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The US Government Says: Let’s You and Him Fight

Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?

By 

Ron Paul Institute

March 15, 2022

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine moves past its third week, there are slight hopes that negotiations between the two sides may soon produce a ceasefire. But with the shrill warmongering talk in Washington, it almost seems like the US government would hate to see that happen.

Congress and the US Administration seem determined to drag the United States into a war with Russia over Ukraine. Senator Lindsay Graham is openly calling for someone to kill the Russian president and many in the US House have demanded that the Administration establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine.

Are they insane? A no-fly zone means you destroy anything and everything that can prevent total US air dominance. That means an attack on Russian missile and air defense systems within Russia. In other words, World War III.

We can all feel disgust at the destruction in Ukraine, but is it really necessary for us to gamble with our own nuclear annihilation?

Sadly, a large bipartisan group in Congress seems to think so.

Much of what is happening in Ukraine can be traced back to the Obama Administration. State Department officials like Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken planned and executed the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. This is what set us on this path to conflict, as the government put in place after the coup began demanding NATO membership.

Blinken, Nuland, and the others responsible for this heinous act returned to government in more senior positions under President Biden and they have continued to push their Ukraine agenda.

Last week Secretary of State Blinken – our top diplomat – sought to send Soviet-era Polish fighter jets into Ukraine to shoot Russians. When the Poles said they’d be happy to ship the planes to a US base in Germany and let the Pentagon transfer them to Ukraine, the Pentagon finally stepped in to quash an extraordinarily high-risk move that even the Pentagon said would have no real effect on the outcome of the war.

The State Department is trying to get us into a war and the Pentagon is trying to keep us out. How ironic!

Back when I was on the campaign trail I would say that we have a few thousand diplomats in government, it might not be a bad idea to use them. But I certainly did not mean that we should use them to try and get us further involved in a war!

Three weeks into this terrible war, the US is not pursuing talks with Russia. As Antiwar.com recently reported, instead of supporting negotiations between Ukraine and Russia that could lead to a ceasefire and an end to the bloodshed, the US government is actually escalating the situation which can only increase the bloodshed.

The constant flow of US and allied weapons into Ukraine and talk of supporting an extended insurgency does not seem designed to give Ukraine a victory on the battlefield but rather to hand Russia what Secretary of State Blinken called “a strategic defeat.”

It sounds an awful lot like the Biden Administration intends to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. The only solution for the US is to get out. Let the Russians and Ukrainians reach an agreement. That means no NATO for Ukraine and no US missiles on Russia’s borders? So what! End the war then end NATO.

From LRC, here.

The Media: Sins of Omission

To Tell The Truth: Major News Outlets Refuse to Cover “Inconvenient Truths” Relating to COVID-19

By Celine Ryan Ciccio  |  January 19, 2021

To Tell the Truth is a Human Events News’ press analysis series. These stories will focus on “news” being reported by either The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News, or CBS News. Despite 24-hour cable broadcasts, and an untold number of internet sources, these established, mainstream platforms continue to influence the majority of American citizens and their political opinions.

The “news” generated by these press is better regarded as “opinion” crafted in a way designed to discourage skepticism and critical thought on the part of the audience. To Tell the Truth will be Human Events News’ periodic effort to help address this bias, and restore the skepticism necessary on the part of all Americans to maintain a free society.

On Jan. 15, Newsweek reported on a groundbreaking study published ten days prior in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study, conducted by Stanford researchers, found that mandatory lockdowns in response to COVID-19 “did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures.”

Five days after Newsweek’s report, news of the study remains absent from the websites of major American news outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, and CBS.

“The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which instituted less severe, voluntary responses. It aimed to analyze the effect that less restrictive or more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing the transmission of the virus,” Newsweek reports.

“We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures,” wrote the researchers.

The named outlets have continued to cover coronavirus-related news and even research studies, especially those having to do with the severity of the virus and the importance of a vaccine. The New York Times has covered several studies in the days since the Stanford research was released, including the following:

Continue reading…

From Human Events, here.

Communist Party USA Denies Having Spies…

Are we hiring spies?

BY: SCOTT HILEY| JANUARY 20, 2021

Q

Hi, I recently came across your website and thought your organization to be very reasonable. I am a student in college and I was wondering if I could apply to be a communist spy. Any advice? 🙂
A
Hi,

Thanks for your interest in our clandestine ops/espionage program!  Here’s how the process works.  You apply for membership in our party, then continue your education, look for a job, participate in non-violent political activity in accordance with your beliefs, and live the outwardly normal life of a regular human being trying to get by in a system based on maximizing profits rather than meeting people’s needs.  But get this: the whole time, you’ll actually be gathering and analyzing information on capitalism and sharing it with other members and allies of a legal, open political party that makes no secret of its goals or program.

You can report on your experiences under capitalism by submitting them as articles to the People’s World (stories@peoplesworld.org) or the party website (discussion@cpusa.org). You can even develop a secret identity based around a pen name if you’d like.  You could be Eugenia Eagleson, a retired teacher from Naperville who’s concerned about the impact of climate change on her grandchildren. Or Larry “Big Jim” Hayes, a laid off mechanic who’s giving cello lessons to make ends meet until he finds another full time gig.

Or you could be yourself.  You’re part of a generation that has inherited a world in deep economic, social, environmental, and political crisis, handed the task of solving a bunch of problems you didn’t cause.  And that’s basically what all Communists are: not secret agents, not operatives of some foreign power, just average working people trying to save the world.

We’d love to hear your ideas on how to do it, comrade.

From CP USA, here.

‘Knowing HOW’ Versus ‘Knowing THAT’: Wittgenstein Against Brisk

Lost in Transcription

Friday, August 22, 2008

Sheldon Richman

Following rules, such as the rules of language, of the market, or of just conduct, is more about “knowing how” than “knowing that.” This is a lesson taught by many important thinkers, among them, Gilbert Ryle (who used these terms in the title of chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind), F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On many matters, we know more than we can say. Yet we are tempted to identify knowing with saying. It’s a temptation best resisted. (Wittgenstein distinguished between knowing the height of a structure and knowing how a clarinet sounds. We use the same word know, but we don’t mean the same thing. Do you know the height if you cannot say it?)

Language, economic activity, and law did not begin when someone published a grammar book, an economics text, or a political treatise that people then used to guide their actions. On the contrary, the books were written after the fact to codify what people had long been doing. And, importantly, the books could never fully describe what people had been doing or would do in the future. At best they were imperfect codifications (abstractions) that couldn’t possibly capture all the details involved in applying the rules to the varied circumstances of everyday life. In truth, they weren’t rules — in the formal, self-conscious sense that we usually define that term — until the books were written. Yet they governed behavior.

“For not only do we not think of the rules of usage — of definitions, etc. — while using language, but when we are asked to give such rules, in most cases we aren’t able to do so,” Wittgenstein writes. And elsewhere: “One learns the game by watching how others play. But we say that it is played according to such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from the practice of the game — like a law of nature governing the play.” Think how children learn something as complex as language and social roles.

Continue reading…

From FEE, here.