THE COMING CONFLICT: The sophisticated form of anthrax delivered to Tom Daschle’s office forces us to ask a simple question. What are these people trying to do? I think they’re testing the waters. They want to know how we will respond to what is still a minor biological threat, as a softener to a major biological threat in the coming weeks. They must be encouraged by the panic-mongering of the tabloids, Hollywood and hoaxsters. They must also be encouraged by the fact that some elements in the administration already seem to be saying we need to keep our coalition together rather than destroy the many-headed enemy. So the terrorists are pondering their next move. The chilling aspect of the news in the New York Times today is that the terrorists clearly have access to the kind of anthrax that could be used against large numbers of civilians. My hopes yesterday that this was a minor attack seem absurdly naïve in retrospect. So they are warning us and testing us. At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat. I know that this means that this conflict is deepening and widening beyond its initial phony stage. But what choice do we have? Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable. Appropriate response will no doubt inflame an already inflamed region, as people seek solace through the usual ideological fire. Either way the war will grow and I feel nothing but dread in my heart. But we didn’t seek this conflict. It has sought us. If we do not wage war now, we may have to wage an even bloodier war in the very near future. These are bleak choices, but what else do we have? [Italics his]
Blog
War is a Euphemism for Theft Funded Mass Murder
The libertarian’s basic attitude toward war must then be: it is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one’s rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals.
– Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D., War, Peace, and the State
I Support HB0220: the Maryland Defend the Guard Act
Here’s my letter in support of HB0220: the Maryland Defend the Guard Act (I’ll also be testifying at the hearing on February 15, 2023):
HB0220 Favorable
Dear House Health and Government Operations Committee:
I write in support of House Bill 220, the Maryland Defend the Guard Act.
In September 2001, the Bush administration was preparing a “Global War on Terrorism” in response to the attacks of September 11th. The White House expressed the desire to be granted the latitude to control the warmaking capacity of the government, which according to the U.S. Constitution is to be checked by the Congress. In the post-9/11 climate of fear that further terrorist attacks might be undertaken against Americans, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed an open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), effectively ceding both their right and their authority to limit the Executive’s ability to mobilize the Armed Forces of the United States to fight, kill, and possibly die in wars abroad. Rather than needing to confer with the Congress before sending troops into harm’s way, the AUMF of 2001 vested in the president the power of a monarch to wage war at his discretion and according to his own timetable.
Under the Constitution, the president already possessed the legal ability to wage war in an emergency or invasion scenario, when time was of the essence and so consultation with Congress could not be undertaken. What changed with the 2001 AUMF was that the Congress delegated to the president the right and authority to wage war without needing to demonstrate or claim conditions of emergency. In emergency military actions, the executive is required within a narrow timeframe to secure the retroactive consent of the Congress, without which the mobilization may not legally continue. With the 2001 AUMF, however, the requirement of retroactive advice and consent was lifted.
What ensued over the next twenty years was the nonstop engagement of U.S. military forces, including National Guardsmen, in the Middle East and Africa, with four successive presidential administrations asserting the right to wage war without congressional consultation. The 2001 AUMF and the subsequent 2002 AUMF against Iraq were ratified under President George W. Bush, but they were regarded by President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump as permitting them to continue the work begun by Bush. Today, in 2023, President Joe Biden continues to deploy troops and bomb countries in the Middle East supposedly under the AUMF authority granted to George W. Bush, while 88% of the people who initially voted for these resolutions have departed from Congress.
It is hard to believe that the men who penned the U.S. Constitution envisioned a scenario in which one Congress could permanently change the balance of warmaking power through passing a single law, but that is what has transpired.
It is unsurprising that no president after Bush chose to roll back the expanded executive powers he had assumed. Power once secured is seldom surrendered. Nor should we expect a Congress to acknowledge the mistakes of the past. An effort to repeal the 2002 AUMF is underway, but this would not stop the president’s ability to wage endless, global war granted by the much broader 2001 AUMF.
With the unlikelihood that either the president will cede his warmaking powers back to the legislative branch, or the Congress will demand that they be returned, House Bill 220 currently under consideration would provide the restraint needed to prevent the Maryland National Guard from being deployed into combat missions abroad at the executive’s caprice, by requiring that the U.S. Congress pass an official declaration of war.
I support the Defend the Guard Act because National Guardsmen enlisted to serve the country under specific conditions which have been bypassed since 2001. The politicians in Washington, DC, have abdicated the most weighty of all of their responsibilities, that of determining whether and when soldiers must be sent to fight. Because Congress has neglected their responsibility under the Constitution to serve as a restraint on the warmaking powers of the executive, the time has arrived for states to assert their sovereign rights and protect their local Guardsmen from reckless and counterproductive deployments as occurred throughout the past two decades of the Global War on Terror in several different countries for which no mission-specific AUMF was ever ratified by Congress.
