Tag: politics

“Capitalism Has Failed”

Today, more than at any time previously, Westerners are justifying a move toward collectivist thinking with the phrase, “Capitalism has failed.”

In response to this, conservative thinkers offer a knee-jerk reaction that collectivism has also had a dismal record of performance. Neither group tends to gain any ground with the other group, but over time, the West is moving inexorably in the collectivist direction.

As I see it, liberals are putting forward what appears on the surface to be a legitimate criticism, and conservatives are countering it with the apology that, yes, capitalism is failing, but collectivism is worse.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing here is not classical logic, as Aristotle would have endorsed, but emotionalism that ignores the principles of logic.

If we’re to follow the rules of logical discussion, we begin with the statement that capitalism has failed and, instead of treating it as a given, we examine whether the statement is correct. Only if it proves correct can we build further suppositions upon it.

Whenever I’m confronted with this now oft-stated comment, my first question to the person offering it is, “Have you ever lived in a capitalist country?” That is, “Have you ever lived in a country in which, during your lifetime, a free-market system dominated?”

Most people seem initially confused by this question, as they’re residents of either a European country or a North American country and operate under the assumption that the system in which they live is a capitalist one.

So, let’s examine that assumption.

A capitalist, or “free market,” system is one in which the prices of goods and services are determined by consumers and the open market, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.

Today, none of the major (larger) countries in what was once referred to as the “free world” bear any resemblance to this definition. Each of these countries is rife with laws, regulations, and a plethora of regulatory bodies whose very purpose is to restrict the freedom of voluntary commerce. Every year, more laws are passed to restrict free enterprise even more.

Equally as bad is the fact that, in these same countries, large corporations have become so powerful that, by contributing equally to the campaigns of each major political party, they’re able to demand rewards following the elections, that not only guarantee them funds from the public coffers, but protect them against any possible prosecution as a result of this form of bribery.

There’s a word for this form of governance, and it’s fascism.

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Sowing The Wind: The New ‘Newspeak’

The presidential election is eight months away. Yet the campaign to preclude a second Trump administration is already in high gear. In the course of two weeks, the public was given a preview of the undemocratic, uncouth, racist dystopia MAGA America is doomed to become. Against the backdrop of the most virulent antisemitism sweeping the U.S. in the wake of Hamas’ savagery, the media has chosen to pillory “white nationalism” as the clear and present danger.

First, a new tome, “White Rural Rage,” is hailed by the New York Times as “an important book that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand politics in the perilous Age of Trump.”

Next, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla proclaims that people who believe human rights come from God are “Christian Nationalists.” She triggers an uproar. Yet she doubles down in an even more incendiary piece: “Christian Nationalism is a political movement. … The thing that unites them … is that they believe our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any earthy [sic] authority. They don’t come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”

Evidently, people who have read America’s founding document – the Constitution – are a mortal threat to our very survival.

Then, on March 3, CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcasts a segment about “Moms for Liberty” waging a “campaign to ban books on race and gender from school libraries.” Could “Fahrenheit 451” be far behind?

We are witnessing what Hannah Arendt calls “the atomization of society.” It is a well-tested tactic: Shatter every natural connection in society; twist the language; isolate people from each other. The individual is all alone – an atom. No family, no community, no solace.

Totalitarianism of all stripes finds fertile ground in frightened, isolated individuals. 

Technology accelerates this “atomization.” We relate to each other in “virtual reality.” Our “friends” are on Facebook.

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The Near Impossibility Of Defending Yourself Against Charges Of Climate Change

I was recently pre-fired from a job helping with the defense of a very large company in its fight over being charged with the same non-crime detailed below.

My point has nothing to do with myself, per se, but on the increasing difficulty, and even impossibility, of defending oneself from non-crimes when people like me are prevented from helping with the defense.

Which sounds confusing. Let me explain.

The non-crime is “climate attribution”. That somehow companies not publicly wringing their hands over “climate change” caused the public not to care, which in turn caused “climate change” to grow worse, which in turn caused “climate change” to cause bad weather.

Which in turn gave dark-souled unscrupulous midwits something to sue over.

I was “pre-fired” (and not for the first time), because the defense was concerned my thought-crimes unrelated to climate attribution studies would become the focus of any cross examination or deposition. Thought-crimes such as my public writings on covid, transgenderism, Equality, race, and so on. And thus all my cogent, and damning, arguments against climate attribution would be ignored.

