Washington Policy Center: Trust Your Neighbors but Identify Your Cattle

Pam Lewison at the Washington Policy Center discusses Electronic Cattle Transaction Reporting (ECTR) related (“identified cattle”) inspection fee reductions and their disproportionate effect on dairy and small cattle operations who don’t use ECTR (“unidentified cattle”) in Trust Your Neighbors but Identify Your Cattle.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture is proposing a cost cut for livestock brand inspections for “identified cattle” from $1.30 per animal to $0.80 per animal and is set to host a hearing May 24 on the topic.

According to the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA), the cost cut will save livestock producers money and maintain the solvency of the livestock inspection program at the same time.

The saying in cattle country goes, “trust your neighbors but brand your cattle.” 

The problem our state faces is the need to both identify livestock and log animal disease traceability information at the same time. Brands are a useful and necessary tool for animals that spend a portion of their lives away from the watchful eyes of their owners. RFID or EID tags are ear tags that provide a digital storage mechanism for animal disease traceability.

Washington state is home to some 9,000 ranch families raising approximately 230,000 head of beef cattle. In addition to our robust beef industry, there are more than 400 dairies in Washington state housing approximately 275,000 dairy cows. The care and raising of these animals vary based upon the practices of the livestock owner but, generally, beef cattle are on range pasture for a portion of the year while dairy cattle are handled every day.

The inspection cost-cutting proposal from WSDA is only applicable to “identified” cattle, or cattle that have an RFID/EID tag and may be branded. Leaving “unidentified” cattle, or cattle that do not have an RFID/EID tag or a brand, still set to pay a fee of $4 per animal. The proposal notes the goal is to wean livestock producers off the need to have inspectors present for private cattle sales and incentivize them to use the ECTR system instead.

However, it still disproportionately punishes dairy operators and small livestock operations, neither of which have a particular incentive to brand their cattle or use an RFID/EID tag, by not addressing the $4 per animal fee for all unidentified cattle.

The livestock inspection department should set a single flat rate for all cattle to better encourage use of RFID/EID tags and logging of private sales via ECTR. A single per animal fee may help foster the use of RFID/EID tags by livestock owners who have resisted the transition from a blank plastic tag to the electronic tags.

Unlike many cattle-heavy states and our direct neighbors, Washington hasn’t figured out how to create an inspection system based on a flat fee per animal. Several other western states – Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, and Colorado – all charge a flat fee per animal with an additional call-out service fee for any inspections that occur on a ranch rather than in a sale barn. The flat fees charged range in price from $0.55 per head (Colorado) to $1.19 per head (Idaho). Other fees like check-off assessments and animal disease traceability are also added on to those costs…(continues)

The Hill: White House Yields to a National Rage Addiction

Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, wrote an opinion piece for The Hill titled From court packing to leaking to doxing: White House yields to a national rage addiction. In the piece, Turley discusses Democrats’ continued bootlicking behavior toward the mob.

Nearly 70 years ago, a little-known lawyer named Joseph Welch famously confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy (D-Wis.) in defense of a young man hounded over alleged un-American views. Welch told McCarthy that “I think I have never really gauged … your recklessness” before asking: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

It was a defining moment in American politics as Welch called out a politician who had abandoned any semblance of principle in the pursuit of political advantage. This week, the same scene played out in the White House with one striking difference: This was no Joseph Welch to be found.

After someone in the Supreme Court leaked a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a virtual flash-mob formed around the court and its members demanding retributive justice. This included renewed calls for court “packing,” as well as the potential targeting of individual justices at their homes. Like the leaking of the opinion itself, the doxing of justices and their families is being treated as fair game in our age of rage.

There is more than a license to this rage; there is an addiction to it. That was evident in March 2020 when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood in front of the Supreme Court to threaten Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer’s reckless rhetoric was celebrated, not condemned, by many on the left, even after he attempted to walk it back by stating that “I should not have used the words I used … they did not come out the way I intended to.”

What occurred at the White House this week is even more troubling. When asked for a response to the leaking of a justice’s draft opinion, White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to condemn the leaker and said the real issue was the opinion itself. Then she was asked about the potential targeting of justices and their families at their homes, and whether that might be considered extreme. It should have been another easy question; few Americans would approve of such doxing, particularly since some of the justices have young children at home. Yet Psaki declared that “I don’t have an official U.S. government position on where people protest,” adding that “peaceful protest is not extreme.”

In reality, not having an official position on doxing and harassing Supreme Court justices and their families is a policy.

Whether protests are judged to be extreme seems often to depend upon their underlying viewpoints. When Westboro Baptist Church activists protested at the funeral of Beau Biden, it was peaceful — but many critics rightly condemned the demonstration as extreme; some even approved of Westboro activists being physically assaulted. When the church brought its case before the Supreme Court, some of us supported its claims despite our vehement disagreement with their views, but 42 senators filed an amicus brief asking the court to deny free-speech protections for such protests. The court ultimately ruled 8-1 in favor of the church.

In this case, the Biden administration and the Justice Department have condemned the court’s leaked draft — but not the threatened protests at justices’ homes, even though those arguably could be treated as a crime. Under 18 U.S.C. 1507, it is a federal crime to protest near a residence occupied by a judge or jury with the intent to influence their decisions in pending cases, and this case remains pending. (Ironically, prosecution could be difficult if the protesters said they had no intent other than to vent anger.)

Even if protests at justices’ homes are constitutionally protected, that does not make them right, any more than the lawful Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 were right.

In 1954, the left was targeted for its political views; today, it is the left which is calling for censorship, blacklisting and doxing. In such moments of reckless rage, presidents often have become calming voices, tempering extremist passions in their own parties. When they have failed to do so, history has judged them harshly, as in the case of President Eisenhower’s belated condemnation of Sen. McCarthy, something he reportedly regretted for the rest of his life.

President Biden has repeatedly shown that polls, not principles, guide his presidency. He showed integrity as a senator by denouncing court packing as a “bonehead … terrible, terrible” idea. However, he has stayed silent as today’s Democrats have pushed to pack the court with an instant liberal majority, a demand that increased this week. Biden long supported the Senate’s filibuster rule and said efforts to eliminate it would be “disastrous” — but when today’s mob formed, he flipped and denounced the filibuster as a “relic” of the Jim Crow era.

