by Credit Repair News, Sebastian Pulvera on Thursday 13 May 2021 02:00 AM UTC-05 | United States Credit Report Repair News. Top Stories to help consumers fix bad credit, gain higher credit score, remove bankruptcy, free annual Equifax, TransUnion, Experian credit report. Free Credit Repair Counseling | (888) 502-1260 | | | Tuesday 11 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 "No, I won't serve you," said an employee of a Seattle chocolate shop to two cops. The incident allegedly occurred on April 27 at Chocolati in the Wallingford neighborhood. The employee—a white girl with green streaks in her hair—refused to sell the cops a box of chocolates. The cops then left. The Post Millennial contacted Chocolati for comment and a store employee who answered the phone said in conversation: Is this how you want to spend your time? Getting essential workers in trouble? Shouldn't you be spending your time harassing homeless people? You really want to spend your time getting essential workers in trouble? Go f*** yourself. After the story broke, a third officer said that he had experienced the same treatment at another Chocolati location. The company is a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is very much against the police. I have not seen any liberal news sites, progressive pundits, or Democratic politicians denounce this blatant act of discrimination. The hypocrisy of the Left on discrimination knows no bounds. Imagine if two blacks, two American Indians, two Hispanics, two Jews, two Muslims, two homeless people, two illegal aliens, two soldiers, two hippies, two gays, two lesbians, or two transsexuals were refused service at this or any other place of business. No matter how small a town it happened in, it would be national news for weeks. We would be harangued by the news media day and night about the evils of discrimination. There would be demonstrations, riots, and boycotts. The talking heads on television would lecture us on how immoral and unethical it was to refuse anyone service. There would be calls for a federal civil rights lawsuit. The "public accommodations" section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be trotted out: "All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin." To this has been added discrimination on the ground of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or age. Now, all of this being said, I still support the right of this chocolate shop in Seattle or any business establishment anywhere to refuse to serve anyone. This is not because I hate blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, homeless people, illegal aliens, soldiers, hippies, gays, lesbians, or transsexuals. It is because I believe in individual liberty and property rights. If a Christian baker or a florist wants to refuse to bake a cake or arrange flowers for the "marriage" of a same-sex couple, then the couple are free to take their business elsewhere. If the Catholic owner of a store doesn't want to sell to Protestants, then there are many other options available. If a Republican businessman advertises that members of the Republican Party receive a discount, then Democrats can pay full price or take their business elsewhere. If a church of cultural conservatives refuses to receive as members those who are part of the "LGBTQ+ community," then there are many other churches that will receive them with open arms. If a black-owned business doesn't want to sell to "whitey," then there are plenty of other businesses that are colorblind. When I have been refused service at a restaurant because I would not wear a face mask to walk to my table, I ate elsewhere. In a free society, the right to refuse service is universal and absolute. All businesses would have the right to discriminate against any potential patron on any basis and for any reason. No one has the right to shop at any particular store, eat at any particular restaurant, or work any particular job. Since discrimination is not aggression, force, coercion, threat, or violence, the government should never prohibit it, seek to prevent it, or prosecute anyone for doing it. Anti-discrimination laws are an attack on property rights, freedom of association, and freedom of thought. But instead of being repealed, they are being expanded every year to include more and more oppressed groups. This is anathema to a free society. Hey cops, next time try a donut shop. They have never been known to refuse to serve cops. The post The Hypocrisy of the Left on Discrimination appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 The new mating call of the Bolshevik regime that now rules Washington, D.C. is "respect the science." Even senile old Joe Biden, a lifelong corrupt political hack who may not even remember anymore what planet he is on, is fed the line by his handlers. It's really hilarious to be preached at in this way since such people obviously know nothing whatsoever about science and the scientific method and do not have the brain matter to begin understanding it. What the establishment really means by "respect the science," however, is: "Do as we say, or else." They don't mean real science and scientific knowledge, derived from research, testing of theories, intellectual debate and discussion. No real scientist would ever utter the words "settled science," especially areas of scientific research that are based on statistical probabilities, as is true of ALL medical science. ("The practice of medicine is all about statistics," a young emergency room physician said to me recently). The notion that the earth was flat was once "settled science," after all. Only ignorant buffoons and political shysters like Al Gore or Joe Biden (and your typical American "journalist") would mumble such nonsense. There are no longer any tradeoffs in life, government has announced, such as recognizing that lockdowns abolish economic freedom, impoverish millions, and destroy lives. All of that is to be ignored, and anyone who brings it up is branded as an enemy of human civilization. "Truth" is determined solely in Washington, D.C. as espoused by the establishment's paid propaganda peons such as one Anthony Fauci, a lifelong government bureaucrat who went to medical school sixty years ago but never actually practiced medicine himself. Fauci, and only Fauci, is to dispense "scientific" information about pandemics and such, we are told by our rulers; all others are to be condemned as quacks and conspiracy theorists in the name of "respecting the science." Only Fauci possesses the deep, dark secrets of "science." When a Trump administration cabinet member told the media in the Spring of 2020 that a second opinion was a good idea, they jeered at and attacked him. They worked diligently to try to destroy Dr. Scott Atlas, who did manage to offer a second opinion from his position in the Trump administration, even though he was essentially censored by the "mainstream media." When Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci why he was still wearing two masks in public after being vaccinated, the media did not follow up on his obvious question, but rabidly attacked the senator for bringing it up. Nothing in the world is more un-scientific than this version of "science" that is practiced by the white-coat-wearing prostitutes of the "public health" bureaucracy and its political patrons. Real Science Now that "respect the science" has replaced "In God We Trust" as the motto of America, let's make some initial suggestions regarding how to go about following the science in another area, economic science. ("Mainstream" economics has aped the scientific method of the physical sciences ever since the early twentieth century). For starters, we should immediately abolish all minimum-wage laws, since economic science has for generations explained how it causes unemployment among the least skilled and educated workers in society, primarily young people. In fact, all price ceilings and price floors should be abolished as well. Economic science has proven for generations that price ceilings cause shortages, wastage of resources, and corruption as bribery becomes a method of allocating the shortages. They have also caused death and disease for centuries when applied to food and other essentials of life. Price floors in agriculture cause surpluses by encouraging farmers to supply more agricultural products than people are willing to buy at artificially-inflated prices. This causes enormous waste of food when there are people in the world going hungry. Government often uses tax dollars to buy the surplus food and then gives it away to poorer countries as "foreign aid," patting itself on the back for doing so. The problem, however, is that dumping millions of tons of grain, for example, on a poor country has often caused the price of grain there to approach zero, driving that country's farmers into extinction. Rent-control laws are price ceilings on rental housing that cause housing shortages and blight, as landlords often just abandon their properties rendered profitless by the rent control laws. They should therefore all be abolished immediately. Economic science (and common sense and reality) has also proven for centuries that government "enterprises" are notoriously less efficient than private enterprises operating in a regime of private property and free-market prices. Just look at the whole sordid history of socialism. Economic science therefore calls for the privatization of all government enterprises. It is also well established that the Fed has made inflation and unemployment worse ever since it was created in 1913, having caused numerous boom-and-bust cycles and ruined the value of the dollar. It also disguises the costs of war (and all other government programs it finances), making senseless, aggressive wars more frequent and longer lasting. Economic science therefore calls for the abolition of the Fed. Respect the science. The Chicago School of Economics has devoted decades to research and publications on the topic