LGBT Activists' War on Privacy, Dignity, and Common Decency
By Scott Lazarowitz
The latest victim of the PC crowd’s intolerance and intimidation tactics has been sports analyst and former Red Sox player Curt Schilling, who was released from ESPN. His crime? He wrote a sarcastic Facebook post on recent transgender, public restroom, and shower controversies.
Merely promoting common decency and civility, Schilling sympathizes with the ladies in the ladies room who are uncomfortable with males intruding into their ladies room. But Schilling’s indiscretion is a no-no for the PC crowd, apparently.
The colleges and public schools seem to be brainwashing the young to believe and accept the latest LGBT nonsense. “Social Justice Warriors,” as the activists seem to be called today, are really anti-social and their activism consists of the use of aggression, intrusiveness, and coercion — certainly not tolerance, and the idea of live and let live.
How did our society get to this point, in which males are being given the right to access the ladies room?
Legally, a big step toward such societal irrationality occurred with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Americans chose to ignore the moral violation by the State of private property rights and freedom of association when the Civil Rights Act enmeshed private property along with government-controlled functions. So there are “public accommodations” laws in which even private business owners may not discriminate against someone based on one’s color or race, or one’s sex or national origin.
But when anti-discrimination laws now include certain groups based on their lifestyles and private sexual activities, that is an entirely different matter. The legal activism is the activists’ way of forcing not only social acceptance but forcing access into the private lives and private property of others.
The activists are becoming increasingly personal now. Such legal inclusions are now becoming personally invasive of the private activities and moral beliefs of the activists’ victims.
You see, the subjects of private bathroom or showering activities, nudity, sexuality and sexual-oriented lifestyles are very uncomfortable subjects for some people. That is because those are private matters. They are personal matters.
The activists say that traditionalists have a problem with their sexuality and their bodies, when no, it is those on the left who have the problem. Not only do the LGBT activists and their leftist cohorts show a lack of decency and discretion, and a lack of understanding of privacy and dignity in regards to human sexuality, but they now seem to side with intruders and invaders.
There have now been many lawsuits by LGBT activists against private businesses such as a bakery run by Bible-believing Christians who didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The absurdity of forcing the bakers to have to do extra labor for someone whose lifestyle the bakers personally oppose became even more absurd when Gov. Gary Johnson was asked at a recent “Libertarian” Party debate whether a Jewish baker should have to bake a Nazi wedding cake, and he answered, “That would be my contention, yes.”
Well excuse me, Gary, but if you’re going to call yourself a “libertarian,” then you should at least understand the basic principles of freedom of thought and conscience, private property rights and voluntary association, no?
For those who believe in freedom and the idea of live and let live, of course, the Jewish baker or Christian baker or atheist baker should not have to bake a cake for anyone for whom he does not want to bake a cake. If prospective consumers don’t like that, they can go to a different baker. Which is exactly what most of those same-sex couples who sued bakers, photographers, and florists, did.
But, despite finding businesses who would serve them, the activists nevertheless felt it necessary to take innocent people to court for no good reason. Those lawsuits are the actions of bullies, those bent on coercion and intimidation. These activists are the ones who turn to the aggressive armed forced of the State to carry out their demands on others.
In contrast, those who say, “Okay, you don’t want to bake a cake for me, so I will go to a different baker. And that’s the end of that,” are the ones who believe in live and let live and who behave with a sense of common decency.
And now the transgender issue, and the various laws and bills regarding public bathrooms and locker rooms/showers. Transgender people are those who identify as the sex or gender opposite of what they really are biologically. It is not that an anatomical male is really a female, but that he believes or says he is a female. In my opinion, a lot of these people just seem brainwashed especially by their early school teachers, mentors, friends, family members, and social media.
Besides the courts, apparently teachers, students, and families seem very accepting of a teenager who was born female but says she is a male and wants to use the males’ facilities in the school. But how are all these people developing such acceptance of this Orwellian nonsense?
Just a few examples of the influencing factors from recent years include laws mandating schools teach only positive perspectives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, “anti-bullying” laws being expanded to outlaw criticism of homosexuality in schools and force “diversity training,” and the Obama administration’s promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism at the kindergarten level. There have even been training videos for activist teachers in the public schools on how to indoctrinate the kids. So the influences aren’t just coming from pop culture and social media, that’s for sure.
A few days ago this lady called the Howie Carr Show to say that her 14-year-old is transgender. The caller said that she knew this since he (or she) was 4. I was hoping that the caller was just one of those local comedians who calls talk shows and fools people, but that was not the case here. Oh, well.
And that reminded me of this Boston Globe op-ed by a lady who refers to her daughter as her “son” and as “he” when her daughter really is a “she.” So the lady is raising her daughter as a boy even though the child is only 5 years old. Can you believe this?
It is just disgraceful what some “adults” are doing to their kids psychologically, out of ignorance or ideology, or for other irrational reasons. Some people even think that this should be considered a form of child abuse as well. Are there really a lot of parents like this?
Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Hospital has pointed out that 70-80% of children expressing transgender feelings had shed such feelings over time. They did so naturally, as a natural part of the course of childhood. Perhaps patience really is a virtue. And perhaps the Globe op-ed writer mom might consider that as it is not too late given the child is only 5 years old. Just sayin’.
Dr. McHugh also noted that transgender people have shown higher rates of depression and suicide following gender reassignment surgery. Again, however, the controversy now is surrounding mostly those who haven’t had such surgical procedures, but merely those who believe or say they really are someone of the opposite sex.
The bottom line here is that the transgender ideology is doing great harm to children and to future generations. What we really need are a return to respect for the dignity of others and for private property rights, and, most of all, we need to get rid of government schools!
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/scott-lazarowitz/bathroom-controversy/
Monday, April 25, 2016
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Are you ready???
How Long Before Global Financial System Fails?
By Egon von Greyerz
The global economy turned down in earnest already in 2006 but with a massive worldwide printing and lending programme, the world has had a temporary stay of execution. But the effect of this fabricated money has now come to an end. And what else would you expect. To print money that has no value or to lend money that doesn’t exist can never create wealth or save anybody. The downturn will soon start to accelerate and eventually lead to a total failure of the financial system and sovereign defaults. But no one must believe that there will be a sudden implosion or a “reset” that solves or changes everything. Instead, what we will experience is a process with things deteriorating at a fast pace but without one single event that overnight changes everything.
It is actually happening all around us right now. Let’s just look at some examples of the stresses within the system. The ECB is facing bank failures in almost every member country. An Austrian bank just had to be bailed-in and the whole Italian banking system is on the verge of collapse. The Greek banks are already bankrupt although no one dares to declare it officially. The ECB knows that they only have one tool left to temporarily postpone a breakdown of the European banking system and that is to further increase its money printing programme. Only in the last 15 months, the balance sheet of the ECB has exploded by 45% to Euro 3 trillion. The Bundesbank, the German central bank, is totally aware of the predicament of the European banks. But they also know that they will be on the hook for the majority of the money printed by the ECB and therefore they have indicated that they will sue the ECB if it accelerates money printing.
The Fed is not printing money currently but in my view, it is only a matter of time before we see a major QE programme in the US due to a deteriorating economy and a financial system under pressure. US outstanding derivatives are at least $500 trillion and most of that will just implode as counter-party fails. The Fed and the FDIC are concerned about this and that is why they just issued a warning to US banks. They told JP Morgan for example that the bank is unprepared for a crisis and that they have no plans for winding down their derivatives. JP Morgan’s derivatives exposure, properly valued, is probably in excess of $100 trillion...
Read the rest here:
https://goldswitzerland.com/how-long-before-global-financial-system-fails/
By Egon von Greyerz
The global economy turned down in earnest already in 2006 but with a massive worldwide printing and lending programme, the world has had a temporary stay of execution. But the effect of this fabricated money has now come to an end. And what else would you expect. To print money that has no value or to lend money that doesn’t exist can never create wealth or save anybody. The downturn will soon start to accelerate and eventually lead to a total failure of the financial system and sovereign defaults. But no one must believe that there will be a sudden implosion or a “reset” that solves or changes everything. Instead, what we will experience is a process with things deteriorating at a fast pace but without one single event that overnight changes everything.
It is actually happening all around us right now. Let’s just look at some examples of the stresses within the system. The ECB is facing bank failures in almost every member country. An Austrian bank just had to be bailed-in and the whole Italian banking system is on the verge of collapse. The Greek banks are already bankrupt although no one dares to declare it officially. The ECB knows that they only have one tool left to temporarily postpone a breakdown of the European banking system and that is to further increase its money printing programme. Only in the last 15 months, the balance sheet of the ECB has exploded by 45% to Euro 3 trillion. The Bundesbank, the German central bank, is totally aware of the predicament of the European banks. But they also know that they will be on the hook for the majority of the money printed by the ECB and therefore they have indicated that they will sue the ECB if it accelerates money printing.
The Fed is not printing money currently but in my view, it is only a matter of time before we see a major QE programme in the US due to a deteriorating economy and a financial system under pressure. US outstanding derivatives are at least $500 trillion and most of that will just implode as counter-party fails. The Fed and the FDIC are concerned about this and that is why they just issued a warning to US banks. They told JP Morgan for example that the bank is unprepared for a crisis and that they have no plans for winding down their derivatives. JP Morgan’s derivatives exposure, properly valued, is probably in excess of $100 trillion...
Read the rest here:
https://goldswitzerland.com/how-long-before-global-financial-system-fails/
Thursday, April 21, 2016
"How does the federal government pay for all those programs? It does not have its own fountain of wealth. So, to get that $3.8 trillion, it forcibly collects taxes from people. If a person refuses to pay his taxes, they put him in jail."
The Immorality of Social Security
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Social Security is based on the same principle that all other welfare-state programs are based on: the forcible taking of money from people to whom it rightly belongs and giving it to people to whom it does not belong.
As I have explained this week in my two previous articles on Social Security (here and here), during their work lives people do not deposit their monies into a Social Security fund from which they can later withdraw their monies during retirement. They also don’t pay “insurance premiums” that will guarantee them a payout during their retirement years.
Instead, throughout their work lives they simply pay taxes — all sorts of taxes — income taxes, sales taxes, FICA taxes, property taxes, and more. When people pay taxes, they are not depositing their money into special accounts. They are not paying premiums. They are simply handing over their money to government — money that they know is now owned by the government and that the government is going to spend immediately.
By the end of each calendar year, the federal government has spent all the money that it has collected in taxes. It’s gone. That includes income taxes, FICA taxes, excise taxes, and all other taxes that the federal government collects. Gone — as in spent. Nobody’s money has been socked away in a special designated account, a lockbox, or a trust fund.
Notwithstanding this basic fact of life, many Americans continue to have a mindset on Social Security that holds, “I put it in and therefore I have a right to get it back” or “That’s my money that I’m just getting back” or “We antie in our money and we’re just getting it back.”
That is, they continue to think in terms of “putting their money in” some sort of an account for later use rather than the reality that they’re simply paying taxes — taxes that are spent immediately upon receipt by the government.
Here’s the right way to think about Social Security. Think of it as part of all the programs, both welfare and warfare, that the federal government spends its money on. Total federal spending amounts to $3.8 trillion. That total spending includes the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, foreign aid to dictators, regime-change operations, the U.S. death machine in the Middle East, “defense” contractors, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, HUD, HHS, DEA, food stamps, and all the other programs that come with a welfare-warfare state. Social Security is just one of those many programs.
How does the federal government pay for all those programs? It does not have its own fountain of wealth. So, to get that $3.8 trillion, it forcibly collects taxes from people. If a person refuses to pay his taxes, they put him in jail.
Where some of the deception comes into play is that federal officials compare FICA tax revenues to Social Security expenditures and point out that the difference is still on the plus side. But that’s really quite irrelevant and also quite misleading because, again, Social Security is simply one part of overall federal expenditures. The fact that one particular tax is bringing in a certain amount of money, compared to other taxes, makes no difference. What ultimately matters is total tax revenues versus total federal expenditures.
Total tax revenues amount to about $3.3 trillion, leaving a $500 billion deficit. That amount is borrowed, which adds another half-a-trillion dollars to the $18 trillion in debt that the government already owes. That debt is threatening to send the government and the nation into a grave economic and monetary crisis.
All the money that Social Security recipients are receiving today is coming from young people — that is, people who are still working. That’s just a fact of life. That’s reality. Young people who are the ones producing the wealth because they are the ones who are working. It’s their money. Under Social Security, seniors are using the government to forcibly take money from their children’s and grandchildren’s generations in order to fund their retirement. And given that it’s based on taxation, it’s all based on force and coercion.
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that many seniors engage in self-deception on this program — convincing themselves that they’re just “getting their money back” — is a good sign. It might reflect that deep down they know that it’s morally wrong to be taking money from people to whom it rightly belongs to fund their retirement.
After all, since our earliest years as children, we are all taught that it’s wrong to take what doesn’t belong to you. It’s called stealing. Every kid knows that. That moral principle remains with most people.
Suppose I were to accost a 25-year-old person on some dark street and, at gunpoint, force him to go to his ATM and withdraw $10,000 and give it to me. I use half the money to fund my retirement and the other half to fund a poor person’s medical bills.
Most everyone would immediately say, “Jacob, you’re just a thief. You can’t do that, either morally or legally. Fund your own retirement. Help out others with your own money.”
But as soon as I do the same thing through government — through Social Security and Medicare — suddenly I have been converted into a responsible, compassionate, and caring person. When people use the federal government to accomplish the same thing as a private thief, suddenly the thievery is converted into something good, moral, and beneficial.
But the fact is that the process of taking money from people to whom it rightly belongs and giving it to others to whom it does not belong remains immoral (and sinful) regardless of whether it’s being done privately or by government. Government cannot repeal the laws of nature law or the laws of God. Immorality is immorality and wrongdoing is wrongdoing, even when the government is engaging in them.
Some seniors do finally achieve a reality breakthrough on the real nature of this socialist program and come to the realization that they are not really getting their own money back but instead that it’s coming from exorbitant taxes that are being collected from their children’s and grandchildren’s generation.
What I find fascinating is that many of them don’t care. They don’t care that they’re taking money that doesn’t belong to them. They don’t care about how much suffering the tax burden is causing young people. They don’t care that many young people are having a difficult time starting out in life and starting a family, owing in large part to the enormous amount of taxes that are taken out of their paycheck. All that matters is the continuation of the Social Security checks regardless of the wrongdoing and damage involved. Their attitude is: “Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation did it to us and, therefore, we have a right to do it to our children’s and grandchildren’s generations.” It’s a sad and tragic sign of what this socialist program has done to people’s consciences, their sense of right and wrong, and a concern for the well-being of others.
When it comes to moral wrongdoing or sinful conduct, there is only one rightful solution: End it immediately. Repeal it immediately. Abolish it immediately. That’s precisely what should be done with Social Security (and all other welfare-warfare state programs). Seniors should lead the way. It would be the best thing that they could ever do for young people, for America, and for themselves before they pass from this life.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/21/immorality-social-security/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Social Security is based on the same principle that all other welfare-state programs are based on: the forcible taking of money from people to whom it rightly belongs and giving it to people to whom it does not belong.
