Is Totalitarianism 'The New Normal'?

We cannot go back to the pre-coronavirus world, they tell us. Everything has changed and we must accept a "new normal." What does this "new normal" look like? It looks a lot like a dystopian horror film, where privacy is destroyed, property is subject to political whim, surveillance is to be accepted, medical treatments can be forced on people. Should we accept totalitarianism as our "new normal"? Plus in today's program: the real story of Houston's "round two hospital crisis." Tune in to today's Liberty Report:



from Is Totalitarianism 'The New Normal'?

Russiagate’s Last Gasp

On Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have US troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it. The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile “paper of record” has earned a new moniker — Gray Lady of easy virtue.

Over the weekend, the Times’ dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans — which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s daily web piece, “The Morning” calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing “how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably.” The following is from Richardson’s newsletter on Friday:

— On April 1 a Russian plane brought ventilators and other medical supplies to the United States … a propaganda coup for Russia;

— On April 25 Trump raised eyebrows by issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin commemorating the 75th anniversary of the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops on the bridge of the Elbe River in Germany that signaled the final defeat of the Nazis;

— On May 3, Trump called Putin and talked for an hour and a half, a discussion Trump called ‘very positive’;

— On May 21, the US sent a humanitarian aid package worth $5.6 million to Moscow to help fight coronavirus there. The shipment included 50 ventilators, with another 150 promised for the next week; …

— On June 15, news broke that Trump has ordered the removal of 9,500 troops from Germany, where they support NATO against Russian aggression. …

Historian Richardson added:

All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 US election and is doing so again in 2020. But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. … this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers.

Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks!

The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead US Troops

Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump’s statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie.

Late last night the president tweeted: “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. …”

Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!! https://t.co/cowOmP7T1S

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2020

For those of us distrustful of the Times — with good reason — on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday:

Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — 'The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.' That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. …

And who can forget how “successful” interrogators can be in getting desired answers.

Russia & Taliban React

The Kremlin called the Times reporting “nonsense … an unsophisticated plant,” and from Russia’s perspective the allegations make little sense; Moscow will see them for what they are — attempts to show that Trump is too “accommodating” to Russia.

A Taliban spokesman called the story “baseless,” adding with apparent pride that “we” have done “target killings” for years “on our own resources.” 

Russia is no friend of the Taliban. At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the US would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam. Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support.

But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool’s errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved. And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove US forces out on their “own resources.” As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad.

Besides, the Russians knew painfully well — from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool’s errand would be for the US What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of?

CIA Disinformation; Casey at Bat

Former CIA Director William Casey said: “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”

Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser. Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public.

If Casey’s spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be. But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge. The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years. This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times, to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend — the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding.

Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media. No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven, with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7?

The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered “Intelligence Community” Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That “assessment” done by “hand-picked analysts” from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the “intelligence community”) reportedly is being given close scrutiny by US Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate’s origins.

If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll. That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us.

Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night — namely, the “intelligence” on the “bounties” was not deemed good enough to present to the president. 

(As a preparer and briefer of The President’s Daily Brief to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that — based on what has been revealed so far — the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.)

Rejecting Intelligence Assessments

Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration’s rejection of what the media is calling the “intelligence assessment” about Russia offering — as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday — “bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan.”

I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged — actually, well over the top.

The media asks, “Why does Trump continue to disrespect the assessments of the intelligence community?” There he goes again — not believing our “intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin.”

In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood. As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.” Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”

“This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: “All roads lead to Putin.” The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant. She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too “accommodating” toward Russia.

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months — on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense. Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself.

Vile

Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty: 

All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Reprinted with author's permission from ConsortiumNews.

from Russiagate’s Last Gasp

Stumbling Towards Catastrophe: The New Cold War With China

With tensions between the US and China at an all-time high, experts warn the two powers are closer to a military confrontation than ever before. A war with China should be unthinkable in Washington since the conflict could be catastrophic to the entire world as the threat of it erupting into a full-blown nuclear war is very real. But with a deteriorating trade relationship, tension over the Covid-19 pandemic, increased US Navy activity in the Pacific, new sanctions aimed at Chinese officials, and hostile rhetoric coming from the Trump administration, the unthinkable is becoming more and more likely.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced new sanctions on Friday aimed at “current and former” Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, accusing them of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy. Hong Kong has served as a stage for recent US meddling, with Washington openly supporting the protests that rocked the city since March 2019. The Trump administration accused Beijing of violating Hong Kong’s autonomy with a new national security law made for the city, a bill designed to quell protests.

Some Chinese officials justified passing the law by pointing to the foreign interference in the demonstrations – that interference included Congress hosting protest leaders and passing legislation to confront Beijing over the former British colony. China’s concern with foreign interference is clearly outlined in the national security bill, which includes “collusion with foreign and external forces” on a list of criminal offenses the bill aims to combat.

The Senate just passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which would sanction “foreign individuals and entities that materially contribute to China’s failure to preserve Hong Kong’s autonomy.” The new legislation is the Senate’s response to the Hong Kong national security law. Congress is also keen on confronting China militarily, with lawmakers working out a plan to give the Pentagon funds to increase its footprint in the region, a plan dubbed the “Indo-Pacific Deterrence Initiative.” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has repeatedly identified China as the Pentagon’s number one priority.

President Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law on June 17th, a bill that will enable even more sanctions against Chinese officials over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province. The Trump administration published a document last week that listed 20 Chinese companies and accused them of being arms of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Although nothing in the document substantiated the claim, it opens the possibility of Washington taking actions against the companies listed, like sanctions, which have become a staple of the administration.

