Month: March 2024

As we reported earlier, the US made its first successful aid airdrops over Gaza on Saturday, at a moment the White House is seeking to stave off further humanitarian disaster in the Strip as the war presses on.

Local footage has begun emerging, captured by Palestinians scrambling to access the aid. Like Jordan before, the US C-130s flew low and dropped the aid crates over and near the beach. Hundreds if not thousands of people could be seen clamoring to open the crates.

This video is heartbreaking for me.

And what makes it crazier is the reason WHY the US is airdropping aid.

Have you asked yourself why don’t they just send aid through trucks as usual?

Israel, which is heavily funded by the US, is limiting aid and blocking access to a lot of… pic.twitter.com/Wvlq9azTFd

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 3, 2024

Pentagon officials have said that such air drops can be risky in terms of the safety of people on the ground, hence a beach is ‘open air’ enough for an optimally safe delivery.

Israel’s military over the weekend issued a video saying it had authorized the US airdrops and coordinated with the Pentagon.

IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Israel is working with international partners “to enable the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza.”

“We encourage all efforts, all of them to help alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza,” he said also of airdrops by the Royal Jordanian Air Force, which has conducted at least 16 drops since the Gaza war began.

Meanwhile, there are emerging reports Sunday saying that children in some local hospitals have begun to die of malnutrition. “The number of children who have died of dehydration and malnutrition in northern Gaza has risen to 15, a Palestinian Ministry of Health spokesman there said Sunday,” CNN reports.

Days ago, King Abdullah of Jordan took part in the aid drops…

King of Jordan takes part in Gaza aid drops

Three Jordanian aircraft participated in the drop, alongside planes from the UAE, Egypt and France

Follow us on Telegram: https://t.co/gtQwYY5WSl pic.twitter.com/QJFv45vMLb

— RT (@RT_com) February 28, 2024

But the report also says that “CNN cannot independently confirm the deaths of the children or their causes due to the lack of international media access to wartime Gaza.”

US officials have reportedly been pressuring Tel Aviv to allow quicker unhindered access of humanitarian cargo trucks waiting at the Rafah border crossing to access the Gaza Strip. The scope of Israel’s ongoing military operation against Hamas has been a point of contention between the White House and Netanyahu government, given fears there will likely be mass civilian casualties in an impending Rafah ground assault.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The world at large isn’t prepared for the pervasive disinformation operations coming from adversaries such as China that aim at swinging votes, warned a research analyst.

If countries “calculate how much those people—[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Xi Jinping—how much money and effort they are investing in those information operations, do the math, and then calculate how much money you’re putting into defense in a society,” the conclusion is “you are not prepared,” Wu Min-hsuan, CEO of Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab that focuses on digital defense, told The Epoch Times.

“Nobody’s prepared for that,” he said, describing the campaign as one of the Chinese regime’s “war tactics.”

Mr. Wu was one of the panelists at an event on Feb. 28 highlighting the threat of Chinese election meddling in a year when about half of the world’s population are set to cast a vote.

At the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office where the panel took place, Taipei’s ambassador, James K.J. Lee, said that Beijing has used Taiwan as a “test ground” for election interference in other democracies.

Ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election in January, China-linked malicious cyber attacks shot up more than two-fold, targeting government offices, police reports, and financial institutions, a U.S. cybersecurity firm found. Close to Election Day, Beijing-backed actors also spread fake news on social media to create the impression of food shortages to incite societal panic. A high volume of artificial intelligence-generated YouTube hosts also emerged on YouTube, making false claims in Mandarin and Cantonese about Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s personal life.

With its own elections drawing near, the United States should be on alert, the experts said.

Chinese state actors had tried to shape the outcome of certain races in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a December National Intelligence Council report. The same month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of “elevated” risk of outside election interference in the 2024 presidential elections. Microsoft analysts had also raised similar concerns in a report released in November.

Kenton Thibaut, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted that the Chinese Communist Party considers its rivalry with the United States “an existential issue.”

“Based on past behavior, they‘ll be involved in this in some way,” Ms. Thibaut told The Epoch Times. “They’ve built out a lot of their digital infrastructure online across a number of social media platforms. I have every expectation that they’ll deploy those to put forward pro-China narratives, to exploit political tensions in the United States, and to try and paint the United States as hypocritical.”