of government regulation, one conclusion of which is that most (if not all) regulation of industry is for the benefit of the industry at the expense of the rest of society. After all, why would corporate lobbyists lobby for regulations that benefit others when they could lobby for regulation that benefits themselves at the expense of others instead? Chicago economists call this the "capture theory of regulation." Economic science calls for the abolition of all such regulation. Respect the (economic) science. A related issue is how it has been proven by economic science that occupational licensing regulation by governments is just another monopoly-creating, crony-capitalist scam. Such regulatory bodies are typically controlled by incumbents in a profession with the purpose of limiting entry or competition for their services, which would of course drop their price. Shut them all down, says economic science. Some years ago economics professors Richard Vedder, James Gwartney, and Randall Holcombe prepared a statistical study for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that showed that when government stuck to its basic constitutional functions and the political plunder of rent seeking was limited, a case could be made that the stable society that resulted was conducive to peace and prosperity. But once government expands beyond that and becomes involved in taxing one group of citizens in order to buy votes from other groups, the effect is impoverishing as more an more people decide that the way to pad their incomes is political manipulation instead of work and production. Fewer engineers and more lawyers will therefore be a curse on society. The Birth of the Transfer Society by P.J. Hill and Terry Anderson explains this in historical perspective. Accordingly, any governmental function that is not specifically listed in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution should be immediately abolished. Respect the science. The post The New 'Respect-the-Science' Regime appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 There have been few politicians in modern times who have done more to undermine personal liberty, capitalist prosperity, small government and especially world peace than the Cheney Clan. So upon Liz Cheney's ouster from the #3 job in the US House GOP hierarchy, we say: Good riddance! And, no, we don't begrudge her vote to impeach the Donald. The man is such an insufferable bully-boy and megalomaniac that upon his richly deserved exile from Washington her "yes" vote amounted to little more than a slightly offensive Bronx cheer. But what is profoundly offensive about the Cheneys is their central role in high-jacking the Republican Party in behalf of the demented worldview of a small priesthood of neocon intellectuals. The latter have turned the Warfare State of the now defunct cold war with the Soviet Union into a globe-spanning imperialist monster that has bled America dry fiscally and unleashed unjustified destruction and mayhem all around the planet in a manner that would have put even Imperial Rome to shame. The immorality, stupidity and monumental fiscal waste of the neocon Forever Wars is bad enough, but actually there is something even more lamentable. To wit, in today's world, prosperity and liberty depend more than ever on fiscal rectitude and a conservative party that fights relentlessly and effectively to uphold it. Otherwise, the inherent self-aggrandizing proclivities of the state and the pork-barrel propensities of elected politicians will mushroom unchecked. Yet impairment of the fiscally conservative party was the basic and original reason why the Reagan Revolution failed. It was hard enough to get elected GOP legislators to walk the plank in behalf of canceling popular Washington handouts or curtailing the entitlement benefits of up to 45% of the public that gets checks directly or indirectly from Uncle Sam. And that was even with the tailwind of a charismatic communicator in the Oval Office. But when they were asked to face the slings and arrows of domestic interest groups and beneficiaries enraged by the Gipper's budget cuts while simultaneously voting for massive defense increases even larger than the domestic cuts, well, they just didn't. After the early 1981 round of modest spending cuts it was all over except the shouting because the incipient neocons of the day convinced Reagan that the economically and industrially collapsing Soviet Union was still striving for world domination and first strike nuclear capacity, when both propositions amounted to exaggerations, lies and self-serving propaganda of the military industrial complex. As a result, Reagan essentially threw in the towel on domestic spending retrenchment to save his huge and wholly unnecessary defense buildup. In turn, that meant that virtually no domestic programs of material import were abolished, thereby insuring that the programs modestly cut in 1981 could live for another day and an eventual recovery and make-whole, which is what actually happened. So when the defense budget kept rising and some of the domestic cuts just got pushed back to state and local governments, the total spending share of GDP barely missed a beat during the Reagan era. In fact, the government spending share of GDP ended higher than during any previous presidential term since WWII. Total Government Spending Share of GDP: - Eisenhower 1960: 27.5%;
- Kennedy-Johnson 1968: 30.7%;
- Nixon-Ford 1976: 32.9%;
- Carter 1980: 32.7;
- Reagan 1988: 33.7%
Still, contrary to neocon revisionism, the Reagan defense buildup did not cause the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was the inherent impossibility of communist dictatorship and central planning that caused its economy to fail, the morale of its people to wither and its military to run out of resources. This not only put the lie to the Reagan defense buildup, but, more importantly, offered the Republican party a historic reprieve. It could now jettison its embrace of Big Government on the Pentagon side of the Potomac and its politically motivated acquiescence to the Welfare State to assure funding for the the Warfare State. But that was not to be and it's Liz Cheney's old man more than anyone else who is responsible. By becoming a stalwart war-hawk, he helped lose the strategic moment in history in 1991 when the shell of the Soviet Union formerly disappeared from the face of the earth, bringing to a close the 75-Years War that incepted with the "guns of August" in 1914. At that point, America needed a Secretary of Defense who could see that the waters of war had parted, and that the Warfare State which had barnacled American governance for most of the years since the Great War could now be dismantled. Destiny had, in fact, bestowed upon Washington a golden opportunity to lead the world to disarmament and a restoration of the status quo ante of 1913—a world at peace and enjoying a flowering of global commerce, prosperity and freedom like never before. What America got, instead, was a brash advocate of Washington hegemony in a now so-called "unipolar" world and an arrogant champion of applying military power or the threat of it against weak states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea which did not bend to Washington's edicts, even if they presented no national security threat to the American homeland (they clearly didn't). Indeed, Dick Cheney emerged during those years as the foremost advocate of the American Imperium, and not unsurprisingly so. We had known him as a colleague in the US House as a moderate conservative on the issues, but also as a man in a hurry to accumulate power. That he did by rising to the rank of House GOP Conference Chairman after 1985, the same position that Liz Cheney holds today. So when Bush the Elder called upon him to become defense secretary in 1989, Cheney was by then a 50-year old who had spent his entire career suckling from the public teat. That started in the Wisconsin statehouse in 1966 and thereafter he was quickly off to Washington as a Congressional intern in 1969. There he soon hitched his star to Don Rumsfeld in the Nixon White House, eventually working his way up the slippery slope to Chief of Staff to President Ford. And that was followed by election to Congress from Wyoming in 1978 and embrace of the neocon national security ideology during his years in the US House in the 1980s. The man's sins as Secretary of Defense were history changing. He fully supported Bush the Elder's rash drawing of a line in the sand during Saddam's petty quarrel with the Emir of Kuwait over OPEC quotas; the latter's alleged theft of oil from Iraq via directional drilling along their artificial border that had been affixed by the Arab League as recently as 1960; and the war debts to Kuwait that had stemmed from Saddam's Gulf States supported invasion of Iran during the 1980s. The fact is, America had no dog in that hunt and should have never intervened military, but essentially did so because it could for the first time since WW II owing to the Soviet Union's disappearance. What added insult to injury, however, was Dick Cheney's personal diplomacy in convincing Saudi Arabia to permit several hundred thousand American troops to be deployed on the sacred lands of the two holy places, the catalyst which turned America's anti-Soviet mercenary army in Afghanistan, Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda jihadists, into implacable enemies. The war on terrorism which inexorably followed thereupon was essentially the spawn of Cheney's foolish brinkmanship in a middle eastern world he did not remotely understand and which presented no threat to the safety and security of America anyway. Likewise, it was Cheney and his neocon pals in the administration of Bush the Elder who launched the unwarranted demonization of Iran, which became another bloody thread in the neocon hegemony. The phony "leading state sponsor of terrorism" charge, in fact, has justified Washington's destructive meddling in the region ever since. Ironically, after Washington helped Saddam Hussein make war on the Iranians during the 1980s, Cheney ultimately put him to the gallows during the regency of Bush the Younger, paving the way for his fortunately aborted plan to take out Iran's embryonic uranium enrichment facilities with nuclear bombs. The single most important development attendant upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, of course, was the opportunity for NATO to declare victory, fold its tent and dissolve. Alas, that was not to be, either, because it was Dick Cheney and his neocon henchman who got the NATO allies into the first Gulf War and conceived of the perversely misguided strategy of bringing the former eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union into NATO. So doing, they laid the foundation for today's utterly pointless and dangerous confrontation with Russia owing to NATO's hostile presence on its very doorstep. Needless to say, the Cheneys are a case of the rotten apple falling directly and completely from the poisoned tree. To our knowledge, Liz Cheney has never strayed an inch from the neocon line on any of the Forever Wars, Washington's foolishly provocative pressure on Russia or the current insane $800 billion national security budget. Undoubtedly, the Donald's rejection of the neocon imperium, poorly and inconsistently executed as it was, is what turned the Cheneys into enemies. And for that, at least, he deserves some credit. 