Even on abortion, Biden has shifted with the polls. He once opposed Roe v. Wade and supported an amendment that would negate the decision. At the time, he declared that “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Now President Biden has switched his position without really switching his logic. He recently declared that he supported Roe because “I’m just a child of God; I exist” and thus can decide what happens to his body. Accordingly, he denounced the Supreme Court’s draft opinion as “radical” and affirmed the right of a woman “to abort a child.“

Whether it is court leaking, packing, doxing or other tactics, many Democratic politicians and pundits continue to follow the mob rather than risk its ire…(continues)

AmRRON Mobile (Radio) Training Exercise, May 14-15

AmRRON is holding a radio operator training exercise this weekend – May 14-15, 2022. This exercise is being held on HF frequencies, using digital modes and off-grid power.

Get ready!  The AMRMRX 22 is a fun exercise involving fixed-site ‘Command’ stations and field mobile ‘Reporting’ stations, requiring the mobile stations to set up a field station, listen and then transmit, then pack up and move to another location and repeat the process!

Exercise begins:  Saturday, May 14th @ 0945 Local Time

  • 4 Segments – Three 2 hour segments and a 1 hour 4 th segment.

Scenario: X10 Solar Flare on 20220508-1200Z with full on CME impact
28 hours later (20220509-1600Z). Expected loss of Grid power,
communications including cellular telephone and internet.

All guidance and instruction documents are downloadable below for you to print and review.

AmRRON CORPS MEMBERS be sure to participate in this Wednesday evening’s ‘BREAKOUT CHANNEL’ AmRRON Z-Net Voice Net for discussing the exercise and the roles and participate in the Q&A session.

There are two documents to download and print:

  1.  AmRRON AMRMRX v1.4.pdf  (Overall Exercise Description and General Guidance)
  2.  Instructions to reporting stations AMRMRX v1.4  (These are specific instructions for deployment as a reporting station.)

Reporting Station Requirements:

  1. AmRRON member
  2. Portable or Mobile HF radio capability (low power acceptable).
  3. Multi band antenna capable of reception / transmission on 40 & 80M.
  4. Digital HF capability utilizing FLdigi suite and JS8call simultaneously.
    Transportation (A conveyance capable of moving the operator and all
    equipment a distance of 3 miles in under 30 minutes).
  5. Off grid power (preferably PV panel and battery or equivalent).
    Generator power is acceptable but use caution in transporting and using
    flammable liquids.
  6. Operation from your vehicle as a mobile station is acceptable.

Kunstler: “Disinformation” Is Just a Boot in Your Face

Author James Howard Kunstler writes about the new Ministry of Truth in “Disinformation” is Just a Boot in Your Face. Unfortunately the government is simply not trustworthy enough to be the arbiter of truth, regardless of what power is in power. Real truth in science is almost entirely impossible to discern any more because you cannot easily tell who is doing real science. Science was first corporatized as wealthy business sought first to corner the best scientists to further their industries. Later those corporations turned to paying for the “scientific studies” that would justify their desires. That corporatization of science then made it easier for science to be co-opted for political ends. News media on both sides of the political spectrum routinely fail to understand the content of the scientific studies that they discuss, either deliberately to suit an agenda or out of a simple inability to understand difficult scientific writing and statistics. Editorial boards of scientific journals themselves have difficulty determining good studies from bad studies, how can we let a government board be the arbiter of truth?

Since Elon Musk pounced on Twitter, are you not amazed to see just how dedicated to the suppression of speech the Left is? Censorship is the Left’s very spark-of-life. Everything they stand for is so false and lawless that truth magnetically repels them. Now, this may surprise you, but truth and reality are joined at the hip, so when you work hard to suppress one, you are also stomping the face of the other. “Disinformation” just means anything that the Left doesn’t want you to say out loud.

The truth is that everything the Left stands for these days is some kind of a hustle — which is the cheap street version of a racket, meaning an effort to extract something of value from you dishonestly. It’s the only way they know how to operate. It necessarily and chiefly depends on the deployment of lies, which by definition are propositions at odds with reality. The more they traffic in lies, the further they must distance themselves from reality and try to coerce you to go along with evermore absurdity: mostly peaceful riots… men-with-ovaries… free and fair elections…  insurrection… conspiracy theories… Lia Thomas in the fast lane… safe and effective vaccines…. Believe it or else!

The Left ends up at war with reality. That adds up to a bad business model for running a society, and the results are now plain to see. What in the USA is not failing these days? Our Potemkin economy of nail parlors, porn sites, pizza huts, casinos, drugs, and helicopter money? Our reckless relations with other countries? Public and higher education? Medicine? Financial markets? The sputtering engine of government under a phantom president? It’s all sinking into chaos and incoherence. For now, food just costs more than ever; wait until it’s simply unavailable. Nobody will care about anything else after that.

All this failure requires cover stories, narratives. Russia did it! Covid-19 did it! White supremacists did it! Trump did it! Narrative failure would equal failure of the Left altogether, so the Left requires the sturdiest possible apparatus for suppressing counter-narratives that lean in the direction of reality, its enemy. The Left found that apparatus in social media, the new vehicle for political debate, especially Twitter, which was so easily, blatantly, and dishonestly manipulated backstage by mysterious code ninjas. Twitter enjoys subsidy relations with government that incline it to do the government’s bidding. In effect, the government enlisted Twitter to undermine and over-ride Americans’ first amendment protections, by proxy.

Now we have the Disinformation Governance Board to be run by a TikTok musical comedy star, Nina Jankowicz, an instant laughingstock, since retailing disinformation has been her main occupation in the scant years she’s been on the Deep State scene. Ms. Jankowicz is a notorious RussiaGate hoaxer and psy-op agent in the October 2020 emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop. She has zero credibility as anything but a professional falsifier. Her Disinfo Governance Board has no authority to regulate anything. It’s just a lame charade that can only draw more attention to the Left’s hatred of truth and reality. The Left pretends that free speech is a threat to civilization because, as usual, they are projecting psychologically. Their world is a mirror. In fact, the Left is a threat to civilization.