The telecommunications company Huawei was included in the list of companies allegedly run by the PLA. Huawei, a major player in 5G technologies, has been banned from the US. The Trump administration is working hard to prevent other countries from doing business with Huawei and continues to pressure its allies into not accepting the company’s 5G technology. The common accusation against Huawei is that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries, an accusation that rings hollow coming from the US, a country that can track cell phones all over the world, as revealed by the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

These latest economic provocations came after the US and China signed the Phase One trade deal in January. According to The Wall Street Journal, when Mike Pompeo met with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Hawaii on June 18th, Yang warned Washington’s recent meddling in Beijing’s affairs could jeopardize the trade deal. Yang listed Hong Kong and Taiwan as areas where the US meddles and expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with President Trump’s signing of the Uyghur Human Rights Act.

The increase in tensions between the US and China is due in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic. Top officials in the White House, including the president, have accused Beijing of a cover-up in the early days of the outbreak. In an interview with Fox News last week, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was asked if the phase one trade deal was over. Navarro responded, “it’s over,” his reasoning being the fact that the Chinese officials who signed the agreement in Washington on January 15th did not mention the pandemic. Navarro claims the White House first heard of the pandemic after the Chinese diplomats’ plane took off, although Covid-19 was already in the news days before.

Navarro quickly recanted his statement on the trade deal and said he was taken “wildly out of context” in the interview. “I was simply speaking to the lack of trust we now have of the Chinese Communist Party after they lied about the origins of the China virus and foisted a pandemic upon the world,” Navarro said. President Trump took to Twitter to ensure that the trade deal is still “fully intact.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Navarro and former White House strategist Steve Bannon fought hard to push President Trump to put tariffs on Chinese goods, a battle they won. Bannon, a self-described ultra-hawk when it comes to China, has been crusading against the CCP since he left the White House. In a recent interview with Asia Times, when asked if Washington should pursue regime change in Beijing, Bannon said, “I don’t think Asia can be free, until we’ve had regime change in Beijing. And I am an absolute advocate of that.”

Bannon denied rumors that he was joining the Trump campaign for 2020 but ensured many of his friends and colleagues will be on the president’s team. “One hundred and twenty percent of my time right now is spent on taking down the Chinese Communist Party, with the Committee on the Present Danger,” Bannon said. The Committee on Present Danger: China (CPD) is an incredibly hawkish think-tank started by Bannon and neoconservative Frank Gaffney in 2019.

On June 5th, the CPD published an essay titled “To the Americans Who Are on Their Knees,” which Gaffney and CPD chair Brian Kennedy called “the single most important call in a generation aimed at enabling our countrymen and women to recognize and respond appropriately to a present danger.” The essay addresses the protests that erupted across the US in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The author claims the American left leading the movement is the “catspaw” of foreign powers. “First, the police will be defunded; second, the Revolution will defund the US military; third, the Chinese and Russians will bomb and invade the country,” the essay reads.

This tirade could be dismissed as the ramblings of a crazed hawk, but a link to the essay remains in prominence on the CPD’s front page, and the think-tank’s message gets through to the White House. The group recently sent a letter to President Trump, praising him for releasing the list of 20 companies that are allegedly run by the PLA and gave the president advice on possible steps forward.

Some of the tamer rhetoric coming from the CPD and right-wing populists like Bannon resonates with many Americans. There are real concerns regarding US reliance on Chinese manufacturing, something that was exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic when the US faced shortages of personal protective equipment. The loss of American jobs to China is another talking point that gets through to people on the right and the left. There is a consensus among both groups that corporations sold out the American people when they exported manufacturing to China.

Despite the rhetoric, the fact that the US and China are each other’s largest trading partners has its benefits. This fact is enough to discourage officials on both sides from turning this Cold War into a hot one. But as trade relations sour, and President Trump openly considers completely “decoupling” from China, the risk of a shooting war is much higher.

The prophetic Justin Raimondo put it best in a March 2008 column titled, “Why They Hate China.” Justin wrote:

“If goods don’t cross borders, then armies soon will – a historical truism noted by many before me, and with good reason. Let it be a warning to all those anti-free trade, antiwar types of the Right as well as the Left – you’ll soon be jumping on the War Party’s bandwagon when it comes China’s turn to play the role of global bogeyman. The way things are going, that day may come soon enough.”

Justin’s words are something to reflect on while the US and China are careening towards war and people on the left and the right continue to demonize Beijing. While there are real concerns to be had with China’s human rights abuses, US intervention will undoubtedly make the situation worse. And hawks like Steve Bannon disguise their neocon hopes of regime-change in a country of 1.4 billion people as populist rhetoric to fool Americans into consenting to this new Cold War. Washington has a history of stumbling into catastrophe in East Asia. From Manila to Pyongyang, US adventurism in the region has left millions dead in its wake, a war with China will kill millions more — a potential catastrophe that must be avoided.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

from Stumbling Towards Catastrophe: The New Cold War With China

Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by US government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid to Ukraine than to its effectiveness. And most of the media coverage pretended that US handouts abroad are as generous and uplifting as congressmen claim.

US foreign aid has long fueled the poxes it promised to eradicate — especially kleptocracy, or government by thieves. A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.” Windfalls of foreign aid can make politicians more rapacious, which economists have dubbed the “voracity effect.”

Early in his presidency, George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid, declaring, “I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt.” Regardless, the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world’s most corrupt regimes.

Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations in 2010 that the US government was “leading a global effort to combat corruption.” The Los Angeles Times noted that Obama’s “aides said the United States in the past has often seemed to just throw money at problems,” while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that “a lot of these aid programs don’t work” and lamented their “heartbreaking” failures. But Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to double foreign-aid spending, which obliterated efforts to reform failed programs. In 2011, congressional Republicans sought to restrict foreign aid going to fraud-ridden foreign regimes. Secretary of State Clinton wailed that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests “has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients.”

Regardless, the Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of US tax dollars into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was “one of the most corrupt countries on earth.” The governor of Kandahar denounced his own government officials and police officers as “looters and kidnappers.” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), declared that “US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has provided more than $6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the House impeachment hearings late last year, a key anti-Trump witness was acting US ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. The Washington Post hailed Taylor as someone who “spent much of the 1990s telling Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of US development assistance for post-Soviet countries.” A New York Times editorial lauded Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent as witnesses who “came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country.”

