Month: January 2023

Authored by Vijay Jayaraj via RealClearEnergy.org,

It is easy for anyone to say that they are against fossil fuels. Opposition to coal, oil and natural gas is fashionable and will prompt heads to nod and even hands to applaud in most places. 

But are people aware of the extent to which their lives are dependent on fossil fuels? Do they know that more than 90 percent of things used in their everyday lives are derived from fossil fuels?

From your toothbrush to your car tire, a majority of the things you use today has been made possible because of fossil fuels. Shoes, refrigerators, washing machines, coffee makers, furniture, pens, eating utensils, eyeglasses, commodes, medical gear, camping equipment, and the list goes on and on. 

Consider the computer or the phone from which you are reading this article. They are made of glass, metal, plastic, lithium and silicon – all of which require fossil fuels to mine, process or manufacture. While some are chemical derivatives of fossil fuels, all depend one way or another on their combustion for electricity generation, process heat or transportation. 

You wouldn’t have the iPhone, Android or MacBook without fossil fuels. Imagine the irony of typing out “end oil” from a phone that is made from fossil fuels! Or supporting climate activism by relaying video that was recorded with a camera made from fossil fuels! Of course, this sort of irony is displayed regularly and missed constantly.

In short, the most fundamental necessities – and the most cherished conveniences – of daily life are products dependent on the use of fossil fuels.

Electricity and Transportation

The industrial era was a time of great change, and the use of fossil fuels played a big part in that. From the early 1800s to the mid-1900s, coal was the primary fuel source for industry and transportation. Oil and natural gas became much more prominent in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Cars, trucks, planes, ships, and trains use oil. If you go electric, the electricity for the vehicle is again predominantly generated from coal or gas. Even wind, solar, nuclear and hydro power are dependent on manufacturing and mining processes reliant on fossil fuels. If you intend to start a new life on the planet Mars or the moon, the rockets you use need fossil fuels. 

While the use of fossil fuels as a source for electricity generation and transportation fuel has been discussed widely, their role in the manufacturing and farming sectors is seldom highlighted.

Cement, Steel, and Plastic

Cement, steel, and plastic are essential materials that are used in the construction, transportation and manufacturing industries, playing a key role in the development of modern civilization.

Being the primary ingredient of concrete, cement is the most frequently used construction material in the 21st century. It is used in the construction of homes, roads, bridges, commercial buildings and other infrastructure. The manufacture of cement is one of the most energy intensive processes, requiring the mining of limestone and other minerals that are eventually heated in kilns at temperatures of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another common construction material is steel, which is preferred for its immense strength compared to its volume and weight – a quality desirable for the structural frameworks of tall buildings, industrial facilities and bridges. Steel is also used in the reinforced concrete of roads and in the manufacture of vehicles, machinery, tools and appliances. 

Paints, resins, fiberglass, coatings, varnishes, adhesives, and thousands of other materials are all made from fossil fuels. It is likely the clothing that you are wearing now was made using fossil fuels. In fact, most carpets, fabrics, coatings, cushions, upholstery, drapes, spandex and other textiles are made with the help of fossil fuels.   

Fossil fuels are used as raw materials in the production of many chemicals and plastics. Lightweight, durable and versatile, plastics are used in a wide range of products, from packaging and consumer goods to automotive parts and medical devices. 

Food Production

Fertilizers – produced with the help of fossil fuels – replenish the soil with essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, improving soil structure and fertility. Fertilizers have played a crucial role in meeting the global food demand by increasing crop yields by as much as 50 percent.  

According to OurWorldInData, which compiles information from the United Nations and World Bank, “From 1961 to 2014, global cereal production has increased by 280 percent. If we compare this increase to that of total population (which increased by only 136 percent over the same period), we see that global cereal production has grown at a much faster rate than the population.”

Not only do fossil fuels enable us to meet the bare necessities our everyday lives, but they are also the reason for the worldwide improvement in the quality of life since the 1950s. 

The campaign against fossil fuels focuses on their use in the generation of electricity. However, every part of our material life is made better by fossil fuel derivates. They help us live more efficiently, safely and in an environmentally friendly way, reducing poverty and helping billions enjoy decent and safe lives.

Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

The unusual relationship between new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., saw another twist Monday after the New York Times quoted McCarthy as pledging his undying loyalty to the second-term congresswoman.

“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy told a friend in a private conversation reported by the Times. “I will always take care of her.”

Frightening. Kevin McCarthy on Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her.” (New York Times) pic.twitter.com/SDfnk7BioZ

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) January 23, 2023

Photos of the two becoming unusually close on the House floor began to surface during the votes for House speaker in early January.

Greene, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, surprised many by breaking rank with other conservatives to voice her staunch support of the centrist and often ineffectual McCarthy.

She quickly lashed out at his detractors after the GOP secured a slimmer-than-expected House majority in the November midterm election.

“I want to tell you how shortsighted and ridiculous that is,” Greene said in November Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

“It is pathetic, the people that are running out saying it’s his fault,” she continued. “No, that is a lazy, pathetic, wimpy, easy mindset. They just want one thing and then they want to carry on without doing the hard work—the real changes in the Republican Party and the way we fight the fight.”

