A 2022 document.
In service of the green agenda, the RANDians have lost their minds…again.
Stop funding the RAND Corporation; zero out all government funding to it.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1500/RRA1524-2/RAND_RRA1524-2.pdf
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
For the individual actor, “as for everyone, other people’s labor as offered for sale on the market is nothing but a factor of production. Man deals with other people’s labor in the same way that he deals with all scarce material factors of production. He appraises it according to the principles he applies in the appraisal of all other goods. The height of wage rates is determined on the market in the same way in which the prices of all commodities are determined. In this sense we may say that labor is a commodity. The emotional associations which people, under the influence of Marxism, attach to this term do not matter. It suffices to observe incidentally that the employers deal with labor as they do with commodities because the conduct of the consumers forces them to proceed in this way.”
—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
The Earth is shifting; stay ahead of the curve.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
The genius public relations mandarins at the Joint F35 program office apparently can’t identify the aircraft they have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on.
The picture above appears to be the Chinese J35 facsimile of the F35.
You can’t make this up. The chaos avalanche is increasing in severity weekly.
We have many questions. Mainly: Where did those twin engines on the JPO image come from? The F-35 uses a single Pratt & Whitney F135 turbofan engine (in two different variants, depending on the aircraft), whereas the fighter in the JPO tweet appears to resemble the twin-engine Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) J-35 fighter jet more than anything else.
Unfortunately, this sort of public affairs flub happens all too often. For July 4th last year, the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s official account tweeted a photo that appeared to show the silhouettes of a Russian Kashin-class destroyer and five Sukhoi-27s fighter jets against the backdrop of an American flag with the command’s Independence Day message. Back in 2021, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service used a photo composite showing an American flag alongside a Russian Kirov-class battle-cruiser to wish the U.S. Navy a happy birthday, the very same mistake Republican Rep. Brian Mast also made back in 2019.
Still, this is quite embarrassing – especially on Veterans Day. But between missed readiness goals and rising costs, it makes sense that the F-35 JPO has other stuff to focus on other than accurately representing its primary aircraft on social media.
https://www.military.com/off-duty/pentagons-f-35-office-has-no-idea-what-f-35-looks.html
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
When I first started learning about how the Federal Reserve system works, I watched an excellent short documentary from the Mises Institute titled Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve, which was released in 1996 (a transcript of the video is available here, or as a PDF file here). That video was also one of my early introductions to the great Ron Paul, whom I also later came to admire for his sensible views on foreign policy. If you have never seen it, I highly encourage you to watch it.
Last month, the Mises Institute released a new 40-minute documentary titled Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve, which reiterates the need to end this government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, including by taking a look at how the Fed has expanded its own power since the 2008 financial crisis, which was precipitated by the collapse of the housing bubble that the Fed blew up with its inflationary monetary policy.
The new documentary explains the importance of sound money as a medium of exchange and a unit of account and how the central banking system engages in legalized counterfeiting to manipulate people’s borrowing and spending behaviors for the benefit of the few at the expense of everyone else in society.
This system arose from banks issuing paper certificates redeemable for gold deposited in their vaults, where in time the bankers, realizing that only a certain proportion of depositors ever came in to withdraw their money in any given period of time, began lending out paper certificates backed by nothing.
Under the “fractional reserve” monetary system, the Federal Reserve expands the base money supply by monetizing government debt, purchasing Treasury securities with dollars created out of thin air. In other words, the Fed exists to engage in legalized counterfeiting, which of course the government loves because it enables politicians to engage in insane amounts of spending without having to directly tax the public. Instead, the spending is paid for through the “hidden tax” of inflation.
From that monetary base, other banks then further expand the money supply by issuing loans. One misconception is that banks lend depositors’ money, so that if a $1,000 deposit is made, the bank can loan out $900 of it and keep $100 in reserve. Instead, what happens is from that $1,000 deposit, the bank can lend $9,000 created out of thin air while maintaining the legal reserve requirement.
Under this system of legalized counterfeiting, the banks are inherently insolvent, which is why there exists the risk of a “bank run” in which a mass panic causes everyone at once to go try to withdraw their money, but since only a certain proportion of that money actually exists in tangible form, the inherent insolvency is exposed, and bank failure occurs.
The Fed was created in 1913 by an act of government legislature with the stated aim of stabilizing the banking system, but instead it has given us permanent inflation as a feature of the economy and the cycle of booms and busts characterized by illusory economic growth that is really an unsustainable misallocation of resources that is inevitably followed by a market correction known as a recession.