Their testimony spurred Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, to bewail that “this is the most fraught time and the most difficult time for our members” since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s accusations of communism in the 1950s. A Washington Post headline echoed him: “The diplomatic corps has been wounded. The State Department needs to heal.” But not nearly as much as the foreigners supposedly rescued by US bureaucrats.

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 31 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to Ukraine, “remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukrainian government]. Kiev hasn’t successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure.” The IMF concluded that Ukraine continued to be vexed by “shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs.” That last item is damning for US benevolent pretensions. If a former Soviet republic cannot even terminate its government-owned boondoggles, then why was the US government bankrolling them? While many members of Congress could not find Ukraine on a map, far fewer could have offered any coherent explanation of what US aid bought in Ukraine.

Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that corruption surged in Ukraine in the late 1990s (after the United States decided to rescue that country) and remains at abysmal levels. Ukraine now ranks in the bottom tier on the list of most corrupt nations, with a worse rating than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major US aid recipients notorious for corruption.

Actually, the best gauge of Ukrainian corruption is the near-total collapse of its citizens’ trust in government or in their own future. Since 1991, the nation has lost almost 20 percent of its population as citizens flee abroad like passengers leaping off a sinking ship. But as long as Kiev was not completely depopulated, US bureaucrats could continue claiming to be on the verge of achieving great things.

The House impeachment hearings and much of the media gushed over those career US government officials despite their strikeouts. It was akin to a congressional committee’s resurrecting Col. George Custer in 1877 and fawning as he offered personal insights in dealing with uprisings by Sioux Indians (while carefully avoiding awkward questions about the previous year at the Little Bighorn).

Foreign aid is virtue-signaling with other people’s money. As long the aid spawns press releases and photo opportunities for presidents and members of Congress and campaign donations from corporate and other beneficiaries, little else matters. Congress almost never conducts thorough investigations into the failure of aid programs despite their legendary pratfalls. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2010, AID “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’ — a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.” Martine van Bijlert of the nonprofit Afghanistan Analysts Network commented, “As long as you spend money and you can provide a paper trail, that’s a job well done. It’s a perverse system, and there seems to be no intention to change it.” The “burn rate” fixation produced endless absurdities, including collapsing school buildings, impassable roads, failed electrification projects, and phantom health clinics. SIGAR’s John Sopko “found a USAID lessons-learned report from 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it.”

Perverse incentives

“Fail and repeat” was also AID’s motto in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, AID and the Pentagon paired up to spend $60 billion to rebuild Iraq. As long as projects looked vaguely impressive at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, AID declared victory. Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), listed some of the agency’s farcical Iraq success claims at a 2011 hearing: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a five-day mental-health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries; … and 280,000 were reported as benefitting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.” Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, denied in 2009 that US aid for relief and reconstruction had benefitted his country: “Maybe they spent it, but Iraq doesn’t feel it.” An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity noted that, according to top Iraqi officials, the biggest impact of US aid was “more corruption and widespread money-laundering.”

After driving around the world, investment guru Jim Rogers declared, “Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers.” Mercedes-Benz automobiles became so popular among African government officials that a new Swahili word was coined: wabenzi — “men of the Mercedes-Benz.” After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, jumped on the gravy train — as did legions of well-connected Washingtonians and other hustlers around the nation. Similar largesse ensures that there will never be a shortage of overpaid people and hired think tanks ready to write op-eds or letters to the editor of the Washington Post whooping up the moral greatness of foreign aid or some such hokum.

Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence. Rather than encouraging good governance practices, foreign aid is more likely to produce kleptocracies. As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, “The history of US assistance is littered with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects.” Both US politicians and US bureaucrats are prone to want to continue the aid gravy train regardless of how foreign regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.

US government leaders are far more concerned with buying influence than with safeguarding purity. Foreign aid is often little more than a bribe for a foreign regime to behave in ways that please the US government. One large bribe naturally spawns hundreds or thousands of smaller bribes, and thereby corrupts an entire country. The impeachment of Trump was driven by the specific favor that Democrats claimed he had requested from the Ukrainian president, not from seeking favors per se.

When it comes to the failure of US aid to Ukraine, almost all of Trump’s congressional critics are like the “dog that didn’t bark” in the Sherlock Holmes story. The real outrage is that Trump and prior presidents, with Congress cheering all the way, delivered so many US tax dollars to Kiev that any reasonable person knew would be wasted.

Foreign aid will continue to be toxic as long as politicians continue to be politicians. There is no bureaucratic cure for the perverse incentives created by flooding foreign nations with US tax dollars. If Washington truly wants to curtail foreign corruption, ending US government handouts aid is the best first step. Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism.


from Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

Lockdown Hypocrisy: Why Are BLM And 'Pride' Exempt?

Tens of thousands marched in a joint BLM/'Pride' rally over the weekend in Chicago (and elsewhere) with the blessing of the same officials who are threatening churches, forcing face masks, and ripping liquor licenses from bars that won't shut their doors (again). Claiming that "cases" are skyrocketing, officials from Texas and across the country are trying to return us to devastating lockdown. But why aren't they talking about the falling death rate? Watch today's Liberty Report:





from Lockdown Hypocrisy: Why Are BLM And 'Pride' Exempt?

How About ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘White Lives Matter’ on an NBA Jersey?

The Golden State Warriors basketball team name is not being changed to the Golden State Social Justice Warriors, at least not yet. But, it does look like National Basketball Association (NBA) players may soon have the option, as related in a Sunday nba.com article, to put “social justice messages” on their jerseys.

“The NBA is collaborating with the National Basketball Players Association to allow players to wear jerseys with personalized social justice messages on the backs instead of their last names during the season comeback in Orlando, according to Oklahoma City Thunder guard and union president Chris Paul,” begins the article.