'Moreover, if his misguided followers in the ranks of House Republicans can now get rid of the Cheney Clan, he deserves even more. At least that would be a start toward the restoration of a conservative party free from the toxic influence of Washington's neocon cabal, and therefore capable of re-engaging with its real mission in American democracy—that of bringing Leviathan to heel on both sides of the Potomac. PEAK TRUMP, IMPENDING CRISES, ESSENTIAL INFO & ACTION Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner. The post Good Riddance, Liz Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Shop all books by Judge Napolitano "No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." — Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Last year, a detainee at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, filed a writ of habeas corpus in a federal district court in Washington, D.C. — to which all cases from Guantanamo have been assigned — and it was denied because he was not in the United States. A writ of habeas corpus is the ancient individual right of every person confined by the government to require the government to justify the confinement under the law to a neutral judge. That right is guaranteed by the Constitution. This is so because the framers, who knew of summary incarceration by British authorities, made certain that the new government here could not treat any persons as the British government had treated the colonists. One of the arguments that the British government had made was that the rights of Englishmen — which included the right of habeas corpus — only applied to persons in England. So the framers included language in the Constitution that prohibited the suspension of the right except in cases of rebellion or invasion of such magnitude that the courts could not sit. Like most rights in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution does not grant the right of habeas corpus — which comes from our humanity — but prohibits the denial of it. When Congress attempted to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in 2006, denying the jurisdiction of federal courts to hear habeas applications from any detainee at Guantanamo Bay, the Supreme Court, in a landmark case called Boumediene v. Bush, invalidated Congress' attempts to interfere with the application of constitutionally guaranteed liberties. It did so for several reasons. There was no invasion or rebellion in the U.S. preventing the courts from sitting. And, assessing the validity of constitutional rights is a judicial not a congressional function. It also ruled that all people detained by the U.S. government have the right to compel the government to justify the detention in a federal court. The court reviewed the efforts of British monarchs to move prisoners to far-off places, and American forces in wartime doing the same, to argue to courts that the rights guaranteed to people in the British or the U.S. constitutions only applied in areas over which the governments had sovereignty. The court rejected that argument and basically ruled that wherever the government goes, the Constitution — and thus the rights it guarantees and the restraints it imposes upon government — goes with it. That has been the law of the land for all persons in custody — no matter their place of birth or place of detention or how they got there — until a decision of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The recently invalidated ruling came down during the 2020 presidential campaign and never made the front pages. That 2020 decision, which rejected the petition for habeas corpus filed by the detainee at Guantanamo Bay, purported to change the law. It held that unless a detainee is physically present in the United States or has property here, he is not entitled to habeas or due process relief. There are two constitutional principles at stake. The first is habeas corpus, and the second is due process. The detainee who sought habeas corpus was met with a judicial decision that denied him both. It also purported to change the Constitution by adding the physical presence of a person or property as a precondition to exercising his fundamental rights. These judicially crafted preconditions appear nowhere in the Constitution or in the Boumediene case. In fact, they defy both. If the physical presence of the person or his property were required before the courts could hear his case, then the feds could keep anyone out of court by converting his property and taking him out of the U.S. That would give the government the legal equivalent of a light switch with which to turn on or off anyone's due process or habeas corpus rights. It was no surprise, but it got little notice, when the full U.S. Court of Appeals late last month vacated the decision of the three-judge panel and agreed to hear the case this fall. All of this leads to profound questions. Did the framers mean that the government could move someone and his property around so as to escape judicial review of his confinement? Do our rights really come from our humanity as the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth Amendment declare? And if they do, how can the government switch them on and off at its convenience? The right to due process — written notice of allegations, a hearing before a neutral jury with constitutional protections, an objectively fair process that includes the right to appeal — expressly protects all persons; thus, it is not limited to citizens. The government's assaults on liberty are unending. It has even attacked personhood, and twice succeeded. The government argued and the court ruled in the Dred Scott case that Blacks are not persons and in Roe v. Wade that babies in the womb are not persons. Dred Scott was reversed by the War Between the States and the 13th Amendment. Roe is, regrettably, still with us. The point of all this is the Constitution should mean what it says. The government has no lawful or moral power to switch our rights on and off. Judges cannot add to the Constitution's requirements nor subtract from its protections. If these principles were not so, then no liberty would be safe. Reprinted with the author's permission. The post Can Federal Judges Alter the Constitution? appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Wake up Lew, it's just a dream. But wait, without that dream, there is no hope. Without hope there is no plan. Without a plan, there is no sense of completion, no direction, no purpose. Tell us that dream again. Less government equals more freedom. Suddenly your dream needs no interpretation. We have been lulled by the freedom we had and failed to preserve it. Among the demagogue Presidents, revered over time with Presidential Libraries, remembered as gods of their time, none would ever even be interested in reading such a treatise. So I read a key sentence: “His job is simply to oversee a tiny government with virtually no power except to arbitrate disputes among the states, which are the primary governmental units." That is entirely foreign and unfamiliar to me because I was raised in the shadow of Presidents as (false) heroes, rescuers, gods. Example: conniving Richard Nixon….. old women still revere him and go in busses to visit his Presidential Library, to praise the man who removed any value to their paper money. What fools! Save for George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and maybe JFK and Ronald Reagan, the rest were clowns. Aside from gaining the Presidency, would any of the past Presidents been considered a man of any great achievement or moral example? Looking back, Lincoln, considered the greatest President, slaughtered the Indians and quashed the South and with it, free enterprise and competition. Your dream may come true via the back door. It suggests the independent States would then be competitive with each other. Except for the California gold rush and when the covered wagons moved west, no prior American generation grew up thinking movement to another State would change their fortunes. But movement and autonomy remain, and those who cherish freedom run to minimalist States… South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Florida, Alabama… Ron Desantis (FL governor) for President? He would be taking a step backwards. Like the Apache Indians who could pick up their tents and move to water and food, the advantage goes to those who can make moves on the chessboard. The motor home is suddenly off the government radar. The polarization is historical. Now will those