Behind all this is the growing panic in the Left that they are culpable for an enormous raft of crimes committed against their own country, and will eventually end up in court, in prison, or worse. Mr. Durham is just the leading edge of what will eventually be a heavy blade of judgment falling down on their necks. He’s busy sorting out the “Russia collusion” flimflam that turned into a coup to oust Mr. Trump, but that is only the beginning. In November, the Democrats will lose control of Congress and its oversight powers of agency operations, and in 2023 there will be inquiries galore into the neo-Jacobin craziness imposed on our country by the folks behind “Joe Biden.”

That includes such dicey matters as the several years of malevolent mismanagement of Covid-19, which looks more and more like a deliberate effort to kill a large number of citizens, and then moving along to the behind-the-scenes official support for those 2020BLM /Antifa riots, the ballot shenanigans around the last presidential election, the colossal failure to enforce border security (featuring Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis), the Biden Regime’s conduct in provoking and prolonging the war between Russia and Ukraine, and (not least) the overseas moneygrubbing of President Biden’s family, as documented in Hunter’s laptop. I’m sure I left a few things out.

If Mr. Biden is still on-the-scene in January next year, he’ll be the first president not only impeached but convicted and removed by the Senate. And if for some reason he avoids criminal prosecution for treason out of some pitiful need for the government to maintain official decorum before the rest of the world, his brothers and his degenerate son may not be so lucky.

Doom and Bloom Medical: Bleeding Wound Management, Part. I

The Altons at Doom and Bloom Medical have part one of an article on bleeding wound management.

In a destabilized society, traumatic wounds may be commonplace is scenarios where there is a desperate population and no rule of law. Even routine activities of daily survival may cause injuries that could become life-threatening. Therefore, the family or group medic must always be prepared to deal with bleeding wounds. Some of these, especially those in the abdomen and chest, are likely to be fatal without advanced medical care. In this article, let’s commemorate National Stop The Bleed Month (I’m a certified instructor through the American College of Surgeons) by concentrating on those hemorrhages that are survivable.

Cuts in the skin can be minor or catastrophic, superficial or deep, clean or infected. Significant cuts (also called “lacerations”) penetrate both layers of the skin (dermis and epidermis) and are associated with bleeding, the amount of which depends on the blood vessels disrupted. Knowing how to manage hemorrhagic wounds quickly and effectively will be of paramount importance for the survival medic.

In studies of casualties in recent wars, 50 percent of those killed in action died of blood loss. 25 percent died within the first “golden hour” after being wounded. The golden hour is the time after which a victim’s chance of survival diminishes significantly if untreated, with a threefold increase in death rate for every 30 minutes without care thereafter.

If there is active bleeding and the wrong artery is severed, however, it could take just a few minutes for a person to “bleed out” and be beyond medical help. A severed femoral artery can lose more than a pint of blood a minute. With hemorrhage, the reality should, perhaps, be called the “platinum five minutes” instead.

Venous bleeding manifests as dark red blood that drains steadily from the wound, while arterial bleeding is bright red (due to higher oxygen content) and comes out in spurts that correspond to the pulse of the patient. As the vein and artery usually run together, a serious laceration can have both.

Once below the level of the skin, large blood vessels, muscles, and nerves may be involved. You’ll identify more problems with vessel and nerve damage in deep lacerations and crush injuries. In any case, bleeding control must be achieved.

In response to fatalities due to bleeding in recent military conflicts, the U.S. instituted Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) guidelines. It is thought that up to one in five deaths from hemorrhage in the field may be prevented with quick action by those at the scene. Civilian and law enforcement authorities have established similar strategies in response to the hard lessons learned by our soldiers; so should the family medic.

BLOOD BASICS

It’s worthwhile for the medic who may be dealing with bleeding wounds to know some basics about blood. Blood is a specialized fluid that comprises about 7-8 percent of a person’s total weight. It’s involved in:

•             Delivering oxygen to the body from the lungs and eliminating carbon dioxide (a process called “gas exchange”).

•             Forming clots that stop hemorrhages.

•             Transporting substances that fight infections and disease.

•             Delivering waste products to the kidneys and liver.

•             Helping to regulate body temperature.

There are four main components to blood:

Red blood cells (RBCs): RBCs are the cells that carry oxygen to body tissues, thanks to a special iron-containing protein called “hemoglobin.” Red cells account for 40-45 percent of total blood volume. They start as immature cells in the bone marrow that mature and are released into the bloodstream. The average lifespan of a red blood cell is about 120 days.

White blood cells (WBCs): These cells account for only about one percent of total blood volume, but are extremely important for fighting infection and disease.  There are several types, including short-lived cells deployed for immediate response and longer-lived ones that regulate the function of immune cells, make antibodies, and directly attack infected cells and tumors.

Platelets and other clotting factors: These are small cell fragments that allow bleeding to stop by gathering at the wound site and helping to form a clot. Like RBCs and WBCs, they originate in the bone marrow.

Plasma: A yellow liquid that transports all of the above throughout the body.

Together, these components are referred to as “whole blood.”

PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF BLOOD LOSS

Evaluating blood loss is an important aspect of dealing with wounds. An average size human adult has about 10 pints (4.73 liters or 4730 ml) of blood. The effect on the body caused by blood loss varies with the amount incurred. The American College of Surgeons recognizes four classes of acute hemorrhage, along with expected signs and symptoms:

Class I:  Hemorrhage is less or equal to 15 percent of blood volume (1.5 pints/750 ml) in an average adult male. 750 ml is the amount in a bottle of wine. A person donating 1 pint of blood is giving slightly less than 500 ml. At this level there are almost no signs or symptoms, although some may have a slightly rapid pulse and feel vaguely faint or anxious.

Class II:  Hemorrhage is 15 to 30% loss of total blood volume (1.5-3 pints/750-1500 ml).  The body’s efforts to compensate for less red blood cells at this point results in a faster heartbeat and breathing rate to speed oxygen to tissues.  This patient will appear pale and skin will be cool.  They’ll feel shaky, weak, and anxious. Blood pressure remains, for now, within normal range. Urine production begins to slow down in order to retain fluid volume.

Class III: Hemorrhage is 30 to 40% loss of blood (3-4 pints/1500-2000 ml).  At this point, the heart will be beating very quickly and breathing very fast as the body encounters difficulty getting enough oxygen to tissues.  Blood pressure drops. Smaller blood vessels in extremities constrict to keep the body core circulation going. This patient will be confused, pale, and in hypovolemic (low blood volume) shock. Urine decreases significantly. In normal times, blood transfusion is usually necessary. 

