Wednesday, October 30, 2019

The US Military's Power Is Overall 'Marginal': Report


In the Heritage Foundation's annual report on the state of the U.S. military, they found the overall condition of the country's armed forces to be "marginal" in their ranking system.The findings of the 2020 Index Of U.S.Military Strength, which was released on Wednesday, is based on the conservative think tank's assessments of each of the military branches' capacity, capability, and readiness. The scale goes from "very "weak," "weak," "marginal," "strong," and "very strong":
"As reported in all previous editions of the Index, the common theme across the services and the U.S. nuclear enterprise is one of force degradation caused by many years of underinvestment, poor execution of modernization programs, and the negative effects of budget sequestration (cuts in funding) on readiness and capacity in spite of repeated efforts by Congress to provide relief from low budget ceilings imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) through two-year budget agreements that either waived the BCA caps or provided extra funding in contingency accounts not subject to BCA limits. Subsequent to new guidance provided by then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis in the 2018 NDS, the services undertook efforts to reorient from irregular warfare to large-scale combat against a peer adversary, but such shifts take time and even more resources."
Broken down into the branches, the Army was given a "very strong," the only one given, in readiness, but was "weak" in capacity, The Navy and Marine Corps were also assessed to be "weak" in their capacity, while being "marginal" in the other two areas. The Air Force was rated as being "marginal" in all three categories. 
"In the aggregate, the United States’ military posture is rated 'marginal' and features both positive and negative trends: progress in bringing some new equipment into the force, filling gaps in manpower, and rebuilding some stocks of munitions and repair parts alongside worrisome trends in force readiness, declining strength in key areas like trained pilots, and continued uncertainty across the defense budget," the Heritage Foundation concluded. 
Prior to their Index's rollout, Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer told reporters how years of continuing resolutions (CRs) and sequestration harmed military readiness.
"If you were to say the Budget Control Act and continuing resolutions and sequestration was to control spending, and I don't know if they were actually considering what it did to readiness, but we were put into this situation...well, ten continuing resolutions later we still provide security for the United States of America and our allies," he said, adding that because the military has shown they can work with CRs, Congress has had the mindset the military can work with a CR for another year.
"Yeah we will, but what will we look like on the other side?," Spencer asked.


Wasn't a $4.4 Trillion Federal Government Big Enough?

The leaders of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate proved again this week that they favor a bigger federal government that spends and borrows more money.

Their timing was symbolically perfect.

On Friday afternoon, the government released the Monthly Treasury Statement for September, the last month of fiscal 2019.

It revealed that during the last fiscal year, the federal government collected an all-time record of approximately $1,717,857,000,000 in individual income taxes.

At the same time, the federal government spent an all-time record of approximately $4,446,584,000,000.

Total federal revenues -- which, in addition to individual income taxes, include such things as Social Security taxes, corporate income taxes, excise taxes, customs duties, estate taxes and gift taxes -- did not set an all-time record in fiscal 2019. At approximately $3,462,196,000,000, they were only the third highest in U.S. history. (Fiscal 2015, when total revenues were $3,505,571,540,000 in constant September 2019 dollars; and fiscal 2016, when they were $3,474,127,040,000, remain No. 1 and No. 2.)

The gap between the federal government's record spending in fiscal 2019 and its third-highest total tax revenues resulted in a deficit of $984,388,000,000.

When the fiscal year came to a close on Sept. 30, the federal debt stood at $22,719,401,753,433.78.

By the close of business on Monday, Oct. 28, that debt stood at more than $22,950,538,299,859.71. It had already increased by more than $231 billion less than one month into fiscal 2020.

When the Senate met on Monday, it took up amendments to a massive spending bill called the Commerce, Justice, Science, Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, Interior, Environment, Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act, 2020.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky offered a succinct amendment to this bill. The Congressional Record summarized it as follows: "To reduce the amounts appropriated to be 2 percent less than the amount appropriated for fiscal year 2019."


"In my office, I have a debt clock," Paul said on the Senate floor when he explained his proposal. "It is spinning out of control. The numbers are mind-boggling."

"What I have offered is a commonsense approach to this," he said. "Everybody has their sacred cow. Everybody has some money they want to spend somewhere. Why don't we cut every program by 2 pennies?"

The amendment lost 24 to 67 -- with nine senators not voting.
    All 24 who did vote in favor of the 2% cut were Republicans. But they were outnumbered by the 25 Republicans -- including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky -- who joined 42 Democrats -- including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York -- to defeat the 2% cut.


Congress is continuing what is now a bipartisan tradition.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, real federal spending has increased by 70.7%.

In fiscal 1999, when Bill Clinton was president, total federal spending, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, was $1,702,942,000,000 in 1999 dollars -- or $2,604,203,010,000 in constant September 2019 dollars (adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator). That increased by $1,842,380,990,000 to reach the record $4,446,584,000,000 the federal government spent in fiscal 2019.

In the intervening years, the Republicans and Democrats have traded control of the White House and both houses of Congress. But neither party has shown a serious interest in controlling federal spending or federal debt.

It is true that much of the increase in federal spending is driven by "mandatory" spending on Medicare and Social Security. In fiscal 1999, for example, the federal government spent $190,447,000,000 (or $291,238,720,000 in September 2019 dollars) on Medicare. In fiscal 2019, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, it spent $650,997,000,000 -- an increase of about $359,758,280,000 or 124%.


In fiscal 1999, the federal government spent $390,041,000,000 (or $596,465,380,000 in September 2019 dollars) on Social Security. In fiscal 2019, it spent $1,044,416,000,000 -- an increase of $447,950,620,000 or 75.1%.

But the federal Department of Education also increased its spending from $49,600,820,000 (in constant September 2019 dollars) in fiscal 1999 to $104,364,000,000 in fiscal 2019. That was a real increase of $54,763,180,000 or 110.4%.

Should Senate Republicans exempt the Department of Education from a 2% cut?

The Department of Agriculture spent $96,095,760,000 in constant September 2019 dollars in fiscal 1999. By fiscal 2019, that had climbed 56.2% to $150,121,000,000.

Should the Republican Senate exempt the Department of Agriculture from a 2-percent cut?

The Department of Commerce spent $7,701,240,000 in constant September 2019 dollars in fiscal 1999. By fiscal 2019, that had climbed by 47% to $11,324,000,000.

Should the Republican Senate exempt the Department of Commerce from a 2% cut?

