The emperor has no brain. Or mind. Or soul. Or charisma, gravitas. Or skill. Or grasp of human nature. Or talent. Or military ability. Or diplomatic, or economic, ability. Or past achievements, in business or even politics. He is (they say) the President of the United States — the greatest republic and civilization in all of human history. Yet he has NO redeeming qualities, no virtues, no assets, no talents OF ANY KIND. Nothing.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The Kremlin demonstrated indecision and weakness, and left a festering wound that Washington is exploiting. As I have long warned, the Kremlin’s passivity will result in war.
The situation has developed precisely as I forecast. The Kremlin’s failure in 2014 to reincorporate the Donbass Russians back into Russia has played into Washington’s hands. The Kremlin gave Washington years to arm and train the Ukrainians, to continue the hostilities toward the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, and to conduct a propaganda campaign that paints Russia as the aggressor. Mistakes of this magnitude usually result in war.
If Russia had accepted the vote of the breakaway republics to be reincorporated into Russia, the hostilities would have ended as not even the Ukrainians are stupid enough to attack Russia herself. If the hostilities had been ended, Washington would have had no opening, and the current dangerous situation would not have been able to emerge.
Live and learn, but is the Kremlin learning?
Kremlin Says Half Of Entire Ukrainian Army Is In Donbass As Blinken Warns Putin: US “Prepared To Act”
WEDNESDAY, DEC 01, 2021 – 05:30 PM
A Wednesday statement out of the Russian Foreign Ministry has charged Kiev with stoking tensions along the Ukrainian border. The statement alleged that over 100,000 Ukrainian troops and military hardware have been moved into the restive Donbass region, where the national forces have been in a stalemate with pro-Russian separatists for half a decade going back to 2014.
While rejecting prior accusations out of Kiev and Washington – and especially Western media – that it’s Russia that’s stoking tensions by sending 90,000 regular forces near the border, Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had this to say: “According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
Further she accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of breaking the peace, particularly the Donbass ceasefire terms of the Minsk agreement, after he submitted a bill to Ukrainian parliament which would allow foreign troops into the country to participate in joint military drills next year.
The rival sides are now in a full-blown media and information war, trading tit-for-tat accusations of military build-up, in a dangerous situation that could be barreling toward renewal of actual armed conflict:
“In recent weeks, we have seen a stream of consciousness from the Ukrainian leadership – especially when it comes to the military – that is excessively inflamed and dangerous,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in follow-up to Zakharova’s words.
Just last week the foreign ministry used similar language which denounced the “hot heads” in Kiev which have a “feeling of complete impunity” and “are in favor of a military solution to this internal Ukrainian crisis.”
But Secretary of State Antony Blinken also weighed in on Wednesday, escalating the rhetoric further. He charged Putin with “laying the groundwork for an invasion” of neighboring Ukraine. He demanded the Kremlin pull back it’s forces from near the border (an implicit admission that we are still merely talking about the “movements” of Russian troops within Russia’s own territory). This despite the Pentagon this week appearing to downplay the ‘invasion threat’.
Meanwhile The Washington Post is reporting that top Biden admin officials are wildly speculating over ‘false flag’ scenarios… and they are already blaming Russia.
“We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know that he is putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide,” Blinken told reporters in Latvia after meeting with NATO foreign ministers, where the crisis was discussed.
“Should Russia follow the path of confrontation, when it comes to Ukraine, we’ve made clear that we will respond resolutely, including with a range of high-impact economic measures that we have refrained from pursuing in the past,” Blinken added. While stopping short of any direct threat of American military intervention, he said that Western allies have expressed “tremendous solidarity” to take action in the event of a Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Paul Craig Roberts
When reason declines — in a person, or in a culture — then emotions and subjectivity fill the void. At first, emotions are all about kindness, peace, tolerance. We might label this the “hippie” phase. But because man cannot live by emotions alone — and, in fact, must possess rational thought in order to function, cope and survive — the era of brotherly love all starts to fall apart. The individual (or the culture), at this point has two options. One, the restoration of reason above unfettered emotion. Or two, living under the tyranny of others, since he’s now unable to think for himself.
I have watched this process thousands of times in my years as a psychotherapist. And now I am watching it with our entire culture.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Another school shooting … this time at a high school in Michigan.
