Category Archives: Politics

Our World of Lies

Posted on by
Reply

If the inflation narrative we are being fed is true, the sanctions policy of the US government makes no sense as the worst sufferers are the American and European populations who are paying for the supply restrictions in higher prices and interest rates.

As Russia is an exporter of energy and minerals, higher prices result in more export earnings. It is Americans and Europeans hit with the high prices who are experiencing the sanctions.

Ask yourself why with supply shortages, disrupted supply chains from the mindless lockdown policy, and rising inflation the US government drove inflation higher by inhibiting supply with sanctions. Is the cause of the current inflation Federal Reserve money printing or is the cause the reduction in the supply of goods and services caused by Washington’s Covid protocol and “Russian sanctions”?

Ask yourself why the Biden regime is more concerned about gangster-state Ukraine than it is about the US inflation rate and the welfare of American citizens.

Ask yourself if the current high gasoline price is really a result of sanctions preventing oil from coming to market. As far as I can tell, Russia continues to sell oil and natural gas. It is only the small US purchases of Russian oil that have stopped. The small amount of oil involved cannot explain the price rise. Most likely it is the oil companies using the “crisis” narrative to raise prices.

Ask yourself if an interest rate rise by half a percentage point is enough to cause a 1,000 drop in the Dow Jones. Presumably, the argument is that a higher interest rate raises costs and drops earnings, thus the stock market’s decline. But if higher interest rates raise costs, how are they anti-inflationary? Most likely the stock market fell because the Federal Reserve said it is halting its policy of printing money to support stock and bond prices. Instead, the Federal Reserve is going to sell stocks and bonds from its $9 trillion dollar portfolio built by buying stocks and bonds for more than a decade in order to support the New York Banks and Wall Street. When Quantitative Easing began, the Federal Reserves portfolio was $800 billion. Today it is 11 times larger. This huge increase in the Federal Reserve’s portfolio explains the long rise in the Dow Jones and the fortunes made on Wall Street.

None of the narratives we are fed are true. The narratives serve agendas that are not disclosed to the public.

It is a fiction that “Western democracies” are self-governing. Hoerw can people self-govern when they live in a world governed by false explanations serving hidden agendas?

Paul Craig Roberts

You Have the Power to Think for Yourself. Use it!

Posted on by
Reply

People sometimes ask me if anything annoys me about my job. I love what I do. But if anything gets to me, it’s when a client pays me good money for advice, and then doesn’t take it – returning again and again with the same problem. Far and away, the guidance most often ignored is, (1) if you want to be successful, stop caring about what others think. And (2), stop feeling that you’re obligated to do anything for anybody other than something you freely choose to do.

Not believing these two things undercuts people in business, in their personal and family relationships and in everyday life in general. I’ve spent well over 30 years trying to help people correct and/or undo the damage done by not heeding these basic rules. Yes, it’s hard to overcome misguided childhood brainwashing, but as adults we have the power to change our thinking for the better. Fresh thinking starts with a choice: “I’m not going to think that way anymore. I’ve been programmed by others and ultimately by myself. But I can change.” Truer words were never spoken.

Sometimes perfectionism gets in the way. “I successfully changed my thinking before, but I fell back in the old patterns. I can’t change.” Yes you can. If you did it once, you can do it again. It’s worth it, because willfully engaging in erroneous thinking is the worst thing you can do to your happiness.

So here it comes: What others think doesn’t matter. If someone tells you something that’s rational and logical, then by all means listen. But judge with your own mind if it is indeed logical. How many times have you said to yourself, “I followed what so-and-so said. But it didn’t work out.” You can’t blame so-and-so for your choice to follow his, hers or anybody’s advice. There are no shortcuts. If something is worth doing, it’s worth thinking about. Otherwise, you’ll never own your accomplishments – or your errors. And if you don’t own your errors, you’ll never grow.

Here it comes again (are you sitting down?): You don’t owe your life to others. You don’t automatically owe anything to anybody, unless you freely take on the obligation. If you choose to have a child, then that child is a responsibility that you chose. If you promise to do something for somebody, you should keep your word. After all, it’s your pride and integrity at stake. Saying what you mean and meaning what you say is the best way to fuel your self-interest and self-esteem. You owe that to yourself.