freedom States take the obvious next step, come to their senses, and print their own money? When money is competitive, the more valued currency will prevail. Texas has the gold to do that. It appears the non-freedom States where people survive on a hand out, will be completely vaccinated, but wither on the vine. Location becomes a life and death decision. The map to freedom lies with less government. Few realize the Federal government is a false proposition, a Ponzi scheme. Its current solution, now having been exposed for what it really is, is to eliminate people since it can't live up to its promises. And history will have been changed. It started with a dream. But only for those who made a move on the chessboard. The post Re: An American Classical Liberalism appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 First, America increasingly relies on strong-arm tactics instead of competence. For example, in the de facto 5G competition, Washington cannot offer Europe a better product at a better price, so it forbids European countries to buy from China. The US cannot compete with China in manufacturing, so it resorts to a trade war. The US cannot make the crucial EUV lithography equipment to make advanced semiconductors, as neither can China, but it can forbid ASML, the Dutch company, from selling to China. Similarly, the US cannot compete with Russia in the price of natural gas to Europe, so by means of sanctions it seeks to keep Europe from buying from Russia. This is not reassuring. Second, the Chinese are a commercial people, agile, fast to market, cutthroat, known for this throughout Asia. America is a bureaucratized military empire, torpid by comparison. America has legacy control over a few important technologies, most notably the crucial semiconductor field and the international financial system. Washington is using these to try to cripple China's advance. A consequence has been a realization by the Chinese that America is not a competitor but an enemy, and a subsequent explosion of investment and R&D aimed at reducing dependence on American technology. There is the well-known 1.4 trillion-dollar five-year plan to this end. One now encounters a flood of stories about advances in tech "to which China has intellectual-property rights" or similar wording. They seem deadly serious about this. Given that Biden couldn't tell a transistor from an ox cart, I wonder whether he realizes that every time the US pushes China to become independent in x, American firms lose the Chinese market for X, and later get to compete with Chinese X in the international market. Anyway, give Trump his due. He lit this fuse. A few snippets 
Prototype of China's 385 mph maglev train
The above beast, developed entirely in China, is the first to use high-temperature superconducting magnets to keep the train floating just above the rails. HTSC magnets are a Big Deal because they can achieve superconductivity using liquid nitrogen as coolant instead of liquid helium for classic superconductivity, this costing, say the Chinese, a fiftieth of the price of using helium. The use of HTSC is very, very slick. The train will extensively use carbon-fiber materials to keep weight down, suggesting that the Chinese cannot distinguish between a train and an airplane. Asia Times "China's Hydrogen Dream is taking Shape in Shandong" "A detailed pilot plan being worked out to transform Shandong, a regional industrial powerhouse, into a "hydrogen society" holds out much hope of delivering on the green promise." The article, hard to summarize in a sentence, is worth reading. As so often, the Chinese do things, try things, while the US talks, riots, imposes sanctions, sucks its thumb, and spends grimly on intercontinental nuclear bombers. "Huawei is Developing Smart Roads Instead of Smart Cars" "Multiple sensors, cameras, and radars embedded in the road, traffic lights, and street signs help the bus to drive safely, while it in turn transmits information back to this network-" "Quantum Cryptography Network Spans 4,600 Km in China" Quantum Key Distribution, QKD, allows unhackable communications. China read Ed Snowden's book on NSA's snooping, realized it had a problem, and set out to correct it. If this spreads to other countries—see below—much of the world could go black to American intel agencies. The Chinese may have thought of this. "…colleagues will further expand the network by working with partners in Austria, Italy, Russia and Canada. The team is also developing low-cost satellites and ground stations for QKD." The last sentence is interesting. If China begins selling genuinely secure commo gear abroad, it is going to make a lot of intel agencies very unhappy. Did I mention that the Chinese are a commercial people? Further: "Chinese scientists achieve quantum information masking, paving way for encrypted communication application." My knowledge of this might rise to the level of blank ignorance after a good night's sleep and three cups of coffee. However, the achievement made the American technical press, and suggests Chinese seriousness about gaining privacy. The video below shows how China constructs high-speed rail lines as if painting a stripe on a highway. Since they can't innovate, they have to get by with inventing things. China to Europe rail freight: "Over 10,000 trains and 927,000 containers were forwarded via the China-EU-China route in 2020, China Railways has announced. The current volume of traffic has grown by 98.3% year-to-year, covering 21 countries and 92 cities in Europe." America makes aircraft carriers. China sells stuff. NikkeiAsia: "What China's Rapidly Expanding Nuclear Industry Means for the West" One Chinese reactor in Pakistan just went live, with another expected in a few months. Says Nikkei, "The Karachi reactor is just the latest of these to come onstream, with the World Nuclear Organization listing a dozen different projects at the development or planning stage across a dozen countries from Argentina to Egypt in its recent survey. Many more are under discussion." In addition, says Nikkei, China intends to have the whole industry from technology to materials indigenous to China and outside of American sanctions. See above, about driving China to make things. First China-Built DRAM Chip Reaches Market DRAM, dynamic random-access memory, appears in almost everything electronic and is a juicy market. Chang Xin Memory, which makes it, redesigned it slightly to remove American technology. If Chang Sin can ramp up volume, which has yet to be established, guess what foreign companies won't sell much of in China any more. 
Pingtang Bridge, recently opened. Well over a thousand feet high
Even in my short two weeks recently in China, I saw that the Chinese do not believe in vertical motion. An American, encountering a mountain, would, sensibly enough, go up and over. This is not the Chinese way. They go through. Similarly, on finding a valley, they do not go down and up. They go across. There may be some genetic abnormality behind this, or maybe interbreeding with space aliens. But it results in hellacious bridges. "Is China Emerging as the World Leader in AI?" "Summary. China is quickly closing the once formidable lead the U.S. maintained on AI research. Chinese researchers now publish more papers on AI and secure more patents than U.S. researchers do. The country seems poised to become a leader in AI-empowered…" Some argue that Chinese patents are of low quality. Maybe so. But don't bet the college funds. "China begins construction of world's longest superconducting cable project" "China's first 35 kV high-temperature superconducting cable demonstration project has started construction by State Grid in Shanghai and it is expected to be completed by the end of the year. This is the world's largest transmission capacity, the longest distance, 2000A current the highest commercial 35 kV superconducting cable project." Regarding the 5G War Trump could have bought 5G from Huawei, gotten a sweetheart deal, great prices, factories in America, and so on. Instead he banned Huawei from the US and then twisted arms of the vassal states of Europe. Thus neither America or Europe has the service, but China is rolling it out fast. Brilliant, Don. This gives China a running start on smart factories, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and the like. 
"An almost entirely automated port in China, during unload of a container ship. "
America talks about 5G, China uses it. NikkeiAsia: "The port is an example of how operator China Merchants Group has been working to automate and mechanize more operations using ultrafast fifth-generation wireless technology. By developing innovative ways to run the port as efficiently as possible, the company aims to accelerate overseas expansion." Aviation Week "Face It: The J-20 is a Fifth Generation Fighter" Says AvWeek: "Clearly, Chengdu's engineers understand the foundation of fifth-generation design: the ability to attain situational awareness through advanced fused sensors while denying situational awareness to the adversary through stealth and electronic warfare. The J-20 features an ambitious integrated avionics suite consisting of multispectral sensors that provide 360-deg. coverage. This includes a large active, electronically scanned array radar designed by the 14th Research Institute, electro-optical distributed aperture system, electro-optical targeting system, electronic support measures system and possibly side-array radars. "In a 2017 CNTV interview, J-20 pilot Zhang Hao said: "Thanks to the multiple sensors onboard the aircraft and the very advanced data fusion, the level of automation of J-20 is very high. . . . The battlefield has become more and more transparent for us." Most of the story is visible only if you have a subscription to AvWeek. Asia Times: Tesla loses lead to local upstart in China's EV market . The headline is kidding. The car that is outselling Tesla is a $4,200 el cheapo for short-haul shopping and picking up the kids in the city. 
