Month: August 2022

There’s mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine could have been over by this point, but key Western backers of Kiev sought to sabotage the potential for peaceful settlement through negotiations. That’s precisely what regional Ukrainian media reports concluded as early as May, soon after the UK’s Boris Johnson showed up in the capital to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time.

This is what a bombshell story in Ukrainska Pravda said at the time, but which was almost completely ignored in Western mainstream media: 

According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages. The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the UK and US] are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”

The Ukrainian media English-language report went on to emphasize that Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”.

At the time the Istanbul peace talks, which saw top officials from each warring side gather in the Turkish capital, was hailed in some corners as “the quickest way to end the war in Ukraine” – according to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s words, who was seeking to mediate between Moscow and Kiev. 

But as the invasion ordered by Putin pressed on, Britain especially was the earliest out front in making large weapons and munitions deliveries to Ukraine via military transport planes a high priority. UK press reports also took note of the ‘convenient’ timing of London going all-in hawkish on Ukraine given Prime Minister Johnson’s enduring ‘Partygate Scandal’ at home.

Again, recall the tone of Ukrainian media following the arrival of the British prime minister in Kiev (and it should be noted Johnson first leader of a G7 country to visit, coming two weeks after Russian forces withdrew from suburbs around Kiev) on April 9: 

Following the arrival of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv, a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin has become less likely.

Now, this week there’s been yet more bombshell smoking gun confirmation to emerge on the role of powerful Western countries in thwarting the potential for ceasefire between Russian and Ukrainian forces…

Ex US National Security Council official confirms citing “multiple former senior U.S. officials” that Russia & Ukraine agreed in April on peace deal framework of #Russia withdrawing to pre-war positions & #Ukraine promising not to seek #NATO membership. Deal was stopped by UK PM. https://t.co/Gsn1kXL6gI

— Ivan Katchanovski (@I_Katchanovski) August 30, 2022

Former official at the US National Security Council Fiona Hill has co-authored a lengthy essay recounting key moments in Russia’s war and Western efforts to aid Ukraine thus far. 

She let slip the following key confirmation in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)-run Foreign Affairs journal: 

According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. But as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer an option.

This disclosure and confirmation from the US side – that there was a tentative agreement on the table for Russia-Ukraine peace is a huge revelation, again which will likely go largely missing from popular mainstream media coverage.

And of course, the glaring omission in the Foreign Affairs essay is Boris Johnson’s aforementioned direct role in scuttling the potential for peaceful settlement at what looked to be a ‘finish line’ moment. Whether or not peace would have ultimately held up will never be known.

What remains clear at this point is Ukraine’s “path to NATO” seems to have already been let go as a key talking point among Ukrainian leadership. And yet, there’s no signs of any peace or ceasefire negotiations that appear to be on the horizon, also as the Kremlin looks poised to possibly expand its war aims into annexation of territory.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday announced a significant update to the Department of Justice’s policies regarding bans on political involvement amid allegations of bias at the agency.

“Although longstanding Department policy has permitted non-career appointees to attend partisan political events, e.g., fundraisers and campaign events, in their personal capacities if they participated passively and obtained prior approval, under the new policy, non-career appointees may not participate in any partisan political event in any capacity,” Garland said in a memo (pdf).

The attorney general did not make any references to any specific Department of Justice (DOJ) employees or incidents.

Garland said previous DOJ policies had “allowed non-career employees to passively attend campaign events and other partisan political events in their personal capacities on the evening of Election Day.”

“In the past, when the Department has further limited attendance at partisan political events during Presidential election years, it has allowed an exception for non-career appointees who had close family members who were running for partisan offices, or similar situations,” Garland said.

“The new policy permits no exceptions.”

But now, he declared, “non-career appointees may not attend partisan political events, even on the evening of Election Day.”

His letter comes as it was reported that a top-level FBI special agent resigned in recent days following whistleblower complaints that were documented by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). In a statement from Grassley Tuesday, he accused the now-departed FBI agent, Timothy Thibault, of having a political bias against former President Donald Trump.

Republicans and Trump also are accusing the DOJ and FBI of carrying out a politicized raid on his Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month in a bid to sway voters away from Republicans and Trump-backed candidates ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. They’ve also said the DOJ has displayed a double standard in how it handles Trump and cases involving Hunter Biden and its inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of an email server.

Other than Thibault, former top FBI official Peter Strzok – who opened the infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation – was fired by the bureau in 2018 for exchanging texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, including ones before the 2016 election that criticized Trump and his supporters while discussing plants to prevent him from becoming president.

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Read more here…

Move over Tesla, people are starting to swoon over the new Rivian models. Certainly that was the case with Wired, who reviewed the models in a new piece out yesterday, giving the vehicles a 9/10 rating. 