It highlights part of the regime’s strategy—to win a “smokeless war” by “weakening the enemy from within,” she said.

AI represents a key new tool of Beijing’s disinformation warfare strategy to cover its tracks.

At the panel, Ms. Thibaut cited the Chinese regime’s efforts to shift the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic onto the United States by first generating a fake think tank report purporting to show the virus originating in Fort Detrick, a U.S. military base, then promoting the misinformation through its other channels.

In summer of 2022, a Chinese state-linked entity hired a Baltimore musician to stage a Black Lives Matter protest in front of the International Religious Freedom Summit and later, a mock protest against the U.S. ban on goods from Xinjiang. Both were recorded and circulated on social media to inflame domestic social tensions in the United States.

The regime’s bet is for pro-Beijing narratives to take on a life of their own, said Jacques deLisle, the Asia program chair at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Once the idea gets in and starts circulating, in democratic societies, it’s very hard to contain it—it is now a view held, for whatever good or bad reasons, by people who have a right in the system to have expressed opinions and vote on it,” he told The Epoch Times.

For the United States, the stakes are “very, very high” to mitigate any foreign election interference attempts, he said.

Even though effects of such efforts are hard to quantify, he said, “our elections are so close in this country now” that “even a modest impact—well under 1 percent in a few constituencies—can have significant outcomes.”

Authored by Jason Montgomery via The Mises Institute,

A recent rash of libertarian-leaning right-wing podcasters’ rehashing of a shopworn takedown of socialism has bothered me to the point of launching into this essay. It goes something like “Why is this still a thing? When are they going to realize that IT DOESN’T WORK, and drop it?”

This criticism deserves a closer look. Maybe socialism does too. By the way, I define the term as any economic paradigm that turns over the means of production to “society,” “the workers,” or some other fictitious entity that effectively means the state; and limits or prohibits private property.

Here’s my best stab at fleshing this out.

Socialism is defective, because everywhere it’s instituted (which is nowhere near Scandinavia, but that’s a different topic), the assured universal plenty fails to materialize.

Instead they get extreme poverty, hunger, and deficits of every variety.

The evidence is littered throughout history, all over the world.

So, any idiot still promoting this mess is ignorant to the facts of reality.

Quite a counterargument; factually correct, hard-hitting, down-to-earth, and practical. No abstract political theory here, just the bottom-line question: does it work? Period. Look to the historical statistics. Any other consideration doesn’t correspond to the real world, so it’s useless. Thus, we’ve effectively relegated socialism to the historical scrap heap, right?

Not in the least.

I’m not calling this refutation ineffective. It’s much worse than that.

First there’s the obvious question; what does it mean for an economic system to “work”? That nobody’s poor? What’s the standard of “poor”? A certain universal margin of disposable income? A level of GDP? Maybe in a survey of 1,000 random people, 672 of them rated their economic status at least “satisfactory”? What are the criteria? What’s the barometer? How can we know if it “works”?

Couldn’t someone just cherry-pick an arbitrary standard of “working” in hindsight and proudly tout socialism’s great success? It’s happened before! And here’s the real question: Who could this someone be? By what right could he decide this measure on behalf of an entire population?

Well, those might be tough questions to answer, but surely we can know what it means to not work. Socialism has repeatedly yielded famine, rationing, production shortages, and the seeming disappearance of natural resources. An economic record like this has to be sufficient to dismiss it.

Think so? Let me ask you…

• Are you against slavery because it doesn’t engender a thriving agrarian industry?

• Are you against restricting speech because it does a bad job protecting people’s feelings?

• Are you against random home searches because they don’t uncover enough contraband to bolster public safety?

If not, why not? These are exactly the grounds on which you’re rejecting socialism; because it appears not to satisfy its stated societal goals. Therefore…

What if it did, indeed, work? If it produced a society of loyal proletarians, happily subsisting on their allotted resources, working limited hours at their communal farms and factories, with plenty of days off, and enjoying their state-approved hobbies with all that spare time? Then I guess you’d be all for it?

Is this really your angle of opposition, or is there something else at work here?

“Of course, there’s more to it!” you say.

“Beyond economics, socialism has repeatedly led to mass surveillance, arbitrary incarceration, torture, death camps, and the greatest human atrocities every known! That’s the real counterargument!”

You’re just digging yourself deeper into the rhetorical pit.