Sexy as a truss ad, but…useful. I'm telling you, put the college funds in this company, not truss ads. Made by an SAIC-GM partnership, majority owned by China, where it was designed and made. Will be sold internationally. "Unlike Tesla, which requires purpose-built charging stations, the Mini can be plugged into a home power system to charge, which takes about nine hours. It has a range of about 120 kilometers and a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour, according to the carmaker's promotional materials." Designed and put into production in one year. (Did I mention that the Chinese are a commercial people?) China's Y-20 strategic transport aircraft gets key indigenous engine: reports Chinese design. How close it is to being ready for prime time is not clear, but it is flying. An inability to make high-end engines has been a problem for China. The WS'20 is a high-bypass turbofan of Chinese design. Finally, Global Times", Beijing's news site: "China's trade volume increases 37% y-o-y in April, marking 11 consecutive months of positive growth" Nuff said. Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review. The post America Makes Aircraft Carriers, China Makes Money appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Mad Max drove around looking for gas. At least he was able to do that. Many Americans will wake up today to find they have no gas – or rather, that none's available. Hard to drive around looking for it when you haven't got any – and can't get it, either. Which is also a function of not being able to pay for it – a problem Max never had. Thanks to the "cyber attack" on the Colonial Pipeline by "Russian hackers"- in air quotes to emphasize the questionability of "cyber" whatever to do what is alleged to have been done (I have discussed this with some knowledgeable people in the business who tell me they smell a rat; that the story has all the ring of truth of a Fauci press conference) there is no gas at many stations along the east coast – especially the Carolinas and Virginia, where Gesundheitsfuhrer "Coonman" Northam just declared a state of emergency (again) over not just the lack of gas but the Max Max behaviors the lack of gas might prompt. The fuel shortage is probably temporary but – as with the weaponization of hypochondria – the damage may last longer. Fuel price spikes are happening; I spent almost $70 filling up my old muscle car with premium (which it needs) which I may need, if the situation gets ugly. I also fueled up all my five gallon jugs and my bikes and my truck. Looks like I've found some gazzuline. For now. It may not be much, but it'll keep me mobile, for awhile. It's not just cars that won't move, either, when the pumps run dry. Food – and practically everything else people need – gets delivered by trucks that use gas (and diesel) and when these stop moving, the food and the rest stops showing up – and that's when people tend to go Mad Max. Keep in mind how they behave when the weather guy says a snowstorm is coming. Read the Whole Article The post Looks Like We Can't Find Any Gazzuline appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 For the past year, I've been demonstrating that every major scientific assertion about the so-called pandemic is a lie. This article is about something else. The money. Money that makes the bailout/stimulus sums look like chump change. Money that makes Bill Gates look like a guy on welfare scraping by. To understand my line of approach here, you have to understand that people are conditioned, in many ways, to accept modern medical care. One successful method of conditioning: a whole nation is invaded by medical propaganda and medical treatment, during a purported crisis. The bottom line: "only doctors can save the population." Think about that chunk of mind control. Think about the long-term implications. And as you read on, picture very populous countries that, to a significant degree, still rely on non-modern traditional medicine—herbs, natural remedies, etc. Do you really believe that when the authorities declare the medical/pandemic crisis is over, the populations of such invaded countries will just go back to their former beliefs and practices? "Thank you for saving our lives with drugs and vaccines, but now we'll return to our ancient Ayurveda and acupuncture…" The invasion of the doctors and the public health authorities, during the crisis, is the point of the spear. The way in. The first planned stage of PERMANENTLY CONVERTING THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO MODERN PHARMACEUTICAL MEDICINE. We're talking about MARKETS. New markets as targets of the invasion. Where are these new markets? China, India, Indonesia, for example. Each of these countries still maintains, to a significant degree, traditional non-modern healing practices. What will happen in the long term, beyond the current "pandemic," if Big Pharma is able to gain a total monopolistic position in these nations? What if the invasion of the COVID drugs and vaccines is successfully followed by new waves of modern medical/pharmaceutical ground troops, and a complete takeover of these nations is achieved? How much money would we be talking about? Here, from registerednursing.org (12/25/20) is a startling assessment: "During one's lifetime, over $400K will be spent on the average American's healthcare in today's dollars. And that is if medical costs rise [at] the same rate as inflation. If medical costs rise at 3% more than inflation, your healthcare will cost over $2MM, the vast majority of which will take place after the age of 45." Yes, healthcare costs in America are very high. So let's cut that $400K in half. Let's say the lifetime healthcare cost for the average person is $200K. How many people, combined, live in China, India, and Indonesia? Let's peg that figure at 3 billion. Now, imagine that 30 years from now, each one of those people is being subjected to modern medicine, at the rate of $200K for a lifetime. What is 3 billion people multiplied by $200K? 600 TRILLION DOLLARS. That's a market. Is that a permanent market pharmaceutical companies and hospitals and public-health doctors think is worth fighting for? A market to control and own? And if the opening salvo in that fight needed some tremendous IMPACT, some serious conditioning and mind control, would the declaration of a global pandemic do the trick? Would the masks and distancing and lockdowns and business closures and bankruptcies and travel bans; the wall-to-wall media fear-porn day after day; the contact tracing and antiviral drugs and vaccines; the heavy police presence to enforce all the restrictions; the inflated false case and deaths numbers—would that declared pandemic be the way to go…if the ultimate goal is a 600 TRILLION DOLLAR MARKET? You bet it would. And that's the way corporations view the planet. As markets. Territories to capture. And now you can see the financial reason why the powers-that-be are forcing this false pandemic on the whole world in every possible way: THE MONEY that's at stake. CODA: A person could say a 600-trillion-dollar market is impossible; there isn't enough fake money you can invent to cover it. And maybe that's true. But however you need to cut that awesome figure to accommodate what banks can achieve, the final number is still going to be an overwhelming percentage of the global economy. Which is why I've been saying for some years that we live in a medical civilization. "But…but wait…you're never going to get all three billion people into lifetime care in the modern medical system…" "True. The three billion people and the 600 trillion-dollar market is the striven-for ideal, the far shore of the pot of gold." "And those three countries you mentioned—China, India, and Indonesia—they already have a significant amount of modern medicine." "Yes they do. But they also have a significant amount of non-modern traditional healing. And notice that I only mentioned those three nations, in arriving at the 600 trillion-dollar figure. I said nothing about about South America or Africa, for example." "Oh." Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport's blog. The post Pandemic: Follow the Real Money, the Unthinkable Amount of Money appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Pepe Escobar explains why Henry Kissinger must have lost the diplomatic plot. Henry Kissinger, 97, Henry the K. for those he keeps close, is either a Delphic oracle-style strategic thinker or a certified war criminal for those kept not so close. He now seems to have been taking time off his usual Divide and Rule stock in trade – advising the combo behind POTUS, a.k.a. Crash Test Dummy – to emit some realpolitik pearls of wisdom. At a recent forum in Arizona, referring to the festering, larger than life Sino-American clash, Henry the K. said, "It's the biggest problem for America; it's the biggest problem for the world. Because if we can't solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States." In realpolitik terms, this "kind of Cold War" is already on; across the Beltway, China is unanimously regarded as the premier U.S. national security threat. Kissinger added U.S. policy toward China must be a mix of stressing U.S. "principles" to demand China's respect and dialogue to find areas of cooperation: "I'm not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results…This is the complex task we have… Nobody has succeeded in doing it completely." Henry the K. actually must have lost the – diplomatic – plot. What Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are now involved in, full time, is to demonstrate – mostly to the Global South – how the American-enforced "rules-based international order" has absolutely nothing to do with international law and the respect of national sovereignty. At first I had archived these Henry the K. platitudes out of sight. But then someone who used to hold a stellar position at the top of the U.S. Deep State showed he had been paying close attention. This personality – let's call him Mr. S. – has been one of my invaluable, trustworthy sources since the early 2000s. Mutual confidence was always key. I asked him if I could publish selected passages of his analysis, not naming names. Consent was given – ruefully. So fasten your seat belts. Dancin' with Mr. S. Mr. S., in a quite intriguing fashion, seems to be expressing the collective views of a number of extremely qualified people. Right from the start, he points out how Henry the K.'s observations explain today's Russia-China-Iran triangle. The first point that we make is that it was not Kissinger who created policy for Nixon, but the Deep State. Kissinger was just a messenger boy. In the 1972 situation the Deep State wanted to get out of Vietnam, which policy was put in place as containment of communist China and Russia. We were there based on the domino theory. He goes on: The Deep State wanted to achieve a number of objectives in approaching Chairman Mao, who was antagonized by Russia. It wanted to ally in 1972 with China against Russia. That made Vietnam meaningless, for China would become the containing party of Russia and Vietnam no longer meant anything. We wanted to balance China against Russia. Now, China was not a major power in 1972 but it could drain Russia, forcing it to place 400,000 troops on their border. And our Deep State policy worked. We in the Deep State had thought it through, and not Kissinger. 