Category: Politics

Burned After Watching

Tucker Carlson discussed the recent activity of YouTube pulling down a video. The video shows doctors criticizing the lock down policy. The doctors are asking sensible questions. YouTube executives do not like sensible questions. Take a look.

Carlson believes we are entering into a totalitarian tech dystopia. This is good rhetoric. It is also good for getting viewers. But it is far from reality.
First, imagine this event was happening 40 years ago. Would we have ever known about this video? Would we have ever gotten a chance to see it? No. The four oligarchs of the media would have shielded it from the public.
Second, I just went on YouTube and searched “Dr. Erickson full video”. The full video can still be found. Trolls keep uploading the video over and over again. It has been copied to millions of computers. People everywhere are posting it on their websites. See this link. What this tells me is that YouTube can not even stop the video from being uploaded on its own platform. This shows how powerless they are. There are to many videos being uploaded on YouTube. To many memes. To many tweets. To many Facebook post. To many links to other sites. No algorithm can stop this without destroying the platform. These platforms only can act after a video has gone viral. This is similar to closing the barn door after the horses are already out.
All of these platforms have opened up free postings to billions of people around the world. They can express their opinion for zero dollars. This has given a voice to brilliant people as well as kooks. They overwhelm political leftism. We are already seeing alternatives to these platforms that promote free thought. It is amazing to see how short sighted YouTube is. If they push to hard, they will destroy the company.
Political leftist are the heads of most of these companies. They do not like dissent. However, they are bringing about the greatest advancement in freedom the world has ever seen. There is almost a funny irony to all of this. They are bringing about a world that is undermining their ideology. The reality is this: I only heard about this video because it was banned. I took me a whole 20 seconds searching online to find the full video.  This is not totalitarianism. This is the exact opposite.

The Donald Is Now America First’s Own Assassin

Via David Stockman:

By the twisted logic of Imperial Washington you could say the Iranians were asking for it. After all, they had the nerve to locate their country right in the middle of 35 U.S. military bases!
Then again, your saner angels may ask: What in the hell is Washington doing with a massive military footprint in a region and in a string of backwater countries that have virtually no bearing on homeland security, safety and liberty?
Djibouti? Oman? Kyrgyzstan? Uzbekistan? Afghanistan? Bahrain? Kuwait? And, yes, Iraq and Iran?
In fact, Washington destroyed the former for no good reason and based on egregious Big Lies about Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs and sheltering of al-Qaeda. That turned Iraq into a failed state hellhole pulsating with sectarian frictions and anti-American grievances – even as the rump state of Iraq centered in Baghdad fell under the control of Iran-friendly Shiite politicians and militias.
At the same time, Iran itself is zero threat to the American homeland. It’s tiny $350 billion GDP amounts to 6 days of US annual output and its $20 billion defense budget is equivalent to what the Pentagon wastes every 8 days.
Militarily, it has no blue water navy, an air force that could double as a cold war museum and a short and medium range missile force that is self-evidently dedicated to defense and deterrence in the region, not an attack on the USA way over on the yonder side of the deep blue seas.
Its 300 or so active aircraft, for example, include 175 US F-4, F-5, F-14 and sundry transports, helicopters and trainers purchased by the Shah during the 1970s and kept together since the revolution with bailing wire and bubble gum. It also fields 60 or so Soviet vintage MiG-29s and Sukhoi Su attack aircraft – plus a few dozen European and Chinese planes of mostly ancient design.

Likewise, even its most advanced medium range cruise missile (Soumar) can barely get to Rome, Italy, to say nothing of Rome, Georgia.
As is evident from the yellow, green, red and black circles on the map below, which circles outline each missile’s striking range, the overwhelming bulk of Iran’s missile force has a range of 500 miles or less. These missiles are capable of hitting targets in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf, or roughly the same area which encompasses the 35 military bases designated by American flags in the graphic above.
Stated differently, Iran’s extremely modest military capacities are not remotely about an offensive threat to the American homeland. They are overwhelmingly about defending itself in its own neighborhood, where Washington has been intervening and occupying with massive firepower and hostile intent for decades.