Remember when these incidents used to be horrifying, and big news? They’re still every bit as horrifying for the individuals involved. But they’re no longer news. Other than more fodder for totalitarian media and government to say it’s time for mass gun confiscation. (Good luck with that, tyrants).
Since government-run schools are either unable or unwilling to ensure even minimal safety — for DECADES now — then why don’t we defund them all? And let parents and innovators in PRIVATE education figure out better ways. Millions of us are mortally petrified at even the mention of the word “flu”. Aren’t these schools way, way more dangerous?
#ShutThemDown
A new era of abortion acceptance has begun, and, typical of the abortion industry, it has to do with money. In several places across the United States, cities have begun to offer bereavement time off for abortions—meaning that men and women are now being compensated and given days off for killing their child.
This new policy has popped up in cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Portland, Oregon. In both Pittsburgh and Portland, city workers can get up to three days of fully paid bereavement leave off following a loss of pregnancy—and abortion is included as an eligible “loss” of pregnancy (similarly, the City of Boston pays workers for up to 12 weeks of abortion time off under the guise of “parental leave”). Portland’s ordinance even goes so far as to specifically outline that abortions do not need to be “deemed medically necessary” in order to qualify for this leave.
These pro-abortion cities are calling this “bereavement leave,” but that smells a little fishy.
In the coming weeks, I will be taking bereavement leave for a couple days following the death of my grandmother. The time off will be spent travelling for her funeral and comforting loved ones in their grief. We will celebrate her beautiful life and mourn the lack of her presence in our lives now. The purpose of my bereavement leave will be to commemorate her. CARTOONS | Steve Kelley View Cartoon
But what is the purpose of bereavement leave following an abortion? Who are they commemorating? After all, the meaning of bereavement is the “state of being sad because a family member or friend has recently died.”
According to some pro-abortion supporters, no one dies during an abortion. Many pro-abortion supporters refuse to accept that preborn children are alive. They refuse to call victims of abortion violence ‘babies,’ referring instead to preborn children as ‘clumps of cells’ or ‘pregnancy tissue.’ Abortion advocates who do acknowledge that a child dies in abortion often portray this as a positive or empowering fact.
To give men and women bereavement leave following an abortion is a logical inconsistency.
Here are three reasons why:
1. Pro-abortion supporters do not get to talk out of both sides of their mouth. There is either a child who has been killed during an abortion, or there’s not. (Spoiler alert, there is a child!) If there’s a child being killed during an abortion, abortion is wrong and should be illegal because children shouldn’t be killed. That means there is no place for paid abortion leave.
2. If pro-abortion supporters insist that the preborn are just clumps of cells and not really children, then there should be nothing to mourn about an abortion. We don’t do bereavement leave for colonoscopies, do we? If an abortion is an innocuous medical procedure, there is no place for paid abortion bereavement leave.
3. If pro-abortion supporters want to argue for paid abortion leave on the basis that women need recovery time after an abortion, that doesn’t fall under bereavement. It also defeats their lie that abortions are safe and easy, a myth widely propagated by the abortion industry. Once again, this policy is inappropriate.
Additionally, what message does it send to parents who are suffering the loss of a child through miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, or the loss of an older child, when city officials place elective abortion in the same category and grant the same benefits to a parent who has intentionally snuffed out the life of his or her child? It is a mockery of the suffering of parents who loved their children.
To make matters even worse, these cities are compounding the injustice by making taxpayers violate their consciences by paying for this abortion leave with their hard-earned money.
SFLA is on the ground working to change these policies. In Portland, Oregon, SFLA has launched its Campaign for Abortion Free Cities, and every day we get closer to our goal of eradicating abortion therein—and everywhere else, too.
Pro-life advocates should work proactively in their cities and states to stop similar policies from going into effect. Paid abortion leave will not become a norm in our country if SFLA and the Pro-Life Generation have anything to say about it — and we certainly do.
Caroline Wharton
Free market often seems a hard sell. The resistance and opposition to its seemingly straightforward case emerges and persists, over and over again. It is all very strange, since, after all, how many people do not want the personal liberty to make their own choices about what to buy, where to live, and the amount they are willing to pay for something?
The same applies to their decisions on the supply side of the market. Which one of us does not want to decide what type of job and employment we’d like to pursue, the wage we are willing to accept for a job offered to us, and the ways we might apply our talents and abilities?