The defense was sad about this, because they wanted me. And they wanted me because I am one of the only people making certain criticisms of climate attributions, and I can make them stick.

But this is politics and not science—science has scarcely anything to do with The Science today—and they were right not to hire me. (As sad as that is to my bottom line.)

I put this here in case somebody else who is involved in the defense against these kinds of ridiculous charges can benefit from reading (at least) my two papers on the subject, both found at the Global Warming Policy Foundation: “The Climate Blame Game: Are we really causing extreme weather?” and “How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There“. The first in particular contains (what I think) are damning arguments to any attribution claim. See also this post (blog, Substack) for gross over-certainties in “climate change”.

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Top Adams aide suffered ‘medical episode,’ rushed to hospital as feds raided home over donor probe

Top Mayor Eric Adams aide Winnie Greco is being investigated by the feds for potentially using workers at a Queens mall to hide campaign donations to Hizzoner, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Friday.

The FBI launched raids Thursday on two homes Greco owns on Gillespie Avenue in Pelham Bay in The Bronx  — as well as the offices of the New World Mall in Flushing — over the alleged possible illegal straw donor scheme, sources said.

The 61-year-old longtime mayoral adviser suffered a “medical episode” during the morning raids —  which included federal agents hauling off boxes of files from at least one of the homes — and was taken by ambulance to the hospital, City Hall sources told The Post. The administration did not immediately comment on her condition Friday.

The city Department of Investigation opened a probe in November after allegations surfaced of suspected straw-donor money stemming from events organized by Greco, a major Adams campaign-raiser and now his $100,000-a-year Asian Affairs liaison, the outlet The City reported.

Greco was heavily involved in organizing eight lucrative fundraising events at New World Mall for Adams’ 2021 campaign, the outlet said.

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Tennessee bill would ban flags based on gender, politics, sexual orientation in schools

A new bill in the Tennessee General Assembly would ban public and charter schools from displaying certain flags on or in school buildings.

SB1722/HB1605 is sponsored by Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald-D28) and Representative Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood-D61) in their respective chambers. The bill caption states it “prohibits LEAs and public charter schools from displaying in public schools flags other than the official United States flag and the official Tennessee state flag.”

An amendment added to the bill further details what will and won’t be prohibited, the amendment stating those allowed will be a U.S. flag, the official Tennessee state flag, a POW/MIA flag, a flag of an Indian tribe, official city, county, or metro government flag, armed forces flags, and official school flags.

What will not be allowed are any flags representing political viewpoints, partisan, racial, sexual orientation, gender, or other “ideological viewpoint” flags.

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Land Of Spooks And Shills And Sheeple

Trust is a rare commodity in today’s world. Maybe it always has been. I remember trusting some older males who were relatives or neighbors, as a child. Then later as an adult, I’d hear from my sister and others about how these fine upstanding men had propositioned them, or touched them inappropriately.

Moral trust is one thing. We all fail to some degree on this count, because we are all sinners. My head will probably always be turned by a good-looking female. It’s just instinctive. I remember a great comedy skit with Richard Pryor, where he was sitting in a crowd with his wife/girlfriend, who was glaring at him, upset over him checking out other women. Then his head turns again, and he tells her, “Can’t you see how strong that shit is? I know you’re gonna be mad, but I still can’t stop it!” While it bothers me when I attend a wedding where the divorced bride’s children from her first marriage are ringbearers or flower girls (mumbling to myself, “I can’t stop thinking she said ‘I do’ to someone else just five years ago’), I understand human weakness. Judge not lest ye be judged.

It’s political trust that’s on my mind. If you listen to me Saturdays at 12 noon on “America Unplugged” with Billy Ray Valentine and Tony Arterburn, you may have heard our discussion this past Saturday on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. It was obvious by the comments in the chat, and later on YouTube, that most people disagreed with me. I was arguing that, whatever Carlson’s real motivations, I usually agree with what he’s saying over 90 percent of the time. Yes, I’m aware that his father was the head of Voice of America, and that he once tried to get into the CIA. That he scoffed at 9//1 “truthers” and other “conspiracy theorists.” Maybe his bow tie was too tight. Is he just playing the role of mainstream “skeptic?”

I’m not accustomed to being the least skeptical person in the room about anything. I was a born skeptic. A doubter of all official narratives. But if the alt media is just going to attribute all good reporting, and sensible commentary to a hidden agenda, then what is the point of even addressing any issue? Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Rand Paul, RFK, Jr., all compromised. And oddly, they draw the attention (and ire) of many of us trying to provide an alternative to our state controlled media, far more often than the Joy Reids, Sunny Hostins, and Joe Scarboroughs do. Tucker Carlson’s father ran the Voice of America. A pretty, young female intern was found dead in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001. Isn’t that a bit more incriminating?