Class IV:  Hemorrhage is more than 40% of total blood volume (greater than 4 pints/2000 ml). The heart can no longer maintain blood pressure and circulation.  All parameters are well outside normal range and the patient becomes lethargic due to lack of oxygen and circulation to the brain. Without major resuscitative help at this point, organs like the kidneys fail. The patient loses consciousness. Heart rate and respiration slows and eventually ceases as the patient dies.

ABCDE VS. CABDE

The traditional initial field assessment of a victim usually involves the acronym ABCDE. Although ABCDE may mean different things to different people, one interpretation goes as follows…(continues)

The Organic Prepper: Hits Against the American Food Supply System Keep On Coming

Spokane Valley firefighters responded to a fire at Spokane Seed (Courtesy of the Spokane Valley Fire Department)

Jeff Thompson at The Organic Prepper writes about ongoing problems in the food supply system with Hits Against the American Food Supply System Keep On Coming. The Organic Prepper previously wrote about these problems with Why Do All These Food Facilities Keep Catching Fire? While it may or may not be related (Food Processing says not), in April the FBI warned the food and agriculture sector about cyber attacks (link opens a pdf file).

Continuing the discussion on the current happenings within the American food supply chain, we have a series of strange events that have taken place over the course of the past week or two that you may want to catch up on.

Perdue Farms catches fire in Chesapeake, Virginia.

April 30 at 8:30 PM, a fire was reported at the Perdue Farms grain processing and storage facility in Chesapeake, Virginia. When firemen reported to the scene, they found a large soybean processing tank that was on fire. Crews were able to get the fire under control within an hour, and no injuries to employees of the facility were reported.

According to the plant manager, the damage from the fire will have a “minimal impact” on the facility’s production or operation capacities.

Spokane Seed Co catches fire in Spokane, Washington

Early on April 29, the Spokane Seed Co in Spokane, Washington, reported a fire just after midnight. The fire was in a multi-story seed storage silo. The company is known for its processing of chickpeas, peas, and lentils. Firemen responded to the scene and were able to contain the fire in two hours but apparently had a difficult time in doing so.

According to the fire department, “The difficulty involving the fire was that it was located in multiple locations as the origin was the auger unit that moved material from ground level and delivers it to the top of the silo; therefore, there was smoldering material located at the bottom of the auger and burning material that had been delivered to the top of the silo.”

(For the record, Powder Bulk and Solids published two pieces of late on April 26 and April 28 claiming that the uptick in fires at food processing facilities was a myth. They then reported the Spokane Fire on April 29 and the Chesapeake fire on May 2. They appear to have largely used Snopes to determine that the uptick in food processing fires was a myth and declared that “the continued spread of the rumor in the news media and on social media is perhaps attributable to a lack of awareness of industrial fire safety issues among the general public.”)

Oklahoma reports highly pathogenic avian influenza and will now monitor backyard chicken flocks.

According to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, as well as the US Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a case of HPAI was found in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, at a commercially run chicken farm.

As of this past Sunday, all chicken swaps, sales, and exhibits have now been declared by these two agencies to be illegal in the state of Oklahoma until July 30. Oklahoma says that it is “working diligently with federal partners to prevent further spread of the virus.”

Both state and federal officials will now begin to conduct surveillance of all poultry flocks in the area around the Sequoyah County case – both commercial and backyard flocks.

Officials are asking chicken owners to alert them if their birds produce strange eggs, don’t produce eggs, have diarrhea, cough, sneeze, have low energy, die, or show signs of respiratory distress. (continues)

For more on worldwide dangers of food shortages, you may refer to Bayou Renaissance Man and his article The food crisis is showing the first signs of real famine.

Here in North America, we’re unlikely to face the full effects of the worldwide famine that appears to be developing, and that we’ve discussed in these pages on several previous occasions.  However, it’s biting hard in several regions and countries, and getting worse.  For example, see these articles (selected at random from many others I could have linked):

Even though I think we’ll probably still have food on US supermarket shelves, there are almost certain to be local and regional shortages of various products;  greatly increased prices;  and disruptions in normal consumption patterns, as people are forced to buy what’s available rather than what they really want.  It’s not going to be easy for anybody.

A few days ago, Michael Yon stuck his neck out with a more dire warning than he’s ever issued before on this subject.  I hope he’s wrong . . . but given his very extensive background in reporting around the world, I’m sure he absolutely believes what he’s saying.  Given my respect for his track record, I’m taking him seriously…(continues)

Bleyhl May 2022 Workshops

Bleyhl Co-op has two workshops in May:

Horse Owner Workshop (Grandview) May 12, 2022 6:30pm – 8:00pm

SPEAKER: Lane Howe, Purina Nutrition SPECIAL GUEST: Bill Lawrence, Horse Trainer. Lawrence has worked on films War Horse, Unstoppable, The Young Black Stallion, The Postman, Racing Stripes, The Legend of Zorro, Evan Almighty, Did you Hear About the Morgans, and John Carter of Mars. No charge to attend. RSVP to save your seat! (509) 882-1225

Goat Owner Workshop (Zillah) May 19, 2022 6:30pm – 8:30 pm

Jena Ozenna, CHS Nutrition Consultant will discuss goat feed and tub options. Nicole Cookson, Bleyhl, will discuss dairy goats and demonstrate milking. Kennedee Lecuyer, 4-H Leader and Champion Showman, will demonstrate showing techniques and tips. We will also cover hoof trimming and vaccinations. No charge to attend, RSVP to save your seat. (509) 829-6922. Feed specials, handouts, and coupons exclusive to those that attend!

The Machine Gun Nest: Biden’s Ghost Gun Rule is Dead on Arrival

The Machine Gun Nest writes about the Biden administration’s latest attempt to strip rights from the American people in Biden’s Ghost Gun Rule is Dead on Arrival Thanks to the 0% Receiver. It has long been recognized in the USA that a person may manufacture a firearm for their personal use with no need for any licensing, registration, or serial numbering. Gun controllers, however, are willfully ignorant on the current laws, historical context, and even the simplest technical understanding of firearms.

