for reinfecting the nation? Truth is, we don’t even know how effective current vaccines are against the UK strain.”

DeSantis told Dr. Fauci he trusted his own state health authorities over financially incentivized federal officials. The conclusion of the conference call went like this:

  How much do you stand to earn from these vaccines, Dr. Fauci? And, Joe, if you continue with this course of action, I will authorize the state National Guard to protect the movement of Floridians,” DeSantis said.

“Address me as Mr. President or President Biden,” Biden said.

“I will not, and you can go fuck yourself,” DeSantis said before hanging up.

Hmmm. Now, that got right to the point, didn’t it?  And consider this was not just Citizen Joe Blow mouthing off to alleged President Joe B, but the governor of a populous state. And what if it suggests a trend?

Another obvious and disconcerting irony in that affair was, of course, that Mr. Biden seeks to restrict the movement of people across Florida’s borders for fear of spreading new strains of Covid-19, while he insolently authorizes thousands of illegal aliens to cross our border with Mexico daily, with no testing for the virus. Could Mr. Biden’s intentions look any worse?

The calls for “unity” are a dodge. Unity requires broad consensual reality, not cynically-constructed pseudo-realities designed to cancel any notion of the common good, a common culture, or the public interest. Without Mr. Trump capering in the spotlight, all you see and hear is the clunky stage machinery of a dangerous mass entertainment aimed at crude mind-fuckery. Going forward, the frail and illegitimate Joe Biden is center-stage in that spotlight. He’s already screwed the pooch on so-called “policy” in less than a month, but the brutal facts of America’s crippled economy are crashing down on him and his Woke managers like the wrath of history. How long will it be before he just gets the hook?

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You’re looking at a country more UNITED than ever. We need more division. | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on June 3, 2020

The last thing we need is a coast to coast dictatorship, with no options for choosing the style of government we want to live under.

But when you open up the market for solutions by towns, cities, counties, and states, we have a shot at getting out of this without a civil war.

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/youre-looking-at-a-country-more-united-than-ever-we-need-more-division/

By Joe Jarvis

What we need is more fragmentation and division. Not conflict and turmoil.

Right now chaos is rampant across the USA, both from rioters and police officers/ National Guard.

This is unity. This is the nation’s police forces, local, state, and federal, uniting against protests in every state in the union.

This is the unavoidable, one size fits all, unified approach to governing a nation of over 300 million, orders coming down the hierarchy from DC.

As the federal government illegally deploys American soldiers on US soil, we have never been so united by force, by fear, by rage, violence, and destruction.

No one mentions that unity sucks so bad.

But what kind of idiot thinks 300 million people should get along?

We have different ideologies, cultures, hopes, and fears. And it is not left/ right, black/ white, millennial/ boomer, or any other binary divider.

It is much more complex than that, but for clarity’s sake, it basically comes down to geography.

It is Appalachia versus New England, California versus Texas, New York City versus upstate, and country farmers versus city slickers.

And none of these groups should have to get along.

They just have to not hurt each other. And they can do that by getting out of each other’s business, and leaving each other alone.

Right now, the biggest case for why we NEED to hurt each other, is to UNITE the country.

People will continue to hurt each other unless federal and state governments allow people to go their separate ways.

We don’t need to be united. We need the exact opposite.

For instance, New York City has been digging its own grave for years. But I’ve never lived there, never paid taxes to New York, and have never been forced to obey its laws.

But I’ve been forced to bail out New York City banks and Wall Street. I’ve been forced to bailout out the New York State government. And now I might be forced to pay for the federal military to invade the state to keep order– to unify the nation.

Compare that to an Idaho town that was threatened with Antifa violence and looting. They all strapped up with rifles, pistols, and went about town for a nice walk, or a pleasant meal. There was no violence despite (or because) “the armed citizens patrols were in such large numbers they effectively took over the streets.”

Other towns in New Hampshire, Texas, and across the nation have done the same.

Are you hearing this? We the People are in control. We can protect our communities where we live, work, eat, breath, and walk the physical streets.

But we cannot protect our country, because there is nothing to protect. It doesn’t exist in the same form as the area we physically occupy and interact with every day.

Minneapolis needs different reforms than Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Texas is not going to have the same solution as California.

And that is not just okay, but the only thing that will keep things on this continent peaceful and prosperous.

The last thing we need is a coast to coast dictatorship, with no options for choosing the style of government we want to live under.

But when you open up the market for solutions by towns, cities, counties, and states, we have a shot at getting out of this without a civil war.

Each one’s solution to various problems–from racist policing to massive debt–will be different. Some will work better than others.

I have strong opinions that free market solutions and individual freedom with strong respect for private property rights will vastly improve the lives of literally everyone (except a handful of scumbags connected to the government who make their money on war and monetary manipulation).

But I don’t need to spread these ideas across the nation. All I need is one city, or one little region, willing to respect my beliefs, and able to defend them. Or rather, one little place that allows me and my fellow citizens to defend ourselves.

That’s a truly well regulated militia– everyday people training to defend their homeland on a moment’s notice.

Defend being the key word. Not attack, oppress, or invade. Repel aggressors, whether it is the police, the rioters, or the foreign enemy in Washington DC.

They are all threats to our freedom and prosperity, but the police and military are the greater threat.

But beyond mustering in the local park on Saturday mornings, we can get more professional with solutions to law and law enforcement which do not involve the state.

Subscribe so you won’t miss more on this private policing solution.

Never let a good crisis go to waste is the mantra of the elites.

In tumultuous times, their tactics have extra potency. They reach for more power.

But this is also when the elite are most vulnerable.

By studying their tactics, you will be more prepared to guard against, and counter-attack the enemy.

The current crisis is being used to exploit the masses. But it also presents tremendous opportunity to take the power back, and reshape this world.

Society is entering a new period of transition, a struggle that will reveal the elites of the next generation.

Now is the time to seize your power if you intend to be among their ranks.

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Nolte: ‘New York Times’ Changes Trump Headline to Appease Far-Left Extremists

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

2) The New York Times is not an independent news organization with principles and integrity. Rather, its business model is comfort food for leftists, a business model it’s not willing to risk under any circumstance.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/08/06/nolte-new-york-times-changes-trump-headline-appease-far-left-extremists/#

by John Nolte

The far-left New York Times caved to the leftist Twitter mob with a major switch in headlines between its first and second editions.

The first print edition’s headline read, “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.”

But after the Blue Checkmark Mafia freaked out, the Times caved with a late edition headline that reads, “Assailing Hate But Not Guns.”

New York Times print editor Tom Jolly tweeted out the original edition.

Within an hour, through, the Times had caved to the left’s demand that President Trump never-ever-ever receive even a neutral headline.

After the original edition was revealed, and even though we are constantly told that criticizing the media is a form of violence, the Times was assaulted through social media by all the usual suspects.

And because there is no appeasing the left, as of this writing, #CancelNYT is still trending on Twitter and still filled with angry and deeply unhappy Trump-haters threatening to either cancel their New York Times subscriptions, or bragging that they already have.

CNN’s Joan Walsh one of those who announced her cancellation.

Even flailing and failing Democrat presidential candidate Paddy O’Rourke got into the dangerous business of criticizing the media.

This all proves three things we already knew…

1) The left is totally fine with threatening and attacking the media … if those attacks come from the left.

2) The New York Times is not an independent news organization with principles and integrity. Rather, its business model is comfort food for leftists, a business model it’s not willing to risk under any circumstance.

3) These bitter Blue on Blue battles are a thing of beauty… 

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Liberia's Daily Talk: All The News That Fits On A ...

all The News That Fits

 

 

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