Then there is the guy Carlson was interviewing- Vladimir Putin. I don’t have to trust him to agree with his purported comments (and this is assuming they’re being translated accurately) about wanting peace with America. If he really did ban all GMO products, and put out an arrest warrant for any Rothschilds strolling into Russia, isn’t that something we’d all agree with? Maybe he has an agenda, too, but why do we focus so much more on him than say, Angela Merkel or David Cameron? Carlson was blasted from all sides for how he conducted the interview. What was he supposed to ask him? He put Putin on the record. At the very least, we got to see the Russian leader’s impressive knowledge of history. Compare that to our putrid politicians.

In my book Hidden History, I delved into the background of the 1960s counterculture movement. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru who urged the impressionable hippies not to trust anyone over thirty (when he was older than thirty himself), was later outed as working for the CIA. So was Gloria Steinem, the face of “women’s lib” in the sixties and seventies. Her magazine MS was financed by the CIA. Murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton had a bodyguard who was an undercover government operative. So did Malcolm X. The guy cradling Martin Luther King’s head in his hands on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel was an undercover CIA asset. I gave lots of other examples of how undercover plants worked inside the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan.

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GOP Congressman Stands By Accusation Some Fellow Members Have Been Compromised

One of the more colorful conservative members of the U.S. House told HuffPost he stands by recent remarks in which he said some of his fellow members were likely victims of blackmail.

But Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who made the comments on a Dec. 21 podcast with a right-wing commentator, declined to elaborate on who he was talking about or give any other details.

“You as a member of the media understand confidentiality, and I appreciate that, and I am going to keep that confidential unless those people tell me otherwise,” Burchett told HuffPost on Thursday.

Asked if he was standing by his comments, Burchett said, “Sure. I’m not going to back up.”

And when asked if he believed there were House members who had decided how to vote based on compromising material about them held by foreign powers, Burchett said, “Absolutely. And other powers. It doesn’t have to be foreign powers.”

On “The Benny Show” podcast, hosted by Benny Johnson, Burchett said, without pointing to specific evidence or names, that powerful people protect their own interests by blackmail.

“The old honey pot. The Russians do that. And I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up. Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing out of Congress?” he asked.

He said members may be on a trip or at a bar, meet someone and buy them a drink.

“Next thing you know, you’re in a hotel room with them, naked. Next thing you know, you’re about to make a key vote, and what happens? Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers into your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you. Were you in a motel room on whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re, like, ‘Uh-oh.’ And they say, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.’”

“They know what to get at. If it’s women, drugs, booze — it’ll find you in D.C. And other elected offices,” he told Johnson.

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Who’s To Blame For The Elite Extreme Left?

Many writers decry the American political scene as “too divisive.” But I don’t think this goes to the root of our political problems. A much more serious concern is that a very powerful minority of Americans reject the core principles upon which our Constitution and our society rest: principles of Western Civilization, republican government, and the Judeo-Christian heritage.

In the view of this minority, the American Founding was a crime, people should be judged largely on race and gender, elections should be manipulated (to protect “our democracy”), the traditional family structure should be abandoned, sexual mores should be perverted, and government should be nearly omnipotent.

These ideas resemble a variant of fascism in which everyone serves the state and individual rights—economic and political—are exercised only by the elite’s permission. This minority not only believe these things themselves, but they want to force you to accept them also. They’re authoritarian, even totalitarian.

When the rest of us push back against their agenda, it isn’t “divisiveness.” It’s self-defense.

The Power of the Elite

Despite our efforts of self-defense, this group has been remarkably successful in setting the national agenda. One example: From 1998 to 2014, there were 30 state referenda on the definition of civil marriage. The advocates of traditional marriage—that is, between a man and a woman—won all these referenda, and most of them by decisive supermajorities.

But the agenda-setters wanted same-sex civil marriage; therefore, now it’s imposed on every state, no matter what the voters might think. So much for “our democracy.”

Once same-sex civil marriage was secured, the agenda-setters proceeded to implement even more outré policies: critical race theory, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and, at least in some states, infanticide and the mutilation of children.

And despite the fact that most Americans think we have too much government and not enough freedom, under the guidance of the agenda-setters, government continues to grow.

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