When Republicans and Democrats work together in Washington, D.C., today, it is not to cut a bloated federal government but to cut the chances this nation will be solvent and prosperous for our children and grandchildren.

a threat to our nation and all the civilized world

The Washington Post obituary read, "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48."

"(A)ustere religious scholar"? How about terrorist?!

After Twitter world went berserk, The Post obituary reappeared with a new headline: "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, extremist leader of Islamic State, dies at 48."

At a time when we should all share President Trump's exuberance about catching and destroying a terrorist, mass murderer and rapist -- a threat to our nation and all the civilized world -- The Washington Post accused the president of "creating a spectacle" around this great achievement.

Once again we are made aware of the enormous chasm that exists in America between the right and the left.

For those who see good and evil in the world, the defeat of evil is cause for celebration.

But for those on the left, who reject the moral clarity of our Judeo-Christian ethos, we live in an ambiguous murk of moral relativism, and any claim to moral clarity is itself the problem, not the solution, even when it comes to the apprehension and destruction of a notorious terrorist/murderer.

The Washington Post, the capital's megaphone for the American left, criticized the president for not being "more measured" in his tone, as was then-President Obama, per The Post, after the elimination of Osama bin Laden.

We might recall that Obama's two terms were bookended by two notable and revealing stands in international affairs.


Obama's first major international appearance was in June 2009, when he traveled to Cairo, Egypt, to give a speech to the Muslim world with the objective of apologizing to them for the behavior of his country.


"9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country," he said. "The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals."

Nowhere did the American president convey to his worldwide Muslim audience that there is anything unique in American principles -- principles that created our strong and prosperous nation -- or anything worth paying attention to and emulating.

In December 2016, at the conclusion of Obama's second term, his administration abandoned our friend and ally Israel by abstaining from a vote in the U.N. Security Council, allowing passage of a resolution condemning Israel for its settlement activity.

One Israeli minister said that the U.S. "abandoned Israel, its only ally in the Middle East," while the Palestinian Authority called it "a victory."

Anyone who loves our country and loves what it stands for will be as exuberant as President Trump was in his announcement of the death of this evil man from ISIS.


Was the president being political? Of course. Politics is the means through which we as a nation define and choose sides.

You're either going to be on the side of a free nation Under God, identifying with the sanctity of life, liberty and property, or not.


President Trump and American conservatives are. The Washington Post and America's left are not.

This is where we are today.

Sen. Lindsey Graham summed it up well in his remarks at the White House.

He described the operation saying, "(T)he best of America confronted the worst of mankind, and the good guys won."

We need to make another distinction between President Trump and his predecessor. A mission such as this requires intense focus and coordination. President Trump did this, despite daily scrutiny by a hostile press and being under constant siege by Democrats in Congress looking for an excuse to impeach him.

Sen. Graham was right to call this "a game changer." Putting fear in the hearts of terrorists is the only way, and President Trump is doing it.

Many were killed on their side. On our side, only one military dog sustained serious injury.

Let's follow Graham's advice here also: Let's pray for the dog.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

More Democrats want Trump removed than wanted Nixon out

Eighty-nine percent of Democrats currently say Trump should be impeached and removed from office. That compares with 71% of Democrats who in 1974 said the charges against Nixon warranted his removal from office. The 1974 survey was conducted days before Nixon announced his resignation from office on August 8, 1974.

Among Republicans, 92% reject Trump being impeached and removed from office while just 7% are in favor of it. Under Nixon, a smaller 59% of his fellow Republicans opposed his removal from office while 31% endorsed it.
Gallup’s new update, from an Oct. 14-31, survey, finds 51% of all Americans in favor of Trump being impeached and removed from office, essentially unchanged from 52% in an early October survey. Support for removing Trump remains higher than earlier this year when the question was asked in the context of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Trump campaign ties with Russia in the 2016 election.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Agenda 21 part 2

Wikipedia defines the UN’s Agenda 21 as “An action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development”. Of course we immediately recognise the phrase “sustainable development” as weasel words, a catch-all term incorporating a host of modish obsessions. Much of the activity described as “sustainable” is clearly unsustainable – for example, the EU/UK energy policy which is doing such huge economic damage across the continent. A better phrase for the UN’s Agenda 21 might be “An action plan with regard to climate alarmism and carbon dioxide paranoia” – though it covers a wide range of other fashionable leftist issues as well. The odd thing is that most people have simply not heard of Agenda 21 – although local authorities across the country, and government institutions across the world, at national and local level, have signed up to it. There’s even a cultural dimension. Clearly then, Agenda 21 is a key part of the UN’s global governance pretensions, and it seeks to drive policies which generally speaking are pretty unpalatable to our party. One party member, Anne-Marie Smith, has been particularly exercised over Agenda 21, and frustrated that it seems to operate under the radar, with citizens and voters largely unaware of it. I invited her to put her thoughts into a few hundred words, and I promised to run them as a guest blog. Here they are:   UN Agenda 21 – Anne-Marie Smith Few political discussions are now taking place without some mention of whether Britain would be better served by removing itself from the EU. However our politicians and MSM seem strangely quiet about the real elephant in the room: UN – Agenda 21. Perhaps the reason for this, is that its influence has now spread so widely into all government institutions throughout the World, without revealing to citizens the true nature and intentions of the agenda. Indeed it has now been adopted by many local councils in Britain as Local Agenda 21. It was back in 1992 that the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, and here 179 nations officially signed up to Agenda 21 — many more have followed since. Maurice Strong has been the driving force behind the imposition of Agenda 21, and was also a member of the UN’s Commission on Global Governance. Below are several quotes by Maurice Strong that I feel make scary reading. “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Founder of the UN Environment Programme) “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” (At the Rio Earth Summit) In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that …. the threat of global warming would fit the bill ….. the real enemy then is humanity itself …..we believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realise world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or …..one invented for the purpose.” (Maurice Strong at the Club of Rome) Agenda 21 is actually a blueprint for the 21st century; which under the cover of environmentalism and scaremongering CAGW, is in fact, just communism resurrected in a new guise. It is clear to see, that with the various political parties producing their election manifestos, the Green Party is actually the “Agenda 21 Global Communist Party”. UKIP on the other hand offers us an escape route; as it is the only party which will repeal the ludicrous, suicidal, 2008 Climate Change Act. That will definitely be a start.