Hmm, what qualifies as a social justice message? From the article:

While players will not be forced to wear a message, Paul says they will provide a list of suggestions for players looking for a cause to support. According to ESPN, these messages could include phrases (like "Black Lives Matter" or "I Can't Breathe"), names of social justice organizations, or the names of individuals who were killed by the police.

“Black Lives Matter” made the list. So it would seem “All Lives Matter” or “White Lives Matter” should also be fine on NBA players’ jerseys, right?

The answer would be “yes” if this were really a move to enable people to express their views. But, instead, expect the display of slogans to be strictly controlled by thought police behind the scenes, as well as by players’ desire to look out for their own well-being.

Even if players are allowed to place on their jerseys phrases that run counter to the “social justice” orthodoxy, would any player take that risk? Doing so could end a player’s career. Doing so would probably also very much reduce or eliminate his endorsement payments. In the current environment, with groups of people routinely verbally and even physically attacking individuals they decide are racist or just against “the cause,” a player may even risk his life by putting on his jersey a deviating phrase.

Some players would put suggested “social justice messages” on their jerseys because they genuinely want to express something through doing so. Others would be like the unfortunate fellow required to march in a parade in a communist country who hopes that, by helping carry a banner displaying some phrase he is indifferent about or even detests, he can make it through the day without trouble and maybe even improve the situation of himself and his family.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2020/june/29/how-about-all-lives-matter-or-white-lives-matter-on-an-nba-jersey/

The Media is Lying About the ‘Second Wave’

For months, the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 “death count” on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying people’s jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out.

The “death count” was always the headline.

But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about “cases” and has always been all about “cases.” Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.

With massive increases in testing, the “case” numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more “cases” you discover.

Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the “party line.” So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline - meaning the virus is getting weaker - is buried under hysterical false reporting of “new cases.”

Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda.

In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.”

In fact, there has been much reporting that the “spike” in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If it’s a positive, well that counts as a “Covid hospitalization.” Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated Federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of “Covid cases” they can produce. As I’ve always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And that’s why we are getting more Covid cases.

Let’s go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to “Covid-19” that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the “second wave” propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only “cases” are important. It’s another big lie.

Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way we’ll get through this.

from The Media is Lying About the ‘Second Wave’

Cash4Covid – How hospitals are making money off the coronavirus

Hospitals in the US are getting money for diagnosing Covid19. They get more money if those patients are then put on ventilators. It’s time we really started thinking about what that means.

Early on in the launch of the Sars-Cov-2/Covid19 “pandemic”, it was revealed by Dr Scott Jensen that hospitals in the US were getting paid bonuses for diagnosing Covid19 in their patients, and then larger bonuses again if those patients were put on ventilators.

We’re not fact-checking that. We don’t need to. It’s already been done.

As soon as his words were aired, the “independent fact checkers” descended upon them in an effort to prove him wrong. They could not. Resorting instead to weasel words and obfuscations.

Snopes found his assertions “plausible”, Politifact called it “half true”, and FactCheck said it was true, writing:

Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment…

Before adding:

…but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting.”

Which is funny because, to that point, nobody had suggested anything fraudulent. Jensen himself went out of his way to say he didn’t think there was any fraud, but there was an “avenue” for it. Obviously the “fact checkers” agreed, because they all felt the need to add very similar qualifications.

The very fact they rushed to pre-emptively defend the practice illustrates how potentially corrupt it is.

The key fact here, established and unchallenged, is that the CARES act does direct a 20% bonus Medicaid payment to hospitals for every diagnosis of Covid19, and a greater payment again for the use of a ventilator.

As I said, we’re not fact-checking that. And we can’t fact-check whether or not there is “fraudulent reporting”, but there’s no denying that these payouts potentially incentivise artificially inflating case numbers.

How big an incentive are we talking about?

The CARES act channelled $175bn dollars into the “fight” against coronavirus, including $15 billion purely for treating COVID patients without insurance.

15 BILLION dollars. That’s a lot of extra money.

You couldn’t blame a doctor for gaming the system to get a little for his struggling, under-funded clinic. For labelling some unknown respiratory illness “Covid19”, or re-ordering a test known to create false-positives until he gets the result which may pay a nurse’s salary, or re-stock a pharmacy.

If a few thousand doctors do that a few hundred times each, you’ve created a “pandemic” out of nowhere, with a comparatively small outlay and 99% of those involved believing they’re doing the right thing.

The American medical system is broken, of course. Has been for decades, and Dr Jensen’s revelations received a comparatively large amount of coverage which people in the UK and Europe largely filed away as “just American healthcare doing American healthcare things”.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the article here.

from Cash4Covid – How hospitals are making money off the coronavirus

It Could Be Worse: Presidential Candidate Joe Biden Wants a National Mask Mandate

It is bad enough that many people across America are living, working, and visiting in places where state or local governments have mandated that people wear masks or, instead, have mandated that businesses mandate that people wear masks when they go about their daily activities away from home. The masks are mandated in the name of countering coronavirus even though there is no clear evidence they create a net reduction in coronavirus transmission from person to person and there is plenty of reason to believe they impair health.

Further, what people wear or do not wear on their faces is none of governments’ business to control. Will governments next mandate we wear big bubbles around us to protect us?

While the current mask mandates are terrible, things could be worse. There could be a countrywide mask mandate. Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, in a Thursday interview with Ken Rice at KDKA-TV of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, declared that, if he were president, he would support just that. Said Biden, “I would do everything in my possible [sic] to make it required that people had to wear masks in public.”

Watch Biden’s interview here:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2020/june/26/it-could-be-worse-presidential-candidate-joe-biden-wants-a-national-mask-mandate/

Washington Sailing on Collision Course With China

As of this month, the United States is deploying three of its aircraft carriers simultaneously to patrol the Pacific in what is designed to be a clear threat to China. Each carrier strike group comprises destroyers, aircraft and submarines. The US has 11 aircraft carriers in total.