Yesterday, President Biden, the Department of Justice, and the ATF announced the details of their new 364-page rule for the redefinition of “frame or receiver.” In doing so, they have decided to attempt an illegal rewrite of the 1968 Gun Control Act. 

If you’ve been paying close attention to headlines the past few weeks, you may have noticed a surge in articles pertaining to “ghost guns.”

The corporate media has been setting up Biden for an easy “win” on guns with this new rule. Likely because of Biden’s low poll numbers headed into the midterms. 

Initially announced in April of 2021, almost a full year later, we’re finally able to see what sort of egregious gun control has been put together for the law-abiding gun owner. 

The rule stems from the gun control lobby’s obsession with home-built firearms. The problem here, though, is that to regulate privately made firearms, or “PMFs” as they’re defined in the new rule, the ATF had to cast an extremely wide legal net. 

In the 364-page rule, we can see that the Biden admin intends to ban “ghost guns” by creating a new class of highly regulated items by redefining the term “firearm” to include parts and collections of parts that the ATF now considers to be “readily” convertible into functional firearms. 

The example used in the press conference was a Polymer80 kit, which quickly sold out of all available models after the announcement of the rule change. 

It’s important to note that from what we can tell from the rule change and the opinion of others in the know, this rule does not ban possession of firearms made from 80% kits. It also does not mandate the serialization of those already made firearms or 3D printed items for personal use. What it does do is require the serialization of 80% kits that are in possession of Federal Firearms Licensees (also known as FFLs) and manufacturers. It’s interesting because the expected outcome of this rule, as Biden pitched, was the complete and absolute ban of “ghost guns” altogether. 

In addition, ATF has commanded Federal Firearms Licensees to hold 4473 records on-site indefinitely. This small change may go unnoticed by many, but this is a significant step towards a legitimate registry. This action shouldn’t surprise many gun owners, who already know that these rule changes are not about saving lives; they’re only about the consolidation of power.

Firearms Policy Coalition had this to say: 

“Far from “clarifying” anything, the rulemaking tortures simple terms from law into multi-part definitions, with newly injected sub-terms like “readily” having their own lengthy definitions. This is clearly an attempt to sidestep Congress, as Biden even indicated in his remarks today.”

Here’s the irony of the situation, though. Regardless of how overly complex it is or how wide a legal net the ATF decides to cast, this rule change will have little to no effect. 

That’s because of the 0% Receiver. 

In response to the announcement of the Biden Admin’s proposed rule change, Defense Distributed decided to shift its focus to the creation of 0% receivers. 

Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed had this to say about the new rule:

“The receiver rule is an illegal attempt to rewrite the GCA outside of Congress. Nevertheless, Ghost Gunner anticipated this maneuver and is now shipping Zero Percent receivers which perfectly defeat the rule from day one. Americans will always be able to build firearms in the privacy of their homes.”

This rule change has caused a surge in demand for Defense Distributed’s Ghost Gunner 3. The Ghost Gunner is a small CNC Machine that users can insert a bar of aluminum, press a button, and after the machine mills out the metal, have a completely legal, privately made, non-serialized firearm frame ready to go. 

Because all the Ghost Gunner 3 needs is a block of aluminum to produce the firearm frame, the Biden Admin & ATF would need to regulate blocks of aluminum to stop people from producing privately made firearms. While the DOJ may be able to convince a judge that an 80% lower is likely to be made into a gun, a block of aluminum is a much harder sell. 

The same can be said for 3D printing. Are we to assume that PLA plastic is to be regulated as a firearm? 

Because gun control has a hard time passing in the legislative branch (even with all three branches of government controlled by democrats currently), the Biden admin has resorted to governing by executive fiat, using the executive branch to pass new “regulations” using existing law. 

As of right now, the rule change has 120 days to take effect after it hits the federal register. Many groups such as Gun Owners of America & Firearms Policy Coalition have already announced their intent to sue the Federal Government over these new rule changes.

Herland Report: The Global Financial Revolution and the End of the PetroDollar Hegemony?

The Ukraine-Russia war and related sanctions have driven Russia to work with China to forward alternatives to the Swift banking system and the hegemony of the US Dollar in international trade. Much has been written lately about the possible collapse of the PetroDollar with some arguing that the the PetroDollar will never fail and others worrying over its imminent demise. If you live in the USA, the existence of the PetroDollar contributes to your quality of life by making the dollar stronger, increasing your purchasing power. If the PetroDollar were to cease to exist, then you would probably be paying more for all goods. Below are a couple of articles discussing the issue.

Herland Report: The Global Financial Revolution and the End of the PetroDollar hegemony?

Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United States.”

Foreign governments, needing dollars, not only accept them in trade but buy U.S. securities with them, effectively funding the U.S. government and its foreign wars, writes author attorney Ellen Brown, published at her blog. Brown is chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books, follow her website here.

But no government has been powerful enough to break that arrangement – until now. How did that happen and what will it mean for the U.S. and global economies?

First, some history: The U.S. dollar was adopted as the global reserve currency at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when the dollar was still backed by gold on global markets. The agreement was that gold and the dollar would be accepted interchangeably as global reserves, the dollars to be redeemable in gold on demand at $35 an ounce. Exchange rates of other currencies were fixed against the dollar.

But that deal was broken after President Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” policy exhausted the U.S. kitty by funding war in Vietnam along with his “Great Society” social programs at home. French President Charles de Gaulle, suspecting the U.S. was running out of money, cashed in a major portion of France’s dollars for gold and threatened to cash in the rest; and other countries followed suit or threatened to.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold internationally (known as “closing the gold window”), in order to avoid draining U.S. gold reserves. The value of the dollar then plummeted relative to other currencies on global exchanges.

To prop it up, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries that OPEC would sell oil only in dollars, and that the dollars would be deposited in Wall Street and City of London banks.

In return, the U.S. would defend the OPEC countries militarily. Economic researcher William Engdahl also presents evidence of a promise that the price of oil would be quadrupled. An oil crisis triggered by a brief Middle Eastern war did cause the price of oil to quadruple, and the OPEC agreement was finalized in 1974.