Ostensibly in return for her loyalty, McCarthy promptly reinstated Greene’s committee assignments, which had been revoked in an (at the time) unprecedented partisan move by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Her appointment to the House Homeland Security and Oversight committees roiled leftists, who claimed she was unqualified for the plum posts.

Asked if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene should be on Homeland Security and Oversight Committees after previously embracing 9/11 conspiracy theories, GOP Rep. McCaul says, “She has matured, I think. She realizes she doesn’t know everything.” https://t.co/nvA1rMizYa pic.twitter.com/b6RXExFAPZ

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 22, 2023

According to the Times, McCarthy also “spent hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.”

LOVE, REPUBLICAN STYLE?

It remained unclear, despite speculation, whether there was a romantic component to the relationship.

Greene was recently divorced amid allegations of infidelity. McCarthy’s marital situation is also the subject of intrigue.

Although he and his wife, Judy, have been together since 1992 and have two adult children, he was foisted into the center of speculation after then-Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., hinted that McCarthy might be aware of drug-fueled orgies involving Republican members of the Swamp.

McCarthy subsequently went on record saying he had “lost his trust” in Cawthorn.

The nature of McCarthy’s relationship with his former landlord, RINO pollster Frank Luntz, who is himself a close friend of Hunter Biden, also raised questions about whether McCarthy’s unconventional lifestyle might conflict with his leadership ability.

McCarthy was previously accused of conducting an affair with former Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., who bears a striking ressemblance to Greene.

Those allegations, based on an anonymous Wikipedia entry, were blamed for derailing an earlier bid for speaker in 2015 after the Freedom Caucus forced the ouster of weepy-eyed ex-Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.

After McCarthy dropped out, members settled instead on failed vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, R-Mich.

MARRIED TO THE SWAMP?

Some have posited an alternative—although no less unseemly—theory to explain Greene’s flirtation with the D.C. Establishment, citing a personnel change as the driving force.

A highly placed conservative GOP staffer on the Hill, speaking on the condition of anonomity, told Headline USA that a shift in Greene’s staff “appears to have heavily influenced her shift toward the swamp,” especially when her current chief of staff, Ed Buckham, assumed the reins.

Buckham, a longtime Washington insider, was once chief of staff to Majority Whip Tom Delay before forming a K Street lobbying firm called Alexander Strategy Group. He was forced to close the firm and left the lobbying world in the aftermath of the poltical corruption prosecution of his close associate Jack Abramoff until he resurfaced to lead Greene’s staff.

Yet, some, including McCarthy, have praised the mollifying effect that Greene’s new alliances have had in helping bring her into the mainstream after a bumpy first term.

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy explained in a brief interview for the Times article.

“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over,” he added. “She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”

*  *  *

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

We all knew it was coming; the establishment media never seems to miss a trick when it comes to making a tragic death into a race conflict.  The exploitation of the murdered as a means to gain social influence is a decidedly leftist endeavor.  You might even start to think that they want to trigger rioting across the country based on false premises.  But that would be crazy, right?  

Mobs directed by disinformation are a useful weapon for national division.  Mainstream media outlets seem to be searching intensely for any new act of police brutality, any new mass shooting, any crime that might fit the bill for their ongoing narrative that America is a “white supremacist nation” that needs to be torn down.  Unfortunately for them, the majority of these events in recent months have not involved white police officers, straight white conservative shooters, or any person the fits the woke narrative.  They have been left grasping at straws.

So, it would appear that the spin doctors are changing strategies.  If they can’t find a race based killing involving a minority and white people, they will simply blame every act of violence on systemic racism anyway. 

CNN has recently targeted the Tyre Nichols beating and subsequent death at the hands of five Memphis police officers as its test case for linking all law enforcement brutality to racism.  The problem for them is that Tyre Nichols is black, and so were all the officers involved.

Don’t worry, though, CNN has an answer for that.  The platform published an opinion piece this week from Van Jones, arguing that even though all five LEOs involved in the death of Nichols were black, the event can still be blamed on anti-black culture.  

How is this possible?  Van Jones leaps into a bizarre display of mental gymnastics and baseless pseudo-psychology, building a tale of black cops brainwashed into “self hatred” by white supremacy and convinced to kill black victims.  You see, it’s not the fault of the cops per se, it’s the fault of the “system” that has made them into weapons of an anti-black society.  Individual responsibility no longer applies when the cops involved are not white.  

What evidence does Van Jones have to back this argument?  He has none, but systemic racism is a vaporous and ambiguous condition based on feelings and fears rather than facts; it is an open ended villain that leftists can apply to almost any situation.  The root foundation of Jones’ argument is best clarified by the claim he makes here:

“At the end of the day, it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence. It’s hard to imagine five cops of any color beating a White person to death under similar circumstances. And it is almost impossible to imagine five Black cops giving a White arrestee the kind of beat-down that Nichols allegedly received.”

In other words, if the victim of police violence is a minority, it was a race based crime regardless of circumstances.  If the victim is white, it is not a race based crime.  The assertion here is that only police brutality against minorities matters; or, that only police brutality against minorities is common. 