Rear Admiral Stephen Koehler, director of operations at Indo-Pacific Command, is quoted as saying of the unusual deployment. “Carriers and carrier strike groups writ large are phenomenal symbols of American naval power. I really am pretty fired up that we’ve got three of them at the moment.”

Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admitted that the operations were provocative, albeit suggesting that the reality was somehow a propaganda coup for Beijing. She said: “The Chinese will definitely portray this as an example of US provocations, and as evidence that the US is a source of instability in the region.”

Forget about Chinese “portrayal”. It seems plainly factual that Washington is ramping up belligerence and instability in the Pacific.

The unprecedented muscle-flexing by the US comes at a time when political relations between Washington and Beijing have descended into a new Cold War. President Donald Trump is whipping up his support base with renewed racist slurs against China over the coronavirus pandemic. At recent rallies in Oklahoma and Arizona, the president has referred to the “Kung Flu” and a “plague” sent from China.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told an online conference last week that the Beijing government is a “rogue actor” threatening supposed democratic Western states. Pompeo urged European allies to stand with the US against China’s “tyranny”.

For its part, Beijing slammed Pompeo for spreading “political virus” with a “deep-seated Cold War mentality”.

The anti-China hysteria in Washington has reached fever pitch. Part of that stems from the Trump administration’s necessity to scapegoat China for its own disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus disease which has seen the death toll in the US surpass 120,000, with no sign of easing up. That’s nearly a quarter of the world’s death toll, a grim tally which is likely to keep on mounting in coming weeks as Trump desperately pushes for reopening of business-as-usual.

Then there is the longer, underlying trend of strategic confrontation. It was under President Barack Obama in 2011 that the US embarked on a “Pivot to Asia”, heralding the explicit focus on China as a perceived global target for American power.

The Trump administration has merely followed through on that strategic agenda of confrontation with China. Which tends to demonstrate the structural nature of US political power, whereby presidents may come and go, but imperialist policy is set on a constant course of deep state planning.

Trump’s fiery personality has certainly added fuel to the anti-China drive with his hobby-horse on the trade war, accusing China of “raping” American industries and all sorts of other alleged skulduggery.

That was before the coronavirus pandemic brutally exposed the frailty of US economic power and Trump’s so-called “Make America Great Again” delusion. Thus, a scapegoat had to be found for the “outrage” of exposing American hubris as an empty shell. Step up China, a ready-made propaganda target for US imperialism.

A study this week by the China-based National Institute of South China Sea Studies claims that the Trump administration is deploying US military power on an ever-increasing greater scale. During the two Obama administrations, the US Navy carried out four “freedom of navigation” operations in the contested South China Sea. Under Trump, the number of such operations has reached 22, according to the institute.

What’s more disturbing, however, is the lines of communication between American and Chinese military commanders have apparently been drastically reduced since Trump took office in 2017.

That means with the massive buildup of US military force around China in the South China Sea and Strait of Taiwan there is a serious risk of some incident or perceived trespass spiraling out of control. (We have yet to see a comparable buildup of Chinese navy off California or Virginia.) American and Chinese warships have already ran into dangerous near misses. But what makes the present situation all the more perilous is the vacuum in military-to-military communications plus the toxic tensions that the Trump administration has deliberately wound up with Beijing. Trust is at rock-bottom despite Trump’s past chummy words for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Washington is not only insinuating that China is legally liable for “decimating the global economy”. The Trump administration is demanding that the European Union curtail its economic relations with China. All sorts of slander is thrown at Beijing, from posing as a national security risk with its telecoms technology, to undermining European national sovereignty because China is investing in infrastructure projects across the EU.

Given that the EU is China’s biggest trading partner, such demands by Washington are a direct assault on Beijing’s vital global interests.

Sailing a US armada towards China is not some isolated maneuver – provocative that that is. It is evidently a configuration of hostility, ranging from political to economic to military. It’s classic imperialist power play by a decaying empire whose zero-sum mentality is a precursor for war.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

from Washington Sailing on Collision Course With China

Again, What Were the Benefits of Locking Down?

The school closures, stay home orders, shuttering of businesses, banning of elective surgeries, closure of physical entertainment events, blocked flights, and sudden imposition of a central plan – it all happened suddenly from mid-March in the course of only a few days, and to enormous shock on the part of people who had previously taken their freedom and rights for granted. 

Despite enormous pressure from Washington, eight states did not lock down or used a very light touch: South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. 

After 100 days, we are in a position for some preliminary analysis of the performance of locked down states versus those that did not lock down. AIER has already published the evidence that lockdown states had higher rates of unemployment. 

The Sentinel, a nonprofit news source of the Kansas Policy Institute, confirms our research by reporting the following data: locked down states have overall a 13.2% unemployment rate, while open states have a 7.8% unemployment rate. 



But perhaps this better economic performance came at the expense of health? 

In terms of health, locked down states have nearly four times the death rate from COVID-19.



The results do not prove that staying open necessarily caused the good outcomes, but should certainly lead us to question the notion that “lockdowns are necessary or else we all are going to die.” 

To be sure, many mitigating factors may exist. Open states may have had fewer long-term health facilities housing people with low life expectacies; in every state, these account for roughly half of all deaths from COVID-19. In fact, “deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%.” 

Population density between the states also varies and that could have been an explanatory variable. The open states also lacked governors who mandated that nursing homes accept active COVID-patients. Earlier this month, we published some more detailed research “Unemployment Far Worse in Lockdown States, Data Show” by economist Abigail Devereux who found similar results.

A routine trope in the media is that people who oppose lockdowns are pushing freedom and wealth over safety and health. But as we can see from this clean examination of the results, the open states experienced less economic pain and less pain from the disease itself. 

We are seeing desperate attempts by politicians, public health officials, and media commentators somehow to make sense of why the United States pursued the course it did with the closures, stay-home orders, travel bans, and near-universal quarantine, in violation of every principle that America has celebrated in its civic culture. 