As I have explained this week in my two previous articles on Social Security (here and here), during their work lives people do not deposit their monies into a Social Security fund from which they can later withdraw their monies during retirement. They also don’t pay “insurance premiums” that will guarantee them a payout during their retirement years.
Instead, throughout their work lives they simply pay taxes — all sorts of taxes — income taxes, sales taxes, FICA taxes, property taxes, and more. When people pay taxes, they are not depositing their money into special accounts. They are not paying premiums. They are simply handing over their money to government — money that they know is now owned by the government and that the government is going to spend immediately.
By the end of each calendar year, the federal government has spent all the money that it has collected in taxes. It’s gone. That includes income taxes, FICA taxes, excise taxes, and all other taxes that the federal government collects. Gone — as in spent. Nobody’s money has been socked away in a special designated account, a lockbox, or a trust fund.
Notwithstanding this basic fact of life, many Americans continue to have a mindset on Social Security that holds, “I put it in and therefore I have a right to get it back” or “That’s my money that I’m just getting back” or “We antie in our money and we’re just getting it back.”
That is, they continue to think in terms of “putting their money in” some sort of an account for later use rather than the reality that they’re simply paying taxes — taxes that are spent immediately upon receipt by the government.
Here’s the right way to think about Social Security. Think of it as part of all the programs, both welfare and warfare, that the federal government spends its money on. Total federal spending amounts to $3.8 trillion. That total spending includes the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, foreign aid to dictators, regime-change operations, the U.S. death machine in the Middle East, “defense” contractors, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, HUD, HHS, DEA, food stamps, and all the other programs that come with a welfare-warfare state. Social Security is just one of those many programs.
How does the federal government pay for all those programs? It does not have its own fountain of wealth. So, to get that $3.8 trillion, it forcibly collects taxes from people. If a person refuses to pay his taxes, they put him in jail.
Where some of the deception comes into play is that federal officials compare FICA tax revenues to Social Security expenditures and point out that the difference is still on the plus side. But that’s really quite irrelevant and also quite misleading because, again, Social Security is simply one part of overall federal expenditures. The fact that one particular tax is bringing in a certain amount of money, compared to other taxes, makes no difference. What ultimately matters is total tax revenues versus total federal expenditures.
Total tax revenues amount to about $3.3 trillion, leaving a $500 billion deficit. That amount is borrowed, which adds another half-a-trillion dollars to the $18 trillion in debt that the government already owes. That debt is threatening to send the government and the nation into a grave economic and monetary crisis.
All the money that Social Security recipients are receiving today is coming from young people — that is, people who are still working. That’s just a fact of life. That’s reality. Young people who are the ones producing the wealth because they are the ones who are working. It’s their money. Under Social Security, seniors are using the government to forcibly take money from their children’s and grandchildren’s generations in order to fund their retirement. And given that it’s based on taxation, it’s all based on force and coercion.
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that many seniors engage in self-deception on this program — convincing themselves that they’re just “getting their money back” — is a good sign. It might reflect that deep down they know that it’s morally wrong to be taking money from people to whom it rightly belongs to fund their retirement.
After all, since our earliest years as children, we are all taught that it’s wrong to take what doesn’t belong to you. It’s called stealing. Every kid knows that. That moral principle remains with most people.
Suppose I were to accost a 25-year-old person on some dark street and, at gunpoint, force him to go to his ATM and withdraw $10,000 and give it to me. I use half the money to fund my retirement and the other half to fund a poor person’s medical bills.
Most everyone would immediately say, “Jacob, you’re just a thief. You can’t do that, either morally or legally. Fund your own retirement. Help out others with your own money.”
But as soon as I do the same thing through government — through Social Security and Medicare — suddenly I have been converted into a responsible, compassionate, and caring person. When people use the federal government to accomplish the same thing as a private thief, suddenly the thievery is converted into something good, moral, and beneficial.
But the fact is that the process of taking money from people to whom it rightly belongs and giving it to others to whom it does not belong remains immoral (and sinful) regardless of whether it’s being done privately or by government. Government cannot repeal the laws of nature law or the laws of God. Immorality is immorality and wrongdoing is wrongdoing, even when the government is engaging in them.
Some seniors do finally achieve a reality breakthrough on the real nature of this socialist program and come to the realization that they are not really getting their own money back but instead that it’s coming from exorbitant taxes that are being collected from their children’s and grandchildren’s generation.
What I find fascinating is that many of them don’t care. They don’t care that they’re taking money that doesn’t belong to them. They don’t care about how much suffering the tax burden is causing young people. They don’t care that many young people are having a difficult time starting out in life and starting a family, owing in large part to the enormous amount of taxes that are taken out of their paycheck. All that matters is the continuation of the Social Security checks regardless of the wrongdoing and damage involved. Their attitude is: “Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation did it to us and, therefore, we have a right to do it to our children’s and grandchildren’s generations.” It’s a sad and tragic sign of what this socialist program has done to people’s consciences, their sense of right and wrong, and a concern for the well-being of others.
When it comes to moral wrongdoing or sinful conduct, there is only one rightful solution: End it immediately. Repeal it immediately. Abolish it immediately. That’s precisely what should be done with Social Security (and all other welfare-warfare state programs). Seniors should lead the way. It would be the best thing that they could ever do for young people, for America, and for themselves before they pass from this life.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/21/immorality-social-security/
It's about time...
The World Health Organization is finally raising concerns about antidepressants prescribed to children
by: J. D. Heyes
There is such a dramatic increase in the prescribing of antidepressants for children in the West, that the World Health Organization (WHO) is taking a closer look – and is becoming concerned.
As reported by the BBC, the increases are sizable: 60 percent in Denmark; 49 percent in Germany; 26 percent in the United States; and 17 percent in the Netherlands, between 2005 and 2012, a new study shows.
After a warning was issued about the drugs in 2004, based on concerns that some of them were leading to suicidal behavior, usage fell. But as new research indicates, the numbers are back up – way up, in fact.
WHO director of mental health, Dr. Shekhar Saxena, said that the new study, published in the European Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, raised some serious questions.
"Anti-depressant use amongst young people is and has been a matter of concern because of two reasons," he told the BBC.
"One, are more people being prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient reason? And second, can anti-depressants do any major harm?"
'You almost feel forgotten about'
In addition to those concerns, WHO officials are also anxious about the rising prevalence of off-label prescriptions, where kids are given drugs that are not licensed or approved for use by anyone under 18.
"These are medicines which have not been tried amongst young people, have no justification for being used widely in young people," Saxena said. "There are legal regulations and professional guidelines and off-label use of drugs many times crosses both of them. That's something the World Health Organization is very concerned about."
The traditional medical community recognizes antidepressants as being one treatment for depression in children, but guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) state that they should not be given initially for symptoms of mild depression (though too often they are). And even in more serious cases, antidepressants are only to be used with additional psychological therapies.
Some adults who were given antidepressants as children say that they had a negative overall effect on them. One example is George Watkins, 20. The BBC reported that he was prescribed antidepressants at age 15, and no other forms of treatment were made available to him.
"My doctor put me on the anti-depressants really after a five-minute consultation," he said. "I wasn't offered counselling or anything like that, it was straight in."
Five years later, he is still taking antidepressants, despite concerns about how they are impacting him.
"I was terrified; I still am terrified of medication, because of how bad it has made me feel," he said. "You almost feel forgotten about."
'Huge waiting list' for psychiatric services
The English government's mental health champion, Natasha Devon, told the news service that there is a genuine problem with providing access for young people to "talking therapies."
"The problem is, of course, is that there is a huge waiting list," she said. (Britain has socialized medicine via its National Health Service, or NHS.) "It's eight weeks if you're lucky, it's far more likely to run into months, so during that interim period all you have are these anti-depressants."
For the record, wait times in Canada, another government-run, single-payer system, are also substantial.
Part of Devon's work is to visit schools in the country. She says that she's become aware of the rising number of kids who have been prescribed antidepressants. She also says that she is concerned that "they can only ever treat the symptoms, they don't get to the root cause of the issue."
The BBC noted further that Prof. Mark Baker, director of clinical practice at NICE, a health watchdog group, understands that assessing child and adolescent mental health services is increasingly challenging.
"This may have led to more severe cases of depression in young people being managed in primary care for longer," he said.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053737_depression_children_antidepressants.html#ixzz46TF1DFvc
by: J. D. Heyes
There is such a dramatic increase in the prescribing of antidepressants for children in the West, that the World Health Organization (WHO) is taking a closer look – and is becoming concerned.
As reported by the BBC, the increases are sizable: 60 percent in Denmark; 49 percent in Germany; 26 percent in the United States; and 17 percent in the Netherlands, between 2005 and 2012, a new study shows.
After a warning was issued about the drugs in 2004, based on concerns that some of them were leading to suicidal behavior, usage fell. But as new research indicates, the numbers are back up – way up, in fact.
WHO director of mental health, Dr. Shekhar Saxena, said that the new study, published in the European Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, raised some serious questions.
"Anti-depressant use amongst young people is and has been a matter of concern because of two reasons," he told the BBC.
"One, are more people being prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient reason? And second, can anti-depressants do any major harm?"
'You almost feel forgotten about'
In addition to those concerns, WHO officials are also anxious about the rising prevalence of off-label prescriptions, where kids are given drugs that are not licensed or approved for use by anyone under 18.
"These are medicines which have not been tried amongst young people, have no justification for being used widely in young people," Saxena said. "There are legal regulations and professional guidelines and off-label use of drugs many times crosses both of them. That's something the World Health Organization is very concerned about."
The traditional medical community recognizes antidepressants as being one treatment for depression in children, but guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) state that they should not be given initially for symptoms of mild depression (though too often they are). And even in more serious cases, antidepressants are only to be used with additional psychological therapies.
Some adults who were given antidepressants as children say that they had a negative overall effect on them. One example is George Watkins, 20. The BBC reported that he was prescribed antidepressants at age 15, and no other forms of treatment were made available to him.
"My doctor put me on the anti-depressants really after a five-minute consultation," he said. "I wasn't offered counselling or anything like that, it was straight in."
Five years later, he is still taking antidepressants, despite concerns about how they are impacting him.
"I was terrified; I still am terrified of medication, because of how bad it has made me feel," he said. "You almost feel forgotten about."
'Huge waiting list' for psychiatric services
The English government's mental health champion, Natasha Devon, told the news service that there is a genuine problem with providing access for young people to "talking therapies."
"The problem is, of course, is that there is a huge waiting list," she said. (Britain has socialized medicine via its National Health Service, or NHS.) "It's eight weeks if you're lucky, it's far more likely to run into months, so during that interim period all you have are these anti-depressants."
For the record, wait times in Canada, another government-run, single-payer system, are also substantial.
Part of Devon's work is to visit schools in the country. She says that she's become aware of the rising number of kids who have been prescribed antidepressants. She also says that she is concerned that "they can only ever treat the symptoms, they don't get to the root cause of the issue."
The BBC noted further that Prof. Mark Baker, director of clinical practice at NICE, a health watchdog group, understands that assessing child and adolescent mental health services is increasingly challenging.
"This may have led to more severe cases of depression in young people being managed in primary care for longer," he said.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053737_depression_children_antidepressants.html#ixzz46TF1DFvc
"The intelligent yet uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments quickly and perfectly. The creative child questions everything and accepts nothing. They are much more manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive growing up. They will often play one parent against another. In school, teachers dislike them because they will harass the teacher with questions that expose the illogical dogma they teach."
Surviving the Coming Transition
By Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: Dear Martin and co-workers,Firstly, I want to express my appreciation for the writings on the blog (it opened my eyes! and I am very much awake now) and I read a daily. I am a stay-at-home-mother, artist, and I had never before gained knowledge about economics , it’s corruptive nature, and leading role in society. However, Just a few months ago I saw the movie The forecaster. Martin, you are truly an amazing guy!!! and I wish you the best!My question:Do you have an advice or suggestion for people like myself. No traders, (middle income) families, living in Europe or the US, kids who would like to study. How can we accomplish that with just a little savings in order to the potential fall of the euro and collapse of the system?P.S. I clearly understand that you don’t want to be a so-called guru.Sincerely, conny
ANSWER: It is very difficult to see forward in such a manner. Tangible assets will make the transition to the next world of finance. There will be a new base of currency and it will most likely be electronic. The reason for this is political. The USA peaked as did Britain. The financial power will move to Asia, and Europe along with the USA will crash and burn because they are caught in this fictional world created by Marx. Russia and China collapsed under Marxism. It is just our time.
I would support some practical basket of currencies since Russia and China dislike having the dollar as the reserve currency. Likewise, with the dollar being the only practical currency standing, the USA is realizing that it may lose control of its domestic economy because of international considerations. Clearly, there have already been discussions of removing the reserve status of the dollar, but this cannot be accomplished unilaterally. Under no circumstance would I support placing the IMF in charge of this instrument. That organization is way too corrupt and my advice to China and Russia (where we also have this blog in their respective languages) is to reject any such attempt to hand this power to the IMF. We need a clean house to start such a project and the IMF has way too much baggage.
Formal education is the way we perpetuate our mistakes forward. When I hire, I do not look at fake degrees. I look at the person and their thinking process. Samuel Butler (1835–1902) the iconoclastic Victorian-era English author, defined genius as “a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.” If your child does not do well in school because they are bored rather than incapable of understanding such subjects, then they may be what people call a genius. Geniuses are often misunderstood in classrooms and are typically poor students whom teachers dislike because they are non-conformists. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile at children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. When we had young people coming into the company who had to take their Series 7 exam, they would ask me questions. I quickly responded, “Do not ask me anything for if you do as I say you will flunk. Just memorize the answers, put them down, and then forget them and we will begin your REAL education in markets.”
These genius children are often viewed as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, and lacking in seriousness or even promise. They even said that of Albert Einstein. Their behavior is typically distracting and they will often appear lazy, bored, and lacking any effort to try to advance, but in truth, they are absorbing everything around them. Such children will also give unique answers to banal questions because they are connecting the dots around them. Other children who are linear thinkers will typically reject these children which can cause them to be loners.
Ellis Paul Torrance (1915-2003) was an American psychologist who studied this subject and found that 70% of pupils rated high in creativity were actually rejected by teachers when picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. In a Stanford study, M.G. Goertzel, V. Goertzel, and T.G. Goertzel concluded that teachers would have excluded virtually everyone we consider to be a genius from Einstein and Edison to Picasso and Mark Twain. There is even a book on this called “The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy” by Arnold M. Ludwig (1995) which explores the lives and achievements of over 1,000 extraordinary men and women. This book sought to answer the age-old questions about the relationship between mental illness and greatness. It also goes into factors that predict creative achievement in people. You will find a long list of very colorful stories about some of the most eminent artists, scientists, social activists, politicians, soldiers, and business people of our time.