Van Jones chooses his words carefully (and dishonestly) in this statement, because he is well aware that there have been many white victims of minority police officers in the past; just not many recorded instances of five black cops killing a white person in the same manner as Tyre Nichols. 

For example, in 2017 a black officer from Minneapolis, Mohamed Noor, fatally shot an unarmed white woman after she called 911 to report a possible rape happening behind her home.  He was later sentenced in 2021 to only five years in prison — the maximum allowed for manslaughter, after his murder conviction was overturned.  With good behavior Noor could be released in half the time.  Does this sound like something that would occur in a country dominated by white supremacy?

At no point did the media suggest that this was a crime based on racism on the part of the black officer.  This is Van Jones’ concept of no white victims of racism in action, just not in the way he implies.  Compared to the death of George Floyd and now Tyre Nichols, the media barely reported on the murder or Noor’s sentencing.  This leads us to a much more important question than any question CNN posits:  What if it’s really corporate media journalists that are racist?  And, are they projecting their racism on the rest of us? 

The vast majority of tragedies and crimes in the US have nothing to do with racism, and systemic racism doesn’t exist in our nation.  Leftist journalists are the only people talking about it because they are among the few zealots obsessed with skin color and diversity politics.  They focus on race because they see it as advantageous, and they see minorities as people to be conned and used for their political ends.   

The theory presented by Van Jones should be insulting to minorities everywhere, because it is based on the notion that minorities cannot think for themselves and are not responsible for themselves.  If five black cops can be hypnotized by white supremacy into killing other black people against their “better natures”, then what possible “agency” do any black people have?  The journalists at CNN and other leftist outlets paint a vision of an America in which minorities are zombies who do nothing more than the bidding of a racist phantom that controls every aspect of their behavior.  All while those same journalists try to influence minorities into mob violence with false claims.  

Is anything more racist than that kind of agenda?           

Authored by Joakim Book via The Brownstone Institute,

The West can never again go totalitarian. 

We saw it happen generations ago. We fought two of humanity’s most destructive wars and faced the horror of industrial-scale extermination. Never again, said the world’s peoples in the late 1940s, and they began the difficult task of uncovering all that had been done, all that had gone wrong. 

The mass graves, the German and Soviet labor camps, the Japanese massacres in the Far East, America’s internment camps, the secret police and the mutilations, the ever-present threat of violence hanging over every member of society. We saw the personality cults around Hitler or Stalin for what they were, the blatant ideologies for what they had resulted in. 

When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, and with it the remains of the Evil Empire that had put it there, we discovered more horror. The archives of East Germany and the Kremlin showed that informants were everywhere happily giving up information – real or invented – on their fellow humans. We found more bodies. We learned that under enough fear and pressure, human life wasn’t worth anything. When push came to violent shove, bonds of family and community meant nothing. 

The error of this terrifying history is to think that this was a problem of “the other,” someone far away who is nothing like us. Asks Thorsteinn Siglaugsson in a recent article: ”How do you find your inner Nazi? And how do you get him under control? Most people would have participated in the atrocities of their time, had they been put in that position – or at least sat by and allowed them to happen.”

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s oft used and highly relevant phrase says that the line between good and evil passes “right through every human heart.” The passage goes on, and Solzhenitsyn digs even deeper into the most horrifying self-reflection a man can reach: the line of good and evil goes through all human hearts, mine included, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

It oscillates. What is evil isn’t always an identifiable thing, a clear enemy, but a blurry line that moves and becomes clear only in hindsight. History is hard like that. It’s us, but in the past, doing things we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing. Yet millions of our prior selves did. Are we really confident enough that with the right external circumstances “we” wouldn’t once again?

We received a small-scale test with the upheaval of societies in the last three years. Many of us wonder both what went wrong in the Covid saga and how the future will look upon the events that took place. Are the anti-vaxxers the unsung heroes who stood up against unjust tyranny, or the new 9/11-truthers nobody really cares about? Are the lockdowners wise lifesavers who hadn’t yet perfected a tool that the future takes for granted as obvious and necessary? Only on a long enough historic timeline will we know. 

Take the following segment from Michael Malice’s The While Pill: A Tale of Good And Evil, a newly released and much-needed account of the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism: 

“Even if the man on the street felt something wasn’t quite adding up, it was very difficult for him to get the full picture – especially in a culture where questioning authority could have deadly consequences for oneself and one’s entire family. The newspapers were filled with boasts about enormous achievements of production and the success of heroic ‘Stakhanovite’ workers, yet there were no clothes in the stores and no food on the shelves.”

Even to the regular Joe (or Vladimir…), something wasn’t adding up: 

“Sure the papers might make mistakes or have a bias, but they couldn’t realistically be filled with lies, week after week, year after year. … Only crazy people would think that there was a conspiracy to control the news and what information reached the public. The only possible logical alternative was that someone must have been keeping the productive socialist bounty from reaching the people. It had to be the wreckers.”

The echo of 2020-22 intrudes, too close for comfort. For is not this precisely what happened to us?