United Nations Agenda 21 : The Death Knell of Liberty

Effective execution of UN Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.“ – UN Agenda 21 Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.From the 1976 report UN’s Habitat I Conference.The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” – Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United NationsIsn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” – Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN’s Earth Summit, 1992. is Re-pressed via Gulag Bound :
At the U.N. Summit at Rio in 1992, the Conference Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, said “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– G u l a g – B o u n d –
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. […] The real enemy then is humanity itself. – From the Club of Rome’s “The First Global Revolution” p. 75 1993
“Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.” – John Donne (1572-1631)
The death knell for freedom has been tolling for some time, and only now are people starting to hear it. It started tolling faintly, decades back, and has slowly progressed in volume, until today its tolling is impossible to ignore. The United States of America — that “shining city on a hill” — had a good run of it, and made a gallant effort at establishing liberty for all. But as the old saw would have it, all good things must come to an end. Liberty, after all, is an aberration in mankind’s history — a light that has flared here and there over the centuries, only to dissolve back into the darkness. America is barreling towards becoming a bit player on the world’s stage, and its vaunted middle class — once the envy of the world — is on the verge of being eliminated. For the good of the planet, for the good of Gaia. for the good of the collective — freedom is being replaced by servitude, capitalism by socialism, and property rights by “sustainable development.” I’m not talking about something we need to be on guard against. It is all already in place. It has been going on for quite some time, and it will continue to go on, at a greatly accelerated pace. We are at the “end game” point. And the Globalists know it. Why do you think the Democratic (and many Republican) political hacks on Capitol Hill are so dismissive of the American people? They are essentially putting on a “dog and pony show” for public consumption, while the final pieces for America’s defeat are slid into place. To a great extent the Globalists own the mass media, the entertainment industry, and the Judicial, Executive, and Legislative branches of government. Why should they worry? Already, several generations have been indoctrinated, via our school systems, to value globalization and “social justice,” over personal responsibility and free enterprise. They have been repeatedly sold the idea that they should, “Think globally, act locally.” God has been demeaned, marginalized, and eradicated, at every turn. Our religions are, in many cases, a watered down and diluted mimicry of true spirituality. The Globalists have come out from the closets, the woodwork, and from under rocks. They know that their time of hiding is at long last over. They are brazen about, and proud of, their anti-American/pro-global stance. Their arrogance and hubris is palpable. Call them Communists, Marxists, Fascists, or Globalists — call them what you will, they are collectivists who despise America’s middle class, capitalism, and free enterprise. They have been duplicitous, Machavellian, clever, and patient. And it has paid off — the trap has been sprung. How did this happen? America got hit high, and America got hit low. We suffered sudden catastrophic sneak attacks from without, and insidious long-term betrayal from within. We were hit low by Alinskyesque “community organizers” in our streets, and propagandists in our schools. We were hit high by “think tanks” like the Trilateral Commission, the CoR (Club of Rome), and the CFR (Council for Foreign Relations). They have divided us with special interest groups, vociferous “talking point” attacks, and identity politics. They have infiltrated our schools, and indoctrinated our children. They have opened floodgates using the Cloward-Piven Strategy — overwhelming our judicial system, banking establishment, and border security. They have encouraged corruption and greed at the lowest, to the highest, levels of government. They have twisted and perverted the U.S. Constitution. They have promoted and encouraged anything and everything that would help bring America down. They intend on taking over the planet, but first they need to destabilize, and then destroy, the United States of America. Because we are a powerful bulwark of freedom, we have to go first. And to a large extent, go we have. The Club of Rome (CoR) was founded 1968, in Italy, by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian scholar and industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist. Over the years the list of its members has included ex-presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, diplomats, and billionaires. Its membership roster reads like a “who’s who” of the world’s “movers and shakers.” It includes U.N. bureaucrats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe After its inception, it split into two additional branches: The CoB (Club of Budapest), and the CoM (Club of Madrid). The CoB focuses mainly on social and philosophical/religious issues, while the CoM concentrates more on political issues. In addition, there are over thirty affiliated organizations in other countries — such as the USACoR in the United States. The CoR first garnered public attention with its 1972 report “The Limits to Growth,” which went on to become the best selling environmentalist book of all time. Simply stated, its main thesis is that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely, because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. It’s sort of an industrialized version of a Malthusian nightmare. Twenty years later, the CoR published The First Global Revolution — a quote from the book appears at the start of this article. This book also made a big splash, and helped to re-energize and expand the whole environmentalist movement. Another quote from the book worth keeping in mind is, “It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary… sucha motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else one invented for the purpose….” “One invented for the purpose.” Enter global warming and greenhouse gases. But something even more important happened the year before The First Global Revolution came out. At the instigation of the CoR, and their ilk, in 1992 the United Nations held the Conference on Environment and Development — informally known as the Earth Summit — in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the Earth Summit, 178 nations signed an agreement called Agenda 21 — so called because it dealt with the United Nation’s agenda for the 21st century. It consists of numerous chapters detailing the role that different parts of society should play in implementing “sustainable development.” There are chapters for central governments, local governments, businesses, and community organizations. George Bush senior, then President of the United States, flew down and committed the United States to the U.N. FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) agenda. Ever since then, the Executive Branch — Republican and Democrat — has been bypassing Congress, and passing “soft laws” foisting Agenda 21 on the American public. Check out the U.S. Department of Energy website. Check out the U.S. Department of Agriculture website. Check out the U.S. Department of the Interior website. No matter where you go, environmentalism permeates the U.S. Government bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s blatant and out front; other times you may need to dig a little — but it is always there. The Agenda 21 Globalists wine and dine each other, and hold conventions and conferences around the world. They give each other praise, pats on the back, and prestigious awards. The Norwegian Globalists just gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, and for the same reason that they gave one to Al Gore — promoting globalization and Agenda 21. Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” also received an Oscar from the Hollywood elite. These honors have been bestowed on Gore, not for exposing the truth — for “An Inconvenient Truth” is merely a slickly packaged lie — but because the film spreads the falsehoods of Agenda 21 so well. It can only be shown to school children in the U.K. if accompanied by a disclaimer. The U.K.