Formal education is terrible. More than 60% of graduates cannot find employment in their field of study. Degrees are only useful to get jobs in brain-dead institutions that lack creativity themselves. Encourage your children to see the world dynamically and look for the connection between the dots. In ancient times, the key education was apprenticeship where you learned the field from the people actually doing the work rather than by those who lack experience. As they say, there are those who do and those who teach. I have been asked to teach at three of the leading universities. The problem is that I have no time. Those of us who really do things would find it boring and unfulfilling to simply stand up and teach a small class of kids. I might as well be a rock star singing the same song for 40 years (which is why rock stars need drugs to constantly do the same thing until they die).
If you understand what is coming, common sense will lead you to the answer. You are better off with tangible assets for the transition when it comes. From a European perspective, you are better off in dollars for now. The euro only gets interesting above 116. So you always have to define where you are right and wrong. Some people are keeping money in PayPal where they are not charged negative interest rates to simply have money there and they do not have bad loans on their books.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/martin-armstrong/marxism-destroying-europe-us/
By Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: Dear Martin and co-workers,Firstly, I want to express my appreciation for the writings on the blog (it opened my eyes! and I am very much awake now) and I read a daily. I am a stay-at-home-mother, artist, and I had never before gained knowledge about economics , it’s corruptive nature, and leading role in society. However, Just a few months ago I saw the movie The forecaster. Martin, you are truly an amazing guy!!! and I wish you the best!My question:Do you have an advice or suggestion for people like myself. No traders, (middle income) families, living in Europe or the US, kids who would like to study. How can we accomplish that with just a little savings in order to the potential fall of the euro and collapse of the system?P.S. I clearly understand that you don’t want to be a so-called guru.Sincerely, conny
ANSWER: It is very difficult to see forward in such a manner. Tangible assets will make the transition to the next world of finance. There will be a new base of currency and it will most likely be electronic. The reason for this is political. The USA peaked as did Britain. The financial power will move to Asia, and Europe along with the USA will crash and burn because they are caught in this fictional world created by Marx. Russia and China collapsed under Marxism. It is just our time.
I would support some practical basket of currencies since Russia and China dislike having the dollar as the reserve currency. Likewise, with the dollar being the only practical currency standing, the USA is realizing that it may lose control of its domestic economy because of international considerations. Clearly, there have already been discussions of removing the reserve status of the dollar, but this cannot be accomplished unilaterally. Under no circumstance would I support placing the IMF in charge of this instrument. That organization is way too corrupt and my advice to China and Russia (where we also have this blog in their respective languages) is to reject any such attempt to hand this power to the IMF. We need a clean house to start such a project and the IMF has way too much baggage.
Formal education is the way we perpetuate our mistakes forward. When I hire, I do not look at fake degrees. I look at the person and their thinking process. Samuel Butler (1835–1902) the iconoclastic Victorian-era English author, defined genius as “a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.” If your child does not do well in school because they are bored rather than incapable of understanding such subjects, then they may be what people call a genius. Geniuses are often misunderstood in classrooms and are typically poor students whom teachers dislike because they are non-conformists. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile at children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. When we had young people coming into the company who had to take their Series 7 exam, they would ask me questions. I quickly responded, “Do not ask me anything for if you do as I say you will flunk. Just memorize the answers, put them down, and then forget them and we will begin your REAL education in markets.”
These genius children are often viewed as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, and lacking in seriousness or even promise. They even said that of Albert Einstein. Their behavior is typically distracting and they will often appear lazy, bored, and lacking any effort to try to advance, but in truth, they are absorbing everything around them. Such children will also give unique answers to banal questions because they are connecting the dots around them. Other children who are linear thinkers will typically reject these children which can cause them to be loners.
Ellis Paul Torrance (1915-2003) was an American psychologist who studied this subject and found that 70% of pupils rated high in creativity were actually rejected by teachers when picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. In a Stanford study, M.G. Goertzel, V. Goertzel, and T.G. Goertzel concluded that teachers would have excluded virtually everyone we consider to be a genius from Einstein and Edison to Picasso and Mark Twain. There is even a book on this called “The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy” by Arnold M. Ludwig (1995) which explores the lives and achievements of over 1,000 extraordinary men and women. This book sought to answer the age-old questions about the relationship between mental illness and greatness. It also goes into factors that predict creative achievement in people. You will find a long list of very colorful stories about some of the most eminent artists, scientists, social activists, politicians, soldiers, and business people of our time.
Formal education is terrible. More than 60% of graduates cannot find employment in their field of study. Degrees are only useful to get jobs in brain-dead institutions that lack creativity themselves. Encourage your children to see the world dynamically and look for the connection between the dots. In ancient times, the key education was apprenticeship where you learned the field from the people actually doing the work rather than by those who lack experience. As they say, there are those who do and those who teach. I have been asked to teach at three of the leading universities. The problem is that I have no time. Those of us who really do things would find it boring and unfulfilling to simply stand up and teach a small class of kids. I might as well be a rock star singing the same song for 40 years (which is why rock stars need drugs to constantly do the same thing until they die).
If you understand what is coming, common sense will lead you to the answer. You are better off with tangible assets for the transition when it comes. From a European perspective, you are better off in dollars for now. The euro only gets interesting above 116. So you always have to define where you are right and wrong. Some people are keeping money in PayPal where they are not charged negative interest rates to simply have money there and they do not have bad loans on their books.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/martin-armstrong/marxism-destroying-europe-us/
"My understanding of cultural Marxism is that it has nothing to do with freedom, or with cultural enlightenment and social progress. Instead, as Horkheimer himself put it, it is all about the creation of identical individuals who do not come together and exchange ideas, as they operate like mindless machines. The Frankfurt School and its followers have therefore clearly proved to be the enemies of freedom and the conscious human mind."
Cultural Marxism and the Birth of Modern Thought-Crime
By Claudio Grass
If a person has no philosophical thoughts, certain questions will never cross his mind. As a young man, there were many issues and ideas that never concerned me as they do today. There is one question, however, which has intrigued me for the longest time, and it still fascinates me as intensely as it did back then: Does spirit precede matter or is it the other way around? In other words, does human consciousness create what we perceive as our reality and the physical existence or vice versa; does the pre-existing material world determine our sentience and shape our cognition? In essence, what really lies beneath the surface of this question is the following: is a man born as a conscious being with a free will and self-determination or not?
Do not be alarmed; this is not an article on political philosophy. But it is a fundamental existential issue that I found underpins many of the doubts that I have regarding the functioning of our society and our political culture. While I freely admit I am no philosopher or expert in the field, in this article I will try to explain why the answer we choose to this crucial question, which most people never consider, has an amazing impact on the way we think, the way we live and act and the way society behaves as a whole. By diving deeper into this debate, we uncover important insights that can help us understand how our Western society and its cultural identity have vastly degenerated and especially why family values have so dramatically deteriorated. A clearer understanding of the historical evolution of this age-old question and its far-reaching implications will provide valuable insights into the intellectual crisis of our Western societies and the strategic suppression of dissent and of independent thought and it will shed light on the origins on the intellectual bondage that we know today as Political Correctness.
The Kantian heritage and the intellectual shackles of Nonage
I believe it makes sense to start our quest to settle this age-old question by looking at the works of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), the German philosopher who is considered the father of modern philosophy. In 1784 he wrote the following about Enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is, therefore, the motto of the Enlightenment.”
Today’s economic and political forces seem to be cognizant of the peril posed by a free-thinking citizenry. As our western culture faces an existential crisis and suffers attacks from multiple fronts, the political elite appears to be focused on enforcing its will at all costs. They are desperately trying to keep a multitude of threats at bay, and failing to do so, they are content with simply having the public accept their failure as a strategic victory: the immigration crisis, chronic economic instability, geopolitical conflicts with horrendous human costs, violations of personal liberties, they are all to be taken as facts of life; this is sold to us as the new normal. Therefore, their priority is to keep the body politic in check, to crush dissent and rebel-rousing. To do so, laws against specific actions are not enough. To “keep the peace”, one needs to have laws against thought itself. By re-defining right and wrong, controlling the narrative and limiting independent thought and free speech, the public, as a whole, remains strategically malleable and intellectually manageable.
Given the success of this strategy, and bearing in mind Kant’s definition of Enlightenment, it seems pertinent to raise the question: did we ever manage to evolve into mature and enlightened individuals or are we still trapped in our own self-imposed nonage? I believe the latter is the case; and to further clarify my view, there is no better man to quote than Kant himself:
“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remains minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on–then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken our supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind–among them the entire fair sex–should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.”
The Frankfurt School and the origins of political correctness
What is becoming increasingly hard to deny, especially in Europe and the USA, is that we no longer have the absolute and inalienable right to free speech. Although we claim to be proud citizens of democratic societies that, in theory, respect and uphold individual freedoms, in practice, the definition of what constitutes free speech has grown so withered and so narrow, that it often makes a mockery of the very principle itself. More and more topics have been classified as “off limits”, the public expression of the “wrong” personal opinions and ideas has been criminalized and even academic or scientific research of certain fields has been suppressed. But symptoms of our socially enforced self-censorship are evident in everyday conversations as well: Is it not deeply unsettling that it is next to impossible to have a normal, temperate debate about the immigration crisis, which is an existential matter that will most likely shape the future of the European continent? The natural rights to one’s own independent thinking and to free speech have been heavily curtailed under the guise of what is now referred to as ‘political correctness’. Speaking one’s mind freely can have them branded as a pariah and a direct threat to society, but the repercussions do not end there: Self- censorship is also enforced through new laws implemented by our moral leaders, who feel that the power vested in them through their governmental offices extends to also placing limitations on what we can and cannot think.
250 years ago, Kant stressed the need for public debate as follows:
“It is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it and is at first incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to exercise it. It is possible, however, for the public to enlighten itself. Indeed, if it is only granted freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. There will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the self-appointed guardians of the multitude. Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage, they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man’s value and of his duty to think for himself. It is especially to be noted that the public which was earlier brought under the yoke by these men afterward forces these very guardians to remain in submission if it is so incited by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment. That shows how pernicious it is to implant prejudices: they will eventually revenge themselves upon their authors or their authors’ descendants. Therefore, a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may bring about the end of a personal despotism or of avaricious tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform of modes of thought. New prejudices will serve, in place of the old, as guide lines for the unthinking multitude.”
In short, without the freedom to debate openly, the individual has not the means to escape his self-imposed nonage. Without the possibility to break free, and to enlighten ourselves, we remain powerless to question, to object to and to challenge the status quo. Like pieces on a chessboard, we have no say in our own fates and no control over the stratagems that we implicitly help to enforce. Silently complicit in devastating policies, in conflicts and in wars being fought in our name, we simply become bystanders and look on as our culture corrodes, our values degrade and our liberties are trampled upon. To understand how the modern man became complicit in his own intellectual subjugation, we have to go back and trace the roots of the crisis.
“Emancipation through indoctrination”
Free thought and free speech have always been intertwined and correlated. The demise of both has its origins in the years between 1930 and 1968 when a group of intellectuals and so-called philosophers came together to establish a school of thought that was essentially focused on destroying Western civilization and all that it stands for (including its economic system based on capitalism) through ‘emancipation’. Max Horkheimer, a Marxist philosopher, was one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School, which embodied modern Critical Theory and was to a great extent characterized as neo-Marxist. Horkheimer, along with Jürgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, to name but a few formed the Frankfurt School and its Institute for Social Research, an intellectual think-tank, that shaped the cultural understanding of the West and Germany in particular. According to Horkheimer, the critical theory would serve “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” Accordingly, their main objective was to create the theoretical and ideological platform for a cultural revolution. This group of “philosophers” sought to, and to a great extent, succeeded in achieving their objective by focusing specifically on culture. It is a culture that forms the foundation that shapes peoples’ mindsets and political outlook by controlling the language and ideas through institutional channels, particularly education. In short, Critical Theory is the politicization of logic. Horkheimer stated that “logic is not irrespective of content,” by which he practically meant that an argument is logical if it aims to destroy Western civilization and it is illogical if it supports it. This is, of course, the cornerstone of “political correctness” and why the open and unrestrained debate is frowned upon as subversive and inflammatory. It breeds dissent and doubt, it encourages critical analysis and it prevents intellectual uniformity and group-think.
Critical Theory and the war on God
The Frankfurt School claimed that its Critical Theory is the theory of truth. The occidental philosophy, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Kant, as well as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe, should, therefore, be summarily dismissed and replaced by their own dogmatic set of rules and guidelines for “thinking right”. Critical Theory in sociology and political philosophy went beyond interpretation and understanding of society, it sought to overcome and destroy all barriers that, in their view, entrapped society in systems of domination, oppression, and dependency.
A principal yet controversial argument concerns their animosity towards religion and spirituality. According to the Frankfurt School, Christianity is the institutional revival of pagan philosophy and God is mere fiction. Religion led people to project their suffering to a divine entity, it served as a distraction from the misery caused by capitalism and in its core lies nothing but pure imagination. As the theories of Darwinism and Freudianism challenged the status of religion, accordingly, Marxism and Neo-Marxism dispelled the unenlightened mythical image of the age-old institutionalized divinity: Not God, but Man is the highest entity. Since it is not my purpose to discuss theology, but to demonstrate the mindset of the members of this school of thought, once again, I will refer to a quote by Immanuel Kant, who wrote the following in Critique of Pure Reason:
“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot evade, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”
Kant was known as a fierce critic of the practice of religion, but he recognized that cognition and rationalization are indicative of the human mind and spirit, and are the means by which the individual arrives at the conclusion that there is a God. The significance of this argument lies in Kant’s belief in the free will and determination of the human mind to develop this process of rationalization in order to arrive at the conclusion that man is essentially good. In this context, God is more of a metaphor for morality and this plays a decisive role in the fundamental spirit versus matter question: Man’s mind and spirit precedes matter. Essentially, Kant reconciled these two concepts in a way that highlights human consciousness and self- determination.
The Frankfurt School positioned its ideology at the opposite end of the spectrum. It professed that man is limited in his existence as a mammal and as a product of nature that is driven by basic needs. There is no room for free will, no capacity for critical judgment or ability to distinguish right from wrong, no awareness, and no rationalization. This position has its roots in their Marxist background, which argues that man is a product of society: his mind and spirit are determined and shaped by the material world. Because of this vulnerability to external factors, the human mind is thought of as frail and manipulable and therefore man cannot be held accountable for his own decisions. This idea served as the basis for the “de-criminalization of crime” thesis of the Frankfurt School. As per Habermas, because man is a product of society, it is inevitable that he adaptively yields to his criminal tendencies, since he is raised under the yoke of the structural violence of a criminal capitalist system.
The Frankfurt School believed that by stripping humanity of spirituality and by destroying the material surroundings created by the capitalist system and its structure, man will live free, without the feeling of responsibility and without the burden of conscience. They promised freedom, without free will, they envisioned emancipation, through intellectual assimilation and they guaranteed fairness, without justice.