The alternative is for someone else to make all such decisions for us. When the fairy-tale rhetoric and utopian dreams about socialism are put aside, and people are told that a real socialist system involves the government telling you where you will live, the kind of job to which you will be assigned, and the wages and amenities of lifet to which you will be allowed, along with the personal freedoms that will be restricted or done away with, many of them soon become disillusioned, and even, sometimes, strongly opposed.
There is also the important moral element to the free-market society, that being that all human relationships should be based on mutual agreement and voluntary consent. Most people do not want to be coerced into associations and relationships to which they do not consent.
Stated in such general terms, certainly a majority of people in the United States would, no doubt, say they believe that these are essential and desirable elements to a free and good society. If the interested person were willing to sit through a more detailed explanation and understanding of the economics of the free society, they would most likely also agree with the logic of division of labor and comparative advantage.
When individuals specialize in their labors and develop their particular skills and abilities, all are made better off in a social setting in which we each offer in trade that which we decide to specialize in and obtain in exchange from others the goods and services we could not produce on our own, or at least not as effectively in terms of qualities or costs as some trading partners. Even if we are more productive and cost-efficient in many or most things compared to potential trading partners, by buying some things from these less efficient producers, it frees up our time to specialize in those areas where our productivity and income-earning possibilities are greatest.
A standard example of the latter is the highly valued lawyer who could do his own gardening around his home in, say, four hours, while a professional gardener might take five hours to do the same job. But if the lawyer’s opportunity cost is such that if those four hours are freed up to represent clients in court for $100 an hour, then even if the less efficient gardener were to charge him $50 an hour, for a total cost of $250, the lawyer would still be ahead to the tune of an additional $150 by entering into an exchange with a less efficient trading partner. If the lawyer values more highly what the extra $150 of income would enable him to buy than doing his own gardening, then both, clearly, gain from the market transaction. The more productive and the less productive all can find a place at the common table of free-market collaborative association.
So why, then, are people so often resistant to allowing the free-market to go about its work? To say there is “one” answer to this question would, of course, be completely misplaced. But a central one, in my view, is an aspect that has its origin in the very system of the division of labor that improves the overall economic wellbeing of all those participating in the social network of specialization.
Each of us in our respective producer roles in the division of labor offers for sale the particular good or service that we have chosen to specialize in. Only to the extent to which we are successful in producing, marketing, and selling that good or service to others in society can we earn the financial means that enables us to return to the marketplace in our role of consumer. In that role, we demand all the other diverse goods and services others in society are, in turn, specializing in the production and sale of so they, too, can earn the financial means to be consumers in the arena of competitive exchange.
Another way of expressing this is that while we are consumers of many goods, we are normally the producer of one or more goods or services. None of us can be a consumer unless we have first succeeded as a producer. As a consequence, we pragmatically place far greater importance on our producer role than on our consumer role in society.
Suppose you produce and sell a product that earns you $5,000 per month, or $60,000 a year. And further suppose that during the year, you spend that $60,000 on 20 different types of goods (e.g., food, housing, clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc.), or, on average, $3,000 per year on each of these categories, or $250 per month (just for the sake of the example).
Imagine that some of the domestic producers of clothing were to lobby their representatives in Washington, D. C., and successfully have an import tax imposed on their foreign competitors’ clothing apparel entering the United States, a result of which is the price of clothing in America increases by, say, 10 percent. This means that the clothing you had been purchasing for $3,000 over the year, or $250 per month, would now cost you $3,300 per year, or $275 per month.
As a consequence, you would find that your income now did not go as far as it had before in the purchase of clothing. You would have to reduce your apparel purchases accordingly, or marginally reduce your buying of other things, so to maintain the real amount of clothing purchased even in the face of the 10 percent rise in its price.
You might mumble and grumble, and if you were aware that this had been caused by the lobbying activities of American clothing manufacturers, you might curse it as another instance of “crony capitalism.” But out of $60,000 of expenditures during the year on all the various types of goods and services you buy, are you really going to become a radical anti-tariff activist over the loss of $25 a month in your standard of living due to this instance of trade protectionism? In many instances, it’s not even equal to the cost of one evening’s nice meal at a pleasant restaurant. And that $300 is barely 0.005 percent of your total $60,000 of spending on all goods and services over the year.