Therein, of course, lies a hint. More than 13 years after Saddam’s last hurrah on a Baghdad gallows, the US still has upwards of 30,000 troops and contractors in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf. But why?
It can’t be owing to ISIS. The Islamic State was never much more than a no count salient of dusty, woebegone towns and villages on the Upper Euphrates straddling Western Iraq and northeastern Syria that was destined to collapse on its own barbaric madness anyway; and which was essentially dispatched by the Russian air force, Assad’s military and the Shiite militia forces organized by the dead man himself, Major General Soleimani.
Likewise, it should be obvious by now that it’s not the oil, either. At the moment the US is producing nearly 13 million barrels per day and is the world’s leading oil producer – well ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia; and is now actually a net exporter of crude for the first time in three-quarters of a century.
Besides, the Fifth Fleet has never been the solution to oil security. The cure for high prices is high prices – as the great US shale oil and Canadian heavy oil booms so cogently demonstrate, among others.
And the route to global oil industry stability is peaceful commerce because virtually every regime – regardless of politics and ideology – needs all the oil revenue it can muster to fund its own rule and keep its population reasonably pacified.
Surely, there is no better case for the latter than that of Iran itself – with an economy burdened by decades of war, sanctions and mis-rule and an 80-million population that aspires to a western standard of living.
So left to its own devices, Tehran would produce 5 million barrels per day from its abundant reserves. That’s barely one-tenth of its present meager output, which is owing to Washington’s vicious sanctions against any and all customers for its oil and potential investors in modernizing and expanding it production capacity.
So if it’s not ISIS or oil, exactly why does Washington maintain the circle of 35 bases displayed in the graphic above and keep thousands of US troops and other personnel in harms’ way in the region?
Or more to the moment, why has the Donald been unable to bring the forces home as he has so often proclaimed to be his policy?
The answer, of course, is that the foreign policy apparatus of the US government is controlled by anti-Iran neocons and regime changers. We are still in Syria not to fight ISIS, which is gone, but to block Iran’s land route to its allies in Syria and Lebanon (Hezbollah); and we remain in Iraq solely to use it as a base for clandestine US and Israeli attacks on these allies and proxy forces.
These Washington instigated or conducted attacks on Iranian allies, in fact, are why there was growing pressure in the Iraqi government to demand that the US finally leave. These pressures will now become overwhelming in light of this week’s US bombing of five PMF camps (Popular Mobilization Forces) which are Shiite militias that have been integrated into the Iraqi army and which are under the command of its prime minister, and last night’s assassination of their Deputy Commander along with Soleimani.
To be sure, Iran’s choice of allies has nothing to do with America’s homeland security: None of the sovereign governments of Lebanon (where Hezbollah is the leading political party) or Syria or even Iraq (which is an ostensible US ally) have protested these confession (i.e. Shiite) based arrangements and the aid and benefits which flow from them.
That’s because the so-called Shiite crescent is a bogeyman invented by Bibi Netanyahu and is the excuse for his hysterical anti-Iranian foreign policy. The latter is not even designed to enhance Israel’s own security, but to vilify a “far enemy” that can keep his rightwing coalition glued together and himself in power.
Likewise, the US military-industrial complex’s greed and appetite for power and pelf is so voracious that it will embrace any and all missions anywhere on the planet – no matter how stupid or futile or immoral, as per the case of 19-years in Afghanistan – that keep the budgetary loot flowing.
Accordingly, the Washington apparatus conspires to keep the 35 Mideast bases in place and to trigger actions like last night’s insane assassination of Iran’s foremost military leader in order to reify the threat and to periodically stoke tensions and counterattacks that keep missions alive and the forces deployed.
Indeed, we are hard-pressed to imagine a more poignant case of the pot calling the kettle black than Washington’s claim that it had to retaliate owing to actual and expected Iranian “aggression”.
For crying out loud, Washington has been demonizing, ostracizing and economically attacking Iran for decades, and is now literally attempting to destroy its economy and society through is oil sanctions and its “maximum pressure” campaign that aims to bring the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to its top leaders in Tehran.
So do ya think a regime under a veritable existential threat might gravitate toward retaliation as an alternative to extinction?
And we needs be clear about the matter of striking back in self defense. Washington’s current sanctions campaign against Iran is so aggressive and brutal that it constitutes war by any other name.
When you surround a sovereign nation with an armada of land, sea and air-based high-tech lethality and than declare outright economic war on it with a barely-disguised aim of regime change, it must and will fight back however it can.
That’s why Secretary of State Pompeo’s statement justifying the Donald’s act of naked aggression is so hideous.
Washington is putting the entire nation of Iran at risk in the very place where God or evolution, as the case may be, formed the peninsula on which it resides; and it is doing so without any Iranian provocation against the security of the American homeland whatsoever.
But this neocon knucklehead has the gall to insist that when it comes to the actual anti-Iranian belligerents (i.e. U.S. forces) Washington has bivouacked where they have no business being at all, that not a hair on their head should come to harm.
That’s Imperial arrogance of a kind rarely seen in a world history which is littered with exactly that.
“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN.
The IRGC general had been “actively plotting” in the region to “take big action, as he described it, that would have put hundreds of lives at risk,” according to Pompeo.
Undoubtedly, things will now spiral out of control because the Iranian regime must and will retaliate for Soleimani’s death. Indeed, by vaporizing the latter, the Donald has now also vaporized any chance of actually implementing the “America First” policy upon which he ran, and which was the principal basis for his freakish elevation to the Oval Office.
The fact is, the only decent thing Obama did on the foreign policy front was the Iran Nuke Deal. Under the latter, Iran gave up a nuclear weapons capability it never had or wanted for the return of billions of escrowed dollars (which belong to Tehran in the first place), while putting itself in a straight-jacket of international inspections and controls that even Houdini could not have broken free from.
But the Donald wantonly shit-canned this arrangement, not because Iran violated either the letter or spirit of the deal, but because the neocons – led by his bubble-headed son-in-law and Bibi Netanyahu errand boy, Jared Kushner – blatantly lied to him about its alleged defects.
Indeed, the resulting Washington pivot to the current “maximum pressure” aggression against Iran is fast becoming the Empire most demented and shameful hour – even as it crystalizes like rarely before the difference between homeland defense and imperial aggression.
Under the former, not one American serviceman, contractor or civilian official would be in harms’ way because the ring of hostile bases surrounding Iran would not exist nor would Washington be waging economic warfare on what would otherwise be a prosperous 5 million barrel per day oil trade with the world.
Only empires put their citizens needlessly in harms’ way and thereby trap their leader’s into a cycle of violence which feeds upon itself.
The Donald is now yet another American president ensnared in the kind of tit-for-tat trap that is the modus operandi of Empire First.

