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Russia, US exchange glances as Prigozhin heads for Moscow

Monday July 10, 2023

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Sometimes one wishes Winston Churchill had left behind an evergreen quote in regard of Russian diplomacy as well, similar to his epic one on Russian politics, which still remains unbeatable — “Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.” 

Renegade Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s defiance of the regime in Russia has apparently turned into a bulldog fight. The last we heard is that the oligarch is back in Russia and possibly heading for Moscow. The loquacious Russian commentators have fallen silent. 

This coincides, strangely, with a sensational disclosure by NBC News regarding Track-2 diplomacy between the Americans and Russians over the Ukraine war. The media leak in Washington coincided with a conciliatory Kremlin statement that Moscow is open to a prisoner exchange involving Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich. Russian authorities allowed the American ambassador to visit Gershkovich in the prison for the first time on Friday. 

The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has since responded that “we are prepared to do hard things in order to get our citizens home, including getting Evan home.” Prisoner exchanges traditionally created a “feel-good” sensation in the Russian-American relationship and provided setting for serious business to be transacted.
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Can Washington Be Saved from Itself at the NATO Summit?

Monday July 10, 2023

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Several crucial decisions likely will be made at this week’s NATO summit meeting. The most important of all involves Ukraine’s application to join the Alliance. Zealotry for Ukraine in some NATO capitals is so strong that that a path to membership for that country is being considered even in the midst of an ongoing war and unresolved territorial disputes. The most likely move would be to approve a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Kyiv, which normally is the final substantive measure that an applicant country must fulfill before being admitted to the Alliance. The usual pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine lobbyists in the West are pushing very hard for that step.

It is a sad comment on the judgment and prudence of NATO leaders that they are even considering such a move. The Kremlin has made it clear on multiple occasions since President George W. Bush first proposed NATO membership for Ukraine in 2008 that such a step would cross a bright red line as far as Russia’s vital security interests are concerned. Yet policymakers in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations remained stunningly tone-deaf to Moscow’s repeated, ever-more-emphatic, warnings.

Bush’s initial diplomatic foray, which was supported by most East European members of the Alliance, was blunted by opposition from some of NATO’s older members, especially France and Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was especially reluctant to add Kyiv, citing both Ukraine’s endemic corruption and the danger of antagonizing Russia. Unfortunately, French-German resistance could only produce a compromise that delayed Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO. No explicit membership invitation was extended in the final declaration from the 2008 Bucharest summit, but a commitment was made that Ukraine could join at some point in the future.
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Federal Court Makes this July 4th a True Independence Day

Monday July 10, 2023

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While Americans were enjoying hot dogs and fireworks this Fourth of July, federal Judge Terry A. Doughty commemorated Independence Day by striking a blow for the separation of big tech and state. Specifically, he issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting a number of government officials and agencies from communicating with social media companies to request they censor certain posts.
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The War We’re Finally Allowed to See

Friday July 7, 2023

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Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker:

"While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them. I later went there with Tynda. In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on iron wheels: a Maxim gun, the first fully automatic weapon ever made. Although this particular model dated from 1945, it was virtually identical to the original version, which was invented in 1884: a knobbed crank handle, wooden grips, a lidded compartment for adding cold water or snow when the barrel overheated…. "
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CNN Host: We Should Yield to Government Censorship Demands

Thursday July 6, 2023

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As a long-standing free speech advocate, the last few years have been alarming and, frankly, depressing. The censorship efforts of the government are, unfortunately, not new. However, what is new is the support of the media and the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the recent opinion finding that the Biden Administration had violated First Amendment in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” However, no one expressed more simply and chillingly than CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly who stated that it “makes sense” for tech companies to go along with government censorship demands.

Mattingly admitted that social media platforms “more often than not” gave in to the censorship demands by the Biden administration. However, he insisted that it “makes sense,” and is “probably what we should do on public health grounds.”

