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“Did I miss?” you asked. “You didn’t exactly miss,” said Pooh, “But you missed the balloon.” “I’m so sorry,” you said, and you fired again, and this time you hit the balloon and the air came slowly out, and Winnie-the-Pooh floated down to the ground.”

 ~ A. A. Milne

Imagine the angst of the people, especially the politicians, when a balloon floated slowly for everyone to see across these United States, gaining more and more press all the time. Of course it was a killer Chinese balloon; what else could it be? The news anchors at every mainstream media outlet in the country had the exact same story as it floated over my home state of Montana, and it was of course completely wrong. Airports were shut down, politicians were screaming, as the dire threat of a balloon filled the skies. The puppet pontificators, along with the military heads were very perplexed, and said there was an ‘indication’ that a balloon possibly from China was traveling across the country, spying on us. What a coup!

Yes, in this extremely advanced technological age, China had perpetrated the perfect covert mission to get all the U.S. military secrets, by sending a balloon that could be seen by everyone floating across the most sensitive sites in America. It maneuvered across oceans, across Alaska, through Canada, and on to the east coast off the Carolinas, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff hurriedly attempted to gather intelligence to decide how to squelch such a massive threat as this. The Chinese could have used Google earth, spy planes, drones, or any number of techniques, but decided on this groundbreaking balloon technology instead. What kind of monsters are these?

But worry not, for the politicians and the military only think of the safety of foreign civilians, and Americans, and that is why they have only slaughtered and murdered tens of millions since World War II. They said that if they shot down this state-of-the-art weaponry down over land, people might be injured by balloon debris. Thank God they care so much about us, as many could have been covered in latex had they chanced a shot at this elusive craft. I guess they missed their opportunity when it breezed over eastern Montana and Kansas, where there is only sagebrush and prairie.

Risk of this nature brings home the reasoning for the United States to have the largest and most advanced military in the world. If this does not justify a trillion dollar a year military budget, nothing could. Just imagine if they had not been there, what horrible destruction could have been the result. What carnage could have occurred? Americans everywhere were holding their breath, awaiting the final moment when the entire defensive forces could swing into action to stop this balloon threat.

But fear not my countrymen, as Top Gun fighter jets were put on notice, so that missiles could be prepared to take out this gigantic balloon. Only the best would be suited for such a dangerous mission. An F-22 Raptor fighter jet was dispatched from Langley Air Base, and was able to take out this balloon with but one single missile. Joe Biden cheered loudly, as he was once again safe, and told reporters, “I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible … and I want to compliment our aviators who did it.”

This terrible ordeal is now over, as the multi-million dollar missile popped the balloon, and sent its surveillance payload plummeting into the ocean off Myrtle Beach. Locals were stunned by this display of bravery and honor, as they watched from the coast as the balloon floated slowly into the murky depths of the ocean. Of course this was televised, and will likely become a reality series very soon, so all can watch this Osama bin Laden-like operation over and over again. Just like bin Laden, the balloon was buried at sea to protect and respect the Chinese traditions.

This is one American who stands proud, as knowing the resolve and the tough decisions made by our great leader Biden, and the outstanding bravery of the Top Gun Pilot will help me sleep at night, knowing that this top notch military machine can take out a balloon with such precision, even though they could not even get a plane in the air on 9/11. Improvement at this level, taking out such a threat, should give pause to any who decide to ever attack us with a balloon again!

How far we have come: “The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.” ~ Michael Hastings

From LRC, here.

Loneliness has been at “epidemic” levels for several years now. In a 2018 Cigna insurance health survey^1,2,3 of 20,000 Americans aged 18 and older, a whopping 46% reported “sometimes” or “always” feeling lonely. More recent studies cited by El Pais⁴ include a World Health Organization paper from 2021, which found loneliness affected up to 34% of older adults in China, Europe, Latin America and the U.S.

Other recent research found loneliness among adolescents ranged from a low of 9.2% in Southeast Asia to a high of 14.4% in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The highest rate — 21% — was found among elderly Eastern Europeans.⁵

Effects of Loneliness on Physical Health

While loneliness statistics can be difficult to pin down, the effects of loneliness are well-recognized at this point. Dr. Facundo Manes, a neurologist, neuroscientist and founder of the Neurological Cognitive Institute in Argentina, likens feelings of loneliness to “a biological alarm bell that reminds us that we are social beings,”⁶ and when this alarm goes off, disease processes are set into motion. Scientists have linked loneliness with a greater risk for:

• Obesity⁷
• Anxiety⁹
• Higher levels of perceived stress¹¹
• Reduced immune function¹³
• Heart disease⁸
• Dementia¹⁰
• Inflammation¹²
• Poor sleep^14,15

A 2011 study¹⁶ found that for each 1-point increase on the UCLA loneliness scale,¹⁷ an individual is 8% more likely to experience some sort of sleep disruption. Research¹⁸ has also shown that lack of sleep has the effect of triggering feelings of loneliness, so the two problems tend to feed on each other.

