Biden's Afghan Speech - A Hit...And A Miss
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There was much to approve of in President Biden's speech explaining his decision to pull out of Afghanistan...and a few yellow flags of caution. We'll discuss the good and the bad. Also today: beware of new and dangerous legislation introduced in Congress. New Zealand madness. And more. Watch today's Liberty Report: Biden's Afghan Speech - A Hit...And A Miss Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity
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This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan? The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war? So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around. Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along. The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke. The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots. The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep. American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers. Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future. Kabul Has Fallen - But Don't Blame Biden Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity Emmanuel Macrons Covid health pass tyranny reveals the true extremism of globalist faux-centrism8/17/2021 Macron was billed as the “moderate candidate” in the 2017 French presidential election but there’s nothing moderate about this authoritarian who has transformed France into a police state under the guise of countering a virus. A few weeks ago, I was in the picturesque Suffolk coastal resort of Southwold. There is a large mural of the novelist George Orwell – who once lived there – at the entrance of the renovated pier. It couldn’t have been a more appropriate moment to be reminded of the author of “1984” for, in 2021, we are truly living in Orwellian times. Almost everything we are being told is an inversion of the truth. Extreme policies are being enacted across much of the Western world by those claiming to be “moderates,” while those who oppose the removal of basic, inalienable human freedoms and making them conditional on taking a new-on-the-market vaccine, or proving one’s “health status,” are the ones being labelled “extremists” – and categorised by the elite’s propagandists as either “far-right” or “hard-left.” Nowhere is this better illustrated than in France. It is now obligatory to present a “Pass sanitaire” – proving you have been vaccinated or tested negative for Covid-19 or have recovered from the virus, to gain access to cafes, restaurants, health centres, libraries, department stores, long-distance trains, and a whole host of public places. France has gone from a relatively free society to a 1940s-style “Where are your papers?” state in an incredibly short time and without any proper parliamentary scrutiny or public debate. Macron the “moderate” has turned into Macron the dictator. What’s happened is deeply shocking – and worth more than one “Zut alors!” – but actually not at all surprising when one considers what Macron’s brand of politics represents and in whose interests he governs (spoiler alert: it’s not the ordinary French people). Back in 2017 – when “centrists” were hailing a new “French Revolution“ – I warned on this platform about the likely next president. “The so-called “outsider” Macron is nothing of the sort. It’s a very strange “revolution” indeed if the end result is the installation in the Elysee Palace of a neo-liberal pro-austerity investment banker (and Bilderberg attendee) heavily favoured by the establishment.” I continued: “The likely success of Macron in round two won’t be a revolution, but the very opposite. It’ll represent a stunning victory for the French and globalist elites who’ve maintained their grip on power in an era of massive public discontent.” I might also have added that in 2016 Macron was listed as one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. You really couldn’t have anyone better than to usher in the WEF’s dystopian “Great Reset” in France, could you? Of course, “Health Passes” – which, if they are allowed to be rolled out completely, will morph, as surely as night follows day, into digitized ID cards, and a fully fledged Chinese-style social credit system, are an integral part of the controlling-the-plebs, globalist project. It’s a project that “centrists” and “moderates” are at the forefront of promoting – just as they promoted the “War on Terror,” and a succession of illegal Middle Eastern/North African wars. Consider this. Tony Blair was Britain’s leading advocate for war with Iraq in 2003. In 2021, Tony Blair is Britain’s leading advocate for vaccine passports. “I think you’re going to the stage where it’s going to be very hard for people to do a lot of normal life unless they can prove their vaccination status,” the Blair creature said earlier this year. In June, he said it was “time to distinguish for the purpose of freedom from restriction” between those who have and haven’t had the vaccine. Blair openly admitted: “Of course we are discriminating between vaccinated and unvaccinated,” yet the medical apartheid which he is so brazenly promoting is still presented by much of the media as a “moderate” proposal. Meanwhile, those who oppose vaccine passports – and treating the unvaccinated as lepers who should be shunned by society – are smeared as “anti-vaxxers” – a highly weaponised term meant to place someone outside the parameters of acceptable debate. The truth is that what is today billed by establishment media as “centrism” and “moderation” is in fact the polar opposite. The conservative commentator Peter Hitchens was absolutely right to say that Blairism – which has become hegemonic not just in Britain but across the Western world – was much more extreme than Corbynism, which was actually only revived traditionally British radicalism. Hitchens said that