In the early days of Covid, the newspapers were filled first with outrageous disaster porn and fear-mongering and later with “boasts about enormous achievements of production and the success of heroic [Big Pharma] workers,” all the while there were “no clothes in the stores and no food on the shelves.” Everyone took outlandish personal actions, yet the catastrophic numbers shot higher and higher.

Clearly, somebody must have been ruining the good men’s neatly laid plans, those who chanted messianic faith in “two weeks to flatten the curve.” They told us what to do; it got worse than they said; somebody must be wrecking the process. 

I did my pandemic part, many people reasoned: I masked and desanitized and kept my distance and vaxxed myself over and over to Fauci’s delight. Yet, the pathogen kept spreading and people kept dying and I even got sick, again and again – something the rulers repeatedly said was impossible. And then it wasn’t, which they said was always going to happen. 

It felt scripted, of course. When I for Brownstone reviewed Mattias Desmet’s great book on totalitarianism last summer, I wrote that toying with objective truth is precisely what totalitarian regimes do:

“The collective hums together and upholds the rules, no matter how insane or ineffective at achieving their supposed aim. Totalitarianism is the blurring of fact and fiction, yet with an aggressive intolerance for diverging opinions. One must toe the line.”

It matters not whether the charge holds water or has logic on its side; it just has to stick, by endless repetition if need be. Like all propaganda. In the last few years surely, there must have been some evil group of detractors undermining the Party’s good efforts. Those fifthly pandemic wreckers, the anti-vaxxers! They are nothing; less than nothing, and it’s OK to blame them!

Replace “wreckers” with anti-vaxxers, the media’s boasts of Soviet production with today’s establishment elite’s never-ending yapping about vaccine efficacy or lockdown effects or responsible monetary policy, and Malice’s distant history feels much closer to our recently lived-through present. 

We might still have food on the shelves — though of worse quality and at much higher prices. We might still have the ability to move and work and travel, but heavily circumscribed, always at risk of canceling and always with papers showing the number of needles in your arm, or your scarred heart tissue. Nobody is torturing us (yet anyway) and for the most part we have some semblance of rights and freedoms remaining. 

But we’re closer to that horrific totalitarian world today than we were, say five years ago. Or perhaps it was just always there, calmly waiting to be unleashed like Solzhenitsyn implied. 

What Malice’s book so expertly chronicles is that elites can be wrong. Wrong in facts, wrong in morals. It is possible that whole sways of intellectuals, scientists, journalists, professionals, and civil servants can be deceived and deluded, for decades stubbornly refuse to admit their error. 

The 1930s US intelligentsia’s view of Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union is one such episode. The warmongering early 2000s in Britain and the US, though far from unopposed by the public, is another. 

Nothing shows this better than my own field of economics, riddled with wrong calls and embarrassing prediction errors. The Great Moderation of stable growth, low inflation and unemployment, circa 1990 to 2007, is another collective bout of madness and mistaken optimism.

Four years before the Great Recession began, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas gave a presidential address to the American Economics Association saying that macroeconomics had succeeded: “its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.” In the summer of 2008, already nine months into the recession and merely weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Olivier Blanchard, then at the IMF, published “The State of Macro is Good.”

The year 2020 marked the beginning of just another such episode of collective insanity. It will take some time and soul-searching before we can once again view the errors of our time the way we now view the “adulation of Stalin’s professed ideology,” or laugh at them like we do the crooks in The Big Short. 

But Malice’s message is ultimately optimistic. “I’m not saying nothing bad ever happens,” he confesses, but that evil isn’t almighty, doesn’t have to win. It might take a while, but even for the West’s most malevolent elements, the “costs are just going to be too much for them to bear – and they’re going to fold.” 

One day, a future chronicler might look upon the Covid era with the same deep incredulity that Malice’s readers look upon the Soviet Union. 

Fatal accidents account for a significant number of deaths in the U.S. every year. For example, nearly 43,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in 2021.

However, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu explains below, without the right context, it can be difficult to properly interpret these figures.

To help you understand your chances, we’ve compiled data from the National Safety Council, and visualized the lifetime odds of dying from various accidents.

Data and Methodology

The lifetime odds presented in this graphic were estimated by dividing the one-year odds of dying by the life expectancy of a person born in 2020 (77 years).

Additionally, these numbers are based on data from the U.S., and likely differ in other countries.

For comparison’s sake, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,000,000. In other words, you are 4000x more likely to die by a lightning strike over your lifetime than to win the Powerball lottery.

Continue reading below for further context on some of these accidents.

Motor Vehicle Accidents

Motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of accidental deaths in the U.S., with a 1 in 101 chance of dying. This is quite a common way of dying, especially when compared to something like bee stings (1 in 57,825).

Unfortunately, a major cause of vehicle deaths is impaired driving. The CDC reports that 32 Americans are killed every day in crashes involving alcohol, which equates to one death every 45 minutes.

For further context, consider this: 30% of all traffic-related deaths in 2020 involved alcohol-impaired drivers.