‘s “The Daily Mail” reports that “…teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming, and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.” The Daily Mail also noted that the lawyer who successfully sued to have the disclaimer attached, said it did not go far enough. “He said ‘no amount of turgid guidance’ could change the fact that the film is unfit for consumption in the classroom.” Yet American students see it over, and over. With no disclaimer. In June of 2009, NASA said that global warming is caused by solar cycles — i.e. the sun. Unsaid was the fact that the greenhouse gas theory is full of holes. Actually it’s a fairy tale, a convenient lie to force the world to bend to the will of the globalists. Under pressure from the Obama Administration NASA now teaches that global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, and “bad” gases like CO2 — which we humans unfortunately emit each time we breathe. Bad humans! Al Gore, the CoR, the U.N., and all of the environmental organizations and their adherents, don’t care what the truth is. They could care less about what causes global warming. They have their “outside enemy… invented for the purpose,” and they are not about to let go of it. The Globalists actually tried Global Cooling first, but for various reasons it didn’t fly. Look at page 22 in the 1974 Annual Rockefeller Report, and you’ll find the mention of a conference called to investigate “…the future implications of the global cooling trend now underway….” Things sure warmed up in a hurry. So what is the “purpose?” What’s really behind all the global warming hoopla? Power. It’s the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist schtick, dressed up in new clothes. Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the U.N. as a cover and tool. As always, there are numerous “useful idiots” who swallow the party line whole. Some of them are simply misguided idealists, and some of them are nuts — dangerously nuts. Behind it all, is a relatively small group of people who are manipulating the world for their own sick, narcissistic ends. It’s a perfect cover. Think about it — who doesn’t feel that fresh air, clean water, and healthy environments are admirable ends to work towards? Any sane person supports such ideals. But hidden in back of the admirable goals are some diabolical designs. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZz1H6TWB5g?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent] Video, “Michael Shaw Agenda 21“ Don’t take my word for it, and don’t dismiss me without research. We all need to know what’s headed our way shortly. If you aren’t aware of these facts already, then educate yourself on the internet. At least check out Green-Agenda.com. What have we seen since the Obama Administration took over? The brainiacs in charge of America’s finances have been ignoring our debts, and eagerly proposing ways to sink us deeper into the quagmire. A lot deeper. At first I thought that they were simply corrupt, venal, self-serving idiots — all of which is undoubtedly true, but they’re also destroying America’s financial foundation, cleverly and intentionally. They want the American dollar replaced by a new global currency. They want America’s middle class to hang in the wind, and die on the vine. They’re Globalists, and they want America to fail. It’s so easy to see, once you realize what’s going on. (See “Chart: IMF Calls For New Global Currency To Replace Dollar.”) Why else would they add trillions to an already staggering debt? Why else would they try to rush through a Cap and Trade bill that will, in Obama’s words, make electricity prices “skyrocket.” Why else would they jam ObamaCare down America’s throat? Why else would Obama say he’d bankrupt anybody who built a new coal plant? [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent]   Video, “Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket“ Once you grasp Agenda 21 and the sly machinations of the United Nations, and globalizing NGOs like the CoR, it all makes sense. It’s “The Plan.” Ruin America’s economy, destroy her middle class, and put a stranglehold on her energy grid. At the U.N. Summit at Rio in 1992, the Conference Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, said “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (See, “Maurice Strong and the Collapse of Industrialized Civilizations.”) He also said, “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.” Club of Rome member, multi-billionaire George Soros [Gulag Bound link] echoed Strong’s statement last fall, when he told an Australian newspaper, “America, as the center of the globalized financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world. This is now over. The game is out,’ he said, adding that the time has come for ‘a very serious adjustment’ in American’s consumption habits.” (See, “Soros Sees End of US-led Globalized Market System.”) Forced to cut back on fossil fuel consumption. Forced to cut back on water usage. Forced to give up our property. Forced to eat less. Forced to warm or cool our homes less. Forced to give up driving. Forced to give up these, and many other things that we currently take for granted. It’s “The Plan” — you had better believe it. Look at what’s happening to California’s Central Valley — once “the world’s breadbasket,” and now a dust bowl. All due to Agenda 21. (See “A Storm Brews over Food, Water, & Power.”) I assure you that the globalists will not help the farmers. As the saying goes, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” The globalists want the land unplowed. They want it to go “back to nature.” They want to increase the price of food. They want to ruin the middle class farming community. It’s all part of “The Plan.” It is not just America this is happening to, of course. Australia, Great Britain, Japan, Canada, Germany… Every country is on the verge of being converted into a vassal state—part of a global hegemony run by the U.N and a power elite. All this will be more easily accomplished with a greatly reduced population. Did I mention population reduction and control? Behind all the warm and fuzzy terminology about “smart growth,” “sustainable development,” and “think green,” lies a very chilling fact. The Agenda 21 folks want to reduce the earth’s population—substantially. In 1996, Club of Rome member and CNN founder, Ted Turner, told Audubon magazine, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” A 95% reduction! Recently he has said that getting rid of a mere two thirds of the world’s population would suffice. Getting mellow in his old age no doubt. (See, “Ted Turner: World Needs a ‘Voluntary’ One-Child Policy for the Next Hundred Years.”) The hard-core environmentalists are all bio-centrists. That is, they believe that humanity is no more important than any other species on this planet. In fact, to hear them tell it, the world would be much better off without any people at all. Anthropologist and anarchist David Graber put it like this in an L.A. Times book review, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. … We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” At any rate, because these Globalists are bio-centrists, most of them don’t believe in a divine spark in man, or unalienable rights, or God for that matter. In short, they don’t have many qualms about killing people. Something else to keep in mind. You know the sardonic comment “Well excuse me for breathing?” These people take that statement literally — and probably won’t excuse you. After all, you’re adding to the earth’s carbon dioxide level every time you breath out. ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability — I know, don’t ask) even has a personal Co2 calculator you can use. ICLEI (pronounced “ick-lee”) believes you should know, and of course want to know, the amount of “your yearly direct personal carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” To which I say, directly and personally, “Get lost,” or words to that effect. (See “United Nations ICLEI and The City of Spokane.”) My favorite eco-friendly slogan is “Save the Planet — Kill Yourself.” There’s something deeply disturbed, and disturbing, about too many of these folks, if you ask me. For example, Yale professor and eco-nut, Lamont Cole, is of the opinion that “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.” You should do yourself a favor and peruse the quotes on Free Republic’s “So you’re an environmentalist…” web-page. If you don’t come away convinced that most of these folks are nuttier than a Payday candy bar, then I don’t know what to tell you. Many of these “useful idiots” may be crazy and harmless, but they can also be crazy and deadly. Behind them, pulling the strings, and waiting to take over, are the Global Elite and their one world government. Whether or not America will last as a free republic until the 2012 presidential elections is debatable. Iran’s leadership is aching to nuke Israel, and Israel’s only going to wait so long before taking preemptive measures — and there goes a large chunk of America’s oil supply. And what happens if Egypt comes under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they decide to close the vital Suez Canal? Remember that Obama’s drilling ban, declared unconstitutional, is still in effect. (See “Judge Holds Interior in Contempt over Drilling Ban.”) Long lines for gas — if you can get any at all; America’s power grid will flicker and intermittently fail. Time for the Globalists to make their final moves. So America, freedom, and Western civilization goes down the drain on our watch. It’s nothing to be proud of, that is for sure. Is there no hope then? If there are still enough patriotic Americans who value personal integrity and freedom — there’s a chance we can still turn this thing around, but it won’t be easy. Far from it. But make no mistake, if we lose this one, America and the world will sink into an abyss of Godless tyranny for a very, very long time. Laus Deo. First published October 12, 2009 Canada Free Press. Revised for Gulag Bound, February 6, 2011. Gulag Notes: For more on Agenda 21, see the tag of the same name: http://gulagbound.com/tag/agenda-21 Please get the word out and face up politicians with this — including at the local and state levels.