400,000 troops on the Chinese border was a drain on their budget, as later Afghanistan became with over 100,000 troops, and the Warsaw Pact had another 600,000 troops. And that brings us into Afghanistan: The Deep State wanted to start a Vietnam for Russia in Afghanistan in 1979. I was among those against it, as this would needlessly use the Afghani people as cannon fodder and that was unfair. I was overruled. Here Brzezinski was playing Kissinger; another overrated nothing who just carried messages. The Deep State also decided to crash the oil price, as that would economically weaken Russia. And that worked in 1985, driving the price to eight dollars a barrel, which ate up half the Russian budget. Then, we basically gave permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait as a ploy to send in our advanced army to knock him out and demonstrate our superiority to the world in weaponry, which very much demoralized the Russians and put the fear of God into Islamic oil. Then we created the Star Wars fiction. Russia to our surprise lost their nerve and collapsed. Mr. S. defines all of the above as "wonderful" in his opinion, as "communism went out and Christianity came in": We then wanted to welcome Russia into the community of Christian nations, but the Deep State wanted to dismember them. That was stupid, as they would balance against China at least from their Mackinder point of view. It was naive on my part to hope to a return of Christianity, as the West was moving rapidly toward total moral disintegration. In the meantime, our ally China continues to grow as we were not finished with the dismemberment of Russia and the advisors we sent to Russia destroyed the whole economy in the 1990s against my objections. The 78-day Belgrade bombing finally woke Russia up and they started a massive re-militarization as it was obvious that the intention was in the end to bomb Moscow into the ground. So defensive missiles became essential. Thus, the S-300, S-400, S-500 and soon S-600s. The Deep State had been warned by me at our meetings on how bombing Belgrade in 1999 would cause Russia to remilitarize and I lost the argument. Belgrade was bombed for 78 days versus the vengeance bombing of Hitler for two days. And China continues to grow. Why balance of power doesn't work And that bring us to a new era – that started in practice with the Chinese announcement of the New Silk Roads in 2013 and Maidan in Kiev in 2014: China wakes up to all of this in that they begin to realize that they have been just used, and that the U.S. fleet controls their trade routes, and decides to approach Russia in 2014 just about the time of their witnessing the Maidan overthrow of Ukraine. This overthrow was organized by the Deep State when they started to understand that they had lost the arms race, and did not even know what was happening. The Deep State wanted to draw Russia into a Vietnam again in the Ukraine to drain them and crash the oil price again, which they did. Beijing studied this and saw the light. If Russia is overthrown, the West will control all their natural resources, which they see themselves needing as they grew into a giant economy larger than the U.S. And Beijing starts to open up a warm relationship with Moscow seeking to obtain land based natural resources as oil and natural gas from Russia to avoid the seas for natural resources as much as they can. In the meantime, Beijing massively accelerates its building of submarines carrying missiles capable of destroying the U.S. fleets. So where does Kissinger in Arizona fit in? Now, Kissinger reflects the Deep State angst on the Russia-Chinese relationship and wants this split up for dear life. This is interestingly covered here by Kissinger. He does not want to tell the truth about balance of power realities. He describes them as "our values", when the U.S. has no values left but anarchy, looting, and burning down hundreds of cities. Biden hopes to buy all these disenfranchised masses as money printing goes wild. So we are back to Kissinger shocked at the new Russian-Chinese alliance. They must be separated. Now, I do not agree with the balance of power intriguers in that morality or noble values should govern international relations, and not power. The U.S. has been following balance of power dreams since 1900 and now it faces economic ruin. These ideas do not work. There is no reason the U.S. cannot be a friend of Russia and China and the differences can be worked out. But you cannot get to first base as balance of power considerations dominate everything. That is the tragedy of our time. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. The post Insider View: The Tragedy of the U.S. Deep State appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 It was said during our Mideast military adventures, and has been considered a truism of war, that you can't really win a conflict without "boots on the ground." For it's difficult to completely subdue a people from afar. It may not be too different with battles for civilization. I stated in 2012, addressing a long-developing reality, that the culture war was over as the Left had achieved social dominance. "What is occurring now is a pacification effort," I wrote — one designed to stamp out the "conservative" guerrilla-group diehards. Other than its intensification, the only thing that has changed about this effort in the last decade is that it has a new name: "cancel culture." With GoogTwitFace (Big Tech) having upped its bias and dropped its mask and corporate America joining academia, the media and entertainment on the Dark Side, these entities act as a malevolent monolith silencing dissident voices from Maine to Maui. But it would be naïve to think the Left, which craves power and wants total control, will be satisfied with its current soft authoritarianism. This brings us to two developments that could cause the raising of eyebrows if not militias. Consider: If you heard about a Third World country in which the leadership was purging the military of political opponents, would you assume it was just an exercise in ideological nepotism? Or would you suppose the leaders wanted a military of devoted fellow travelers who would, when asked, unflinchingly turn their guns on domestic opponents of the regime who couldn't be cowed by other methods? Now, should the assumption be different just because the military purge occurs in a developed country? Just such an event has been taking place in the U.S. for at least a decade. It began under Barack Obama, who not only tried to socially re-engineer the military but also engaged in a widely noted purge of top military brass. President Trump didn't (couldn't?) do enough to reverse this process, and now it has been kicked into high gear. Having largely corrupted the armed forces' upper echelons, the Left now aims for rank-and-file ideological conformity. Thus do we hear about how we must stamp out the imaginary boogeyman du jour, "white supremacy," from the military. Preposterously, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin even issued, in early February, a 60-day stand-down order to address the alleged internal threat it poses. Of course, white supremacists are about as common as straight, happily married women at a NOW convention; why, I'm well into middle age and I don't know that I've ever met one. This isn't to say there aren't liberals delusional enough to believe the threat is real; that they're detached from reality is partially why leftists are so dangerous. Yet it's clear there's a different motivation among the Machiavellian leftists. It hasn't escaped the Left's notice that the military traditionally leaned Republican. Moreover, even if this has changed somewhat, having armed forces that are obedient to the ruling party to the point of wickedness isn't possible with dissidents in the ranks. (Besides, "fragging" is a real thing.) So you need a purge. You do this by conjuring up a boogeyman — in our case "white supremacy" — and then characterizing it as a widespread, existential threat. This now means defining Trump support, patriotism, opposition to illegal migration and, really, any deviation from the Left's agenda at all as reflecting white supremacy. It's an old tactic: Portray already persecuted minorities or political opponents as the persecutors so you can leverage even more control over them. It's how you create your own Enabling Act moment. Read the Whole Article The post How the Left Plans To Put Boots on the Ground To Subdue Middle America appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 The lesson of Officer