As for those who claim that you owe them “just because,” don’t listen! This is the most toxic nonsense known to mankind. “You’re doing better than I am. Must be nice! Give me some of what you have.” This can apply both to material or non-material things, and either way it’s wrong. Your honestly achieved success is not at a cost to anyone else. Note the words “honestly achieved”: Outside of lying or stealing, you have nothing to feel guilty about. The world is full of people – occupying some the highest offices in the land, unfortunately – who explicitly say, “Your success is something to feel guilty about. Give it away!” Take it from a mental health professional: Nothing is more destructive to your motivation, esteem or good will. The people who seek to loot your spirit (or your wallet) often have guns and jails on their side, but even more powerful is the force of unearned guilt many have been persuaded to buy into. Every well-written self-help book can be summed up this way: Don’t let abusive or irrational people make you feel guilty. It’s THEIR problem, not yours.

There’s a lot of stupidity in the world, and much of it has a toxic agenda. But as long as you keep these two simple rules in mind, you’ll havbe tremendous power that only the very smart are willing to grant to themselves.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

Ruth from “Ozark”: A Heroine Trying to Burst Out

Posted on by
Reply

If you enjoyed “Ozark,” as I did, the character of Ruth is probably the primary reason why. On the surface she was a bad guy, as is everyone in this era of antiheroes. But through the “badassery” there was authentic sensitivity, a bit of wisdom and an individualist spirit determined to overcome her morally and economically trashy background. And she almost succeeded. Ruth was a heroine trying to break out. This is why I responded to her so strongly, and why I think many others (subconsciously) did so too. Ruth was written as a character that seemed meant for a better era, and the viewer could not help but root for her. The whole show ultimately evolved into something of a Greek tragedy, but I will stop there in case you haven’t yet seen it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Holodomor: Ukraine Famine of 1933 was a Government-Made Disaster

Posted on by
Reply

Since the 19th century, global nutrition levels have increased and malnutrition is on the wane. We have never had access to so many calories from so many different goods available to so many people at such low prices. The threat of famines has thus, unsurprisingly, faded. In the 1870s, some 142 people per 100,000 died due to famines. In the decade that just ended, that number stood at … 0.5 per 100,000 – a 99% reduction.

Yet, there is a paradox. It is in the period of rising nutritional levels that we observe the worst famines in human history. Indeed, prior to the 20th century, most famines caused by natural factors (e.g. climate, disease) were not exactly extreme events as those that generally come to mind such as the Holodomor in the Ukraine during the 1930s or the Great Famine in China during the 1950s and 1960s. These pre-20th century famines were more like periods of dearth with severe malnutrition. True, there were horrible episodes caused by natural events such as the Great Irish Famine, but this was an exception more than a rule.

The reason for this distinction is that famines and dearth of food caused by natural events have indeed waned heavily. No market economy with a liberal democracy suffered through a famine during the 20th century. However, famines produced out of human design increased considerably. The ten worst famines of the 20th century could all be attributed directly (e.g. the Holodomor) or indirectly (e.g. wars) to government policies. And these ten worst famines are amongst the worst famines in all of humanity’s history.

However, one should notice that I just distinguished between “directly” and “indirectly.” That distinction is important because it points to the obvious fact that these famines were never monocausal. As such, there are always debates about these extreme famines: was the famine started by a drought; was the famine started by government policy, were the famine deaths due to governments failing to provide relief? Disentangling these finer threads is a very daunting task.

Fortunately, recent work by Natalya Naumenko in the Journal of Economic History provides us with such a disentanglement in the case of the Holodomor in the Ukraine during the 1930s.

The Holodomor is ideal for such an effort. First of all, the death toll was horrific: six to eight million died in 1933. Second, many scholars debate whether the famine was precipitated by a drought and whether government policies (such as the collectivization of farms that had started in the 1920s and the banning of private food trading in order to facilitate procurement of wheat by the government for export) made things worse.

To provide the disentanglement, Naumenko collects district-level data about mortality, weather, collectivization, agricultural inputs, ethnic composition and urbanization. Combined with other data sources, she first discredits the idea that droughts had taken place before 1933 in ways that made the local populations vulnerable. The temperatures in those years were roughly similar to previous years even though the months of May and June 1932 were marked by unusually high levels of rainfall.