Rep. Doug Collins Says Judge’s Order Giving House Dems Access to Secret Material Is ‘Dangerous For Every American’


Democrats are looking for a better reason to impeach President Trump, and they’re hoping to find it in secret grand-jury materials. Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointed judge, approved a request by House Democrats on Friday for access to redacted material from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, as well as various items referenced in it. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) said the ruling by Judge Beryl Howell is “dangerous for every American.”
Rep. Collins, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, stated in a press release on Saturday that “grand jury secrecy rules exist to protect innocent people against public disclosure of information and hearsay that could unfairly harm them.” Rep. Collins criticized the judge’s ruling for failing to consider historical experience and said he’s looking forward “to an expeditious appeal

Deep State Hates America First Policy

After the longest war in the history of our country, it is time for our troops to return home. In 2001, the United States responded to the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11 by sending our military to Afghanistan on a mission to destroy Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. We were successful in destroying their terrorist camps, killing and capturing Al-Qaeda leaders, and forcing Bin Laden out of the country.
Amazingly, our military is still in Afghanistan, although the Taliban control over half of the country. Of course, President Trump and his supporters want to bring these troops home, but he is facing enormous resistance within the government, including the Defense Department.
During the war in Afghanistan, the administration of President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was believed that he harbored weapons of mass destruction; however, none were ever discovered. Eventually, Hussein was captured and executed, and, fortunately, Bin Laden was also killed in Pakistan in 2011 after a daring Navy Seal Team 6 mission.
After many twists and turns in Iraq, the terrorist group ISIS was largely destroyed, the country was stabilized, and most of our military forces departed. Today, the United States maintains 5,000 troops in the country.
While some military presence in the region is worthwhile to monitor terrorist strongholds, it does not have the same type of importance for our economy. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, this region of the world was incredibly important to our economy. Today, while it is still critical to Europe and other areas of the world, it is not as vital to the United States. Fortunately, our country does not “need” their oil, we are energy independent for the first time in many decades.
This independence should give our country ample reason to bring many of our troops home. After 18 years of fighting and spending trillions of our American tax dollars in the region, we are still engaged in the “war on terror.” The results have been mixed, with not only a strong Taliban remaining in Afghanistan, but also a situation in Iraq which is very complicated. While Iraq is more peaceful, terrorist activity has not been eliminated. Looming over the region is the destabilizing influence of Iran, the world’s largest supporter of terrorist activity.
When the Arab Spring movement started in 2010, governments in the region fell. For example, Libya transitioned from a dictatorship to total chaos, more terrorism, a breakdown of the country and an environment which led to the attack against our consulate in Benghazi.
In Syria, an even more chaotic situation developed as a brutal civil war erupted. The country has been torn apart, as refugees have flooded Europe and other areas of the world. Today, Syria remains fragmented and a magnet for terrorist activity.
The United States sent approximately 1,000 troops to Syria, presumably to fight ISIS and other terrorist groups. However, what is our national security interest in Syria? In fact, we should not be involved in an internal battle in Syria as some of these groups have been warring for centuries.
The United States will not be able to end such longstanding conflicts, so our troops should not be stationed in the middle of these battles. Therefore, President Trump was correct to order our military to leave the northern Syrian territory near the Turkish border. These troops may have been killed when Turkey invaded Syria to root out Kurdish fighters operating in the region.
Today, the President deserves tremendous credit for orchestrating a “permanent cease-fire” between the Kurds and the Turks in the region. In return, we are lifting the sanctions on Turkey that were imposed after their invasion of Syria. While some troops will remain to protect Syrian oil fields from ISIS, this mission is in line with our goal to prevent the terrorists from using these resources to build their organization.
With the cease fire and the protection of the oil fields, the President’s policies in the region have been vindicated. It is tragic that so many members of Congress voted to support a resolution condemning the President’s Syrian policy. Only 60 GOP members, mostly affiliated with the Freedom Caucus, did not vote for the resolution.
Sadly, many of the establishment politicians in both parties support never ending wars. Most of these political swamp dwellers hated the message of Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign.
With his recent actions, the President is fulfilling another campaign promise. This important pledge was to put “America First” and bring our troops home. It is what the American people supported, in that election, and it is outrageous the so many in Congress, the media and the Deep State are trying to negate the 2016 results and the wishes of the electorate

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Secularists Assault on Religion and Traditional Values brings Mental Illness

Last week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr told a University of Notre Dame Law School audience that attacks on religious liberty have contributed to a moral decline that’s in part manifested by increases in suicides, mental illness and drug addiction. Barr said that our moral decline is not random but “organized destruction.” Namely that “Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

The attorney general is absolutely correct. Whether we have the stomach to own up to it or not, we have become an immoral people left with little more than the pretense of morality. The left’s attack on religion is just the tiny tip of the iceberg in our nation’s moral decline. You say: “That’s a pretty heavy charge, Williams. You’d better be prepared to back it up with evidence!” I’ll try with a few questions for you to answer.

Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another? And, if that person does not peaceably submit to such use, do you believe that there should be the initiation of force against him? Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me the answer is no to both questions. I bet that nearly every college professor, politician or even minister could not give a simple yes or no response.