You know the responses to this. Say them with me.

“That wasn’t real communism.”

“That was all just one bad guy in charge, not an indictment on the system itself.”

“It was the leftover greed and sadism from the market economy.”

“Marxism is scientifically sound. It just requires a maturation period for people to learn the right values, then it all turns to paradise.”

Are these platitudes frustrating? Well, anyone arguing that “it doesn’t work” has tacitly agreed to the exact same underlying premises.

This argument appeals to pragmatism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and consequentialism; the Four Horsemen of Sophistry.

It says don’t knock socialism till you try it. Gauge its practical impacts (pragmatism), based solely on experience (empiricism), to see if it confers the greatest good on the greatest number (utilitarianism) by delivering its promised economic equality and prosperity (consequentialism).

This is part of the desperate longstanding campaign to render economics a hard science, with a definitive answer, discoverable through rigorous testing of hypotheses. If you accept these terms, then “it doesn’t work” is no counterargument at all. The possibility of a blown experiment is built right into this scheme. It just hasn’t worked yet, so we tweak the theory and try again.

Did we get… riches and happiness for all? Great! It worked! Or… an extermination campaign of biblical proportions? Ooops, back to the drawing board. There was no way to see that coming.

Here is where “it doesn’t work” surpasses fruitlessness and becomes self-defeating. If you posit one unfavorable result (or a few) as grounds to reject the theory wholesale, the other side can call you inconsistent and unscientific, and they’re right! See how their fraudulent reasoning can make a correct conclusion seem wrong?

Therefore, socialism continues to be apologized for, rationalized, promoted, and consequently implemented around the globe; with more comebacks than Aerosmith (apologies to Aerosmith).

(This is covered brilliantly in Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism.)

This plays to two of Marx’s great historical swindles.

• First, commerce and all human action can be scientifically engineered by a central authority to produce desired ends.

• Second, that the nobility of those ends in the indeterminate future justifies any and all means, potentially limitless suffering, in the present.

Other than stripping the ethics, morality, and all humanity from human action; whether it “works” can never be resolved, just deliberated ad infinitum, making it ideal mainstream media fodder. Under any legitimate scrutiny, it collapses under its own haughty intellectual weight because there’s something missing at its foundation; fundamental principles that can be ascertained as self-evidently true or not.

To go after socialism, you must aim for its fundamental principles. And what are some of those?

• Rooted in collectivism – no individual is of material importance, only society as a whole. Any number of individual needs, preferences, and lives can and should be sacrificed for the good of the collective.

• Absence of a market – production and trade operate by the will of central planners, not economic actors. What gets made, in what quantity, and for what use is not determined by consumer demand or the profit motive, but by top-down calculations. Based on what? Such questions will not be tolerated. Now, get in the bread line! Which brings us to…

• Necessitates a totalitarian state – This centralization of economy requires such thorough micromanagement of human action that monitoring, espionage, harassment, and stiff penalties for violators (for starters) must become features of the landscape. Some adherents claim that state control, and the state itself, will one day become unnecessary under socialism, once the people fall in line (read are beaten into submission). But, like the arrival of universal abundance, that day never seems to come. More on this momentarily…

This argument may not be perfect, but notice the differences between this and where we started. These premises are axiomatically integral to socialism. No experience, experimentation, or research is required to bear them out. No statistical data is going to come along and change them. These aren’t ends, which cannot be conclusively known at the outset of any initiative (if they ever can at all). These are means, which are known, instantly and to a certainty, as they effectively become the material conditions of life in the given society. Economics is a journey, not a destination, so those someday promises of wealth and statelessness in exchange for your present suffering mean nothing from the man prodding you with the rifle.

Now a REAL debate begins.

The socialist must be prepared to defend all of the items above, at least. Any claim against the necessity of these factors can be gleefully met with, “then that’s not real socialism!” If they prefer their ideologies a la carte, by plucking the “good bits” of socialism and discarding the gulags and mass graves; then they’re arguing for something else entirely, a mixed economy, the polluting of the market with some degree of the above tenets.

Do the Horsemen’s graphs and data have any validity? Sure, as persuasive support. But they cannot BE your argument.

That must come from First Principles, e.g. freedom, property, and individual sovereignty. These are all that matter. To subordinate them to numbers and stats is to discount them entirely.