Derek Chauvin's show trial, a trial as crooked as any experienced by black Americans in the demonized South, is that police training needs to be changed. Chauvin is the victim of many years of media emphasis on police brutality against black Americans. According to reports, US police, or many of them including those in Minnesota, were trained by Israeli firms. This is the worst possible choice. In Israel, police are used to brutalize and murder Palestinians. The emphasis is on the value and importance of the police officer's life, not the Palestinian's. It is training that guarantees excessive police force. Officer Chauvin was convicted largely because of the influence over the years of national media reports of police shootings of black Americans. As the larger number of police shootings of white Americans was ignored, the reporting gave the police a racist hue. In other words, the presstitutes with their one-sided reporting turned a training problem into a racist problem. This made it easy for the presstitutes to use a misleading video suffering from camera perspective bias to turn Chauvin into a white racist who murdered black Floyd by depriving him of oxygen. Indeed, the jury was so pre-convinced of Chauvin's racism that the evidence presented in court of his innocence had no effect. The failure of Democrat city administrations to understand the situation resulted in the burning and looting of their business districts and the belief among the "peaceful protesters" that they are not accountable to law. Getting back from here is not going to be easy. Many residents of Democrat cities have realized this and are fleeing the cities. Unfortunately for those of us more sensibly located, they will bring their destructive liberal beliefs into our communities and destroy us as well. I wish Florida's governor would ban white liberal Americans from relocating in Florida. Perhaps we could put out the story that the Black Plague is raging and that would keep them way. I doubt police training—the solution to the problem—will change. The Democrats benefit too much from the racism angle, and the Red States have seen what happens when police aren't supported. The Red States are not in the mood for a kind and gentle police force. When lies prevail over truth, as they do every day in America, the conundrums mount as the energy and courage to tackle them fades. The idiot white liberal Democrat mayor of Portland who called the rioters and looters in Portland "peaceful protesters" is now appealing to the residents to help him "take the city back" from lawlessness. Only violence can do that, and Democrats only use violence against "white supremacist Trump supporters." Violence is spreading. Asians in New York City are now routinely brutally attacked by blacks on subways and in the streets. Within the ruling narrative, how can this be stopped without "racial violence" against blacks?  As I have explained for decades, a Tower of Babel has no common ground. There are no shared values, no shared culture, no shared holidays, no shared history. In their place is the cultivated hatred taught in public schools with critical race theory, the NY Times 1619 Project, and reinforced with sensitivity training in corporations, universities, and the US military. This means there is no basis for law. Whatever law exists is seen as a tool of the ruling race, not as something to respect.
One consequence is that the public interest disappears because there is no public interest—only the interests of the races, genders, classes. As has been clear throughout history, the lack of ethnic homogenuity means multicultural states are dysfunctional. They have no common basis. White liberals will dispute this even as they live in an increasingly dysfunctional multicultural state that is thoroughly disunited and themselves spread disunity with their screams for death to Trump supporters. The American people had a good thing going, and they stupidly let it be taken from them. The post The American Multicultural State Is Collapsing appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Joe Biden calls it the worst attack since the Civil War. Attorney General Merrick Garland compares it to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI is breaking down the doors of Iraq War veterans and small business owners who have no criminal records, and some are hauled off to rot in solitary confinement in a fetid D.C. jail, for their involvement in the alleged travesty. The event, of course, is the roughly four-hour-long disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. As mostly nonviolent Americans dared to protest Congress' certification of a clearly fraudulent presidential election in a place that once was considered "The People's House," lawmakers scurried for cover as reporters and photographers captured part of the ruckus on video and still shots to wield as political ammunition against Donald Trump and his supporters. But have we seen a full and fair depiction of exactly what happened that day? The answer, as evidenced by an ongoing coverup by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Justice Department, clearly is no. Almost all the January 6 video seen by the public isn't from official government sources but by social media users and journalists on the scene. For example, the widely viewed footage of protestors occupying the Senate chamber was recorded by a New Yorker journalist. But thousands of hours of real-time footage is in the hands of the Capitol Police—and that agency, along with government lawyers and federal judges, is using every legal trick possible to keep the trove hidden from the public even as clips are presented in court as evidence against hundreds of January 6 defendants. According to an affidavit filed in March by Thomas DiBiase, the Capitol Police department's general counsel, the building is monitored 24/7 by an "extensive system of cameras" positioned both inside and outside the building as well as near other congressional offices on the grounds. The system captured more than 14,000 hours of footage between noon and 8 p.m. on January 6; the archive was made available to two Democratic-controlled congressional committees, the FBI, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. (After a request by Congress, the agency reportedly handed over footage from the entire 24-hour period.) Capitol Police also produced selective clips for Democratic House impeachment managers to use in the trial against Donald Trump. But Capitol Police argue that making all the tapes available to defense attorneys —let alone to the American public—could provoke future violence. "The Department has significant concerns with the release of any of its footage to defendants in the Capitol attack cases unless there are safeguards in place to prevent its copying and dissemination," DiBiase wrote March 17. "Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again." The Justice Department, in numerous cases, is seeking protective orders to rigorously limit how surveillance video is handled by defense attorneys. Recordings have been deemed "highly sensitive" government material subject to onerous rules; the accused only have access to the evidence in a supervised setting. Clips cannot be copied, downloaded, shared, or reproduced in any fashion. Read the Whole Article The post Why Is the Government Hiding January 6 Video Footage? appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Wednesday 12 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 International Man: It's been over a year since the COVID lockdowns started, and they have established a terrible precedent. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued what they call a "dire warning." They say there will be a 5% increase in carbon emissions as global economies reopen after the COVID shutdowns this year and that it will be "anything but sustainable" for the environment. This implies that the shutdowns have been good for the environment and that returning to normal is bad. There has also been a flood of articles in the mainstream media advocating for the use of lockdowns to address so-called climate change. Do you think that the COVID lockdowns could become climate change lockdowns? Doug Casey: Without exception, almost everything they say in the above article is either an overt and intentional lie or just factually incorrect. Things that are controversial at best are presented as incontrovertible facts. Let me first reiterate a few facts about COVID. It's hard to be sure because everything about it has become highly politicized, but COVID itself seems no more serious than the Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, or Swine Flu that have come and gone in recent decades and is not even remotely comparable to the Spanish Flu of 1918. The numbers show that COVID is a risk for people over 70, the obese, and the sick—but a medical non-problem for everyone else. That's why the average age of decedents is 80, even though it appears that everyone who dies with the virus in their system is reported as a statistic—even if they die of an auto accident or a heart attack. People with zero symptoms are, nonetheless, listed as "cases" if they fail the overly sensitive and very expensive PCR test. We might ask: "What's behind this insane flu hysteria—which is radically restructuring the world's political and economic landscapes? And why now?" It seems very oddly coincidental with a few other phenomena. One is that the world is on the cusp of a fantastically devastating depression due to the insane creation of currency units all over the world by central banks. Is the phony COVID hysteria—and, yes, I believe it's 80% phony—being used as an excuse for the coming collapse, a way to recuse those responsible for the insane economic policies causing the depression? In other words, is the COVID hysteria an artificially constructed force majeure used to distract from the real cause of the Greater Depression? Another phenomenon is that the COVID hysteria