The Rise of Freedom and the Decline of the State

George Orewell’s classic book, 1984, is about an omniscient government, led by Big Brother, that employs thought police to stomp out any one that does not toe the party line. In the novel, the government controls the narrative. It rewrites history as it sees fit and changes the meaning of words as needed. The idea that the western world is in decline and we are headed to this dystopian future is a popular idea across the political spectrum. Particularly among the right wing. The exact opposite is happening. Everyday that passes, we are becoming more free. First, a little history is required about Matt Drudge.

Matt Drudge
I go to the Drudge Report everyday. Even people who hate Matt Drudge go to his website. Why? Because he sets the tone of the news cycle with his headlines and the stories he links too. The other day he linked to a speech he gave to the National Press Club on June 2, 1998. The speech he gave was prophetic. It is also an interesting story about how he started. His father thought Matt was stuck in a rut. So he flew to Hollywood and winded up buying him a computer. Two months later, Matt began posting news stories to the internet.

I moved on to scoops from the sound stages I had heard — Jerry Seinfeld asking for a million dollars an episode — to scoop after scoop of political things I had heard from some friends back here.
I collected a few e-mail addresses of interest. People had suggested I start a mailing list, so I collected the e-mails and set up a list called The Drudge Report. One reader turned into five, then turned into 100. And faster than you could say “I never had sex with that woman,” it was 1,000, 5,000, 100,000 people! The ensuing website practically launched itself!