So, when it comes to socialism; stop saying it doesn’t work, stop calling it a perfect idea on paper that falters in implementation, and stop dignifying its adherents with “noble intentions.”

Give it its intellectual due, then you can call it what it is; an evil concept on its face that has no place among the human species.

Russia’s military may have its sights set on Ukraine’s key southern port city of Odesa next. On Saturday a wave of drone and artillery strikes reportedly killed at least 11 people.

According to Ukraine government officials, “Eight were confirmed dead, including a child and a baby, after an overnight drone strike on the southern port city of Odesa.” Two more bodies were said to have been found on Sunday. A direct drone strike appears to have destroyed a residential apartment block.

Zelensky in the attack aftermath said that ongoing aerial strikes like these are why Kiev urgently needs additional batteries of advanced anti-air defense systems.

“Russia continues to hit civilians,” Zelensky said in a statement on social media. “We need more air defenses from our partners. We need to strengthen the Ukrainian air shield to add more protection for our people from Russian terror. More air-defense systems and more missiles for air-defense systems save lives,” he said.

The country’s Interior Minister Igor Klymenko described that in Odesa, “a nine-story building was destroyed as a result of an attack by Russian terrorists” – as stated on Telegram. There have been local reports that debris from an Iranian-made drone was recovered.

At the same time, Ukraine’s cross-border attacks on Russian territory have continued to intensify. On Saturday there was a rare Ukrainian drone attack that reached all the way to St. Petersburg, reportedly striking a residential building in the Krasnogvardeisky district.

Further, Russia’s defense ministry said that overnight a large wave of 38 drones were intercepted over the Crimean peninsula. According to fresh reporting Sunday, some of the drones may have gotten through:

In Russian-occupied Crimea, loud explosions were heard near an oil depot in the early hours of Sunday, according to a local pro-Kyiv Telegram news channel, while Kremlin-installed officials in the territory said that a nearby stretch of highway was closed to traffic for about eight hours.

Videos shared with pro-Ukrainian channel Crimean Wind showed explosions lighting up the night sky, followed by loud booms. The channel said they were taken by local residents near Feodosia — a coastal town in northeastern Crimea. It was not immediately possible to verify the circumstances in which the videos were shot.

Below: severely damaged apartment block in Odesa struck by suicide drone…

#Watch | Russian drone crashed into a residential building in Odesa, destroying several apartments, and leaving several people trapped in the rubble.#russia pic.twitter.com/9cFzgVSgZX

— DD News (@DDNewslive) March 3, 2024

The last several months have witnessed repeat cross-border attacks on Russian oil and energy infrastructure especially. But Russian civilians have also been killed and injured as a result of drone and missile attacks on the center of Belgorod city. 

Moscow has meanwhile condemned Western powers in addition to Kiev, given Kremlin officials have charged that Western-supplied weapons have been used in these cross-border attacks.

Author\ed by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Supreme Court could issue a ruling as early as March 4 regarding a case that seeks to bar former President Donald Trump from appearing on primary and general election ballots for the 2024 presidential election.

The Supreme Court, in an unusual Sunday update to its schedule, didn’t specify what ruling it would issue. However, the justices on Feb. 8 heard arguments in the former president’s appeal of a ruling in Colorado and are due to issue their own decision.

The March 3 announcement said the opinion would be posted online at 10 a.m. Washington time. “The court will not take the bench,” it only said on its website.

Late last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that President Trump is disqualified from appearing on ballots in Colorado, citing an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment provision that stipulates that candidates who engaged in an “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States should be prevented from holding office. Maine’s Democratic secretary of state made a similar decision days later, and a judge in Illinois recently issued a similar ruling to prevent his appearance on ballots.

The amendment was drafted more than 150 years ago, after the Civil War, and the court was the first to invoke it. However, that ruling and the two others are on hold pending the Supreme Court decision.

The former president appealed the Colorado court ruling to the Supreme Court, which took up the matter quickly. Oral arguments in the case were heard last month.

Notably, the Supreme Court has until now never ruled on the provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The court indicated this weekend that at least one case would be decided on March 4, although it didn’t indicate which one.

Except for when the end of the term nears in late June, the court almost always issues decisions on days when the justices are scheduled to take the bench. But the next scheduled court day is March 15. And apart from during the coronavirus pandemic, when the court was closed, the justices almost always read summaries of their opinions in the courtroom.