Then, she attempts to assess the relative contribution in 1933 of the different factors. Variations in climate characteristics are found to pack very little explanatory firepower: they explain less than 10% of the excess mortality in that year. However, the effects of collectivization and government procurements of wheat do provide strong explanatory power: between 52% and 57% of excess mortality is explained by variations in the rate of collectivization of the farm economy across districts.

To tie those facts together, Naumenko then investigates the effect of collectivization on farm output. Unsurprisingly, areas with higher rates of collectivization exhibited smaller sown area per capita. Collectivization was also associated with a drop in livestock per capita. These two mechanisms suggest that there was clearly an institutional root to the famine. As Naumenko summarizes succinctly, it is necessary to “put the blame where it belongs:” at the feet of “government policies that make the food supply susceptible to disaster when environmental conditions are less than perfect.”

This work of economic history is not just worth reading because of its well-executed nature. It is worth reading because it is a potent reminder of how governments can fuel some of the worst disasters in human history.

Vincent Geloso is a visiting assistant professor of economics at Bates College. He obtained a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.

Alito 5 Must Stay the Course

Posted on by
Reply

In February, five Supreme Court Justices voted in camera to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states, where it resided until 1973.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett had all signed on to the majority opinion overturning Roe that had been drafted by Justice Samuel Alito.

The right-to-life movement was only weeks away from a stunning victory in its half-century struggle to overturn Roe.

This suggests that the leak to Politico of the Alito draft was the work of a saboteur seeking to derail the course of the court by the media explosion he or she knew it would ignite.

Whoever leaked Alito’s draft, it was a violation of an oath, an unethical act and a betrayal that ought to see the perpetrator fired in disgrace and disbarred permanently from the practice of law.

But the crucial issue now is for the Alito Five, even if unwedded to the exact language of the Alito opinion, to stay the course until the ruling comes down in late June.

For, on the substance of the abortion issue, Alito’s opinion is dead on:

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe … enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

“We hold that Roe … must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”

Indeed, at the time of Roe, January 1973, the U.S. had a long history of punishing “abortionists,” and the laws under which they were prosecuted were “spurred by a sincere belief that abortion kills a human being.”

The nation remains divided, and the issue is best decided in this democracy, Alito argues, not by unelected justices on the Supreme Court but by democratically elected representatives of the American people.

Pro-abortion Democrats say a woman’s “right to choose” must remain paramount and sacrosanct. But the “right to choose” what?

As President Joe Biden just described it bluntly this week, it is the right to choose to “abort a child.”

But at what point in a pregnancy does the pre-born child’s right to life supersede a woman’s right to abort that child. And who decides?

A New York Times front-page map this week shows that if Roe is overturned, states with liberalized abortion laws such as Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington, New York and most of New England would not be significantly affected.

It is the Republican states, the Trump states, the Mountain West and the South, where the overturning of Roe will free up Christians and social conservatives to write the regulations and restrictions that were abolished and outlawed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe.

These states are where the post-Roe abortion wars will be fought.

But is this not how a democratic republic is supposed to work?

Remarkable, is it not? Those who do not cease to talk about right-wing threats to “our democracy” are today the loudest and most insistent that abortion not be sent back to the states for the people and their democratically chosen representatives to decide.

While Democrats see their base energized today, we are six months away from the election. And if the Alito draft becomes law, pro-choice Democrats will have to sustain their outrage and fight political battles in virtually all the red states.

Pro-life Republicans and conservatives should stand with the Alito Five and what they have done and what, hopefully, they are about to do.

For this is what a vast slice of the party and the conservative movement has fought for, worked for, marched for and prayed for, for half a century.

If Roe is overturned, it is never coming back. It is gone for good. No Supreme Court will ever reinstate it. It will be on the ash heap of history, as President Ronald Reagan used to say.

If Biden, Nancy Pelosi’s House and Chuck Schumer’s Senate majority want to make abortion the issue of 2022 by passing a federal law codifying Roe v. Wade, if they want to die on that hill, it’s their call.

Democrats claim 60% of the nation wants Roe preserved and only 1 in 5 Americans wants Roe overturned.

Why, then, do they not pass that law codifying Roe at the national level and rely upon Roe’s supporters to produce pro-choice laws in the states where they do not today exist?

If the Alito draft opinion survives and Roe is overturned, pro-lifers will have many people to thank.