He made the correct conclusion:

What’s going on here? Well, clearly there is a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations. As the first guy who has made a name for himself on the Internet, I’ve been invited to more and more high-toned gatherings such as this, the last being a conference on Internet & Society and some word I couldn’t pronounce, up at Harvard a week ago. And I mention this not just to blow my own horn, but to make a point. Exalted minds — the panelists’ and the audience’s average IQ exceeds the Dow Jones — didn’t appear to have a clue what this Internet’s going to do; what we’re going to make of it, what we’re going to — what this is all going to turn into. But I have glimpses. And sometimes deep in the middle of the night I tell them to Bill Paley.

He than accurately states what the next 20 years would be:

We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

Drudge became famous when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story. MSM was sitting on the story trying to keep it quite.

It certainly changed on the night of January 17th, when Newsweek spiked, at the 11th hour, a well-researched, responsibly documented piece about the President of the United States and an obscure White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. After checking with multiple sources, I ran a story about the killing of the story. According to the Los Angeles Times, people familiar with the matter said Clinton was informed Saturday night or Sunday morning The Drudge Report had posted that Lewinsky was about to erupt. For four days I had the story exclusively, and I took a lot of heat. Everyone was afraid of it until the water broke…over at The Washington Post that Wednesday, and then everyone jumped on it.

We get the usual haters and cry babies:

Now they love it too much, and I’m still taking the heat. “He’s one man out of control,” a caller warned on talk radio in Los Angeles. “There is such a built-in level of irresponsibility in everything he does,” cried First Amendment protector Floyd Abrams in a page one Wall Street Journal piece. “The notion of a Matt Drudge cyber gossip sitting next to William Safire on Meet the Press would have been unthinkable,” smacked Watergate’s Carl Bernstein in an op-ed.

The oligarchs of the media were visibly upset by this moment. They realized this was the beginning of the end for them. In their minds, stories must be carefully vetted before public consumption. Drudge than makes his most important statement of the speech:

The Internet is going to save the news business. I — I envision a — a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. It’s freedom of — freedom of participation, absolutely realized.

This is exactly what happened. Anyone can pull out there phone and start recording. Any government bureaucrat that dares cross the line will wind up on YouTube. He closes with this:

I was walking the streets of Washington — the streets I grew up in — last night. Found myself in front of the Washington Post building again, looking up, this time not longingly. This time I laughed.
Let the future begin.

I go to CNN and other MSM sites once in a while. I find them amusing. Just like Drudge laughed back in 1998, I also laugh at MSM sites. Just low level conversation. The words “political hack” come to mind. They are all predicable. CNN is running a headline story now called “Dollar stores are everywhere. That’s a problem for poor Americans.” Imagine that! A store that sells cheap goods to lower class people! The outrage! The injustice!
The rest of the headlines are about Trump and how he is a this-ist and that-ist. Predicable. Boring. Below are the main points why freedom is the future.

Decentralization of Information
On February 19, 1942, FDR issued executive order 9066. Japanese, Italians and Germans living in the USA, citizens and non citizens, were relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps. Do you think such an event could take place in the USA again? I do not. By the time government officials got to the third house to drag people away, there would be a YouTube video exposing them. Can you imagine Drudge’s headline for this?
There are three things bureaucracies hate:
1- Being told what to do by other bureaucracies.
2- Funding cuts.
3- Bad publicity.
This would fall under point 3.
The gatekeepers of information have lost control of the narrative thanks to the internet. The doors have been blown off the hinges. You can start a website or podcast and write or talk about whatever you want. You do not need to go to a publisher or the FCC to get permission or be vetted. The Silicon valley giants have banned Alex Jones and others from their platforms. But trolls still post his show everyday on YouTube.

As I said before, internet censorship is not going to happen.
Government bureaucracies have been hand cuffed. A civil servant gets a job, does his 20 years and gets out. Bureaucrats are risk adverse. They do not want to risk their pension by winding up on a YouTube video that goes viral. The decentralization of information has been a death blow to states.