If the resolution of the case comes on March 4, a day before Super Tuesday primary contests in 16 states, it would remove uncertainty about whether votes for President Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, will ultimately count.

Colorado and Maine are two of the states that will hold its GOP primary during the March 5 Super Tuesday contest.

Lawyers for the former president asked the nine justices to reverse the Colorado court decision because only Congress can make a determination as who can become president.

The court’s decision is also “the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate,” his lawyers said, concluding that it “is not and cannot be correct.”

After the ruling, President Trump wrote on social media that he is “not an insurrectionist,” adding that President Joe Biden is one. He also noted that he told supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” during a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, before protesters and rioters entered the U.S. Capitol during the certification of electoral votes for the 2020 election, which forms the basis of the “insurrection” accusations against him.

Justices for the Colorado Supreme Court had argued that they believed President Trump engaged in an insurrection because of his activity before and on Jan. 6, 2021, during the breach of the U.S. Capitol building. The former president, however, was never charged or convicted of insurrection. He was charged by a federal special counsel in connection with the 2020 election, but not for insurrection, rebellion, or related charges.

“President Trump asks us to hold that Section Three disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the majority for the Colorado Supreme Court wrote in its 4–3 ruling.

“Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section Three.”

Oral Arguments

During oral arguments in front of the justices in early February, at least six of the justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, appeared to be at least skeptical of some of the claims made by the lawyer representing several Colorado voters who brought the lawsuit against the Republican front-runner.

“It’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election,” Chief Justice Roberts said, referring to the potential effect of the Colorado court’s ruling.

“That’s a pretty daunting consequence.”

Justice Clarence Thomas asked the lawyer, Jason Murray, why there weren’t many examples of individual states’ disqualifying candidates under the 14th Amendment after the Civil War.

“There were a plethora of confederates still around, there were any number of people who would continue to either run for state offices or national offices, so it would seem—that would suggest there would at least be a few examples of national candidates being disqualified,” Justice Thomas, a Bush appointee, said.

Justice Elena Kagan, considered a member of the court’s liberal wing, asked the attorney why one state would have power to determine which candidates should be on the ballot for a nationwide election.

“Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but also for the nation?” she asked the attorney, adding the move would be “quite extraordinary.”

Remember when, in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine war, Russian oil immediately traded down to a discount of as much as 30% below spot Brent as the entire western world suddenly found itself locked out of access to the most valuable Russian export (which also meant that China and India were the only natural buyers left) and the price of Russian oil had to reflect the explicit plunge in demand?

Well, that’s no longer the case because in the two years since the start of the Ukraine conflict, it became apparent that Western sanctions were merely a theatrical publicity stunt as the alternative – strict enforcement – would have sent oil prices soaring and that would be unacceptable to a Biden administration terrified of losing the November elections if and when oil and gasoline prices surges.

And as fear of enforcement became a non-issue over time, so did the discount of Russian oil to Brent, which brings us to today, and Goldman’s “chart of the week” which illustrates the collapse in the discount on Russian crude oil close to zero relative to Brent, according to the bank’s estimates using the most recent customs data for December.

According to Goldman, which estimates the effective price of Russian crude paid by its trade partners using detailed customs data on import volumes and import payments for Russia crude, this drop in the price discount was primarily driven by the countries outside of the G7 coalition.

However, the discount has also narrowed for most of the buyers as Russian fleets were becoming more capable of operating under the G7 price cap.

The US Treasury’s recent decision to target Sovcomflot, Russia’s state-owned shipping company and fleet operator, comes against the backdrop of the drop in the effective discount late last year and the twin goals of US policymakers to “limiting Kremlin profits while promoting stable energy markets.”

It is also an admission that western attempts to prevent Putin from generating oil export revenues – critical in keeping the Russian war machine going – were either a failure, or merely a theatrical, virtue signaling sleight-of-hand from the beginning. And while the former is bad, the latter is far more disturbing as it suggests that the west has been willingly enabling Putin to sell oil and fund the war in Ukraine, the same war with Western nations are so vocally against.

Almost as if both Russia and the West are aligned in their (shared) goal of keeping the war in Ukraine going to its inevitable and dire, for Zelenskyy, conclusion; it also almost makes one wonder if the destruction of Ukraine – at the hands of Russia with the implicit enabling by the West – was a pre-planned exercise all along.