Foremost among these are President Donald Trump, who elevated to the Supreme Court three of the five justices who voted with Alito, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, who saw to it that these three alone would make it.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

Today’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Posted on by
Reply

In Chapter 6 of The Book of Revelation in the Bible, something akin to the last judgment is symbolized by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The horses are colored white, red, black, and pale; they symbolize (depending on the interpretation) conquest (or pestilence), war, famine, and death (or plague)-in sum, the end of the world. They represent God’s punishment for rejecting faith in God and may preview the second coming of Christ where all accounts will be settled.

The symbols, though not their religious base, can be applied today to the secular world. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse now are China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. These countries have five anti-freedom and anti-life characteristics in common:

  1. They are all totalitarian dictatorships which deny political rights to their citizens, i.e., one-party systems, government censorship of speech and the press, political trials and associated punishments, and no private property by right. Citizens are forced to live and die in obedience to the state.
  2. These countries are all imperialistic. They act to bully, dominate, or take over by force any countries that they can and/or do not like.
  3. They have a passionate fear and hatred of free countries, and especially the United States, because it has the military power to destroy any aggressor(s) and represents a moral and practical repudiation of their own rulers who gain and retain their power only at gunpoint.
  4. They give moral support to each other (to rationalize coercion) and often give material support to each other such as supplying food to prevent starvation and/or providing goods which free countries will not supply. They also share military technology designed to suppress rights such as weapons and spy systems.
  5. They all have or are building nuclear missiles with the capability of reaching the United States and other free countries. They routinely threaten to use them.

In sum, these countries have the desire and potential to destroy the free world and bring us to a new Dark Age with them as rulers—a real Apocalypse. But the antidote is not the worship of an imaginary ghost in the sky (mysticism) but rather, better horses– representing reason, individual rights, self-interest, and capitalism. The application of these principles would greatly reduce or eliminate pestilence and famine, bring peace and greatly increase life expectancy.

Free, capitalist countries deal with one another by voluntary trade and have very little if any incentive to go to war as Ayn Rand said in “The Roots of War”:

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens — there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact — and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.

In a statist economy, where wealth is “publicly owned,” a citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving peace — he is only a drop in the common bucket — while war gives him the (fallacious) hope of larger handouts from his masters. Ideologically, he is trained to regard men as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the same public altar for the benefit of the same state.

The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders — for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as “selfish” and conquest as “noble.” [1]

It should be noted that if dictatorships with advanced weapons did not exist, there would be no need for free countries to build thousands of atomic missiles—there could be a rational and safe trend toward some nuclear disarmament. Pacifist demands by leftist intellectuals for unilateral disarmament in free countries would disappear.

Given that the four bad horsemen of death are here, how should they be dealt with?

1. Acknowledge the fact that a cold war exists.
2. Arm ourselves to the teeth.
3. Cooperate with other free countries based on mutual self-interest.
4. Make a moral judgment: state publicly that dictatorships are morally wrong and that we and other free countries are morally right.
5. Assume that the bad horsemen will do everything in their power to manipulate and deceive us. Take suitable precautions.

Notes

[1] Ayn Rand, “Roots of War“, June 1966, The Objectivist Newsletter.

You Can’t Believe Anyone in Government or Media — Not Any Longer

Posted on by
Reply

We don’t call someone a liar only if they lie 100 percent of the time. We call someone a liar because he or she does not care about the TRUTH.

A liar is at war with reality. Facts are uttered when it’s convenient. Falsehoods are uttered when it’s convenient. Crucial facts are left out when it’s convenient. For whose convenience? The liar’s.

Anyone who has been close to an addict, a narcissit or a sociopath understands. You cannot EVER believe what a liar says. Even if the liar happens to be accurate 80 or 90 percent of the time. Why? Because you cannot TRUST someone who does not care about objective truth.

That’s what we’re all facing with today’s media and government. It’s not that they’re always lying. It’s that they do not care about truth. They will say whatever needs to be said — truthful, or not — in order to maintain and expand their power over people.

We saw this with the deception over COVID that goes on to this day. We saw this with the deliberate refusal to mention the violence of the Black Lives Matter rioters and looters. We saw this with the refusal to even report on evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, and overt punishment or censorship when discussion was even contemplated.