Blairism was more “left-wing” but that’s only true in a limited cultural sense. Blairism can best be seen as global-elite, monopoly-finance capital-favouring freedom-destroying authoritarianism with a PR covering of wokery to make it appear “progressive.” You only have to follow the money trail to see what’s behind extreme centrism – and in particular the push for vaccine passports. Tony Blair’s “Institute for Global Change“ has received generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which it lists as one of its “partners.” We know Gates’ links to the World Economic Forum. All roads in this “new normal” operation lead back to Davos. That ain’t no “tin-foil hat conspiracy theory” bruv, but rather a conspiracy fact. A global agenda is quite clearly being implemented, with France being the European “trial” case for vaccine passports. If the large, growing, and inspiring public protests force Macron to drop the scheme, other countries (including Britain, whose government says it wants to introduce jabs-only vaccine passports in October) will get cold feet about implementation too. But if France’s Blairite president succeeds? Let’s not even contemplate that nightmare scenario. Reprinted with permission from RT. Emmanuel Macron’s Covid ‘health pass’ tyranny reveals the true extremism of globalist faux-centrism Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power. But Trump and Biden shouldn’t blame one another. It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers, with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before. By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the US built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency. The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years. They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as “collateral damage.” They essentially built a government and army of the northern Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes against the plurality population of the country, the Pashtuns. Where Pashtuns did have power in the government, it in no way enhanced the representation of the people. It just meant the people had to deal with the same old corrupt drug dealer, child rapist, murderer warlords, like Pacha Khan Zardari (“PKZ”), President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Wali Karzai, and Abdul Razik, only now empowered by the corrupt central government in Kabul and US military and intelligence forces. This was never a sustainable project. Even the Great American Fraud, Gen. David Petraeus, admitted that the Taliban’s process for civil and criminal disputes among the people was far preferable to the local population compared to the corrupt court and police systems the Americans had set up to replace them. Early in the occupation, Bush spurned repeated offers of surrender from former CIA favorite Jalaluddin Haqqani and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar, only to send American GIs off to get blown up by their men for years afterwards. Our allies the Pakistanis, with Saudi money, have backed the Afghan Taliban since at least 2005, giving them safe-haven and helping to pay their way. This has been to further Pakistan’s goal of limiting Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Americans’ solution? Ask the Indians to intervene even more in support of anti-Taliban efforts there. This of course has only motivated increased Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban in turn. When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the “right” war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II. But he really only promised a small escalation of a couple brigades. The military, however, had other plans. His Bush-holdover secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and Central Command Chief, Gen. Petraeus, demanded that Obama send the general in charge of the Afghan war, Gen. David McKiernan home and replace him with the supposed strategic genius and push-up and jogging super-hero Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The trio then spent the better part of 2009 teaming up with hawkish senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the think tanks, especially the Democrats’ new Center for a New American Security, and the news media to pressure Obama into sending a total of 70,000 reinforcements in a so-called “surge.” The added troops were to implement Petraeus and marine General James Mattis’s rewritten counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which they sold as a magic potion that would guarantee “success” at winning over the hearts and minds of the good people of the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Though Vice President Joe Biden urged Obama to go with a much smaller escalation and a narrowing of the strategy to counterterrorism, that is, hunting down the last mythical Arab terrorists still hiding in Afghanistan, while abandoning the fight against the Taliban, Obama gave in to the generals and tripled forces there. Not that Biden resigned over it or anything. Gen. Petraeus swore he would have the Taliban bleeding from the nose and ready to sign whatever he demanded of them by July 2011. That never happened. McChrystal abandoned COIN after its very first test case in the town of Marjah in the Helmand Province. After the heroic independent journalist Michael Hastings’ journalism got McChrystal removed, Obama insisted that the man himself, Gen. Supposed Bigshot, David Petraeus take command of the war himself. They would lose the war together. And they did. But not before getting more than another thousand Americans killed, tens of thousands of Afghans with them, and sending over all those trucks, rifles and helicopters to the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces that the Taliban have seized in the last few weeks. As predicted, Obama’s Afghan “surge” only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s “insurgent math” explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy. By the time Petraeus got there, he’d forgotten all about his own counterinsurgency doctrine and simply escalated special operations night raids and air strikes instead. As the great Gareth Porter proved, they were mostly killing and imprisoning innocent people. The Drone Papers leaked by Daniel Hale further confirmed Porter’s reporting. The Taliban figured out very quickly that if the US strategy was centered on training up the Afghan National Army, they could thwart that by sending in sleeper agents to commit “insider” or “green on blue” attacks against their American trainers. That was it. The game was over. The distance created between the US soldiers and the local charges by these attacks amounted to the ultimate sabotage of their plans to create an effective force—if that were ever possible. The ANA was mostly a bunch of “ghost soldiers,” who existed only on paper for the financial gain of the officers in charge. The actual men who showed up were mostly looking for a pair of boots, a rifle and a decent meal. At no time did the largely Tajik and Uzbek army have the Taliban’s sense of morale in fighting for their country. They were fighting at the behest of a foreign power to try to subjugate the population of part of their country, not really in self-defense at all. Former marine captain-turned State Department official Matthew Hoh broke ranks to blow the whistle and try to stop Obama’s “surge” in the summer of 2009. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis did much the same in 2012 to tell the people that Gen. Petraeus and the rest of the military were lying and that the “surge” was a counter-productive disaster. Not enough listened to these honest men. Obama had tried to overthrow the corrupt Hamid Karzai in 2009, but Karzai was able to stuff enough ballot boxes to remain in power for another term. In the farcical election of 2014, Ashraf Ghani and his major competitor Abdullah Abdullah fought it out for weeks until Secretary of State John Kerry came to town to force them to concede to a completely ad-hoc and unconstitutional “co-presidency” instead. The same spectacle took place last year with both refusing to concede and even holding competing, simultaneous swearing in ceremonies. Obama pretended to end the war in 2014, but he actually did no such thing. He left office with about 8,000 troops still there, mostly fighting Afghan ISIS, so-called ISIS-K for “Khorasan Province,” at its core a group of Pakistani Taliban refugees from America’s war there in the early Obama years. According to Gen. Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, President Donald Trump ordered the troops out of Afghanistan in March of 2017. But then he apparently just forgot about it. Subjected to a season-long pressure campaign by his generals, Trump eventually gave in, just as Obama had done before him, though to a lesser extent, ordering another 5,000 troops to the country and a massive escalation of the air war there. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts. I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained. It was four days after I published my first book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, which was four years ago Monday. In it I wrote: The major question seems to be when, not if, the ‘National Unity Government’ will unravel, which leaves them in a very weak position from which to negotiate, if they ever get the chance. If the ‘co-presidents’ cannot figure out how to get along, how can they be expected to negotiate peace with a broad-based insurgency?If we had left back then, the Kabul government would have at least been in a somewhat stronger position to defend itself, and the Taliban would have had a bigger incentive to negotiate with them. By taking so long to leave, the US allowed the Taliban to make further gains in usurping government authority across the country, preparing for their current successful coup de main. Trump also continued to allow the Pentagon to send military equipment to the ANA, most of which is falling into the hands of the Taliban now. Really, the Taliban have been buying American weapons from the ANA all along with American cash paid directly to them in the form of protection fees, or taxes, for allowing US convoys through their territory and “reconstruction” money given to them by the duffle bag full. So it makes little difference. To Trump’s great credit, he never believed in the mission of building a modern, democratic, centralized state in Afghanistan. He consistently railed against such a project for years before ever taking office. In 2018, he finally appointed neoconservative policy adviser Zalmay Khalilzad to make a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, and unbelievably, Khalilzad did so. On February 29, 2020, they signed the Doha Agreement to leave by May 1, 2021. In fact, as of a year ago, during the cease-fire, US JSOC forces were fighting with the Taliban against ISIS in Nangarhar Province, referring to themselves as the “Taliban Airforce.” Call it the Afghan Awakening. At the start of this war the US could have negotiated extradition. Or they could have focused on bin Laden and the guilty al Qaeda members there. Or they could have launched punitive air raids against the Taliban but not driven them completely out of power. Or they could have settled for seeing them overthrown and then simply left the country to its own people to sort out. But no. The Bush government wrote themselves a writ for a massive campaign to remake another society on the other side of the globe. The Obama government cashed that check and massively expanded the war and the nature of its failure. Trump initially gave in to the military but later pushed for a real bilateral withdrawal deal with the Taliban. If it was not for the pathetic CIA stenographer