The strategic importance of public education
According to the Frankfurt School, the system’s malfunction starts with the family. The family is the first and primary moral entity that we encounter. This entity raises children in an authoritarian manner that creates submissive, obedient and dependent adults. In other words, it is the family that primes and programs us for fascism. Thus, by discrediting and destroying the family as a concept, one can nip capitalism and fascism in the bud. With this antagonistic attitude towards the family unit in society, combined with their ideological crusade against spirituality, the Frankfurt philosophers needed to put forward an alternative, to replace the old ways with their own roadmap for the future. In their view, the answer was simply to reprogram and reengineer society so that everyone behaves as is expected by others and so that human behavior becomes an act of reciprocity. This alone would be the universal code of ethics governing their utopia. To instill and to enforce this code in society, they proposed the use of institutions, and most importantly, education. Commandeering these institutional channels would be the most efficient way to impose and to promote their ethics, with education providing the key to assured compliance, weeding out dissent and any potential for future independent thinking by the individual.
The repercussions of this strategy are obvious in today’s society. Public education has conditioned us since childhood not to question the government and its collectivist policies. Maybe you remember one of our latest articles about the origins of the public education system, in which we introduced you to Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology (and his proponents John Dewey and Edward Thorndike in the U.S.), the scientist who shaped today’s state education approach. He based his methodology on the following assumption: “Man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism”. He then set out to prove that “man is the summation of his experience, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.” The great H. L. Mencken wrote in 1924 that the aim of public education is not: “ […] to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.”
The rise of Cultural Marxism
The Frankfurt School developed the dogma that “freedom and justice” are dialectic terms, meaning that they stand in opposition to each other, in a zero-sum game, where “more freedom equals less justice” will be the consequence and “more justice equals less freedom” is the outcome. Based on this dialectic, freedom stood as the thesis, and justice reflected the anti-thesis.
This rather interesting dialectic approach was adopted from the ideas and works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Frankfurt School, however, twisted the core of the concept and denatured its consequential logicality. In short, the main difference between Hegel and Horkheimer’s dialectic approach lies in the conclusion: Hegel, an idealist, believed like Kant that spirit creates matter, while for Horkheimer, a disciple of Karl Marx and his theory of materialism, the opposite was the case. Marx postulated that the world, the objective reality, can be explained by its material existence and its development and not from the realization of a divine absolute idea or as a result of rational human thought, as adopted in idealism. Therefore, putting limits on the material world, placing external rules and guidelines on the environment within which individuals live, think and operate, should, in their view, suffice to shape their cognitive experience and confine their spirit to the “desired” parameters.
I believe this is the key point that links the Frankfurt school of thought to what we know today as “political correctness”. At its core, we find this familiar false belief that less freedom guarantees more justice, and therefore more security. This mantra is regurgitated through institutional and political messaging, instilled in social values and planted in the minds of the younger generation and future voters, though the educational channel, just like the Frankfurt School intended. Instead of creating the platform to encourage individual human development, by reasoning, raising questions and stimulating dialogue, the institutional system works as an assembly line, from cradle to grave, and it successfully standardizes individuals and primes them to submit to the status quo, to accept and not to question. This is the logic of Critical Theory and the core element of “political correctness”. It is a vain and doomed attempt to control the inherent entropy of human ideas and independent thinking, to force the flux of our intertwined and unique experiences to an unnatural stasis and ultimately, to break Man’s spirit and to bring his mind to heel. .
Now you can maybe understand what Tom DiLorenzo meant in one of our latest interviews about “cultural Marxism” when he said: “They largely abandoned the old “class struggle” rhetoric involving the capitalist and worker “classes” and replaced them with an oppressor and an oppressed class. The oppressed include women, minorities, LGBT, and several other mascot categories. The oppressor class consists of white heterosexual males who are not ideological Marxists like them.” When the members of the Frankfurt School were forced to leave Germany during Nazi rule, they moved to the USA, near Hollywood, and they established strong ties with Columbia University and Harvard. This is how they spread their influence in the United States and aside from Hollywood, they also turned the academic elite at most universities into reservoirs of “cultural Marxism”. Here in Europe, some of the most prominent names in politics today were among the 1968 rebel students who were mentored by the first generations of the Frankfurt School. These include former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his Minister of Defense Joschka Fischer, current Vice-President of the German Bundestag, Ulla Schmidt, and last but not least Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the anniversary of “60 years Christian-Democratic-Union (CDU)” on June 16th, 2005 in Berlin, she explained how many changes in society which were triggered in 1968 have shaped the old German Republic and continue to influence the CDU to this day. As she put it: “We don’t want to return to the family concept, to the 1950s image of a woman and we don’t want to return to the sociopolitical frame of that time. We as women must march through the institutions und take our place in the key power positions in the leadership of this country”.
My understanding of cultural Marxism is that it has nothing to do with freedom, or with cultural enlightenment and social progress. Instead, as Horkheimer himself put it, it is all about the creation of identical individuals who do not come together and exchange ideas, as they operate like mindless machines. The Frankfurt School and its followers have therefore clearly proved to be the enemies of freedom and the conscious human mind.
In conclusion, let me yield the closing words to Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “ A large degree of civic freedom appears to be of advantage to the intellectual freedom of the people, yet at the same time it establishes insurmountable barriers. A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity. Nature, then, has carefully cultivated the seed within the hard core–namely the urge for and the vocation of free thought. And this free thought gradually reacts back on the modes of thought of the people, and men become more and more capable of acting in freedom. At last free thought acts even on the fundamentals of government and the state finds it agreeable to treat a man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/claudio-grass/birth-modern-thought-crime/
By Claudio Grass
If a person has no philosophical thoughts, certain questions will never cross his mind. As a young man, there were many issues and ideas that never concerned me as they do today. There is one question, however, which has intrigued me for the longest time, and it still fascinates me as intensely as it did back then: Does spirit precede matter or is it the other way around? In other words, does human consciousness create what we perceive as our reality and the physical existence or vice versa; does the pre-existing material world determine our sentience and shape our cognition? In essence, what really lies beneath the surface of this question is the following: is a man born as a conscious being with a free will and self-determination or not?
Do not be alarmed; this is not an article on political philosophy. But it is a fundamental existential issue that I found underpins many of the doubts that I have regarding the functioning of our society and our political culture. While I freely admit I am no philosopher or expert in the field, in this article I will try to explain why the answer we choose to this crucial question, which most people never consider, has an amazing impact on the way we think, the way we live and act and the way society behaves as a whole. By diving deeper into this debate, we uncover important insights that can help us understand how our Western society and its cultural identity have vastly degenerated and especially why family values have so dramatically deteriorated. A clearer understanding of the historical evolution of this age-old question and its far-reaching implications will provide valuable insights into the intellectual crisis of our Western societies and the strategic suppression of dissent and of independent thought and it will shed light on the origins on the intellectual bondage that we know today as Political Correctness.
The Kantian heritage and the intellectual shackles of Nonage
I believe it makes sense to start our quest to settle this age-old question by looking at the works of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), the German philosopher who is considered the father of modern philosophy. In 1784 he wrote the following about Enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is, therefore, the motto of the Enlightenment.”
Today’s economic and political forces seem to be cognizant of the peril posed by a free-thinking citizenry. As our western culture faces an existential crisis and suffers attacks from multiple fronts, the political elite appears to be focused on enforcing its will at all costs. They are desperately trying to keep a multitude of threats at bay, and failing to do so, they are content with simply having the public accept their failure as a strategic victory: the immigration crisis, chronic economic instability, geopolitical conflicts with horrendous human costs, violations of personal liberties, they are all to be taken as facts of life; this is sold to us as the new normal. Therefore, their priority is to keep the body politic in check, to crush dissent and rebel-rousing. To do so, laws against specific actions are not enough. To “keep the peace”, one needs to have laws against thought itself. By re-defining right and wrong, controlling the narrative and limiting independent thought and free speech, the public, as a whole, remains strategically malleable and intellectually manageable.
Given the success of this strategy, and bearing in mind Kant’s definition of Enlightenment, it seems pertinent to raise the question: did we ever manage to evolve into mature and enlightened individuals or are we still trapped in our own self-imposed nonage? I believe the latter is the case; and to further clarify my view, there is no better man to quote than Kant himself:
“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remains minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on–then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken our supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind–among them the entire fair sex–should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.”
The Frankfurt School and the origins of political correctness
What is becoming increasingly hard to deny, especially in Europe and the USA, is that we no longer have the absolute and inalienable right to free speech. Although we claim to be proud citizens of democratic societies that, in theory, respect and uphold individual freedoms, in practice, the definition of what constitutes free speech has grown so withered and so narrow, that it often makes a mockery of the very principle itself. More and more topics have been classified as “off limits”, the public expression of the “wrong” personal opinions and ideas has been criminalized and even academic or scientific research of certain fields has been suppressed. But symptoms of our socially enforced self-censorship are evident in everyday conversations as well: Is it not deeply unsettling that it is next to impossible to have a normal, temperate debate about the immigration crisis, which is an existential matter that will most likely shape the future of the European continent? The natural rights to one’s own independent thinking and to free speech have been heavily curtailed under the guise of what is now referred to as ‘political correctness’. Speaking one’s mind freely can have them branded as a pariah and a direct threat to society, but the repercussions do not end there: Self- censorship is also enforced through new laws implemented by our moral leaders, who feel that the power vested in them through their governmental offices extends to also placing limitations on what we can and cannot think.
250 years ago, Kant stressed the need for public debate as follows:
“It is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it and is at first incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to exercise it. It is possible, however, for the public to enlighten itself. Indeed, if it is only granted freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. There will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the self-appointed guardians of the multitude. Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage, they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man’s value and of his duty to think for himself. It is especially to be noted that the public which was earlier brought under the yoke by these men afterward forces these very guardians to remain in submission if it is so incited by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment. That shows how pernicious it is to implant prejudices: they will eventually revenge themselves upon their authors or their authors’ descendants. Therefore, a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may bring about the end of a personal despotism or of avaricious tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform of modes of thought. New prejudices will serve, in place of the old, as guide lines for the unthinking multitude.”
In short, without the freedom to debate openly, the individual has not the means to escape his self-imposed nonage. Without the possibility to break free, and to enlighten ourselves, we remain powerless to question, to object to and to challenge the status quo. Like pieces on a chessboard, we have no say in our own fates and no control over the stratagems that we implicitly help to enforce. Silently complicit in devastating policies, in conflicts and in wars being fought in our name, we simply become bystanders and look on as our culture corrodes, our values degrade and our liberties are trampled upon. To understand how the modern man became complicit in his own intellectual subjugation, we have to go back and trace the roots of the crisis.
“Emancipation through indoctrination”
Free thought and free speech have always been intertwined and correlated. The demise of both has its origins in the years between 1930 and 1968 when a group of intellectuals and so-called philosophers came together to establish a school of thought that was essentially focused on destroying Western civilization and all that it stands for (including its economic system based on capitalism) through ‘emancipation’. Max Horkheimer, a Marxist philosopher, was one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School, which embodied modern Critical Theory and was to a great extent characterized as neo-Marxist. Horkheimer, along with Jürgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, to name but a few formed the Frankfurt School and its Institute for Social Research, an intellectual think-tank, that shaped the cultural understanding of the West and Germany in particular. According to Horkheimer, the critical theory would serve “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” Accordingly, their main objective was to create the theoretical and ideological platform for a cultural revolution. This group of “philosophers” sought to, and to a great extent, succeeded in achieving their objective by focusing specifically on culture. It is a culture that forms the foundation that shapes peoples’ mindsets and political outlook by controlling the language and ideas through institutional channels, particularly education. In short, Critical Theory is the politicization of logic. Horkheimer stated that “logic is not irrespective of content,” by which he practically meant that an argument is logical if it aims to destroy Western civilization and it is illogical if it supports it. This is, of course, the cornerstone of “political correctness” and why the open and unrestrained debate is frowned upon as subversive and inflammatory. It breeds dissent and doubt, it encourages critical analysis and it prevents intellectual uniformity and group-think.
Critical Theory and the war on God
The Frankfurt School claimed that its Critical Theory is the theory of truth. The occidental philosophy, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Kant, as well as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe, should, therefore, be summarily dismissed and replaced by their own dogmatic set of rules and guidelines for “thinking right”. Critical Theory in sociology and political philosophy went beyond interpretation and understanding of society, it sought to overcome and destroy all barriers that, in their view, entrapped society in systems of domination, oppression, and dependency.
A principal yet controversial argument concerns their animosity towards religion and spirituality. According to the Frankfurt School, Christianity is the institutional revival of pagan philosophy and God is mere fiction. Religion led people to project their suffering to a divine entity, it served as a distraction from the misery caused by capitalism and in its core lies nothing but pure imagination. As the theories of Darwinism and Freudianism challenged the status of religion, accordingly, Marxism and Neo-Marxism dispelled the unenlightened mythical image of the age-old institutionalized divinity: Not God, but Man is the highest entity. Since it is not my purpose to discuss theology, but to demonstrate the mindset of the members of this school of thought, once again, I will refer to a quote by Immanuel Kant, who wrote the following in Critique of Pure Reason:
“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot evade, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”
Kant was known as a fierce critic of the practice of religion, but he recognized that cognition and rationalization are indicative of the human mind and spirit, and are the means by which the individual arrives at the conclusion that there is a God. The significance of this argument lies in Kant’s belief in the free will and determination of the human mind to develop this process of rationalization in order to arrive at the conclusion that man is essentially good. In this context, God is more of a metaphor for morality and this plays a decisive role in the fundamental spirit versus matter question: Man’s mind and spirit precedes matter. Essentially, Kant reconciled these two concepts in a way that highlights human consciousness and self- determination.
The Frankfurt School positioned its ideology at the opposite end of the spectrum. It professed that man is limited in his existence as a mammal and as a product of nature that is driven by basic needs. There is no room for free will, no capacity for critical judgment or ability to distinguish right from wrong, no awareness, and no rationalization. This position has its roots in their Marxist background, which argues that man is a product of society: his mind and spirit are determined and shaped by the material world. Because of this vulnerability to external factors, the human mind is thought of as frail and manipulable and therefore man cannot be held accountable for his own decisions. This idea served as the basis for the “de-criminalization of crime” thesis of the Frankfurt School. As per Habermas, because man is a product of society, it is inevitable that he adaptively yields to his criminal tendencies, since he is raised under the yoke of the structural violence of a criminal capitalist system.
The Frankfurt School believed that by stripping humanity of spirituality and by destroying the material surroundings created by the capitalist system and its structure, man will live free, without the feeling of responsibility and without the burden of conscience. They promised freedom, without free will, they envisioned emancipation, through intellectual assimilation and they guaranteed fairness, without justice.