Drowning

The odds of drowning in a swimming pool (1 in 5,782) are significantly higher than those of drowning in general (1 in 10,386). According to the CDC, there are 4,000 fatal drownings every year, which works out to 11 deaths per day.

Drowning also happens to be a leading cause of death for children. It is the leading cause for kids aged 1-4, and second highest cause for kids aged 5-14.

A rather surprising fact about drowning is that 80% of fatalities are male. This has been attributed to higher rates of alcohol use and risk-taking behaviors.

Accidental Firearm Discharge

Lastly, let’s look at accidental firearm deaths, which have lifetime odds of 1 in 7,998. That’s higher than the odds of drowning (general), as well as dying in an airplane accident.

This shouldn’t come as a major surprise, since the U.S. has the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. More importantly, these odds highlight the importance of properly securing one’s firearms, as well as learning safe handling practices.

As a percentage of total gun-related deaths (45,222 in 2020), accidental shootings represent a tiny 1%. The two leading causes are suicide (54%) and homicide (43%).

Interested in learning more about death? Revisit one of our most popular posts of all time: Visualizing the History of Pandemics.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

The Conference Board – a nonprofit think tank that delivers cutting edge research – recently published its latest Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States.  The findings were a giant bummer.  In December, the LEI dropped for the tenth consecutive month.

The LEI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, consolidates various measures of economic activity, including credit, interest rate spreads, consumer expectations, building permits, new orders of goods and materials, and several other items, to assess which way the economic winds are blowing.  Over the past six months, the LEI has fallen by 4.2 percent.  This is the fastest six-month decline since the great coronavirus panic.

This week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis provided its advance estimate of Q4 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).  For the final quarter of 2022, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent.

How could it be that GDP is expanding while the LEI is contracting?

The most probable answer we can think of is the massive expansion of consumer debt.  For example, credit card balances hit a new record of $866 billion during Q3 2022.  That marks a year-over-year increase of 19 percent.

Americans are borrowing from their future to make ends meet today.  This may give GDP the appearance that it’s expanding.  But, in reality, the GDP expansion is merely a measurement of the rate that consumers are going broke.

The fact is the U.S. economy is traversing headlong into a recession at the worst possible time.  We expect things will get especially ugly, as consumers are operating in a world of chaos…

World of Chaos

In a centrally planned economy, decisions are not made between individuals through free market mechanisms.  Instead, they’re made by politicians and bureaucrats through policies of mass market intervention.

The elites pass down their edicts.  Thou shall not use gas burning stoves, for example.  Or though shall burn corn in their gas tank.

The central planners, many of which are unelected administrators, force the decrees upon the populace.  Programs, forms, penalties, and whatever else are imposed.  Pounds of flesh must be exacted at every turn.

The real tragedy, however, the very thing that makes ultra-mega governments possible, is the monopoly on the control and issuance of money that’s granted to central bankers.  Without the Federal Reserve, the central bank to the U.S. government, and its seemingly endless supply of fake money, it would be impossible for Washington to cast its wide nets across the entire planet.

Feeding the Leviathan is only a small part of what the Fed does.  Through its control of the money supply the Fed causes a world of chaos to storm through the economy and financial markets.  When the money supply is inflated, a false demand is signaled.  Businesses and individuals change their behavior to exploit the apparent demand.

Then, when the money supply is contracted, and the rug is yanked out from under the false demand, disaster strikes.  Businesses go bankrupts.  People lose their jobs.  Stocks and real estate prices crash.

In short, the Fed’s money games make it exceedingly impossible for a wage earner to save, invest, and build real wealth.  The uncertainty this provokes turns regular wage earners into speculators and gamblers.  Here’s why…

Uncertainty and Instability

In a centrally planned economy, like America and most countries today, where people are compelled by legal tender laws to use fiat money, people must work, save, and invest with the recognition that the government will continue to arbitrarily change the rules.  The Fed may command ultra-low interest rates one year.  The next year it’s jacking them up by hundreds of basis points.

We know that central planners change course at whim and often for political reasons.  Where did the most campaign contributions come from?  Their decisions can be downright suicidal.

The 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, for instance, turned a routine recession into the Great Depression.  Likewise, Fed tightening of monetary policy in 1987 drove interest rates up and triggered a massive stock market crash.

The great consumer price inflation of 2021 into the present marked the highest rate of inflation in 40 years.  And now it’s providing an instructive lesson to individuals and organizations about the uncertainty and instability that’s inherent to centrally planned economies.

As the Fed hikes rates and tightens its balance sheet in the face of a recession, many overleveraged businesses and individuals find themselves wholly unprepared for the central planner’s new set of rules.  Decisions were made in 2021 under a framework that’s radically different today.

Consider real estate investors.  Over the last decade, as interest rates were artificially suppressed by the Fed, their businesses flourished.  They could easily borrow money to buy properties to refurbish and resell at a profit.

But then raging consumer price inflation, which was manufactured by the Fed in the first place, became politically indefensible.  So, the Fed had to move to rein it in by restricting the money supply.  This pushed interest rates relatively higher and undermined the real estate market.