"[T]he Biden administration would regularly reach out to Twitter and Facebook and other companies in kind of the early stages of their COVID response and say, this person is spreading lies about vaccines, this account is spreading misinformation that is inhibiting — not just our efforts, the administration’s efforts to address COVID — but also public health, do something about it. And often, I think more often than not, the companies would respond and say, okay. And there are emails that came out during the course of this case that that was something that I think — when it was explained to me at the time, I thought, alright, that makes sense, that’s probably what we should do on public health grounds."

What is striking is not just the blind acceptance that the government should be protecting us from harmless thoughts. It is also the failure recognize that the government was wrong on many of these points while experts were been banned and blacklisted.
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Circle the Wagons: The Government Is On the Warpath

Thursday July 6, 2023

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How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?

Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician translate them for you—and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and keeping the government’s nose out of your private affairs.

In an age of overcriminalization, where the average citizen unknowingly commits three crimes a day, and even the most mundane activities are regulated, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do.

Yet it was not always this way.

It used to be “we the people” giving the orders, telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the government are “no,” “not” and “nor.”
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CIA Chief Burns' Descent into Delusion

Wednesday July 5, 2023

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Radio Sputnik called me first thing this morning and asked me to comment on the recent speech in Oxfordshire, England by the Director of the CIA, William Burns. I quickly scanned the news item and assumed it was a joke. I did a quick check to verify that this was a hoax or another clever bit of satire by the Babylon Bee. Nope. Burns really is this fatuous. Maybe the real Bill Burns has been abducted by aliens (the outer space kind).

"CIA Director William Burns called Russia’s war on Ukraine a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to recruit spies for the intelligence agency. 

“'Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service,' Burns said in a lecture Saturday to the Ditchley Foundation in the United Kingdom, according to a transcript of his remarks."

I have posted the full video of Burn’s remarks below. If you held out hope that Burns was the lone adult in the Biden Administration, forget about it. Burns, while well spoken, is a shallow, mendacious twit.
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The failed coup in Russia through American looking glass

Wednesday July 5, 2023

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The former US president Donald Trump’s remarks regarding the failed coup attempt in Russia by Yevgeniy Prigozhin stood out for their sheer subtlety amidst the crass new western narrative that the dramatic events on June 23-24 highlighted “cracks” within the Russian system.  No one cares to explain what these “cracks” are but the coinage conveys that Russia is heading for implosion. Per Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have been “somewhat weakened”, creating an opportunity for the US to broker a peace settlement in Ukraine.
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Indiana Jones and the Project Paperclip Nazis

Tuesday July 4, 2023

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The new Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, shares much in common with the first movie in the series — Raiders of the Lost Ark. Among the common features is that the villain in the new movie, as in Raiders, is a German Nazi.

How is that? While Raiders was set when the National Socialists ruled Germany, the new movie takes place roughly 30 years later. The twist is that in the new movie the German Nazi villain, a physicist, had moved to America toward the end of or after World War II and, under an assumed name, played a celebrated role in the advancement of the American space program.

The means of this trajectory for the villain is not explained in the new movie. But, it is a trajectory that is quite similar to that of other German scientists after World Wat II that was facilitated by a United States government’s Project Paperclip.

Project Paperclip brough many German scientist to America, including some whose pasts would have made them subjectable to war crime prosecution. While US officials proclaimed the need to achieve justice in the Nuremberg Trials, allowances were made so scientists who could advance US technology for military and other purposes could be brought out of Europe, including secretly, and set up with new lives in America.
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Why We Must Come Together

Monday July 3, 2023

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One of the greatest influences on both my personal philosophy and the strategy of how to promote it was Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Read founded FEE in 1946, just as WWII was ending and the US government was about to embark upon a cold war with the Soviet Union. Read must have foreseen the expansion of government that was coming – both at home and overseas – and he started FEE to spread the message of non-interventionism and freedom. You could say that FEE was the first modern libertarian organization.
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