The strategic importance of public education
According to the Frankfurt School, the system’s malfunction starts with the family. The family is the first and primary moral entity that we encounter. This entity raises children in an authoritarian manner that creates submissive, obedient and dependent adults. In other words, it is the family that primes and programs us for fascism. Thus, by discrediting and destroying the family as a concept, one can nip capitalism and fascism in the bud. With this antagonistic attitude towards the family unit in society, combined with their ideological crusade against spirituality, the Frankfurt philosophers needed to put forward an alternative, to replace the old ways with their own roadmap for the future. In their view, the answer was simply to reprogram and reengineer society so that everyone behaves as is expected by others and so that human behavior becomes an act of reciprocity. This alone would be the universal code of ethics governing their utopia. To instill and to enforce this code in society, they proposed the use of institutions, and most importantly, education. Commandeering these institutional channels would be the most efficient way to impose and to promote their ethics, with education providing the key to assured compliance, weeding out dissent and any potential for future independent thinking by the individual.
The repercussions of this strategy are obvious in today’s society. Public education has conditioned us since childhood not to question the government and its collectivist policies. Maybe you remember one of our latest articles about the origins of the public education system, in which we introduced you to Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology (and his proponents John Dewey and Edward Thorndike in the U.S.), the scientist who shaped today’s state education approach. He based his methodology on the following assumption: “Man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism”. He then set out to prove that “man is the summation of his experience, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.” The great H. L. Mencken wrote in 1924 that the aim of public education is not: “ […] to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.”
The rise of Cultural Marxism
The Frankfurt School developed the dogma that “freedom and justice” are dialectic terms, meaning that they stand in opposition to each other, in a zero-sum game, where “more freedom equals less justice” will be the consequence and “more justice equals less freedom” is the outcome. Based on this dialectic, freedom stood as the thesis, and justice reflected the anti-thesis.
This rather interesting dialectic approach was adopted from the ideas and works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Frankfurt School, however, twisted the core of the concept and denatured its consequential logicality. In short, the main difference between Hegel and Horkheimer’s dialectic approach lies in the conclusion: Hegel, an idealist, believed like Kant that spirit creates matter, while for Horkheimer, a disciple of Karl Marx and his theory of materialism, the opposite was the case. Marx postulated that the world, the objective reality, can be explained by its material existence and its development and not from the realization of a divine absolute idea or as a result of rational human thought, as adopted in idealism. Therefore, putting limits on the material world, placing external rules and guidelines on the environment within which individuals live, think and operate, should, in their view, suffice to shape their cognitive experience and confine their spirit to the “desired” parameters.
I believe this is the key point that links the Frankfurt school of thought to what we know today as “political correctness”. At its core, we find this familiar false belief that less freedom guarantees more justice, and therefore more security. This mantra is regurgitated through institutional and political messaging, instilled in social values and planted in the minds of the younger generation and future voters, though the educational channel, just like the Frankfurt School intended. Instead of creating the platform to encourage individual human development, by reasoning, raising questions and stimulating dialogue, the institutional system works as an assembly line, from cradle to grave, and it successfully standardizes individuals and primes them to submit to the status quo, to accept and not to question. This is the logic of Critical Theory and the core element of “political correctness”. It is a vain and doomed attempt to control the inherent entropy of human ideas and independent thinking, to force the flux of our intertwined and unique experiences to an unnatural stasis and ultimately, to break Man’s spirit and to bring his mind to heel. .
Now you can maybe understand what Tom DiLorenzo meant in one of our latest interviews about “cultural Marxism” when he said: “They largely abandoned the old “class struggle” rhetoric involving the capitalist and worker “classes” and replaced them with an oppressor and an oppressed class. The oppressed include women, minorities, LGBT, and several other mascot categories. The oppressor class consists of white heterosexual males who are not ideological Marxists like them.” When the members of the Frankfurt School were forced to leave Germany during Nazi rule, they moved to the USA, near Hollywood, and they established strong ties with Columbia University and Harvard. This is how they spread their influence in the United States and aside from Hollywood, they also turned the academic elite at most universities into reservoirs of “cultural Marxism”. Here in Europe, some of the most prominent names in politics today were among the 1968 rebel students who were mentored by the first generations of the Frankfurt School. These include former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his Minister of Defense Joschka Fischer, current Vice-President of the German Bundestag, Ulla Schmidt, and last but not least Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the anniversary of “60 years Christian-Democratic-Union (CDU)” on June 16th, 2005 in Berlin, she explained how many changes in society which were triggered in 1968 have shaped the old German Republic and continue to influence the CDU to this day. As she put it: “We don’t want to return to the family concept, to the 1950s image of a woman and we don’t want to return to the sociopolitical frame of that time. We as women must march through the institutions und take our place in the key power positions in the leadership of this country”.
My understanding of cultural Marxism is that it has nothing to do with freedom, or with cultural enlightenment and social progress. Instead, as Horkheimer himself put it, it is all about the creation of identical individuals who do not come together and exchange ideas, as they operate like mindless machines. The Frankfurt School and its followers have therefore clearly proved to be the enemies of freedom and the conscious human mind.
In conclusion, let me yield the closing words to Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “ A large degree of civic freedom appears to be of advantage to the intellectual freedom of the people, yet at the same time it establishes insurmountable barriers. A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity. Nature, then, has carefully cultivated the seed within the hard core–namely the urge for and the vocation of free thought. And this free thought gradually reacts back on the modes of thought of the people, and men become more and more capable of acting in freedom. At last free thought acts even on the fundamentals of government and the state finds it agreeable to treat a man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/claudio-grass/birth-modern-thought-crime/
"The overwhelming power of the free market to offer productive alternatives to the masses and to the elites is the magnificent trend of our time."
The Free Market vs. Fraud
Gary North
Charles Hugh Smith begins his essay on widespread fraud in the rhetorically correct way: by stating the truth in a list of short observations.
This can't be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The financial system is a fraud.
The political system is a fraud.
National Defense is a fraud.
The healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher education is a fraud.
The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture--from high to pop--is a fraud.
Need I go on?
I have never seen a more cogent short list of neglected but important points.
But Smith neglects to see all this as an extension of Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap." Theodore Sturgeon was my favorite science fiction author in my youth. But his law is more science than fiction.
What is different today is this: a growing minority of Americans understand the specific nature of several of these frauds, and the general public is sensing that something is deeply wrong.
There is another important aspect of this list: it's not just America. Western industrial society indulges in the same frauds.
The financial system is international. It's an Anglo-American fraud. At the heart of this is the Mother of All Financial Frauds, central banking. The British provided the model in 1694: the Bank of England.
Higher education is a fraud everywhere. It's not just the West.
Outside of the State of Israel, national defense is a fraud.
The West's political systems have been frauds from the beginning. The increase in fraud is due to democracy. It takes greater skill and more spin to bamboozle the democratic public than it does a public under tyrants. That is Classical Greece's legacy to the West. Educated men in the West have been asked to read Thucydides' reconstructed speech by Pericles on Athenian democracy. In the good old days, educated men read the speech in Greek. But their teachers rarely asked them to put two and two together. Pericles had convinced Athens to start a war with Sparta in 431 B.C. In the second year of the war, he gave a funeral oration -- a rhetorical justification of his own lack of good judgment. If you want the background, read my 2003 article, "It Usually Begins With Thucydides." Athens lost the war after 26 years. Five years later, the Athenian government convicted Socrates of corrupting youth by asking politically incorrect questions. Socrates was silly enough to drink the hemlock instead of departing, which was an option granted to him by the assembly. He believed -- as they all believed -- in salvation through politics. For the Greeks, as for Tip O'Neill, all politics was local. Socrates preferred to die rather than to leave Spin City. Apologists for both Greek democracy and Socrates have been spinning this sequence of events for a millennium. The Western political tradition rests on fraud. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the United States, this increase in the reign of political fraud has had the support of the public for over a century. The election of 1912 solidified it politically: the triumph of the Progressives. We had a respite, 1921-29. Then it ended. Basically, the Presidential election of 1904 ended the Old Democracy: limited civil government based on Grover Cleveland's model. Yet how many historians -- let alone voters -- remember that election and the candidate who lost? Almost none.
Mainstream media are frauds all over the world.
There are healthcare systems that are not frauds. The rich have concierge medicine. Where there is no government support, medical technology advances, and prices fall. Think of cosmetic surgery. Think of laser eye surgery. Meanwhile, Canadians flee to the USA to get treated. The British system was the pioneer in the West: the National Health Service. The Soviet Union beat Britain to the punch.
In short, when we combine Sturgeon's law, the welfare state, and Keynesian finance, the world is in the grip of a fraudulent system.
This is altogether good. How would we like a world in which the theft implicit in the welfare state produced greater insight into the burdens of life and how to deal with them?
Bad ideas produce bad results. We should never complain about this system of moral and intellectual causation.
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
Can parents escape the fraud of higher education? Of course. Their kids can work part-time at McDonald's and pay for college: distance learning. Some parents know this, yet they still write the checks to send their kids off to a high-priced college. Fools and their money are soon parted. My YouTube video on how to earn an accredited degree for $11 a day has had over 115,000 hits over the last decade. Only one person has ever contacted me and said he did it my way as a result of my video.
Here is what Smith did not mention: Even when people know something is a fraud, most of them stick with it. Quoting Kipling's poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, we stick with the devils we know. This is the tried and true method of safe living.
Productive change comes at the margin. Most changes do, outside of major wars. Most changes fail. This is Pareto's 20/80 law in action. We wait to see what works before we change. Most of us are late adopters. Even though most of us can escape most of these frauds if we choose to, we choose not to.
Yet somehow we have muddled through as a civilization. The creative power of Sturgeon's 10% has enabled us to move forward.
Politically, we're trapped, but where can we go where we will not be trapped? It is universal.
National defense is a fraud, but at least our wars cost us mainly money, not lives. And there is no draft. That ended a generation ago. The Great Fraudster Richard Nixon ended it.
The mainstream corporate media are fraudulent, but they are declining in influence. They are losing market share.
Mass culture is fraudulent, but we can still read classic (pre-1923) books -- cheap or even for free. Download them on Kindle.
We can read the classics of free market economics online for free on Mises.org and the Liberty Fund's online library of liberty. We can buy printed copies inexpensively. Two decades ago, most of these books were available only in used bookstores, and only sporadically.
We can still watch classic movies for $2.95 on Google and Amazon -- for $3.95, we can watch in high definition. We do not watch on 9-inch black-and-white flickering screens. (Yes, my family owned such a set in 1949. I watched Hoot Gibson and Ken Maynard on Saturday mornings. This was not Shakespeare.)
The variety of choices is enormous, and it is growing.
We can use Pareto's law and Sturgeon's law to access the best 10%. The price is low.
THE FREE MARKET
The free market has done this for us. The range of choice grows. Prices continually fall. This has been going on since at least 1820 in the United States and Great Britain. This is nothing new.
The overwhelming power of the free market to offer productive alternatives to the masses and to the elites is the magnificent trend of our time.
As for fraud, it is also growing. People buy it. They prefer it.
Pogo Possum had it right a generation ago: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
We have known about Gresham's law for half a millennium: "Bad money drives out good money." But this law is misstated. Here is the correct formulation: "Money that is artificially overvalued by the state drives out money that is artificially undervalued."
There is a Gresham's law of culture: "Bad culture drives out the good." But that law is misstated. "Bad culture when subsidized by the state drives out good culture."
We live in an era of the modern humanist state. It has promised us protection. It has promised us a security net. In banking, this is called -- accurately -- "moral hazard." Walter Bagehot coined the term in 1873. It holds true in every area of life, not just banking.
Still less should it [the government] give peculiar favour to any one [bank], and by entrusting it with the Government account secure to it a mischievous supremacy above all other banks. The skill of a financier in such an age is to equalise the receipt of taxation, and the outgoing of expenditure; it should be a principal care with him to make sure that more should not be locked up at a particular moment in the Government coffers than is usually locked up there. If the amount of dead capital so buried in the Treasury does not at any time much exceed the common average, the evil so caused is inconsiderable: it is only the loss of interest on a certain sum of money, which would not be much of a burden on the whole nation; the additional taxation it would cause would be inconsiderable. Such an evil is nothing in comparison with that of losing the money necessary for inevitable expense by entrusting it to a bad bank, or that of recovering this money by identifying the national credit with the bad bank and so propping it up and perpetuating it. So long as the security of the Money Market is not entirely to be relied on, the Government of a country had much better leave it to itself and keep its own money. If the banks are bad, they will certainly continue bad and will probably become worse if the Government sustains and encourages them. The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good bank.
Remove the state's guarantees of protection from the competition of the free market, and Gresham's law will be repealed. Good money -- and everything else -- will drive out bad money.
I am optimistic. I think the free market will reduce the percentage of crap to 80%. Then, over time, to 75%. All change comes at the margin. It takes time. It is cumulative.
As for those who prefer crap, its price will fall. That is the tendency of the free market. "Sell people what they want, but at a lower price."
If fraud increases in a free market, it is because we prefer it. Like a rich old widow who prefers to hear sweet nothings in the mouths of unemployed younger men, we may prefer fraud. Don't blame the free market for that.
Link:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/15089.cfm
Gary North
Charles Hugh Smith begins his essay on widespread fraud in the rhetorically correct way: by stating the truth in a list of short observations.
This can't be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The financial system is a fraud.
The political system is a fraud.
National Defense is a fraud.
The healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher education is a fraud.
The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture--from high to pop--is a fraud.
Need I go on?
I have never seen a more cogent short list of neglected but important points.
But Smith neglects to see all this as an extension of Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap." Theodore Sturgeon was my favorite science fiction author in my youth. But his law is more science than fiction.
What is different today is this: a growing minority of Americans understand the specific nature of several of these frauds, and the general public is sensing that something is deeply wrong.
There is another important aspect of this list: it's not just America. Western industrial society indulges in the same frauds.
The financial system is international. It's an Anglo-American fraud. At the heart of this is the Mother of All Financial Frauds, central banking. The British provided the model in 1694: the Bank of England.
Higher education is a fraud everywhere. It's not just the West.
Outside of the State of Israel, national defense is a fraud.
The West's political systems have been frauds from the beginning. The increase in fraud is due to democracy. It takes greater skill and more spin to bamboozle the democratic public than it does a public under tyrants. That is Classical Greece's legacy to the West. Educated men in the West have been asked to read Thucydides' reconstructed speech by Pericles on Athenian democracy. In the good old days, educated men read the speech in Greek. But their teachers rarely asked them to put two and two together. Pericles had convinced Athens to start a war with Sparta in 431 B.C. In the second year of the war, he gave a funeral oration -- a rhetorical justification of his own lack of good judgment. If you want the background, read my 2003 article, "It Usually Begins With Thucydides." Athens lost the war after 26 years. Five years later, the Athenian government convicted Socrates of corrupting youth by asking politically incorrect questions. Socrates was silly enough to drink the hemlock instead of departing, which was an option granted to him by the assembly. He believed -- as they all believed -- in salvation through politics. For the Greeks, as for Tip O'Neill, all politics was local. Socrates preferred to die rather than to leave Spin City. Apologists for both Greek democracy and Socrates have been spinning this sequence of events for a millennium. The Western political tradition rests on fraud. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the United States, this increase in the reign of political fraud has had the support of the public for over a century. The election of 1912 solidified it politically: the triumph of the Progressives. We had a respite, 1921-29. Then it ended. Basically, the Presidential election of 1904 ended the Old Democracy: limited civil government based on Grover Cleveland's model. Yet how many historians -- let alone voters -- remember that election and the candidate who lost? Almost none.