Charlie Savage, whose ridiculous lies in the New York Times about Vladimir Putin paying bounties for Taliban murders of American soldiers in Afghanistan, which was debunked by the NSA, some CIA analysts, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the commander of CENTCOM and the general in charge of the war — but too late — Trump may have been able to follow through on his plan to pull them all out before last year’s election. Even after the election, he balked after initially approving plans for a full withdrawal by the new year. Fortunately, Biden has long since given up on believing the generals that they know what they’re doing in Afghanistan or that the war to keep the Taliban out of power is one worth fighting. Though they have announced plans to try to leave CIA, JSOC and mercenary “counter-terrorism” forces in the region to continue to hunt down international terrorists there, that seems unlikely to continue very long or in very large measure, barring a new major and embarrassing al Qaeda presence there. The whole concept of Afghanistan as a safe haven is a myth. They don’t seem to mind fighting on the side of AQAP in Yemen against the Houthis or helping the Turks protect Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria’s Idlib Province. Biden did the right thing by resisting the hawks’ calls to drag this out one more day. (Now it is up to us to prevent the Biden government from allying with the Taliban and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) against China in Xinjian like it was in old days.) As embarrassing as the withdrawal is for the Americans, it could have been much worse. The Taliban took many military bases and provincial capitals while hardly firing a shot at all. Though there have been some brutal executions, the fighting has been kept to a minimum. As your author has suggested would be the case for years, when the day came, the Taliban just walked right into Kabul. The chances of a massive Black Hawk Down-type slaughter of US personnel on the two-mile trip to the airport from the embassy seems slim, for the moment at least. Much of the panic by the Americans and Afghan civilians attempting to flee from the airport may be based on fears that the Taliban would roll into town like the ISIS invasion of western Iraq in 2014 and start slaughtering people. The Taliban can of course be absolutely ruthless, but here they seem to have decided to allow foreign forces to leave in peace and have thus far announced no plans to bar civilians from leaving if they want. The final stages of the withdrawal have not been great, but the hype about the embarrassment is more likely cover for those who have failed us all along by perpetuating this war and want to pretend the failures started in this administration, or the last at the latest. The ease of the Taliban’s victory over America’s installed puppet government in Afghanistan proves that the whole war was a fool’s errand all along. That regime never had the support of the population, and it never was going to. If all the hawks who already lost this war had their way, and the US stayed another 20 years, that withdrawal would look much the same. It’s 20 years late and not a moment too soon. Goodbye Afghanistan, sorry and good luck. Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com. Blame Bush and Obama for the Afghan Disaster Click on the headline to read the full story from
The race is on to blame Biden for the dramatic fall of Saigon...er...Kabul over the weekend. Politicos who've been most responsible for the 20 year disaster continuing are now pointing fingers elsewhere. The truth is there is plenty of blame to go around...but will we finally learn the lessons? Also today, new threats according to Homeland Security...you'll never guess what they are? Today on the Liberty Report: Should We Blame Biden For Afghan War Loss? Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan? The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war? So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around. Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along. The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke. The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots. The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep. American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers. Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future. Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Biden Click on the headline to read the full story from In the early 11th century, King Canute—while at the peak of his power—set out to demonstrate to his fawning courtiers the limited power of royal edicts. After having his throne placed by the sea’s edge, he sat down and commanded the tide to stop rising. When the water began washing over his feet, he declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings.” Nearly a thousand years later, facing a different force of nature—Covid-19—an entire global generation of presidents, prime ministers, governors, mayors, public health officials, scientists and citizens is being given the same lesson. However, where Canute’s lesson sprang from his humility, this lesson springs from the hubris of the present-day ruling class and the credulity of the masses who place far too much faith in their rulers’ power. The lesson was pointedly driven home on July 19th. That was “Freedom Day” in the United Kingdom, with government ending restrictions on social contact, allowing the reopening of remaining establishments such as nightclubs, and abandoning mask mandates. Two weeks before Freedom Day, as the Delta relentlessly pushed the UK’s case count higher, 122 prominent scientists and doctors submitted a letter to The Lancet calling the planned easing of restrictions “a dangerous and unethical experiment.” On the eve of Freedom Day, the UK’s daily case count was over 40,000. Imperial College