Full Goldman note available to pro subscribers in the usual place.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An appeals court in Washington unanimously ruled that a Jan. 6 defendant’s sentence was improperly enhanced, a move that could impact numerous other Jan. 6 cases.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Larry Brock, who was convicted for a range of crimes related to Jan. 6, improperly had additional charges of “interference with the administration of justice.” The judge who wrote the court’s opinion wrote that the charge doesn’t apply to a sentencing enhancement, however, and struck it down.

“Brock challenges both the district court’s interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2)’s elements and the sufficiency of the evidence to support that conviction,” wrote the judge, Patricia Millett.

The judge, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, concluded that any interference with Congress’ certification of the 2020 electoral votes isn’t tantamount to a sentencing enhancement.

“Because Section 2J1.2’s text, commentary, and context establish that the ‘administration of justice’ does not extend to Congress’s counting and certification of electoral college votes, the district court erred in applying Section 2J1.2(b)(2)’s three-level sentencing enhancement to Brock’s Section 1512(c)(2) conviction,” the judge wrote.

The judges, in siding with Mr. Brock, wrote that Congress’ function on Jan. 6 was not judicial but was only a part of the 2020 presidential election process.

“Taken as a whole, the multi-step process of certifying electoral college votes—as important to our democratic system of government as it is—bears little resemblance to the traditional understanding of the administration of justice as the judicial or quasi-judicial investigation or determination of individual rights,” the panel concluded.

Law enforcement officials who were there at the Capitol on that day, they added, were “to protect the lawmakers and their process, not to investigate individuals’ rights or to enforce Congress’s certification decision.”

“After all,” the judges wrote, “law enforcement is present for security purposes for a broad variety of governmental proceedings that do not involve the ‘administration of justice’—presidential inaugurations, for example, and the pardoning of the Thanksgiving Turkey.”

Now, Mr. Brock’s sentence under the statute will be vacated and will be remanded to the district court for resentencing, according to Friday’s order.

But it’s not clear whether Mr. Brock’s sentence will be reduced or whether it will apply to a number of other people who were charged with interference in the administration of justice related to the Capitol breach. However, the ruling could impact plea negotiations for future Jan. 6 defendants who are charged with the felony.

Dozens of Jan. 6 defendants have been convicted and sentenced for interference in the administration of justice, according to data provided by the Department of Justice. It may mean that their time in prison and other penalties need to be reduced.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has often asked judges to apply the enhancement charges to the defendants, saying that the Congressional session on Jan. 6, 2021, to count electoral votes and certify the election was the same as a judicial proceeding.

But Mr. Brock’s lawyers successfully argued in an appeal that the charges shouldn’t impact his sentence after he was given a two-year prison term in 2023. At the time, the lower court judge who convicted and sentenced Mr. Brock calculated that the obstruction charge meant he should spend more time in jail.

The court made the sentencing decision as it simultaneously upheld Mr. Brock’s felony conviction regarding his activity on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands breached the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the election.

During court arguments in September, Mr. Brock’s lawyer noted that he committed no violence on Jan. 6 and said the man believed the 2020 election was stolen. “Mr. Brock thought he was acting righteously, patriotically and with a eminently proper purpose,” attorney Charles Burnham said at the time, according to reports.

That argument was rejected by the panel of judges on Friday. “Brock participated in a riot that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force, and that he was himself prepared to take violent action to achieve that goal,” the judges wrote.

Because of his social media posts about the election, the court added, “Where a defendant announces his intent to use violence to obstruct a congressional proceeding, comes equipped for violence, and then actually obstructs that proceeding, the evidence supports a finding that he acted with an impermissible purpose or knowledge of the wrongfulness of his actions.”

Some Jan. 6 defendants have argued in court motions that the law have been improperly applied to charge them with felonies. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a Jan. 6 defendants’ appeal in April on the application of the law, which could also impact special counsel Jack Smith’s case against former President Donald Trump as he faces two obstruction charges in Washington.

The Canadian government and the Trudeau administration apparently cowered in the face of a sizable group of protesters angry at the soaring death toll in Gaza and Canada’s pro-Israel policies on Saturday. Typically heads of state, top government officials, and their schedules and access to high-secure venues take precedence, but apparently in this situation the pro-Palestinian protesters were allowed to ‘win’.