The result? The R1T turned out to be the highest rated EV author Matt Jancer has ever reviewed. 

Most importantly were the truck’s range claims and ability to gauge how much range was left. As the review notes “changes in temperature, weather conditions, driving style, speed, and traffic congestion can all throw a range estimator off” but “the Rivian was remarkably precise on its range calculations at all times”. 

“Real-world range during my 1,300-mile journey was strong,” he wrote. “Only significantly changing my altitude or temperature seemed to throw the range estimator into momentary confusion, which is expected and normal.”

He also talked about all of the driving modes for the truck, lauding its for its speed, acceleration and torque: “Slight movements on the pedal call forth surges of instantaneous power, and the Rivian is a fast truck. With the quad-motor Rivian packing 835 horsepower and 905 foot-pounds of torque, it can apparently reach 60 miles per hour from a standstill in three seconds.”

“Both the R1S and R1T performed competently, thanks to a NASA control room’s worth of electronic calculations and adjustments that the truck continuously makes to send the right amount of power to the right wheels at the right time,” he continued.

He called the vehicle a “home from home” his review, leading with how comfortable the interior was. He even noted that during his journey, the driver’s seat was easy to sleep in:

I never sleep well in cars, but with the driver’s seat leaned all the way back and the charging station pulsing slowly as it fed the Rivian’s batteries, I nodded off in no time. Automakers have gotten awfully good at creating synthetic leather that can be mistaken for the real thing. The R1T’s faux-leather seats could’ve fooled anyone, and even after several 12-hour days driving (and sleeping in) the Rivian, I never once felt a pang of discomfort.

Jancer also said that the interface of the touchscreen was “the best of any all-screen infotainment center I’ve seen yet”.

He continued, on the interface, stating: “It’s all the more impressive because a towing, hauling, off-roading, commuting truck like the R1T has so many more driving configurations than, say, the Polestar 2, which has a similarly industry-leading and intuitive UI, but is not as aesthetically pleasing or packed with as many driving screens and settings. The touchscreen interface is a weakness for many car companies, and it’s astonishing that they don’t look at systems like this for valuable lessons.”

He concluded gushing about the trucks: “Both Rivians score so highly here not only because they do one thing exceptionally well compared to any other EV before them, but because they do almost everything exceptionally well.”

And finally: “The amount of information that has to be communicated to the driver through the infotainment system would be daunting if it weren’t so cleanly and intuitively designed. The range and performance from tarmac to dirt track is exemplary. The plush interior and clever storage solutions round out the small details that competing trucks—and even cars—don’t offer, but should.”

You can read Wired’s full review here. 

Authored by David Gordon via The Mises Institute,

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Regnery Publishing, 2022; xx + 242 pp.

Like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Tom DiLorenzo is an economist with an extraordinary knowledge of history, and this shows to great advantage in his brilliant new book. In it, he stresses that economists who fail to grasp how the free market works often devise elaborate theories to show “market failures,” but when examined in the light of historical evidence, these theories fall to the ground.

As a prime example of this, Paul Samuelson in his Economics, for decades the most influential university textbook, indicted the market for its failure to conform to the welfare ideal of “perfect competition.” Concerning this, DiLorenzo says:

That never-to-be-realized-anywhere-on-earth state of perfect competition is one where all products in every industry are identical; they are produced by “many” business firms; everyone charges the same price; everyone has perfect information … and there is free or costless entry into every industry and every exit out of it. Several other equally unrealistic assumptions were added over the years, but these were always the main ones. This pipe dream became the new understanding of what constituted “competition,” at least among academic economists. (pp. 30–31)

Supporters of this view used the perfect competition model to demand that large firms be broken up. Couldn’t “monopolists” engage in “predatory pricing” to secure their position against competitors? DiLorenzo finds no historical evidence that such a thing has ever taken place.

In fact, to this day there is no record of any business achieving a monopoly through predatory pricing! There have nevertheless been hundreds of antitrust lawsuits based on this theory, most of them private lawsuits with one company suing a competitor for lowering its prices. Think about that: in the name of protecting the consumer, antitrust regulation allows businesses to sue to “protect” customers from their competitors’ lower prices. (p. 38)

Unfortunately, perfect competition is far from the only case of an alleged “market failure.” Critics charge that “public goods,” goods that are both nonrival and nonexcludable, cannot be adequately supplied in the free market. As an example, a guided-missile defense system protects everyone within a territory, not just customers willing to pay for it; and, given the large numbers of consumers of this good, people could in a free market “free ride,” imagining that others would bear the burden. General awareness of this phenomenon will make everyone reluctant to pay, since even those who want the good would rather not pay for it.