London mathematical biologist Neil Ferguson told the BBC it was “almost inevitable” the end of restrictions would prompt daily cases to soar to 100,000 and perhaps even 200,000. Mother Nature was about to deliver a harsh comeuppance to Ferguson and others who’d have us believe government restrictions and mask mandates offer a potent defense against Covid contagion: Cases promptly went into a two-week free fall. In addition to fostering well-founded doubt about the benefits of lockdowns and face coverings, the turn of events should also cultivate healthy skepticism about the pronouncements of the public health establishment. Hopefully, Ferguson’s particular humiliation will immunize officials, journalists and citizens against trusting Imperial College London’s Covid-19 models. Those models, which played a key role in enabling unprecedented, draconian lockdowns around the world—have been wildly wrong again and again. For example, Imperial College London projected Sweden’s relaxed approach to Covid-19 would leave nearly 100,000 Swedes dead by July 1, 2020. The actual count: 5,700. The United States has endured its own false alarms about what will happen when government-imposed restrictions are eased. Grim predictions and accusations of gubernatorial indifference to human life accompanied the ending of restrictions and mandates in states like Iowa, Texas and Florida, and proved as wrong as the ones made in the UK last month. Lacking Canute’s humility and undaunted by contrary evidence, the great majority of officials, scientists and pundits who’ve favored coercive government measures have proven stubbornly incapable of entertaining the possibility that these interventions—which have boosted depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, drug overdoses, domestic violence and undiagnosed cancer—aren’t a net positive for public health after all. That resistance to contrary evidence extends to a great many everyday citizens whose unwavering support of lockdowns, business restrictions, remote schooling and mask mandates is part of a politicized tribal identity. Exasperatingly, that tribe embraces “trust science” as a mantra, oblivious to the fact that the scientific method hinges on the reliable replication of results that supports one’s theory—something sorely lacking where lockdowns, masking and other measures are concerned. The “trust science” crowd is likewise oblivious to the fact that scientists are far from unanimous in supporting those government-imposed nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), and that highly-credentialed scientists from esteemed institutions are among the most vigorous dissenters. The most prominent demonstration of such dissent came with the October 2020 “Great Barrington Declaration.” Led by professors from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, epidemiologists and public health scientists from around the world expressed their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” The declaration has now been signed by more than 58,000 medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners. Their numbers and credentials don’t guarantee their views are correct; however, they do bely the presumption of a scientific consensus behind coercive mitigation policies. Among three original Stanford signatories to the declaration is biophysics professor and Nobel Prize recipient Michael Levitt. He and a group of Stanford and international scholars have been analyzing Covid-19 data since January 2020. Referring to the steep drop in cases after UK restrictions were eased, Levitt recently asked the Twitter-verse: “Can anyone show clear correlation between NPI or other restrictions & reduced COVID-19 cases anywhere? I keep trying & failing. We really need to know this to deal better with future pandemics.” Levitt isn’t the only reputable scientist who sees little if any correlation between government-imposed NPIs and Covid-19 trajectories. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in a recent interview with the New York Times. “These surges have little to do with what humans do. Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.” “We had record high cases, hospitalizations and deaths in January, followed by a precipitous decline throughout February and into March…this does not reflect anything to do with…human mitigation. This is the natural ebb and flow of the virus we’ve seen time and again around the world,” said Osterholm on his Covid-19 podcast. In that vein, those who exclusively attribute today’s surging case counts in southern states to lagging vaccination rates and purported local mismanagement should note that:
- The southern wave’s timing roughly parallels the region’s 2020 summer surge, which should prompt consideration that seasonality—alongside Delta’s greater transmissibility among even the vaccinated—may be the dominant driver
- While Florida is considered the new epicenter of the pandemic, the state’s vaccination rate matches the national average
- Oregon, despite an above-average vaccination rate, is experiencing its own sharp spike—but has been spared the kind of contemptuous scorn that journalists and Democratic politicians heap on Republican-led Florida