With the evidence coming in that the lockdowns were neither economically nor medically effective, it is going to be increasingly difficult for lockdown partisans to marshal the evidence to convince the public that isolating people, destroying businesses, and destroying social institutions was worth it.

Reprinted with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

from Again, What Were the Benefits of Locking Down?

Coronavirus: Worse Than Ever...Or More Fake News?

Suddenly politicians are talking about locking the US back down. They are screaming about a "second wave" and warning that the hospitals are full. We know they cooked the books to pad the coronavirus death count...are they cooking the books again to bring back the panic? Watch today's Liberty Report:





from Coronavirus: Worse Than Ever...Or More Fake News?

The 'Greatest' Generation’s Refusal to Fight the 'Good War'

The most sacred shibboleth of US foreign interventionists is World War II. Whenever the issue of foreign interventionism arises, you can count on interventionists to raise what they call the “good war” and the “greatest” generation who fought it. If the “greatest” generation had not intervened in the “good war,” they exclaim, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would have ended up conquering the United States and the rest of the world.

Yet, there is an important oddity about World War II that is never raised in any discussions about the war. According to the website of the National WWII Museum, 38.8% (6,332,000) men were volunteers in World War II while 61.2% (11,535,000) were draftees.

What’s up with that?

Let’s keep in mind something important about the “draft” — or as it is also known, “conscription”: It’s not voluntary. Conscription or drafting people to fight a war means forcing them to do something that they are not willing to do voluntarily. If a man refused to comply with a draft order in World War II, the government sent armed agents to seize him forcibly, after which he would be criminally prosecuted and incarcerated.

When a free nation is being attacked and invaded, why would people have to be forced to fight? Wouldn’t you think that under that circumstance, you could count on at least 95 percent of men and women to come to the defense of their country, themselves, their families, and their liberty?

Yet, there is that glaring statistic: The US government had to force 61.2% of the “greatest generation” to fight in World War II.

Why?

Why didn’t those 11,535,000 men of the “greatest” generation immediately volunteer to fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941? Why did they need to be forced to fight?

Reasons for refusing to volunteer

One possible explanation, of course, is that the many members of the “greatest” generation were scared to fight and just wanted other American men to do the fighting for them. Fear undoubtedly was a factor for a few American men to not volunteer to fight, but my hunch is that it was not why most of those 11 million American men had to be forced to fight.

My hunch is that most of the 11 million men who had to be forced to fight in World War II instinctively knew that (1) the war was a crock, just like World War I that preceded it; (2) that President Franklin Roosevelt had knowingly and deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor with the aim of getting the United States embroiled in the war; and (3) that there was no possibility of a Japanese or German invasion and conquest of the United States.

In other words, by not volunteering to fight in the “good war,” those 11 million American men were essentially saying that they had no desire to give up their lives for what they considered was a nonsensical cause.

The 'Great War'

Remember: Most Americans knew that World War I itself had been a crock. The United States had no business intervening in that war. But like so many other leaders in history, President Woodrow Wilson as well as other US interventionists felt that war was the way to national greatness. Wilson also maintained that US intervention into the “Great War” would make the world “safe for democracy” and, by bringing about the total defeat of Germany, make it the last war in history.

Within a relatively short period of time, however, brutal unelected dictators ruled in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Italy. So much for making the world safe for democracy. That was followed by the outbreak of war between the European powers in 1939. So much for the war to end all wars.

After World War I, Americans could easily see that that war had entailed a total waste of American life and treasure. 160,000 men had died for nothing. $32 billion had been wasted. Civil liberty had been quashed in the United States during the war.

Lesson learned

The American people were resolved to never let another US president do that to them again. When war broke out again in 1939 between England and France and Germany, the overwhelming sentiment of the American people was: Stay out. Don’t get us involved in this one.

But President Roosevelt, like Wilson, would have nothing of that mindset. While falsely paying lip service to non-interventionism during his 1940 campaign for an unprecedented third term as president (“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”), the truth was that Roosevelt was doing everything he could to provoke first the Germans and then later the Japanese into attacking the United States.

Americans could see what Roosevelt was doing. Sending US warships to serve as escorts for British ships in the Atlantic. Giving money and armaments to Great Britain and the Soviet Union under so-called “Lend-Lease.” An oil embargo against Japan to paralyze its army in China. Freezing Japanese bank accounts in the United States. Imposing humiliating terms in pre-war negotiations with Japan. Leaving US troops and battleships vulnerable to attack in the Philippines and Hawaii.

Moreover, those 11 million American men could see that after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no attempt by the Japanese military to invade and occupy Hawaii, much less the United States. They could see that the Japanese aim was simply to knock out the US Pacific fleet so that it would be unable to interfere with Japanese efforts to secure oil in the Dutch East Indies.

They could also see that Germany lacked the military means and even the interest in crossing the Atlantic Ocean and invading and occupying the United States. Given that Germany was unable to even cross the English Channel to successfully conquer England, the chances of having a different result crossing the Atlantic and conquering the United States were nil.

Moreover, don’t forget that it wasn’t Nazi Germany that declared war on Great Britain. It was Great Britain that declared war on Nazi Germany. It was always clear that Nazi Germany was moving east, toward Hitler’s enemy the communist Soviet Union, which ironically would become America’s wartime partner and ally as well as its official postwar enemy.

Perverse consequences

Moreover, those 11 million men undoubtedly instinctively knew that the results of intervening in World War II were going to be just as perverse as the results after World War I: a complete 45-year-long communist takeover of Eastern Europe and half of Germany; a 45-year Cold War against America’s wartime partner and ally the Soviet Union; the Korean War; the Vietnam War; and the conversion of the US government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, a type of totalitarian governmental structure to oppose communist totalitarian governmental regimes.

Those 11 million men who refused to volunteer for “service” in World War II and who had to be forced to fight a crock war knew what they were doing. That’s what made them great.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from The 'Greatest' Generation’s Refusal to Fight the 'Good War'

We left Libya in ruins. Now, it's a crucible of terror that has come back to haunt us

The CIA calls it ‘blowback’, when the unintended consequences of what seemed like a good policy at the time come back to bite you.