“Away with this flimsy theory!” says DiLorenzo: it too lacks historical support.

Another problem with the theory of the “free-rider problem” is that there are examples all around us of private individuals and groups providing myriad types of goods and services that are “nonrival” and “nonexcludable.” Americans are probably the most charitable people in the world…. The very existence of the many privately funded charities proves that the free-rider problem is not nearly as severe a problem as students of economics are led to believe…. Especially at the state and local levels of government, it is hard to think of any service provided by governments that is not also provided by private businesses (or private nonprofit organizations), usually at a fraction of the cost and with higher quality and customer service to boot. (pp. 67–69)

DiLorenzo finds a general pattern that underlies the failure of all the various attacks on the free market. In the free market, entrepreneurs have an incentive to satisfy consumers, as that is the path to profit. Government bureaucrats have no such incentive; to the contrary, they are free to seek “power and pelf,” as Murray Rothbard used to say. DiLorenzo puts this key insight in this way:

Profits and losses are the measuring rods of how good a job a business is doing with regard to serving its customers. Growing profits mean that a better and better job is being done in that regard; losses mean the opposite. No one is forced to buy anything from anyone in a free market…. In government bureaucracies, failure is success. The worse the public schools get, the more money they get in next year’s budget. The longer government fails in the War on Poverty, the more money the poverty agencies get. The longer the failed wars that are never won go on, the more enriched is the Pentagon and the military-industrial establishment. And on and on. (pp. 121–23)

If the free market is better than a centrally directed economy, we must in choosing proper policy beware that we have the genuine article, not a counterfeit. As an example, DiLorenzo first aptly brings out the fallacies of protectionism. “Chief among them is the ‘Buy American’ scam designed to make people believe that protectionism will somehow save American jobs. The truth is that protectionism may temporarily preserve some jobs in the protected industry, but always at the expense of destroying other American jobs elsewhere and plundering American consumers with higher prices” (p. 178).

But, he says, international trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) do not in fact promote free trade but subject it to government control.

Just because politicians call something a “free trade agreement” doesn’t make it one. They always choose wonderful-sounding names for their legislation, which in reality is usually the work of scores of greedy plunder-seeking lobbyists. This was the case with NAFTA, which was some 2,400 pages of bureaucratic regulation and central planning of the trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico and the rest of the world. It contained nine hundred pages of tariffs, the opposite of free trade. (pp. 181–82)

As mentioned above, DiLorenzo has a wide knowledge of history, and this he puts to exemplary use in his discussion of the federal income tax, which, he aptly reminds us, the great Old Right author Frank Chodorov called “the root of all evil.” However much we hate to pay taxes, Chodorov’s phrase may seem exaggerated, but, DiLorenzo reminds us, he had a point.

Americans were literally turned into slaves of the state, said Chodorov, for what the government was now saying to its citizens was: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own. We have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours. We will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, but not your right … The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of the government, and you have nothing to say about it.” In other words, the income tax was the biggest attack on the principle of private property in American history. (p. 163)

Relying on the great book of Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism, which he calls “the best book ever written about American federalism” (p. 165), DiLorenzo says that the federal income tax bypassed the authority of the states over their citizens. Further, “it essentially turned most state governments into puppets of the ‘federal’ government once the federal government had enough funds with which to bribe or threaten the states to bend to its will by either granting or withholding ‘aid to the states’” (p. 165).

Tom DiLorenzo’s masterful book brings out in unsurpassed fashion that the free market rests on mutually beneficial exchange. He quotes Adam Smith: “Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind proposes to do this: Give me that which I want, and you shall have that which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of” (p. 5). (Smith, by the way, here alludes to the Latin do ut des, “I give that you may give,” important in the Roman religion and civil law.). The book is, as David Stockman says, a worthy successor to Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

I fail to see how this can possibly be legal but few governments give a damn about legalities these days…

Tackling homelessness in L.A. Image from video below

60,000 Homeless, 20,000 Hotel Vacancies 

Activists estimate there are about 60,000 homeless in LA with about 20,000 nightly vacant rooms.

On July 21, L.A. city attorney Michael Feuer reported that union activists from Unite Here Local 11 collected enough signatures to demand the City take some action on homelessness. 

The LA City council rejected direct action on August 5th by an 11-1 margin with one economically illiterate woke council member voting in favor. 

Voters now get to decide on March 5, 2024.

Here is a link where you can download the two-pronged Proposed Ordinance on utilizing vacant hotel rooms and on replacing space taken by new hotels.

The following points are direct quotes from the proposed ordinance.