Every NPI Deserves Scrutiny Over the course of the pandemic, some anti-Covid-19 measures have fallen out of favor in light of new findings and observations. For example, with the understanding that surface transmission of Covid-19 is extremely unlikely, far fewer people are wiping groceries with Clorox. Perhaps because they’re bolted into place, the nation’s thicket of plexiglass dividers have shown more staying power, despite research indicating they may not only be futile, but could actually be making matters worse by thwarting ventilation. In March, the CDC rescinded its recommendation for barriers on school desks, but has apparently stopped short of discouraging their broad use elsewhere. Though it’s now socially acceptable to question the use of disinfectants and plexiglass, questioning masks can get you suspended from social media and tarred as a promoter of disinformation—even when you’re citing peer-reviewed studies. However, with other widely-embraced mitigation measures fading in light of new data, intellectually honest people should be equally open to the question of whether widespread face-covering—particularly with anything other than an N-95 mask—is worthwhile. That forbidden discussion is starting to creep into mainstream media. In a recent appearance on CNN, the University of Minnesota’s Osterholm—a former Covid-19 advisor to President Biden—caused a stir by saying, “We know today that many of the face cloth coverings that people wear are not very effective in reducing any of the virus movement in or out.” That’s because Covid-19 particles are astoundingly small. Hard as it to imagine, the imperceptible gaps in surgical masks can be 1,000 times the size of a viral particle. Gaps in cloth masks are well larger than that. Osterholman has offered a highly relatable standard by which to judge if a particular face covering serves as a meaningful barrier against particles that small: “If you were in a room with somebody smoking, would you smell it in your device that you are using?” That standard not only eliminates cloth masks, but surgical ones too. Beyond the realities of nanoparticle science and the conclusions of previous studies, the case for masking is undermined by what we’ve observed during the pandemic. Sweden, for example, never widely embraced masking. While its per capita Covid death count is well higher than neighboring Finland and Norway, it’s the 15th lowest out of the 31 European Union countries and the UK. If face-covering were such an essential life-saving practice, Sweden wouldn’t be found in the middle of the EU pack. It would be dead last. That said, using Covid-19 death counts alone to evaluate outcomes is problematic. Different testing protocols can mean an individual would be positive in one country and negative in another. Jurisdictions also differ in what exactly comprises a Covid-19 death—was it a death from Covid or merely with Covid? More importantly, though, when we solely focus on Covid-19 deaths, we ignore the suicides, fatal overdoses and other unintended deaths that result from the lockdowns themselves. That’s why it’s best to compare countries using excess all-cause mortality: total deaths beyond what’s expected in a normal year. By that measure, lockdown- and mask-eschewing Sweden had one of the best 2020 excess mortality rates in all of Europe--23rd-lowest out of 30 countries. (It again trailed Finland and Norway, but a variety of factors undermine the idea they present a full-on apples-to-apples comparison; what’s more, by some measures, Finland and Norway had even less stringent policies during the first several months of the pandemic.) CDC is 'Following the TV Pundits' Vinay Prasad is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and co-author of Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. “Medical reversal” is what happens when new data shows a commonly-accepted practice is not helpful—or is actually harmful. Decrying the lack of randomized trials backing many Covid-19 policies, Prasad recently wrote, “When it comes to non-pharmacologic interventions such as mandatory business closures, mask mandates, and countless other interventions, the shocking conclusion of the last 18 months is this: We have learned next to nothing,” Referring to the CDC’s decision to once again recommend universal indoor masking in areas of higher Covid-19 transmission, Prasad wrote, “The CDC director calls this ‘following the science,’ but it is not. It is following the TV pundits.” While declaring his openness to the possibility that masking can be an effective public health intervention, Prasad says mandates should be driven by evidence—and that the CDC isn’t offering any. Prasad, who doesn’t shy away from endorsing coercive government action when he thinks it’s warranted, concludes: When the history books are written about the use of non-pharmacologic measures during this pandemic, we will look as pre-historic and barbaric and tribal as our ancestors during the plagues of the middle ages. What the books won't capture is how, in the moment, our experts were simply so sure of themselves.Reprinted with permission from Stark Realities. Subscribe to the website here. Lockdowns, Masks and The Illusion of Control Click on the headline to read the full story from If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that. It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during March, April, and May of 2020. Local governments were building makeshift hospitals in convention centers—yet they went unused. Memphis’s overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals “were never overwhelmed.” Colorado built a twenty-two hundred–patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used. Now we’re being told that this time, they really mean it and hospitals are on the verge of overflowing. Yet according to data from Johns Hopkins, most of these cases may be overstated. In Texas, for example, whose hospitals have been the subject of countless recent stories about overflowing ICUs, the state is a long way from reaching its earlier peaks of 2020. Moreover, Texas is now staffing fewer ICU beds overall. The story is the same in Georgia, that supposed home of an “experiment in human sacrifice,” where officials were among the first to end stay-at-home orders in 2020. Indeed, it’s clear most of the country—regardless of the state’s use of mask mandates or stay-at-home orders—remains well behind previous peak levels. One outlier in terms of hospitalizations, however, is the state of Florida. Numbers in Florida do appear to be closer to previous peaks than in most other