Investors who had planned for mortgage rates at 3 percent are being absolutely destroyed by mortgage rates at 6 percent.  Suddenly their investments don’t pencil out.  Real estate agents and mortgage brokers may find the years ahead to be extraordinarily challenging.

Are You the Collateral Damage of Central Planners?

When the Fed inflates the money supply it also inflates asset prices, including stocks, bonds, and real estate.  When it then yanks the rug, and contracts the money supply, businesses and investors face big losses.  And employees become collateral damage.

According to tech job tracker layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 200,000 technology jobs lost since the start of last year.  What’s more, in 2023 alone, not even one month into the New Year, technology companies have laid off over 67,000 employees.  What’s going on?

Right now, technology companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, are discovering that the world they knew and loved over the last decade no longer exists.  As the supply of money has tightened, and the flow of speculative money into technology stocks has dried up, these companies have learned they have far too many employees who produce far too little value.

Coding senseless applications and widgets may be a viable job when there’s a seemingly endless supply of the Fed’s cheap credit being pumped into financial markets.  Take the money away, however, and those jobs are incapable of standing on their own two feet.

The point is in a centrally planned economy people are continually misled about how they should go about working, saving, and investing for the future.

Just asked the former code cruncher who was RIFed after two decades of Googling all day.  They thought they were set for life.

Instead, whether they know it or not, they’re the collateral damage of central planners.  Are you the collateral damage of central planners too?

*  *  *

You may not know it.  But you could unwittingly be wiped out be the schemes and designs of central planners.  One way to avoid becoming their collateral damage is to significantly increase your wealth.  The decks stacked against you.  But it can be done.  If you’re interested in learning how, take a look at my Financial First Aid Kit.  Inside, you’ll find everything you need to know to prosper and protect your privacy as the global economy slips into a worldwide depression.

The famous Pentagon and US government-linked think tank RAND Corporation has finally attempted to inject some rare realism into the Washington establishment’s thinking and planning regarding the Ukraine war. So far throughout eleven months of conflict which remains largely stalemated, though the last few days have seen Russian military momentum and advance grow in the Bakhmut offensive, US and NATO officials have unhesitatingly and enthusiastically cheered on every major escalation of the West’s involvement.

But the new 32-page RAND document has sounded the alarm over the dangers of this approach, which is unusual given the think tank is notorious for being the hawkish academic arm of the military-industrial complex. This was especially the case in the Vietnam war era, when RAND became infamous for its fueling the policy behind various insurgency and counterinsurgency fiascos in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

RAND now argues that in Ukraine “US interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict,” and that “costs and risks of a long war…outweigh the possible benefits.”

The policy document lays out that allowing the conflict extend longer, which we should note the Biden administration has almost guaranteed with its decision this past week to supply advanced battle tanks, is itself a severe danger.

The abstract on the introductory page reads as follows: 

The authors argue that, in addition to minimizing the risks of major escalation, U.S. interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict. The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States. Although Washington cannot by itself determine the war’s duration, it can take steps that make an eventual negotiated end to the conflict more likely.

Ultimately the study (pdf) explains why from a strategic point of view based on real US interests, there’s little benefit for Washington in rolling back Russia’s control of territory in east; however, there remains immense risk and high costs that would be attached to it.

The study additionally concludes of ongoing efforts to punish Russia economically and militarily that
“further incremental weakening [of Russia] is arguably no longer as significant a benefit for US interests.” Alternately it warns that the impact on energy markets and food in the at-all-costs drive of “keeping the Ukrainian state economically solvent” may not be worth it, given these costs will only “multiply over time.”

Similar to some recent media reports based on the reluctant acknowledgement of US officials, RAND also points out that continuing NATO military aid to Ukraine “could also become unsustainable after a certain period,” given the likelihood that Russia may “reverse Ukrainian battlefield gains.”

Another crucial admission in the document is that the Ukraine war distracts and wastes precious defense resources away from another important theatre of operations: China and east Asia. It states:

Beyond the potential for Russian gains and the economic consequences for Ukraine, Europe, and the world, a long war would also have on sequences for U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. ability to focus on its other global priorities —particularly, competition with China— will remain constrained as long as the war is absorbing senior policymakers’ time and U.S. military resources.

And although Russia will be more dependent on China regardless of when the war ends, Washington does have a long-term interest in ensuring that Moscow does not become completely subordinated to Beijing. A longer war that increases Russia’s dependence could provide China advantages in its competition with the United States.

Thus open-ended and deepened Pentagon involvement in helping Ukraine to push back Russia ultimately benefits Beijing. 

But at this point, the authors ask, what can be done? RAND recommends the following course to be put into action immediately: 

A dramatic, overnight shift in U.S. policy is politically impossible—both domestically and with allies—and would be unwise in any case. But developing these instruments now and socializing them with Ukraine and with U.S. allies might help catalyze the eventual start of a process that could bring this war to a negotiated end in a time frame that would serve U.S. interests. The alternative is a long war that poses major challenges for the United States, Ukraine, and the rest of the world.

…So even RAND is sane enough to see that the Western world is headed for disaster if it keeps up this jingoistic push to support Kiev at all costs and with no off-ramp.