The deal held firm until 2000, when Saddam Hussein broke it by selling Iraqi oil in euros. Libyan president Omar Qaddafi followed suit. Both presidents wound up assassinated, and their countries were decimated in war with the United States. Canadian researcher Matthew Ehret observes:

“We should not forget that the Sudan-Libya-Egypt alliance under the combined leadership of Mubarak, Qadhafi and Bashir, had moved to establish a new gold-backed financial system outside of the IMF/World Bank to fund large scale development in Africa. Had this program not been undermined by a NATO-led destruction of Libya, the carving up of Sudan and regime change in Egypt, then the world would have seen the emergence of a major regional block of African states shaping their own destinies outside of the rigged game of Anglo-American controlled finance for the first time in history.”

The first challenge by a major power to what became known as the petrodollar has come in 2022. In the month after the Ukraine conflict began, the U.S. and its European allies imposed heavy financial sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal military invasion.

The Western measures included freezing nearly half of the Russian central bank’s 640 billion U.S. dollars in financial reserves, expelling several of Russia’s largest banks from the SWIFT global payment system, imposing export controls aimed at limiting Russia’s access to advanced technologies, closing down their airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, and instituting personal sanctions against senior Russian officials and high-profile tycoons. Worried Russians rushed to withdraw rubles from their banks, and the value of the ruble plunged on global markets just as the U.S. dollar had in the early 1970s.

The trust placed in the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency, backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” had finally been fully broken. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech on March 16 that the U.S. and EU had defaulted on their obligations, and that freezing Russia’s reserves marks the end of the reliability of so-called first class assets.

On March 23, Putin announced that Russia’s natural gas would be sold to “unfriendly countries” only in Russian rubles, rather than the euros or dollars currently used. Forty-eight nations are counted by Russia as “unfriendly,” including the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Canada and Japan.

Putin noted that more than half the global population remains “friendly” to Russia. Countries not voting to support the sanctions include two major powers – China and India – along with major oil producer Venezuela, Turkey, and other countries in the “Global South.” “Friendly” countries, said Putin, could now buy from Russia in various currencies.

On March 24, Russian lawmaker Pavel Zavalny said at a news conference that gas could be sold to the West for rubles or gold, and to “friendly” countries for either national currency or bitcoin.

Energy ministers from the G7 nations rejected Putin’s demand, claiming it violated gas contract terms requiring sale in euros or dollars. But on March 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was “not engaged in charity” and won’t supply gas to Europe for free (which it would be doing if sales were in euros or dollars it cannot currently use in trade). Sanctions themselves are a breach of the agreement to honor the currencies on global markets.

Bloomberg reports that on March 30, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower Russian house of parliament, suggested in a Telegram post that Russia may expand the list of commodities for which it demands payment from the West in rubles (or gold) to include grain, oil, metals and more.

Russia’s economy is much smaller than that of the U.S. and the European Union, but Russia is a major global supplier of key commodities – including not just oil, natural gas and grains, but timber, fertilizers, nickel, titanium, palladium, coal, nitrogen, and rare earth metals used in the production of computer chips, electric vehicles and airplanes.

On April 2, Russian gas giant Gazprom officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies.

U.K. professor of economics Richard Werner calls the Russian move a clever one – a replay of what the U.S. did in the 1970s. To get Russian commodities, “unfriendly” countries will have to buy rubles, driving up the value of the ruble on global exchanges just as the need for petrodollars propped up the U.S. dollar after 1974. Indeed, by March 30, the ruble had already risen to where it was a month earlier…(continues)

Continue reading “Herland Report: The Global Financial Revolution and the End of the PetroDollar Hegemony?” →

Regular Assembly, Thursday, Apr. 14th

The Patriot Barn

The next meeting of the Lower Valley Assembly will be held on the evening of Thursday, April 14th at 6:30pm in the Patriot Barn at 22202 N. Hinzerling, Prosser. There will be two speakers and other topics.

Speakers:

Benton County candidate for Prosecuting Attorney Eric Eisinger

Benton County Sheriff Tom Croskrey

AIER: Explaining Free Speech to the Twitterati

In Explaining Free Speech to the Twitterati, Max Borders at the American Institute for Economic Research writes about free speech and free speech on private property. If someone holds up their private property as a public forum, should they be held to respect free speech, including free speech that the owner doesn’t like? Additionally, just because the US Constitution is a limitation on government, does that mean that the concept of free speech holds no moral suasion against private individuals?

Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. … Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.

– Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia

If ever you were wondering about free speech, you could turn to Twitter. The Twitterati will tell you everything you need to know about free speech and what it means in 280 characters or less. 

First, they will tell you that free speech has nothing to do with anything that happens on Twitter because Twitter is a private company. 

Private companies may control speech as they wish “ya dopes” because the Constitution only protects citizens from censorship by the U.S. government. 

Got that? 

Free speech has been reduced to 45 words. And if you are not a U.S. citizen, those words don’t apply.

Then, they will tell you that critics of private companies like Twitter are, therefore, not only out of bounds but that free speech concerns are an affront to freedom of association (and therefore also disassociation). 


From this, you might think that apologists for digital lynch mobs and private censorship have been worshipping at the altar of libertarian brutalism. Though technically accurate in Abstractionland, narrow construals of free speech overlook more than a few essential points. 

Free Speech: Letter and Spirit

In the United States, it is true that the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship. It is also true that private property rights trump free speech. Property owners generally make the rules about speech on their property, and those rules can be illiberal, arbitrary, and grossly unfair as long as the government is not involved in setting those policies. (The latter point is an important qualifier to which we’ll return).

But the thing about free speech is it has a letter and a spirit, which the Founders understood. 

So, apparently, does Elon Musk.

The letter is the law, but the spirit transcends the law among conscientious people. And Musk is one of them. He just bought the largest stake in Twitter, which will surely test the Twitterati.

But according to liberals such as John Stuart Mill, we ought to practice speech toleration even in private settings. The ought here is moral, not legal. If one objects to censorship or suppression on private platforms, she appeals to the spirit of free speech, which differs from the First Amendment. One can and should apply moral suasion beyond a strict legal doctrine. We do it all the time. Sure, some people get confused about the difference, but some free speech “scolds” are simply appealing to an established liberal doctrine, which we call toleration.

