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Ron Paul: Hope the War on Russia Is Worth It…

Foreign Policy Fail: Biden’s Sanctions are a Windfall For Russia!

By 

Ron Paul Institute

July 5, 2022

It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up.

Last week a New York Times reporter asked Biden how long he expects Americans to pay record gasoline prices over his Administration’s Ukraine policy. “As long as it takes,” replied the president without hesitation.

“Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” added Biden as justification for his Administration’s pro-pain policy toward Americans. The president has repeatedly tried to deflect blame for the growing economic crisis by claiming Russia is solely behind recent inflation. “The reason why gas prices are up is because of Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said in the same press conference.

But Biden has a big problem: Americans do not believe him. According to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month, only eleven percent of Americans believe Biden’s claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin is to blame for high prices.

When it comes to disdain for the average American hurt by higher prices, there is more than enough in the Biden Administration to go around.

Brian Deese, Director of President Biden’s National Economic Council, was asked in a recent CNN interview, “What do you say to those families that say, listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?”

His answer? “This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm.”

Has there ever been an Administration more out of touch with the American people? If you asked working Americans whether they’d be happy to suffer poverty for the “liberal world order,” how many would say “that sounds like a great idea”?

President Biden’s attempts to bring down gasoline prices are bound to fail because he does not understand the problem. He can beg the Saudis to pump more oil, he can even threaten the US oil companies as he did in a Tweet yesterday. He can buy and sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an attempt to give the impression that prices are lowing. None of it will work.

The strangest part of this idea that Americans must suffer to hurt the Russians is that these policies aren’t even hurting Russia! On the contrary: Russia has seen record profits from its oil and gas exports since the beginning of the Ukraine war.

According to a recent New York Times article, increasing global oil and gas prices have enabled Russia to finance its war on Ukraine. US sanctions did not bring the Russian economy to its knees, as Biden promised. They actually brought the American economy to its knees while Russian profits soared.

As Newsweek noted last week, Russian television pundits are joking that with the financial windfall Russia has seen since sanctions were imposed, “Biden is of course our agent.”

Washington’s bi-partisan foreign policy of wasting trillions on endless wars overseas has finally come home. Biden is clearly out of touch, but there is plenty of blame to go around. The only question is whether we will see an extended recession…or worse.

From LRC, here.

Hashem Improving the World for Mashiach

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

2018-04-28–⁠2021-08-12 finished ⁠

It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.

It all adds up.

So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/​early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).

Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the Third World out of poverty, eliminating child mortality⁠⁠1⁠, or science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal disease, conquering hepatitis C, or curing deadly cancers with genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are, and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so one hopes). Small stuff matters too. What about the little things in an ordinary life?

The seen and the unseen. When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats⁠. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it. (“The past is a third world country”, but America in the 1990s could also have used some improvement.)

Continue reading…

From Gwern.net, here.

Discriminating Taste in Stereotypes (get it?)

Non-PC truth: Stereotypes are not all bad

June 21, 2022

By Walter E. Block

Stereotypes have a bad press, particularly with the progressive wokesters on the left.  This mode of expression is deemed to be insulting and demeaning.  And not only that, but stereotypes are also widely thought to be inaccurate, amounting to blatant lies.

True, there are always exceptions that appear to belie any given stereotype.  But does this mean that stereotypes have no explanatory power at all?  Of course not.  They are merely empirical generalizations.  On average, men are taller and weigh more than women.  Certainly, though, there are short and slight males and tall, heavy females.  We are talking averages here.  They do convey a certain, albeit limited, amount of information.

Suppose you were sent to a college campus and were to be given $1,000 if you could accurately select two students, just by looking at them: one who could solve a quadratic equation and the other who could dunk a basketball.  You could not subject either of them to any test or interview before choosing.  Based on looks alone, if you followed the supposedly inaccurate stereotypes, you would choose a tall black kid for one of these tasks and an Asian youngster with thick glasses for the other.  Which would be which?  If you have to ask that question, you are woefully ignorant of stereotypes.  If you really don’t know, you have been Rip Van Winkling it all your life.

We can also resort to the animal kingdom to demonstrate the truthfulness and accuracy of such typecasts.  Rabbits are helpless.  Cheetahs run fast.  The bear can be ferocious.  The wolf hunts in packs.  Elephants weigh a lot.  Giraffes have long necks.  Science, too, is replete with such categorizations.  Iron is harder than wool.  Gold is softer than diamonds.  Coal burns better than steel.

Yes, there is a problem with some overgeneralizations.  All women are not better athletes than all men.  But there is nothing wrong with accurate albeit imperfect summaries of reality.

What are the benefits of stereotypes?  That is like asking, what are the benefits of empirical generalizations, or categorizations, since that is all that a stereotype is.  It would be a vast exaggeration to say chemistry consists of nothing more than categorizations (the periodic table of elements), but there is at least a ring of truth in this stereotype.  Similarly, the study of biology consists of much, much more than breaking up living matter into phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, but an awful lot of this field is focused on precisely that issue.  Stereotypes also help us better understand dog breeds: both the Great Dane and the Chihuahua are members of the same species, but they are stereotypically different.  Mary Tyler Moore once said that “love is all around us.”  I say that stereotypes, also, are “all around us” and as far as both claims are concerned, it is a good thing they are.

Are the feelings of some people hurt by such summaries of human characterizations?  Of course — this cannot be denied.  But the truth is the truth.  The hurt feelings emanate from the reality of the situation, not from its summarization.  The truth is not only the first victim of actual war; the same applies in the war over words.

According to Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men, “you can’t handle the truth.”  Well, stereotypes are indeed part of the truth.  And yes, some people “can’t handle” them.

From American Thinker, here.

Well, Define ‘Winning’…

You know you’re winning

Monday, June 21, 2021

 when they change the argument.

All last year and as late as May of this year:

  • “coronavirus came from a lab” is a debunked conspiracy theory
Now:
  • what difference does it make where it came from, what matters is what we do to stop the next one.
The only response to the latter is to ask them why it mattered so much during the course of the previous year?  So much so, in fact, that you would be removed from Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube for talking about the lab leak theory.