We’re supposed to view the recession as the problem that the Fed will cure by doing what it always does, which is to print more money, creating artificial demand for Treasury securities that pushes interest rates down below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market. Actually, the recession is the cure for the unsustainable boom caused by the Fed’s monetary inflation and manipulation of interest rates, which are a critical price in the economy signaling to investors and entrepreneurs how scarce resources ought to be allocated.
The documentary explains the Austrian theory of the business cycle using the appropriate analogy of the Fed acting as both the fireman arriving on the scene to put the fire out and as the arsonist who started the fire in the first place.
Through its monetary manipulation, the Fed creates winners and losers in the economy. Those who get the new money first at low rates are able to use it to buy up assets before the resulting price increases, while everyone else in society is robbed of their purchasing power, thus effecting an upward transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the politically connected financial elites.
Then, of course, when the banks do get into trouble during times of economic crisis, they get bailed out at the public’s expense. As explained in the video, the profits are privatized while the losses are socialized. The biggest losers are the average American workers and families.
Since the COVID‑19 pandemic, we continue to see the economic devastation and soaring price inflation described by the mainstream media as a consequence of “the pandemic” or “the virus” when in fact it was caused by the government deliberately shutting down the economy and spending trillions of dollars created out of thin air to try to keep things going.
It was the lockdown insanity and the Fed’s monetary inflation that caused the housing affordability crisis that clueless politicians try to blame on the free market, including the claim that it is a failure of the market to produce enough supply of houses, which isn’t true, as I discussed in my October 19 article “Kamala Harris’s Economic Ignorance and the Housing Affordability Crisis”, and as economist Thomas Eddlem demonstrates graphically at The Libertarian Institute in his November 5 article “The Myth of an American Housing Shortage”.
It wasn’t the free market that caused the median sale price for an existing home to soar from $273,342 in 2019 to $414,701 in 2023!
The Mises film also discusses the threat of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which always brings to my mind the passage from the book of Revelation about how Satan would deceive the world and cause all to “to receive a mark” so that “no one might buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
As noted in the video, “An increase in the money supply does not benefit society. It benefits some at the expense of others.” And as the great Ron Paul says, if you want to have sound money and a healthy economy, just get rid of the Fed.
To learn more about how the Federal Reserve’s monetary inflation caused the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, read my short book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which was described by the financial weekly Barron’s as both funny and informative, conveying “more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks”.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
A photograph taken on the morning of March 8, 1906, on the eastern crest of Bud Dajo. (John R. White Papers, Knight Library, University of Oregon)
“Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service” or “thanks for protecting our freedom.”
The events at Bud Dajo in the Philippines will cure you of that happy salutation.
What! I hear this familiar refrain again and again every November. I am appalled whenever this unthinking salutation is proffered.
I am a retired career Army officer and like USMC General Smedley Butler before me, I find these sentiments to be hogwash.
The only service rendered was to the American political power structure in the dishonorable hands of the Democrats or Republicans; the former, despite their protestations to peace, have gotten America involved in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, Haiti [again], Serbia, Syria, Yemen and on and on. Starting with the shameful expropriation of the Mexican territory from 1846-48 to the War of Northern Aggression from 1860-65; the United States went into hyper-colonial overdrive in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands and has not stopped since. The entire history of American arms on Earth has been a shameful and expansionist enterprise culminating in the first ever post-WWII (the Japanese attack on American territories in the Aleutians during the War to Save Josef Stalin and the minor coastal skirmishes in Oregon by IJN submarine I-25) attack on American state soil in 2001 (9/11 attack). I am frankly astonished at the length of time it took for a substantive attack of any kind to be initiated on American soil with the breadth, ferocity and long sordid history of American mischief and mayhem abroad.
The sheer number of military expeditions the US has embarked on over time is breathtaking. One worthy notes there have been 234 military expeditions from 1798-1993 [and that study dates from 1993]. My readers and listeners may be able to point me to an updated list.
Good Gods, if I were a Martian who landed on Earth ten years ago and found myself attending government schools, to include college, and watching television for any additional cultural education, I would not be aware of any of this. The constant drumbeat emanating from the State is the Orwellian chorus about America making the world safe for freedom and liberty and never using force abroad except in self-defense. The history proves otherwise.