It is too late to do anything about the soldiers sacrificed in Afghanistan, only to withdraw from that country with the Taliban still in power in 2021. Nor can the tragic loss of Guardsmen to suicide be undone. But House Bill 220, the Maryland Defend the Guard Act, will help to protect future guardsmen from such fates.
Sincerely,
Laurie Calhoun
Refuting the SJW Narrative in 8 Minutes (feat. Dr. Wilfred Reilly)
[I]f this were truly a “white supremacist” society, being called a white supremacist would be a badge of honor, not a professional death sentence.
– Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Wilfred Reilly, Ph.D., is a Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University.
Books by Wilfred Reilly:
Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About
Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The 2100 B.C. Project
[M]ore importantly to force us to grapple with what it means that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in ourcountry that few things outdate African slavery and yet we’ve treated this as a marginal story so at its heart the 1619 project is the story of America told through the lens of slavery.
The goal of the 1619 Project is to create the narrative that America is founded on slavery therefore the capitalist system that America (partially) practices should be abandoned.
It turns out, slavery is the least unique thing about America.
Here is a translation of four laws from The Code of Ur-Nammu (Mesopotamia, 2100 B.C. – 2050 B.C.), the oldest legal code known to the human race:
4. If a slave marries a slave, and that slave is set free, he does not leave the household.5. If a slave marries a native [i.e. free] person, he/she is to hand the firstborn son over to his owner.
8. If a man proceeded by force, and deflowered the virgin female slave of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.
17. If a slave escapes from the city limits, and someone returns him, the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him.
24. [text destroyed] If he does not have a slave, he is to pay 10 shekels of silver. If he does not have silver, he is to give another thing that belongs to him.
25. If a man’s slave-woman, comparing herself to her mistress, speaks insolently to her, her mouth shall be scoured with 1 quart of salt.
26. If a slave woman strikes someone acting with the authority of her mistress, [text destroyed]
Dr. Thomas Sowell refuting the 1619 thesis a decade ago:
For centuries before, Europeans had enslaved other Europeans, Asians had enslaved other Asians and Africans had enslaved other Africans. Only in the modern era was there both the wealth and the technology to organize the mass transportation of people across an ocean, either as slaves or as free immigrants. Nor were Europeans the only ones to transport masses of enslaved human beings from one continent to another. North Africa’s Barbary Coast pirates alone captured and enslaved at least a million Europeans from 1500 to 1800, carrying more Europeans into bondage in North Africa than there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed. Moreover, Europeans were still being bought and sold in the slave markets of the Islamic world, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.
Slavery was a virtually universal institution in countries around the world and for thousands of years of recorded history. Indeed, archaeological evidence suggests that human beings learned to enslave other human beings before they learned to write. One of the many fallacies about slavery— that it was based on race— is sustained by the simple but pervasive practice of focussing exclusively on the enslavement of Africans by Europeans, as if this were something unique, rather than part of a much larger worldwide human tragedy. Racism grew out of African slavery, especially in the United States, but slavery preceded racism by thousands of years. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.
– Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies, p. 180
Out of the Blank Podcast: The War Machine in all its Sprawling Ignobility
Robbie Robertson interviews Laurie Calhoun on the Out of the Blank podcast about a wide range of topics, including drone killing, the war machine, the implications of the normalization of assassination using robotic devices for domestic policing, government control of the narrative, the importance of transparency, the Black Budget, the CIA, institutional conservatism, and why we cannot renounce free speech if we are to save the republic.
#1341 – Laurie Calhoun – Out Of The Blank | Podcast on Spotify
Black History Month?
If a Martian social scientist were to visit America, he surely would assume that Black History Month had been concocted by racists. And he’d be right — for a racist qua racist need not bear ill will toward a particular group. What makes someone a racist is the very concept of human groupings, in this case, persons of African ancestry. In other words, what all racists have in common most fundamentally is the scientifically baseless idea that the species homo sapiens is divided into three (or more) segments that differ significantly at the genetic level. Like so many things we “know,” this one ain’t so.
The myth of race is what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call “racecraft,” and yes, they do mean to analogize it to witchcraft (Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life). What most people, benevolent and malevolent, mean by race could not differ more from what biologists mean by race. As the Fieldses write:
Race in today’s biology is not a traditionally named group of people but a statistically defined population: “the difference in frequency of alleles between populations (contiguous and interbreeding groups) of the same species.” Unlike the units of bio-racism, these populations are not held to be visible to the naked eye [emphasis added], or knowable in advance of disciplined investigation. [Link added. The internal quote is from Anthony Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetics.]
Racecraft saturates the language of even well-intentioned people, which is why the Fieldses’ book is so damn important.
ESG in Canada
When I talk about ESG it isn’t out of concern for the corporations being regulated, it is out of concern as to how it affects the common man. While many dismiss my concern as a “conspiracy theory” cutting people off from their money and financial institutions is in fact taking place around the world. My good friend Gord Magill has been documenting how ESG metrics are being used as a punitive measure against Canadians that were involved in the Trucker Protests. While that topic is old news to most, some are still paying the price.
Podcasts