A no answer, translated to public policy, would slash the federal budget by no less than two-thirds to three-quarters. After all most federal spending consists of taking the earnings of one American to give to another American in the form of farm subsidies, business bailouts, aid to higher education, welfare and food stamps. Keep in mind that Congress has no resources of its own. Plus there’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy that gives Congress resources. Thus, the only way that Congress can give one American a dollar is to first, through intimidation and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American.

Such actions by the U.S. Congress should offend any sense of moral decency. If you’re a Christian or a Jew, you should be against the notion of one American living at the expense of some other American. When God gave Moses the Eighth Commandment — “Thou shalt not steal” — I am sure that He did not mean thou shalt not steal unless there is a majority vote in the U.S. Congress. By the way, I do not take this position because I don’t believe in helping our fellow man. I believe that helping those in need by reaching into one’s own pocket to do so is praiseworthy and laudable. But helping one’s fellow man in need by reaching into somebody else’s pockets to do so is worthy of condemnation.

We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society. Morality is society’s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior. Religious teachings, one way of inculcating morality, have been under siege in our country for well over a half a century. In the name of not being judgmental and the vision that one lifestyle or set of values is just as good as another, traditional moral absolutes have been abandoned as guiding principles. We no longer hold people accountable for their behavior and we accept excuses. The moral problems Attorney General William Barr mentioned in his speech, plus murder, mayhem and other forms of anti-social behavior, will continue until we regain our moral footing.

In 1798, John Adams, a leading Founding Father and our second president said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I am all too afraid that a historian, writing a few hundred years from now, will note that the liberty Americans enjoyed was simply a historical curiosity. Then it all returned to mankind’s normal state of affairs — arbitrary abuse and control by the powerful elite.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

United States under communism

Whenever I say Democrats put the Lenin Statue in Seattle or Democrats are Marxist-Leninist.  I have something to say. The Frankfurt School is basically Marxist-Leninist culture of East Germany under the Bolsheviks.  Those  douchbags say there isn't collective farming so Leninism is thrown out.  Both the Communist Party USA and Democratic Party have a central committee. They both do central planning/5 year plans.  Earth Day celebrates Vladimir Lenin's birthday from 1974 so the EPA can do central planning. HUD also does 5 year plans.  Cities do 5 years plans.  Communism is here and the Midwest is under communism, even Leninism.

Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built to Mann’s specifications, in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations, the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a cultural center.

The house deserves to stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold epilogue to a melancholy tale.

Mann was hardly the only Central European émigré who experienced uneasy feelings of déjà vu in the fearful years after the end of the Second World War. Members of the intellectual enclave known as the Frankfurt School—originally based at the Institute for Social Research, in Frankfurt—felt a similar alarm. In 1950, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic_ _individual.” The work was based on interviews with American subjects, and the steady accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments in the case studies gave the German-speakers pause. Likewise, Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin type of rabble-rouser, contemplating the “possibility that a situation will arise in which large numbers of people would be susceptible to his psychological manipulation.”

Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most extreme case of a late-capitalist condition in which people surrender real intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort. Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:

    Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.** **

Mann, who had consulted Adorno while writing his musical novel “Doctor Faustus,” was reading “Minima Moralia” as he contemplated his departure from America. He compared the book’s aphoristic style to the “enormously strong gravitational force-field” of a super-compact celestial body. Possibly, it exerted a pull on his decision to go into exile again. A few months later, on the eve of leaving, Mann wrote to Adorno, “The way things are developing is already clear. And we have rather gone beyond Brüning.” Heinrich Brüning was the Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932.

The fears of Mann, Adorno, and other émigrés came to naught—or so it seemed. The McCarthyite danger passed; civil rights advanced; free speech triumphed; liberal democracy spread around the world. By the end of the century, the Frankfurt School was seen in many quarters as an artifact of intellectual kitsch. In recent years, though, its stock has risen once again. As Stuart Jeffries points out in his recent book, “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School,” the ongoing international crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy has prompted a resurgence of interest in the body of work known as critical theory. The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario Adorno and others had in mind: mass distraction masking élite domination. Two years ago, in an essay on the persistence of the Frankfurt School, I wrote, “If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized.”

I spoke too soon. His moment of vindication is arriving now. With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism is on the verge of being realized, its characteristics already mapped by latter-day sociologists who have updated Adorno’s “F-scale” for fascist tendencies. To read “Prophets of Deceit” is to see clear anticipations of Trump’s bigoted harangues. (The script in 1949: “We are coming to the crossroads where we must decide whether we are going to preserve law and order and decency or whether we are going to be sold down the river to these Red traitors who are undermining America.”) As early as the forties, Adorno saw American life as a kind of reality show: “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” Now a businessman turned reality-show star has been elected President. Like it or not, Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.

What Adorno identified as the erasure of the “borderline between culture and empirical reality” is endemic on social media. The failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the campaign season should have surprised no one; the local hirelings of logic are too enamored of their algorithms—and of the revenue they generate—to intervene. From the start, Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upwelling of ugliness on the Internet. A defining moment was the turn-of-the-century wave of music piracy, which did lasting damage to the idea of intellectual property. Fake news is an extension of the same phenomenon, and, as in the Napster era, no one is taking responsibility. Traffic trumps ethics.


Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value-free mentality, pumping out Trump stories and airing his rallies because they got hits and high ratings. At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day, when a CNN executive, boasting of his network’s billion-dollar profit in 2016, spoke of “a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton Administration.” Of the clouds and shadows that hung over Clinton in the press, the darkest, perhaps, was the prospect of boredom. Among voters, a kind of nihilistic glee may have been as much a factor in Trump’s election as economic dissatisfaction or racial resentment. The mechanism by which people support a political program “largely incompatible with their own rational self-interest,” as Adorno wrote, requires many kinds of deception.

So here we are, living in what feels like an excessively on-the-nose novel by Don DeLillo, in which a President-elect tweets of his cabinet-selection process, “I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” One all-too-schematic plot twist is the revelation that Richard Spencer—the white supremacist whose phrase “alt-right” was adopted by Trump’s strategist, Steve Bannon—wrote a master’s thesis on the topic of none other than Theodor W. Adorno, arguing that Wagner’s anti-Semitism prevented Adorno from coming to terms with his love for Wagner’s music. The Department of Hitler Studies, from DeLillo’s “White Noise,” is moving to D.C.

When the purchase of the Mann house was announced, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and likely its next President, declared, “In stormy times like these, we need more than ever cultural anchor points with our most important partner outside of Europe.” Steinmeier was implying that the villa could become an outpost of cosmopolitan thinking as nativism overtakes both America and Europe.