The classic example is Western sponsorship of radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

That covert war against the Kremlin was a significant factor in crippling Communism in Russia which was a good thing, surely? It certainly seemed cost-free for America — until that bright morning of September 11, 2001, when Afghan-based terrorism struck New York and Washington on a grand scale.

Today our own nation is reeling from yet another savage consequence of our own ‘blowback’, after three people were randomly and fatally stabbed and three others wounded, as they sat enjoying a warm evening in a local park.

Violent

The alleged perpetrator, 25-year-old Khairi Saadallah, is a Libyan refugee. And in the initial aftermath, as the horror sank in and claims of a possible ‘terror’ link filtered through, the people of Reading found themselves confronting the same grim question as did the people of Manchester in May 2017 after a 22-year-old Libyan refugee, Salman Abedi, detonated a bomb killing 22 at a pop concert.

"Why us? Why here?"

To understand the Libyan link, think back to 2011. David Cameron’s government was confident the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, would be the latest domino to fall in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of popular uprisings.

Gaddafi, who had funded the IRA and was key to Lockerbie, had plenty of domestic enemies. All they needed to get him out was some aerial support from the RAF and other Nato allies.

Then democracy and human rights would flourish in the oil-rich country and it would no longer be the maverick and threatening nation it was under Gaddafi’s aggressively eccentric 40-year rule. So after six months of bombing, Gaddafi met the grisly fate of tyrants throughout history.

But there was no new dawn for Libya. The armed groups who had been the West’s allies immediately quarrelled over the spoils, especially the oil.

Civil war, violent faction-fighting and social disruption have prevailed ever since, with Libya also becoming the gateway for African migrants heading to Europe.

This chaos has given militant Islamic terrorists an ideal breeding ground for spreading their anti-Western ideology, and a place to train terrorists and practise bomb-making.

Our fly-by-night intervention has turned into a nightmare that continues to haunt us as well as Libya. The litany of terrorist atrocities committed by Libyans or by people trained in Islamist camps there has been growing.

Just as Afghanistan became a safe haven for terrorists in the 1990s, though a hell-hole for its people, Libya has gone the same way.

Indeed, it has become the perfect laboratory — and one located close to Europe — for indoctrination and terrorist training. With so many Libyans engaged in fighting each other, the terror groups can hole up in camps far from any police or state control.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the whole article here.

Almond is an Academic Advisor to the Ron Paul Institute.

from We left Libya in ruins. Now, it's a crucible of terror that has come back to haunt us

President Donald Trump’s ‘Racist Joke’

“Trump Made a Racist Joke in a Phoenix Megachurch and the Crowd Went Wild.” That is the title of a Wednesday The Intercept article by Robert Mackey. Sounds like a major story that could sink President Donald Trump’s chance of reelection, heh? However, it is clear from the first paragraph of the article that what happened at Trump’s Tuesday speech is very different from what the article title suggests. Trump told a pun that played on his contention that coronavirus originated in China and a form of fighting associated with China, and many people in the audience seemed to like the pun. That’s all.

Here is the first paragraph of Mackey’s article:

WATCHING FROM HOME, at first it was hard to say which moment in Donald Trump’s rally at a Phoenix megachurch on Tuesday was the ugliest. Was it when the president of the United States repeated the racist joke he told last weekend in Tulsa, calling Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China last year, the “Kung Flu;” or was it a spilt second later, when thousands of his young supporters erupted in cheers?

Helpfully, Mackey placed in his article a video including Trump telling the pun and the audience reacting:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2020/june/24/president-donald-trump-s-racist-joke/

Coup Exposed: Gen. Flynn Case Ordered Dismissed

DC Court of Appeals has ruled that the case against Gen. Michael Flynn must be dropped, after a judge ignored a previous order by US Attorney General William Barr to drop all charges. As more documents and notes by FBI officers involved in the case are released, it becomes ever more evident that this was no counterintelligence investigation - it was a coup attempt. And it went all the way to the top. Also in today's program mask-mania continues to spread faster than the coronavirus, with Americans lining up to turn in other Americans for not wearing masks. But what happened in states that did not shut down? We discuss a Wall Street Journal editorial of yesterday with the hard numbers. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Coup Exposed: Gen. Flynn Case Ordered Dismissed

D.C. Delegate Asks The Right Question After Bizarre Incident Near White House

NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) had a bizarre encounter yesterday when a man dressed only in a bra and panties rushed then near Black Lives Matter Square and the area claimed earlier as the “Black House Autonomous Zone.” Mitchell immediately asked “where’s the police” and Norton added “where’s the police when you need them?” It is a question that many of us have been asking D.C. officials for weeks as police have stood by and watched statues destroyed and defaced around the city. This week, D.C. Chief of Police Peter Newsham stated that his department has made the “tactical decision” not to intervene as certain statues have been torn down in front of them. I have been highly critical of both this destruction and the failure of D.C. officials to act, including the iconic bust of George Washington on my own campus at George Washington University.

Thankfully no one was injured in this encounter:



The answer to the question however is equally troubling. Police are often around when violence and destruction occurs in these protests.

The question came up when reporters asked Newsham why officers stood around as mere pedestrians on Friday night as a mob pulled down the statue of Albert Pike in Judiciary Square. There have been good-faith calls for the removal of the statue, including by Norton. I have participated in this debate for years on determining what public art should be removed and what standards we should apply to the preservation of historical monuments, including a discussion organized by the Smithsonian Institution a few years back. Some monuments should be removed but this should be done with the consent and deliberation of the communities. Indeed, such acts hold greater meaning when done through legitimate and consensual means. This is not part of that debate, this is destruction by mobs who unilaterally determine what public art will be allowed and what will be destroyed.