states, and ICU usage is now larger than what it was during the summer of 2020. Why is this? According to many reports from the corporate media, this must be because the state’s governor is Ron DeSantis. Because of his connection to the Trump movement, the media has predictably focused on DeSantis and his policies as alleged drivers of rising covid cases in Florida. The preponderance of media articles about Florida are careful to mention that the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has opposed mask mandates, vaccine passports, and stay-at-home orders. The implication, of course, is that DeSantis’s opposition to these measures has somehow caused today’s rising number of hospitalizations. This connection is so tenuous, however, that even Philip Bump at the Washington Post—who clearly is no fan of DeSantis—admits it’s unclear what’s behind Florida’s rising numbers. Florida may be an outlier in terms of new hospitalizations, but it's not an outlier in terms of policy. States that have been relatively laissez-faire on covid, like Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, and Nebraska have not seen trends similar to Florida’s. Moreover, Bump notes that Florida has higher vaccination rates than many states with both fewer hospitalizations and fewer new covid deaths. Florida isn’t an outlier in terms of vaccinations. Nearly 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated in Florida—California is at 53 percent. Floridians are vaccinated at higher rates than is the case in Utah, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota. Yet these other states all have fewer cases of new deaths and hospitalizations, per capita: Something makes Florida exceptional here: These numbers are hazy enough (thanks to reporting periods and the lags in case and death counts) that one can certainly cobble together a case that there’s some other factor at play than indifference from state leadership. And, in fact, something else may be the problem. It’s hard to say. Moreover, even with the current surge in hospitalization in Florida, the state may still never catch up with states like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in terms of total covid deaths per million. As of August 11, Florida is still twenty-sixth in the nation in terms of total deaths per million, at 1,870. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts still top the list, with 3,003, 2,797, and 2,629 deaths per million, respectively. There is also evidence that the current increase in covid cases—and the “delta surge” in general—has already peaked. So here we go again—the narrative doesn’t lend itself to easy explanations. States with long-lasting lockdowns, covid restrictions, and even mounting vaccine “incentives” have still been hit harder than more laissez-faire states in many cases, even after the virus has had eighteen months to spread well beyond the borders of the initial hot spots. But for anyone who can remember the media narrative eighteen months ago, the current story will seem quite familiar. Hospitals are overflowing. But if we heed the diktats of the regime’s technocrats, we’re told, things will markedly improve. Those places that refuse to take orders from Washington will have many times more death, illness, and economic destruction. The facts never backed up this story in 2020. Twenty twenty-one isn't shaping up to be much different. Reprinted with permission from Mises.org. Yet Again, the Media's Covid Narrative Doesn't Add Up Click on the headline to read the full story from Whenever one gets into discussions about the decline of America’s ability to positively influence developments around the world a number of issues tend to surface. First is the hubristic claim by successive presidents that the United States is somehow “exceptional” as a polity while also serving as the world’s only superpower and also the anointed Leader of the Free World, whatever that is supposed to mean. Some critics of the status quo also have been willing to look a bit deeper, recognizing that it is the policies being pursued by the White House and Congress that are out of sync with what is actually happening in Asia, Africa and Latin America, being more driven by establishing acceptable narratives than by genuine interests. The problem starts at the top. One can hardly have a great deal of respect for presidents who appointed neocon or neoliberal ideologues Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo or current incumbent Tony Blinken as Secretaries of State, but when all is said and done the area where the US fails is most egregiously is in the personnel it actually sends overseas. It has far more non-professional ambassadors than any other country in the world. Does the American public know, for example, that fully 44% of American Ambassadors sent overseas under Donald Trump were political appointees, whose sole distinction in many cases is that they contributed large sums of money to the Republican National Committee? Though such individuals can sometimes turn out to be surprisingly effective, many frequently know nothing of the country that they have been assigned to and do not speak the local language. To cite my own experience, in my 21 years as an intelligence officer spent mostly in Europe I did not once work for an ambassador who was a Foreign Service Officer career diplomat and few of the political appointees I knew never bothered to learn the local language. Part of the problem is that many US ambassadors do not know what their job consists of. Ambassadors have existed since the time of the ancient Greeks. They were from the beginning granted a special immunity which enabled them to talk to enemy spokesmen to attempt to resolve issues without resort to arms. In the modern context, Ambassadors are sent to reside in foreign capitals to provide some measure of protection for traveling citizens and also to defend