Loneliness Raises Your Risk of All-Cause Mortality

Loneliness is also strongly linked to reduced life span.¹⁹ One 2015 meta-review²⁰ concluded loneliness can raise your risk of dying by as much as 30%. Older adults are also more likely to die within 30 days of emergency surgery when loneliness is a factor.²¹

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

My old friend Yuri Maltsev passed away on Thursday.  As many LRC and Mises.org readers know, Yuri was part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika staff until he defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and came to America.  He earned a Ph.D. at Moscow State University during the Cold War and, lo and behold, became an Austrian School economist!  I met Yuri soon after he arrived in the U.S. and asked him how he became familiar with the Austrian School.  His answer was that part of his job for Gorbachev was to read and criticize the literature of the bourgeois capitalist exploiters.  As such, he was given special permission to access that literature, some of which came with a long prison sentence to any ordinary Soviet citizen caught with it.

Yuri said that he read a contraband copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in mimeograph form, and passed it on to someone else immediately after he finished it.  Everything in the book was absolutely true about collectivism and government planning, he said.  Years later, in 2009, right after the crash of 2008, Yuri and our friend Tom Woods appeared on the Glenn Beck television program to discuss The Road to Serfdom.  After that discussion, the sales ranking of this 1943 book went to #1 on Amazon.  I then put together a five-week online course on the book for the Mises Institute that attracted several hundred students from all over the world.

Having spent so much of his life in socialist hell, once he got a good-paying job in America Yuri reveled in consumerism.  He would buy a $3,000 car, drive it for a while, then sell it back to the dealer he bought it from.  He said he did that about thirty times.  He also bought foreclosed real estate from HUD and rented or resold them, typically offering say, $5,000 for a house listed at say, $35-50,000 – and succeeding!

Yuri was associated with the Mises Institute for many years as a guest speaker at conferences and a lecturer at the annual Mises University.  What an amazing time it was for me in the early days of Mises University to sit around at a place like Stanford University shortly after the worldwide collapse of socialism talking with such people as Murray Rothbard and Yuri Maltsev.  He was always an extraordinarily popular speaker because of his wit and his unique knowledge of both Austrian economics and real-world experiences of having lived much of his life in the former Soviet Union.  No one in the world was better able to explain in such vivid detail why Mises was right about socialism all along.  If anything, Mises may have understated the barbarity of socialism which, in the Soviet case, was “all about mass murder,” as Yuri said.

When I first met Yuri I asked him what he thought the biggest difference was between life in the Soviet Union and life in America.  He said that in the Soviet Union no one believed anything the government said, but Americans believe everything the government says.  The response of at least 90 percent of Americans to covid totalitarianism is the most recent example of this truism.

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

Thanks to the latest release of the “Twitter Files,” we now know without a doubt that the entire “Russia disinformation” racket was a massive disinformation campaign to undermine US elections and perhaps even push “regime change” inside the United States after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Here is some background. In November, 2016, just after the election, the Washington Post published an article titled, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” The purpose of the article was to delegitimize the Trump presidency as a product of a Russian “disinformation” campaign.

“There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in US democracy and its leaders,” wrote Craig Timberg. The implication was clear: a Russian operation elected Donald Trump, not the American people.

Among the “experts” it cited were an anonymous organization called “Prop Or Not,” which in its own words claimed to identify “more than 200 websites as peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”

The organization’s report was so preposterous that the Washington Post was later forced to issue a clarification, even though the Post provided a link to the report which falsely accused independent news outlets like Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and even my Ron Paul Institute as “Russian disinformation.”

The 2016 Washington Post article also featured “expert” Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence officer who went on to found another outfit claiming to be hunting “Russian disinformation” in the US, the “Hamilton 68” project. That project was launched by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a very well-funded organization containing a who’s who of top neocons like William Kristol, John Podesta, Michael McFaul, and many more.

Thanks to the latest release of the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi reveals that the Hamilton 68 project, which claimed to monitor 600 “Russian disinformation” Twitter accounts, was a total hoax. While they refused to reveal which accounts they monitored and would not reveal their methodology, Twitter was able to use reverse-engineering to determine the 600-odd “Russian-connected” accounts. Twitter found that despite Hamilton’s claims, the vast majority of these “Russian” accounts were English-speaking. Of the Russian registered accounts – numbering just 36 out of 644 – most were employees of the Russian news outlet RT.

It was all a lie and the latest Twitter Files release confirms that even the “woke” pre-Musk Twitter employees could smell a rat. But the hoax served an important purpose. Hiding behind anonymity, this neocon organization was able to generate hundreds of media stories slandering and libeling perfectly legitimate organizations and individuals as “Russian agents.” It provided a very convenient way to demonize anyone who did not go along with the approved neocon narrative.

Twitter’s new owner, who has given us a look behind the curtain, put it best in a Tweet over the weekend: “An American group made false claims about Russian election interference to interfere with American elections.”

The whole “Russia disinformation” hoax was a shocking return to the McCarthyism of the 1950s and in some ways even worse. Making lists of American individuals and non-profits to be targeted and “cancelled” as being in the pay of foreigners is despicable. Such fraudulent actions have caused real-life damages that need to be addressed.

From LRC, here.