Mainstream media are frauds all over the world.
There are healthcare systems that are not frauds. The rich have concierge medicine. Where there is no government support, medical technology advances, and prices fall. Think of cosmetic surgery. Think of laser eye surgery. Meanwhile, Canadians flee to the USA to get treated. The British system was the pioneer in the West: the National Health Service. The Soviet Union beat Britain to the punch.
In short, when we combine Sturgeon's law, the welfare state, and Keynesian finance, the world is in the grip of a fraudulent system.
This is altogether good. How would we like a world in which the theft implicit in the welfare state produced greater insight into the burdens of life and how to deal with them?
Bad ideas produce bad results. We should never complain about this system of moral and intellectual causation.
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
Can parents escape the fraud of higher education? Of course. Their kids can work part-time at McDonald's and pay for college: distance learning. Some parents know this, yet they still write the checks to send their kids off to a high-priced college. Fools and their money are soon parted. My YouTube video on how to earn an accredited degree for $11 a day has had over 115,000 hits over the last decade. Only one person has ever contacted me and said he did it my way as a result of my video.
Here is what Smith did not mention: Even when people know something is a fraud, most of them stick with it. Quoting Kipling's poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, we stick with the devils we know. This is the tried and true method of safe living.
Productive change comes at the margin. Most changes do, outside of major wars. Most changes fail. This is Pareto's 20/80 law in action. We wait to see what works before we change. Most of us are late adopters. Even though most of us can escape most of these frauds if we choose to, we choose not to.
Yet somehow we have muddled through as a civilization. The creative power of Sturgeon's 10% has enabled us to move forward.
Politically, we're trapped, but where can we go where we will not be trapped? It is universal.
National defense is a fraud, but at least our wars cost us mainly money, not lives. And there is no draft. That ended a generation ago. The Great Fraudster Richard Nixon ended it.
The mainstream corporate media are fraudulent, but they are declining in influence. They are losing market share.
Mass culture is fraudulent, but we can still read classic (pre-1923) books -- cheap or even for free. Download them on Kindle.
We can read the classics of free market economics online for free on Mises.org and the Liberty Fund's online library of liberty. We can buy printed copies inexpensively. Two decades ago, most of these books were available only in used bookstores, and only sporadically.
We can still watch classic movies for $2.95 on Google and Amazon -- for $3.95, we can watch in high definition. We do not watch on 9-inch black-and-white flickering screens. (Yes, my family owned such a set in 1949. I watched Hoot Gibson and Ken Maynard on Saturday mornings. This was not Shakespeare.)
The variety of choices is enormous, and it is growing.
We can use Pareto's law and Sturgeon's law to access the best 10%. The price is low.
THE FREE MARKET
The free market has done this for us. The range of choice grows. Prices continually fall. This has been going on since at least 1820 in the United States and Great Britain. This is nothing new.
The overwhelming power of the free market to offer productive alternatives to the masses and to the elites is the magnificent trend of our time.
As for fraud, it is also growing. People buy it. They prefer it.
Pogo Possum had it right a generation ago: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
We have known about Gresham's law for half a millennium: "Bad money drives out good money." But this law is misstated. Here is the correct formulation: "Money that is artificially overvalued by the state drives out money that is artificially undervalued."
There is a Gresham's law of culture: "Bad culture drives out the good." But that law is misstated. "Bad culture when subsidized by the state drives out good culture."
We live in an era of the modern humanist state. It has promised us protection. It has promised us a security net. In banking, this is called -- accurately -- "moral hazard." Walter Bagehot coined the term in 1873. It holds true in every area of life, not just banking.
Still less should it [the government] give peculiar favour to any one [bank], and by entrusting it with the Government account secure to it a mischievous supremacy above all other banks. The skill of a financier in such an age is to equalise the receipt of taxation, and the outgoing of expenditure; it should be a principal care with him to make sure that more should not be locked up at a particular moment in the Government coffers than is usually locked up there. If the amount of dead capital so buried in the Treasury does not at any time much exceed the common average, the evil so caused is inconsiderable: it is only the loss of interest on a certain sum of money, which would not be much of a burden on the whole nation; the additional taxation it would cause would be inconsiderable. Such an evil is nothing in comparison with that of losing the money necessary for inevitable expense by entrusting it to a bad bank, or that of recovering this money by identifying the national credit with the bad bank and so propping it up and perpetuating it. So long as the security of the Money Market is not entirely to be relied on, the Government of a country had much better leave it to itself and keep its own money. If the banks are bad, they will certainly continue bad and will probably become worse if the Government sustains and encourages them. The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good bank.
Remove the state's guarantees of protection from the competition of the free market, and Gresham's law will be repealed. Good money -- and everything else -- will drive out bad money.
I am optimistic. I think the free market will reduce the percentage of crap to 80%. Then, over time, to 75%. All change comes at the margin. It takes time. It is cumulative.
As for those who prefer crap, its price will fall. That is the tendency of the free market. "Sell people what they want, but at a lower price."
If fraud increases in a free market, it is because we prefer it. Like a rich old widow who prefers to hear sweet nothings in the mouths of unemployed younger men, we may prefer fraud. Don't blame the free market for that.
Link:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/15089.cfm
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
"By the same token, there is no trust fund and there never has been. As soon as the government receives the taxes it collects from whatever source — income taxes withheld, estimated tax payments, FICA, tariffs, or whatever, it spends them. In fact, as everyone knows, is spends more than it brings in with taxes. It borrows the difference. That’s what the ever-increasing mountain of federal debt is all about."
Social Security Is Welfare, Just Like Food Stamps
by Future of Freedom Foundation
The Social Security program is a perfect example of how people can deceive and delude themselves when it comes to socialist programs. Advocates of Social Security have long convinced themselves that Social Security is a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program.
It is a classic case of the life of the lie — the life of self-deception. In reality, Social Security is a welfare program, just like food stamps. Like food stamps, it is nothing more than a program in which the federal government forcibly seizes the money of one group of people and gives the money to another group of people, after deducting a certain amount to cover the government’s expenses for conducting this “service.”
That’s the way it’s been from the very beginning. Ever since Social Security was enacted in 1935, the federal government took money from one group of people and gave it to another group of people. That’s the way it’s been ever since.
In fact, the law that established Social Security was clear from the get-go: It’s nothing more than a welfare program. And when cases challenging Social Security reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court made it clear that this was nothing more than a welfare program, not a savings-retirement program.
Nonetheless, many Americans, especially those who have reached Social Security age, have convinced themselves that Social Security is really a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program. This is manifested in the oft-heard phrase employed by Social Security recipients: “I put it in and I have the right to get my money back.”
The phrase “put it in,” of course, implies that a person has deposited a portion of his income into a savings account. The phrase “get my money back” implies that the person is simply withdrawing his money from that savings account when he reaches Social Security age.
A recent example of the life of the lie and self-deception appeared in an op-ed in last week’s Los Angeles Times entitled “Hillary-Clinton Flunks the Yes-No Question Test” by Jon Healy. Discussing the differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over how to “close the funding gap” in Social Security, Healy writes:
But Sanders didn’t acknowledge how the move would transform Social Security from an insurance program into a welfare program, transferring wealth explicitly from higher incomes to lower ones…. One reason Social Security has withstood attack after attack over the years is the public’s sense that it’s a savings program — what you receive in benefits is based on what you pay in. That sense would evaporate if benefits were capped but taxes were not…. Clinton pointed out other changes that could be made to shore up the Social Security Trust Fund without reducing benefits or turning the retirement program into something that looks like welfare.
Do you see what I mean? Notwithstanding the fact that the Social Security law established it as a welfare program, and notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court has held that Social Security is nothing more than a welfare program, and notwithstanding the fact that Social Security is based on the government’s forcibly taking money from Peter and giving it to Paul, Healy seems to adhere to the lie and the myth — that Social Security is really a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program.
Why? Why do so many people insist on engaging in this life of the lie and this life of self-deception? Why not simply be honest? Why not simply say, “We know full well that people’s Social Security money is coming from money that the government is taking from working people and that’s okay with us”?
My hunch is that deep down, Social Security recipients know that there is something morally wrong with forcibly taking something that rightfully belongs to someone else. Indeed, conservative advocates of Social Security have long condemned food-stamp recipients on that very basis — that they are buying things with money that has been forcibly taken from working people. The average Social Security recipient doesn’t want to be like a food-stamp recipient.
But the fact is — the reality is — that the Social Security recipient stands in the same position as the food-stamp recipient. He is taking money that rightfully belongs to other people, and he’s using the government to do this, just like the food-stamp recipient does.
In an absolutely ingenious political ploy, the federal government has fed into this life of the lie and life of self-deception. First, it established a tax that would specifically “fund” Social Security and Medicare, another socialist program. Second, it established a Social Security “trust fund.” And third, it established a schedule of payments that people would receive upon reaching Social Security age.
It’s all really nothing more than a fraudulent way to reinforce people’s life of the lie and self-deception. These political devices are designed to tell people: It’s okay for you to feel good about Social Security because Social Security recipients are not really taking other people’s money but instead simply getting their own money back.
But the fact is that those devices are nothing more than ploys designed to disguise reality. Reality is that Social Security is a welfare program, just like food stamps. The government uses force to take money from people who are working and gives it to people who have reached Social Security age.
It makes no difference that the government imposes a tax and calls it a Social Security tax. It could have instead simply raised the income tax by the same amount. Or it could have imposed a new tax and called it “the additional federal tax revenue tax.” What the government titles its various taxes is quite irrelevant. What matters is that they are all nothing but taxes — taxes that fund the overall operations of the government, including both welfare and warfare. Thus, no one has ever “put their money in.” They have simply been taxed.
By the same token, there is no trust fund and there never has been. As soon as the government receives the taxes it collects from whatever source — income taxes withheld, estimated tax payments, FICA, tariffs, or whatever, it spends them. In fact, as everyone knows, is spends more than it brings in with taxes. It borrows the difference. That’s what the ever-increasing mountain of federal debt is all about.
So, what’s the Social Security “trust fund” all about? No, they don’t deposit everyone’s FICA taxes into the “trust fund.” Like I say, they spend that money just as soon as they get it. But long ago, to reinforce people’s decision to live the life of the lie and self-deception, they created a Social Security “trust fund” in which they deposited federal IOUs rather than real cash. It’s those IOUs that people are convinced are funding their Social Security payments. The IOUs reinforce their conviction that they are getting their “money back.” But it’s all political legerdemain because the only way to pay the IOUs back is go out and tax people.
Despite all this legal trickery, the fact is that people are not getting their money back when they receive Social Security payments from the government, just as the first Social Security recipients weren’t getting their money back when the government began sending them checks. The money that people have paid in taxes during their work years is gone. It was spent, some of it by giving money to Social Security recipients who are now dead.
Social Security recipients exclaim, “Don’t reduce our benefits and don’t even think about canceling our socialist program. We have become hopelessly dependent on it and could never survive without it.” The food stamp recipients say the same thing. So do Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. Same with the DEA, HUD, HHS, Department of Homeland Security, and all the other recipients of federal welfare. Everyone on the dole demands that his dole be continued, no matter how heavy and difficult the burden for those who are being taxed.
Meanwhile, the federal government continues hurtling toward bankruptcy and taking the country down with it.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/19/social-security-welfare-just-like-food-stamps/
by Future of Freedom Foundation
The Social Security program is a perfect example of how people can deceive and delude themselves when it comes to socialist programs. Advocates of Social Security have long convinced themselves that Social Security is a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program.
It is a classic case of the life of the lie — the life of self-deception. In reality, Social Security is a welfare program, just like food stamps. Like food stamps, it is nothing more than a program in which the federal government forcibly seizes the money of one group of people and gives the money to another group of people, after deducting a certain amount to cover the government’s expenses for conducting this “service.”
That’s the way it’s been from the very beginning. Ever since Social Security was enacted in 1935, the federal government took money from one group of people and gave it to another group of people. That’s the way it’s been ever since.
In fact, the law that established Social Security was clear from the get-go: It’s nothing more than a welfare program. And when cases challenging Social Security reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court made it clear that this was nothing more than a welfare program, not a savings-retirement program.
Nonetheless, many Americans, especially those who have reached Social Security age, have convinced themselves that Social Security is really a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program. This is manifested in the oft-heard phrase employed by Social Security recipients: “I put it in and I have the right to get my money back.”
The phrase “put it in,” of course, implies that a person has deposited a portion of his income into a savings account. The phrase “get my money back” implies that the person is simply withdrawing his money from that savings account when he reaches Social Security age.
A recent example of the life of the lie and self-deception appeared in an op-ed in last week’s Los Angeles Times entitled “Hillary-Clinton Flunks the Yes-No Question Test” by Jon Healy. Discussing the differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over how to “close the funding gap” in Social Security, Healy writes:
But Sanders didn’t acknowledge how the move would transform Social Security from an insurance program into a welfare program, transferring wealth explicitly from higher incomes to lower ones…. One reason Social Security has withstood attack after attack over the years is the public’s sense that it’s a savings program — what you receive in benefits is based on what you pay in. That sense would evaporate if benefits were capped but taxes were not…. Clinton pointed out other changes that could be made to shore up the Social Security Trust Fund without reducing benefits or turning the retirement program into something that looks like welfare.
Do you see what I mean? Notwithstanding the fact that the Social Security law established it as a welfare program, and notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court has held that Social Security is nothing more than a welfare program, and notwithstanding the fact that Social Security is based on the government’s forcibly taking money from Peter and giving it to Paul, Healy seems to adhere to the lie and the myth — that Social Security is really a savings-retirement program rather than a welfare program.
Why? Why do so many people insist on engaging in this life of the lie and this life of self-deception? Why not simply be honest? Why not simply say, “We know full well that people’s Social Security money is coming from money that the government is taking from working people and that’s okay with us”?
My hunch is that deep down, Social Security recipients know that there is something morally wrong with forcibly taking something that rightfully belongs to someone else. Indeed, conservative advocates of Social Security have long condemned food-stamp recipients on that very basis — that they are buying things with money that has been forcibly taken from working people. The average Social Security recipient doesn’t want to be like a food-stamp recipient.
But the fact is — the reality is — that the Social Security recipient stands in the same position as the food-stamp recipient. He is taking money that rightfully belongs to other people, and he’s using the government to do this, just like the food-stamp recipient does.
In an absolutely ingenious political ploy, the federal government has fed into this life of the lie and life of self-deception. First, it established a tax that would specifically “fund” Social Security and Medicare, another socialist program. Second, it established a Social Security “trust fund.” And third, it established a schedule of payments that people would receive upon reaching Social Security age.