* * *

Meanwhile, most top decision-makers and commanders are unlikely to heed the memo…

🇺🇸🇪🇺🇷🇺Journalist(1:05 of the video):”We are ready to a direct confrontation with Russia?”

“We are” – Chair of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer pic.twitter.com/GbrzgYzMN4

— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) January 28, 2023

Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Holding bullhorns and sometimes graphic signs depicting aborted babies, sidewalk ministers around the United States have seconds to reach the hearts of pregnant women moments before they walk into abortion facilities.

“We had one mother who came up to me on the sidewalk. She saw some signs of ours, stopped, and said, ‘Is that real?’ It was a photo of a baby that had been aborted,” Denny Green, 56, of Cumberland, Virginia, told The Epoch Times. “We let her know, ‘Yeah, that is real.’ She said, ‘If that’s real, I can’t do that to my baby,’ and she decided not to take her baby’s life.”

Green said the group followed up with the woman, helping with food and other needs but eventually lost contact, until five years later.

“She saw us out on the street again, stopped and let us meet her little girl,” he said. “That has happened numerous times. We’re there for the long haul, if they need us, as a friend or as a help. We’re there to walk with them.”

Green is among 11 people federally charged with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for a March 2021 pro-life demonstration at a now-closed abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The FACE Act prohibits interference with obtaining or providing abortions.

In this case, the abortion facility was inside a larger medical building that had other, unrelated medical offices. Some of those charged stood in the hallway, blocking the door, while others stood down the hall, closer to an elevator. They sang Christian songs, prayed, and spoke to women seeking to enter the facility, which is shown in a video captured by one of the group members.

“Sir, that baby is a blessing from God,” one of the 11 told a couple who walked toward the abortion facility door, saw the people in the hallway, then got back on the elevator.

“Yeah. More power to you,” the man with the woman said as the elevator doors closed.

Local police arrested some members of the group and charged them with trespassing. Once the trespassing charges were handled, those arrested thought the incident was behind them. But 19 months later, in October 2022, they were charged by the FBI.

By this time, the abortion facility was closed due to a change in Tennessee law that now bans abortion after a baby’s heartbeat is detected.

The landscape on the frontline of abortion is changing.

While sidewalk counselors preach, most often from the sidewalk, abortion facilities have volunteer escorts to walk women from their cars to the facility doors. The escorts sometimes try to drown out the voices of preachers and counselors by blowing whistles, running loud leaf blowers, or screaming vulgarities at them.

Shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden issued an executive order for his administration to address “the heightened risk related to seeking and providing reproductive health care.” He formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, a Justice Department-led group focused, in part, on enforcing the FACE Act.

Passed in 1994, the FACE Act chilled some pro-life activity at abortion facilities. Starting in the late 1980s, thousands of pro-life activists willing to face low-level trespassing charges used to hold sit-ins, pray, and carry signs at abortion facilities around the country. But after the fatal shootings of two abortionists and three facility workers in the early 1990s, the FACE Act—which calls for federal prison and fines—was implemented. Fewer people were willing to risk federal charges and left the movement.

Still, some pro-life activists are willing to risk their freedom to save babies headed for death.

Now, the Biden administration is cracking down on them. In the 10 years between 2011 and 2021, the Department of Justice criminally charged 17 people with FACE Act violations, according to the DOJ website. In 2022 alone, the DOJ charged 26 people. The Epoch Times requested comment from the DOJ.

Stiffer Penalties

Paul Vaughn, a father of 11 in Centerville, Tennessee, was preparing to take his children to school on Oct. 5, 2022, when the FBI pounded on his door with their guns drawn, terrifying the children, he said. FBI agents put him in handcuffs, drove him to Nashville, put him in a holding cell, and charged him with violating the FACE Act and with conspiracy to violate civil rights for his participation in the Tennessee event.

By 2 p.m., he said, they released him onto the streets of Nashville with no phone or wallet to find his way home and with a new list of pretrial restrictions to follow, such as where he was allowed to travel.

In addition to there being more FACE Act arrests recently, the penalties are higher. Vaughn faces 11 years in federal prison because of the added conspiracy charge.

“I’ve got an 18-month-old at home and several other children that will spend a good part of their developing years without dad at home, if I end up going to prison for an extended time,” Vaughn told The Epoch Times.

He said he and his wife have cried and prayed about the situation many times.

“God is in control,” he said. “He knows the beginning from the end. My children will see their dad at least had the courage to stand for what’s right.”

There are two federal conspiracy statutes for these kinds of cases, Stephen Crampton, Vaughn’s attorney and senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, told The Epoch Times. One requires that, for a conspiracy violation, the penalty cannot be greater than the penalty for the underlying crime.

“In this case, a first offense, nonviolent FACE violation, you only have a misdemeanor charge, up to one year in prison. So if they were to use that particular generic conspiracy statute, all they could get for the conspiracy part is another one year,” Crampton said, stressing that this is the first time he recalls a conspiracy charge in connection to a FACE charge.