“A reception meant to cap off a day of meetings between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Italian counterpart was abruptly cancelled on Saturday after protesters blocked entrances to the venue and kept key figures, including the guests of honor, from getting in,” a Canadian national broadcaster reported.

The protesters charged that Trudeau is funding genocide in Gaza, given the supply of Canadian defense items to Israel. Despite the government’s attempts to downplay, there’s been growing controversy over Canadian arms supplied to Israel of late. 

But when it comes to rection to major world events and foreign conflicts, Canada typically plays junior partner to Washington policy, regardless of whichever administration is in the White House.

“Due to security concerns, the event was cancelled,” a statement by the prime minister’s office to CBC News indicated.

It happened at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where crowds completely took over steps and a large entrance area. Police apparently stood by while it unfolded…

The demonstrators were shouting pro-Palestine slogans and waving large flags and banners, while huddling close together at the building entrances.

Reports described that some 200-300 protesters were present, and it’s unclear if any arrests were made. But apparently they were there in big enough numbers to block all key entrances.

One report described that “The disruption marked a tumultuous ending to an otherwise cordial day of meetings in Toronto, during which Trudeau and Meloni said they agreed to establish the Canada-Italy Roadmap for Enhanced Cooperation.”

Outside the AGO, Palestinian solidarity activists block @HonAhmedHussen from entering. Trudeau is expected soon to meet with the Italian PM. All entrances are blocked. pic.twitter.com/PAINqfbNTJ

— Andrea Houston (@dreahouston) March 2, 2024

The Toronto Police Service is said to be reviewing its response (or lack of) and the series of events that led Trudeau’s team to scrap the event.

Authored by Daniel Kowalski via FEE.org,

The plot of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged can be briefly summed up as follows: the productive leaders and innovators of the country go on strike by disappearing from society to protest the cronyism, corruption, and oppressive taxes that have made living a virtuous life unbearable.

The nation is then on the brink of an economic collapse as the remaining politicians, intellectuals, and mediocre businessmen are only able to take from others and have no capability to create or add value. Atlas Shrugged is very popular with those whose views lean toward libertarianism, while those who lean to the left react to it like a vampire does to a crucifix, despite never even reading a page.

Concerningly, the state of California seems determined to bring Rand’s novel to life.

During the 20th century, California was the jewel of America. Beautiful weather, diverse landscapes, access to the Pacific Ocean, and other features made it the leading state of the nation. There is a saying that says “As California goes, so goes the nation” because to many Americans this seemed like the best place in the entire country to live and raise a family.

Things seem to have changed in the 21st century though. When times were good, the government of California grew and spent more money than it had. In the short term, most people ignored this problem, but as time went on the deficits grew and grew. By the year 2000, the government had run up a debt of $57 billion. Twenty-two years later that number had almost tripled to $145 billion dollars. Since California is a state and not a nation they couldn’t print money to make up for the downfall, so their only options were to either cut spending or raise taxes. They chose the latter.

For state income taxes, California has the highest rates in the entire nation. They also have a declining population, with a loss of more than half a million people since a peak population of 39.5 million in 2019—and they did not all die of Covid. The majority are people who left to live in other states that did not have oppressive taxes and draconian Covid restrictions.

While wise leaders might look at this indicator and see it as a sign that they should change course, wisdom seems to be in short supply for the political elite in this state. Rather than move towards freedom, they are instead moving to erode and attack property rights even more through the form of a wealth tax. Of course, the people proposing this are trying to sell the idea to the public by saying only the super wealthy will be on the hook for this. The rest of us in the ninety-percent will benefit thanks to the rich paying their “fair share”.

The 16th amendment was sold to the American people under this promise too, and had people back then known that income taxes would lead to the system we have today, where the majority of the people use the majority of their income to pay taxes (federal, state, local, property, sales, etc), then this proposal would have been dead on arrival. Today’s politicians are trying to use the same tricks to pass a wealth tax, but the difference between now and then is that now we should know better.

What makes California’s proposed wealth tax even more disturbing is that they wish to still collect the tax for years after a person moves out of the state, like a feudal lord persecuting a serf for moving off his land.