The Loss of Faith in Bureaucracies
Hegel praised bureaucracy as the “objective class”. He said they put the public good above its own. Max Weber said bureaucracies are the embodiment of “goal orientated rationality”. There is not a person left who believes this. In fact, just the opposite. Everyone hates going to the DMV. “Red tape” has a bad connotation. Even calling some one a bureaucrat is considered an insult. The welfare and warfare state are visible failures. People still clamor for both on some level. This contradiction exist in the minds of the voting public. What do you think is going to happen when the US government checks begin to bounce? What do you think is going to happen when the government demands more and more and they offer less and less? Complete loss of faith.

Conscription
Conscription has been brought to an end. Armed forces have become all voluntary. The Carter administration attempted to register young men as a preliminary toward possible conscription in a future emergency. It was met with resistance and abandoned. All future endeavors have failed.

Gun Laws
People who own guns for self protection on some level understand that police bureaucrats are not going to protect them. They are minutes away when seconds count. The ability to own guns was always symbolic. In a practical sense, owning guns has nothing to with resisting government oppression. It was always more of a deterrent. If the feds come to your house to take your guns and you resist, there are only two possibilities:
1- you are leaving in cuffs
2- you are leaving in a body bag.
The best thing to do is pull out your phone and start recording. Bad publicity!
Putting all that aside, gun laws everywhere are obsolete. They were made obsolete by 3D printers. Cody Wilson already fought this battle and won under the first and second amendment. People have the right to post gun designs for 3D printers online. The prints for gun designs have been copied everywhere and to millions of computer probably. As time goes on, 3D printers will get cheaper and cheaper. The reason people are not printing guns up in mass is because its cheaper and easier to buy guns legally and illegally at the moment.

The Idea of Decline In Western History
 Arthur Herman wrote the book, “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” He traces the idea of decline and what he calls “cultural pessimism.” This idea of decline predates the sixties counterculture by at least a hundred years.
The material life of people in the western world has improved dramatically. The amount of wars have been declining. Life expediency is up. Crime rates and murder rates have been on a steep decline over the past few decades. Amazingly, the public mood clashes sharply with this underlying reality. Especially from right wing people. We are not becoming less free. Orwell’s book 1984 will stay a fiction novel.

Advocates of Freedom Favor Impeachment

Government bureaucrats have time constraints like the rest of us. The more time they waste harassing other politicians, the less the time they have doing damage to the rest of us. Advocates of freedom want impeachment. Think of the time they would waste. I can see the posturing and grandstanding now.
The media is pushing hard for impeachment. They have become such a joke, I am not sure who is left that takes them seriously.

I hope it happens.
I did not read the 448 page Mueller report. I do not plan to read it. My time is valuable to me. Both sides dug in, even before the report was released. I do not think this has changed anyone’s mind. The presidents approval ratings remain steady.
Governments rule because the majority believe in their legitimacy. Impeachment would not only consume time, but chip away at government legitimacy for about 50% of US citizens. For this reason, I favor impeachment.

Greenspan Issues Warning

In a recent interview Mr. Greenspan issued a warning.

I think the real problem is over the long run, we’ve got this significant continued drain coming from entitlements, which are basically draining capital investment dollar for dollar

The long run will eventually become the present. The trends are clear. Even with very conservative estimates, entitlements are going to sink the federal government. The CBO makes a whole bunch of rosy assumptions about the future. Low interest rates forever and no recessions. They produce this.


He continues:

Without any major change in entitlements, entitlements are going to rise. Why? Because the population is aging. There’s no way to reverse that, and the politics of it are awful, as you well know

I am going to show you how bad the politics of it really are. Open up google search and type “how do I qualify”. The search engine begins to complete my thought based on its algorithm.

Does the public care about any of this? Let us take a look at a Gallup poll from 2011.

