Monday February 6, 2023
As I originally wrote in my July 10, 2022 article Wunderwaffe Du Jour:
“The US military is not built nor equipped for protracted high-intensity conflict. Nor can it supply a depleted proxy army with the means to prosecute a protracted high-intensity conflict.”
The incontrovertible reality is that the US and its NATO allies are presently incapable of supplying the massive material demands of modern industrial warfare, as Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Alex Vershinin articulated so well in this essential June 2022 analysis: The Return of Industrial Warfare.
And yet the public discussion of potential war always includes convinced voices proclaiming that, just like in the Second World War, US industry could very rapidly ramp up to produce armaments of surpassing quality, and in overwhelming quantities.
This titillates the biases of American exceptionalists in general, and is a particularly seductive fantasy of the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult drones propagandizing for filthy lucre at the countless armaments-industry-funded “think tanks” in Washington and London.
But the notion that the rapidly declining empire can resurrect the Arsenal of Democracy band for one final farewell tour is a singularly delusional vanity.
read on...
Monday February 6, 2023
A group of House Republicans is supporting legislation that would replace federal income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes with a 30 percent national sales tax. The bill also eliminates the Internal Revenue Service, giving states the responsibility to collect the sales tax and send the revenue to DC.
read on...
Monday February 6, 2023
Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of "Russian propaganda".
I know I'm not a Russian propagandist. I'm not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I'm literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.
Yet for years I've watched people pointing at me as an example of what "Russian propaganda" looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about "Russian influence" that's been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.
That's one reason why I wasn't surprised by Matt Taibbi's reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.
read on...
Saturday February 4, 2023
It’s remarkable how easy it is to rile up the American public. The latest bit of theatrics centers around a “communist” balloon that is either a spy device or a weather balloon that has drifted off course. Either way, this thing isn’t some sort of major threat to America.
Even so, it can be used as clickbait.
That’s right, the commies may use the balloon to poison us, never mind how ludicrous this is on its face.
First, allow me to dispel a myth. The government in China is not communist. It is, at best, authoritarian crony capitalism. Marx would be appalled. His idea was to do away with capitalism.
read on...
Saturday February 4, 2023
Biden's Ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, is a particularly odious specimen in a long line of obnoxious US residents of Szabadság tér since the end of Hungary's subjection to Soviet control in 1989.
read on...
Friday February 3, 2023
Note the following sentence in a New York Times news story yesterday by Michael Schwirtz and Anton Troianovski about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Mr. Putin’s attempt to put a veneer of nobility on an unprovoked invasion that has killed thousands of civilians and turned millions more into refugees was made in the Russian city once known as Stalingrad, on the 80th anniversary of a victory there against Nazi Germany that changed the course of World War II.” (Italics added.)
The operative word is “unprovoked.”
First of all, it’s a strange word for news reporters to be using because it’s more in the nature of a commentary or editorial. News reporters are supposed to report the news, and the editorial department of a newspaper is supposed to render opinions and commentary on the news. Schwirtz and Troianovski do both in their news article.
Second, and more important, for the life of me, I cannot understand how Schwirtz and Troianovski are unable to see that Russia’s invasion was provoked. It was provoked knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately.
read on...
Thursday February 2, 2023
Although the narrative pushed by the US government and propped up by the mainstream media is that "Ukraine is winning," in a recent classified briefing to Congress the Pentagon is singing a very different tune. As the Biden Administration continues up the escalation escalator, shouldn't the American people hear what military experts really believe? Also today: Why F-16s? And...when a medical school goes "woke." Watch today's Liberty Report...
read on...
Thursday February 2, 2023
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky just sicced his secret police (Ukraine’s SBU) on Igor Kolomoisky, a billionaire oligarch who was once wholly responsible for financing the Ukrainian president’s rise to power. The significance of the story — regarding Zelensky turning on his longtime patron and Kolomoisky’s other significant ties — was entirely buried by foreign and state media, with most merely referring to the situation as another in a series of “anti-corruption” actions.
A quick rundown on why Mr. Kolomoisky is significant:
He owned Burisma when it employed Hunter Biden.
He financed Zelensky's entire television, business, and political career, including his rise to the presidency.
He once funded Ukrainian militias, but later argued that Kiev should engage in a detente with Russia. This part is critical, as Kolomoisky’s good standing with the West shifted dramatically after this decision.
Since then, he became the subject of an FBI probe and US sanctions.
read on...
Thursday February 2, 2023
That the police officers charged with the beating death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols are Black is a distraction. Don’t be distracted. This latest instance of police brutality is not about racism in policing or black-on-black violence. The entire institution is corrupt. The old guard—made up of fine, decent, lawful police officers who took seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—has given way to a new guard hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
read on...
Thursday February 2, 2023
When Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson first burst onto the news cycle in 2016 he was seen by many as a principled iconoclast among the spineless intellectuals who was speaking out against an approaching toleration left. Protesting the gender identity rights bill C-16, he was thrusted into the public eye when he made viral Youtube videos warning that such a law would force compelled speech on a slope towards big-brother state overreach.
Beloved and hated by many, years of interviews, public lectures, and debates has made Peterson one of the most influential intellectuals on Earth — but with his recent partnership with the conservative media giant The Daily Wire, he has been shifting closer to the neocon-prointervention war-wing ideologies of the world, cozying up to their version of tolerationism while lamenting the others. Attacking woke leftist ideology is still the ex-professors main grift, but now he has stuck his feet in the water of the “promoting democracy through regime change” faction of conservatives. He sold out to the war party, and may never come back around.
Like so many of the contrarian figures that challenge pervading narratives about culture, there is something immensely likeable about Peterson. Self-described as a critic of academic neo-Marxist post-modernism, he will use his Harvard psychologist background to attack leftist gender ideology and progressive views on environmental fanaticism.
read on...