After a mob was allowed to attach ropes and work to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson, there was a belated response from federal and district officers. The statue however was defaced and was only saved from toppling by its sheer size. Media reported that Mayor Muriel Bowser and her office declined any comment on the mob scene that was seen on every network. That was what one might call a “tactical political decision.”

The “tactical decision” made by the Newsham is a convenient and widely used approach around the country. Leaders are allowing art to be destroyed rather than confront these mobs — not on the inherent value of the monuments but the right of society to make such decisions as a whole. This is nothing new. Such tactical decisions have been made by universities for years as they watched their art destroyed without any action or discipline. At the same time, police have been ordered to give mobs free range in destroying public art. Even when arrests are made, prosecutors have dropped charges under pressure from the public. 

This same tactical decision has been made in other cities by leaders. Just yesterday, a legislator was attacked and sent to the hospital for taking a picture of the destruction. Both journalists and pedestrians have also been attacked for filming such scenes by protesters. Democratic senator Tim Carpenter told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he was beaten after taking a photo last night as two statues being toppled.

I believe this is State Senator Tim Carpenter. Minutes earlier he told us the protesters assaulted him. Then he collapsed walking towards the Capitol. We called paramedics. An ambulance is here now. pic.twitter.com/uUSdKyQ1hp

— Lance Veeser (@lanceveeser) June 24, 2020

I took this pic- it got me assaulted & beat up. Punched/kicked in the head, neck, ribs. Maybe concussion, socked in left eye is little blurry, sore neck & ribs. 8-10 people attacked me. Innocent people are going to get killed. Capitol locked- stuck in office.Stop violence nowPlz! pic.twitter.com/Zw2hdfYG66

— Tim Carpenter (@TimCarpenterMKE) June 24, 2020

The protesters tore down the statue of Col. Christian Heg, who fought and died during the Civil War on the Union side

As noted earlier, the spectrum of action from cities and universities seems to range from deafening silence to cringing compliance in the face of such destruction. At the University of Oregon, famous statues of the Pioneer and Mother Pioneer were torn down. The University condemned the destruction and then promptly promised that the statues would be carted away and not returned.

Thus, the answer to D.C. Delegate Norton’s question is that the police are often present, but remain mere pedestrians by design. Call it “tactical” or consensual, but destruction of public art and historical monuments is occurring with the acquiescence of the city leaders.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from D.C. Delegate Asks The Right Question After Bizarre Incident Near White House

‘Stay Home Stay Safe’ … Say What?

Near the top at a Dallas County, Texas government COVID-19 web page, just below a link people can click on to find out about a “job opportunity” in the county’s new “contact tracing” surveillance program begun in the name of countering coronavirus, there is a chart titled “TODAY’S COVID-19 RISK LEVEL.” Lit up is the highest risk level on the chart, appearing on a red background: “STAY HOME STAY SAFE.” You can see other governments across America promoting a similar message of fear at their similar web pages.

Say what?

Here we are over three months into the American coronavirus scare whipped up by people in the media and government. And this scare was preceded by months of sensational reporting in America on coronavirus overseas and the authoritarian government actions taken there in the name of countering coronavirus. Over all this time, it has increasingly become evident that coronavirus is much more like the flu viruses that Americans routinely deal with in its danger instead of being the super-killer disease originally advertised. It has also become clear that the threat of serious illness and death from coronavirus is largely concentrated among elderly people and people who already have major health problems. Thus, we see the large percentage of coronavirus attributed deaths — increased by government mandates — in nursing homes while professional athletes who have coronavirus tend to have no or minor sickness. Also, children seem to be at nearly zero risk of great harm or death from coronavirus.

Take this information all together and most people would do well to just get on with their lives as normal, accepting a risk from coronavirus that, for younger and healthier people, can be significantly less than the risk posed by routine activities such as driving to work, school, errands, and social activities — all of which, by the way, governments have forced many people to stop doing, supposedly to protect them from coronavirus. Of course, Dallas County, whose county government is hyping a coronavirus threat, also never had anywhere near the percentages of deaths for its population attributed to coronavirus as did places such as New York City.

This sort of fearmongering is not just taking place in Dallas County, where well over two million people live. Local and state governments across America, as well as the United Sates government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and prominent US government officials, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci, are playing up coronavirus danger.

Looking more at the Dallas County coronavirus risk chart, it is clear that the plan is to fearmonger about coronavirus as long as the county government can get away with it. That may be quite a while as many people have become devoted to their fear of coronavirus as if it were their cherished religion. They cannot fathom that their government, from the local to state to national level, would be so wrongheaded or evil that it would blatantly misinform them to such a great extent and for so long about a supposedly super-dangerous health matter. And the severity of governments’ coronavirus crackdowns, including stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and forced business closures, further leads many people to think the government must know coronavirus poses an unprecedented threat. We are witnessing firsthand how propaganda projected relentlessly by government and media, coupled with despotic government action, can mollify many people, allowing the enforcement of unjustified and oppressive mandates to persist.

While the coronavirus risk chart is still stuck on the highest level of alarm, the lower levels would only push back the alarm level in small increments and never back to recommending just going about life as before. It can feel like this is some sort of dream or practical joke given that all this purported risk is in regard to a disease that should be of little concern for most people. Moving down from “STAY HOME STAY SAFE,” the chart threat levels are “EXTREME CAUTION” on an orange background, then “PROCEED CAREFULLY” on a yellow background, and then, finally, “NEW NORMAL UNTIL VACCINE” on a green background.

That’s right, even the chart’s lowest level of alarm for this massively over-hyped disease is a dystopian “new normal” where ordinary human interactions like hugging a friend or relative you do not live with or choosing not to wear a face mask while shopping may be discouraged or even prohibited. Discouraged or prohibited, that is, until you take a vaccine that has been rushed into production without the following of regular protocols for promoting safety and efficacy and that may well cause much worse consequences than would the disease the vaccine is purported to protect against. Now that potential vaccine sounds like something we should be warned about.



from ‘Stay Home Stay Safe’ … Say What?