They also wish to impose the wealth tax on “part time residents” for the portion of the year that they “reside” in the state. In other words, a family vacation to Disney Land might come with a tax bill from the State of California. And when tourism declines, I wonder who the politicians will blame?

While the wealth tax has not become law yet, it is already prompting some of the mega-rich to move away, depriving California of their portion of the income tax and increasing the deficit. And it’s not just individuals who are leaving the state. National corporations are also deciding not to do business there as well.

As inflation rages across the nation, the costs of everything have gone up, and building materials are no exception. It costs more to replace a house now than it did five years ago. To meet this new reality, home insurance premiums everywhere have increased. California’s Department of Insurance has responded to the new reality by placing new regulations on the insurers to prevent them from raising rates on their customers. The logic here is that the state has the largest population so if insurers wish to do business in the largest market in the United States, then they must abide by our rules.

The reaction has essentially been a boycott of the state by the companies. In addition to normal risks, California is also prone to natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes, and even mud slides from heavy rains. With these new regulations limiting what prices could be charged, the cost of doing business in the state increasingly outweighs any potential profits. As a result, many of the largest insurance companies in the nation like Allstate and Hartford are no longer issuing new policies in the state.

California government policy has created an insurance desert in the state and with private business unwilling to respond because the once free market is no longer free, the politicians have solved the problem with a government insurance system called FAIR so that homeowners can comply with the insurance requirements for their mortgage. Under this state-owned enterprise, California residents get to enjoy reduced coverage at a higher premium than they would have been able to get before the politicians stepped in to help. This is a clear cut, black and white example of the standard of living decreasing.

The theme of Atlas Shrugged is that the freedom of American society is responsible for its greatest achievements. The book warned that as freedom declined, so too would the standard of living. California’s politicians seem determined to recreate the dystopian world of the book with oppressive taxes, attacks on personal property, and regulations that drive away private businesses.

Someone really ought to tell them that the world of Ayn Rand’s novel was not meant to be aspirational.

Shehbaz Sharif, the chairman of the PML-N party (Pakistan Muslim League-N), has been elected as the new prime minister of Pakistan by lawmakers in Pakistan’s National Assembly on Sunday, according to national broadcasters.

This will be the 72 year-old Sharif’s (who is brother of Nawaz Sharif) second time to lead the country as prime minister, having previously been in office between April 2022 and August 2023. He’s entering office for a five year term.

Sharif said in his acceptance speech after a tumultuous and at times violent election season, “We were subjected to political victimization in the past but never took any revenge.” This appeared to be a shot at former PM Imran Khan, but without naming him directly.

Sharif had secured 201 parliamentary votes to become the clear victor over rival Omar Ayub (at 92 votes), who significantly had the backing of Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Khan has been urging on his political movement and allies, candidates which were forced to run on independent platforms, from jail.

Khan’s party has repeatedly claimed that the election “was stolen during the vote count” but the Election Commission vehemently denies this charge.

The Associated Press writes of the past weeks since the early February election, “Following days of negotiations, Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party and his supporters formed an alliance after the Feb. 8 election, which was overshadowed by militant violence, a nationwide mobile phone shutdown, Khan’s exclusion from the vote, and an unusual delay in announcing the result.” This delay was used of Khan’s party to issue charges of vote rigging and corruption.

Opponents made their anger known during new PM Sharif’s acceptance speech before parliament, per the AP:

Holding portraits of Khan, some lawmakers stood in front of Sharif when he began his speech, shouting “vote thief” and “shame.” Sharif denounced their actions, saying they were causing chaos in parliament. He also said they should present their evidence of vote rigging to the relevant authorities.

Sharif then addressed the opposition saying, “I am offering you reconciliation. Let us sit together to work for the betterment of Pakistan.” But he was greeted with more protests and shouts.

Day 2 of the Pakistan’s 🇵🇰 parliament.

Those who are brought in by establishment won’t last very long under this pressure.

The sooner they correct the form-47 results better it would be for Pakistan.

pic.twitter.com/AKWUMnGLwn

— 🇺🇸 Bilal Khan ﷽ (@Peace4allpak) March 3, 2024

Khan and his supporters have long described the more than one hundred corruption cases brought against him as ultimately the military’s attempt to control the country and permanently ‘disappear’ Khan from politics.

As for Sharif, he vowed in the Sunday speech to repair ties with the United States, and blamed the Khan era for creating tensions with Washington.