The ironic reversal of roles hardly needs to be noted. However the Trump Presidency turns out—whether it veers toward autocracy, devolves into kleptocracy, or takes some unheard-of new form—America has, for the time being, abdicated the role of the world’s moral leader, to the extent that it ever played that part convincingly. “Make America Great Again” is one of Trump’s many linguistic contortions: in fact, one of his core messages is that America should no longer bother with being great, that it should retreat from international commitments, that it should make itself small and mean.

Germany, on the other hand, increasingly appears to be the strongest remaining bastion of liberal democracy. With the United Kingdom mired in the aftermath of Brexit, France facing a possible hard-right swerve, and Italy in disarray, the country that long stood as a synonym for nationalist insanity has so far resisted political and cultural regression. Tellingly, it has rejected the libertarian code of the big Silicon Valley companies, with their disdain for privacy, copyright, and limitations on hate speech. On the day after the American election, which happened to be the seventy-eighth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a neo-Nazi group posted a map of Jewish businesses in Berlin, titled “Jews Among Us.” Facebook initially refused to take down the post, but an outcry in the media and among lawmakers prompted its deletion. Such episodes suggest that Germans are less likely to acquiesce to the forces that have ravaged the American public sphere.

The defeat of the Freedom Party candidate in the Austrian Presidential election is a hopeful sign: perhaps the German-speaking countries can remind the rest of the world of the darkness of their former path. Still, the far right is creeping forward in Germany, as it is all over Europe. No coming political race will be as tensely watched as

Angela Merkel’s run next year for reëlection as Chancellor. The ultimate fear isn’t of the second coming of Hitler: history never repeats itself so obviously, and a sense of shame over the Nazi past remains pervasive in all corners of German life. No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes.
Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” He will publish his third book, “Wagnerism,” in September.

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Is America Becoming Sinicized

A little over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.
The results of Deng's revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the second-largest economy on the planet. It lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese into the global middle class.
Deng's revolution came at a cost of terrible environmental damage, the rampant destruction of local communities and continued political repression. A more efficient economy empowered dictatorship.
Abroad, China systematically violated every tenet of international trade and commerce. It stole copyrights and patents. It ran up huge trade surpluses. It dumped products at below the cost of production to hook international customers. It threatened critics with boycotts, divestments and expulsions. It manipulated its currency. It demanded technology transfers from companies doing business in China. It created a vast espionage network in Western countries to steal technology. And it increasingly bullied and threatened its Asian neighbors.
Such criminality abroad and such repression at home was contextualized and mostly excused by Western nations.
U.S. foreign policy toward China seemed to be based on the belief that the more China modernized and the more affluent its citizens became, the more inevitable Chinese political freedom would be.

Supposedly a free-market China would drop its communist past to become a Westernized democracy such as Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Once China fully joined the family of successful, law-abiding nations, it would empower Western freedoms and help create a stable international order.
None of that came close to happening.
There was never evidence that China wished to end communism -- other than to allow some market reforms designed to strengthen its dictatorial rule and its influence overseas.
If in the past Chinese communism impoverished its own citizens but left the world mostly alone, now it has enriched more than a billion people at home and terrified 6 billion abroad.
Far from a newly rich China becoming Westernized politically, the West and the rest of the world are more likely to become politically repressive like China.
Westerners, who apologize when Islamists kill cartoonists and journalists for supposedly insulting Islam, do not say a word when China puts a million Muslims into re-education camps, bulldozes Islamic cemeteries and shuts down mosques.
Loud human rights lions in Europe turn into kittens when it is a question of Chinese organ harvesting, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the jailing and execution of dissidents.
American environmentalists demand a radical shutdown of the current fossil-fuel-based U.S. economy. They say little about greenhouse gas emissions from China, the biggest polluter in the world by far.
Outspoken NBA athletes and hip Hollywood celebrities damn the Second Amendment, curse their president and boycott states they find politically incorrect. But they become abject cowards when it comes to China.
Loud college students who disrupt campus speakers and forbid free speech never say a word about the horrendous human rights record of China. They ignore strident Chinese expatriate student supporters on campus.
College deans who weigh in on global morality say nothing about Chinese gulags or crackdowns against Hong Kong.

Why are we becoming more like China than China is like us?
China has the world's largest consumer market. Corporations get rich outsourcing their factories to take advantage of its cheap labor. They all compete for lucrative markets of television viewers, tech consumers and students.

Western intellectuals always romanticize lethal communists as misguided idealists rather than stone-cold authoritarians. Mao is still a hero to many in the West despite his liquidation of some 50 million people over his violent career.
China does not fool around. Beijing does not just threaten neutrals, rivals and enemies, but uses its economic clout -- and no doubt soon its growing military power -- to force acquiescence. An appeasing world is terrified about what a huge military and economic colossus of 1.4 billion people will soon be able to do to its critics.
A non-diverse and abjectly racist China plays the victim card brilliantly. It often claims that as an Asian nation it suffers racial bias from the Western white establishment. China always channels the victimization myth that supposedly oppressed nonwhite peoples cannot themselves be oppressors.
All these reasons and more explain why there wasn't a single major Western politician who warned the world of a frightening, Chinese-dominated future -- one in which the West turned into China rather than China into the West.
The single figure who finally issued such a warning, brash Donald Trump -- without prior military or political experience -- was as loudly and publicly damned as he was privately and quietly admired for doing so.