“They dug deep in their little bag of tricks and found the conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights statute and charged us with that one, which carries a sentence up to 10 years,” Crampton said. “What was the civil right we were talking about with FACE? It was abortion. So now they’re going to pretend that the civil rights they’re dealing with, is the right to access to so-called reproductive health care. … Civil rights was always abortion, not the right to go in and get a pregnancy test. Nobody in the pro-life movement is going to engage in concerted activities to prohibit that action. So there’s all these little white lies that they’re using to try to throw the book at Paul and other folks since Roe v. Wade has been overturned.”

The conspiracy charge that some in this case face stems from using Facebook to communicate about meeting and live-streaming the group standing in the hallway.

Read more here…

North Korea has issued somewhat rare statements lashing out at growing US military involvement in Ukraine, with the influential sister of Kim Jong Un condemning the decision to transfer heavy battle tanks.

Kim Yo Jong’s statement came on the heels this week of the US confirming it will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and they were her first public remarks in months. She charged that Washington is crossing a “red line” in its drive to escalate a “proxy war” aimed at regime change in Russia. “I express serious concern over the US escalating the war situation by providing Ukraine with military hardware for ground offensive,” said Kim.

“The US is the arch criminal which poses serious threat and challenge to the strategic security of Russia and pushes the regional situation to the present grave phase,” she added, in her official statement as vice-department director of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea.

“I do not doubt that any military hardware the US and the West boast of will be burnt into pieces in the face of the indomitable fighting spirit and might of the heroic Russian army and people,” she added.

Importantly, at a moment the US is accusing Pyongyang of supplying Russia’s military with artillery shells and other lethal equipment, particularly the Wagner Group, Kim stressed that North Korea will always “stand in the same trench” with Russia.

The US throughout months of the war going back to the summer has issued repeat vague allegations that North Korea supplying Russian forces with tens of thousands of artillery shells, which both sides have denied.

But starting last month the Biden administration narrowed the allegations to Pyongyang’s support to the Putin-linked mercenary Wagner Group.

“Wagner is searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby had said in a late December press briefing. “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment.” 

The US now says it has satellite evidence of the transfers, describing weapons-laden trains going back and forth over the small stretch of Russia-North Korea border in the far east.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Jack Phillip, the Colorado baker who brought the challenge in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission has again lost an appeal in Colorado state court. After the Supreme Court effectively punted on the issue of his free speech and free exercise challenges to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (“CADA”), which protects against the denial of service in a place of public accommodation based on one’s identity. After the 2018 decision, Phillip faced additional demands including the creation of a gender transitioning cake. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that the refusal to make the cake requested by Autumn Scardina did not constitute free speech.

I have a forthcoming law review article on free speech protections for the speech involved in this and similar cases around the country: “The Unfinished Masterpiece: Speech Compulsion and the Evolving Jurisprudence over Religious Speech” (forthcoming 2023).

Many years ago, I wrote an academic piece on how anti-discrimination laws would inevitably collide with free-speech and free-exercise rights. Those conflicts continued to mount across the country. In 2018, the court was thought to be ready to clarify the applicable standards in the case of a religious cake shop owner who refused to make cakes for same-sex couples. The court ultimately punted in Masterpiece Cakeshop, leaving uncertainty over the constitutional limitations on cities and states under anti-discrimination law.

Smith’s case has long been a focus for some of us. I have written in favor of taking a free-speech approach to these cases rather than treating them as conflicts under the Constitution’s religion clauses. For that reason, one aspect of this grant of review was immediately notable. The court agreed to consider only one question: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

For Phillips, he has spent over a decade in state and federal courts. In the latest decision, the appellate court found that the creation of the cake can be “inherently expressive and therefore entitled to First Amendment protection.” However, the court still denied free speech protections by dismissing the notion that this particular cake was expressive:

“We conclude that creating a pink cake with blue frosting is not inherently expressive and any message or symbolism it provides to 39 an observer would not be attributed to the baker. Thus, CADA does not compel Masterpiece and Phillips to speak through the creation and sale of such a cake to Scardina.”

The court used the same rationale of the cakes design to deny Phillips religious claims:

“We also reject Masterpiece and Phillips’ argument that the statute punishes them for exercising their religious beliefs because CADA is “applie[d] through the Commission’s purported use of an ‘offensiveness rule.’” For the reasons previously articulated, even if we were to assume such a standard exists, the trial court’s ruling in this case was not predicated on the perceived “offensiveness” of the message, but rather on the fact that the pink and blue cake expressed no message, whether secular or religious.”

Fortunately, 303 Creative has the makings of a major free speech victory.  The case involves a challenge of a web designer who was not only told that she must prepare websites for same-sex marriages despite her religious objections but that she cannot post a statement on her own website on her views of same-sex marriage. For free speech advocates, it is a nightmarish combination of compelled speech and censored speech.

With this denial of his constitutional rights, Phillips moves closer to a new appeal to the Supreme Court, which left him to years of additional litigation by effectively punting his case in 2018.

Here is the decision: Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop Inc., No. 2023COA8 (Colo. App. Ct. Jan. 26, 2023), https://www.courts.state.co.us/Courts/Court_of_Appeals/Opinion/2023/21CA1142-PD.pdf.