America, next to Rome in the Western world, ranks as one of the world’s most aggressive nation states when one examines the evidence. A country sheltered from the tempestuous and constant warring on the European continent by one ocean and the turbulence in Asia by another ocean yet the US simply cannot mind its own business nor resist the temptation to maim and murder abroad for expansion of political power and control whether for mercantilist or colonial aspirations.
One can even see that the brutality practiced by American soldiers abroad is not recent but a long-standing tradition.
Afghanistan, recently:
“All told, five soldiers were charged with killing civilians in three separate episodes early last year. Soldiers repeatedly described Sergeant Gibbs as devising “scenarios” in which the unit would fake combat situations by detonating grenades or planting weapons near their victims. They said he even supplied “drop weapons” and grenades to make the victims appear armed. Some soldiers took pictures posing with the dead and took body parts as trophies. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of snipping fingers from victims and later using them to intimidate another soldier.
He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had “disassociated” the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer.
Sergeant Gibbs said he that was ashamed of taking the body parts, that he was “trying to be hard, a hard individual.” But he insisted that the people he took them from had posed genuine threats to him and his unit.”
Philippines, then:
“Like many of their officers, American troops also showed incredible callousness toward the Philippine civilian population. A man named Clarence Clowe described the situation as follows in a letter he wrote to Senator Hoar. The methods employed by American troops against civilians in an effort to find insurgent “arms and ammunition” include torture, beating, and outright killing.
***
At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, or bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.
All these things have been done at one time or another by US forces, generally in cases of trying to obtain information as to the location of arms and ammunition.
Nor can it be said that there is any general repulsion on the part of the enlisted men to taking part in these doings. I regret to have to say that, on the contrary, the majority of soldiers take a keen delight in them, and rush with joy to the making of this latest development of a Roman holiday.[16]
Another soldier, L. F. Adams, with the Washington regiment, described what he saw after the Battle of Manila on February 4-5, 1899:
In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead niggers, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don’t know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners.[17]
Similarly, Sergeant Howard McFarland of the 43rd Infantry, wrote to the Fairfield Journal of Maine:
I am now stationed in a small town in charge of twenty-five men, and have a territory of twenty miles to patrol…. At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into a nigger heaven. On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy-five nigger bolo men and ten of the nigger gunners. When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets.[18]
These methods were condoned by some back at home in the U.S., as exemplified by the statement of a Republican Congressman in 1909:
You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon; and the secret of its pacification is, in my opinion, the secret of pacification of the archipelago. They never rebel in northern Luzon because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him. The women and children were spared, and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers in that part of the island.[19]”
And countless incidents small and large in between from the only nation state in the Western world that not only endorses the use of torture but makes it an official means of projecting power abroad.
I have often remarked that cops are the only reason freedom and liberty is and has been in the hazard in America, and unfortunately, the same standard applies for military power abroad.
The only just war is one fought to defend one’s own soil from invasion. There is no other. Every other conflict reeks of statist opportunism and a yen to expand tax jurisdictions and the power to rob others of their wealth and resources. Some may mistake this for a pretense of the Left, this is the government supremacist mindset, right and left. Not only do the progressives and the collectivists in America have a rich history of cheer-leading wars such as WWI and WWII but they also wish to employ military-style violence domestically to achieve their government supremacist dreams.
The notion that foreign wars and entanglements are wrong still emanates from a sparsely populated philosophical quarter that has no majority presence in the academy or the government–media complex. It is a true voice in the wilderness. That voice has one signature message: you cannot thank a veteran for your freedom because they have actively done nothing more than endanger its very existence. In fact, American military power abroad (and increasingly, at home) has made civilians more unsafe than they have ever been. The threat not only emerges from aggrieved victims of American brutality abroad but a government desperate in bad times to ensure that not one dollar of military expenditures is reduced. America is now a national security garrison state. Think about that the next time you take a flight.
Veterans don’t need gratitude but a self-realization on their part that the machine they worked for was never an engine for liberty but a device whose single purpose was aggrandizement of American political power at home and abroad. And that political hammer always extinguishes liberty and never expands it.