Wednesday, October 09, 2019

Top 50 Death Metal Albums

  1. Altars Of Madness - Morbid Angel
  2. Human - Death
  3. Scream Bloody Gore - Death
  4. Seven Churches - Possessed
  5. Unquestionable Presence - Atheist
  6. Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious - Carcass
  7. Blessed Are The Sick - Morbid Angel
  8. Pierced From Within - Suffocation
  9. Left Hand Path - Entombed
10. Cause of Death - Obituary
11. Legion - Deicide
12. Mental Funeral - Autopsy
13. Like An Ever Flowing Stream - Dismember
14. Nespithe - Demilich
15. Heartwork - Carcass
16. Slaughter Of The Soul - At The Gates
17. Individual Thought Patterns - Death
18. Clandestine - Entombed
19. Focus - Cynic
20. World Downfall - Terrorizer
21. Deicide - Deicide
22. Slowly We Rot - Obituary
23. Covenant - Morbid Angel
24. The Bleeding - Cannibal Corpse
25. Morbid Visions - Sepultura
26. Leprosy - Death
27. Symphonies of Sickness - Carcass
28. Harmony Corruption - Napalm Death
29. None So Vile - Cryptopsy
30. Here In After - Immolation
31. Severed Survival - Autopsy
32. My Arms, Your Hearse - Opeth
33. Tomb of the Mutilated - Cannibal Corpse
34. Symbolic - Death
35. Tales from A Thousand Lakes - Amorphis
36. Consuming Impulse - Pestilence
37. The Gallery - Dark Tranquility
38. Effigy of the Forgotten - Suffocation
39. Piece of Time - Athiest
40. Horrified - Repulsion
41. Close To A World Below - Immolation
42. The End Complete - Obituary
43. Jester Race - In Flames
44. Annihilation of the Wicked - Nile
45. Slumber of Sullen Eyes - Demigod
46. Onward to Golgotha - Incantation
47. Dark Recollections - Carnage
48. Crimson - Edge of Sanity
49. Abducted - Hypocrisy
50. Obscura - Gorguts

Sunday, October 06, 2019

Andrew Yang: Bernie’s And Warren’s ‘Wealth Tax’ Would Be Disastrous

We all know that Democrats want to redistribute the ultra-wealthiest Americans’ money through mass taxation. It seems everybody on the left who is running for the presidency thinks a “wealth tax” is a good idea. But, there is only one candidate who explains why this tax would never work. Andrew Yang, political outsider, is against a wealth tax more because it would be impossible to enforce, not necessarily that it would kill industry.
Here is what CNBC’s John Harwood asked Andrew Yang:
The Republican economists I talked to who praise the efficiency of what you proposed contrasted it with the wealth tax that Sanders and Warren have talked about. They say it just won’t work, won’t raise the money, will trigger a lot of evasion. There are measurement problems. Do you think the wealth tax is a bad idea?
Here’s what Yang responded with:
I think the wealth tax is an idea, in spirit, that makes sense, given the wealth distribution. But in practice it would have massive implementation problems. There would be capital flight, wealthy people would renounce their citizenship. And the bigger problem isn’t even the money. It’s the annual inventorying of their assets. The truly wealthy in this country have zero interest in submitting to an annual audit of all of their assets. They barely know what all their assets are. And the last thing they’re going to do is report them every year and then pay a toll. So you would have massive compliance problems. And to me there are better ways to make this economy fair, though I understand the spirit of it and the intent of it. But I agree that it would be somewhere between problematic and a disaster in practice.
To be clear, the government taking people’s money to redistribute it amongst the masses is never a good idea “in spirit.” In fact, it is called socialism and it kills the human spirit. But, at least Yang is realistic enough to understand a “wealth tax” could never actually work out

This Whistleblower Complaint Sure Is Reading Like The Steele Dossier

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) on Wednesday told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum he believes the whistleblower complaint filed against President Donald Trump for a call made with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “reads like the Steele dossier.”
“We learned about this three weeks ago on a late Friday night press release that was multiple pages long, about a paragraph long,” Nunes said about the whistleblower complaint.
Nunes comments come after it was learned that Schiff knew about the whistleblower’s complaint a month before it was brought to the Intelligence Committee.
“We got that, Republicans receive that, what on Earth is going on here. All of you in the press office, why is this being pumped up as big,” he said. “A few days later after a briefing, Schiff briefs us a little bit on this and claims he doesn’t know exactly what this is, but it must be really important.”
“Those are just two sets of facts that clearly he’s trying to pump up and promote this story. And that we find out that, yeah, because his staff knew about it ahead of time,” he said. “The thing not clear is when did they actually find out about it. We still don’t have a date, when did the whistleblower start talking to the Democrats of the Intelligence Committee? It would’ve been very easy to just tell us. He had multiple opportunities to tell.”
According to Nunes, there are similarities between how the dossier was written and how the whistleblower complaint was written.
“From reading the complaint, this person is a supposing intelligence officer. Intelligence officers are trained to not have only first-hand sources, but multiple first-hand sources that can corroborate the evidence. So this intelligence person knows this. That’s not what is in the complaint,” Nunes said. “It’s all hearsay. There’s no first-hand evidence. To me, this is somebody — I don’t even believe this whistleblower wrote this complaint because it’s written in a way that reads exactly like the Steele dossier, which, for your viewers, I think they know, the Steele was a Clinton bought and paid for.”
“The president says today Adam Schiff had a hand in writing that actual complaint. But is there any evidence to back that up?” MacCallum asked.
“No, but it looks like from at least the stories that were written earlier about this, okay, that are from known Russia hoax writers, journalists, then retweeted out by Democrats on the committee, that we learn the Democrats on the committee knew about it, so it has all the markings of the Russia hoax,” Nunes explained. “Certainly, don’t forget, the whole explanation how the regulations got changed a week before the whistleblower came in and actually didn’t get changed online until they were asked by the press, I think the IC IG — I suspect that he had to know something too.”
The dossier, which was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was unverified and used to obtain a FISA warrant. The dossier ultimately lead to spying on Donald Trump’s campaign for alleged collusion with Russia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately declared a collusion did not take place

Schiff Is ‘Basically the Jussie Smollett of Congress on Steroids’

Donald Trump Jr. went off on House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff Wednesday, comparing the California Democrat to Jussie Smollett.
“Adam Schiff has never been afraid of a microphone. He’s never met a camera he didn’t love. And frankly, he’s never met a camera he didn’t lie to. Adam Schiff is basically the Jussie Smollett of Congress on steroids. I’ve never seen anything so ridiculous,” Trump Jr. said on Fox News’s “Hannity.”
Last week, during his opening remarks at a House Intelligence hearing with acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, Schiff read a made-up summary of the Ukraine call’s transcript, claiming it was “part parody.”
Schiff also knew about the whistleblower complaint before it was made, according to a New York Times report, meaning he lied when he said “we did not speak directly to the whistleblower.” President Trump even accused him of helping write it, too.
Trump Jr. said if he did even a fraction of what Schiff has done, he’d be in jail.
“If I lied even a little bit … like Adam Schiff has lied to the American people, and in front of Congress the other day, they’d throw me in jail for perjury,” Trump Jr. said. “He’s done it over and over. … He’s probably the person that magically leaked my emails and edited them —which was the big CNN bombshell which made it seem like I got the WikiLeaks stuff the week before as opposed to a week after