It’s all really nothing more than a fraudulent way to reinforce people’s life of the lie and self-deception. These political devices are designed to tell people: It’s okay for you to feel good about Social Security because Social Security recipients are not really taking other people’s money but instead simply getting their own money back.
But the fact is that those devices are nothing more than ploys designed to disguise reality. Reality is that Social Security is a welfare program, just like food stamps. The government uses force to take money from people who are working and gives it to people who have reached Social Security age.
It makes no difference that the government imposes a tax and calls it a Social Security tax. It could have instead simply raised the income tax by the same amount. Or it could have imposed a new tax and called it “the additional federal tax revenue tax.” What the government titles its various taxes is quite irrelevant. What matters is that they are all nothing but taxes — taxes that fund the overall operations of the government, including both welfare and warfare. Thus, no one has ever “put their money in.” They have simply been taxed.
By the same token, there is no trust fund and there never has been. As soon as the government receives the taxes it collects from whatever source — income taxes withheld, estimated tax payments, FICA, tariffs, or whatever, it spends them. In fact, as everyone knows, is spends more than it brings in with taxes. It borrows the difference. That’s what the ever-increasing mountain of federal debt is all about.
So, what’s the Social Security “trust fund” all about? No, they don’t deposit everyone’s FICA taxes into the “trust fund.” Like I say, they spend that money just as soon as they get it. But long ago, to reinforce people’s decision to live the life of the lie and self-deception, they created a Social Security “trust fund” in which they deposited federal IOUs rather than real cash. It’s those IOUs that people are convinced are funding their Social Security payments. The IOUs reinforce their conviction that they are getting their “money back.” But it’s all political legerdemain because the only way to pay the IOUs back is go out and tax people.
Despite all this legal trickery, the fact is that people are not getting their money back when they receive Social Security payments from the government, just as the first Social Security recipients weren’t getting their money back when the government began sending them checks. The money that people have paid in taxes during their work years is gone. It was spent, some of it by giving money to Social Security recipients who are now dead.
Social Security recipients exclaim, “Don’t reduce our benefits and don’t even think about canceling our socialist program. We have become hopelessly dependent on it and could never survive without it.” The food stamp recipients say the same thing. So do Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. Same with the DEA, HUD, HHS, Department of Homeland Security, and all the other recipients of federal welfare. Everyone on the dole demands that his dole be continued, no matter how heavy and difficult the burden for those who are being taxed.
Meanwhile, the federal government continues hurtling toward bankruptcy and taking the country down with it.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/04/19/social-security-welfare-just-like-food-stamps/
Are you ready???
"This Will All Blow Up In The Fed's Face," Schiff Warns "Trump's Right, America Is Broke"
By Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Euro Pacific Capital’s Peter Schiff sat down with Alex Jones last week to discuss the state of the economy, and where he sees everything going from here.
Here are some notable moments from the interview.
Regarding how bad things are, and what’s really going on in the economy, Schiff lays out all of the horrible economic data that has come out recently, as well as making sure to take away the crutch everyone uses to explain any and all data misses, which is weather.
“It’s no way to know exactly the timetable, but obviously this economy is already back in recession, and if it’s not in a recession it’s certainly on the cusp of one”
“We could be in a negative GDP quarter right now, and I think that if the first quarter is bad the second quarter is going to be worse”
“The last couple years we had a rebound in the second quarter because we’ve had very cold winters. Well this winter was the warmest in 120 years so there is nothing to rebound from.“
On the Fed, and current policies, he very bluntly points out that nothing is working, nor has it worked, but of course the central planners will try it all anyway. He also takes a moment to agree with Donald Trump regarding the fact that the U.S. is flat out, undeniably broke.
“The problem for the fed is how do they launch a new round of stimulus and still pretend the economy is in good shape.”
“Negative interest rates are a disaster. It’s not working in Japan, it’s not working in Europe, it’s not going to work here. Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean we’re not going to do it, because everything we do doesn’t work and we do it anyway. It shows desperation, that you’ve had all these central bankers lowering interest rates and expecting it to revive the economy. And then when they get down to zero, rather than admit that it didn’t work, because clearly if you go to zero and you still haven’t achieved your objective, maybe it doesn’t work. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, they’re now going negative.”
“The United States, no matter how high inflation gets, we’ll do our best to pretend it doesn’t exist or rationalize it away because we have a lot more debt. America is broke, if you look at Europe and Japan even though there is some debt there, overall those are still creditor nations. The world still owes Europe money, the world still owes Japan money, but America owes more money than all of the other debtor nations combined. Trump is right about that, we are broke, we’re flat broke, and we’re living off this credit bubble and we can’t prick it. Other central banks may be able to raise their rates, but the Fed can’t.”
On how he sees everything unfolding from this point, Peter again points out that the economy is weak and it’s only a matter of time before this entire centrally planned manipulation is exposed for what it is, and becomes a disaster for the Federal Reserve. He likens how investors are behaving today to the dot-com bubble, and the beginning of the global financial crisis.
“The trigger that’s going to really send us into a higher gear is going to be the admission by the Fed that the economy is weak or the markets figure it out on their own. There’s not a lot of stimulus left, all they’ve got is potentially negative rates and a huge round of quantitative easing, and this thing is going to blow up in the Fed’s face.”
“Investors still just don’t get what’s going on. For the past several years everybody has been positioned as if this recovery were real, that it was sustainable, and that the Fed could normalize interest rates and everything was going to be fine. The first quarter of this year investment returns, it was the worst quarter in eighteen years for actively managed funds.”
“The federal reserve has not solved our problems, but exacerbated them.”
“You’ve got big banks like Goldman Sachs shorting gold, telling their clients to short gold. A lot of people unfortunately listen to Goldman Sachs, and they’re doing the wrong thing. A lot of times the markets are just mis-priced, because so many people don’t get it. Just like all the people who were buying the subprime mortgages before the bottom dropped out of the market, or all the people who were buying thos dot-com stocks for several years before they collapsed. The same thing is going to happen now.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/tyler-durden/will-blow-feds-face/
By Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Euro Pacific Capital’s Peter Schiff sat down with Alex Jones last week to discuss the state of the economy, and where he sees everything going from here.
Here are some notable moments from the interview.
Regarding how bad things are, and what’s really going on in the economy, Schiff lays out all of the horrible economic data that has come out recently, as well as making sure to take away the crutch everyone uses to explain any and all data misses, which is weather.
“It’s no way to know exactly the timetable, but obviously this economy is already back in recession, and if it’s not in a recession it’s certainly on the cusp of one”
“We could be in a negative GDP quarter right now, and I think that if the first quarter is bad the second quarter is going to be worse”
“The last couple years we had a rebound in the second quarter because we’ve had very cold winters. Well this winter was the warmest in 120 years so there is nothing to rebound from.“
On the Fed, and current policies, he very bluntly points out that nothing is working, nor has it worked, but of course the central planners will try it all anyway. He also takes a moment to agree with Donald Trump regarding the fact that the U.S. is flat out, undeniably broke.
“The problem for the fed is how do they launch a new round of stimulus and still pretend the economy is in good shape.”
“Negative interest rates are a disaster. It’s not working in Japan, it’s not working in Europe, it’s not going to work here. Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean we’re not going to do it, because everything we do doesn’t work and we do it anyway. It shows desperation, that you’ve had all these central bankers lowering interest rates and expecting it to revive the economy. And then when they get down to zero, rather than admit that it didn’t work, because clearly if you go to zero and you still haven’t achieved your objective, maybe it doesn’t work. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, they’re now going negative.”
“The United States, no matter how high inflation gets, we’ll do our best to pretend it doesn’t exist or rationalize it away because we have a lot more debt. America is broke, if you look at Europe and Japan even though there is some debt there, overall those are still creditor nations. The world still owes Europe money, the world still owes Japan money, but America owes more money than all of the other debtor nations combined. Trump is right about that, we are broke, we’re flat broke, and we’re living off this credit bubble and we can’t prick it. Other central banks may be able to raise their rates, but the Fed can’t.”
On how he sees everything unfolding from this point, Peter again points out that the economy is weak and it’s only a matter of time before this entire centrally planned manipulation is exposed for what it is, and becomes a disaster for the Federal Reserve. He likens how investors are behaving today to the dot-com bubble, and the beginning of the global financial crisis.
“The trigger that’s going to really send us into a higher gear is going to be the admission by the Fed that the economy is weak or the markets figure it out on their own. There’s not a lot of stimulus left, all they’ve got is potentially negative rates and a huge round of quantitative easing, and this thing is going to blow up in the Fed’s face.”
“Investors still just don’t get what’s going on. For the past several years everybody has been positioned as if this recovery were real, that it was sustainable, and that the Fed could normalize interest rates and everything was going to be fine. The first quarter of this year investment returns, it was the worst quarter in eighteen years for actively managed funds.”
“The federal reserve has not solved our problems, but exacerbated them.”
“You’ve got big banks like Goldman Sachs shorting gold, telling their clients to short gold. A lot of people unfortunately listen to Goldman Sachs, and they’re doing the wrong thing. A lot of times the markets are just mis-priced, because so many people don’t get it. Just like all the people who were buying the subprime mortgages before the bottom dropped out of the market, or all the people who were buying thos dot-com stocks for several years before they collapsed. The same thing is going to happen now.”
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/tyler-durden/will-blow-feds-face/
Without government, who would spy on you???
Orwellian Reality: Big Brother Watching You on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
Sputnik News
The US Central Intelligence Agency has become increasingly focused on monitoring social media, according to a document obtained by The Intercept; the intelligence agency is pouring money in start-ups mining tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook posts.
Every time you post a message on Facebook or share a photo on Instagram, remembers this: Big Brother is watching you. No, it’s not a quotation from the famous “1984” by George Orwell. The truth of the matter is that the US Central Intelligence Agency has set its eye on social media platforms.
In his latest article US, investigative journalist Lee Fang sheds some light of the CIA’s investment programs, referring to a new document obtained by The Intercept.
It turns out that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, is pouring money into companies and start-ups specializing in social media mining and surveillance.
“The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media,” Fang stresses.
Indeed, social media also offers a wealth of potential intelligence, the journalist notes.
The companies, which receive funding from In-Q-Tel, are developing unique tools to mine data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The advanced applications help to collect, sort and visualize data, spotting trends in real time.
For instance, “Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments,” Fang narrates.
The company’s website message reads:
“Hundreds of customer experience, education, public sector and security teams rely on the Geofeedia platform to listen to and engage with social media content from locations across countries, cities, buildings and everything in between from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, VK, Sina Weibo and other social channels.”
Another firm, PATHAR, designed a tool which is used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to analyze data from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms in order to “determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization.”
Fang reveals that for the last ten years In-Q-Tel has been engaged with companies specializing in scanning large sets of online data.
The investigative journalist cites Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, who wrote in his 2012 report that keeping an eye on social media is increasingly essential for government agencies.
“Governments are increasingly finding that monitoring social media is an essential component in keeping track of erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends,” the report states.
The CIA-funded technologies are used not only for collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries and terrorists but also for keeping track of domestic labor union activists, student groups, minimum wage advocates and political opposition, the journalist notes, adding that privacy advocates are increasingly upset over the methods being used to mine public data.
Remarkably, American high-tech companies and even Silicon Valley giants have a long record of cooperation with US government agencies.
In his March Op-Ed for Russia Today Neil Clark, a journalist, writer, and broadcaster, called attention to the fact that Google experts had a role in managing the Syrian “regime change” project back in 2011-2012. He quoted a series of emails by then president of ‘Google Ideas’ (now called ‘Jigsaw’) Jared Cohen to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, recently exposed by WikiLeaks.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Cohen wrote on July 25, 2012.
“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” the president of ‘Google Ideas’ emphasized.
Information technologies play a crucial role in today’s world. However, the question then arises to what extent these technologies, tools and applications can be used. What is at stake are fundamental values — privacy, freedom of speech, nations’ sovereignty, and independence.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/no_author/big-brother-trolling/
Sputnik News
The US Central Intelligence Agency has become increasingly focused on monitoring social media, according to a document obtained by The Intercept; the intelligence agency is pouring money in start-ups mining tweets, Instagram photos, and Facebook posts.
Every time you post a message on Facebook or share a photo on Instagram, remembers this: Big Brother is watching you. No, it’s not a quotation from the famous “1984” by George Orwell. The truth of the matter is that the US Central Intelligence Agency has set its eye on social media platforms.
In his latest article US, investigative journalist Lee Fang sheds some light of the CIA’s investment programs, referring to a new document obtained by The Intercept.
It turns out that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, is pouring money into companies and start-ups specializing in social media mining and surveillance.
“The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media,” Fang stresses.
Indeed, social media also offers a wealth of potential intelligence, the journalist notes.
The companies, which receive funding from In-Q-Tel, are developing unique tools to mine data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The advanced applications help to collect, sort and visualize data, spotting trends in real time.
For instance, “Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments,” Fang narrates.
The company’s website message reads:
“Hundreds of customer experience, education, public sector and security teams rely on the Geofeedia platform to listen to and engage with social media content from locations across countries, cities, buildings and everything in between from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, VK, Sina Weibo and other social channels.”
Another firm, PATHAR, designed a tool which is used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to analyze data from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms in order to “determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization.”
Fang reveals that for the last ten years In-Q-Tel has been engaged with companies specializing in scanning large sets of online data.
The investigative journalist cites Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, who wrote in his 2012 report that keeping an eye on social media is increasingly essential for government agencies.
“Governments are increasingly finding that monitoring social media is an essential component in keeping track of erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends,” the report states.
The CIA-funded technologies are used not only for collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries and terrorists but also for keeping track of domestic labor union activists, student groups, minimum wage advocates and political opposition, the journalist notes, adding that privacy advocates are increasingly upset over the methods being used to mine public data.
Remarkably, American high-tech companies and even Silicon Valley giants have a long record of cooperation with US government agencies.
In his March Op-Ed for Russia Today Neil Clark, a journalist, writer, and broadcaster, called attention to the fact that Google experts had a role in managing the Syrian “regime change” project back in 2011-2012. He quoted a series of emails by then president of ‘Google Ideas’ (now called ‘Jigsaw’) Jared Cohen to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, recently exposed by WikiLeaks.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Cohen wrote on July 25, 2012.
“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” the president of ‘Google Ideas’ emphasized.
Information technologies play a crucial role in today’s world. However, the question then arises to what extent these technologies, tools and applications can be used. What is at stake are fundamental values — privacy, freedom of speech, nations’ sovereignty, and independence.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/no_author/big-brother-trolling/
Now, what's so hard about understanding this???
Rights Versus Wishes
By Walter E. Williams
Here is what presidential aspirant Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “I believe that health care is a right of all people.” President Barack Obama declared that health care “should be a right for every American.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “Every person has a right to adequate health care.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his January 1944 message to Congress, called for “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” And it is not just a health care right that people claim. There are rights to decent housing, good food, and a decent job, and for senior citizens, there’s a right to prescription drugs. In a free and moral society, do people have these rights? Let’s look at it.