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
– Gandhi
“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”
The 11th of November, specifically at 11AM is a sacred time that has taken on a religious observance among the victorious of World War One. A time to officially remember those who died in that war and the many others since, often with the observation of silence for a minute of more. It is when a nation is supposed to fall silent, stand still and dip it’s head for those who died in the service of King, President, Empire Or Government. It is to remember the millions who died in war that ended ancient dynasties and gave rise to new ones, a war that was supposed to be so terrible that it should have ended all wars. Instead in it’s aftermath we have seen a century plus of conflicts and carnage emerge because of it.
By November 1918, the Russian empire was no more, allowing for the German and Austro-Hungarian attention to switch West and Southwards. Both empires themselves starved and suffering beneath the weight of attrition. By then the United States was now fighting in the war, it was a desperate situation for the Central Powers. Peace was negotiated, and an armistice was reached. After four horrible years, there would be peace.
With days of preliminary negotiations, the Kaiser vacating his throne on 9th November, the new German Republic signed the Armistice with the Allied representatives in a railway carriage at 5am on the 11th November.
War makes communication unreliable at the best of times and in an age where new technology was used alongside ancient methods, the word spread both fast and slow.
British Prime Minister released his official communique at 10:20am that day to the people of Great Britain, ““The armistice was signed at five o’clock this morning, and hostilities are to cease on all fronts at 11 a.m. to-day.”
The news reached the front line with a mixed reaction, joy, relief, exhaustion, wariness, disbelief and in some cases anger. Those who had sacrificed and lost close ones felt a need to justify such hardship with total victory, while others were happy that it was all over. Some had matured into adulthood while serving in war, it was all they had known. Others had been mutilated in mind and body that such news could never reach them.
Despite being informed of the Armistice and when hostilities were to end, fighting raged up until that hour. An urgency to claim more ground before the war officially ended led to the needless death of more soldiers. Canadian force at Mons were ordered to fight hard by their General Sir Arthur Currie, who had received the news about the Armistice at 6am that morning. Instead of giving his men a safer uneasy peace for five hours, he sent them into the Hell of war.
Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was the last known Allied casualty of the war, when a German sniper took his life just two minutes before the end of hostilities was to be observed. What was to be gained from his death is only known in the minds of warmongers.
Many others died after the Armistice from the injuries they had been inflicted in the hours, days and weeks prior. The war slowly consuming thousands despite the signatures of ‘great men’ on a piece of paper,
The war was not limited to just Europe, those in Africa and the Middle East slowly ceased hostilities, and navigated the complex nature of colonial rule alongside the emergence of new Nation States, where old enemies suddenly became uneasy comrades against locals and bandits. A tradition that would happen on a greater scale at the end of World War Two, when thousands of Japanese soldiers remained on active duty serving the Allies to preserve colonial possessions at the expense of independent movements and the promises they had received. Such is imperialism.
The lesson the Great War is that it never should have happened, the death of an imperial regent led to the mass murder of millions. An event of hubris and arrogant ignorance which led to vile men pushing their hands across the map, ignoring terrain, modern warfare or the well-being of those involved. It was a war that began with Statesmen and Regents signatures and just as magically it ended with inked names on paper.
It is a war that in its final moments of death led to the birth of the deadly infections of Bolshevism, Fascism, Hitlerism, variations of national Communism and the ‘Spanish Flu’. It would be the cause of World War Two, the realities of the ongoing wars in the Middle East, much of Africa and Asia since. Genocides occurred during, and many others would happen afterwards. It was a war that did not end on 11-11-11-18. With names like Sykes-Picout, Balfour and so on tainting the future of the world, to the point that we would see the fingerprints of such signatures in murder armies such as ISIS.
Inside the nations that identify as “free” the end of the war reigned in greater surveillance powers, more taxation, a debt economy to be paid for by each generation thereafter, collectivised prohibitions, censorship, aerial policing that culminated into dropping bombs from aircraft onto civilians and an exceptionalism based on the notion that variations of democracy as the victor in the Great War thus should be worshipped as the most moral ideology.
Many died, suffered and experienced tremendous loss due to the Great War. A miserable mark in human history that has gone on to leave other moments and periods of horror. Lest we not forget those who died. But also the legacy of the war itself and each war after. Young men volunteered or were press ganged to serve, enslaved and eager to go fight across the world. Millions died, not all of them soldiers or men. It was a war that claimed many civilians as well. Lest we not forget them. In that moment of symbolic remembrance, don’t forget the history that spiralled from the assassins bullet when it took the Archduke’s life in 1914, by 1918 several millions more had fallen and humanity was worse for it. Lest we Forget.