has proved an excellent way to scare the hell out of the public everywhere. Terrified people demand "strong" leaders and strict controls. It's a godsend for the kind of people who go into government, anxious for any excuse to self-aggrandize and take more power. "Never let a serious crisis go to waste" has been an operating principle of powermongers since Day One. And war is the most serious kind of crisis. Don't forget what Randolf Bourne said in 1914: "War is the health of the State." But a real war with a real enemy is always risky and may not always be feasible. So powermongers create phony wars. In order to fight a war—any kind of war—you need a State to organize and legitimize it. The first major phony war in living memory was Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty—the poor lost. Then came Richard Nixon's war on drugs. Then, Baby Bush declared war on terror. They're all still ongoing, but it seems time for a two-front war. A war on global warming combined with a war on COVID will be ultra-effective for breeding fear in Boobus americanus. They say global warming can destroy the planet and COVID can kill everyone. A sure-fire combination. They're certain to get widespread support from the usual suspects. As a bonus, there's a very high correlation between those who support the COVID hysteria and those supporting the climate change agenda. And both of them claim to have a new ally, "the science," to sell the wars to scared chimpanzees. Not just in the US, but everywhere in the world. These two new wars will bring out the worst in everyone, everywhere. Once you wash away their social veneer, the patina of civilization, you find that humans are tribal. Put them in groups and they revert to the lowest common denominator—they act like our anthropoid ancestors and relatives. Get people excited, hooting and panting like chimps, and they're anxious to wage war on one thing after another. Imagine them as the anthropoids contesting the watering hole in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Conflict gives them a sense of solidarity and gives their lives meaning. That's especially true of humans with collectivist views, which is to say, Leftists and busybodies. In today's world, they include the "woke," social justice warriors, progressives, BLM supporters, Antifa, and, of course, socialists, communists, Marxists, and all their fellow travelers. They're all Puritans motivated to control other humans. The Left has always been that way, although it occasionally disguises itself as pro-freedom to seduce the naive. For instance, during the '60s, the Left was pro-drugs. But that's not because they were for personal freedom or because they believed you have the right to do what you want with your own body. They were pro-drugs because widespread and irresponsible drug use can destroy civilization. Even when the Left seems to have good intentions, it's not the case. For instance, the Left was against the Vietnam War. It wasn't because they were anti-war, but because the war was against their fellow communists. It was clever, in both cases showing up the Republicans as dim-witted, unethical, and hypocritical. Today the Left, in its various incarnations, is all for the COVID lockdowns. Those will mutate into climate change lockdowns. Both will act to compromise human freedom—even more than previous phony wars. It's ironic that the word "lockdown" used to be used mainly in prisons—it's rather indicative of where the world in general and the US, in particular, are headed. International Man: What are the chances climate lockdowns will work if and when governments try them? Doug Casey: Climate change lockdowns will work. Why shouldn't they? COVID lockdowns worked wonderfully. They'll work even better because they're not just about saving a few old, sick people but the planet itself. People have been brainwashed into being green eco-warriors for decades. The kids especially treat climate change and Greenism as a new religion and take it much more seriously than what's left of Christianity. Yahweh is being replaced by Gaia. People who can't see that the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror were really just stupid scams are totally on board with new scams, the wars on the virus and climate change. They're the same people making the same phony do-gooder arguments. The popularity of Greta Thunberg is indicative. She's become an icon for the people who support this whole syndrome. It's disturbing because she's so pathologically angry. People don't care that she's mildly psychotic, highly indoctrinated, and irrational. It's a sign of how degraded society has become that an autistic and deranged teenager can be an international hero. I think it's a natural segue to go from COVID lockdowns to climate change lockdowns. Although the eco-warriors will eventually see COVID as a good thing because they actually hate humans and would like to see Gaia cleansed of them. As I've said many times before, I see both COVID and Global Warming as vastly overblown manias. Viruses go viral; everybody gets them and becomes immune. That's the end of the story unless the virus is artificial and intended to cull the population. Anything is possible in a world where technology is advancing exponentially while ethics are going in reverse. Barring that, COVID will go away. Of course, they may come up with a COVID 2.0, COVID 3.0, etc., as needed. As for Global Warming, nobody knows its degree of reality for sure—it's all conjecture. But the danger of another ice age is at least as great as continued global warming. The only thing for certain is that the public, propagandized by the elite, can't keep anything in context. The last ice age only came to an end 12,000 years ago. And the globe has been warming, more or less, ever since. The public is unaware that there have been dozens of ice ages, lasting 50 to 100,000 years, throughout the Pleistocene period. There's no reason to believe that the one that ended 12,000 years ago was the last one; we're currently in an interglacial. Past ice ages have lasted many millions of years. International Man: The Guardian recently ran a piece titled "Why Genghis Khan was Good for the Planet." The article states: "His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green." It seems to imply that population reduction through mass murder was good for the planet. What are your thoughts on this? Doug Casey: That's a great quote from the article. The abhorrent psychology of its writer borders on the criminal. He goes on to say, "It's an intriguing notion, certainly"— meaning that he actually thinks it might not be a bad idea to wipe out a meaningful percentage of the population. I hope he sacrifices himself for the climate, although that's unlikely since he likely considers himself one of the elite who should be preserved because he's ideologically pure and politically reliable. These people have Pol Pot's psychological makeup. In Cambodia during the '70s, anybody who wasn't a manual laborer with callused hands was liquidated—that's what they did with roughly a quarter of the population. Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, as well as Genghis Kahn, are idols for these people because they all think the same way. They actually hate the human race. And people are so stupid that they laud their destroyers. I've got news for them: Life is already nasty, brutish, and short enough. We don't need political criminals making it worse. International Man: The COVID hysteria has changed the way governments react to a real or manufactured global crisis. Now that this precedent has been established, what do you see happening next? Doug Casey: It's shaping up like the 1930s in Germany, when they led the way with a disastrous form of statism called National Socialism. It was almost as bad as Communism under Stalin—and it seems like the Germans might be doing it again. They've just passed a law the "Infection Protection Act" instituting nightly restrictions, school closures, and stricter regulations for businesses. COVID provides an excellent cover and excellent justification for the imposition of a police state. Remember that once these governments pass a law, they rarely ever repeal them. Those laws have to be financed with new taxes and enforced by new agencies. The negative effect is cumulative and compounding. International Man: While the US and other Western countries are committing economic and cultural suicide, what do you think will happen to countries like China, Russia, Brazil, and others? Will they follow the West or go their own ways? Doug Casey: It's hard to say what's actually happening in a lot of countries because the quality of news reporting is so abysmal. But the trend is worldwide. When it comes to climate change, these countries laugh at Westerners for their naivete, stupidity, and self-destructive tendencies. They don't take it seriously. It's another reason why the next century belongs to China. The same is true of Russia, which, for all of its faults, is basically an anti-woke country. It's been said—correctly—that there are more communists in American universities than there are in all of Russia. Regarding investment advice, I'm much more interested in Chinese and East Asian stock markets than in Western stock markets. The same is true of Russian and East European stock markets because they haven't been infected by the virus of wokeism. They had a serious bout of it from the '30s through the '90s, and it's given them some immunity. Plus, their markets aren't in a bubble, like those in the US especially. The countries that have hooked their car to the US choo-choo train are going to go over the cliff with the US. It's not as if China and Russia are models of intelligence and probity, but they're acting far more intelligently than the US. Reprinted with permission from International Man. The post How Covid Lockdowns Will Become Climate Lockdowns appeared first on LewRockwell.  |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.