In the standard historical usage of the term, a “right” is something that exists simultaneously among people. As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Similarly, I have a right to travel freely. Again, that right imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference.
Contrast those rights to free speech and travel with the supposed rights to medical care and decent housing. Those supposed rights do impose obligations upon others. We see that by recognizing that there is no Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. If one does not have money to pay for a medical service or decent housing and the government provides it, where do you think the government gets the money?.
If you agree that there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy and that Congress does not have any resources of its very own, the only way for Congress to give one American something is to first take it from some other American. In other words, if one person has a right to something he did not earn, it requires another person’s not having a right to something he did earn.
Let’s apply this bogus concept of rights to my right to speak and travel freely. Doing so, in the case of my right to free speech, it might impose obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone, and audience. My right to travel freely might require that others provide me with resources to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations. If I were to demand that others make sacrifices so that I can exercise my free speech and travel rights, I suspect that most Americans would say, “Williams, yes, you have rights to free speech and traveling freely, but I’m not obligated to pay for them!”
As human beings, we all have certain natural rights. Of the rights we possess, we have a right to delegate them to the government. For example, we all have a natural right to defend ourselves against predators. Because we possess that right, we can delegate it to the government. By contrast, I do not have a right to take one person’s earnings to give to another. Because I have no such right, I cannot delegate it to the government. If I did take your earnings to provide medical services for another, it would rightfully be described and condemned as an act of theft. When government does the same, it’s still theft, albeit legalized theft.
If you’re a Christian or a Jew, you should be against these so-called rights. 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 Congress.” The bottom line is medical care, housing, and decent jobs are not rights at all, at least not in a free society; they are wishes. As such, I would agree with most Americans — because I, too, wish that everyone had good medical care, decent housing, and a good job.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/walter-e-williams/rights-vs-wishes/
By Walter E. Williams
Here is what presidential aspirant Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “I believe that health care is a right of all people.” President Barack Obama declared that health care “should be a right for every American.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “Every person has a right to adequate health care.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his January 1944 message to Congress, called for “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” And it is not just a health care right that people claim. There are rights to decent housing, good food, and a decent job, and for senior citizens, there’s a right to prescription drugs. In a free and moral society, do people have these rights? Let’s look at it.
In the standard historical usage of the term, a “right” is something that exists simultaneously among people. As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Similarly, I have a right to travel freely. Again, that right imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference.
Contrast those rights to free speech and travel with the supposed rights to medical care and decent housing. Those supposed rights do impose obligations upon others. We see that by recognizing that there is no Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. If one does not have money to pay for a medical service or decent housing and the government provides it, where do you think the government gets the money?.
If you agree that there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy and that Congress does not have any resources of its very own, the only way for Congress to give one American something is to first take it from some other American. In other words, if one person has a right to something he did not earn, it requires another person’s not having a right to something he did earn.
Let’s apply this bogus concept of rights to my right to speak and travel freely. Doing so, in the case of my right to free speech, it might impose obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone, and audience. My right to travel freely might require that others provide me with resources to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations. If I were to demand that others make sacrifices so that I can exercise my free speech and travel rights, I suspect that most Americans would say, “Williams, yes, you have rights to free speech and traveling freely, but I’m not obligated to pay for them!”
As human beings, we all have certain natural rights. Of the rights we possess, we have a right to delegate them to the government. For example, we all have a natural right to defend ourselves against predators. Because we possess that right, we can delegate it to the government. By contrast, I do not have a right to take one person’s earnings to give to another. Because I have no such right, I cannot delegate it to the government. If I did take your earnings to provide medical services for another, it would rightfully be described and condemned as an act of theft. When government does the same, it’s still theft, albeit legalized theft.
If you’re a Christian or a Jew, you should be against these so-called rights. 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 Congress.” The bottom line is medical care, housing, and decent jobs are not rights at all, at least not in a free society; they are wishes. As such, I would agree with most Americans — because I, too, wish that everyone had good medical care, decent housing, and a good job.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/walter-e-williams/rights-vs-wishes/
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
" The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China."
How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace
By Paul Craig Roberts
When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.
I know about this because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into the agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA’s claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA’s way of perpetuating the Cold War and the CIA’s importance.
The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.
The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents—George W. Bush and Obama—who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.
Thus was mankind’s chance for peace lost along with America’s leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existence over which American influence would have prevailed.
Instead, the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.
The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons’ arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist. It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony.
The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of America’s leading corporations, such as Apple. China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets.
To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skeptical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills.
Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia. What if Russia responded in kind?
NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO. NATO is a cover for Washington’s war crimes. It can provide no other service.
Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is modernized many decades before the neocons thought possible. China’s military forces are moderized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete.
The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Killary’s support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership.
Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Killary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocon’s war.
The neocons have flocked to the support of Killary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put Killary in office. Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president.
The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well-informed population. The US owes its 20th-century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries.
Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to America’s Japanese vassal that it was defenseless if Russia and China so decided.
The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises.
The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China.
This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/paul-craig-roberts/destroying-mankinds-hopes-peace/
By Paul Craig Roberts
When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.
I know about this because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into the agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA’s claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA’s way of perpetuating the Cold War and the CIA’s importance.
The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.
The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents—George W. Bush and Obama—who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.
Thus was mankind’s chance for peace lost along with America’s leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existence over which American influence would have prevailed.
Instead, the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.
The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons’ arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist. It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony.
The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of America’s leading corporations, such as Apple. China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets.
To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skeptical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills.
Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia. What if Russia responded in kind?
NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO. NATO is a cover for Washington’s war crimes. It can provide no other service.
Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is modernized many decades before the neocons thought possible. China’s military forces are moderized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete.
The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Killary’s support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership.
Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Killary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocon’s war.
The neocons have flocked to the support of Killary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put Killary in office. Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president.
The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well-informed population. The US owes its 20th-century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries.
Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to America’s Japanese vassal that it was defenseless if Russia and China so decided.
The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises.
The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China.
This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/paul-craig-roberts/destroying-mankinds-hopes-peace/
Value life like we do or you're dead...
Value Life Like We Do! Or Else!
By Jack Perry
I overheard a somewhat interesting if disturbing conversation this weekend. A career U.S. military man was telling these folks at a coffee shop that “we” need to go into the Middle East and “mean business this time”. As in, you know, kill them all and let Allah sort them out. Now, I’ve heard all of this before so I wasn’t especially astonished. This is standard-issue manure that gets doled out via government propaganda outlets we call “talk radio” and “television talk shows”. But what he said next is what I found astonishing: “They don’t value life like we do!” What?! Excuse me, but, what?!
Right, “they” don’t value life like we do. And we’ll teach them to value life like we do by killing every last one of them! Then they’ll learn about the sanctity of human life, by jingo! I considered this point of view and wondered if this guy was a bomber pilot since that was the branch of the military he hailed from. Not to mention that is the branch of the military in control of the thermonuclear curtain-closers that the United States would use to pull off an award-winning finale to the human race if we needed to fully demonstrate how much we value life.
“They” don’t value life like we do. Pardon me, but who is “they”, hmmm? Oh, right, the Middle East! I agree. Look what happened when they got a hold of nuclear weapons. They no sooner got a hold of them and they nuked two cities and vaporized a couple hundred thousand human beings. Oh, wait, that was us that did that. Oops! Sorry, my bad. Didn’t “they” kill about three million people in the Vietnam War? Oh, sorry, that was us again. Gosh, I suppose now is not the time to mention that our Civil War dwarfs the current Syrian Civil War in terms of the hundreds of thousands of dead. We’re still not sure how many died. Could be 400,000 or it could be 600,000 or it could be 750,000 depending on the latest figures. That means we just shoveled them into mass graves and we still don’t know where those are. Yeah, they found Saddam’s mass graves, but the ones from our Civil War, meh, who cares? We value life. It must have made good fertilizer for corn.
We have an epidemic of murder and violence in our society because the government leads people by example. But because we value life, we don’t care to admit it and blame the guns instead. As if the guns just get up all by themselves and open fire. Pardon me, but the guns that wind up in the wrong hands are usually the ones the government issues. I bet we don’t even know how many people our government has killed over bizarre foreign policy objectives, incoherent ideologies, and centuries-old ideas about political institutions. The idea of “democracy” has already killed more people in the Middle East than the “dictators” we were trying to or did replace. Right, they don’t value life like we do. And if we have to murder everybody in the Middle East to prove that, then so be it, sayeth the United States government.
Because we value life, we lock up many lives in prisons for such horrific crimes as possessing a plant. We have more people in our prisons per capita than all of those Middle Eastern nations do per capita. That shows how much we value life. We value it so much, we’re willing to lock it away behind bars. What’s more, our commitment to providing greater opportunities for private prisons and private military contractors demonstrates our overwhelming resolve to value life. I’m sure the price-point-per-life appears on their spreadsheets when they bill the government for jailing one or removing one from the equation. Can’t all you Middle Eastern people see how much we value life over here?!
If you people don’t learn to value life, we’ll carpet-bomb your countries and reduce thousand-year-old cities to rubble until you do. We’ll station troops in your cities and barge into your homes to cart your sons off to jail where they will be taught how to value life using electric shock, waterboarding, and vicious dogs. The CIA just announced they won’t waterboard people anymore. Meaning they probably changed the name to “Life Valuation Training” because that’s how the government rolls. When the United States runs concentration camps, they call them “resettlement camps” or “reservations”. Just change the name and it all looks snazzy. That’s why we can call state-sponsored genocide “valuing life” and all that crap.
Gosh, I sure am glad I live in a country that values life. That must be why the cops have tanks now, too. How can you affirm life without tanks, I ask you? I mean, armored personnel carriers are nice, but nothing says “I love you” like a tank does, right? Just paint a happy face on the turret and it’s all good. Indeed, “they” don’t value life like we do. They don’t love their children, cry when their mothers die, fall in love, enjoy pizza, or smile to one another. Because if we knew that and had to admit that to ourselves, we might see that the government is lying to us about these wars. And that we, not “they”, are the ones who do not value life.
If we knew that these are human beings who want to live as much as we do, we might be compelled to make a decision: Do we value life—or not? We can’t keep blaming “them” for this violence anymore. Not when we’re part of the world that is responsible for both world wars and will probably be part of the coalition which begins the third one. Not when the United States eggs on the violence over there like it’s a mixed-martial arts cage match. “They” don’t value life like we do? Huh. Do tell.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/jack-perry/dont-value-life-govt/
By Jack Perry
I overheard a somewhat interesting if disturbing conversation this weekend. A career U.S. military man was telling these folks at a coffee shop that “we” need to go into the Middle East and “mean business this time”. As in, you know, kill them all and let Allah sort them out. Now, I’ve heard all of this before so I wasn’t especially astonished. This is standard-issue manure that gets doled out via government propaganda outlets we call “talk radio” and “television talk shows”. But what he said next is what I found astonishing: “They don’t value life like we do!” What?! Excuse me, but, what?!
Right, “they” don’t value life like we do. And we’ll teach them to value life like we do by killing every last one of them! Then they’ll learn about the sanctity of human life, by jingo! I considered this point of view and wondered if this guy was a bomber pilot since that was the branch of the military he hailed from. Not to mention that is the branch of the military in control of the thermonuclear curtain-closers that the United States would use to pull off an award-winning finale to the human race if we needed to fully demonstrate how much we value life.
“They” don’t value life like we do. Pardon me, but who is “they”, hmmm? Oh, right, the Middle East! I agree. Look what happened when they got a hold of nuclear weapons. They no sooner got a hold of them and they nuked two cities and vaporized a couple hundred thousand human beings. Oh, wait, that was us that did that. Oops! Sorry, my bad. Didn’t “they” kill about three million people in the Vietnam War? Oh, sorry, that was us again. Gosh, I suppose now is not the time to mention that our Civil War dwarfs the current Syrian Civil War in terms of the hundreds of thousands of dead. We’re still not sure how many died. Could be 400,000 or it could be 600,000 or it could be 750,000 depending on the latest figures. That means we just shoveled them into mass graves and we still don’t know where those are. Yeah, they found Saddam’s mass graves, but the ones from our Civil War, meh, who cares? We value life. It must have made good fertilizer for corn.
We have an epidemic of murder and violence in our society because the government leads people by example. But because we value life, we don’t care to admit it and blame the guns instead. As if the guns just get up all by themselves and open fire. Pardon me, but the guns that wind up in the wrong hands are usually the ones the government issues. I bet we don’t even know how many people our government has killed over bizarre foreign policy objectives, incoherent ideologies, and centuries-old ideas about political institutions. The idea of “democracy” has already killed more people in the Middle East than the “dictators” we were trying to or did replace. Right, they don’t value life like we do. And if we have to murder everybody in the Middle East to prove that, then so be it, sayeth the United States government.
Because we value life, we lock up many lives in prisons for such horrific crimes as possessing a plant. We have more people in our prisons per capita than all of those Middle Eastern nations do per capita. That shows how much we value life. We value it so much, we’re willing to lock it away behind bars. What’s more, our commitment to providing greater opportunities for private prisons and private military contractors demonstrates our overwhelming resolve to value life. I’m sure the price-point-per-life appears on their spreadsheets when they bill the government for jailing one or removing one from the equation. Can’t all you Middle Eastern people see how much we value life over here?!
If you people don’t learn to value life, we’ll carpet-bomb your countries and reduce thousand-year-old cities to rubble until you do. We’ll station troops in your cities and barge into your homes to cart your sons off to jail where they will be taught how to value life using electric shock, waterboarding, and vicious dogs. The CIA just announced they won’t waterboard people anymore. Meaning they probably changed the name to “Life Valuation Training” because that’s how the government rolls. When the United States runs concentration camps, they call them “resettlement camps” or “reservations”. Just change the name and it all looks snazzy. That’s why we can call state-sponsored genocide “valuing life” and all that crap.
Gosh, I sure am glad I live in a country that values life. That must be why the cops have tanks now, too. How can you affirm life without tanks, I ask you? I mean, armored personnel carriers are nice, but nothing says “I love you” like a tank does, right? Just paint a happy face on the turret and it’s all good. Indeed, “they” don’t value life like we do. They don’t love their children, cry when their mothers die, fall in love, enjoy pizza, or smile to one another. Because if we knew that and had to admit that to ourselves, we might see that the government is lying to us about these wars. And that we, not “they”, are the ones who do not value life.
If we knew that these are human beings who want to live as much as we do, we might be compelled to make a decision: Do we value life—or not? We can’t keep blaming “them” for this violence anymore. Not when we’re part of the world that is responsible for both world wars and will probably be part of the coalition which begins the third one. Not when the United States eggs on the violence over there like it’s a mixed-martial arts cage match. “They” don’t value life like we do? Huh. Do tell.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/jack-perry/dont-value-life-govt/
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