The media and our government are liars. It’s not really a partisan issue. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are no better than Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden. The longer anyone has been in government, the less you can trust them. The media is so dishonest that they’re even worse than the media under a dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you can at least excuse the fear. Our media does not yet have to lie (and a small number of them don’t); but they lie anyway, in order to advance the sociopathic, narcissistic and financial interests of those in power.

It’s sick to the point of evil. But it’s where we are. So just as you should arm yourself literally, you also must arm yourself intellectually and psychologically — with an understanding that the people you have been trained to trust on NBC, CNN, CBS and at the White House do not value the truth, or tell the truth.

Somehow, we will have to figure out the truth for ourselves. We have the brains to do so; if only more of us would use those brhe’ll.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Twisted World of Biden’s New Ministry of Truth Czarina

Posted on by
Reply

PJ’s Rick Moran revealed recently that the chief of America’s new Thought Police, Disinformation Governance Board executive director Nina Jankowicz, brings a peculiar wealth of experience to her new job: she falsely claimed in 2017 that Republicans funded the notorious Steele Dossier that was a central element of the Russian Collusion hoax, and she insisted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Trump campaign product.” So it’s clear: this is an individual who knows all about disinformation. She also brings a certain enthusiasm to her Disinformation Governance Board job, as is clear from a video Tucker Carlson broadcast Thursday, in which Jankowicz lustily belts out a song, sung to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” denouncing disinformation.

Jankowicz herself tweeted the video on Feb. 17, 2021, with the caption, “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation.” Affecting a poor English accent, she sang:

Information laundering is really quite ferocious

It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious

By saying them in Congress or in mainstream outlets so disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious

It’s how you hide a little lie, little lie

It’s how you hide a little lie, little lie

It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie

But Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine

Or when TikTok influencers said COVID can cause pain

They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note, and not support their lies with our wallet, voice or throat

These are our moral superiors, America! These are the guardians of acceptable opinion! Is there anyone who ever saw this video who thought it was cute or funny? Likely the only people who did were members of Jankowicz’s own social circle: far-Left members of the Washington elite, affluent, comfortable, and untroubled by the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. because they themselves are the authoritarians.

Tucker Carlson pointed out: “Now, you may have noticed if you listened carefully to the ditty that she just sang that every example of disinformation in her karaoke performance came from people who opposed Joe Biden’s policies. Is that a coincidence? Probably not. In fact, we know it’s not because Nina Jankowicz is telling [us that] all the disinformation is on the other side of the political divide.” That is no surprise, as the whole point of Jankowicz’s Disinformation Governance Board is to quash dissent by stigmatizing it as falsehood that is inimical to the life and health of “our democracy,” by which Leftists mean “Leftist hegemony in politics and culture.”

Jankowicz is a natural for her new job. Not only does her revolting disinformation ditty reveal her enthusiasm for censorship, but she has been calling for it for quite some time. On Jan. 28, 2021, she published a lengthy article in Wired entitled “Online Harassment Toward Women Is Getting Even More Insidious: From coded memes to deepfake porn, abusive disinformation campaigns are sliding past moderation tools. Platforms, Congress, and employers need to help women fight back.”

On the same day, she tweeted: “For @WIRED, I wrote about the online gendered abuse I experienced, and the attacks we tracked against @KamalaHarris, @AOC, and more. Platforms and governments aren’t doing enough. It’s time to act. Our national security and democracy are at stake.” Apparently conservative women don’t experience any online harassment; that’s only for Leftist women. Ominously, Jankowicz declared in her article that “Congress should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and include provisions against online gender-based harassment.” If the definition of “violence” is to be redefined to include certain types of speech, the door is opened to all manner of censorship. Anything can be said to be speech that might lead to violence, including political dissent, and silenced accordingly.

The very idea of the Disinformation Governance Board is bad enough, but the fact that Biden’s handlers would put a convinced and enthusiastic fascist such as Nina Jankowicz in charge of it is even worse. Nina Jankowicz has been preparing for this moment for practically her entire professional life, and this is her chance to shine on the biggest stage of all. Her own website is labeled “Nina Jankowicz, Disinformation Expert.” Her bio at that website begins: “Nina Jankowicz is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation.” This is her entire professional identity. There is no doubt that she is going to undertake her new duties with gusto. And that’s just one more problem with this new Disinformation Governance Board, on top of all the others.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.