Let me translate the results.
‘I see there is a problem. However, don’t raise taxes and don’t cut entitlements.’
This is very simple. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Across the entire political spectrum people understand this. The voting block of the western world has schizophrenia.
When will this end? How much longer can it go on for? I don’t know. No one does. It can last a lot longer than people think it can. The movement of interest rates will play a key role. I doubt the bond bull market is dead. So don’t be surprised if another 20 years go by without an issue.
I want to make an important observation. If inflation began to pick up, the idea that the Federal Reserve would stand by idly and watch it spiral out of control is absurd to me. If the CPI has a print of 8% the Federal Reserve will act to shrink the monetary base and interest rates will rise. The US government interest expenditure will sky rocket. The bond bull market that started in 1982 will not last forever. One day it will end.
I have ideas about how it will all play out. Like any prediction about the future it is speculation. There is one thing I am certain of though. Promises will be broken in one form or another.

IRS vs Grandma

We have heard the stories. IRS using gestapo type tactics. Seize assets first, ask questions later. It has the entire power of the US government behind it. What match does Grandma have against the IRS?
Let me tell you something about Grandma. She votes. She sits at home all day watching the news. She represents the largest block of voters by far. If any politician dares mention ‘reform’ following by ‘social security’ or ‘medicare’, she will rush out to the voting booth and retaliate.
The IRS budget shrinks every year. The amount of workers gets less and less. I can depict the IRS bureaucracy in one chart.

0.5% of all returns are audited by the IRS. The total number of audits shrinks every year. This is a very good.

Does this look like the trends of a future totalitarian state? The most hated bureaucracies will be slashed first. The checks need to keep on flowing to Grandma. The bills keep pilling up. Grandma takes more and more of the federal budget.

The US government can issue more debt, no doubt. However, the interest component will grow and grow. Between Grandma and interest payments, whats left for the rest of the bureaucracies? Not much. Grandma is going to take down the entire federal bureaucracy. The last check to bounce will be to her. Read about the future here.

Envy, Taxes and the Green New Deal

Thoughts from the envious:
“I can never achieve what you have achieved. Therefore, I want to destroy you.”
A lot of chatter has entered into the national dialogue about raising taxes on the rich. Individuals know that raising taxes on the rich will not provide any benefit to their life one way or the other. The government is going to spend what it is going to spend, regardless of its revenues. Interestingly, most of these people calling for increasing taxes on the rich also believe that government debt does not matter. There is an irreconcilable  contradiction in these two thoughts. If government debt does not matter, why should the government tax anyone? Why can’t the government just keep borrowing more money to pay off old debt and initiate new spending projects. Envy plays an important part in this thinking.

Climate Change is the new WW II.
We are told the human race is facing extinction in less than 12 years unless action is taken by federal governments around the world. We heard this 12 years ago. We heard this from Bill Mckibben in his book, “The End Of Nature” written in 1989. When I glance outside my window, I take note that nature has not ended. This racket changes every few decades. Global cooling , global warming and now climate change. The arctic was also melting in 1922.

To combat climate change requires a mobilization not seen WWII. In order to pay for this, taxes have to go back to WWII levels. Never mind that the math doesn’t add up! If “we” can pay for WWII than we can pay to fight climate change!

The highest tax bracket was above 90% during WWII, the 1950’s and 1960’s.
They never talk about the lowest tax bracket.

It went from about 1% to 23% to pay for WWII. This is left out of the debate. WWII was paid for with massive tax hikes across the board, inflation, and blood.

Why I am not worried.
I am going to tell you a secret. No matter how high the income tax rates have been, the US federal government never, EVER, has collected much more than 20% of revenue in GDP. EVER!

The individual income tax collected hovers around 8% of GDP since 1944.
Total from 1974 is shown below:

There will not be any massive tax hikes that actually collect taxes. The American public does not let the government take more than 8% of GDP from them. There is not going to be any green new deal.

The video above shows the case for optimism. The students reject it once the content of the bill is revealed. It has almost 2 million views. 30 years ago this video would have not seen the light of day. The guard keepers of information would have never aired it on NBC. For less than 100$ worth of equipment, anyone can become a journalist and post videos on YouTube for millions of people to view. I am not worried about the college girl, the green new deal or massive tax hikes.