Mandate on Housing the Homeless 

• Each Hotel shall communicate to the Department or its designee, in a form that the Department prescribes, by 2:00 p.m. each day the number of available rooms at the Hotel for that night.

• The Department shall develop a program for paying a Fair Market Rate, or such other rate as the Department may negotiate with a Hotel, for vacant hotel Guest Rooms on behalf of Unhoused Individuals or Families. 

• It shall be unlawful to refuse to provide lodging to an individual or family seeking accommodations using the program.

• Civil penalties of $500 for each day that each individual or family was unlawfully denied lodging

In addition to accepting homeless the ordinance blames hotels for causing homelessness and mandates replacement housing.

Attempt to Stop More Hotel Building

• The City of Los Angeles has seen a massive increase in new hotel development in recent years at the same time as the number of people experiencing homelessness has skyrocketed and the City’s affordable-housing crisis has grown. Hotels are frequently proposed for land that is equally suitable for housing development and thus crowd out sites that could be used to help alleviate the City’s need for affordable housing.

• The purpose of this Section is to enhance the public welfare by establishing policies which require hotel development projects to replace demolished or converted housing with housing affordable to households of Extremely Low, Very Low, Low, and Moderate Incomes, help meet the City’s regional share of housing needs.

• A proposed Hotel Development Project shall be required to include the replacement, on a one-for-one basis, in the form of new construction of Residential Dwelling Units or acquisition and rehabilitation of existing market-rate Residential Dwelling Units, of each Residential Dwelling Unit on the Hotel Development Project parcel or parcels that is or will be Converted or Demolished as a result of the Hotel Development Project and each such Residential Dwelling Unit that was Converted or 9 Demolished during the five-year period immediately preceding the Applicant’s application for First Approval.

L.A. City Council Rejects Proposal Forcing Hotels to House the Homeless

LAMag reports L.A. City Council Rejects Proposal Forcing Hotels to House the Homeless

Councilman Joe Buscaino told KTLA in a report that aired Thursday night ahead of the vote that he thought the plan was “the dumbest measure” he’s seen in his decade on the City Council. He described the idea as “the worst of all options” in L.A.’s struggle to solve the homeless crisis, only exacerbated by the pandemic.

“It baffles me that Unite Here, which claims to protect its members, is leading this measure that would very likely jeopardize worker safety,” Heather Rozman, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of Los Angeles, in a statement Friday morning. “We’re relieved that the council saw this for the political stunt that it is and call on them to instead pursue long-term solutions to homelessness that actually work.”

Should Vacant Hotels in Los Angeles House the Homeless?

CNN asks Should Vacant Hotels in Los Angeles House the Homeless?

That’s the wrong question. Even the title is wrong. CNN left out the word “forced” or “forcing”. 

Here are the right questions.

Questions

• Would you want your 12-year-old daughter riding an elevator with a smelly, emotionally-deranged drug addict? 

• If you were a hotel owner, would you be fearful of losing business due to hoards of smelly, emotionally-deranged drug addicts running about?

• If you were a hotel owner, would you be fearful of property destruction by someone mentally unstable?

Those are good questions, but here is a better one: How the hell can this ordinance possibly be legal?

The key question is likely moot because I believe the ordinance will not pass. Then again, we are talking California where woke madness is the norm. 

So, we cannot be certain until March 5, 2024.

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California power grid officials have a sobering warning this week, telling customers to brace for potential blackouts as the state’s grid faces capacity constraints over the Labor Day weekend.

“The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights. 

“Lowering electricity use during that time will ease strain on the system, and prevent more drastic measures, including rotating power outages,” California Independent System Operator (CAISO) told customers. 

California’s grid is projected to exceed 48,000 megawatts next Monday, the highest of the year, as a menacing heatwave will send temperatures across the state 10-20 degrees above normal through next Tuesday. 

“If weather or grid conditions worsen, the ISO may issue a series of emergency notifications to access additional resources and prepare market participants and the public for potential energy shortages and the need to conserve,” California’s grid operator warned. 

The fact that CAISO has to ask customers not to charge their EVs during the current heatwave implies the grid is fragile. So much for the green energy transition to unreliable renewable solar and wind. A surge in EV charging at home could bring down parts of the state’s grid. 

So how is the progressive state hellbent on ridding fossil fuel generation from the grid, expected with unreliable solar and wind going to support all the new EVs after lawmakers passed a new measure last week to eliminate all gas-powered vehicles by 2035?

Nuclear is the only answer to decarbonizing a power grid with sustainable power generation. Asia gets it. 

Grid operators are concerned by the increasing use of air conditioners, and as the evening rolls around, people plug in their EVs to charge, increasing power demand as supply constraints suggest the state will have years of a chaotic grid, similar to a third world country.