By analogy, let’s imagine that the same brutalist libertarian criteria applied to people living in the Jim Crow South. Regarding the law, one can agree that property rights and freedom of association should always trump free speech in private settings. So when a racist denies entry to a person of another race, solely because of his race, one might argue that is wrong. To forbid an innocent human being from sitting at a lunch counter or attending a university, even if the owner’s decision comports with a principle of property rights and freedom of association, would still be wrong. That’s because discrimination based solely on race is wrong under most liberal ethics. So if Adam Bates (referenced above) is determined to protect “freedom of association,” but refers to anyone who evokes the spirit of free speech as “scolds,” he must also be prepared by his own narrow rationale, to defend the racist owner of the lunch counter in our example. 

Good luck with that.

By Twitterati logic, anything goes as long as it’s legal, and if it’s legal, you should just shut the eff up. But that sort of thinking excludes too many extra-political and extra-legal standards and practices that give rise to peace and progress. 

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf tries mightily to find the spirit of free speech among the free-speech reductionists.

Friedersdorf got a number of dismissive responses including this, from someone I generally respect and consider a liberal:

Therefore, the idea that “consequence cultures” has, and ought to have, no limiting principle at all, nothing that checks it, questions it, or stands in its way–according to reductionists. Not even the greatest Enlightenment liberals offer anything of substance to the conversation because they appeal to points on spectra that don’t exist.

What a godawful failure of imagination. 

The “consequences” of consequence culture can therefore be completely arbitrary – the contrivances of a mob or any illiberal march through the institutions – as long as they do their job. That job is to contrive “consequences” that push people into submission, subjection, or silence.

Too many people are “basically okay with that,” which is one reason discourse has turned to shit, not to mention much of social media. I suspect those who tolerate such intolerance enjoy watching Twitterati team sports more than they seek understanding or strive to uphold any principles essential to community life outside The Church of State.

Those who think they have some sort of gotcha when it comes to this two-step about “private companies” might be Brutalist Libertarians, Regime Leftists, or something in between — but they don’t seem to be liberals. To be a liberal, after all, is to think that the best antidote to bad opinion or “misinformation” is higher-quality speech and evidence that tracks truth and respects discourse norms. Liberals seek to protect speech in both spirit and letter to a greater extent, even if such protections can never yield perfect outcomes. The discursive process generally creates better outcomes over time. 

In the domain of morality – which is distinct from politics or law – people have to practice it together for community to form and strengthen. Toleration is a moral practice. It’s no wonder that beltway types never seem to appreciate that. Washington is a cesspit where good opinion is about whom you know and what you’re trying to get out of them. Twitter is just Washington’s domination discourse extended to the centralized internet. In other words, it’s politics all the way down. The moral fibers that help weave people together in community and collective intelligence might as well be dental floss among the purveyors of politics, policy and punditry.

But human progress depends on a dance of cooperation and competition rooted in discourse norms designed for people to track truth. As we have indicated, one such discourse norm is the practice of speech toleration. As Mill writes in On Liberty,

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Now, I have a Jewish daughter. My appreciation of Mill doesn’t mean I’ll invite neo-Nazis into my home to say hurtful things to her, you know, out of some disproportionate sense of liberal toleration. 

I’m simply arguing we can all do better, even if there are no bright lines or points on a spectrum. For example, it is possible to have moderated platforms with far more liberal speech policies. The owners of said platforms ought to liberalize those policies, notwithstanding real threats from authorities. Likewise, individuals needn’t be so quick to press the block button when someone disagrees with them. Instead, they can try harder to use it with patience and discernment in a framework of liberal toleration. Why? At the very least, contact with diverse ideas, viewpoints, and opinions help one test and strengthen one’s position. 

Illiberalism Goes Viral

Mill’s insights have perhaps no more important application than in our effort to understand an evolving virus during a dangerous pandemic. School marms, censors, and public health authoritarians have too frequently sought to silence dissenting voices, mock alternatives, and belittle justifiable questions about any number of illiberal public health measures. And, ironically, they have also been the greatest purveyors of misinformation…(continues)

Mises Wire: The State – It’s Oligarchs All the Way Down

It’s turtles all the way down.

There is an old saying about the world resting on top of a giant world tortoise, and a question about what the holds up the tortoise with the answer being “It’s turtles all the way down.” In this article from the Mises Institute, Professor Jason Morgan of Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan, writes about government as a hierarchy of oligarchs in The State – It’s Oligarchs All the Way Down.

The standard history of post-Soviet Russia goes something like this. During the Soviet era, there were no real prices because of the Communists’ incessant, blanket meddling in economic activity. Nobody knew what anything was really worth. Not a loaf of bread, not a mine full of uranium. It was all owned and redistributed by the state. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the state of course disappeared. Suddenly, there were no prices, and no owners. It was like a gigantic economic free-for-all. A “Wild West,” as the saying goes. Everything was up for grabs.

In a fashion that Mises readers will immediately understand as textbook Hoppean-Rothbardian, in the midst of this chaos the worst of the worst rose to the top. The hyenas moved in to tear at the Soviet carcass. Ruthless and cunning opportunists took over formerly state-run factories and extraction operations. A kind of national gang culture emerged, and the logic of this gangland mentality worked to sort out the spoils among the strongmen. Some people, those who were particularly well endowed with craftiness, came out ahead, appropriating to themselves billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of oil, gas, and mineral rights, among other commodities. Those nouveau riche from the Russian criminal class we now call “oligarchs.” And the king of all the oligarchs, the baddest dog in the junkyard, turned out to be a former KGB colonel and deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

A by-now-infamous 2009 episode in the Russian town of Pikalyovo sums the whole thing up perfectly. Prime Minister Putin (then on theatrical break from his main job of president) showed up to order a factory complex restarted so thousands of breadwinners could get back to work. One of the factories was owned and supplied by Oleg Deripaska, one of Putin’s rival oligarchs. Putin humiliated him at a public meeting, ordering Deripaska to sign an agreement which would reopen the factory complex, thereby showing the world that Putin was in charge of every operation in Russia. When Deripaska had signed the agreement, Putin twisted the knife by making Deripaska return to him his pen. Oligarchs gonna oligarch. Putin is the man, and he will show up in any town to have a shootout with anyone foolish enough to cross him. One big O.K. Corral: this is how most of us in the West understand Russia today.

