From The American Conservative. The Political Class hates cash, and seeks to abolish it at every turn, because it’s anonymous, there’s no paper trail. The State doesn’t want any activity taking place outside of its view, and cash is one of the last bastions of anonymous exchange.
From The Atlantic: “Despite what the ACLU has long advised, you do not have the right to take photos or record videos of cops—except when you’re planning to actively challenge police activity with the images. This is what U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney has ruled in a case involving two Philadelphia residents suing city police for using excessive force against them. The two plaintiffs, Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, both had their cameras taken by police while they observed and filmed the officers’ actions, and both filed suit claiming this was a violation of their constitutional rights.”
Unionized henchmen for the Political Class don’t like their crimes documented. But it’s crucial to do so, since, absent video evidence, a cop’s word is taken as Gospel by a jury.
From the excellent Philip Giraldi, writing in the Unz Review on the devastating and counterproductive effects of sanctions. Philip writes:
“I oppose sanctions in principle because I believe they are a blunt instrument that punishes innocent civilians when broadly construed while having no effect at all when directly targeting the country’s relatively wealthy and unreachable government officials. If sanctions are to make any sense they should be designed to achieve a quantifiable result but that is rarely the case and they frequently serve no purpose whatsoever beyond dishing out punishment. It has been claimed that sanctions actually worked in Sudan because its government has moved to meet some of Washington’s demands over Darfur and South Sudan, but that is a simplistic explanation for rather more complex phenomena that were likely driven by multiple constituencies and interests.
More often than not, sanctions harden a government’s resolve to resist, as they did in Cuba, and even become useful to the regime as an excuse for government failures. The explanation provided by George W. Bush’s special envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios that sanctions “send a message…to start behaving differently when they deal with their own people. That’s what this is all about,” is hubristic imperialism at its finest. It is reported in Sudan that many young Sudanese hate the United States and it is not difficult to understand why.”
Indeed. Rather than turning the people against their leaders, sanctions rally the public around their government that is now being persecuted by a foreign power. Sanctions stoke the flames of nationalism and lead to retaliatory terrorism, since the citizens rightly view their government as too weak to mount an effective counterattack. That’s what sanctions are: an attack, an act of war.
From The Telegraph.
The Power Elite are panicking.
Philip Giraldi on federal overreach, principled resistance, and the false choice between liberty and security.
…in 1974.
The pilot, who allegedly put on latex gloves first, opens the bloody door and a dead black man falls out.
From Reason. Death rates for Blacks and Hispanics have fallen in the past 15 years, while White death rates have risen 11%. This New York Times piece postulates that the answer lies in how Whites compare themselves to their parents, who had more economic opportunity than they currently have, which degrades morale to the point of hopelessness. Scary.