Each of us in our respective producer roles in the division of labor offers for sale the particular good or service that we have chosen to specialize in. Only to the extent to which we are successful in producing, marketing, and selling that good or service to others in society can we earn the financial means that enables us to return to the marketplace in our role of consumer. In that role, we demand all the other diverse goods and services others in society are, in turn, specializing in the production and sale of so they, too, can earn the financial means to be consumers in the arena of competitive exchange.
Another way of expressing this is that while we are consumers of many goods, we are normally the producer of one or more goods or services. None of us can be a consumer unless we have first succeeded as a producer. As a consequence, we pragmatically place far greater importance on our producer role than on our consumer role in society.
Suppose you produce and sell a product that earns you $5,000 per month, or $60,000 a year. And further suppose that during the year, you spend that $60,000 on 20 different types of goods (e.g., food, housing, clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc.), or, on average, $3,000 per year on each of these categories, or $250 per month (just for the sake of the example).
Imagine that some of the domestic producers of clothing were to lobby their representatives in Washington, D. C., and successfully have an import tax imposed on their foreign competitors’ clothing apparel entering the United States, a result of which is the price of clothing in America increases by, say, 10 percent. This means that the clothing you had been purchasing for $3,000 over the year, or $250 per month, would now cost you $3,300 per year, or $275 per month.
As a consequence, you would find that your income now did not go as far as it had before in the purchase of clothing. You would have to reduce your apparel purchases accordingly, or marginally reduce your buying of other things, so to maintain the real amount of clothing purchased even in the face of the 10 percent rise in its price.
You might mumble and grumble, and if you were aware that this had been caused by the lobbying activities of American clothing manufacturers, you might curse it as another instance of “crony capitalism.” But out of $60,000 of expenditures during the year on all the various types of goods and services you buy, are you really going to become a radical anti-tariff activist over the loss of $25 a month in your standard of living due to this instance of trade protectionism? In many instances, it’s not even equal to the cost of one evening’s nice meal at a pleasant restaurant. And that $300 is barely 0.005 percent of your total $60,000 of spending on all goods and services over the year.
Each of us in our respective producer roles in the division of labor offers for sale the particular good or service that we have chosen to specialize in. Only to the extent to which we are successful in producing, marketing, and selling that good or service to others in society can we earn the financial means that enables us to return to the marketplace in our role of consumer. In that role, we demand all the other diverse goods and services others in society are, in turn, specializing in the production and sale of so they, too, can earn the financial means to be consumers in the arena of competitive exchange.
Another way of expressing this is that while we are consumers of many goods, we are normally the producer of one or more goods or services. None of us can be a consumer unless we have first succeeded as a producer. As a consequence, we pragmatically place far greater importance on our producer role than on our consumer role in society.
Suppose you produce and sell a product that earns you $5,000 per month, or $60,000 a year. And further suppose that during the year, you spend that $60,000 on 20 different types of goods (e.g., food, housing, clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc.), or, on average, $3,000 per year on each of these categories, or $250 per month (just for the sake of the example).
Imagine that some of the domestic producers of clothing were to lobby their representatives in Washington, D. C., and successfully have an import tax imposed on their foreign competitors’ clothing apparel entering the United States, a result of which is the price of clothing in America increases by, say, 10 percent. This means that the clothing you had been purchasing for $3,000 over the year, or $250 per month, would now cost you $3,300 per year, or $275 per month.
As a consequence, you would find that your income now did not go as far as it had before in the purchase of clothing. You would have to reduce your apparel purchases accordingly, or marginally reduce your buying of other things, so to maintain the real amount of clothing purchased even in the face of the 10 percent rise in its price.
You might mumble and grumble, and if you were aware that this had been caused by the lobbying activities of American clothing manufacturers, you might curse it as another instance of “crony capitalism.” But out of $60,000 of expenditures during the year on all the various types of goods and services you buy, are you really going to become a radical anti-tariff activist over the loss of $25 a month in your standard of living due to this instance of trade protectionism? In many instances, it’s not even equal to the cost of one evening’s nice meal at a pleasant restaurant. And that $300 is barely 0.005 percent of your total $60,000 of spending on all goods and services over the year.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 