But let us think a bit more carefully, going back to our Hoppe and Rothbard for help. What is a state? A state is a gang of criminals. A state is organized crime on a massive scale. A state is oligarchs everywhere. It always is, always has been. Political scientist James C. Scott’s most recent book, Against the Grain (2017), details how the “earliest states” preyed on human endeavor. States extract protection money (euphemistically called “taxes,” sometimes also called “tribute” or “war bonds”) from as many people as the criminals who sit in the state’s central chambers or on the state’s throne can reach.

Russian oligarchs post–Soviet era are hardly unique. States are just this, just as we see in the relationship between Putin and the beta oligarchs. The only thing shocking about the Russian case is that it is more transparently corrupt than usual. Most states clothe their theft behind anthems and flags and tales of heroic deeds. The Russian Federation lost its politico-mythic backing when it rose out of the ashes of the USSR. But it is trying to get it back. Stalin has been rehabilitated in Russia as a great man. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will one day be remembered as the glorious sacrifice of the brave for the motherland. All states are gravity fields for propaganda and fake news. Give Russia time, and she will look just like all the other states again. You won’t be able to see through the shop windows the smash-and-grab going on inside. Everything will look grand and state-like. The Russian state will normalize, and nobody will call its elite “oligarchs” anymore.

Thus, statists have a natural incentive to legitimate one another’s plundering schemes. Presidents and prime ministers and kings drink to one another’s health at sumptuous galas paid for with private property taken from all the rest of us (who never get invitations to the ball). I wouldn’t be surprised to find crowns and ermine capes coming back in fashion among state leaders soon. Statists think they’re gods, and they act like they own everyone else’s money. Not just Russia, not at all.

Indeed, this Hoppean-Rothbardian insight, that states are basically groups of oligarchs who give themselves titles and medals, can be expanded far beyond the Russian example. For if the current crop of Russian oligarchs are just standard statists, then the narrative about the collapse of the Soviet Union must also be called into question. It wasn’t that the Soviet Union collapsed, in this sense. It was that one form of oligarchy gave way to another, with a messy period of transition in between. The Soviet Union was “Communist,” but communism was never about the equal distribution of wealth or the alleviation of social problems. As Hoppean-Rothbardians, we must not take statist excuse making at face value. Communism was, and remains, a system for gathering total social and economic control into the hands of a very few. In other words, a cover story for oligarchy. The current Russian oligarchs aren’t doing anything new. Before them there was Stalin, of course, and Brezhnev and Khrushchev and Lenin, and the handful of other divines who took everything from the Russian people and lived in opulent palaces with servants and harems and caviar.

And it isn’t just Russia. What state does not have oligarchs running it? It’s a trick rhetorical question, because, as I’ve been saying, states and oligarchies are the same thing. Communism, democracy—it’s all from the same barrel. Unjust enrichment comes in many different flavors. But the main ingredient is always taxation and consolidation of ownership into the hands of the elite. The exclusion of the hoi polloi from the fruits of their expropriated labor is what makes the state the state. There are grand halls and massive monuments in the state’s capitals, marble utterances of the state’s political theology scattered across the land. The state has its own saints and martyrs, its own calendar of holy days. The state is a kind of religious ritual, only the tithe is not optional. And it’s a lot more than 10 percent. That’s what a state is, theft dressed up as solemn duty. People die all the time for the state. Graveyards are filled with the state’s dead. The state charges the bereaved for those cemeteries’ upkeep. More taxes. No matter what happens, the state always wins in the end.

So let’s use this knowledge to examine the current situation in Ukraine. A world-class oligarch, who relaxes in a Russian Versailles, is going up against a very minor Ukrainian oligarch to his west. This arriviste oligarch has the ambiguous backing of a massive cabal of big-time oligarchs in Western Europe and the United States. This cabal calls itself the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and it is a very exclusive club. Members have access to an impressive array of security options, including all the best equipment of some of the biggest militaries in the world. The ostensible leader is the American president, whose son has grown extraordinarily rich by conspiring with the oligarchy in Ukraine, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization oligarchs are now glaring across the borderlands at the oligarchs in the Kremlin. The Atlantic oligarchy wants to crowd in on the turf of the Russian oligarchy, and a Ukrainian oligarch is caught in the middle. The people who are normally taxed by the oligarchs are also the ones who are being shelled and who are being sent out in tanks to do the shelling. More deaths for the glory of the state—which doesn’t exist, being simply a euphemism for “oligarchy.”

There is more. An upstart oligarchy in Beijing hovers over the tense scene, appearing ready to broker “peace” among the other oligarchs when its own interests will be best served. And the Beijing oligarchy has its own coterie of beta oligarchs, including the tribute bearers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, all of which are filled with political cronies with access to their own income streams ultimately deriving from the paychecks of lowly taxpayers. When the time comes, the taxpayers in those places will also die for the oligarchs. American Marines are on Okinawa waiting their turn to die, too. The oligarchs are going to live, though. They are going to do just fine. War and peace—the oligarchs make money either way. “L’état, c’est moi!” Yes, exactly.

The fact that the United States Department of Justice managed to slap sanctions on Russian “oligarchs” in record time after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and is now deploying a special “task force” to appropriate the property of Putin and his network of grifters, tells us everything we need to know about what is going on in Eastern Europe right now. The task force—can you believe the chutzpah?—is aimed at “Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs.” Abbreviation: REPO. The state taketh, and then the state taketh some more.

Lenin called World War I a war among the capitalists of Europe. He was wrong. It was a war among oligarchs, statists who extract wealth from legitimate economic activity at the barrel of a gun. And when some oligarchs step out of line, they are killed off and the other oligarchs take the spoils. Ditto for Ukraine. It’s not the “West” versus the Russian oligarchs there. It’s the oligarchs versus the oligarchs versus the oligarchs. It’s oligarchs all the way down. Read Hoppe and Rothbard, and don’t fall for the latest round of fake news about the always, everywhere criminal state.

Radio Contra Ep. 148: James Wesley, Rawles on Economics, Precious Metals, and Community Protection

In Radio Contra Episode 148, NC Scout of Brushbeater interviews author and preparedness blogger James Wesley, Rawles.

I’m joined by James Wesley Rawles of Survivalblog.com and author of the Patriots series to discuss the danger the Dollar is currently in, investment strategies for precious metals, and how to better prepare yourselves and communities for the potential coming unrest as the result of a economy run amok.

Radio Control Ep. 148: NC Scout Interviews James Wesley, Rawles