other perceived national interests. Ambassadors are not soldiers, nor are they necessarily the parties of government that ultimately make decisions on what to do when dealing with a foreign nation. They are there to provide a mechanism for exchanging views to create a dialogue while at the same time working with foreign governments to avoid conflict, whether over trade or politics. They should be bridge-builders who explain how American politics function, how the American government works, and at the same time educate Americans on how the country they are based in sees the United States. By all these metrics, the US diplomatic effort has been a failure and, at the end of the day, the United States taxpayer spends astonishing sums of money to support its global representational and security structures that provide little in return, rarely experiencing any notable successes and watching the reputation of the US decline due to sheer ineptness. In my experience, the worst US Ambassadors tend to be academics, which brings us to Michael McFaul, who served as Ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama from 2012-2014. To be sure, viewing Russia as an enemy is a bipartisan impulse among the Washington political class. The neoconservatives and their neoliberal allies have both long been dreaming of regime change for Moscow, either because it is perceived as a threat or as an unacceptable autocracy. Given that, the appointment of Stanford Academic and Russia expert McFaul as Ambassador was intended to “reset” the bilateral relationship while also pushing the democracy promotion agenda and confronting various aspects of the domestic policies of the Vladimir Putin government that were considered unacceptable, to include the treatment of homosexuals. Pursuing that end, McFaul made a point of openly meeting with the political opposition in Russia. He thereby antagonized the officials in the government that he should have been working with to bring about acceptable change to such an extent that his term of office became untenable and he was an embarrassing failure. But now McFaul has turned the usual Washington trick, converting failure into personal success. He is a regular go-to guy when Democrats either in Congress or in the White House need expert testimony on Russia and he is reliably a passionate supporter of the largely unsustainable Russiagate tale and all that implies. He is again a tenured professor at Stanford, where another top government failure Condi Rice, she of “mushroom cloud” fame, serves as Director of the Hoover Institution. McFaul was recently bothered by what he described as an anonymous presumed “Russian troll” attack on twitter which had referred to his failure as Ambassador to Russia. This is how he responded: “I have a job for life at the best university in the world. I live in a giant house in paradise. I make close to a million dollars a year. I have adoring fans on tv and half a million followers on twitter 99% who also admire me. I’m doing just fine without a damn visa from Russia. And I am not afraid to tweet under my own name. I feel sorry for people like you who aren’t brave enough to do so.” Not surprisingly, McFaul’s message, which was replayed in a number of places on the internet, struck many as a bit over the top, dripping with entitlement and self-esteem coming from someone who had been given an important government job and had only succeeded in making matters worse. He responded to the criticism by tweeting an addendum: “I wrote than message in a private channel. I did not expect it to be published. But it was still a mistake, I apologize. It was arrogant and idiotic. A swarm of Russian trolls was accusing me of failure, and I responded in a most unprofessional way. Explanation, not excuse.” Well, it’s nice to hear an apology for a change from anyone associated with the United States government, but the point is that McFaul is symptomatic of much of what is wrong in terms of how the White House makes policy impulsively and appoints poorly informed ideologues to implement what has been decided. McFaul is not unique. President Donald Trump certainly set a precedent in providing a whole group of incompetents to support the clueless Mike Pompeo at State, to include Nikki Haley at the United Nations, Rick Grenell in Germany, David Friedman in Israel, and the ubiquitous John Bolton at the National Security Council. It is almost as if in the area of foreign policy, the United States government as it is currently configured is designed to fail. The solution is obvious. The United States desperately needs a foreign policy that is based on genuine national interests. It needs to stop rewarding political donors and needs also to send people as Ambassadors who are sensitive to the culture and red lines existing in the countries where they are posted. That doesn’t mean approving what others do, but it does mean listening to what they have to say. If one wants to restore America’s credibility and its reputation, examining the McFaul experience in Russia should be an excellent learning tool and taking steps so as not to repeat that failure would be a good place to start. Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation. Washington’s Clueless Ambassadors: Damaging American Interests Is Their Legacy Click on the headline to read the full story from
Mainstream media would have us believe that those who are resisting the pressure to take the shot are low-educated, knuckle-dragging neanderthals. A new study provides some surprising evidence to the contrary. Also today, mainstream media nervous about vax effectiveness, Texas blue regions in open revolt, a teacher's plea, and more. Today on the Liberty Report: You'll Never Guess The Education Level Of The Most Vax Resistant Americans... Click on the headline to read the full story from |
Ron Paul
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